[HN Gopher] Brand-new Linux release, which I'm calling the Debia...
___________________________________________________________________
Brand-new Linux release, which I'm calling the Debian Linux Release
(1993)
Author : ecliptik
Score : 292 points
Date : 2023-08-16 14:30 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wiki.debian.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (wiki.debian.org)
| dehrmann wrote:
| I went to Purdue. Its LUG had 10 year birthday party of Debian,
| and alumnus Ian Murdock was there. Sadly, it was a week before
| the semester started, so I wasn't in-town, yet.
|
| https://www.cs.purdue.edu/news/articles/2003/debian-birthday...
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Hey, we were at Purdue at the same time (I graduated December
| '04)! That means the chances of me having met you in person are
| _very_ slightly elevated compared to just a random person on
| HN...
| gorgoiler wrote:
| Debian changed my life. My first look at an OS produced by a
| collective of disparate developers was RedHat 5.0 in the late
| 90s. Linux HOWTOs were basically all the docs I had. I got a pppd
| to answer the phone and dialed home from my friends house. I was
| logged in as root all the time. fvwm was the pinnacle of cool.
|
| Debian changed all that. Local, top quality documentation. A
| community. Packages that had been hand crafted to work like the
| rest of the system. The friction disappeared and let me move
| freely around the OS discovering things. Imagine walking around
| LA and then someone gives you a _car_ and a _map_ -- that was the
| kind of difference in quality of experience it gave me.
|
| potato worked. woody felt like the future. I ran it for years on
| my iBook G3 (which one of the DDs helped me set up.) To this day,
| "sarge" still feels like the ultimate next gen, so it's funny to
| see it is actually pretty old. To me, sarge means "futuristic out
| of touch thing" because I waited for it for so long.
|
| Thank you all so much.
| antod wrote:
| That mirrors my first Linux/Unix experiences in the late 90s.
| Except for a short go at OpenBSD for firewalling between trying
| Redhat 5.0 and ending up on Debian.
|
| Debian just felt so much more "right" to me than Redhat did
| back then, and I never really went back to the Redhat side of
| the fence. This was despite Debian having way less third party
| support for anything back then - it wasn't really until Ubuntu
| took off that Debian (by extension) felt secure. Up until then,
| I always had a nagging feeling that the Redhat ecosystem would
| completely take over, and I would yet again have
| picked/preferred the wrong horse in the technology world.
|
| A big thank you to all the Debian devs/maintainers over the
| years.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| I did my little part to help Debian: I ordered 100 CDs of
| Debian 1.1 (in 1996? 1997?) from the US to Europe, which I then
| shipped to 100 people in Europe (and even some in north
| Africa). I ran out of the 100 CD and ordered 30 more and by
| then it was already Debian 1.2!
|
| (my old memory may be failing: it may have been 1.2 then 1.3
| and not 1.1 then 1.2)
|
| It was _hard_ to get Linux distro for some of us back then:
| dial-up at best and otherwise we 'd buy magazines or books
| that'd come with a Linux CD.
|
| I've basically been using Debian and derivatives since forever.
| Did a short stint with Red Hat and Fedora back in the days but
| came back to Debian.
|
| Before Debian I was using Slackware.
|
| And as you said: thanks so much to everyone who worked on
| Debian!
| snvzz wrote:
| It took a very long time to load.
|
| Perfectly illustrates how even serving tiny static files really
| is hard these days.
|
| >?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=Debian-announcement-1993.txt
|
| Perhaps that's why. There's some dynamic script duplicating the
| functionality of HTTP GET.
| whalesalad wrote:
| who would have imagined a post from 30 years ago might be in
| cold storage and take a lil while to load.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| The first time, sure, but I'd expect it to be cached after
| that.
| paulddraper wrote:
| If it was cold, it's not anymore.
| neilv wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230816143054/https://wiki.debi...
| [deleted]
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| If you're using Debian, you can apt-install the debian-history
| package, which will put some nice HTML files in your
| /usr/share/doc/debian-history directory outlining the history of
| the project!
