Version 33 of Debian

Updated 2003-11-20 14:21:55

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.)

At the risk of being considered a Debianista, here [L2 ] is an article about what is good about Debian.


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


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