for the Linux experts, WINE problem

[Tellos Athenaios]

Ubuntu *is* a real distro. It's not a distro aimed at the same audience as Fedora is, or Debian is, or Arch/Gentoo are.

I'd define the intended audiences as follows:

1. Ubuntu: for those who want to run a Debian installation but do not wish to spend the time administrating it. Essentially what Windows XP was to the NT range of Microsoft's OS. It is, understandably, similarly popular. It has very much the same approach to the technical side of things as Debian, except it wants to run a considerably more recent crop of software than Debian does (generally speaking it is halfway between Debian sid [unstable] and Debian testing on release). Also it does not mind proprietary software (including drivers) as much; as long as it is freely redistributable. Users that run pre-release versions of the distribution run essentially the Fedora equivalent of a Debian based system. Users that run LTS (long-term-support, is extra stable) releases are essentially Windows XP users who want a Linux.
2. For those who want & expect to run (much) the latest software found in Linux land: Fedora. These people must have some of the skills, persuasion & perseverance to run Debian but in addition are supposed to file bugs on their software, too.
3. For those who want & expect to control their software through manual configuration after installation: Debian. There is a strong emphasis on “it just works”, if not before configuration to make it work the way you want to. In addition you had better drop your proprietary ways if you want an easy time on Debian. You are expected to read man pages, /usr/share/docs/ and the various other documentation of the packages you seek to tame. It's not so hard, just time consuming. Essentially this is a system administrator's distribution with its emphasis on stability, wide range of software: installing Debian is best done once, and the resulting OS imaged and copied to other machines.
4. For those who like & expect to control their software from building it to configuring it after installation: Arch & Gentoo. It is essentially a BSD approach to a free OS.

Now personally I am of the opinion you can save yourself a *lot* of time, brain cells, and money otherwise spent on various substances to kill or appease aforementioned brain cells in frustration, if you chose a Debian based installation. Package management that just works is a godsent. Building from source means you either have faaaar too much time on your hands or you cannot upgrade nearly as often as the binary distributions allow you to.

And if you do chose a Debian based system; and if you do want to run much of the latest software (not to mention hardware)... Ubuntu is not such a bad choice after all. Although, I must admit that I run Kubuntu (KDE 4.4.2) myself because I find Gnome to be an inflexible, unwieldy, eye sore in general. It is however true that Ubuntu adds things in their Gnome'd flavour, of questionable value such as a compositing window manager (desktop effects are sweet, and you might have chosen to install one anyway, but one can certainly question the wisdom of including it by default).

[Husar]

So if I understand that correctly, KDE and Gnome are two different graphical user interfaces for Linux and Ubuntu uses Gnome while Kubuntu and SuSe for example use KDE?

And yes, I know the console is an important part of Linux.

And I made my Ubuntu theme look dark grey and added my own wallpaper, why is that important, I thought you Linux/Win XP people don't care about graphics at all?

And there are some instabilities but those seem to be mostly related to the Flash/Opera combo and the programs itself, the OS seems to run pretty fine most of the time.

Fiddling around with it myself might just as well mean that I would break things myself and not know how to fix them, not get a single program to run for a month etc.
It's nice when it finally works etc. but I'd rather learn the basics properly through that course for example and then add to it myself, don't want to turn my Linux notebook into a day job.

[Tellos Athenaios]

You can think of both as a suite of applications and a desktop environment for your Linux machine, yes. EDIT: Although, you can run KDE on your Windows machine as well. There's a Windows port (which does not have feature parity with the main Linux product) and IIRC a Mac OSX port in the works, too.

And it is certainly not true that Linux people don't care about graphics. I'd say many might care quite a bit more than do Mac OS X users. If you care about making your OS work the way you want it to, you probably would not stop short of making it look how you want it to.

[caravel]

Ubuntu *is* a real distro. It's not a distro aimed at the same audience as Fedora is, or Debian is, or Arch/Gentoo are.
<etc>

I'm afraid I disagree strongly with your overall definition.

With respect to the first point, this is somewhat of an oversimplification. Windows XP and Windows NT are not the best analogy for this. Ubuntu does not run a "more recent crop" of software to Debian. It's based on Sid and always has been. This myth comes from the fact that Ubuntu's repositories are more up to date than the stable (currently Lenny) repositories - of course it they are, but that's because they've been based on Sid's. I find it roughly equivalent to a mixed Testing/Unstable system.

