One of the advantages of working with Linux these days is that you can get a Linux distribution on CD but with a book that explains how to do the install plus a complete start up guide of 400++ pages describing all the free software that comes with the system(compare that with what comes with Apple MacOS or Windows XP - not even close, even the Internet based documentation is scattered). And that is exactly what Debian Gnu/Linux 3.1 Bible by Hill et alia is about. Now the book also helps users evaluate how well Debian will fit their needs. The intro chapter spends 20 pages explaining to users about Linux, its specific advantages and a little about why there are so many distributions.

Basically Linux groups differ on what priorities should be applied to development beyond the core and what supporting software should be included. Then the authors explain the specifics of the Debian distro(shorthand for distribution) which is all the files needed to run Linux plus all the extra freebies - and that is a lot as we shall see. Also the authors describe how Debian is geared toward developers and users that want a very stable, safe and standards compliant version of Linux and supporting software. The emphasis even on core OS functionality is "no feature before its time". So Debian tends to lag by 3-9 months the other Linux distributions in terms of delivering tested new Linux kernel features. But then when it does deliver, debian has a well tested and trusted kernel plus a trusted set of supporting utilities and framework. As we shall see below, that trusted reliability is a reason that some major distributions have branched off from Debian Linux.

Now users may have already heard of the Debian distro and what's in it so they may want to proceed immediately to the Installing Debian chapter in the book (and this review). Otherwise, users will be pleased with the author's broad, candid overview on Linux in general and Debian in particular. Just by consulting the Table of Contents, a potential user will get a strong feel for the open source and third party packages available in the Debian distro. Here is a summary of the catechistic of the Debian distro:
user orientation - developer over end-user
theme - stability and security over latest software features
tools - complete Free Software/Open Source set over 3rd party/commercial
hardware support - same uniform install and support for a very broad range of hardware including: Intel i86, Motorola m68000, Sun Sparc/sparc64, DEC alpha, ibm PowerPC, Intel arm, SGI nips, HP hp pa, Intel Itanium, IBM s390 mainframe, Hitachi sh, AMD amd64, etc.
derivative distributions - Ubuntu, UserLinux, Knoppix

Debian is targeted for developers, particularly Unix and Linux developers, who are familiar with the filesystem plus shell languages and scripts available. Mac and Windows users may find themselves a bit into deeper water on the three topic areas:
basic system administration - this is a full multi-user, server operating system requiring at least basic admin understanding and familiarity for some shell scripting operations;
software management - the first install and basic upgrade process of Debian, like so many versions of Linux is unique in many respects
rigors of install process - Debian prides itself on the stability of its distro, so it requires package reconciliation and validation. This means that adding or changing features can be rigorous. This may require extra steps with CD installer or online through the www.debian.org site. This install verification process can be intimidating.

Remarkably, one of the easiest to use and friendliest Linux versions, Knoppix, is based on the Debian Core and allows users to boot directly from a CD and have a basic Debian Linux running in less than five minutes. This can provide another quick insight into whether the Debian distro meets your needs.

Debian Views

Debian, like so many versions of Linux, prides itself on the fact that it can be configured for many different types of users and their specific views and needs. So here are the tools available for different types of users. The book covers these tools, their installation/configuration in 1-2 page summaries including valuable screenshots and sometimes basic usage for an additional 1-5 pages.

For basic users looking for a web connections with email, messaging plus browsing, word processing plus one or two additional applications and photo or entertainment (games, audi and/or video support) Debian has:
KDE or Gnome GUI interface - both are good; Gnome is default install, but choose the one with best available docs and easiest to train and remember how to use
Internet browser - Mozilla, Firefox and Konqueror - go with Firefox for its features and 3rd party, free add-ons
Internet Mail - Evolution, KMail, Thunderbird - go with Evolution which has extra calendaring and PIM features
Internet Instant Messaging - Gaim is the only default game in town; Jabber works with substantial effort
Word Processing - OpenOffice Org has a powerful word processor which is very interoperable with Microsoft Word, Excel, etc.
Graphics and picture processing - GIMP provides 70-80% of Photoshop functionality for free; but like Photoshop, stiff learning curve
Digital camera and video - gPhoto2 for digital camera access plus mplayer and xine all have restrictions or gotchas - be careful here and ask it to be demo-ed
Games and entertainment - like all Linux distros, Debian has a very rich selection of games from kids through card playing plus lots of popular board games to strategy and action thrillers. Many users have the impression that Linux is a desert for having fun with games. The reality is even on dour Debian, users can choose from Chess through Tetris to Doom and Quake 2. In short Linux users have no trouble finding things to do alone or in groups over the network/Internet.

