[clue-tech] Presentation on Ubunto/Debian?

[David Anselmi]

I'd like to see an intro to packaging for Debian, and especially how to 
package things that a normal user might want to (kernel patches/modules, 
java (well, that's a snap), other patches to official packages...)  But 
I don't know how many people care about Debian development.

Collins Richey wrote:
> I would really appreciated it if one or more of you gurus would put
> together a presentation about maintaining a Debian system, Ubuntu
> flavor as a preference, but I'm sure it's not wildly different than
> POD (plain olde debian).

I wonder whether this would be better as an installfest topic, perhaps a 
small group, hands-on tutorial.  I could do some on Debian but I don't 
use Ubuntu and even on Debian I only use what I need so there's a lot I 
don't know about.

> Where do you find configuration files (well doh, it's probably /etc,
> but how to know), how the init files work, where you find updates,
> how to know what type of updates you want, how to setup to get
> updates that are not too wild and wooly,etc., etc. All those things I
> know how to do in my sleep with Gentoo or RedHat <grin>.

Seems to me that /etc and /etc/init.d are pretty obvious, especially if 
you look in /usr/share/doc (which will point out /etc/alternatives and 
/etc/defaults, the only part that isn't absolutely straightforward).

Updates are just a matter of picking a mirror and a release for 
sources.list.  The official repository probably has everything you want 
so you don't need any rpm repository finders.

[...]
> If your IQ is room temperature or above, you can install Kubuntu, but
> what do you do after you've got it?

You watch it go and update+upgrade once a month.  I guess a new release 
might be more involved but I don't do those anymore.

I guess I could put something together but it would take a lot of 
feedback to make it interesting to anyone besides me.  Although I do 
have to build a new system (Debian is dropping support for Alpha and 
other exotic hardware) so maybe I should demo an install...

Dave