Debian Etch: like a comfortable pair of old shoes

I've been running Debian in one form or another, on one box or another, ever since Etch went stable in April 2007.

Lately most of my work in Debian has been on my Gateway laptop (aka The $0 Laptop), which from a hardware standpoint responds better to Lenny (Testing) than to Etch (Stable), so I'd been using Lenny about 100 percent of the time until I got what I'm calling The Debian Mac, a Power Macintosh G4/466, in a mass giveaway of old Apple hardware.

I tried a Xubuntu live CD, but once I burned a Debian PowerPC image and installed Etch, I knew that this chunk of hardware — especially the ATI video card and LaCie 22-inch monitor — responded to the distro extremely well.

I last ran Etch extensively both on my VIA converted thin client and on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt), but since then the VIA has been used to compare Ubuntu and Wolvix, and the Compaq has been running OpenBSD and Puppy.

So it had been a long time since I had worked with Etch.

It really is like a comfortable pair of old shoes.

On the Mac, anyway, everything works perfectly. I didn't have to do anything beyond enter my LaCie electron22blue II monitor's native resolution (1600x1200) when prompted during automatic X configuration while the install was running.

Sure there are a lot of old packages in Etch: OpenOffice 2.0, Gaim instead of Pidgin, Firefox 2 instead of 3.

But again, everything works, and I could really get used to not having to wait for dozens or hundreds of new packages to download and install every week, like I do when running Lenny.

Eventually Lenny will be as old-shoeish as Etch is now, with the rush of revised packages slowing to a familiar trickle, and with the whole system working as well as it ever will (and hopefully that will be well enough.

I already see this process happening in my Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy install on the Gateway, where everything is settling in (and where I recently did a reinstall after what I suspect were UUID conflicts after I monkeyed around with the partitions more than one too many times).

I'll be hoping that for the next 2 1/2 years, the Canonical team can give the same quality of attention to security and bug-patching in 8.04 — the distro's second "long-term support" release — as the Debian Project does for its Stable release and Red Hat does for its RHEL products.

I kind of, sort of planned to remain with Ubuntu 8.04 on the laptop for at least two of the three years for which it will receive support, especially now that I'm continuing to have problems with X in Lenny on that machine that I can't seem to solve. The same problems don't occur in Etch on the laptop, but there are so many things that Lenny does bring to that particular platform that rolling back to Etch isn't an option.

Also, I see using more desktop machines, as opposed to laptops, in my near future, and that breaks things wide open, since the ACPI problems I have with laptops and FOSS operating systems aren't nearly as much of a factor on desktops, where CPU fans generally run all the time and I don't care about suspend/resume.

It's been suggested that I try Slackintosh — an unofficial port of Slackware to the PowerPC — on the G4. That's intriguing. I've always found that KDE runs quicker in Slackware than in any other Linux distribution. KDE probably runs about as fast in Debian, and I could add that desktop (as well as Xfce, Fluxbox, Fvwm, or what have you) to this Etch install.

In my experience, it's easier and better to run a given distribution with its "main" window manager: Debian and Ubuntu with GNOME, Slackware and Mandriva with KDE, etc. Everything seems to "fit" better and work better, too.

I do appreciate that things like the GNOME NetworkManager and Synaptic Package Manager appear across the Ubuntu offshoots (Kubuntu, Xubuntu), unifying the experience somewhat. Going into the KDE version of Debian and using whatever it is that KDE uses to update packages, or into the Xfce version and relying on Aptitude (not a bad alternative; I use and appreciate Aptitude more and more these days) is a bit jarring, and I credit the Ubuntu developers for maintaining a core of helpful applications across their different distros.

And as I've said many times, both GNOME and Debian take a lot of bashing out there in blogland, but I've found GNOME to be extremely fast and quite capable of doing what I want to do, and in tests between Debian and Slackware (running Xfce and Fluxbox), Debian more than holds its own in terms of speed on the desktop.

Not that I wouldn't or won't run Slackware in the future. The fact that Patrick Volkerding and crew seem to maintain Slackware's various versions for years and years says a lot for how long you can safely run it. I don't know if that same longetivity applies to running Slackintosh; I suppose it depends on how many of the packages come from Slackintosh and how many come from Slackware.

But it's hard to argue with "Debian just works." When Lenny goes from Testing status to Stable, Etch will become what Debian calls "Old Stable," and receive security patches for another year. That gives those of us running it — on the desktop, the server, in embedded systems, etc. — ample time to figure out what to do next.

This being a Linux PowerPC box, I wonder how long I'll be happy without the ability to run Flash (which Adobe doesn't code for Linux on this platform; guess I could always dual boot Linux and OS X if I really, really need Flash. Or I could just give up on PowerPC and run i386. I have a promising Pentium 4 machine that ideally will be my next OS test bed, replacing the VIA converted thin client that has spawned dozens of reviews and hundreds of blog posts since I began writing this particular brand of blather at the beginning of 2007.

Taking another tangential trip in this already-too-tangential entry, it's tempting to try each and every new distro, to write a quickie review and reap the substantial boost in traffic that one gets from links in places like Distrowatch.

Truth be told, I've exposed my family to Linux quite a bit. When our iBook was awaiting the 3-hour operation to replace its ailing hard drive, I had a laptop set up dual-booting Ubuntu 8.04 and Debian Lenny (before Lenny's X problem surfaced). My wife prefers Ubuntu, and my daughter prefers Debian, if only because I have her Lenny account set up to quickly access her favorite educational games, which run that much better in Debian (the main difference being that launching TuxPaint through GCompris in Ubuntu results in a lack of the usual sound effects, which return when starting TuxPaint by itself, or starting the program either way in Debian.

And with the Mac's giant, wonderfully-clear monitor, I can see getting a whole lot of work done on this G4. With its 466 MHz CPU, it's not as fast as the 1+ GHz machines I seem to have in abundance, but for a hack writer, it's plenty fast.

And with a drive inside the box set up for and dedicated to backups (something I could do in any i386 desktop box with a case of sufficient capacity), a solid if unsexy distro (Etch), I could get a lot done if I manage not to screw the whole thing up.

(I'm not saying I won't try again to install OpenBSD and actually get it to boot, but it'll be on a different drive so I can preserve this Debian goodness. If I can dual-boot both systems, I will, but it doesn't look good at present.)

All that means is that I won't be dist-upgrading this Mac anytime soon from Etch to Lenny, even if the latter actually goes Stable, as scheduled, some time this month. I might try a cautious test of Lenny on a separate hard drive, or I might hold onto Etch with my cold, dying fingers until the last possible moment.

But like many, it only takes a little promise of something better to change my mind. If Gnash would play Flash video with any kind of consistency, I'd jump this box to Lenny in a second. If Gnash gets that good, will somebody let me know?