Debian

[musicman]

The main differences between debian, debian-based, other (inc, redhat,
slackware, gentoo, SUSE) and other-based are something along the lines
of:

debian v other: mostly it how various things are implemented

eg: debian uses the apt package management system, redhat uses rpm,
SUSE uses YaST, gentoo uses emerge (I think that's all correct). Note
that 5 years ago this was an issue, but these days most distros come
with a "install with other system's package manager".

also, differering distros put things in various places and have
differing file structures - debian put's a lot of (all?) conf in /etc,
other distros put new programs and sometimes their conf's (by default)
variously in /usr, /usr/share, /usr/local/share, /var etc etc (I don't
actually know all of them or which distro does what).

debian also has a very strict ethical code about all their software
being GPL, which is not as tightly monitored necessarily in other
distros. It also has a distinctive triple release candidate system
that I'm not sure other distro's have (gentoo doesn't need them for
example, since it's compiled from code at the time)

debian-based systems tend to have one distinct feature: they are not
as strict in what programs they provide in terms of GPL'd only
software (ie, not as strict as Debian).

Also, debian has a slow release cycle since it runs on a gazillion
chip architectures (alpha, amd64, arm, hppa, i386, ia64, mips, mipsel,
powerpc, sparc) whereas debian-based systems (like ubuntu) will
usually only run on the main consumer chip architectures: amd64,
powerpc, i386 but will also have faster release cycles as a result.
eg, ubuntu is roughly 1 every 6 months, debian can be as long as 2
years (for stable).

Further, ubuntu is a debian-gnome distro. If you want ubuntu with KDE
for instance, you would use Kubuntu instead. Debian let's you choose
which desktop you want on install (maybe, it's been at least a couple
of years since I moved from debain-desktop to ubuntu-desktop)

other-based systems (CENTOS based on redhat, PCLinux OS on Mandriva)
have their own differences from their respective sources distros.

 hope that helps

cheers
L.

On 9/17/07, Mihamina (R12y) Rakotomandimby
<mihamina.rakotomandimby at etu.univ-orleans.fr> wrote:
> maman durahman wrote:
> >> beside debian, what is the other?
> > there are slackware, redhat, ...
>
> But there are also many many debian based distro.
>
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