GNU/Linux related activities
I have been an active member of the [http://www.linux-india.com Linux-India] mailing list in the past. I was active there for around 1 to 2 years starting somewhere in 1998. I was an early member there. While I was there I met Arun Krishnaswamy. Together we started a local Linux User's Group (LUG) at Chennai. With the help of my Linux Guru, Prof. P. Sriram (Aerospace Engg. IIT-Madras) we organized for regular meetings, started a mailing list. A lot of helpful folks stepped in. P. Asokan arranged for a site to host our web pages. For about four years from its inception in July 1998 I was responsible for organizing the meetings and the mailing list. After that I stepped down from the post of co-ordinatorship because I had a little too much to do. I am no longer in Chennai and am no longer interested in LUG related activities. ILUGC now has a life of its own and has over 1000 odd members. More information on ILUGC is available on the ILUGC website.
Why I use Debian
I started off using the Red Hat distribution. At the time I believe it was the right choice for me since I knew no Unix. I got fairly handy with Linux and got to the point of making RPM's (not too hard, really!) for Red Hat. Here is my old Linux page. After I got the hang of Red Hat and Linux Arun told me about Debian. Initially I hesitated but after I moved there was no turning back. The reasons I like Debian are as follows:
Debian is extremely stable. It is generally considered to be the most stable and secure Linux distribution.
- It has far more packages that ship with it than Red Hat does. As of the Debian 3.0 Woody release I believe that there are about 8000 packages (debs) that ship in 4-6 CD's. This number is growing quickly.
- The quality of the packages and their integration is superb. This is because Debian has more than 500(?) or so package maintainers who maintain and are responsible for the proper packaging of individual packages.
- Debian is completely free and maintained by a group of volunteers all over the world. A non profit organization called
Software in the Public Interest (SPI) maintains Debian's assets.
- Debian has very clear standards. Their policy can be found
here.
- Overall the entire distribution is extremely well organized. Almost any useful and important package is already packaged and available on CD. This is particularly useful for folks who don't have fat pipes to the Internet.
- Some may argue that RPM's are ubiquitous. True, but very few of the RPM's are actually well integrated. This is true especially for large, complex software packages.
- Debian has the best upgrade tool -- apt-get. This makes it very easy to keep up to date with Debian. If one has a decent Internet connection updating the entire OS is as simple as a couple of commands. Something like : apt-get update; apt-get upgrade is all that is required to upgrade to the latest packages in the current distribution. Similar commands exist to upgrade from one release to another.
- Unlike commercial organizations Debian has no necessity to make releases frequently. Because of this Debian releases take a long time but are very well tested before they are released. However, there is always the testing release that bleeding edge Debian fans can use.
- Since Debian is completely free, it is possible for users to join Debian and actually become part of it. This is particularly nice for developers.
- Besides all of this there are a lot of small things here and there that Debian does correctly, all of which endear the distribution to its users. For example: all the large text documentation files in /usr/share/doc are gzipped. This is a neat thing to do. There are tons of such examples one can give.
All in all it is a really nice OS to work on.