Why Not Just *run* Debian?

[dabomb3627]

its been said time and time again, theres going to be an official package management app on the p&|a that will connect to official repos on the net like synaptic (plus i found manual installs on the '2x much easier than manually installing on a full linux build.)

 

[Karel Jansens]

its been said time and time again, theres going to be an official package management app on the p&|a that will connect to official repos on the net like synaptic (plus i found manual installs on the '2x much easier than manually installing on a full linux build.)

Please don't make the same mistake Nokia did. They also thought they needed a "different" package manager on the Internet Tablets, resulting in the piece of shite that is Application Manager.

Synaptic works, isn't hard to understand for newbees and plays nice with apt-get. Why reinvent the wheel, risking that your New and Improved Wheel will turn out a square?

 

[_VWV_]

its been said time and time again, theres going to be an official package management app on the p&|a that will connect to official repos on the net like synaptic (plus i found manual installs on the '2x much easier than manually installing on a full linux build.)

Please don't make the same mistake Nokia did. They also thought they needed a "different" package manager on the Internet Tablets, resulting in the piece of shite that is Application Manager.

Synaptic works, isn't hard to understand for newbees and plays nice with apt-get. Why reinvent the wheel, risking that your New and Improved Wheel will turn out a square?

I wanted to say the same thing. Well, any way, if it's possible to run debian on zaurus, and on nokia 770, than I see no obstacle to lunch it on p&|a. Why not? It's a stable and well developed distro... As far as I get, people lunch Oo on zaurus via debian.. What if I want to make a presentation via TV-out B) ... At least it's an option.
EDIT: a good slogan for advertisement: The power of a table-top distro in your pocket.

 

[Sphinxter]

Because no one wants to wait 5 years for an os update.

 

[HIVexploder]

oh god I hope we're not seriously gonna call it the P&|a now. I liked panda more, even. that is actually slower for me to type than pandora because I have to look and see which buttons is & because I almost never use that key except to type the Reference symbol in C which I do rarely.

 

[teggun]

I wanted to say the same thing. Well, any way, if it's possible to run debian on zaurus, and on nokia 770, than I see no obstacle to lunch it on p&|a. Why not? It's a stable and well developed distro... As far as I get, people lunch Oo on zaurus via debian.. What if I want to make a presentation via TV-out B) ... At least it's an option.
EDIT: a good slogan for advertisement: The power of a table-top distro in your pocket.

Yeah thats good, but as far as the default OS is concerned putting a full desktop distro on a handheld is a bad idea. It would cripple performance significantly. Imagine waiting 2 or 3 minutes to boot, then having to free up enough memory just to run an emu or open a text file. If you want debian just put it on yourself, it won't be that hard.

 

[Karel Jansens]

Because no one wants to wait 5 years for an os update.

I'd rather have an update every five years than bugfixes every five days.

In any case, I wouldn't want cutting edge beta stuff on a Pandora; I'd want the Pandora to just keep running. Desktops were made for crashtesting...

 

[yannv]

I'm fond of Debian, and have used it on several smaller systems, including the bitsy and shannon platforms (aka ipaq and tuxscreen, both arm). I remember familiar going with ipkg and debian-installer setting up its own udeb system, and I found both somewhat odd, since deb doesn't really require that much.
What I'd really like to point out here is that a Debian based platform does NOT have to mean running the same initscripts, a mail daemon, etc etc. Even the main distribution offers several different ways of handling things (take a look at runit-run, minit, nfsbooted, file-rc). What we really want is to keep the advantages of apt, and the easiest way to do so is simply to run it. It's not the most efficient, but it's robust and relatively easy to repair. In fact the text based status database is one of the things that have kept me running Debian.
Other dependency handlers are worth looking into, though. I remember smart looking rather good. The one thing that does annoy me about aptitude is its slow reloading of the databases, even at times when it appears pointless (such as after a single non-interactive install).

 

[Clad]

Desktops were made for crashtesting...

Really ? I thought it was made to put sheets or anything you want to write on.

You're sure you're not mistaking with dummys ?

 

[teggun]

(such as after a single non-interactive install).

aye that is really irritating.

 

[StealthBagel]

I really hope whatever is used will be free of Debian's infamous "Dependency Hell".

