23 Jul
2003
23 Jul
'03
1:46 p.m.
Hi,
I am somewhat new to Linux low-level development. I have developed for
other UNIX systems before, and also for Windows NT and for JavaCard
compatible smartcards.
I have used (and enjoyed) Debian for a long time as a Linux user and for
web development. Getting into low-level development, I find Debian sid
slightly more unstable than I would find myself entirely comfortable
programming with. I have tried Mandrake for Intel and PowerPC platforms
and also enjoyed it as an user. Unluckily, latest Mandrake is not very
well supported for PowerPC platforms, and my computer at home is an
Apple G3 (even now, I know Mandrake 9.1 will be the last PowerPC
version). There is no Red Hat for us (though I know about but not tried
Yellow Dog).
I dream about a development setup as stable but also as updated as posible.
I'd like to know about your development setup, being whatever the
platform (Intel, PowerPC, etc.), distros you like for development,
whether if you use packaged drivers and libraries or latest versions
compiled from snapshots or even CVS, also about packaged, stable or
development, unstable kernels, etc.
Any feedback will be very useful. Thanks in advance.
Regards, Ismael
23 Jul
23 Jul
2 p.m.
On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Ismael Valladolid Torres wrote:
Hi,
I am somewhat new to Linux low-level development. I have developed for
other UNIX systems before, and also for Windows NT and for JavaCard
compatible smartcards.
I have used (and enjoyed) Debian for a long time as a Linux user and for
web development. Getting into low-level development, I find Debian sid
slightly more unstable than I would find myself entirely comfortable
programming with. I have tried Mandrake for Intel and PowerPC platforms
and also enjoyed it as an user. Unluckily, latest Mandrake is not very
well supported for PowerPC platforms, and my computer at home is an
Apple G3 (even now, I know Mandrake 9.1 will be the last PowerPC
version). There is no Red Hat for us (though I know about but not tried
Yellow Dog).
I dream about a development setup as stable but also as updated as posible.
Try gentoo. It is the reasons you describe why I switched. I get the
latest updates as soon as there available. Sometimes, I can't wait and
just update the ebuild scripts (you'll read about them on the web site:
www.gentoo.org). I have since replaced all my production servers to use
gentoo. It's great. It takes a little more to install on the front end,
which will be taken care of on the next major release (due Aug 5), but
it's worth it because of the ease of maintainance.
Matt Gerassimoff
2:38 p.m.
Matt Gerassimoff escribio el 23/07/03 19:46:
Try gentoo. It is the reasons you describe why I
switched. I get the
latest updates as soon as there available. Sometimes, I can't wait and
just update the ebuild scripts (you'll read about them on the web site:
www.gentoo.org). I have since replaced all my production servers to use
gentoo. It's great. It takes a little more to install on the front end,
which will be taken care of on the next major release (due Aug 5), but
it's worth it because of the ease of maintainance.
I am afraid that I would feel more "unstability" over Gentoo than over
Debian whichever the flavour. Thanks for the suggestion, I think I will
be trying someday. Anyway, nothing surpasses Debian stable for
production servers... :P
Regards,Ismael
3:01 p.m.
On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Ismael Valladolid Torres wrote:
Matt Gerassimoff escribio el 23/07/03 19:46:
As far as the stablilty, you need to try it first.
But, when you ask for conflicting features, one is always going to suffer.
Stability or lastest releases of software. There are differing levels of
stability for gentoo. It depends on how stable you want it. You can
also, choose stability for some packages and development versions for
others. The system is setup to handle both seemlessly.
Matt
Try gentoo. It is the reasons you describe why I
switched. I get the
latest updates as soon as there available. Sometimes, I can't wait and
just update the ebuild scripts (you'll read about them on the web site:
www.gentoo.org). I have since replaced all my production servers to use
gentoo. It's great. It takes a little more to install on the front end,
which will be taken care of on the next major release (due Aug 5), but
it's worth it because of the ease of maintainance.
I am afraid that I would feel more "unstability" over Gentoo than over
Debian whichever the flavour. Thanks for the suggestion, I think I will
be trying someday. Anyway, nothing surpasses Debian stable for
production servers... :P 
4:37 p.m.
On Wed, 23 Jul 2003 19:33:06 +0200
Ismael Valladolid Torres <ismael(a)sambara.org> wrote:
Hi,
I am somewhat new to Linux low-level development. I have developed for
other UNIX systems before, and also for Windows NT and for JavaCard
compatible smartcards.
I have used (and enjoyed) Debian for a long time as a Linux user and for
web development. Getting into low-level development, I find Debian sid
slightly more unstable than I would find myself entirely comfortable
programming with.
If unstable is too unstable, why not try testing.
I have been using testing on two desktop machines and an iBook for for
up to two years now. I have never had anything break in testing and its
pretty close to the cutting edge.
Erik
--
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
Erik de Castro Lopo nospam(a)mega-nerd.com (Yes it's valid)
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
"Fifty years of programming language research, and we
end up with C++ ???" --Richard A. O'Keefe
5:11 p.m.
Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:
I have been using testing on two desktop machines and
an iBook for for
up to two years now. I have never had anything break in testing and its
pretty close to the cutting edge.
I don't find testing as cutting edge as desirable, at least for some
important packages for me. Moreover, I heard that sometimes testing is
more unstable than unstable, and that when testing breaks, your face
gets a different color than that it gets when unstable breaks. ;)
Don't know if this is a well based information, though.
Regards, Ismael
6:44 p.m.
By the way, Knoppix uses Debian sid, and is overall considered to be a
very good demonstration of Linux' capabilities, both in features and in
stability. I don't think it would have gotten the recognition it has, if
people would have found it buggy or unstable.
Maarten
6:38 p.m.
This is a nice coincidence, because I just installed Debian Sid
('unstable') on my home workstation.
I am also a convinced Debian user, and all the servers and workstations
I administrate are Debian Woody ('stable'). Now, recently, I have seen
myself forced to install more and more backported packages, and backporting
some myself, because Debian stable is rather conservative, and this can be
a problem if you have new hardware, esp. video cards, or if you need to run
recent versions of applications, are depend on recent versions of
libraries...
Personally, I think the release cycle of Debian should be a lot shorter,
and I think a lot of people agree with that. On the other hand, on the
web/mail/file/cvs servers I run, I really want stable. The good thing is,
you get the choice, and I think Debian is the only distro with such a
choice. A lot of distro's present unstable and untested things as
stable. For me the clearest example, and actually the reason I switched to
Debian, was RedHat's broken GCC (2.96 I think), which I guess was just
included to pretend to be "cutting edge". Now, I recently installed a
RedHat 9, and with PlanetCCRMA on top, it is very nice, but running Debian
Sid does not feel less safe to me. And I would never run any mission-
critical servers with RedHat. Here Debian stable is the safest bet.
Anyway, I expect that I might switch to unstable, or at least testing, for
some of the workstations, when I feel that modifying stable becomes more work
and also more risky, than simply using unstable.
Maarten
7900
days inactive
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days old
linux-audio-dev@lists.linuxaudio.org
7 comments
4 participants
participants (4)
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Erik de Castro Lopo -
Ismael Valladolid Torres -
Maarten De Boer -
Matt Gerassimoff