In sum, Debian provides casual users in both home and business a better solution to their pragmatic computing needs - faster and more reliable computing power than Windows until Windows gets rid of COM and ActiveX vulnerabilities which it will do with Vista. But that will come at the price of substantial hardware upgrade requirements plus major learning curves for the Vista OS. Also expect a buggy start-up for Windows Vista of 6-12 month period or more as third parties have had to substantially rewrite their drivers and Windowing routines. And users of Microsoft Office apps also face a bewildering array of different Offices all of which will exact big-learning curve and the old "can I read my or my colleagues Word file in the new Office" questions.

Bottom line, Linux delivers much lower initial and ongoing costs plus full-featured home office apps. And if users absolutely need to run some Windows programs they have more ways to do so in Linux using Wine, Mono, and/or Xen to provide various shades of Windows.

For power users seeking analytic or publishing power, in addition to the above Debian has:
Presentation features - Open Office combines a top notch drawing program with its Impress presentation capabilities in Open Office. Again the Impress presentation program is just as good as PowerPoint but can read and write more versions of Microsoft's PowerPoint format than PowerPoint itself.
Desktop Publishing - Open Office Write is quite powerful but open source Scribus offers kerning, more color models with high res print control, more font and language capabilities including Arabic and Hebrew right-to-left operations. For college and university settings there is extensive Tex, LaTex, and SGML support.
Analytics - Again, Open Office Spreadsheet and Base database functionality are both powerful. But the new Base takes and Access approach but gives it real guts with ability to support MySQL, PostgreSQL, plus a host of other databases transparently. As well there a numerous open source and commercial statistical, econometric, engineering and other analysis tools available for savvy power users.
high-end 3D, CAD, and design modeling - a steady stream of tools in the 3D an design model world have come to Linux for its clustering capabilities and better throughput. These are open source as well as commercial applications. Xara Linux and Canvas are just two of the steady stream of graphic products taking advantage of Linux speed, low cost and networking.

Debian Linux has been a bit slow to pick up the steady stream of high end analytic and graphic applications; but it is getting its share of Linux in-migration.

For developers Debian has a strange duality. On one hand there are great tools for Web development with classic LAMP support - Apache in both 1.x and 2.x versions, MySQL plus PostgreSQL and PHP/Perl/Python. As well Debian has the server development infrastructure such as the requisite coterie of Shell scripting; OpenLDAP, IMAP and POP3 mail servers, DHCP with DNS and BIND plus PPTP and IPsec network services; Samba and NFS file serving/sharing, But on the other hand, Debian is missing from this distribution C/C++, Java, and other programming languages and applications both Open Source, dual licensing like Trolltech and commercial software. I was surprised that neither Eclipse nor NetBeans visual development tools for C/C++, Java, JSP, JSF, UML, etc were on board this distro. Many of these tools are available but users must download and then validate against www.debian.org - just a painful process especially for users like this party with dial-up or no connections to the Web. For developers, Ubuntu may be the better Debian-derived developer system.

For multi-user servers, we are not recommending Debian. True enough Debian has all the utilities and basic tools to do basic multi-user operations right out of the box. But Debian tends to deliberately lag behind the latest kernel and especially multi-user updates. Second, other distributions like RedHat or Suse are better suited to multi-user or enterprise Linux installations.

