[lug] RFI Debian vs. Slackware

[Nate Duehr]

Make sure to see my other message about security.debian.org getting into
your /etc/apt/sources.list if you want to automate security updates, and
also one that used to get me for a while...

When you "remove" a package on Debian, it leaves behind its config files and
any data files created.  If you did "removes" you may want to go look around
in /etc and other places for any remnants of the software you had installed.

It won't hurt anything if they're there, but the first time you corrupt a
config file and then attempt to uninstall/reinstall a package to fix it
(thinking you'll get the config files rebuilt) this will drive you insane.
Properly built RPM's deal with this scenario also, so it shouldn't really be
a surprise, but just in case...

Use 'purge' instead of 'remove' if the appllication is going away
permanently.

It's _ in dselect, or apt-get remove --purge <packagename> ...

Enjoy! 

Nate

on 10/6/00 8:00 PM, B O'Fallon at bof at americanisp.net wrote:

> "J. Wayde Allen" wrote:
> 
>> I've never really seen an interface like Yast or dselect for the Red Hat
>> system, but it seems like there should be one.
> 
> First of all, my thanks to all of you who took time to answer.
> 
> I found a copy of Debian 2.1 and installed it to play with. Installation went
> OK (but was exceedingly slow compared to any other distribution) after I
> figured out to use the single CD selection rather than the multiple CD one to
> find the packages ... (Yeah, I know, RTFM. But that way is not much fun, for
> you learn the answers too quickly and don't get to reinstall everything a
> couple of times. <g>).
> 
> The dselect package system is pretty slick, and in fact, I think I like it
> better than any other packaging system I have seen. It's nice for
> installation,
> but even nicer for removal.  I stripped my installation from 680 MB to 208 MB
> today and it seems to work fine. What I really like is the display of how
> essential a package is to the system, and how easily it can be removed. YAST
> allows some of this, but then turns around and reinstalls everything you
> selected to remove because it seems that on SUSE, EVERYTHING is dependent upon
> everything else.
> 
> My only complaint is that Debian seems to lag behind datewise in their
> packages
> (I did take a look at the 2.2 distro to see how much they actually were behind
> compared to others). However, some may view this as a strength, and this
> supposedly contributes to the stability of the system. Each to their own, but
> I
> would like a little more cutting edge system.
> 
> So I think that I will probably go with Slackware in the end.
> 
> BTW, there is a graphical equivalent of RPM under Gnome, called Gnome RPM. It
> will show icons for all packages installed on a system, and allow finding out
> info such as version, files, and file locations, as well as adding or removing
> them. Unfortunately, every time I've tried using it under RH 6.1, it has
> crashed and I ended up using the text-based version, but it does seem like a
> good idea in theory.
> 
> Again, my thanks to all those who took time to reply.
> 
> B. O'Fallon
> 
> 
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