Stop Microsoft
Operating Systems => Linux and UNIX => Topic started by: Faust on 22 December 2002, 13:17
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Im thinking of getting the Debian linux distribution to replace Mandrake. Does anyone out there have any opinions / views re Debian? Anything important I should know?
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Debian is my second favorite distro right behind Red Hat. It's an *excellent* distro. Just keep in mind it's not going to have that fancy dancy installer you have with Mandrake.
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I use Debian exclusivly, and void's right; it's an excellent distro, but it's rather a steep climb to install. There are alternatives, though. One of Debians main goals is a GUI installer for their next release, currently "testing" (Sarge). Of course, ince Debian has no fixed schedule for releases, it could be a while. My suggestion, if you're not real confident in your ability to install "pure" Debian would be LibraNet; it's the best Debian-based distro out there; I've used it, and it's almost indistinguishable from Debian; the main difference is LibraNets "adminmenu" app; it allows you to configure devices from the desktop that are usually fairly difficult for a newbie to do. The installer is somewhat easier than the default Debian system, but it's still ncurses based; not impossible, but you have to READ THE INSTRUCTIONS! If you purchase LibraNet, there's lifetime assistance available; they DO take good care of their customers. I think the latest release is around $55.00 US, but it's a real nice intro to Debian, with a lot less pain>
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hmmmmmm... I might give debian a try some time soon. I happen to have some extra space on my machines.
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quote:
Originally posted by The Master of Reality / B0b:
hmmmmmm... I might give debian a try some time soon. I happen to have some extra space on my machines.
I'd suggest at least a gig of space; not that Debian is a space hog- you can install in as little as 20 Mb, but that's really barebones.
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do i really need to download all 9 discs to install debian? (by extra space i meant about 20Gb)
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Thanks guys! Does anyone have the URL for where I can buy libranet?
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www.libranet.com (http://www.libranet.com) is their homepage
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quote:
Originally posted by The Master of Reality / B0b:
do i really need to download all 9 discs to install debian? (by extra space i meant about 20Gb)
As far as I know, the full Debian CD-ROM set is 7 discs; I have a set for Debian 3.0 "Woody" (stable), but you don't need ANY CDs to install; if you have a cable connection, you can do an FTP install directly from Debians website (check the ebsite for details). If you don't have cable, I wouldn't try the FTP install; you'll be older than me before it's done. The advantage of the full 7 CD-ROM set is this; to do a basic install, all you need is one CD, but the other 6 CD's have EVERY APPLICATION AVAILABLE; you can setup your Debian any way you want using apt-cdrom, then, when updates to apps you have installed become available, you just "apt-get dist-upgrade" with an open internet connection, and Debian checks your installed applications, sees if upgrades are available for any installed apps, downloads, configures, and installs any upgrades BAM- just like that. I know it sounds fantastic, and you CAN get into trouble with "apt-get" if you're not careful, but 99% of thetime, it works just like I outlined. And even better, when Debian has a new releae, just "apt-get dist-upgrade" and you're upgraded to the new release WITHOUT a new installation; I've heard that there are Debian users that haven't shut their boxes down for years, and have never re-installed; they just "apt-get". Vey COOL!!!
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you'd have to restart for a kernel upgrade though... but i think that changes in 2.6.* (2.5.* dev)
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Debian is nice... Although i have 1 tiny problem. I mounted my windoze partitions on which I downloaded nvidia drivers. It doesn't allow me to write stuff on the windoze partitions, though, so i can't extract the files in which they reside. Should I add some extra parameters(or however you call those things... I'm a n00b when it comes to 3l337 hax0r jibberish, (-= ) when mounting? Because in Slackware and Mandrake it worked fine.
BTW, I must say that i'm truly impressed that all you need to install debian is 2 floppy disks. My CDROM-Drive is screwed and it doesnt load any cdroms anymore, so I couldn't boot cds. apt-get is lovable.
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quote:
Originally posted by Interscope:
Debian is nice... Although i have 1 tiny problem. I mounted my windoze partitions on which I downloaded nvidia drivers. It doesn't allow me to write stuff on the windoze partitions, though, so i can't extract the files in which they reside. Should I add some extra parameters(or however you call those things... I'm a n00b when it comes to 3l337 hax0r jibberish, (-= ) when mounting? Because in Slackware and Mandrake it worked fine.
BTW, I must say that i'm truly impressed that all you need to install debian is 2 floppy disks. My CDROM-Drive is screwed and it doesnt load any cdroms anymore, so I couldn't boot cds. apt-get is lovable.
if it's ntfs you'll be a lot better off if you dotn try to write, if it's fat than try doing it as root, shouldn't have a problem there.
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fat
no succes...
btw the command i use is
mount -t vfat /dev/hda5 /windows/d
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Do you get an error message? If so, what is it? Can you post the output of an "# fdisk -l" command? Does the "/windows/d" directory exist before trying to mount something on it?
