[Tfug] distro suggestions

[Ammon Lauritzen]

On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 7:12 PM, John Gruenenfelder
<johng at as.arizona.edu> wrote:
> You want Debian.  Enough said.  :)
>
> I just recently installed Debian on old laptop with 64 MB of RAM (try *that*
> with Ubuntu or Gentoo).  Shortly thereafter it was upgraded to 256 MB and it
> was a breeze to go back and give it a minimal X treatment (using Xfce).

Debian was my distro of choice from about '02 to about '05 or so when
Ubuntu began to fill that slot. My primary reason for leaving it was
their stubborn refusal to get with the now. I eventually had to run
Sid if I wanted even vaguely current versions of desktop applications
and I remember having to roll my own SSL libraries on production
servers because those took weeks to mosey into apt-get after major
security announcements.

Granted, things could have changed in the last 5 years...

Browsing the current package availability, I would have to run
unstable again if I wanted Ruby 1.9.2 (this is the current favored 1.9
build - 1.9.0 and 1.9.1 were garbage - Debian stable and testing ship
1.9.0).

They also ship a 3-year-old version of OpenSSL with stable, so I'd
have to run at least testing if I wanted apt-get to manage that for
me... My quick glance doesn't make me feel like things have really
changed all that much since I abandoned them for stagnation.

What I don't want to have to do is apt-pin everything useful from
unstable just to have modern packages. However, I'm not that opposed
to running testing... shrug.

Debian _would_ allow me to install a fairly minimal system quickly and
then hand compile what I need. I'll give it some stronger
consideration.

Do they ship a decent firewall configuration utility?

On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 7:28 PM,  <robbinsc at gmail.com> wrote:
> Just curious - what version of Ubuntu were you using?  I know this (might) sound dumb, but I've been using Ubuntu Server for the past 6+ months with no issue.  What problems did you run into?

I'm pretty sure we tried 10.10 server. My dad tried to do the initial
install w/o me there and it was a terrible experience for him. The
installer felt like a step back in time to a darker, sadder time.
There was no graphical option, console only.

I had to fdisk by hand because the partitioning utility they provide
in the text-mode installer itself is unforgivably bad. When I said I
wanted to select individual packages (since this was planned to be a
very small install), they dropped me into aptitude - a program that
was bad a decade ago and hasn't improved any since. We had a
nonspecific issue with grub mysteriously hanging of the sort I've not
seen in ages.

The third pass through the whole process finally took. I wound up not
selecting any additional packages and then wound up having to manually
install everything under the sun every three minutes. When we decided
that my dad needed xdmcp, we discovered that the version of gdm that
ships with current ubuntu has a mysteriously broken xdmcp
implementation, etc... it really was just one long series of minor
train wrecks in succession.

I suspect that all of the love is going into ubuntu's desktop release.