TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

Debian is one of the largest, oldest, and most democratic of all the Linux distributions out there. All of these points could be argued to be good or bad depending on your perspective.

Politics aside, there's no arguing Debian hasn't had a significant influence on the Linux world. It spawned Ubuntu, the now most popular desktop out there. It's sparked many a vociferous debate.

At the end of the day all I care about is whether or not I can use the damned thing. Let's see if nearly two years of development yielded any results.

Install:

I did something a little different this time around; I tried installing using the 150MB "netinstall" disc, which basically has just enough stuff on it to set up the basic system and lets you download the rest on demand over the internet.

Normally this isn't an option for me since I have notoriously slow and buggy internet connections most of the time. I got lucky this week.

One thing I was interested in taking a look at was the new graphical installer for Debian. It looks about as decorated as Redhat's Anaconda installer, which is to say it's very sparse and plain.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, except that sometimes between screens after I press the "Next" button the installer would gray out the buttons and give me no other feedback. A less patient person might think that the installer had frozen at this point and reboot.

I however was feeling uncharacteristically patient, so I trudged on and got the whole system installed (though it took some time on my internet connection). There were no errors that I could see and the system rebooted itself.

Upon reboot I was greeted by a very pleasant blue logon screen. The default desktop (I chose Gnome during installation) is plain, but nice. It's no better or worse than the last Ubuntu desktop I looked at.

The menu setup was awkward. There were submenus for Accessories, Games, Graphics, Internet, Office, Programming, Sound & Video, and System Tools. That made sense.

What was odd was that several of these options were duplicated in the "Debian" menu option, which held much of the same list of programs with a few non-Gnome additions. This could have been handled better.

MP3 support was...sort of present. When I tried to play an MP3 file, the music whizzed by at light speed making anything I played sound like an arrangement by Alvin and the Chipmunks.

I downloaded and installed XMMS and the proper MP3 plugin through Synaptic and that fixed the playback problem for MP3s. MPGs and WMV8s played fine. My scanner was not detected by Xsane.

One random strange thing was that my wired network was detected but not enabled by default, so every time I rebooted I had to click the network connection icon in the top right corner and choose "wired network". I'm not exactly sure what caused this, or if this is some new "feature" I've never encountered.

Software Selection:

Software selection in Debian is what you make of it. If you download the DVD images you get the choice of basically everything and the kitchen sink, but it's not all installed by default (thankfully).

Likewise if you have a decent internet connection the entire apt repository is at your fingertips, and it's not exactly sparse on content. Usually in this section I talk about what's installed when you just Next->Next->Finish, so here goes.

All the basics were covered. I had IceWeasel (basically Firefox renamed), GAIM (recently renamed to Pidgin due to a court case), OpenOffice and GIMP. So far so good.

The usual Gnome default programs were present. With an internet connection I was able to add Eclipse and a proper Java VM, which was nice. I can't say if either of these are available on the 2 DVDs however.

It's worth noting that if you want to make Debian useful offline you'll likely need to either download at least the first DVD or the first 2 CDs. Apt-get is a wonderful thing, but it's only as good as the repositories you give it, whether those be online or via CD.

Who's it best for?

If you can get access to the DVD set, Debian is an excellent all-inclusive distribution for someone with slow or no internet connection. You'll find most everything you need (and some things that are just cool to have) on the discs.

It's the grandfather of popular projects like Ubuntu, and as such it doesn't move as fast. It's stable, but you're going to be stuck with older software for a long time.

Debian is also hampered by political issues that sometimes cause releases to not come on time. There is also a fringe group in the Debian community that adhere to a very strict "all free software" policy, which causes grief for everyone else.

In short, if you're looking for stability, don't necessarily need the newest software, and can stand the political debates, Debian will work for you.

If you just want something small and solid that works for most desktop purposes, you're probably better off with a newer, more regularly released offshoot like Ubuntu.