On 2/3/21 7:52 PM, Keith Lofstrom wrote:
... I'm thinking about
abandoning 25 years of Redhat experience and switching to
Debian, while my aging brain can still handle change.
...
So - who else is contemplating a move to Debian?
I am. Why Debian and not a downstream version like Ubuntu, Mint, Pop_OS
or similar? It actually boils down to professionalism. Professionalism
has a couple of definitions, one of which is 'The use of professionals
rather than amateurs in any sport etc' where open source distribution
development qualifies as 'etc.' The other definition is "The status,
methods, character or standards expected of a professional or of a
professional organization, such as reliability, discretion,
evenhandedness, and fair play." Debian has been around a very long time
and is proven reliable; the Debian way of deciding things about the
distribution definitely has discretion and is evenhanded; Debian has no
single corporate overlord, and thus fair play is more assured than with
any other distribution.
I have already converted my main laptop to Debian 10 (hereafter just
called 'Buster:' so maybe I'm a MythBuster about being able to switch
from C8 to Debian 10? :-) ). There is virtually no difference to CentOS
8 for the most part. I purchased an 'Everything' USB collection from
LinuxCollections.com (gets all DVD ISOs and have a nice setup for
installing), and installed the GNOME desktop for maximum compatibility
to CentOS 8.
The first thing I installed was the superb Synaptic GUI package
manager. Synaptic won't run properly under Wayland, so I logged in to a
GNOME Xorg session, and Synaptic works. The move from dnf to apt isn't
that hard, but the commands are a bit different, but there are several
'rosetta stone' references out there. In my lists below I'm not going
to repeat the standard 'install dependencies using apt or Synaptic'
statement; that is assumed.
The GNOME extensions set up in Buster is somewhat different from CentOS
8, and I still haven't gotten everything set up like I like it (notably
clickable desktop launchers), but I'm comfortable so far. I copied the
appropriate directory trees over from where I did the backup
My main set of tools:
1.) KiCAD and Sigrok. I had to jump through hoops and build the package
myself to get KiCAD running on C8. KiCAD 5.0.x is already part of the
Buster package set. Lather, rinse, and repeat for Sigrok and pulseview.
2.) Firefox, Thunderbird, and Chrome. I did have some fun with both
Firefox and Thunderbird creating new profiles the first startup, but
once I selected the imported profile from C8 I was up and running with
everything I need up and running. Chrome installed and just works.
3.) Virtualization. I have multiple guests of various operating systems
and versions; running Windows 10 in KVM is an at least weekly task to
manage some security hardware at $dayjob. I had already exported the
xml definitions for those guests on CentOS 8 prior to the reinstall. So
here is where I hit the first relatively major difference. First, of
course, I installed the appropriate packages, including the various
libguestfs tools, the livbvirt tools, qemu-kvm, and virt-manage.
Now, on CentOS 8 there are a number of machine types that reference
specific RHEL versions; most of my guests had the machine type for an
i440FX PC for RHEL 7.6 defined. The Debian libvirt and qemu-kvm
configuration is different; hand-editing of the xml to change the
machine type to 'pc' was required. Also, under CentOS 8 the kvm
executable is qemu-kvm and is in /usr/libexec; on Debian the executable
is just 'kvm' and it's not in /usr/libexec anymore, but /usr/bin. So
that line had to be edited. I then needed to define the locations in
virt-manager where the disk images are. After verifying the xml and the
image locations, I used 'virsh define' with each of the exported xml
files. I did have to activate the default NAT network interface in
virt-manager and set it to come up at boot.
One of my Windows 7 machines insisted on re-activation, but the Windows
10 and the other Windows 7 and XP guests did not (one x64 Win 7 guest
for some solar power system design software, two x86 Win 7 guests (one
for a remote console for the DFM telescope control system for our two
26-meter radio telescopes; the second for the Zilog ZDS-II development
system for the eZ80); three Win XP guests (one for Altera Quartus 9 for
FLEX 10K FPGA and MAX7000 CPLD development; one for running the MyPal
browser plus an ancient Java for managing our EMC Clariion SAN; one for
running some old historical proprietary software)).
4.) Speaking of Altera.... Quartus II version 13.0sp1 (NOT version
13.1!) for MAX7000 CPLD and Cyclone II/IV/V FPGA development. The
simulation tools are substantially different between Quartus 9 and
13.0sp1 for the MAX7000, and I have projects in both versions. This was
also a bit of a challenge, as I had to hand-build and install an older
version of libpng to get it to run.