Cannot install Pidgin because it depends on: GTK.
Cannot install GTK because it depends on: libpng.
Cannot install libpng because it depends on: GTK.
Cannot install GTK because it depends on: libpng.
Cannot remove GTK, pidgin or libpng because they depend on each other.

........ and then the OS won't let you install anything else until you satisfy the broken dependencies by uninstalling everything that upset it in the past. This kind of horseshit is probably not exclusive to Debian but it happened to me all the time when I still bothered with Linux on a PC....

 

[Megatog615]

Stealth Bagel:
CODE
apt-get install pidgin

And it resolves dependencies for you. I've never had "dependency hell" in Debian in my life.

 

[atomicthumbs]

The only time I've ever had dependency hell when using Linux (including Debian and Ubuntu) is trying to install games on Fedora Core 1 with a non-working modem and no knowledge of Linux.

Things have changed since 2003.

 

[___]

LOL I remember having that kind of problem with SuSe 9.1... not too long ago ^^. Dependency problems suck! Also in ubuntu I have had problems with non-official repositories resulting in version incompatibilities before. I think those problems can be avoided though. Also as said before: Times have changed.

 

[Karel Jansens]

I really hope whatever is used will be free of Debian's infamous "Dependency Hell".

Cannot install Pidgin because it depends on: GTK.
Cannot install GTK because it depends on: libpng.
Cannot install libpng because it depends on: GTK.
Cannot install GTK because it depends on: libpng.
Cannot remove GTK, pidgin or libpng because they depend on each other.

........ and then the OS won't let you install anything else until you satisfy the broken dependencies by uninstalling everything that upset it in the past. This kind of horseshit is probably not exclusive to Debian but it happened to me all the time when I still bothered with Linux on a PC....

Are you posting from an alternate universe? Or did you ever actually use Debian?

 

[Clad]

Stealth Bagel:
CODE
apt-get install pidgin

And it resolves dependencies for you. I've never had "dependency hell" in Debian in my life.

It's 2008 people, should be about time to forget about dselect

What you want to type is CODE
aptitude install pidgin


The main difference being that if you remove an app, any libs that came with is is removed to. If you do apt-get install vlc && apt-get remove vlc, libvlc would still lie around somewhere on your systeme, whereas aptitude install vlc && aptitude remove vlc will leave your system in the very same state it was before entering the command.

By the way, I'm a long time debian user (since woody (2.6)) and I never ever had dependency problem since they switched from dselect to aptitude.

 

[StealthBagel]

That is all in a perfect world but unfortunately apt-get and dselect did not always work as advertised..... I admit I was not as linux savvy as I could have been at the time but simple program installs would often result in dependency hell so severe it required a reinstall of the OS because it deleted some critical thing like libc6 or what-not and now nothing would install or uninstall.... if this happens on a handheld it would drive me up the fuckin' wall.

 

[atomicthumbs]

That is all in a perfect world but unfortunately apt-get and dselect did not always work as advertised

Key wods: dselect and "did not". I've never felt a need to use dselect for anything.

And while using Debian (and Debian-based distros), I have never had dependency hell or any other problems like that, while using apt-get and aptitude. And I have about 30 third-party repositories enabled.

 

[danboid]

That is all in a perfect world but unfortunately apt-get and dselect did not always work as advertised..... I admit I was not as linux savvy as I could have been at the time but simple program installs would often result in dependency hell so severe it required a reinstall of the OS because it deleted some critical thing like libc6 or what-not and now nothing would install or uninstall.... if this happens on a handheld it would drive me up the fuckin' wall.

Some Debian trolling par excellence off mr Bagel in this thread.

In his defence, you can wind up in 'dep hell' under Debian if you're running unstable or experimental sometimes but dependency probs are none existent if you're running a stable release. Problem with that is Deb stable normally has quite old packages but this is where Ubuntu steps in.

None of the ipkg / embedded deb distros I've tried use synaptic, they all use a custom package manager but I would rather pand use synaptic.

 

[b._.o._.b]

Why should you end up in dep hell? You just need to have a repository for Pandora only.
My choice would be a small and tweaked version of debian (should boot fast), with an easy gui like gmenu2x out of the box.