Debian also allows proprietary drivers. The difference again is that Ubuntu provides a GUI tool for their installation. All of the proprietary drivers in Ubuntu are from upstream - Ubuntu simply provides the GUI. I'm afraid LTS are not "stable" either. The latest is Squeeze based (not stable) The only "stable" Debian based distro is Lenny. This is why Lenny is so "out of date" (though the average Ubuntu user could get what they want running on Lenny pretty easily with backports). The definition of a stable system is probably arguable, but in general it's a system that is pretty much guaranteed not to receive updates that will break it. Ubuntu LTS and non LTS regularly receive such updates due to their being based on the Sid or Testing branches.

On your second point. Fedora is no more up to date than Debian Sid - in fact Sid is usually ahead in terms of updates. Debian Sid or Testing users are also supposed to file bug reports. So I'm not sure I get your point?

Third point: I'm a long term Debian user. I run a mixed Sid/Testing setup. I have no idea where you get the "proprietary ways" idea from? My system is full of binary blobs - out of necessity. fglrx (latest pre-release), firmware-nonfree, wireless adaptor microcode running under ndiswrapper to name but a few. I didn't need a degree to install them. So this idea that it's for "sysadmins" just doesn't cut it with me.

Man pages? I hardly have to read them - but when I do it's for bash commands that I would need to understand regardless of distribution. Debian has some of the best wikis and howtos as well. Far better than the Ubuntu ones and more up to date. With Ubuntu a lot of the dependence for support is on the 'community', which is not ideal for reasons I won't go into.

As to Kubuntu, it's now pretty well known for it's poor KDE implimentation. OpenSUSE or Mandriva's is superior.

So if I understand that correctly, KDE and Gnome are two different graphical user interfaces for Linux and Ubuntu uses Gnome while Kubuntu and SuSe for example use KDE?

gnome and KDE are "desktop environments". You can install whichever you prefer. KDE, gnome, XFCE etc. There are also a wide range of "window managers" such as fluxbox, openbox, icewm etc. Window managers are less bloated than full blown desktop environments but not as fully featured (to start with).

And I made my Ubuntu theme look dark grey and added my own wallpaper, why is that important, I thought you Linux/Win XP people don't care about graphics at all?

Not important at all, "the brown one" is a nickname.

And there are some instabilities but those seem to be mostly related to the Flash/Opera combo and the programs itself, the OS seems to run pretty fine most of the time.

I'm afraid flashplugin-nonfree "sucks" and always has as far as I can remember - (blame adobe). It "works for me" at the moment, but in general it uses tons of memory and does have stability issues. You might want to try an open source alternative (such as gnash), but bear in mind that they lag behind adobe flash. I have found that the plugin works better in firefox than opera anyway.

Fiddling around with it myself might just as well mean that I would break things myself and not know how to fix them, not get a single program to run for a month etc.

Part of the learning process. I remember fiddling around with windows and breaking it back in the day. Then I went through the process of fiddling around with and breaking Linux. in all honestly though if you're just installing packages, and if you know what you're doing, then you shouldn't break anything.

It's nice when it finally works etc. but I'd rather learn the basics properly through that course for example and then add to it myself, don't want to turn my Linux notebook into a day job.

[Tellos Athenaios]

First of all I am comparing release versions. Thus the unstable branch of Debian is somewhat irrelevant; yes: Debian Sid is usually more up to date than anything. It's closest analogy is Fedora Rawhide. And more or less famously: the question of “how do you run it?”, is answered with “you don't” [that is the Debian wiki, not me]. These are not real distributions: these are dumping grounds for new code to be tested.

Now, when it comes to *release* (supposedly: *stable*) versions: Ubuntu, or at least, Kubuntu is certainly more up to date than Debian Squeeze is. When I had KDE 4.4.2 on Kubuntu, I'd have KDE 4.3.4 on Squeeze (testing). KDE 4.3.4 was 9.10 material for Ubuntu. As I said: Ubuntu is in between Squeeze (testing) and Sid (unstable), with the early alpha being mostly Sid and the release being closer to Debian testing.

