On Thu, Jul 01, 2004 at 12:50:52PM +0100, Graham wrote:

On Thursday 01 July 2004 12:07, kpwatson@pop3.ukfsn.org wrote:

...

I use Debian and have done this so I'd be happy to talk about how easy/dificult it was and the kludges I had to do to get it working.

But I'm sure there's others on the list who have also.

Can we have a quick show of hands;

1. who else would be interested in a talk on this subject?

2. who else has done this and would be willing to participate in leading

a disscussion on it?

Keith

Having installed Debian it seemed to me a lot more closed than Red Hat / Mandrake / SuSE, possibly due to the cultural bias against anything 'impure'. So as a Java programmer I was disappointed to be offered a 5-year old Microsoft-level relic rather than the current Sun version. I'd be interested not so much in the OS installation - that was pretty easy - but more on how to manage and use the system on a day-to-day basis without tools like YAST or DrakConf.

There's a lot of unofficial debian sources, as for Java, well, we're still waiting on that for a bit :) Of course, most people just install the latest Java from Sun in to /usr/local/java/blah and then set the right environment variables and paths (it's certainly what I do, but then I only use Java for damned Java applets anyways).

As for configuring the system, there's debconf for most packages (dpkg-reconfigure-plow packagename) which will do most things that are simple, otherwise, you learn how the system works, and what tools like YaST and DrakConf do in the background, /etc/ is a lovely place to play in, use it wisely :) There's always linuxconf/webmin if you really do need a front end to configuring things... I tend to be more of the opinion that a text editor and man pages are the right way to administer configuration rather than rely on a front end to edit those files for you, and, in some cases, make rather nasty mistakes.

Cheers,

On 2004.07.01 13:06, Brett Parker wrote:

On Thu, Jul 01, 2004 at 12:07:15PM +0100, kpwatson@pop3.ukfsn.org wrote:

...

I use Debian and have done this so I'd be happy to talk about how easy/dificult it was and the kludges I had to do to get it working.

Kludges?! What kludges? I didn't use any kludges to get it working on my debian unstable system :/

It is some time since I upgraded to 2.6 on three systems running Debian and the only thing I remember being critical knowledge was that 2.6 uses module-init-tools in place of modutils. I also think I learned that from this list.

Steve.