Recently, I chose Debian GNU/Linux. I started Linux in 1994 with Slackware and it's floppy disk sets. Before switching to Debian, I've used RedHat for the last 5 years. However, over the last few months, I've become very fond of Debian. I've replaced all of my RedHat systems with Debian.
There are a number of good reasons why I abandoned RedHat and migrated to Debian. The primary reason is Debian's package system that saves me time and effort. I maintain a large number of Linux systems. With RedHat, I had to download and compile a large number of packages on each system to achieve my standard configuration. With Debian, nearly every package that I use was already in Debian. And, if that package was not in Debian, I've since added it to the main development distribution.
As an example, I wrote a computed tomography simulator CTSim. I started this in 1980 on my IBM-PC using PC-DOS 2.0. In 1999 after I ported this to Linux using RedHat. I had to download and compile a number of libraries to build and use this with RedHat. Specifically, CTSim required FFTW, wxWindows, and CTN which were not in RedHat. As new versions of these libraries were released, I needed to re-download and re-install them.
With Debian, this is much easier. Both FFTW and wxWindows are already in Debian. As new versions of these libraries are released, I give a single command to Debian to upgrade all of my packages. CTN, being a speciality DICOM library, was not in Debian a few months ago. However, I've since added it to Debian distribution and now Debian users can easily add it to their system. Finally the best part: CTSim is now in Debian. When a user chooses to install CTSim, all of the required libraries are automatically installed along with CTSim. This is far better than me having to instruct RedHat users how to download and install all of the required libraries. (To be fair, I did have a statically-linked RPM available for RedHat, but it was 10MB in size vs. the current 1MB Debian package size.)
My Debian web page has a list of the Debian packages that I've added or adopted.
Comments (2)
one comment
Posted by James | August 7, 2002 10:17 AM
Posted on August 7, 2002 10:17
I am not sure if you've heard of Gentoo Linux (http://www.gentoo.org) but I thought I would mention it on the hopes that you might at least try it. It can be both a source based distribution or a binary based one. Like debian it also has simple commands to update all your packages and make sure all the dependencies are taken care of. I won't make any value statements about one vs. the other since I believe they both have their niche. I only suggest so that more Lisper devs might give Gentoo a try :).
Posted by charzilla | September 19, 2002 2:24 PM
Posted on September 19, 2002 14:24