What is "stability"?
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Debian is supposed to be super-stable, yet I and some other people I have heard have found Debian to be rather unstable in practice. I cannot even begin to describe how confused I am.
Should a post about Debian be moved to "The troll hole"?
"Debian is supposed to be super-stable, yet I and some other people I have heard have found Debian to be rather unstable in practice. I cannot even begin to describe how confused I am."
Are you sure that it isn't a certain package that is making Debian unstable?
"Should a post about Debian be moved to "The troll hole"?"
No, The troll Hole is for threads that are likely to cause a flame war, or needless controversy.
Debian will only boot as long as I did not boot any other operating systems on the computer since installing Debian. I have Debian on an external HDD and Trisquel on my internal HDD. If I use Trisquel after installing Debian, then try to use Debian afterwards, Debian refuses to boot and I need to reinstall Debian to use it again. I cannot use Trisquel without destroying my Debian installation. Is this a Trisquel problem?
On 30/05/13 12:06, name at domain wrote:
> Debian is supposed to be super-stable, yet I and some other people I
> have heard have found Debian to be rather unstable in practice. I
> cannot even begin to describe how confused I am.
There are a few bugs in gnome-panel, Compiz, Metacity, and other
packages that shipped in Trisquel 6.0 (and Ubuntu 12.04). Those sort of
bugs _might_ have been fixed in an equivalent hypothetical Stable Debian
release with the longer freeze period (and more developers than Trisquel).
Andrew.
My main problem is getting Debian to boot reliably from an external HDD on my Gentoo Penguin laptop.
Should I try using an older release of Debian even though it is very much discouraged?
Should I get a Debian account to ask these questions?
I am a member!
I'll start by stating Debian is not on the FSF-certified list of free distributions. It gets very close and it t might otherwise be today if not for a few issues related documentation and a non-free repository existing within the project. I mainly say this to make sure your aware of these issues before proceeding. The issue you have is probably not specific to Trisquel or Debian.
My gut feeling is your installing two different distributions that are dependent on different versions of the bootloader (be it the same bootloader or a different one). If the distributions are installed in the right order there probably isn't a problem. But because you've installed it in the wrong order the older bootloader is overwriting the newer one and the configuration files for it aren't properly recognized by the older version.
There are different ways to solve this problem. During installation of Debian you are probably being asked where to install a bootloader (GRUB probably) and the default is to install it to the internal hard drive. Instead of doing that install it to the external drive where Debian is being installed.
Then when your system starts up press the F12 key (this is for your Gentoo laptop only; other systems may have other keys to bring up the boot menu) and select the external hard drive.
You should now be able to boot both Trisquel and Debian/or whatever other distribution you want.
Maybe I should abandon Debian for the reason that only the text installer seems to work.
Something odd I have noticed with various graphical installers: Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Debian graphical installers all say, "cannot find file" when I try to use them. I can only install Debian through the text installer. While Ubuntu and Kubuntu fail to install (possibly due to graphical incompatibilities rather than a faulty installer), the Trisquel and Linux Mint (which, as you know, are based on Ubuntu) graphical installers work flawlessly. This might also be because I need new DVD-RWs. Do DVD-RWs normally become more and more faulty over time?
I have read the list of free GNU/Linux distros from gnu.org.
I am a member!
It may be the discs. Usually the best discs to use are CD-R discs. It may be the drive is having more of an issue reading the disc. It might be scratched, etc. or just this drive doesn't like this disc. Some types of discs can be more problematic. I believe its due to the lasers inside or lack thereof.
I'd probably burn a new copy on a CD-R / DVD-R medium and verify the disc. What ISO did you actually burn?
I believe we have used this one on the Gentoo:
http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/7.0.0/amd64/iso-cd/debian-7.0.0-amd64-kde-CD-1.iso
I might suggest using this one though:
It is a live version of Debian you can run from CD.
That said this thread may not be appropriate for this forum given Debian's not Trisquel and it's not FSF-complaint either. Distributions like Parabola GNU/Linux are probably OK here because they are on the FSF list although distributions that include non-free software are certainly not OK here. Debian is some where in-between. Consider contacting support at thinkpenguin or maybe getting on the Debian forum/mailing list/etc.
Stability can mean many things. In the case of Debian, I think it just means that the software is well-tested and you can be sure that the system isn't just going to randomly break when you update; it doesn't mean that programs crash less frequently or work better or anything like that.
Debian's stable releases probably aren't any good for most people. Most people want more recent software that has recent bugfixes, new features, etc, and you won't get that with Debian. I've heard that Debian makes more sense for servers, though, and it might make sense for other systems that you don't want to update very often.
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