TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, after years of ranting over Debian-derivative distributions, I finally decided to let loose on the grandfather of all, Debian itself. It took several hours and no less than TWO DVD-Rs.

Had I chosen the CDROM route, it would have taken 14 of them, and probably some of my sanity as well. Given the sheer number of software packages available in the "main" Debian distribution branch, I can't say I'm *that* surprised, but wow. This distro wins hands down for the FREAKING HUGE distribution category.

Install:

The installer for Sarge is much improved over Woody, but it's still ncurses based.  It's basically the same installer Ubuntu uses, except it installs the 2.4 kernel and on my system it failed to set up my X Windows environment correctly.

At least dpkg screens were removed. That was perhaps the most confusing and convoluted part of my Woody install. One thing I noted (with a fair amount of  pleasant shock) was that the installer correctly noticed that I was running it on an AMD64 platform and installed the 2.6-amd64-k8 version of the Linux kernel and added it to my GRUB menu along with the old fallback of the 2.4-i386 kernel. Bravo, that's actually a first among Linux distributions I've tried, since usually it requires a separate AMD64 edition to get a 64-bit kernel.

After the initial install I was basically told that X Windows had exploded and dumped to a console. It took about an hour and a half of fiddling around with things that only a veteran fiddler of Linux would know about before I got a functional (albeit VESA, non-3D-accelerated) X Windows environment working. Even UBUNTU was able to properly configure an X Windows environment for me, so there's no reason in my head that its parent distribution should have trouble.

As I usually do, the next thing I tried was getting my Nvidia commercial drivers to install. This step isn't really necessary for folks who have access to the online Debian repositories which have a convenient little "nvidia-glx" package you can apt-get.

Unfortunately due to some philosophical issues (more on that later) this package is not included in the main distribution and therefore did not come on my 2 DVDs. The kernel sources I needed to compile the Nvidia driver module were included, however. I only discovered this by using Synaptic to search my DVDs, since the package names aren't very easy to guess.

Once I had the driver compiled and installed, I edited my XF86Config-4 as usual and was greeted with the familiar Nvidia logo. All was well with that, and with a very minimum of effort, however it was more effort than I would have had to expend if they would just include the nvidia-glx package on the disc like Ubuntu. But I digress.

Software Selection:

I did some digging around in Synaptic to see just what all was included on the distribution DVDs, and for the most part I was impressed.

A great many very cool programs were included (particularly games like the GPL version of Quake 2, although the data files still needed to be pulled off the game disc).  One package I really wish had been included was the Eclipse Java IDE, which if I'm not mistaken *is* present in the current "unstable" (Sid) branch of Debian, but I couldn't find it anywhere on my Sarge discs.

The Debian online repositories have a staggering amount of software available on them, so for those blessed with broadband you're in very good shape. The shining acheivement of the Debian project in my mind has always been apt-get.

There is no better package management and system upkeep tool than apt. There are plenty of tools that offer about the same features (and act about the same way) such as yum, or SuSE's YaST, but apt-get is still my personal favorite, as long as I have an internet connection.

One positive of having mountains of software available on the DVDs is that you can set up apt to read from them as if they were an online source, and tools like Synaptic will only show you what's available from your discs. This was set up for me automatically during the install.

On the subject of included software, the maintainers of the Debian and GNU projects, including the rather outspoken RM Stallman (link), refuse to include anything non-GPL into the main branch of the distribution.

This includes the Nvidia drivers, Macromedia Flash, Sun's Java and a host of other things that I personally find quite useful. The only reason I can see for this (since all of the above are redistributable without charge) is a philosophical one.

The maintainers want all software to be "free" as defined by the GPL, and since Nvidia and others don't make their sourcecode available, they are relegated to the "non-free" section of the Debian repositories and banned from the actual distribution discs. 

To me, this is an absolutely silly and limiting thing to do, since an awful lot of people who use Linux, and Debian in particular, don't care about philosophy.

They care whether or not their devices work, end of story. If I'm given the choice between not having 3D acceleration on my $300USD video card and using something that's not blessed by St. Ignutius (see the Stallman link), I'll take something that works, and to hell with Stallman. I don't think I'm alone in this regard.

Most Annoying Feature:

Aside from not including a few packages I'd really find useful, Debian is a very stable and complete distribution. I can't stress enough the sheer magnitude of software they ship with it.

It's the polar opposite of Ubuntu in that respect. One thing that Debian still lacks is easy installing. The Sarge installer is much better than previous installers, but it still doesn't auto-configure X Windows properly, and that's a big deal for people new to Linux.

One small thing, I was also unable to mount my USB stick in Debian, despite much fiddling. It may have had something to do with the default kernel, but regardless, it was an annoyance, particularly since I keep my site on that thing and I couldn't write this review from inside Debian because of it.

Who's it best for?

If you have broadband and you're reasonably competent with Linux in general, Debian will not cause you much undue stress. If you have access to the 2 DVDs or 14 CDROMs, you should also be reasonably fine.

This is definitely not a distribution for folks new to Linux. There are many more easily-installed distributions out there that will give you a working Debian base (and properly configured X Windows) with a lot less work.