[NCLUG] Debian Question

David Braley davbraley at comcast.net
Thu Jan 3 17:42:40 MST 2008


I wanted to say thanks for all the good responses! I have learned a lot. 
I seem to be more on track then not. But now I digress.....

A few years ago, I used to update/upgrade the hardware in my machines 
every few months. It was fun to re-install Linux often (what ever flavor 
I was into at that time). But times have changed, and I am less 
interested in hardware and more interested in just using my machine. The 
desktop I have now is three years old and I don't see myself doing 
anything with it upgrade wise for at least another three years.

What REALLY started all of this was this; I noticed boot times have 
dramatically changed in the last three years or so for most of the Linux 
distro's. Back in 2004 when I built this machine, I installed, lets 
see... what was it... maybe Suse 10.0 onto the desktop I have now. You 
could get from grub to a KDE desktop in about 50 seconds. Boot times are 
important to me because I shut my machine off when I am not using it. I 
know, I must learn how to suspend......

Now it doesn't matter what newer distro I load onto the machine, Ubuntu, 
Fedora, Suse, Mandrake, they all take about 2 minutes to come up! Some 
of them even longer. These new distro's make my machine seem old and 
tired. Just for the curious, my old and tired machine is a:

AMD64 3700+ 1meg cache (2.4 ghz)
2 gigs ram
2 - 250gig sata HD's
Blah, Blah, Blah.

So I did a minimal install of Debian. Put fluxbox on for my WM, and 
WAMO! I can get to my desktop from grub in about 15 seconds! And... it's 
not just the booting up that is faster. Applications like Firefox, 
Thunderbird, and even OpenOffice.org loads much faster as well. My 
Firefox loads in less than one second. In Kubuntu, Firefox loads in 
about 4 seconds.

I like this new speed. Makes me feel like I have a new machine. ;-) 
That's when I got concerned about the long term effects of updating the 
system, hence, the reason for the original post.

I know it sounds like I am just complaining and I need to learn some 
patience, but it does bring up some interesting questions. Why the hell 
is Linux getting so Huge? And why does it take so damn long to boot up? 
Is it the Desktop system (Gnome, Kde, Fluxbox, well, technically, 
Fluxbox is a window manager) that slows the loading of apps?

I leave it to the geniuses that is known as nclug. Take care all! I 
appreciate this resource!

David

dann frazier wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 03, 2008 at 10:35:43AM -0700, Bob Proulx wrote:
>   
>> Paul Hummer wrote:
>>     
>>> You shouldn't need to apt-get dist-upgrade very often, if at all.
>>>       
>> The 'upgrade' target upgrades packages of the same names.  After the
>> 'upgrade' the package list of names is the same as it was before the
>> upgrade.  No new names are allowed installed if they weren't installed
>> before.  No old names are allowed to be removed.  This blocks (by
>> design) any package that adds new dependencies.
>>     
>
> fyi, there was a discussion about this on planet.debian.org last
> month. Colin Watson was complaining about the new-dependencies issue:
>
>   http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/ucgi/~cjwatson/blosxom
>
> And, as I recall, one of the maintainers blog-replied and said they'd
> consider changing this behavior. I can't find a link to that reply
> though (yay blog conversations).
>
>   



More information about the NCLUG mailing list