Talk:Debian/Archive 1

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Commercial/non-free

On http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#TOCCommercial it states:

Please don't use ``commercial as a synonym for ``non-free. That confuses two entirely different issues.

In the first paragraph the article seems to use ``non-commercial as a synonym for ``free. Debian doesnt realy have to be non comercial - you can happily charge money for Debain and many commercial distros are based on it. This is a classic confusion with Linux but fairly obviously is false, hence the multitude of commercial linux distros --Htaccess

I agree with you, that "non-commercial" != "free". The core of Debian is non-commercial and free that's why I added the word "free" to the first sentence. Hope this is o.k. with you. --mkrohn 15:38 30 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Yup - that makes sense, its pretty clear what it is now, the only issue is that the link to free software includes both free beer and free speech, but thats quite good anyway - as the reader will then understand the difference and probably then realise that Debian is free in both senses. --Htaccess

Non-commercial didn't really make sense there, the pipe link to Free software works fine. --Shallot 00:01, 2 Sep 2003 (UTC)

List of Debian-based distros

Should this really be a list of all Debian-based distributions, which it is fast becoming as many are added to the list? Instead, this purpose is better served by categories, possibly with a link to the appropriate category in section "Related articles", only leaving here a list of the most famous Debian-based distributions or, better yet, no list at all. Distributions that are relevant to the discussion of the article may be linked within its text. --Centrx 20:47, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I say no list at all -- move it all out into a separate article linked from here. --Joy [shallot] 21:35, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Done that. --Joy [shallot]

Debian-based distros

I'm much in favor of including a few words about the characteristics of each of the debian-based distros. Would make it much easier to get a quick overview. Reading all subpages is not the same as a quick characterization of each distro with 3-6 words. --Gabriel Wicke 23:42, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Just make it consistent. --Shallot 23:50, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I've kept this very short now, I wouldn't mind it being a bit longer for each. Similar to the listing at Linux distribution. --Gabriel Wicke 00:17, 7 Feb 2004 (UTC)

How about Lesbian GNU/Linux [1], it it a real distribution or just some joke? should we list it? --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 17:54, 2004 Jun 26 (UTC)

It's not a real distro, it is a porn retriever with the user interface of apt-get and apt-cache. So, you type porn-get install boobies and it downloads the porn archive it has listed as "boobies". --Centrx 19:58, 26 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I'm not sure it is even that- purely in the interests of research, I attempted to d/l it, and actual files were simply not on the site. --Maru Dubshinki

Testing, unstable

The "Criticism" section notes the existence of 'testing' as a counter to the criticism that 'stable' is too old. From what I've heard, this isn't the purpose of testing. The testing distribution is for testing, not for users. If you want to stay the most up-to-date with upstream versions, that's what 'unstable' is for. (This is my experience, as well: trying to run 'testing' as a user, you get the worst of both worlds: the instability of 'unstable', and the slow rate of releases of 'stable'.) --Anonymous

Regardless, the users still widely use testing instead of stable to get newer packages. --Joy [shallot] 09:37, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Check the Sid FAQ. Broken dependencies, etc. make Sid not recommendable. Stable is currently hard to recommend. There's testing remaining. --Chealer 22:19, 2005 Feb 12 (UTC)

Second Joy. Testing is what any other distro would probably call stable- I never had the slightest problem wi' it. -- Maru Dubshinki

Neologism: "debianize"

12:56, 26 Aug 2004 68.74.167.117 (Added make-up word "Debianize" -- gabrielinux@softhome.net)

• To "[debianize|debianize]:" To fulfill Debian's mission, or to install or experiment with Debian. ([Debianized]) Said of a machine that runs a Debian-based system, or a person who is very much into Debian.

This is not a place for just-invented words, especially if they don't match the actual most common use in Debian -- to equip an upstream source package with Debian-related stuff so that it can build a (Debian-compliant) .deb. --Joy [shallot] 12:27, 26 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Categorization

In response to the most recent edit by Shallot, I erred because I meant to include the category Linux distributions in the category Operating systems, but forgot. If this had been done, the Debian article inherits the categorization of operating system because it is in the category Linux distributions. With categories, only the most specific categorization should be specified in the article.

Now that I think about it more though, this whole categories business may need some discussion with regard to Linux, GNU/Linux, and distributions. The most pertinent question here might be whether "Linux distributions" should be in category Operating systems. Another might be whether all the Linux distributions should instead be categorized as GNU/Linux distributions. Another might be whether there should be a general category GNU/Linux for all things Linux, with the category Linux being only for kernel-related items. Alternatively, Linux might be the larger category with only free-software- and GNU-related items in GNU/Linux. And so forth... --Centrx 20:32, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Another editor subcategorized the operating system category in the meantime it seems. I guess it's okay now. --Shallot 12:25, 6 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Screenshots?