5.) MATLAB R2020b. I let my maintenance subscription expire (expensive
software, MATLAB!) so this is the version I will be using for a while.
I do RF engineering work with this, so I have the Antenna and RF
engineering related toolboxes. The install and initial run of this was
uneventful except for it needing to re-activate when I installed the
next package....
6.) nVidia drivers. Now, the out-of-box Buster install recognized my
Quadro K3000M in my laptop just fine, and drove all three monitors at
$dayjob (laptop screen and two external 24-inch Dells connected to the
E-port dock via Displayport) just fine; moving the laptop to my dock at
home with the single 27-inch 2560x1440 monitor (also connected with
Displayport in order to get full resolution) everything worked fine, but
after installing MATLAB and getting the warning that software OpenGL
rendering was in use, I installed first the nvidia-detect package and
ran the nvidia-detect program, which told me that the latest driver was
the correct one for me. It was a quick and easy install; reboot and
everything worked ok, although I did have to setup the monitor placement
again and then had to re-activate MATLAB.
7.) Qoppa's PDFStudio 2019 Professional. PDFStudio is a fantastic and
useful PDF editor, even though it's a commercial and not very
inexpensive program. The install and activation went smoothly.
8.) Harrison Mixbus and Mixbus32C. I've been a Harrison Mixbus customer
since the day it was released for Mac OSX back in 2009 (bought a used
Mac JUST to run Mixbus), and after the Linux version was released I have
kept up to date and subscribe to Harrison's 'Plugged-in' membership.
Mixbus is a commercial, professional, digital audio workstation, based
on the open-source Ardour DAW, with fantastic sound and ease of mixing;
Mixbus32C adds component-level emulation (down to the resistors,
capacitors, and printed-circuit parasitics) of the legendary Harrison
32C analog mixing console. I am a heavy user of Mixbus, and it just had
to work; worked out-of-the-box with no issues.
9.) Codeweaver's Crossover Linux. I run a few Windows programs on
Linux, and have been a customer of Codeweavers for some time now. The
main one I use is Lotus WordPro; I have installed the Debian package of
Crossover but haven't yet reimported the WordPro 'bottle' so I don't
know if I need to reinstall it or not. I have a large cache of
documents in WordPro that use features of WordPro that don't port to
either Word or LibreOffice, so WordPro is still something I use from
time to time.
10.) STMCubeIDE and STMCubeMX. There is a .deb for STMCubeIDE and it
installs with no issues. STMCubeMX installed the same as it did on
CentOS 8.
11.) IFtools MSB, Cleverterm, and luactb. I have two incredibly useful
protocol sniffer devices made by IFtools Gmbh, one for RS-485 and one
for RS-232. The software for these sniffers installed with no issue.
12.) Zoom client. Doesn't everybody use a Zoom client these days? Zoom
provides both RPM and DEB packages for their linux client; installation
was easy (sudo apt install ~/Downloads/zoom_x86_64.deb) and once
configured for my multimonitor setup it worked fine; the built-in camera
of my laptop 'just works' just like it did under CentOS 8.
13.) TRS-80 emulators. Ok, so I have a soft spot for ancient Z80
machines I grew up with, like many others on the https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.vcfed.org_forums&d=DwIFAw&c=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA&r=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A&m=7rzfu_vxkqnrJK4tOCY3bePXgBQ0wv3MJag4rJr-Ciw&s=QXM9oF_CZvrzKSUE89txx3hyC5EJcQqvDYwAn95oybo&e=
site; I rebuilt the SDLTRS and trs80gp emulators from source and they
both run with no issues.
14.) GNUradio. It's already packaged; works fine, even though it's an
older version.
15.) Assorted packages such as Handbrake, Audacity, VLC, etc. All just
work, easy install, run as expected.
On the virtualization server side I'm doing a Proxmox setup; Proxmox is
based on Buster so everything works the same. Getting the fibre-channel
registered to the EMC Clariion arrays was a really simple matter for
installing the 'alien' package and then using 'sudo alien -i
ServerUtil-Linux-64-x86-en_US-1.0.55.1.0044-1.x86_64.rpm' to install it;
cd to /opt/Unisphere/bin and run ./serverutilcli just like on CentOS,
and the arrays show like they're supposed to.
If people want me to post updates as I go along I will, but it's been at
least as easy as migrating from CentOS 7 to CentOS 8 was, other than a
few things in different locations. GNOME 3 is GNOME 3, and that all
works the same, other than a different set of extensions being installed
as the default.
