[Eug-lug] Free O'Reilly book

[T. Joseph CARTER]

On Fri, Jan 28, 2005 at 07:09:07AM -0800, John Sechrest wrote:
>  % I would like to have a look at Knoppix Hacks at some point as I am
>  % beginning to conclude the only way to get a reasonably sane Linux
>  % distribution is to do it myself.  I still have most of the skills needed
>  % to do that, but I no longer have quite all of them, and I definitely
>  % haven't got the time.  Knoppix 3.7 or some Morphix based thing is probably
>  % a more reasonable starting place given my time constraints and slightly
>  % dated skillset.
> 
>  What is missing from the default sarge install that you find a problem?
> 
>  Or what configuration issue are important to you that knoppix
>  has or that ubutoo has that debian does not have?

You want something damning against Debian?  As a former developer:

Debian currently supports 13 architectures, if not more.  These include
old Amigas, Ataris, and Motorola 68000 systems.  BEFORE a security fix is
made, it must be compiled for each of these and preferably tested.  That
means you have to wait for someone's Atari Falcon to compile the security
fix before you can get it on an ia32, x86-64, or PowerPC system.  This
takes about a week, on average.  (After all, if compiling X take hours on
an "old" 1GHz P4, how long do you think it's going to take on a 16MHz
Atari--or even a 66MHz overclocked Amiga?

Debian contains some 15,000 packages nowadays, as I understand it.  Before
they can release anything, they have decided that it must all work on all
13 architectures.

On February 7th, 2002, I posted a message in reply to a new feature in
dpkg which would be enabled AFTER Debian's next release (sarge).  I
replied that it was ridiculous to hold back an important feature for the
next three years, because I predicted it would take that long for sarge to
ever be released.

Some time after, I figured that by the middle of this year, we'd see Linux
2.8 kernels, XFree86 4.5, and Debian using a 2.4 kernel.  For saying such
things, I was flamed.  Mercilessly.  And rightly so--I was wrong.  XFree86
4.5 is really called X.org and Linux 2.8 hasn't materialised.  Sarge
hasn't been released yet, and Debian stable uses a 2.2 kernel still.


Ubuntu seems nice enough, although it is basically Gnome Linux.  If you
don't intend to use Gnome, there's probably not much point to Ubuntu.

Knoppix uses KDE by default, but isn't tied to it in any way, and the
really nice thing about Knoppix is that it and its slightly more flexible
brother Morphix are designed to be a bootable Linux system on CD that can
be installed into a reasonably current and reasonably coherent Debian-
based system.  Both it and Ubuntu pull things out of Debian that actually
work and target them for achitectures people will actually be using.