Debian Administration

Although I tried about every distro alive at the time,
I stuck with Debian as seen as it had had its chance.

I guess that's a familiar story among those having
"always been with Debian". :)

Tschuess,
Tom

The first Linux distro I came across was a Red Hat Linux (4.x or 5.x era), it was close enough to Solaris for me to be happy and a lot cheaper. When I had a chance to try out Linux on my own box I bought Red Hat Linux 5.1, which I used for a few years.

Later at work I played with various Red Hat Linux versions in the 6.x era. The employer after that was running Red Hat Linux 7.x and later Red Hat Enterprise 2.x, 3.x and 5.x. I took RHCT training and passed the exam.

At home I decided to switch from Windows NT 4.0 to Debian Woody as a friend used Woody and was able to help - not that I needed much help by then. I've used Debian at home ever since and my partner and father now run Debian, as I no longer support Windows systems. At work the most recent systems I've installed have been Debian too.

I don't dislike Red Hat, I just think Debian is better. I've not used SUSE or Slack so I can't comment about them. I've used Ubuntu on and off but much prefer Debian - I seem to have less problems with Debian.

--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam

I started out with Caldera, purely because it came with some-or-other "teach yourself linux" book. While I thoroughly enjoyed working with Linux, the Caldera way of doing things didn't really grab me too much, even though it was better than NT. In the same week I also installed Red-Hat 5 in a VM, but liked it even less. The main problem I had with Caldera (at least the version on the book's CD) was that it didn't have a compiler.

Being naive, I downloaded the latest GCC source tarball, before I realised the irony of what I'd just done... And its been a wonderful learning experience since then ;-)

About a year and a half of dual booting later (gradually spending more and more time in Linux), I got a copy of all 7 Woody CDs from a guy at a local lug (LEAD in Durban, thanks Paul -- LEAD rocks!), and I haven't looked back since then.

Cheers.
:wq

I tried freebsd at home, at work the server had fedora 3, and then Sarge was installed on it.

You should add Ubuntu, because debian is and always be my server, but foy my desktop I use Ubuntu.

Debian was my first Linux more than a dozen years ago, and I've yet to find a reason to switch. I've tried Slackware, SUSE, Caldera, and Red Hat, but Debian's what fits my world.

FreeBSD is what I was running before Debian, and what I'd run if I couldn't have Debian.

If have used many distro's in my life. Officially I'm not using Debian currently. We're currently use a 90% Debian Etch distro + a few custom debs inclusing HiPac.

We have also altered the installation of Debian with other types of install such as Firewall, VPN Gateway, etc. The existing options such as Mail are changed (we're using qmail).

At work I've always have used Debian (stability). At home I've used Red Hat 5.0, Suse, Slackware, Gentoo.

I've tested Knoppix, Ubuntu, PcLinuxOS. Besides Linux i've also used FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. In the basement we still have a FreeBSD VPN Gateway connected with 4 modems. It is used as an alternative VPN for the IPsec internet based.

I've also kept it for nostalgic reasons. I really like the noised that modems make when they connect to another modem.

Unix, than Red Hat 6 or so, mandrake 4, because these were all installed at work, then at home it started with Red Hat 9, Mandrake 10 i guess, than SUSE than Gentoo, Ubuntu, and finally Debian, at home i have 4 pc's all running Debian Lenny and one Etch, and at work i have 2 servers running Etch and my workstation running Lenny. So Debian it is!

Debian since the first time I touched GNU/Linux. Don't get me wrong or anything, but I never felt the need to try anything else.

For me, Debian is EXACTLY what I want on a OS.

I started out using Debian derivatives (Libranet, then Mepis) for their tools and to learn what I needed to know, for the last four years my main distro has been Debian Stable because I can depend on it getting the job done.

Um, other? Unless you're counting Ubuntu as "Debian"...

If the Ubuntu folk hadn't kept piling on more and more Gnome crap and sneaking in random widgets to eat up all my CPU, I would never have been mad enough to switch. Installing Debian on a laptop is clearly for masochists only. *sigh*

I am with mandriva also. But Debian is best for my servers.Thanks to its packages.

