Debian cont...

, Will Kahn-Greene | share this (mastodon)
Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts over a long span of time. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

I'm on the UserLinux discussion list mostly because it's really interesting to watch a distribution get going and also because I'm hankering for a user-oriented distribution that I don't have to fiddle with that I can do regular non-fiddling things with.

Anyhow, caught this email, which is fascinating--I had no idea (apologies to Mr. Perens for quoting without permission and out of context but I figure it's in the public archives anyhow):

Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2004 13:41:44 -0800
From: Bruce Perens <---------------->
Reply-To: ---------------------------
To: ---------------------------
Subject: [Discuss] Meaning of the Debian Swirl

Fabio asked what the Debian Swirl means.

It's "magic smoke". Electrical engineer lore is that when you burn out
an electronic component, you cause the "magic smoke" that makes it work
to be released. Once the magic smoke is gone, the component doesn't work
any longer. Debian is supposed to be the magic smoke that makes your
computer work.

    Thanks

    Bruce

That's cool--I had no idea.

Also, I burned a Knoppix cd, brought my old Dell Inspiron 7000 laptop with a DLink wireless card right up, and installed Debian by typing:

knoppix-install

(or something very very similar) at the prompt and selecting debian-installation. It worked, it was trivial, and it was fantastic. My laptop was up and running in 30 minutes (from when I burned the cd to when the laptop had booted into Debian). Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. Now I can _use_ it.

Want to comment? Send an email to willkg at bluesock dot org. Include the url for the blog entry in your comment so I have some context as to what you're talking about.