Version 30 of Debian

Updated 2003-11-18 22:29:15

Debian is one of the oldest and most well-known Linux distributions.

It is created and distributed entirely by volunteers, which explains some of its characteristics: the quality is very high, but the flashiness factor is often low. It is very easy to keep the system up to date, and there are thousands of packages available. Of particular interest to Tcl'ers, Debian has versions of Tcl, Tk, tcllib, BLT, expect, snack, Rivet, AOLserver, tkcon, itcl, tix, xotcl, tclvfs, Img, tclparser and a host of other packages.

David Welton is a Debian developer.

More information is available at http://www.debian.org

Used and recommended by a number of Tclers - including

A good way to test Debian is to try the Knoppix CD. If you install Knoppix to the hard-drive, it becomes a nicely configured Debian system. Debian itself can be tricky to make pretty. PT

Luciano ES survived a Debian installation earlier this year (2003). And shall not forget the experience any time soon.

AK: Can you tell us more about the experience ? Where was Debian good, bad, etc. ? IIRC they are working on a better installer for the next release. The Knoppix stuff is also quite nice.

LES: It was Debian 3.0. I cannot remember quite exactly, but in a wild stab I'd say I had to answer about 186 questions until the installation was done. After the 130th or so, I was on my knees saying "I don't care, just go on and install it, PLEASE!" I also remember using a very unfriendly program to select the packages. It looked like a long list in a console and I had to memorize some idiosyncratic shortcut keys to (de)select the packages and/or view the descriptions. What was it called again? I was also somewhat put off by the "old" packages because I had the "stable" version, which is always so conservative. It had KDE 2.x! Then I installed another distro with KDE 3.1 and it was soooo much better.

CMCc: Les, that installer is called dselect, and the first piece of local knowledge you need is 'never use dselect', it's abysmal. Instead one should install a base system, then get apt going as soon as possible, and use it. Secondly, although there's no way you would know this, the level of detail in the questions it asks you can be configured to remove most of them. Thirdly, debian unstable has newer packages and is far from unstable (on i386) use it as soon as you have apt going.


Debian [L1 ] recently won several readers' choice awards from different magazines for Best Distribution. For good reason.


CMCc: I sat down and installed Debian and Redhat, alternately, five times each. I then chose the one which installed and configured best, had most of what I wanted, made most sense.

Since then, I've personally installed and remotely maintained dozens of Debian systems all over the world: uptimes of 500 days, never been cracked (heh, 'kick me' sign), ran flawlessly. I've shipped commercial systems based on Debian (unstable, no less) in high reliance context, with never a moment's regret. I've helped software development companies move to debian, for its high quality, good security, ease of maintenance and administration.

I've helped many people learn to install Debian, some of them arts-types. I've got users who give new meaning to the word computer illiterate (not the arts types, incidentally.)


Other distributions used and recommended by Tcl'ers: Suse, Redhat, Peanut

Who is recommending Redhat? I added that link as a courtesy to the folks at Suse (primarily rmax, I believe) who have put out a product that a lot of Tcl'ers seem to be happy with. I don't read any recommendations on that page, just complaints about Redhat breaking things. - davidw

TV I've used RedHat 6.0-2 or so long ago, which was cool, it ran tcl as a cgi under apache, and did most unix stuff, so I was satisfied with it serving images. More recently I used redhat 8 and now I regularly let 9 run, which works fine, rpm's, tcl/tk 8.4.1 works fine enough, though I wouldn't let a average computer user install it. As a unix replacement, at least it is serious, I like running wmaker, with kde and gnome panels/utils on various screen pages, which is fun. The kernel I used offeres audio support, but for (mixed) multiple channels, some special constuct must be run, which may be fast, but that is sort of crappy to use, in the past it broke down, but I guess using the right deamons and processes and making sure nothing runs double or has wrong permissions, it runs. I tried the ccrma patched kernels for millisecond range sound delay, which would be great for building sound apps, but they fail me thus far, the hardware detection somehow seems to go wrong on the machine I can try it on. I had to let the nvidia driver from that company recompile the kernal, which worked fine, and now 3D is blazing, it seems, which may noit be all too rh dependent. The installer works, and probably unattended makes things start up without much care, but a lot of things are not integrated clearly with either kde or gnome based installer and maintenance tools, and the redhat ones, which at times are fine, are often not trivial to find for me though. Without prior unix knowledge, lots of things I woulnd't have been able to do. Then again, having it start up and run a supplied shell and the compiler and such is worth it. Compared to suse (a bit older version a few years ago) and caldera I'd say it probably would still get my preference, suse probably being a bit nicer, though I'd have to do a lot of recapping to know for sure, it still has probably the most professional feel to it. I myself didn't try debian, ever.

Recently, I found redhat linux will be discontinued next year, which sort of surprised me, I alreadt knew there is a new, experimental, developper supported package called fedora, and the enterprice version, which are commercial, will continue I understand, which I never tried out. The current download wasn't that easy to find, the site directs you most clearly to a cheap version, not the free download. By regularly filling in a questionaire, you can for free stay subscribed to redhat net, where automatic updates can be gotten, bug fixes and 'security updates', search for and download rpm's. Versions don't mix, which can be annoying, and I can't say I feel free with rpm's, but the redhat ones do work.

Tcl I cou;d use easily enough, though indeed the standard version is probably old, and indeed getting it installed and running easily wasn't a breeze. You must know what /usr/local/bin is and then some, and it's just not so handy from the sources, but it works fine with some work, thus far.


[ Category Environment ??? that would comprise OS's, text editors, IDEs etc. ]