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Re: [LUG] General consensus: AMD64 or I386 install of Debian Testing?

 

 >>>>
I previously did 8.04 -> 8.10 -> 9.04 -> 9.10 -> 10.04, and there it
stayed until tonight. So the system has been through several successive
upgrades previously already, but apt never complained quite so much as
it is tonight. I've been toying with the idea of moving back to Debian
for a while - don't get me wrong, I like Ubuntu, I'm just finding the
original attraction that took me away from Debian in the first place is
becoming less and less important and I'm finding more and more
irritations with the Ubuntu system, so I think it probably is time to
get back to Debian. I was thinking of giving Slackware another go -
haven't played with that in many years, but last time I spent more time
"tinkering" than I did actually using the system productively! The more
I think about it, the more I think I'm a Debian person. Anyho, laptop
specs ahoy: It is an HP G6092EA with: AMD64 TK-57 dual-core proc. 1GB
RAM (I know! How old school! :p) nVidia GeForece 7000M GFX Atheros
AR5001 WiFi And I think that's the most significant specs needed. The
things that put me off back in the day was things like getting Flash to
work - Adobe (or was it Macromedia still) didn't have an AMD64 Linux
plugin, only an i386 Linux plugin, and that didn't play nicely with any
AMD64 browsers, so people ended up installing i386 browsers on their
AMD64 distro so they could have the i386 Flash plugin working. That, and
other similar awkward situations. I am pretty much a "desktop" user, but
not necessarily your "average" desktop user. ;) If there really aren't
any significant advantages in it, then i386 is good with me. Familiar
territory and all that jazz. Grant.


I'm not saying it won't work, it just won't work well or easily - there
have been a lot more radical architectural changes recently than there
were back in the old 8.04 - 10.04 releases. If you're confident and
don't mind the work it definitely can be done though, you'll just have
to fix a lot of stuff. You might as well have just done sed
/s/lucid/oneiric/g on your apt sources and updated straight through if
you're not using ubuntu's do-release-upgrade tool incidentally, there's
nothing to be gained by incrementally upgrading. For what it's worth, my
mail server has just been updated to fedora core 16 - it has now been,
over it's long life, running every single version of fedora core from
the initial release.

Good call on switching back to Debian, if that's what you choose to do:
I was a huge ubuntu fan for years until more recently when they started
really screwing around with it post-maverick (the last decent release).
As you say, more and more irritations to fix out-of-the-box. You know
how the old joke goes: ubuntu is ancient African for "can't configure
Debian". Being a Debian guy originally, I just went straight back to it
for anything that matters. The old faults you remember have completely
gone now - really, just completely gone. Flash is 64bit just for a
start, and even has it's own repo (hint: use the official testing repo
from Adobe themselves, it's one of the very few things they've got right).

As for your laptop, well, you should certainly splash out and upgrade
your RAM to the maximum 2Gb supported - it's cheap as chips these days,
unlike hard drives. With only 1Gb of RAM and no realistic chance of
using it for virtualization of any type, you really should just go with
the i386 flavour I would suggest. If you value your time at all,
definitely dump ubuntu, don't even think about Slackware and steer clear
of Arch/Gentoo. Debian i386 all the way!

Cheers,

Mat

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