On Sun, 18 Jul 2004, Bob George wrote: > Heimo Claasen wrote: > > > And while email and (text) browsing are fairly feasible even under > > prevailing (social as well as "regional") conditions - and with > > rather elementary hardware (as it should be) -, I condider the almost > > complete "net dependency" of something as "sophisticated" as system > > maintenance a somewhat doubtful condition. > > You rarely HAVE to update via the network (or update period). But if you > can, it's a great way to do it. Again, the older packages are probably > fine, and you can certainly buy $2 CDs periodically to update. Or are we > talking about a sense of entitlement that makes such users think that > because others have broadband, their system should work the same way via > slow dial-up?
The truth of the matter lies, I think, somewhere in between. Debian, it is true, can be made to work in such a way that its package management system will always look to local removeable media (e.g., a CD) when trying to update the system. So, it *can* work without 'net access. At the same time though, it seems obvious to me that the whole package management system was developed to primarily use a network, and the network to be hooked, ultimately, to the main Debian servers. This 'net dependence has, if anything, become more pronounced as broadband prices have decreased. So, not using the 'net for the package management under Debian is certainly possible, but it's something of a kludge applied to the intended way of updating the system. > > "commercial" Mandrake managed that on the fly. So I'm stuck with that > > less-than-perfect RPM. As seldom as I use it indeed, it works too. > > Have you tried the Knoppix bootable CD? It's as good, if not better than > MDK at hardware detection. (and FREE!) It's also Debian-based, and can > run entirely from CD or from an HD install (assuming your system meets > requirements.) You can use Knoppix to detect all your hardware, then > simply use those parameters in configuring a "real" distribution. Mention should also be made here of the new Debian installer, now being tested by the Sarge developers. I tried it recently and was thoroughly impressed. It's sort of an interesting hybrid of the old installer interface with Knoppix's hardware detection (don't know if they've used Knoppix at all, but I mean to say it's as effective). I ran it on a ThinkNIC (thin clientish box I inherited), and it detected all hardware flawlessly. But the most amazing part was the following: the machine has no HD to speak of (it's got a little 4MB flash-on-chip IDE thingy), but I did have an external HD attached to it via USB. The new installer detected and set up the USB, set up the disk properly as a scsi emulated drive, and offered it as one of the possible install partitions. This is exactly what I wanted it to do, but doubted that it would. So, this installer is on a par with other bleeding edge Linux hardware detection software. James
