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**Asher** · January 29, 2003, 17:58

Does anyone know of a Linux distro that supports apt-get but has a competent installation system that doesn't require me to hold its hand to do everything like Debian?

**Inverse Icarus** · January 29, 2003, 18:37

Originally posted by Asher
Does anyone know of a Linux distro that supports apt-get but has a competent installation system that doesn't require me to hold its hand to do everything like Debian?

that was my problem with Debian.

note to the uber-novices (i like to think i've graduated to quasi-novice, thank you): do not go into an IRC chatroom and ask "what's your favorite distro", unless you want to see a flamewar

**Ari Rahikkala** · January 29, 2003, 20:55

Off the top of my head... Xandros, Progeny, Libranet, Yoper, Lindows. I haven't read very many reviews, but for what I know I'd recommend Libranet - it seems to do things in a rather clean way. I'm a bit concerned about Yoper - it claims to support all major packaging systems available for Linux, but that might just mean the dependency hell is even worse than in a distro with no dependency tracking package management software... Still, I have only heard of one case of dependency problems with it, so it might work fine anyway.

Having way too much more choice than a mortal would ever need is a nice way to "organise" an operating system; you can always point to five different things that haven't even been tried yet

.

**Harovan** · January 29, 2003, 21:40

Originally posted by Asher
WinXP has somewhere around 35M lines of code. How many of those do you think have security vulnerabilities, as a percent?

Ummm, 99%? I'm not sure and have absolutely no prove for this number, but it's Windows, ya know, and buggy per definition...

EDIT: As for your Debian setup problems: We already spoke about this, and I still don't understand, what's your point. You can on nearly every PC install a vanilla Woody in, say, 10 or at most 15 minutes. It can do nothing, only connect to the internet. For all else, including GUI installation (well, if you consider Gnome or KDE to deserve this name, I don't), you can use apt-get.

**Asher** · January 29, 2003, 21:59

Well I ask because I wasted five hours today ****ing around with Debian (3.0r1) since I desperately want apt-get.

I've reinstalled it three times with a net-install.

It creates the core installation, I select which tasks I want to do, it selects 600 some-odd packages and begins downloading and configuring via apt-get.

About 5 of the packages simply fail to configure properly without really telling me why (

), and XWindows claims to be installed correctly, but when I go and run "startx", it tells me something like:

Screens found, but none have a usable configuration.

Fatal Server Error: No screens found

and then doesn't let me load it.

So I went in and configured it manually, it still says the same thing.

THAT'S why I want a distro with apt-get with a competent installer, Debian's installer is such utter ****e it's an embarassment...

I have no idea why it doesn't work, and I'm 99% certain I configured it properly (I know all the settings and even tried running xf86config myself several times, and it didn't help).

So now I have no working Linux distro, since I replaced Mandrake 9 with Debian 3.0r1 which doesn't have a graphical interface.

Linux is fantastic.

**Drake Tungsten** · January 29, 2003, 22:02

Mac OS is more secure and less buggy than Windows...

**Asher** · January 29, 2003, 22:23

Yeah, like the iTunes installer that deletes your partitions.

I'm downloading Libranet, will give impressions soon.

**Asher** · January 30, 2003, 02:18

Okay, I've toyed with Libranet now.

I downloaded 2.0.2 (the latest free version) and burned it, booted and installed.

The good: apt-get is beautiful. Configured XFree perfectly without any input from me.
The bad: Everything is outdated, apt-get dist-upgrade needs to download about 700MB to get me up to date. When installing, you can't choose individual packets -- only about a dozen categories.
The ugly: It doesn't know how to add Windows partitions automatically to the bootloader. It doesn't know what to do with an Audigy soundcard. It can't configure the network on its own.

Bottom line: Still pathetic compared to Mandrake in the install & configure department, lightyears ahead in the maintenance department thanks to apt-get.

Edit: Does anyone know how to get apt-get to install more recent stuff? Like it just "upgraded" to Mozilla 1.0.0, when 1.2.1 is the latest official release and 1.3a is out...

Or must I find those .deb and do them myself manually?

**MRT144** · January 30, 2003, 02:44

asher, your rabid fanboyism of windows et al is almost as bad the mac fanaticism...no wait its worse.

**Asher** · January 30, 2003, 02:53

Yes yes, I've heard that all before, and I still don't care that people think that.

The fact of the matter is, Linux ain't all that-and-a-bag-of-potato-chips like some people want you to believe.

I pine for Windows whenever I use a *nix.

If you want to contribute to the thread, feel free to. That means you gotta put on the bigboy pants and tell us what you think. Otherwise you can go away...

**Ari Rahikkala** · January 30, 2003, 03:41

apt has, at least if you're using the official Debian package repositories, three different levels of up-to-dateness (stable, testing, unstable). You should already know of this, and of sources.list, I think... If not, go to http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/ap.../index.en.html . What you want to do is to add

APT:

efault-Release "testing";

(testing is what I always used... I heard unstable wasn't that bad, either, compared to some commercial distros)

in your /etc/apt.conf and the lines for the unstable package repositories in your /etc/apt/sources.list. Remember to apt-get update to actually download the package lists. Now you can (should be able to...) use apt-get -t unstable install mozilla to get the version 1.2.1. This is all described in the apt HOWTO. If you want to get later versions, you need to install them manually.

BTW, this won't be of any use for you, but running /usr/bin/X11/XFree86 --configure did a pretty good job of autodetecting my graphics hardware on Gentoo. However, autodetecting hardware was all it did, so I still had to decomment and edit a couple of lines and add one to make it work like I wanted.

**Asher** · January 30, 2003, 03:45

Thanks Ari.

**Asher** · January 30, 2003, 03:58

What do I put in the sources.list file to get the testing stuff? Do I need to change anything?

Also, on KDE's website, it says to get 3.1 with Debian:

deb http://download.kde.org/stable/3.1/Debian stable main

I assume I add this to the sources file, then do an update, then dist-upgrade?

Edit: I just copied and pasted the existing sources.list entries, replaced "stable" with "testing", and now I've got another 300MB to download to upgrade some more.

But I still can't get the KDE site to work, it returns an error for it about the file not existing, when I put exactly what they said to.

**CICSMaster** · January 30, 2003, 09:10

Oh for god's sake, GET REDHAT and install AUTORPM.

**Ari Rahikkala** · January 30, 2003, 11:33

I checked the autorpm manpage at autorpm.org , and it seems like that script doesn't do dependency tracking, which, I believe, Asher is after. Besides, if you have even the most basic knowledge about security and sysadmining, you do not use a script or a cron job to upgrade (replace!) software on your system. You do not want to try to login at morning and notice that some third party package has done a rm -rf /.

I'll look into that KDE download...

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