[clue-tech] Presentation on Ubunto/Debian?

[Nate Duehr]

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

> 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.

I hear ya.  No objections there!  ;-)

> 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.

I think that shows that many programmers on these projects would rather
piddle around with interfaces than work on usability, probably because
of the same reason you mentioned above?  ;-)

> 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?

Never used it.  Never had a need.  Perhaps I'm missing out on something
useful, but I don't think so.  Anything with "build" in the name usually
indicates it's part of the package creation chain on Debian, and not
needed to just keep binary packages installed up-to-date.

> 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.
 I was having a discussion with a friend who's always been a
dyed-in-the-wool RedHat guy and we drifted into discussing his one major
use of Debian on a cluster, and he brought this up.  Personally, I just
ignore it and read for the interesting techincal and useful operational
bits.  Every once in a while I'll read along in the flamefests, but
usually not.

> 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.

Okay.

> 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.

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.  So I'm probably not
much help there.

> 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.

Ick.  I didn't know that about Kubuntu.

> 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)?

On most Debian systems I think the norm is /var/www with ownership and
group of www-data, a "made-up" standard user and group that packages can
use to install things into the web tree if they need to.  Most packages
seem to actually use /usr/share/package or other variants of /usr/share
nowadays though, directly installing to /var/www in practice doesn't
seem to be done by many packages today.  Quite a while back the apache
folks changed the way they were handling the config files so that new
packages could just install their own config file and it would be
appended via an INCLUDE into the main httpd.conf, so much cleaner, and
use of directories outside of /var/www could then easily be used.

Sounds like Ubuntu and others do some wacky things -- most of the
choices about where stuff goes in the Debian filesystem tree is based
off of policy and enforced via bugs if a package doesn't meet policy.
If the new distros are messing with that stuff, hopefully they're doing
it consciously and letting their users know they've removed long-debated
security and usability policy-driven stuff... yikes.

Ahh... I don't mean to sound like a commercial -- they can certainly do
what they want, it's free code... just sounds kinda like they're going
to relearn lessons already addressed in Debian, down the road... or
maybe not...

Nate