[NBLUG/talk] Debian

Jeremy Turner linuxguy at linuxwebguy.com
Fri Jun 27 00:49:01 PDT 2003


Steve and list,

The more I use Debian, the more I find that it is the most polished on the
backend (config files, consistant file locations, etc) but a little less
polished on the frontend (more difficult X config, text-only install).

<quote who="Steve">
> On Thu, Jun 26, 2003 at 04:19:49PM -0700, E Frank Ball wrote:
>> On Thu, Jun 26, 2003 at 02:46:19PM -0700, Steve wrote:
>> } Also when debian comes out with a new release, will upgrading the
>> system } be as simple as doing an apt-get
>> } late one night and magicly you are now running the newest release of
>> debian?
>>
>> Yes.  And if you keep the system upto date it may not even have to
>> update very many packages.

If you do upgrades at night, I would also recommend only downloading the
packages to upgrade, and then doing a regular apt-get upgrade in the
morning or whenever.  This gives you the best option of configuration.  I
wrote some slick shell scripts to do this and even email output if
upgrades are required.  I'll try to add it to the Scripts section on my
website (http://linuxwebguy.com) sometime this week.  Oh wait, that's
tomorrow.  Well sometime soon anyway.

>> } I also see that RPM is installed.. so I am assuming I can install
>> RPMS } on this system if I need to.
>>
>> Don't know, but "alien" run on debian does a good job of converting
>> rpms to deb packages and vice versa.  alien on redhat seems be
>> useless.

If given the choice between a regular tarball or an RPM on a debian
system, I'd rather compile the tarball myself that use alien, but I've
heard people use it with no problems.

You can use the same RPM system on a Debian machine, *but* you might run
into some weird file conflicts between apt and RPM.  I'm guessing the best
use of the RPM program on a debian machine is using it to package a
software for a RPM-based distro.  But as always, YMMV.

Jeremy

-- 
Jeremy Turner - linuxguy at linuxwebguy.com
Linux Web Guy






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