Debian experiences (was: Wonderful world of new dists)

[Ben Scott]

On 11/2/06, Paul Lussier <p.lussier at comcast.net> wrote:
>> -- Ben "Currently running Debian etch, but has gotten tired of having
>> the X server break every time I run 'apt-get upgrade'" Scott
>
> ... installing the latest version of xxdiff which resulted in having
> to upgrade to the X.org stuff.
>
> Amazingly, surprisingly, miraculously everything "just
> worked"...

  I suspect part of my troubles stem from the fact that I'm running an
NVidia card.  The X.org open source driver yields video corruption around
text cursors, and the NVidia binary-only driver seems to bounce in and out
of the repository.  This has been a major hassle in an otherwise pretty good
trial experience.

> Oh, and through all that, the system never needed a reboot, and my
> screen session running multiple shells and instances of emacs never
> stopped.

  The "traditional Unix" has always been rock solid.  :)


  Here are my thoughts and a detailed accounting of my experiences
with Debian Etch so far:

---- Installation ----

  Last spring, I discovered that my motherboard was suffering from capacitor
plague, and the system was becoming more and more unstable.  In the summer,
I picked up a new Dell Precision 380.  (Normally, I would never buy such a
thing, but I got a great deal on it through work.) Since it was a "forklift
upgrade", I decided to try out some new distros.

  The latest Debian "Sarge" (I think it was 3.1r2 at the time), in typical
Debian fashion, didn't even recognize the SATA controller, so that was still
born.  Debian's slow release cycle, combined with their decision to ship
very "vanilla" kernels, tends to mean lots of hardware compatibility
problems on any hardware newer then the r0 release.  This is unfortunate.
is unsex

  I decided to give Debian "Etch" a try.  I downloaded an ISO of the latest
"net install" snapshot and booted it.  It did find my SATA controller.  The
installer uses text mode video, and while I wouldn't call it "sexy", it was
quite serviceable.  It detected all my hardware automagically, walked me
through all the steps with suitable guidance, and generally worked fine.

  Now, I've long maintained that installing *any* OS is fairly hard for the
"newbie user".  Give Grandma Ethel a Windows XP install CD and see how she
does with it sometime.  If you're willing to assume the minimum level of
competence needed to install an OS, I don't see why the Debian installer
would not get the job done.

  I expect that people use to the GUI, mouse-driven install of, say, Red
Hat, might be in for a bit of culture shock at first, due to the
aforementioned text mode UI.  But the UI still uses the windows-and-buttons
scheme that everything else does, and prompts are given on screen, so anyone
willing to read the screen will quickly get back up to speed.

  The installer detect my network card, found a mirror to pull packages
from, and did all that stuff well.  It even handled my rather esoteric
requirements for LVM with lots of logical volumes and filesystems.

  It detected and configured my video subsystem fine.  As mentioned above,
there are problems with the X.org "nv" driver and my card, but I can't
really blame that on Debian.

  So the install was good, I thought.

---- Hardware support

  As mentioned, everything was detected fine, and was configured for me.
That's the first time that has *ever* happened to me with Debian.  The
people working on this stuff deserve some serious kudos for getting Debian
up to speed in this department.  I only hope the slow release cycle doesn't
cause problems over time.

  Other than the X server issue, the only other problems I had were with SMP
support and sound support.

  This Dell has a dual core processor package.  For a time, one of the
updated 2.6 kernels Debian was giving me didn't seem to like it.  But
another update appeared to fix that, so no harm done.

  Likewise, the sound card has some issues with one of the kernel releases.
Everything indicated the sound card was there, and the volume levels were
up, and so on, and it would go through the motions as if it was playing
sound, but nothing came out of the speakers.  Likewise, this too eventually
got fixed with a kernel update.

  So, really, the only lasting hardware problem has been X.

---- Packages and such

  Post-install, the initial system appearance was rather stark, but I had
asked for that, so I considered that a success.  (Compare this to, say,
Fedora Core, where you're going to get 500 MB of stuff whether you want it
or not.)

  It was an easy matter to use "apt-get install foo" to get whatever I
wanted.  While RPM-based distros have long since caught up, Debian was one
of the earliest distros with good dependency management, and still does it
well.  I'm impressed with the speed of apt-get vs yum (which, in Fedora 5 at
least, is still slow for some tasks).  Now, compared to RPM, dpkg still
seems slower, and slightly clunkier for some things, but it certainly works
fine, and with today's hardware speed problems largely diminish.  :)

  One of Debian's greatest strengths remains the very large repository size.
There are, at last count, twenty bajillion packages in the Debian
distribution.  The chances of being able to do "apt-get install foo" and
actually find "foo" are very good.  Running Fedora 5, I was building even
fvwm from source.

  Of course, it isn't all honey and roses.  There's an irritating tendency
to be missing the packages I need most.  Aside from the X server issue,
support for some kinds of multimedia were lacking.  Fortunately, adding
the third-party repository from www.debian-multimedia.org solved that
nicely.

  Synaptic, the GUI front-end to apt-get, is also very nice.  I would go as
far as to say that it is one of the better package management GUI's I've
used.  I have been very unimpressed with the newer stuff in the RPM world;
most of the newer stuff seems like steps backward compared to tools from
five years ago.

  I do note that package churn is quite large.  Tens or even hundreds of
megabytes of updates a week.  Now, that's quite acceptable to me, given the
nature of the "testing" distribution, but it does belie claims that Debian
unstable is just as stable as other big distros.  Sure, Red Hat does ship 20
metric assloads of updates in most cases, but it's nowhere like this.
Again, I don't have a problem with the policy (it's called "unstable" for a
reason), just the Debian zealots with false advertising.

  It does mean the latest and greatest in many cases, of course.  New stuff
comes out quickly.  That certainly comes in handy at times.

  One thing I did find myself wanting was some source of information on the
status of some package.  I could find out current revisions, open bugs,
testing status and such, but nothing along the lines of, "Our plan for this
package is such-and-such".  When things update so often, with a rapid cycle
of "release, identify problem, release fix", that sort of thing becomes more
important.  Maybe apt-get should include blog functionality for the package
maintainers.

---- Conclusion

  All in all, it's been a pretty successful trial for me, even with all
other things being equal.  (Compared to my past experiences with Debian,
it's been a resounding success!)

  I just hate this X server issue.  It's not just the regular breakage, it's
the not knowing when (or if) the binary driver packages are coming back.
It's been several days now, for this latest episode, and I'm getting really
sick of not being able to enter text in Firefox.

  Anyway, there's my review of Debian Etch.  :-)

-- Ben "Not sure what I want to try next" Scott