[Tfug] distro suggestions

[John Gruenenfelder]

On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 09:09:32PM -0700, Ammon Lauritzen wrote:
>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?

I can't speak to the usability of current firewall config tools.  Nowadays, I
configure all that on my router running OpenWRT.  However, the last time I had
to do it in Debian it was about, oh, five years ago or so.  I remember it
being rather easy to configure.  But... that was a while ago.

I personally run Sid at home.  I find breakage to be very rare, and since I
know what's what with Debian, if there *is* breakage, I can usually fix it
very quickly.

At work I have a file server running stable and it is *very* stable.
Definitely not bleeding edge, or anything, but there hasn't been a peep from
it.  On my office machine I run testing so I can get newer software.  I'd run
Sid on it, but other people use it on occasion and I don't want anything to
break.

Regarding OpenSSL, are you sure it's truly three years old?  It may be one of
those Debian-special packages that seems old from the version number, but has
a zillion patches applied to it.  Of course, that can backfire sometimes too
(cough, OpenSSH)...


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