On Mon, 2005-04-25 at 10:42 +1200, James Clark wrote:
On Sun, Apr 24, 2005 at 08:56:16PM +1200, Kyle Carter wrote:
you will love Ubuntu, trust me.. Ive been a redhat / fedora fan for ages, but moved one of my servers to ubuntu..
Ubuntu - desktop Debian - server or desktop
Debian upgrades very nicely, I've never used Redhat and don't intend to until I hear that "dependancy hell" has been resolved.
I'm in the process of creating an automatic Ubuntu "server" install CD (see http://www.wlug.org.nz/UbuntuRemastering for the details, if you're interested), and am really happy with my choice of distribution so far. The machines which will be replaced are all Debian Woody machines, which are packed up to the eyeballs with backports to get useful new functionality. The Ubuntu team do more visible work on the desktop packages, sure, but if it comes to a choice between either Sarge or Sid (which are moving) or Hoary (which is stable in one of the Debian senses), Hoary seems to be the right choice. The most obvious problem is "what do I do in 6 months?" Options include "upgrade to Breezy" (obvious, but hard to roll out to many production machines etc), "upgrade to every second release" (not a bad idea), or simply "don't upgrade until security runs out (18 months)". While I don't think security applies to the 'universe' component of Ubuntu, where the big bad Debian repository is, most of the stuff you need is in main, and as time goes on and more people join the project, more stuff will end up in main. In the extremely unlikely (and really bad) event of Debian also moving to a 6 month release cycle, we would realistically have the same problem. As orj has pointed out, there really is no such thing as dependency hell on Fedora any more. The big problem I have on my Fedora (MythTV) box is based on political decisions of the packagers; ATrpms packages lots of new updated (backported, if you want) packages for FC3, which get dragged in in order for me to use MythTV. [1]
Also, please note that Ubuntu != Debian. You can not insstall Debian packages on Ubuntu. You have to use Ubuntu's package repository. Fortunately they appear to have mirrored and rebuilt most (if not all) of the Debian universe.
You can install Debian packages on Ubuntu; what I wouldn't do is add an apt source, because if for example you added an apt repository that tracked sid, you'd get all the newer packages from Debian Unstable pulled on top of Ubuntu Stable, which you don't want to have happen. You can get around this with apt's pinning mechanism. For example, I want the w32codecs package from the marillat Debian repository on Ubuntu. I don't want anything else from that archive. In my /etc/apt/preferences file: Package: * Pin: release o=Christian Marillat Pin-Priority: 1 You can see the relative priorities with "apt-cache policy /packagename/" - locally installed packages are 100, and new packages on a standard repository are 500. Therefore, only packages from marillat that aren't in Ubuntu (eg. the aforementioned w32codecs) will get installed, as the packages installed locally are at a higher priority, even though they are at a lower version. orj is right with respect to the Universe component. The only things I've dragged in from outside Ubuntu itself are some very bleeding Mono stuff to run Beagle, and the win32 codecs. In an amazing show of coolness, Ubuntu does NTFS _AND_ MPPE encryption for PPTP in its out-of-the-box kernel, which were often my first two addons for any new Fedora kernel. Craig [1] Now you've read this far, yes, I could probably get around that with apt pinning. :)