Getting started w/ Debian

[zcerza at coe.neu.edu (Zack Cerza)]

On Wed July 21 2004 08:03, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> On Tue, 20 Jul 2004 20:02:31 -0400
>
> David Kramer <david at thekramers.net> wrote:
> > I was mostly joking, but I've never had much luck with it myself.
> > YYMV.  I have a friend who has been trying to get Knoppix installed
> > and all her hardware working for about a month in her spare time.
> > Similar stories from another friend or two about Debian.
> >
> > I've had bad experiences with apt, but it musta been something I did
> > wrong. Really messed up my system, though.
>
> I used Debian on my desktop system about 6 years ago. It's packaging
> system is better than RPM, but it's packaging user interface, deselect,
You may want to try aptitude. It can function similarly to both dselect and 
apt-get, with an ncurses mode and a standard CLI mode. It can also (and I 
don't know that dselect can't do these things) be run by a user to explore 
without changing things, and automatically keep track of which packages were 
installed explicitly and which were installed because something else depended 
on or otherwise wanted them.

I'm not saying aptitude is super fast, but it's not *too* slow and offers a 
few very useful features. 

> was very slow. It did a very good job of resolving dependencies. I
> switched to SuSE because Debian was very slow at incorporating the newer
> features and because SuSE's installer (eg. YaST) was very similar to
> deselect. I never liked Red Hat's interface. At the time I was running
> Red Hat on my Alpha.
> I like Knoppix. At Usenix, I was talking to a member of WPLUG, who had
> been using Knoppix very successfully.

-- 
Zack Cerza   <http://greenfs.mine.nu>
GPG Key:     CE48 481B AC70 9C06 740E  E196 A64C 0952 9A8B E23F