Zen of Debian

Zen of Debian

Steven Rosenberg September 4, 2022

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Chapter 1

Introduction

"The Zen of Debian" is an essay about Debian GNU/Linux. It's also a personal account of my computing journey and how an operating system like Debian -- or really any Linux- or BSD-based OS -- can bring order, calm, productivity and stability to your life and work.

Who am I?

My name is Steven Rosenberg. I am a journalist, writer and developer. Over the last decade and then some, I have written quite a bit about my experiences with computer hardware and software as a pretty much regular user learning things along the way. Much of that writing can be found at . com/click (mirrored at ) and http:// blog. Newer posts are at .

During years and years of blogging, I have written hundreds of posts about Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and other Linux distributions. I haven't counted, but I probably wrote more than 100 posts about OpenBSD.

I'm sure I've written about the drought in Linux book publishing, and I know that few are writing -- and even fewer are publishing -- books about how to use Linux on the desktop. There's certainly no money in it.

I began using Linux and BSD operating systems around 2007 when I didn't have a computer of my own and was hacking on old machines. I had a surplus thin client with a VIA CPU and IDE hard and CD drives hanging out the back. I bought a very, very used Compaq laptop for $15. Then someone gave me a broken Gateway laptop. I rewired the power plug it and ran it for years. Even when these castoff computers came with Microsoft Windows, I always ran Linux or BSD on them. The first distro I really used was Puppy Linux, which ran from a live CD. My first and favorite release was 2.111.

During those early Linux days, I found out about Ubuntu during the 6.06 and 7.04 era and had heard how it was an "easier" Debian. (First question: What's Debian, and why is it so hard?)

When Debian Etch came out (and it could have been the July 2008 release of Etch and a Half2, I read about it, downloaded an ISO and gave it a spin. The

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CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION

installer wasn't much more complicated than Ubuntu's, and once I had Debian running, it looked, smelled and worked like a bluer, faster Ubuntu. At that time, Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE, Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux/CentOS all shipped with a very similar GNOME 2 desktop. Package management was different (yum vs apt and all), but it soon became very apparent that if you could run Ubuntu, you could run Debian.

In more recent years -- 2012 and 2017 -- I have used Windows on new laptops in order to give the OS "a chance" and avoid compatibility issues that can affect new hardware. I gave Windows 10 maybe two years on my current HP Envy laptop before giving up after some very thorny upgrades and enough quirks to make me question why I didn't just return to an OS where simplicity, stability and performance are all part of the package (and package management system).

For me over the years, those OSes have been the Debian and Fedora distributions of Linux. I first used Debian in the 4.0 "Etch" era, and was surprise to find out it was a bluer, faster yet not appreciably more difficult version of what the brown yet growing Ubuntu was offering in the 6.06 era. I experimented rather heavily with both Debian and Ubuntu at the time, and I seemed to always come back to Debian.

I looked back at the list of Debian releases and realize that I've spent time using every one from Etch (Version 4) through the current stable release Buster (Version 10).

I have run a lot of Fedora over the years. I began 2010 with Version 13 and stuck with Fedora through version 15, turning to Debian Squeeze when a Fedora upgrade went really bad due to the proprietary AMD/Catalyst video driver. I returned to Fedora with my next laptop in 2012 -- the Fedora 17 "Beefy Miracle" era. I still have that laptop today, and it runs Fedora 30, I had ONE bad upgrade in all those years, and that time I was able to reinstall Fedora and use the same partitions and /home directory.

With my current laptop, a 2017 HP Envy, I decided to spend some time using Windows 10, and it was a couple of years before thorny upgrades, persistent bugs and lagging performance led me to get a small, cheap M.2 NVMe SSD, and install Debian Stable (version 10 Buster). I immediately began to feel comfortable and productive on the computer I use for wrangling websites, writing and editing, hacking on Ruby, and all of the other day-to-day things I do with a PC.

Chapter 2

The Zen of Debian

Installing, managing and using the Debian GNU/Linux operating system on your computers can bring a sense of calm, mastery and productivity to your life and work.

If Debian Stable works on your computer today, it will keep working for the rest of the two-year release window, plus an additional year, with minimal yet important updates that will keep your system secure.

Like most Linux operating systems -- called *distributions* -- Debian comes with all the tools you'll need to install and remove software using remote repositories that contain tens of thousands of packages. Those same tools will keep Debian up to date with the latest security patches and critical bug fixes.

Also with those tools, you have the power and the option to upgrade your *Stable* system to the *Testing* or Unstable* releases, or the *next* Stable release when Debian's developers deem it ready.

Whether you are a full-fledged Debian Developer, or a new user installing Debian for the first time, you are part of a history and tradition that goes back to the beginning of the Linux kernel in the 1990s, the GNU tools in the 1980s, and the first Multics and Unix operating systems of the 1960s and 1970s.

Time-sharing, an everything-is-a-file philosophy and dedication to portability were part of Unix in the 1970s, and they continue to be so today -- even if you're *technically* the only user on your laptop or desktop computer. The days of Unix-running Digital Equipment Corporation VAX computers accommodating dozens of simultaneous users via "dumb" terminals over serial connections may be over, but those same dozens of users can connect to shared Unix/Linux systems via secure shell, and we know that thousands can interact with systems that connect via Web servers and are backed by databases.

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CHAPTER 2. THE ZEN OF DEBIAN

Chapter 3

Installing Debian: How to get good

I learned to embrace the process of installing Debian by doing it dozens and dozens of times, beginning when I first "discovered" Etch until now, when I run Buster on a 2017 HP laptop and 2011 iMac desktop. During the many years between Etch and Buster, it helped a great deal that I had many older "test" computers and hard drives at my disposal. If I screwed anything up, I could start over.

I tended to do it the same way every time: Encrypted LVM most of the time, accepting most if not all of the installer's defaults.

Non-free firmware: Do you need it? How do you get it?

There are many ways to install Debian. That's good, but also bad. Choices bring flexibility and confusion.

In Debian -- and the Debian installer -- much of this confusion is due to non-free firmware.

If you don't want to use a non-free firmware image, you can also choose to keep the most common non-free firmware in a place where you can use it. On most systems, that means a FAT-formatted USB flash drive.

Debian provides a link to a compressed file of the non-free firmware in the yellow-highlighted portion of , near the bottom.

Get the .zip if you know you have the software to unzip it. In a basic Linux environment, you'll always be able to unpack a tarball, and there is a .tar.gz file for that reason.

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CHAPTER 3. INSTALLING DEBIAN: HOW TO GET GOOD

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