[linux-help] Re: More Info on hardware

[Nate Bargmann <n0nb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

* John Heffington <john1982@xxxxxxx> [2002 Jul 16 22:30 -0500]:
> 
> Is Debian up-to-date? Like the same as RedHat 7.3?
> If it is as good, I'll might just do it.

Debian Stable?  No.

Debian Testing, soon to be Stable, is reasonably up-to-date, but I'm not
sure if it is available on CD yet.

Debian Unstable is leading edge and is probably in the same league as
the latest offerings from Mandrake, RedHat and others.  Debian referes
to this branch as Unstable, not because all the software packages are
unstable, rather it is the development branch of the distro and some
things are put in that break other packages.  Unstable is not considered
suitable for production systems like servers and such.

Testing is the go-between branch and right now is getting far fewer 
updates than a few months back.

You might check Cheapbytes http://www.cheapbytes.com and see if they
have Debian Woody (a.k.a. Testing) CDs available.  Even if they are a
few months old, you can install and then update the system off the
Internet quite easily.

If you try Debian, you'll probably find the learning curve steeper than
with Red Hat and especially Mandrake.  On the other hand it's not as
steep as Slackware (unless Slack has changed markedly in the past six
years ;-)

Debian is a volunteer project with the aim to build a Free Software OS
available for many hardware architectures.  All its software is freely
available and Debian obligates no one financially to fully utilize its
offering.  Initially, Debian appears rougher than some of the commercial
offerings, but it is well integrated and its ability to seemlessly
update anything from a single package to a complete point release
upgrade is legendary and is the standard Red Hat et. al. are trying to
meet.

There is a fair amount of documentation at http://www.debian.org
covering installation and the like.  Remember, Linux is Linux and most
all the distros are very similiar and differ mostly in look and somewhat
in feel but the major packages are common to all.  Some do a better job
with less common hardware and it's very hard to say which is best for
your machine.  If you want to try different ones, Anne's offer is about
the best deal going.

- Nate >>

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