[ Thanks to Ladislav Bodnar for this
link. ]
“While most reviews tend to focus on the installation and
initial impressions of various distributions, I thought it might be
of interest for readers to hear about the past couple of months
dabbling in the meta-distribution known as Debian.“Among versions of Linux, Debian is fairly unique, unlike most
distributions it isn’t backed by any for profit venture and instead
is an all volunteer organization. There is no for profit company,
or business plan behind Debian, it is a wide ranging project along
the lines of GNU. Aside from the main distribution which I ran for
this review, Debian also provides the basis for a number of other
Linux distributions, such as Lindows, Xandros, Libranet, and
Knoppix.“The linchpin of Debian is a combination package management
system and distribution network called forth by the mighty apt-get
command. What makes this network so exceptional is that the
dpkg-deb files which make up Debian packages contain information on
their underlying dependencies so installing a package from the
Debian network will call up all of its dependent packages. As an
example, installing a KDE application would make sure that KDE, X
windows, and everything underneath was already installed on the
system, and if the prerequisite packages weren’t already installed
than the packages would automatically be downloaded and installed
from the Debian network…”