I'd like to question the usefulness of the screenshots, particularly as they are now - presented as Debian Desktops. This is simply untrue - there is no such thing as a Debian Desktop - it's KDE, *box, WindowMaker, GNOME, XFCE, or any of a host of others. It's simply not specifically a Debian Desktop. As such, what is the purpose of the inclusion of these screenshots? --Brother Dysk 12:01, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)

I somewhat agree, as they were never even "typical" Debian desktops. Nevertheless, it is useful to have screenshots of systems running Debian, and it would be even better if those screenshots had Debian-specific tools displayed, like aptitude. Ultimately, it would also be best if we knew what was running in the screenshots and in all screenshots, but some thoughtless fool neglected to provide any information about the screenshots, neither in the Image: page or in this article. --Centrx 01:26, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Agree. I don't think it's useful to have screenshots (at least those) unless someone would really know nothing about GNU/Linux. If one is kept, I suggest a bare Woody with the default DE. I don't even know what it is. I'm removing the old-looking one. I suggest displaying mozilla on debian.org to replace the remaining one. --Chealer 22:19, 2005 Feb 12 (UTC)

Agree. I think having some screenshots is important, as people naturally want to 'see' what they are reading about, even if that doesn't mean much. I agree regarding a useful apt shot. The current one doesn't demonstrate dependency handling (I'll upload an alternative). Perhaps a different desktop shot would be good - e.g. Wmaker out-of-the-box has a 'debian' theme? --Jon Dowland 14:33, 7 May 2005 (UTC)

The screenshot doesn't appear as what a user might 'typically' expect from Debian... Perhaps a more generic screenshot of a debian desktop (i.e. the default layout of Gnome before any customisation) would be better? If we wanna show off what Gnome can look like surely that belongs in its own article? --mattsday 01:19, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Disagree. This screenshot looks great and is one of the possible ways you can configure Debian. A more productive action would be to create a debian package called "gnome-theme-wikipedia" or something that perfectly recreates the presented desktop. --Ean Schuessler 20:30, 9 June 2005 (UTC)

Disagree. Though this is a screenshot of Debian, it's also a perfectly valid shot of GNOME. It shows off GNOME's features more obviously than those specific to Debian. If you can somehow make a screenshot that's more of Debian than of GNOME... --Ihope127 15:10, 16 July 2005 (UTC)

Agree. Although the current screenshot exemplifies the features of GNOME, and GNOME is a feature that is compatible with Debian, there is very little on the shot that can't be recreated on another Linux distrution. A GNOME Desktop with a Debian background or theme would probably be more helpful. I think a similar case applies to several other Linux-distro articles such as Gentoo and SUSE. Of course, I must admit that Debian screenshot looks very nice. I wonder if someone could tell me what Gnome Theme was used. --Omegamiko 11:39, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

Featured Article candidacy (not promoted)

(Contested -- Jul 1) Debian

I'd like to nominate this article since it contains a fair amount of detail and information on the subject -- certainly more than I would have expected. --pne 11:26, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)

• Agree. Is a screenshot possible? --Merovingian✍Talk 11:29, Jul 1, 2004 (UTC)

• Object. While not wishing to plunge the article into a holy war, 1) I'd like to see some comparison of Debian in relation to other distributions (carefully NPOV, of course). Currently we mention Debian's features, but don't give a context as to how this compares to other distributions. For example, the large number of platforms is described, but it's not mentioned that other major distributions typically support only one or two platforms. APT is mentioned, but it's not compared to other (commonly perceived to be...) inferior packaging systems, e.g RPM. Similarly for the free-software philosophy and the nature of the Debian Project. 2) Also, there's no discussion of the (commonly perceived...) weaknesses of the distribution; it's common to hear people criticise the user-friendliness of Debian (e.g. no pretty installation / configuration tools). ---- Matt 14:39, 3 Jul 2004 (UTC)

• Not focused. (Is GNU/FreeBSD really deserving of a mention in the intro for more than the sheer novelty factor?) and the writing is not compelling. Both are fixable. Try news style for the intro? --David Gerard 18:13, 3 Jul 2004 (UTC)

sid as backronym

Is "sid" actually a "back-formation"? Why doesn't the article refer to it as a backronym? Mickeyreiss 17:58, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

No, it does not, but this is no reason for deleting information. It is a reason for correcting it... --XTaran

