[aclug-L] Re: FW: Debian GNU/Linux 2.2, the "Joel 'Espy' Klecker" release

[Nate Bargmann <n0nb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Aug 16, 2000 at 10:15:41PM -0500, Greg House wrote:
> 
> <snip>
> 
> Um...what planet was the person that wrote THIS from? I've heard nothing but
> nightmare stories about people trying to upgrade Debian. I think I could like
> Debian if they've made dselect easier to deal with (maybe added some "typical
> installation" type preset packages so you don't have to select...and configure
> every little thing). How's it looking in that dept these days? I could care
> less about a glitzy graphical install wizard thing like RedHat & Mandrake are
> trying to do, I just want something that can be set up and configured quickly
> and easily without having a 2 week learning curve on how to use the package
> manager.

Hmmm.

I've performed three upgrades from Debian 2.1 to Debian 2.2 frozen, IOW, a
few months back.  I had to change /etc/apt/sources.list to point toward
potato rather than stable.  I did apt-get update and then apt-get 
dist-upgrade, and didn't touch dselect at all.  All three went off without 
a hitch and only had a couple of minor issues with a couple of packages.  
Over all I am very impressed with Debian's capability to upgrade the entire
system from release to release.  I do know that with Slackware such
was not possible.  One thing that did surprise me was that doing a
dist-upgrade did not upgrade the kernel.  That exercise is left to the
administrator to do manually and for many good reasons.

> Not saying any of the other distros are much better. I upgraded Mandrake 6.2
> to 7.0 on my main home machine awhile back and it totally broke my networking
> (both local AND ppp). I'm afraid to upgrade to 7.1, I don't have time to try
> and fix it...

Essentially, upgrading *any* operating system is fraught with risk.  MS
Windows does little more than delete most everything and the re-install
everything requiring several reboots.  With Debian I found it totally
amazing that everything but the kernel is upgraded in place without any
reboot required.  This includes such system dependent things as initd
and glibc.  Overall, Debian is the best experience in an OS I've ever had.
I came from Slackware and find Debian to be much more complete.  At least
I have no trouble with such things as backspace vs. delete in X anymore.
For me Debian has allowed me to concentrate on getting things done, not
fooling with getting things working.

I will admit, dselect's keystrokes are somewhat different than any program
I use, but I spent about an hour with the Debian User's Guide on the 'net
and played with dselect for a few minutes and was selecting stuff in no
time at all.  dselect is the first package manager I've ever used
and I really like the visual display of packages affected by dependency
resolution.  Is dselect perfect?  No, but I've watched it improve over 
the past year.

If graphical installs and a graphical version of dselect are your desire,
check out Stormix (http://www.stormix.com).  It is essentially Debian 2.2
with many add-ons.  According to the Debian-user list traffic, it is
very well done and it can be upgraded either from the Debian archive or
Stormix's archive.  At least it received good reviews by those on the
list, I have not tried it.

HTH,

- Nate >>

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