Ubuntu installed like a breeze. The installed was beautifully easy and quick. The default options were mostly good and the gnome environment it drops you into is setup nicely. The first thing I tried to do was update some packages being the bleeding-edge man I am. I used the synaptic package manager, a great front-end for apt. I merrily updated almost all of my packages until I realised that it was updating over http. Where I am our http use has a quota. I am still suffering for that blunder. Our ftp, however, does not have a quota and so I did a s/http/ftp/ and tried updating. It was painfully slow, most of the time it didn't even work. I couldn't have that. So I googled around for some ubuntu mirrors, I found one which didn't work either. During my search I noticed there where a whack of Debian mirrors and this got me thinking: Why can't I just use Debian packages. Well Ubuntu has an answer. In the meantime I thought I would play around with Ubuntu. This is where my problems kicked in. I am a geek, and like all good geeks I am a control freak, I need to set up my whole machine and know what every bit of it is doing. Ubuntu isn't made for geeks, it is made for your Grandma who is too scared to turn on the computer, or the journalist who doesn't have the time or skills to set up a computer. I was impressed by its ease of use and will definately reccomend it, but it wasn't for me.

One of my motivations for trying out Ubuntu was to get to grips with Debian. So instead of beating around the bush I decided to go for Debian. Tristan gave me a bit of help in this regard explaining the differences in distributions and by giving me a nice local mirror, ftp.is.co.za. I had heard from someone that Debian had out of date packages which worried me. However, his was untrue as the sid distribution is up to date and is basically the unstable branch (~<arch e.g. x86> in Gentoo), which I have found to be quite stable so far. As I was going to be upgrading all of my packages, Tristan reccomended I go with a netinstall iso. This is simply a basic Debian installation which then downloads the rest of the packages (.deb's) from the mirror of your choice. I burnt myself the ISO and got installing. The first thing I noticed is that Ubuntu's cool installer was, in fact, Debian's cool installer. The install was smooth as a baby's bum and even autodetected ALL of my hardware unlike Ubuntu. From then on it was love at first sight.

It downloaded all the package groups I told it to and then asked me how I would like to use debconf. I had options from readline to GTK. I chose ncurses as I definately didn't have X installed yet. It then asked me what level of control I would like. I chose low for control freak. Then I was blown away. Not only did it ask me all the basic questions to set up my box, like what is your IP or do you DHCP, it gave a whole bunch of very usefull tips and tricks. For example it told me about common security vulnerabilities in packages, offered me wrapper scripts so mozilla flash wouldn't sometimes stall, asked me intelligent questions about what kind of permissions I want on some devices and told me what I should set it to given my usage description, it even gave me some reccomendations for the niceness level of X. I was blown away. Read this for a very verbose description of an install.

After the very smooth install I was booted into a default gnome environment that lookej very much like Ubuntu's. I did some minor tweaking with some blazing fast installs thanks to the binary packages and had my fluxbox up and running. Over the next few days I configured everything I needed to from iptables to squid to snort to apache to fluxbox...you get the idea. During all of this I found I really enjoyed the way Debian has its filesystem laid out. For example /etc/network has all the setting you would need for your network in an very easy to configure file, which still provides you with the ability to do many advanced tweaks. In a normal system you would need to put your IP setting in one file, your firewall rules in another and set-up your sysctl in yet another. With Debian it is all in one place and all controlled by one usefull program, ifupdown. I thought I was being clever when I made my own Gentoo-style iptables init script to save and restore firewall rules, only to find out that is how Debian used to do it and ifupdown deprecated it.

After playing around I realised that Gentoo is what Debian was three versions ago. Debian is far more mature and it is easy to see.

For my next party trick I decided I wanted to install Xorg. Debian is in the process of moving over to Xorg but there is much work that needs to go into making the package. In the meantime I found this page which details how to install Xorg in conjunction with Debian's XFree package. I downloaded, built and installed Xorg in about 30 minutes, including compile time. I did have some problems using Xorg as it is pretty hard to make it use the updated LD_LIBRARY_PATH and so xkbcomp wasn't working. This was solved by renaming xkbcomp and making a wrapper script which set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to my Xorg installation and then called the normal xkbcomp. The script looks like this:

-> cat /usr/local/X11R6.8/lib/X11/xkb/xkbcomp
#!/bin/bash
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/X11R6.8/lib
cat | $LD_LIBRARY_PATH/X11/xkb/xkbcomp.bin "$@"

This is a problem purely due to me being difficult and not Debian.

Then there is the beauty of a binary distribution. I started with Gentoo thinking all the hardcore CFLAGS would make my machine so much faster. They probally did but the amount of time I waited for things to compile didn't justify it. When someone comes to me asking to print something only for me to find that I don't have gimp-print compiled and then having to wait 20 minutes while all of gimp recompiles was just infuriating. USE flags also drove me mad. There are millions of them, and unless you keep checking ufed you end up with some bizzarre packages being compiled sometimes. Vhata has some ranting about why USE flags are broken too. With Debian I get a binary which is compiled properly and integrates nicely with everything else. For the first time in my life I can print from every program that supports printing. Some people were concerned about the security of binary distributions, I am not sure why. To quote some random joe: "Individual packages are not signed, but Release files are signed; those have MD5 checksums of Packages files, which in turn have MD5 checksums of each package." Which at the moment seems more secure than Gentoo. Anyway I still dig Gentoo and will continue using it on my home machine, although I am loving Debian more and more.

So this has been a huge rant/ramble that really should have been better structured and more informative. If you made it this far, well done, you are braver than I.