Well, not really. I've actually never heard of these "some people" saying that until I read this on Wikipedia! It's a too frivolous piece of half-information to be that high up in the article. --Shallot 13:14, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Ok, that sounds like an argument. So I just asked Joey from the Debian Project about the frequency of this expansion. He shares my opinion: In his opinion, Wikipedia should list it as "inofficial expand of the codename sid". I'll try to find a place not so high up in the article. --XTaran 14:54, 01 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Done. Anyone knows how to make footnotes a better way? Haven't found any special Wiki markup for them, I just used ==Footnotes== and <nowiki>[1]</nowiki></nowiki>, which looks quite ugly but at least works. --XTaran 19:38, 1 Mar 2004 (UTC)

BSD criticisms

The effort to combine the GNU-based userland with BSD kernels is also controversial among some of the developers of the BSD systems, who do not consider their kernel to be a separable component from the userland.

The original wording implied that they all don't like it. I'd like to see some quotes or discussions, we need to quantify this statement. --Joy [shallot] 11:47, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Also, isn't the opposition also based on the fact it's the GNU system (with GPL and all) that is being integrated with the BSD kernels? --Joy [shallot] 11:48, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Pages for individual releases

I really don't think we need silly little pages for each release, and titled after the codename at that. Unless someone actually adds some non-generic content to them, I'm going to nominate them for deletion.

Another angle to this issue would be the fact that we redirect Debian GNU/Linux here. If we split off the page about the project and about the software, we could easily and logically redirect the release names over to that page. However, this would beg the question - where to redirect the term "Debian" itself, to the project or to the software? --Joy [shallot] 11:53, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Yes, let's get rid of those pages again. --Kaare 19:11, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Category

Isn't Category:Linux distributions redundant, since Category:Debian is already in it? --Karol 04:05, August 9, 2005 (UTC)

Fixed that. --Maru 04:12, 9 August 2005 (UTC)

Check WP:CLS. It states:

An article should not be in both a category and its subcategory, e.g. Microsoft Office is in Category:Microsoft software, so should not also be in Category:Software — except when the article defines a category as well as being in a higher category, e.g. Ohio is in both Category:U.S. states and Category:Ohio. (emphasis added)

Because Debian defines Category:Debian, it belongs in the same categories that the category it defines belongs to. -- Antaeus Feldspar 00:06, 11 August 2005 (UTC)

Yes, you are right... I myself was not aware of this point. What about the reason you changed [[Category:Debian| ]] to [[Category:Debian|*]] ? Isn't there a tendancy of last to replace the stars with spaces? Karol 05:49, August 11, 2005 (UTC)

I don't think there should be any such tendency because such a pre-listed article stands out *less* in the category, my visual parser (so to speak :) just skips over it because it has no heading letter. --Joy [shallot] 10:17, 11 August 2005 (UTC)

Distributions based on Debian (externals links)

the links in section Distributions based on Debian aren't external per say... --[Pascal D.] 24.202.172.138 20:58, 3 September 2005 (UTC)

I've just moved the sub-section to See Also. It seems like it might fit there better. Izogi 22:06, 3 September 2005 (UTC)

Name of the Article

Shouldn’t it be Debian GNU/Linux?

Not necesarily, as most people searching or browsing are likely to type “Debian”, so it’s sensible to use that as a name. Notice however that Debian GNU/Linux would also show the same page. — (drini’s page|☎) 10:21, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

Also, the debian project doesn’t just make Debian GNU/Linux, it also produces Debian GNU/Hurd, Debian GNU/NetBSD and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. —ajdlinux 20:38, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

Besides, whether it should be Linux or GNU/Linux is a debated issue, both with important characters argumentating it. Stallman likes GNU/Linux, Linus likes just Linux. This isn't getting settled soon, so I think it's probably best if Wikipedia doesn't take a stance in this debate by naming their articles to any of either. However, an argument for using Linux in article names rather than GNU/Linux the fact it's more well-known. --Michiel Sikma 20:30, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

There's no contest in this case. The full name of the distribution is "Debian GNU/Linux". According to Debian's about page, "the system we have created is called Debian GNU/Linux, or Debian for short". I think that's an argument that Debian GNU/Linux is the more proper name, although it does exclude the other kernels. --Dylan Thurston 01:11, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

The 'system' being referred to there is obviously the Linux one, though, and this page is really referring more to the project ('Debian Project') than the Linux system specifically, in my opinion. --Fuzzie (talk) 03:22, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

debian packages

What is a Debian package?

