First look at Debian Squeeze
Like many of you in the Ubuntu community, I am concerned over the direction Ubuntu is going, especially with the Unity Interface.
With the release of Debian 6.0 (Squeeze), I thought I’d take it out for a test drive. Debian is NOT recommended if you are a Linux Noob. Sure Ubuntu is based on Debian, but the install is a bit more complicated then doing a typical Ubuntu install. If you are new to Linux, I’d still recommend Ubuntu, hands down.
Hardware:
So what was the install like. Well, it ain’t Ubuntu! Here is what I installed it (Physical Hardware)
AMD 64 Bit, 2GHZ, 2 G ram, 1 t/b hard drive.
An Nvidia GeForce 6150SE nForce 430 graphics card.
1 m/b sec download speed. (hey that’s all I can budget!)
Let me decode that: 64 bit machine, 2 gigahertz CPUS (2), 2 gigabytes of memory, and a 1 terrabyte hard drive.
I installed the 32 bit CD version of Debian, into Virtual Box, since my machine doesn’t support hardware virtualization (thanks Loni!) The virtual machine uses 512 meg of RAM, and 64 meg for graphics.
The default install gives you an ext3 filesystem, which is different from Ubuntu’s ext4 default. Ext4 gives better performance, but there certainly is nothing wrong with ext3.
If you are used to Ubuntu’s ask 7 questions and go away for 30 minutes install, Debian default installation is quite different.
It asks a LOT more questions, installs a bit, asks more questions…it is more interactive then I’d like it to be. Once you get through all the questions, it settles down to the nitty gritty. Downloading 1071 files to update Debian, took about 90 minutes (remember I don’t really have a super high speed connection, and hey this is a virtual box!). After spending 90 minutes to download the updates, it spent another hour configuring all that it had just downloaded. All told the install took about 3 hours, which is far longer then a Ubuntu install. And it requires a broader knowledge base to install.
Debian is basically a bare bones Ubuntu system. It has all the same features, but it doesn’t install anything that truly isn’t wanted or needed. So you need more experience (why I do NOT recommend Debian for Linux Noobs), in deciding what packages/programmes you may want to install.
That said, choice is not a bad thing! I’ll be playing with this over the next few days, and will eventually turn my box called Phoenix, into SquisheeMachine for further testing.
As always, a big thanks to Loni for her guidance.
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1 user responded in this post
Debian is great for servers and I recommend it over ubuntu for the better virtualization support (openvz vs lxc) but for laptops I’ve found ubuntu to be painless in comparison, especially when it comes to things like wireless.