Chosing a Distributions

The Debian distro doesn't come with development tools installed…but it's easy to pull them in with apt-get. I'm a total Debian newbie - former experience with Red Hat - and I found it pretty easy.

If you want to build and install things from source, you'll have to apt-get a few packages to bootstrap with, like

apt-get install gcc make dpkg-devel

To get a source package, go to a convenient directory and do

apt-get source which will retrieve and unpack the sources there for you.

I haven't used Slackware, but I can't imagine it getting much easier.

Can't go wrong with Slackware. All of the core stuff for console goodness and development is installed in the small (450) package. The debian option is good also if you are into "apt-get" and running slightly aged versions of software. But for general ./configure, make, make install you can't beat Slackware.

Since I like to try new software as soon as they are released, i usualy prefer do a ./configure myself than wait until a package is released.

Do you thing that Slackware is nearest to freebsd that debian ?

How about distribution upgrades ???

I read that apt-get is very good on that, so Debian is very easy to upgrade.

But … what about Slackware ? Is easy to upgrade like debian ?

Thanks

Nuno

Well Debian is great at distribution upgrade – apt-get dist upgrade (after changing your /etc/sources.lst file I think) -- however it is a catch 22 because they are on version 3.0 and just celebrated their 10th year. So unless you want to play on the bleeding edge with debian unstable, then your chances to upgrade full distribution versions may be far and few in between.

Slackware on the other hand I am not sure.