HankB
January 1st, 2005, 05:48 PM
I'm curious about the relationship between Ubuntu and Debian, on both a philosophical level and technical level.
I've been a long time Debian user so when I decided to plunge into the AMD64 world Debian was a natural choice. But I had some difficulties getting my X desktop running with Debian and after spending weeks just getting the H/W stable I didn't want to spend more time twiddling with S/W. So I tried Ubuntu and for the most part, it just works.
It seems like Ubuntu is following the Debian philosophy (as near as I can tell) and I'm curious if Ubuntu is a bunch of Debian developers that decided to fork Debian or if it is a bunch of Linux developers that chose Debian on which to base their distro.
Either way, I'm happy with the results. I've tried other distros like Mandrake, Redhat and Fedora Core and I can't even recall what was the first distro that I tried back when the kernel was (IIRC) 0.99. I wind up coming back to Debian every time because of the ease of administration (for someone who likes the traditional text config files. ;) ) and the upgrade capability.
So I'm pretty comfortable with what I see under the covers of Ubuntu. I see "Debian" in all sorts of test messages. I'm happy to see apt and it seems that the primary difference here is the sources. That leads me to wonder if there is any reason to or problem with including Debian repositories in /etc/apt/sources.list. I read somewhere that Ubuntu includes all Debian packages but I don't know what this means. I don't seem to have all packages available on Ubuntu AMD64 that I have access to on Debian Sarge. But perhaps that is more a reflection of the lack of porting to AMD64 than lack of porting from Debian.
Does Ubuntu base the distro off of one or more Debian distros? (Sarge? Sid?)
Is it truly "all packages" or "all packages that Ubuntu has had the time to test and merge into their repository."
Does Ubuntu package anything that Debian doesn't?
Is there an upgrade path from Debian to Ubuntu (or back to Debian) via dist-upgrade? Years ago I installed Progeny on a laptop and then when Progeny decided to back out of the distro business, they provided a suggested sources.list entry and commands to migrate to Debian. That laptop is still current thanks to apt, deborphan and dist-upgrade.
Is there a compelling reason to upgrade from Debian to Ubuntu?
Well... enough rambling for now. I've probably forgotten some of the things I wanted to ask (incipient CRS ;) ), but if this subject generates any discussion, I'm sure I'll think of them.
thanks,
hank
I've been a long time Debian user so when I decided to plunge into the AMD64 world Debian was a natural choice. But I had some difficulties getting my X desktop running with Debian and after spending weeks just getting the H/W stable I didn't want to spend more time twiddling with S/W. So I tried Ubuntu and for the most part, it just works.
It seems like Ubuntu is following the Debian philosophy (as near as I can tell) and I'm curious if Ubuntu is a bunch of Debian developers that decided to fork Debian or if it is a bunch of Linux developers that chose Debian on which to base their distro.
Either way, I'm happy with the results. I've tried other distros like Mandrake, Redhat and Fedora Core and I can't even recall what was the first distro that I tried back when the kernel was (IIRC) 0.99. I wind up coming back to Debian every time because of the ease of administration (for someone who likes the traditional text config files. ;) ) and the upgrade capability.
So I'm pretty comfortable with what I see under the covers of Ubuntu. I see "Debian" in all sorts of test messages. I'm happy to see apt and it seems that the primary difference here is the sources. That leads me to wonder if there is any reason to or problem with including Debian repositories in /etc/apt/sources.list. I read somewhere that Ubuntu includes all Debian packages but I don't know what this means. I don't seem to have all packages available on Ubuntu AMD64 that I have access to on Debian Sarge. But perhaps that is more a reflection of the lack of porting to AMD64 than lack of porting from Debian.
Does Ubuntu base the distro off of one or more Debian distros? (Sarge? Sid?)
Is it truly "all packages" or "all packages that Ubuntu has had the time to test and merge into their repository."
Does Ubuntu package anything that Debian doesn't?
Is there an upgrade path from Debian to Ubuntu (or back to Debian) via dist-upgrade? Years ago I installed Progeny on a laptop and then when Progeny decided to back out of the distro business, they provided a suggested sources.list entry and commands to migrate to Debian. That laptop is still current thanks to apt, deborphan and dist-upgrade.
Is there a compelling reason to upgrade from Debian to Ubuntu?
Well... enough rambling for now. I've probably forgotten some of the things I wanted to ask (incipient CRS ;) ), but if this subject generates any discussion, I'm sure I'll think of them.
thanks,
hank