I started with SuSE 6.3 on my desktop as I had to support SuSE 5.3-6.3 Servers on a local ISP.
Then I had to use RedHat (6.x-7.2) but it was hard to get current software (for php4 it was was ugly to solve dependencies by hand...)
With woody (it was testing ;)) I switched over and still I´m happy with debian on my servers (woody,sarge,etch) and of course on my desktop/laptop (lenny)

7horsten

started with red hat 5.2 in early 1999 and stayed with red hat through 6.2 until i moved to debian sometime in late 2000 or early 2001 (testing/woody on the desktop and stable/potato on my server). this is all personal use, as i don't use linux professionally much.

what frustrated me about red hat was the update feast-famine and rpm hell. red hat releases were every 6 months, so you had no new official packages (except for security updates) for 6 months, but then at the end of 6 months there would be a new release and you would dedicate a whole weekend to upgrade every package on your system. and you never upgraded to a ".0" release because something was always broken, which means that when you finally upgraded to the ".1" release the installation took two whole weekends (but everything eventually worked after that, unlike the ".0" irreparable releases). to avoid the lack of official packages you could resort to third-party packages, but that introduced rpm hell (packages built for different distros, dependent on newer packages not in distro, no clean upgrade path to next distro release, etc). i tried rawhide, but i quickly learned that it was only a dumping ground for new packages, with no care or concern for the packages collectively (lots of dependency problems, conflicting packages, etc).

i heard about debian with its stable/testing/unstable distros and that's what attracted me. testing was exactly what i wanted for my desktop: up-to-date software with regular updates and a cohesive set of packages. after i was comfortable with debian on my desktop (learning the "debian way"), i installed debian on my server/firewall. i've been using testing on my desktop and stable on my server ever since (except for a period of time after the woody release when i stuck with it on my desktop for a while and learned to backport packages, before backports.org existed).

besides my desktop and server, all other computers (laptop & another desktop) use ubuntu (more up-to-date packages than stable, but security support and regular releases unlike testing) as those installations are "disposable" (very little customization, all data kept on the server).

Debian was the first linux distro that i've really used... before that i tried to use slackware but i failed :P

I hate installation with RPM, it was dependency for other package.
Debian is very useful for all.

My first Linux distribution was Corel Linux (Debian based ironically) in 1998 or 1999, since then i tried most popular distributions. The ones that i enjoyed most were Slackware and Debian, thesedays i use primarily Debian on servers and Ubuntu for laptop and some desktops when im feeling lazy.

Its nice having lots of choice.

In 1996 I needed a development platform for our webpages on the unix production machine. Windows was incapable of providing this functionality back then.

The admin at my work told me about Suse and so I started using this. After about 2 years I got pissed off by the system and changed to Debian.

Then a few years ago I tested Gentoo out of curiosity but that was a very unpleasant experience and so I changed back to Debian.

I was and I am mostly happy with it.


cb

Conectiva -> turbolinux -> redhat 7 -> mandrake (2 days on my pc) -> suse (1 week) -> redhat 7 -> debian:
potato -> woody -> sarge -> etch -> testing

RH -> LFS -> Etch -> Sid

I really, really liked LFS:
- Extremely granular control of distro
- Minimal interference with the upstream package (oh, like, umm, OpenSSL)
- Minimal bloat. E.g., you could compile everything with --disable-nls with many GNU packages and not end up with a 100 files with error messages in Urdu.

But:
- It was very, very labor intensive. It was particularly painful to add packages with a lot of dependencies, e.g. ImageMagick.
- Entropy was maximized as there was no package manager to do housekeeping when upgrading or removing an application. Bare-metal installs were needed about once a year.
- Some things never worked quite right. You would often end up with uncommon combinations of applications and libraries that didn't play nice together. My favorite was liblow, which would always generate the following error when called from aumix: "Oh, oh, it's an error! possibly I die!"

That said, LFS did give me an appreciation for what's involved in maintaining a distro.

Unfortunately Debian really seems to err in the opposite direction. Debian package management is sometimes more complicated than compiling everything by hand was. I can't say equivs is a joy to use. And some package maintainers seem to gratuitously piss all over the original package. Like, why do so many files have to be renamed in Apache server? I wasn't at all surprised when the OpenSSL debacle came to light.

But I won't deny that it's nice when a simple "apt-get install" makes a whole lot of functionality suddenly appear.

Where is the SLS option? :-)

I went from SLS to SLackware to *BSD to Debian. I would be curious to know who else switched from a BSD to Debian and why. I am still like OpenBSD. The base system is a tight integration of everything you need in a *nix and nothing more. Where I find that it failed is in system maintenance and package management. Apt won me over to Debian.

I am start with Red Hat 6.0 it was great and I continue the Red Hat until its turn into Fedora and then I am switch into the Debian until now , it's great and have best package manager that I have ever seen , it's stable and has too much ready to run packages , I also used the FreeBSD and I like the kFreeBSD packages mixture of of FreeBSD nice kernel core and simplest package manager of Debian together.

SuSE 4 or 5. Fortunately, this is history for me. Some 10 years ago, I tried Debian once and never ever wanted anything else again. At least not for servers. For desktops and laptops I in general use Ubuntu. -- Andreas

startet with susem not long.
after that again some xp and then Ubuntu and since some months debian etch