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| > This library will contain packages like the S3 X-server
|
| It took me a moment to realize he meant a version of X for S3
| cards. In the meantime, my brain was trying to imagine an X
| server running from an AWS bucket...
| jeffbee wrote:
| Lost to history is the fact that XFree86 version 3 provided a
| different binary for some families of graphics card. If you
| owned an S3 911 (a very common "Windows accelerator" at that
| time) you needed XF86_S3 but if you owned one of S3's execrable
| ViRGE 3D cards you needed XF86_S3V. Having a single server that
| contained or could load every driver did not come until version
| 4.
| sharts wrote:
| Dang, I haven't heard S3 ViRGE in so long. That thing was
| terrible. But that's all I could have at the time and seemed
| to work well enough.
|
| As for those old "Win modems" back in the day...that's a
| different story.
| h2odragon wrote:
| > S3's execrable ViRGE 3D cards
|
| _twitch_
|
| clocks so bad the screen would swim at 1024x768.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Did it already have the .deb package format and the amazing apt
| repositories at this point? To me that is what blew my mind; the
| transitive dependency management and automatic upgrades made me
| not touch an RPM based distro again.
|
| I don't recall using this first release, I was probably still on
| SLS or something then, and I believe I briefly played with
| RedHat... But I did use it maybe a year or two later, and haven't
| stopped (okay, sometimes I use Ubuntu, shh).
| mr_sturd wrote:
| Looks like the .deb format was introduced in 0.93[0]. Can't
| really tell if that was the time `dpkg` was introduced, in
| 1994.
|
| [0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deb_(file_format)
| davidw wrote:
| I have been happily using Debian, and its derivative Ubuntu since
| 1997. They do great work, and getting involved as a Debian
| packager was a great way to get involved in the world of open
| source for someone like me who had no college CS or professional
| background at that point. Indeed, it was a stepping stone to
| getting a job as a software developer.
| myle wrote:
| The email looks like it describes Arch with the exception of the
| installer perhaps
| OJFord wrote:
| Arch has an official/built-in installer now (as of last year
| iirc) - 'archinstall'.
| abhijeetpbodas wrote:
| > 2) Debian will contain the most up-to-date of everything.
|
| Hasn't aged too well, I suppose.
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| Switch to unstable.
| emilsedgh wrote:
| It has aged extremely well. Based on the degree of the _up-to-
| date_ you need you can use
|
| * Experimental
|
| * Unstable/Sid
|
| * Testing
|
| It all depends on what your definition of up to date is.
| paulddraper wrote:
| There's always RHEL :D
| rollcat wrote:
| Quite the contrary, it aged extremely well. Debian testing/sid
| is very usable on a desktop/laptop; I've used it successfully
| in such fashion for something like a decade. Nowadays I do
| prefer a distro/OS with a 6-month release cycle (like NixOS or
| OpenBSD), but as far as rolling releases go, Debian has always
| been great.
| Corsome wrote:
| What are the advantages of using Debian testing/sid rolling
| release instead of a regular rolling release distro (say,
| Arch)?
| rollcat wrote:
| Like toyg says, I really enjoyed having a familiar working
| environment both on servers and on my workstation. When big
| changes would come around (like the transition from SysV
| init to systemd), I'd start getting hands-on experience
| early, and upgrade production with more confidence.
|
| Between testing/sid/experimental you also got the choice of
| running "somewhat stable" vs "bleeding edge"; I'd usually
| stick to testing (except around the freeze leading up to a
| release).
| brnt wrote:
| What's irregular about Debian, and why would I use Arch
| instead of it?
| Corsome wrote:
| I rather meant irregular with regards to Debian Sid not
| Debian in general.
|
| Arch only has rolling release mode so everyone is using
| the latest (thus any potential issue in Arch will affect
| bigger % of Arch users) while Debian has stable and
| testing and I was wondering if that'd make Sid less
| stable for practical use (since "it's not stable").
|
| I don't want to start a distro war here, just wondering
| about some anecdata of actual distro users.
| toyg wrote:
| Debian Sid is the original rolling release. Its advantage
| is is that you are on a rolling-release distro _but it 's
| still Debian_, so all the system knowledge you accrue will
| apply seamlessly to production Debian servers. Most
| rolling-release distros, on the other hand, are typically
| not used on production servers.
| dunno7456 wrote:
| Also, packages are tested in sid/unstable and migrates to
| testing which then becomes the new stable when it's
| ready.
|
| And packages are tested across releases, enabling one to
| dist-upgrade to a new version of the system easily. I
| think it's piuparts that does this job of testing
| packages among themselves too.
| JohnnyDoe737 wrote:
| Sid is not a rolling release. This is a common
| misconception.