A Debian package is used to install a program or library or something else on a Debian box. The extension is .deb. It is extracted and installed with dpkg or apt/aptitude. It's similar to an installer on Windows. Cookiecaper 23:13, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

Logo

File:Debian.openlogo.svg

Debian has an absolutely gorgeous logo. I'm saying that as graphic designer. There needs to be some way to add a large thumbnail of the logo in the article somewhere. I decided to put one on a left floater in the beginning paragraph, but I think it's best to find a better place for it. --Michiel Sikma 20:27, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

Official logo

I read once that there were two Debian logos- one of just the magic smoke, which could be freely used, and the one of the genie bottle with the magic smoke, which was official and trademarked. Should we have the official one instead of the purely smoke one? --maru (talk) contribs 20:25, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

"GNU/Linux" versus "Linux"

Debian has always gone out of its way to call itself a GNU/Linux distribution and not a Linux distribution. That's how it should be represented on this page. Thanks to those that reverted the change in question. —mako 23:46, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

Infobox

What is the purpose of the inserted infobox? With a single exception (Latest stable release, which might ought to be put in the introduction), it contains information that is already found in the first two sentences of the article and is poorly formatted, leaving four empty lines. --Centrx 22:30, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

One word, my friend- Tradition! --maru (talk) contribs 20:49, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

Also, it provides a quick glance to Debian. —vedant (talk • contribs) 06:55, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

The OS infobox should be included on as many OS pages as possible. Is presents the information in a more accessible format and as Maru pointed out is standard fare. If you have an objection to the current implementation of the infobox, edit the template. Is there an OS project somewhere? cookiecaper (talk / contribs) 13:54, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

I asked on Template_talk:Infobox_OS how the width could be corrected and have received no response. I have asked a few times on #wikipedia, the IRC channel, how to change the format and either received no response or was told that it was not possible to change the column width. This matter ought to be resolved before the infobox be inserted into front-end articles.

"Standardizing" information into compressed factoids and summaries of summaries generally misrepresents the truth and is especially inaccurate and misleading in the case of Debian. For example, while the Debian Project as an entity provides some facilities and some structure for administering development of the Debian distribution, that entity is unlike nearly every other provider of operating software, whether commercial or not. Official Debian Developers, who do most of the work are self-organizing and autonomous, each with the liberty to work only on what he wishes and, in such work, often choose to do it rather independently. "OS family", "Source model", "License", and "Working state" all have problems like this, in addition to being ambiguous. Also, with the exception of "Latest stable release", all of this information is provided in the very first sentence of the article, and that information might also ought to be put in the introduction. Trying to fit reality into standard boxes does a disservice to any reader seeking true, accurate information. This is a rather new phenomenon, not tradition, and that it is becoming more common is not a reason for doing it if it is misleading.

So, what is the purpose of this "accessibility"? Is a reader coming to this page going to check out the right-side infobox first and not read even the first sentence of the article? Is a glancing reader going to care about the the version date and number of the latest stable release or some hodgepodge of license information more than that the distribution is developed by volunteers under the auspices of an organizing Debian Project? Why would it be a good thing that the glancing reader goes away thinking that the software in Debian is created by a "company", like Microsoft, from start to finish? How is a poorly formatted table more accessible than a single sentence and is the targetted readership of Wikipedia the same as the targetted readership of USA Today, with as much filler, tables, and graphs as possible? - Centrx 01:41, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

merge

I've marked embedded debian for merge since it barely merits a section in this article, what with being dead. Hell, it may be worth deleting instead of turning into a section. But I leave that for other minds. 65.95.124.5 07:15, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm sure we will be able to refine Embedded Debian into a sentence in this article. It is possible that it could warrant its own article, but as it stands it is mostly fluff, and really any of the Debian-related topics could possibly warrant "History of Debian", etc. articles but right now there is not enough to distribute it across several pages. - Centrx 02:41, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

The merge suggested by 65.95.124.5 (Toronto-HSE-ppp3704050.sympatico.ca) seems reasonable. But there is a recommended size limit on articles of 30KiB.

So: The question has to be asked: Would the embedded Debian article distract from the main Debian article, and hence get deleted. Or would it better to tag embedded Debian as a stub, and let it grow. until these issues are decided, then I suggest keeping the statusquo.

Keep Both: but tag embedded Debian as a stub.

FYI: IMHO users that should not nominate pages for merge:

• a user identified by just a numerical IP address. (Unless they are permanently anchored on this IP address)
• a users who has never significantly contributed content to either of the pages to be merged.
• a user that has not made any significant content contributions elsewhere.
  • Bulk cataloging and copying editing are not "a significant content contribution".
  • Bulk CfD, TfD and Vfd are not "a significant content contribution".
• a user that has only just registered their username.
• a user that - specialises in or - habitually nominates pages, template or categories for merging or deletion.

