On Fri, 31 May 2002 21:26:11 -0700 Ken Moffat <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Fri, 31 May 2002 20:22:44 -0600 > Collins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > 2> Reading the writeups about Libranet, etc., I always came to the > > conclusion that the package offerings were too damn old. > > Old and Stable. > This is not always bad. It seems to be the debian way. > But you have the option of changing the sources.list and going to > the unstable or testing versions; unstable is pretty much the > standard to most distros, I think. Debian has a different definition > of stable.
YMMV. Stable to me means - new enough to provide current content; old enough (a few weeks, maybe) that it doesn't break my system. FYI, I'm within a few weeks of current on most gnu/kernel/wm/browser/mailer stuff, and I haven't had any sort of a failure in years. I wouldn't know a kernel oops if it bit me in the rear. I lied: There was one small problem. gentoo like many others got caught by a compatibility change in libpng a few months back - I did have to relink all my X related apps. But that's once in two years. Since I make frequent backups (clone to another partition), recovery is pretty easy. The debian concept may well be just the thing for servers (you only need security updates), but it leaves me cold. By the time kde 4.0 and kernel 2.6 are out and running well, debian may just possibly have picked up on 3.1 and 2.4. The debian concept may well work for desktop environments, too. The debian package management system is pretty slick. If I had put the same effort into debian that I have into gentoo, I could probably have a first-rate and stable (by my definition) debian system now. However, I chose to honor the fact that gentoo had chosen to offer the current X (my god, it's not stable yet!) with its install, whereas debian could only offer an ancient version of X (it's stable, of course) that would not run my Savage 3 video card. The debian installer also failed to setup DHCP automatically. I just wasn't ready to screw around with this when a perfectly good alternative (Mandrake, RedHat, etc. would have worked, too) was at hand. This is all history now. For all I know, it may now be possible to install a debian distro on my current hardware. It just left a bad taste in my mouth when I tried it, so I never tried again. If someone like Libranet wants to come up with a really current debian-based distro, I might give that a try. -- Collins Richey - Denver Area - WWTLRD? gentoo(since 01/01/01) 2.4.18+(ext3) xfce-sylpheed-mozilla _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list - http://linux-sxs.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-users Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Archives,and Digests are located at the above URL.