|
| In preparation for a new stable release, it goes through
| what is effectively a package freeze. Maintainers are
| discouraged from updating packages in Sid in order to
| focus on the new release. So almost no new updates are
| uploaded to the repositories until Stable is finally out.
| abhijeetpbodas wrote:
| It would have been fair to say it aged well, if the version
| which is currently called _testing_ was their flagship
| version.
|
| For most software, the testing version gives you relatively
| latest stuff. But that doesn't mean every software can
| advertise itself as being up-to-date.
|
| For debian specifically, I don't think they recommend using
| the testing version unless you're a Debian
| contributor/tester.
|
| I've tried using Sid (desktop) in the past, but ran into
| several version issues while installing through apt. Didn't
| try much to debug, and switched to stable. Been a happy user
| since!
| abhijeetpbodas wrote:
| And happy 30th birthday to debian! Really appreciate all
| the work and effort that has gone into it.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Interesting that they were called "releases" back then. I wonder
| when it became a "distribution"? Was that word only used by BSD
| back then?
| gowld wrote:
| It's amazing that when I discovered debian in 1997, it was just
| the thing that was the normal way to do Linux (OK, there were
| other competing options that were nice too), but actually it was
| a pretty new idea.
|
| And now it's 25 years later.
| kragen wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Murdock#Death
|
| police reported finding him dead of suicide the day after he
| pledged to spend his life opposing police brutality like what
| he'd just experienced
|
| (after, it must be said, threatening suicide that day as well)
| tcj_phx wrote:
| Wikipedia doesn't mention that Ian was apparently adversely
| affected by psychiatric drugs.
|
| _Autopsy reveals Debian founder committed suicide_
| (theregister.co.uk) [July 7, 2016] -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12050263
|
| From the first comment [0] on that discussion: "They found
| chlordiazepoxide, diazepam, temazepam, and oxazepam in his
| bloodstream, which could have had some terrible interactions
| with alcohol. This sounds more to me like a drug overdose that
| caused a psychological episode than just the alcohol-fueled
| suicide they make it out to be."
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12050481
|
| "Chlordiazepoxide, trade name Librium among others, is a
| sedative and hypnotic medication of the benzodiazepine class" -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlordiazepoxide
|
| "Diazepam, first marketed as Valium, is a medicine of the
| benzodiazepine family that acts as an anxiolytic." -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diazepam
|
| "Temazepam (sold under the brand names Restoril among others)
| is a medication of the benzodiazepine class which is generally
| used to treat severe or debilitating insomnia." -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temazepam
|
| "Oxazepam is a short-to-intermediate-acting benzodiazepine." -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxazepam
|
| That's _four_ benzo 's. The whole class of drug is known to be
| degenerative: they perfectly treat anxiety for 2-3 weeks, then
| you need to up the dose just to feel normal. Looks like Ian was
| on a benzo spiral.
|
| The anxiety tragedy is that there used to be a very safe GABA
| supplement, GHB, in supplement stores, but this supplement got
| scheduled because it's also useful as a date-rape drug. GABA
| itself doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier, but GHB does.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-Hydroxybutyric_acid
|
| Allopathic psychiatry is an obsolete tragedy:
| https://www.madinamerica.com/2022/02/malignant-gooderism/
|
| (minor edits)
| kragen wrote:
| i didn't realize that; thank you for the added information
|
| psychiatric drugs can have surprising effects, but generally
| the terrible interaction benzodiazepines have with alcohol is
| that they send people into a potentially fatal coma, rather
| than causing suicide attempts or psychotic episodes
|
| the hangover, though...
|
| withdrawal from ghb doesn't sound like a picnic either, often
| including delirium
|
| that blog post is pretty appalling; the author admits to
| intentionally submitting his 'friend' to alcohol withdrawal.
| doesn't he know delirium tremens routinely causes permanent
| brain damage
| tcj_phx wrote:
| GHB is approved for narcolepsy - I understand it helps
| improve the quality of sleep.
|
| My friend ran out of alcohol - we were not aware of how
| much she was drinking. She lived with her mother at the
| time - her mother & aunt called the mental health crisis
| team on the first day of alcohol withdrawal. She was taken
| to the hospital. I think she was likely tranquilized with
| haloperidol. This is not an appropriate treatment for
| alcohol withdrawal, but it's reasonable under the
| psychiatric standard of care.