If you want all users to be able to write to it you need to add the "umask=000" parameter to the mount command and/or to your /etc/fstab.
To mount it on the command line with that option you would:
# mount -t vfat /dev/hda5 /windows/d -o umask=000
But I suggest adding this line to your /etc/fstab:
Then it will mount automatically that way when you boot. Or you can manually mount it by typing:
# mount /windows/d
And of course for any of this to work the /windows/d directory has to exist prior to mounting:
# mkdir -p /windows/d
[ December 22, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]
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quote:
Originally posted by X11:
I have tried Debain and arrr, Red-Hat is better, i just dislike Debian because of how difficult it can be to setup. So it is my favorite before urm... here is how i feel right now on distros in general.
Red-Hat
Slackware
SuSe
Debian
Mandrake
"Wishing and wishing away as we go"
I cant believe you dislike mandrake so much. Here is my order.
Slackware
Mandrake
Red Hat
Suse
FreeBSD
Someone once told me that if I liked Slackware, I would like FreeBSD, this was not the case. I had multiple problems with Red Hat when I first tried it that werent present when I tried Mandrake for the first time. The installer for slackware is nowhere near as hard as people made it out to be, and it runs a whole hell of a lot faster than Mandrake, Red Hat, or SuSe. Since I run generally slow computers, the speed issue was the factor that put slackware ahead of all others.
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mandrake's good, but it fails to be the newbie distro it is touted as. It applies a lot of defaults that are shit and need to be reset to decent values immediately after install, and that's no job for a newbie no matter how easy it is. the main difficulty is knowing which mandrake defaults are crap to start with.
Last night for instance i installed mandrake again and i said 'i'll wait till supermount fucks up before i disable it'. less than an hour later supermount fucks up, so i disable it. which took two goes because it needs to be cat > to your fstab file since it fails to work as it implies in the man page. You wouldn't know this if you were a newbie and you would probably reboot to fix it. Not a good start.
Mandrake is filled with these goodies, and while it is an excellent distro i am eager to try red hat.
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yes, the 2.5 kernel can "hotswap" kernels without a reboot. This will definately be included in the 2.6 release. Although I fail to see the real advantage of it (especially for a desktop), wouldn't you have to kill all processes, dump all modules, then swap the kernel? Is the 1 minute post really that aggrevating? maybe i should do some reading or get the latest 2.5...
as for the windows partition, if the "umask=000" doesn't work, drop a ",rw" right after it (no spaces). It might be getting mounted read-only. check your boot messages.
-t.
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umask=000 will cause it to get mounted with all files having rwxrwxrwx (777) permissions. Everyone can then read/write files on the partition, not just root which is the default. And that is only something you would use on FAT/VFAT file systems as those file systems are not capable of understanding file permissions.
[ December 23, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]
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quote:
Originally posted by Calum:
mandrake's good, but it fails to be the newbie distro it is touted as. It applies a lot of defaults that are shit and need to be reset to decent values immediately after install, and that's no job for a newbie no matter how easy it is. the main difficulty is knowing which mandrake defaults are crap to start with.
Last night for instance i installed mandrake again and i said 'i'll wait till supermount fucks up before i disable it'. less than an hour later supermount fucks up, so i disable it. which took two goes because it needs to be cat > to your fstab file since it fails to work as it implies in the man page. You wouldn't know this if you were a newbie and you would probably reboot to fix it. Not a good start.
Mandrake is filled with these goodies, and while it is an excellent distro i am eager to try red hat.
Funny Ive never had that supermount problem, but it seems to me that its much easier for a newbie to disable supermount. Just go to mandrake control center, then mount points, click on the cdrom icon, then click on the little options button. After this all you have to do is deselect supermount. This isnt exactly hard. As for redhat, I havent used it since 7.1, so things may have changed, but simply put I had trouble with my hdd controller card, and my sound card at the time. This put a bad taste in my mouth, and when I switched to Mandrake, neither problem was present. My friend who started using red hat 8.0 told me that no mp3 support was included. Is this true? If it is true, why would they do this? Recently while trying to find a perfect linux distro, I came across slackware, and let me just say that it is the fastest, and smoothest running linux distro around. Too bad it doesnt have a lot of the utilities that I like in Mandrake.
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my point of contention is not how hard mandrake is to use (it is easy) but that it doesn't tell you stuff. I for one didn't know you could do that point and click stuff to disable supermount and i have been using mandrake one year. I only found out supermount even existed because i read it in a review of mandrake 8.1. I only have the download edition so maybe all this is spelt out in the manual but to be honest, newbies are more likely to get the download edition well before they splash out on the boxed-with-manual edition. I just think mandrake should be more helpful a system. It has all this great stuff in it, why doesn't it tell people how to use them?