[clue-tech] Presentation on Ubunto/Debian?

[Nate Duehr]

Collins Richey wrote:

>>>Yeah, that's been my major hangup over the years with Debian. Just the
>>>facts, ma'am, and keep the religion between yourself and RMS, thank
>>>you very much.
>>
>>I never realized until recently what a turn-off this is for some people.
> 
> 
> Yep, I'm one of those people. I'm also major turned-off by those who
> get their rocks off by trouncing newbies, and I understand this is a
> daily occurrence on Debian lists.

Since I've been reading far too many of those lists for too many years, 
I guess I can comment on this one.  This truly has gotten better and 
this behaviour is almost gone on debian-user.  Whoa for the poor newbie 
that might wander into debian-devel though, asking a newbie question... 
that might spark some people off... but that also generally doesn't happen.

The IRC channels though -- fuggetaboutit.  It's gone downhill over the 
years.  Too bad really.  Lots of the devels used to be active on 
irc.debian.org (it's a CNAME to somewhere, I forget)... but most don't 
frequent the main #debian channel anymore, and those that do are usually 
out-shouted by the jerks.  Just IMHO, anyway.  Haven't been there in 
about three months, so maybe someone cleaned up, but I doubt it.

>>Hmm... I'm not much for doing multimedia type "stuff" on Debian, since I
>>use it mostly for servers.  I do all the video watching/media playing
>>stuff on the Gentoo laptop right at the moment.  S
> 
> 
> Yep, Gentoo is usually the answer.

Heh... well really building the packages from the newest source you can 
stand to run is the "answer" for most things Linux, but Gentoo seems to 
strike a decent balance between brand new and broken and still new 
enough to be interesting, even using ~86... the supposedly "unstable" 
branch.

I kinda like it for the laptop, but waiting for this Celeron to build 
things is pretty painful.  It's become a habit to start the emerge on 
the way to bed, any night I'm fiddling with the machine in Linux.

Of course, for everything non-CPU bound, the Celeron with 1.2G of RAM 
seems to do great, but give it compiling to do and it's a bit sluggish. 
    The 2.6 kernels never really seem to take full advange of that 1.2G 
though -- there's plenty of unused RAM all the time, which is 
disappointing, as I would have thought it would be more aggressive about 
filesystem caching or something useful with that RAM.

No other machines around here any faster at the moment or I might try 
out distcc... I've been too cheap to buy any faster machines in a while, 
ever since I had to move the "good desktop machine" (Athlon 2500) into 
the mailserver's job because spamassassin was crushing the other box 
completely.

"Modern" fast machines are a bit scarce here right at the moment... 
can't think of any good reason to spend money on faster boxes right now 
other than "play" reasons, and there's house fixing and remodeling junk 
to do this year... computer upgrades are kinda low on the list.

> Yep, I've heard that already. Interestingly enough, I discovered after
> a little research that [K]ubuntu puts User myownuser Group myownuser
> in the apache2.conf. Sort of makes sense since they want the
> 'myownuser' to be able to do everything and they avoid root
> completely. My few web systems work mucho better after the appropriate
> chown.

Ahh, okay.  Cool that there's a plan there...

Nate