| kragen wrote:
| i think timely treatment with haldol can in fact
| significantly reduce or even entirely prevent the
| excitotoxic brain damage from alcohol withdrawal, but i'm
| not certain of that
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delirium_tremens#Treatment
| tcj_phx wrote:
| Haloperidol is sort-of useful for it's anti-serotonin
| properties [0]. The Soviets used this drug to induce
| agony in political dissidents.
|
| The physiology of psychosis is now fully described, so
| there's no need to use haloperidol as a palliative 'anti-
| psychotic' anymore.
|
| Someone responded to my comment yesterday [0] to mention
| pimavanserin, an antipsychotic that works as an anti-
| serotonin drug (rather than an anti-dopamine drug).
|
| [0] my comment from yesterday:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37136792
| kragen wrote:
| i didn't mean to prevent or arrest psychosis, i meant to
| prevent or arrest excitotoxicity
|
| delirium tremens can induce psychosis but while that's
| pretty unfun it's usually less crucial to interrupt the
| psychosis than the neural damage
| [deleted]
| layer8 wrote:
| Previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12050263
| tuukkah wrote:
| A comment from that discussion:
|
| > _if you read the autopsy report there are a variety of
| injuries that you 'd have to try pretty hard to inflict on
| yourself, but are absolutely consistent with being beaten and
| thrown to the ground, and then having someone dead-drop knee-
| first into your back._
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12050924
| kragen wrote:
| and that kind of treatment is hardly unlikely (though not,
| i think, forgivable) when cops find a drunk guy banging on
| the door of someone else's house insisting it's his own
| paulddraper wrote:
| > (after, it must be said, threatening suicide that day as
| well)
|
| And having a significant amount of alcohol + anti-
| depression/anti-anxiety drugs in his system.
|
| And a day after he was arrested (twice) for drunkenly banging
| on a neighbor's door.
| tuukkah wrote:
| Getting targetted (mistakenly or not) by the law enforcement
| for certain minor offences seems to be one of the most
| dangerous things that can happen to you: they won't investigate
| carefully and they won't presume you're innocent.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| Something worth keeping in mind when people blame the victim
| with the classic "they should have complied!" retort.
| sdfghswe wrote:
| > Something worth keeping in mind when people blame the
| victim with the classic "they should have complied!"
| retort.
|
| I noticed it's more common to get that retort if the victim
| is black and/or poor.
|
| If the victim is a middle class white American, you don't
| hear that.
| imtringued wrote:
| Compliance does nothing against American police violence.
| You're merely reducing the chance that they pull out a gun
| and execute you on the spot.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| A summary execution by cop, regardless of how much you
| resist, should not be the punishment for any crime, yet we
| have enough bootlickers and sycophants that want to give
| the police carte blanche (yet also claim to be skeptical of
| government power somehow).
| [deleted]
| winter_blue wrote:
| One particularly horrible exmaple of an innocent man being
| brutalized is that of James King:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HujPlUyTXRY
|
| Plainclothes officers acted like thugs/thieves, and then beat
| him up, and nearly murdered him. After that they charged him
| with an array of federal criminal offenses (including
| resisting arrest, assaulting them (the police), etc). This
| went all the way to a federal jury trial (which defendants
| _rarely_ win), which he did win. The amount of emotional
| psychological trauma this must have caused is inexcusable.
| There 's more details here: https://ij.org/case/king-v-
| brownback/ - quote:
|
| _> Worse still, Kent County, Michigan, prosecutors refused
| to drop the charges. Instead, after James rejected a plea
| offer, prosecutors subjected him to a criminal trial.
| Thankfully, a jury acquitted James of all charges. If James
| had been convicted or pleaded guilty, he could have faced
| decades in prison, and it would have been nearly impossible
| for him to sue the officers and hold them to account for
| their actions that violated his constitutional rights._
| agumonkey wrote:
| For the french crowd, https://pdfbib.com/pdf/0325-formation-
| debian-gnu-linux.pdf was a famous tutorial that many suggested to
| others before we had search engines. Alexis Delattre.
| darkwater wrote:
| Happy 30th birthday, Debian!
| HankB99 wrote:
| Happy birthday Debian and thank you Mr. Murdock and all of the
| many devs and maintainers who have kept it going.
| emersion wrote:
| Printed version here:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20151229025053/http://ianmurdock...