Mergeaholic 00:03, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Unfortunatly, Emdebian is an entirely separate project from Debian; it's one of a host of Debian derivatives, like ubuntu, Knoppix, Gnoppix, etc. - Anonymous

No, it's done by the Debian developers, it's a subproject, like OpenSSH is of OpenBSD, and since it's so small and could easily be put in Debian's article, I repropose the merge. 65.94.100.225 16:43, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

GFDL criticism

Centrx deleted some stuff about the GFDL. I think it is worth mentioning- I remember that the Emacs people were quite annoyed when the manual was reclassified as nonfree. --maru (talk) contribs 00:33, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

The way you describe it here, this sounds more like simply being irritated, and temporarily so, possibly at having to do a little extra work, rather than a coherent rational criticism of Debian. It is also, as you say, more of a reclassification into the non-free section than a change that significantly affects a user. Anyone can still install the documentation, using apt. Anyway, I have slightly altered so that it reads that "some software and documentation" is not included in the official repository, and it is already mentioned at the bottom of the section that invariant documentation is excluded from the main archive. ~ Centrx 03:24, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

Copyvio from old Debian Project?

According to Talk:Debian Project, the article Debian Project, which was merged into the article Debian, contained material from http://www.debian.org/intro/about. http://www.debian.org/intro/about is not GFDLed. Does that mean there are likely to be copyvios in the article Debian or is it likely it's all rewritten and paraphrased enough now? I have not checked personally, but if anyone else checks, it would be great if they could let others know on this talk page. Cheers, --unforgettableid | talk to me 17:10, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

Reading over the copyrighted text there, and knowing the text of the Debian article here fairly well—and having glanced through the article again right now, I do not think that any of the copyrighted text has been duplicated. Note also that it does not appear that any of that text was actually merged in any of the edits in May 2004; it was likely just redirected with no merging because all of the information was already in the article in some form or another. - Centrx 04:21, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

Package Manager?

Is APT actually the package manager? I was under the impression dpkg was the package manager, and apt was a front-end around it. The manpage for dpkg does include the phrase "package manager". BirdbrainedPhoenix 17:52, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

I assume you are reading this from the poorly designed infobox at the top. dpkg is what manipulates the DEB format and actually installs, upgrades, and removes packages, but apt is so common and almost invariably used all the time, and it is something that is used to "manage packages". It is a nebulous term that is only found in the infobox, an item which I am going to remove now because it also isn't so important as to be at the top of an encyclopedia article. -- Centrx 22:33, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

lead

I've tried to reword some awkwardness in the lead. Part of this akwardness seems to come from the need to say that it's a flavor of Linux, even though there is a version that uses the Hurd kernel. Since only a very tiny percentage of users are running Hurd, it seems inappropriate to me to twist the lead into contortions just in order to allow for that fact. I've left in the GNU/Linux reference, but it also seems silly to me. Realistically, almost everyone just calls it Linux, and I think it's sufficient to mention in the lead that it uses a lot of GNU utilities.--24.52.254.62 23:02, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

In this case, the official name of the Debian system is "Debian GNU/Linux" —Centrx→talk 23:21, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

Custom or Vanilla Kernel

I wanted to see what sort of kernel does Debian use and didn't find the info in the article. Maybe it should be put in as it is, in my anonymous opinion, relevant to the entry.

Debian is using patched kernels 213.10.147.18 19:03, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Finding out Debian version number

I was hoping to find some hints for figuring out which version of Debian I am running. If anyone knows how to do that, it would be helpful.

Wikipedia isn't the right place to ask such questions, but one way to get the information is to run cat /etc/debian_version in a shell. - Kaare 18:51, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

Separate articles for Debian releases - necessary?

Okay, I just now noticed the Wiki article on individual releases of Debian (Sarge, testing, unstable, experimental, etc.) and I'm wondering - why do these releases need articles? Most of these articles are just stubs talking about when each of these versions were released and what architectures it supports. Additionally, no other Linux distribution has pages on it's individual releases (and an article on the Dapper Drake release of Ubuntu was redirected to the article of the distro), so what makes Debian's releases so special that they get articles, and say, Fedora Core 6 and SUSE 10.1 don't? These articles aren't really necessary. NeoChaosX [talk | contribs] 23:06, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

They aren't warranted at all. Feel free to merge them or simply redirect if there is nothing to merge. —Centrx→talk • 23:47, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

I redirected most of them. The only article I merged any information from was Oldstable, all the other articles were already explained in this article. NeoChaosX [talk | contribs] 01:42, 27 October 2006 (UTC)