[clue-tech] Presentation on Ubunto/Debian?

[Collins Richey]

On 5/30/05, Nate Duehr <nate at natetech.com> wrote:

> How did you get to the point where you could do them in your sleep on
> Gentoo or RedHat?  Repeat that process, it apparently works!  :-)

I said it all in an earlier post. I'm lazy <grin>. The repeatable
process is several years of RTFM and RTFLISTS. I'm looking for
shortcuts.


> Nothing earth-shattering seems to be coming out of Linux at all on any
> front these days, really... KDE and GNOME are hopelessly mired in their
> battle and usability isn't really getting any better with any release,
> stuff still takes too much effort after a decade or so of development to
> get various things working (fonts, anyone?), and I'm kinda kicking back
> and not very actively pursuing any major projects right now...
> 

It seems to me that the main reason these two are not making any
usability progress is that they keep changing the interface/API/etc.
Package makers spend all their time keeping up with the changes.

> But as far as Debian maintenance goes... I was a dyed-in-the-wool
> dselect and apt-get fan for a long time... apt-get update && apt-get
> upgrade seemed to take care of most needs for patching and updating...
> 
> But I learned about aptitude and started using it.  It calculates
> dependencies to a finer level and will automatically remove unused ones
> if asked, which leaves less overall cruft on the system.
> 
> aptitude update && aptitude upgrade -- seems to "work a treat" as my
> Aussie friends from ham radio would say.

I'm still too much of a babe in the woods with this stuff. Isn't the
dependancy checking and removal what apt-get build-dep does?

> 
> I hear this site is gaining massively in popularity also, and might
> produce some jewels of documentation --
> http://www.debian-administration.org.  It got some press recently in the
> Debian Weekly News.  DWN is probably another thing I would highly
> recommend... 

Thanks, I'll give them a shot. 

> hidden in all the political and ever-raging debates over licenses and
> elections and goodness knows what else t

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.

> 
> Trying to track what's going on in Debian from a spin-off is virtually 
> impossible.

My mission at home is to find a distro that's relatively stable,
relatively easy to update, and relatively close to current without
being bleeding edge and to get a little exposure to the Debian way of
doing things. Ubuntu might fill that bill ; it's way too early to
tell. I have no need for servers at home, and my at work servers are
all RedRat.

Two shortcomings at present: 

1) The recommended approaches to the installation of mplayer, xmms on
the newbie guides don't seem to produce a usable result.
mplayerplug-in either hangs or produces pictures with no sound. Didn't
have that problem with CentOS.

2) The standard [K]ubuntu offering doesn't have the compiler
toolchain. I've gotten spoiled by Gentoo in that respect. It's a lot
of work to produce a system that will allow you to build from source
on Ubuntu.

> 
> I just use Debian on the servers nowadays... it's stable, rarely if ever
> jacks up a configuration file without warning during an upgrade, doesn't
> leave crap like ".rpmnew" and ".rpmold" lying around for me to sort out
> during upgrades either (that would break Debian policy - the package
> maintainer is supposed to help you get through major changes with more
> intelligence than just dropping you at a new version with your old
> config, a new broken one, and a document with no details... like
> RedHat-type distros do), and in general it's just kinda "there"... it
> works.  No frills, no fuss.
> 
> Kubuntu and Ubuntu and the like add the frills and fuss and complexity
> back in to some degree, making some things like configuration of a nice
> desktop/laptop machine "easier" at first, but I wonder how they'll hold
> up to upgrades and the test of time.  Ubuntu shows a lot of promise in
> that regard.

Thanks for the input. 

One thing I'm curious about, security-wise. On Kubuntu, Debian too?,
the root web directory is /var/www owned by root:root whereas RedHat
and others put the root directory in /var/www/<somethingelse> usually
owned by apache:apache. Isn't root ownership of the web directory a
bad idea (TM)?

-- 
 Collins
       Head teachers of the world unite: you have nothing to lose but 
       the Start button.