|
| > Yes, that's an actual scanned printout of the Debian
| announcement. I received such an overwhelming number of responses
| I had to print them out to avoid filling my 500 kilobyte (!) disk
| quota on the student Sequent Symmetry.
| woleium wrote:
| Named after Deborah and Ian (Deborah was his girlfriend at the
| time)
| [deleted]
| echelon_musk wrote:
| I embarrassingly used to pronounce it as "deebian" before being
| schooled by a graybeard.
| nicoburns wrote:
| I always assumed it was pronounced "day-bian" until I heard
| the above story of how the name came to be.
| fortyseven wrote:
| Shit, I say it like that! OH GOD, MY WORLD IS IN SHAMBLES. :D
| joemi wrote:
| I don't think I've ever said it aloud, but that's how I
| always read it in my head.
| Midnight1938 wrote:
| [flagged]
| themerone wrote:
| Because most people aren't into conspiracy theories.
| snvzz wrote:
| Perhaps respect.
|
| e.g. I very much prefer to remember him for Debian.
| kergonath wrote:
| How would that be relevant to what he did 20 years before?
| Also, because these conspiracy theories are bullshit?
|
| His death was a tragedy and a symptom of our times, but
| there's no point banging on about it here.
| random467 wrote:
| [dead]
| edgyquant wrote:
| The guy was sexually assaulted and then accused himself of
| sexual assault which got him "cancelled." I followed him on
| Twitter back then, it's hard to imagine it not being suicide
| after all of that.
| [deleted]
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Nice to see the key innovation described so well: "The system
| will be easy to keep up-to-date with a 'upgrading' script in the
| base system"
|
| I don't know that dpkg was the first such upgrade system but it
| definitely still is one of the best. And continues to be, many
| later imitators are not nearly as effective. A key part of that
| is all the work done in packaging so that the packages are
| maintainable and upgradeable, of course.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| I gave an online talk[1] about the history and future of
| package management last year that you might find interesting.
| It was very difficult to determine exactly what was the
| 'first'; as is often the case with big ideas, the Linux
| community seemed to spontaneously decide that it was needed and
| came up with multiple solutions in the space of just a few
| years. Even the question itself is complicated, because
| software did not typically come with a clear 'release date',
| which it usually has now.
|
| Ultimately, the conclusion I drew from my research was that
| Bogus Linux[2] (which is still available, but no longer
| maintained) was the first distribution with a fully functional,
| system-wide binary package manager, but that Perl might have a
| had a functional package manager limited to Perl libraries in
| development or even in use by some in 1993 too.
|
| [1]: https://framatube.org/w/uubjKne6swPQpJWiQLfqxd
|
| [2]: https://bogus.org/
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Oh fascinating, thanks! Yeah CPAN dates to about 1993. CPAN
| in turn was based on CTAN (for TeX), which Wikipedia dates to
| 1991 or 1992. I used both systems in the early/mid 90s and
| they were not very good. CPAN in particular had a penchant
| for deciding to rebuilding and reinstall everything,
| including the Perl interpreter.
|
| I assume the general idea is older, going back to at least
| the 70s and minicomputers or the like.
| oalders wrote:
| Excellent look back at the history of CPAN here:
| https://github.com/neilb/history-of-
| cpan/blob/master/history...
| tuukkah wrote:
| dpkg handles individual packages, while APT is used to handle
| dependencies and version upgrades. I recall using dselect as a
| predecessor of APT in the beginning, but I don't know if it was
| part of the first release.
|
| EDIT: dselect was developed at the same time as dpkg and was
| initially considered a part of it, so in that sense it was
| possible to upgrade a system by using just dpkg:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dselect
| agumonkey wrote:
| IIRC deselect was ultra ambitious, but out of the missed
| target, apt emerged (sic) as a solid cornerstone.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| > 1) someone who will eventually be willing to allow me to upload
| the release to their anonymous ftp-site. Please contact me.
|
| Back then data sharing was so good. Despite the now present
| security threats in a more weaponized net, this even beats the
| most convenient drag&drop sharing site.
|
| > Debian will contain the most up-to-date of everything.
|
| Ironic that today it is the dependable system. Still flexible
| enough for development, but I guess priorities have changed.
