[plug] Thinking about Debian

[Craig Ringer]

Trent Lloyd wrote:
> Personally, I think that woody would be your way to go. Potato is so out
> of date today (over 2 year old I beleive) so using it as a desktop
> wouldn't be the nicest thing in the world if you've been using some other
> more modern distro.

IMHO potato is so ancient its painful to use for _anything_ be it 
webserver, router, desktop, anything really. The 2.2 kernel doesn't help 
( life w/o iptables .... ) but even stuff like vim is so old it hurts.

> Woody is actually frozen at the moment so no major updates are made, and
> it is pretty rock solid.
Be aware that it isn't officially released, and security updates may not 
be perfectly timely.
This is the only reason I haven't moved work's colo webserver to woody 
yet. OTOH I doubt I'll be running woody for more than 3 weeks before I 
go to the new "testing" after woody's released. I'm hooked to the 
bleeding edge - since it seems to be rock-solid too with debian.

> - Netinstall CD (30MB): This CD provides you with just the kernel and
> drivers, the rest needs to eb downloaded over an ethernet (dialup may be
> supported, nto sure) connection.

This is the best in my opinion if you've got _fast_ access to a mirror, 
but its pretty good even on 256k ADSL. You know the system is right 
up-to-date on install.

> - Woody Mini ISO (185MB): This CD provides you with everything you need to
> get a basic text system. It is possible to then use the 'apt' package
> manager to download all the rest of mirrors on the internet.

Much like the above but you have more chance to get it work for weird 
situations like cable internet requiring unusual login clients (*sigh* 
glad to be rid of _that_). On the other hand you might find yourself 
re-downloading some of it if a big core update to something like glibc 
has gone in since you grabbed the ISO.

> - Woody Full CD (576MB): This is the full cd with alot of packages include
> X etc that will get you going
It's a waste unless you plan to install from behind a 56k modem. Better 
to bring the machine to somewhere with a local mirror for the install if 
possible.

> My personal recommendation is the Woody Mini-ISO.
I'll second that, though if you've got a pretty normal setup and a fast 
'net connection I'd suggest you might consider the net install instead - 
its much easier to do stuff like install onto reiserfs or ext3 w/o 
having to do ugly messing around later.