Installing Debian

The Debian Bible authors are frank - "Debian has long been criticized for its installer...Debian 3.1 is the first release of Debian to be built from this brand new installer, which has been in the works for more than half a decade. " Despite the warning, our experience was tedious but largely positive using the new installer. We booted from the Books CD onto a 256MB Toshiba Satellite 3100 portable and found the process to be remarkably straightforward if a bit lengthy. We also booted and installed onto a Compaq laptop and a WhiteBox generic PC - again straightforward operations except in the latter case when some specific drivers were required but were not in the CD boot package. And the PC had no network card to connect to the Web and www.debian.org to get the required packages. That install required a backtrack re-install of Windows to install the network card and to get the missing packages and then proceed to install Debian successfully.

The new installer simplifies things by having a pretty advanced auto-hardware detection mechanism and automatic partitioning utility. The install process is a bit long-winded but goes through 4 distinct phases:
1) Boot up from the CD - you must enable your CD for booting ahead of your hard drive and should not have any disk in any floppy drives.When Debian boots it has its distinctive boot screen and goes through preliminary configuration which includes establishing the language, time zone, country, and keyboard layout and . In effect, Debian is configuring the installer including running the installer in a different language then that to be used by Debian once installed. Debian supports over 50 languages.
2) The second phase of the install the auto-detection phase. The system auto-loads components throughout this process depending on the hardware you have available and its ability to detect your hardware. It took appreciably longer - about 15 minutes fro the white box PC to go though this process because it had some devices (tape drive, three different disk drives, etc) not on the top of the Debian list of devices.This auto-detection process includes installing basic network connections, so a hardware firewall actually speeds up the connection to the Web and the overall installation.
3)The third phase involves auto-partitioning and loading the GRUB multi-boot loader if you want to preserve a portion of your pre-existing OS like Windows. With GRUB installed you will be able boot either into Debian or your earlier OS. the trick is to clear all files from the original OS from a disk partition. The Debian installer will do the partitioning for you but not the clearing the partition and copying to a safe place any files you want to preserve. In short setting up a dual boot is a bit tricky - get help if required. Once the partitioning is done the core Debian files are loaded and GRUB is loaded with single or multi-boot settings, whichever you have chosen.
4)The 4th and last phase involves your first boot into Debian Linux. You must remove the Boot CD from the system otherwise you will be escorted through the core install again. At this stage the Debian installer will ask you what additional programs and utilities you want to load from the CD - so now its safe to re-insert the CD and configure and personalize the system. This last phase can take any where from 20 to 80 minutes depending on how many options you choose.

The book carries you through the first 3 phases of the install showing you all the screens that you will see and warning users about most of the potential gotchas along the way. This is the second chapter of the book. The next 24 chapters of the book are really advice on what options to choose for configuring your system in the 4th phase. Chapter 3 through 7 get users up to speed in basic Linux system administration and management. This includes user permissions, the shell and filesystem semantics, Debian's Apt system management utility, Xfree for configuring graphics and sound.

The next 15 chapters describe software from KDE and Gnome GUIs through LAMP-Linux Apache MySQL Perl/PHP/Python web development tools to various Printing Services. The last two chapter are devoted to becoming an active member of the Debian community - how users can create their own contributions by adding Debian packages to the Project. Throughout here there is strong open source content and a repeated open message. Commercial software barely merits a mention except in comparisons to equivalent Linux software.

Summary

When I originally bought the Debian/GNU Linux 3.1 Bible I had expected it to guide me well through the process of installing Debian - and it has served very well. There are a few gotchas that the book does not alert you to - the need for a Web connection to add programs not in the CD distribution is most notable. But the book has taken me through at least half a dozen install with barely a scratch. Kudo to the stability and comprehensiveness of the Debian installer. In contrast, the use I though I would put Debian Linux to - system development has had to be modified. Debian is really geared for LAMP Web development; not broader system development and certainly not with commercial software. So if one wants Debian but with a broader development reach including use of commercial tools, users are encouraged to take a closer look at Ubuntu.

Debian is probably best suited to shops that want to utilize a desktop Linux that is very stable for their basic users who need a computer for a link to the Web or network. It is a good thin client The code is solid with phenomenal uptime and performing well with older machines - memory size 256MB or less and Pentium 3 or less at 500Mhz or less. It is a niche Linux whose derived distributions like UserLinux and Ubuntu appear to be taking Debian into the power user and developer workstation segments.

(c)JBSurveyer 2006