|
| Debian is my favorite distro, it just always works for me. The
| author seemed to have a tragic life and made many stops at
| different companies, would have been interesting to hear his
| reaction to the development of Debian. I don't know if he was
| still an active developer, Debian had many, many project leaders
| as far as I know.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > I don't know if he was still an active developer
|
| According to Wikipedia he died in 2015:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Murdock
| echelon_musk wrote:
| The use of "was" in the parent as opposed to "is" tells you
| that they are already aware.
| edgyquant wrote:
| [flagged]
| jrockway wrote:
| Are you sure Twitter is to blame? It seems like he was
| abused by the police.
| throw81749202 wrote:
| I worked with him at the time of his death shortly after
| Christmas of 2015. There was definitely a toxic twitter
| mob, and it's also true that he had been in police
| custody the day before, but whether either of these
| things was the reason for his suicide was never clear.
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| I think the parent was wondering before they passed.
| clintfred wrote:
| Unfortunately, he passed away in 2016. RIP Ian.
| avar wrote:
| 2015, not 2016.
| macintux wrote:
| I worked closely with Ian at Progeny Linux. He wasn't an active
| developer on Debian at that point in time, although he was very
| technically savvy.
| ilyt wrote:
| > Ironic that today it is the dependable system. Still flexible
| enough for development, but I guess priorities have changed.
|
| Testing is pretty stable for something named "testing" and
| unstable is remarkably stable for something called stable.
| Well, except that one month every 2 years after release where
| all that was frozen for release gets unfrozen..
|
| And it being stable is not only important feature. The upgrades
| _just work_ , better than in any other distro I tested (unless
| you make frankendebian but even then surprisingly often it also
| "just works". Slap unattended-upgrades package with some
| settings and you can basically forget it if it is just some
| service
| neilv wrote:
| Of course, for anyone who wants up-to-the-minute
| Unstable/Testing channel, Debian still has that as an option,
| but I'm with you on Debian Stable.
|
| When Debian's APT network package manager happened, that was
| pretty new and unusual. Imagine hearing about a package, typing
| a shell command, and Debian probably had the package, and it
| was installing. (When I was using Red Hat before Debian, there
| was a set of Web sites that I'd have to use to find packages,
| in a way that now seems naive and reckless:
| "https://www.neilvandyke.org/lab-linux-1999/#software".)
|
| The package ecosystem is more mature now, and it turns out that
| Debian Stable almost always has what I need, so I still get the
| APT experience. (I even got the closed Nvidia CUDA stack from
| Debian Stable `non-free` repos, the other day, and it just
| worked. Maybe a little too easily and well, but that's another
| matter.)
| LanternLight83 wrote:
| This explains what freshmeat was; I hit it via google looking
| for an old scheme library, but the link's long dead.
| antod wrote:
| _> When Debian 's APT network package manager happened, that
| was pretty new and unusual. Imagine hearing about a package,
| typing a shell command, and Debian probably had the package,
| and it was installing._
|
| I think a lot of people who came to Linux later don't fully
| realise how revolutionary apt was back then.
|
| I can still remember the pain of manually downloading rpms
| only to find it needed another one installed first or wasn't
| version compatible with something else etc.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > The package ecosystem is more mature now, and it turns out
| that Debian Stable almost always has what I need
|
| At times it's missing something I want but usually Debian
| stable is all I need. I don't use unstable or backports:
| typically I either use Debian stable or I compile from source
| (like Emacs).
|
| Last little hiccup recently is the lack of support for JPEG
| XL in the latest ImageMagick shipped with Debian stable (if
| I'm not mistaken), so I'd need to compile it from source
| (haven't done it yet but it's on my todo list: I want to
| recompile "losslessly" all my JPG to JPEG XL).
| twic wrote:
| > 2) Debian will contain the most up-to-date of everything.
|
| No plan survives contact with the enemy.
| glonq wrote:
| My first awareness of Debian was in a surplus electronics store
| in Rohnert Park California. A kid who bore a striking resemblance
| to Martin Short's Ed Grimley character from SCTV brought a fat
| stack of floppy disks to the check-out and then proudly
| proclaimed that he was using them for installing Debian linux.
| Bless him.
| [deleted]
| mr_sturd wrote:
| Early Linux is before my time in computing. Had to look up SLS -
| Softlanding Linux System[0] - thought it might have been
| something to do with Slackware.
|
| [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softlanding_Linux_System
| jzb wrote:
| Other way around, really - Slackware was based on SLS.
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