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purpose: Will Kahn-Greene's blog of Miro, PyBlosxom, Python, GNU/Linux, random content, PyBlosxom, Miro, and other projects mixed in there ad hoc, half-baked, and with a twist of lemon

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Tue, 12 Oct 2004

My status with Debian

I have Debian GNU/Linux happily running on my laptop, though my laptop is pretty pokey (it's an Inspiron 7000 that I bought in 1998).

My server at Serverbeach (bluesock.org) runs Debian and it was doing fine until the kernel switched the / mount to read-only and then died. Rebooting caused the server to fsck everything and I lost /var/lib and /var/cache... Then things got pretty interesting for a few hours. My friend gave me a tarball of his /var/lib (minus some random stuff) and from that and some useful files in /var/backup, I was able to bring most of the server back to life. Additionally, I found some of the files that were missing in lost+found. Tawdry things like mailing list archives dating back to 2000. Time to institute a more rigorous backup system that includes more data....

My dad loaned me one of his monster servers (see figure 1) because it was non-functional. My roommate pulled all the stuff out and put it back in again and now it works fine... Not clear what the actual issue was. Anyhow, once I get it booting, I'm going to slap Debian on that machine and start using it for development. Then I'll switch my pokey laptop to mirroring/backing-up bluesock.org.

I've been really happy with Debian. As happy as I was with Gentoo, except I don't have to wait hours for X and various other large things to compile. 

   ____
  ||__||   <---- server
  ||__||
  |    |
  |    |
  |____|   . <-- me

figure 1: an ascii picture of me standing next to the server

[ tags: bluesock, debian | category: /debian | Permalink | View/Add Comments: 2 ]

Comments:

Posted by Brazen on Tue Oct 12 22:09:16 2004
I've been very happy with debian.  I run debian stable on production servers and debian test on my desktop.

Stable is a little too stable sometimes, I think the default python is still 2.2 and some other packages are a little old (stable, just old).  So I end up with some stuff compiled from tarballs.

Test is a little too unstable sometimes.  A weekly update is at least tens of megs of updated packages.  It isn't unsual for some features of firefox to break after an update (the download dialog was recently error text, for instance) in which case I have to wait a day and update again.

That said I much prefer Debian over RedHat.  I could never get non-RedHat(TM) RPMs to play nice but I have a bunch of non-Debian debs on my update list for individual projects and they just work.

I still have one redhat 7.1 box running on my home network as a fileserver.  It is a headless P133 who's CPU fan stopped turning about two years ago, so I don't dare reboot the thing lest it not come back up (in fact it was once a redhat 5.1 box that had to be reinstalled after a reboot because the /usr hard drive had failed sometime in 250 days of uptime but I hadn't noticed because all the needed files were in memory cache).

That's all the linux geekiness I have in one post.

Just kidding, I also wrote a python wrapper for the top level blackbox object -- so technically my window manager runs under python.

It gets worse, but I'll stop there.


Posted by will on Thu Oct 14 10:17:35 2004
I'm pretty much with you.  I ran RedHat 5.1 then 5.2 and then upgraded to 7.0 and then I ditched it after going through RPM hell more than I wanted to.  Part of the issue was that I didn't want to pay for the up2date subscription thing.  Well, either that or I was very confused about how all that worked.

I ran Gentoo for a while and liked that.  Then switched to Debian and I've been running Debian on all my boxes ever since.

I run testing.  Occasionally I have issues, but for the most part I'm ok.

/will


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