The proprietary ways bit comes from a lot of `fun' with ndiswrapper & fglrx, including but not limited to unrecoverable installations. YMMV. The bit about manpages is probably clarified with a simple `man xorg.conf'. Similarly, polkit/policykit have man page entries for their configuration as well IIRC. Of course, you do not have to configure your system. But my point is: if you don't want to do the configuration dance then maybe Ubuntu is not such a bad option -- it comes with mostly sensible defaults and a considerable later crop of software out-of-the-box.

Ubuntu (LTS or not) does not intentionally receive any update that `breaks' the system in the way you mention it. Have you actually *used* Ubuntu? I ask because if you had used it you would know that the Ubuntu repositories are most definitely not the Debian repositories, that you should not even attempt to mix the two (barring some very specific apt.get wizardry), and that there is such a thing as a “Debian Import Freeze” and it is before the first alpha is released. You will, therefore, never get your updates directly from Debian Sid or testing if you run a release version of Ubuntu; and Ubuntu LTS means that you get updates on your software for a longer period. Also LTS releases are based on LTS kernels which typically means the kernel of (next) RHEL. In casu 10.04 ships with 2.6.32 for that reason.

[caravel]

First of all I am comparing release versions. Thus the unstable branch of Debian is somewhat irrelevant; yes: Debian Sid is usually more up to date than anything. It's closest analogy is Fedora Rawhide. And more or less famously: the question of “how do you run it?”, is answered with “you don't” [that is the Debian wiki, not me]. These are not real distributions: these are dumping grounds for new code to be tested.

Sorry but no, Sid is actually a working, downloadable distro that is actually surprisingly stable. You may need to actually install and use a Sid system before you can make a fair assessment. I would guess from the above that perhaps you haven't? If not then I highly recommend it. In Debian terms "releases" are when the "freeze" occurs and the current testing branch goes stable and the previous stable is move to old-stable. most Debian users don't actually use stable on their desktops - they use either Sid or Squeeze or a combination of the two (this is where a part of the concept of Ubuntu originally came from).

Now, when it comes to *release* (supposedly: *stable*) versions: Ubuntu, or at least, Kubuntu is certainly more up to date than Debian Squeeze is. When I had KDE 4.4.2 on Kubuntu, I'd have KDE 4.3.4 on Squeeze (testing). KDE 4.3.4 was 9.10 material for Ubuntu. As I said: Ubuntu is in between Squeeze (testing) and Sid (unstable), with the early alpha being mostly Sid and the release being closer to Debian testing.

The reason Kubuntu is more 'up to date', is because it's not stable, thoroughly tested software and Ubuntu are known for pushing through untested software before it's ready (believe me I know). Yes you're getting something 'newer', but you're also getting something that's far more likely to break - and break it does.

KDE 4.4 should be in Sid soon - it wasn't last time I checked (still 4.3.5 I think?). Last I heard they were holding off due to the problems most other distros were having with it. Most of those problems have been ironed out now. It gets released "when it's ready".

Debian Stable is used extensively for servers, including webservers of course where security patching and stability is a must. If you've ever tried Stable, you'll know that as a desktop it's also rock solid and dependable. As I've touched on before, backports are the best thing about Lenny. You can get most of the latest packages from Sid and Squeeze and put together a decent desktop with most if not all of the packages that you want. Mrs Asai's PC runs Lenny with backports and is nothing but dependable. I'm toying with the idea of upgrading it to squeeze though.

The proprietary ways bit comes from a lot of `fun' with ndiswrapper & fglrx, including but not limited to unrecoverable installations. YMMV. The bit about manpages is probably clarified with a simple `man xorg.conf'. Similarly, polkit/policykit have man page entries for their configuration as well IIRC. Of course, you do not have to configure your system. But my point is: if you don't want to do the configuration dance then maybe Ubuntu is not such a bad option -- it comes with mostly sensible defaults and a considerable later crop of software out-of-the-box.

I've never had an "unrecoverable installation" from either fglrx and certainly not ndiswrapper either. If fglrx causes hard lock up, it's usually because you installed an fglrx module that wasn't built for your specific kernel. This is actually the circus that has happened a few times with Ubuntu at dist-upgrade time. In fact with any proprietary closed source drivers it's pretty much unavoidable.

The man page for xorg.conf is called 'documentation'. It's a config file and thus the man page needs to be extensive. These days in most cases you can get away without an xorg.conf anyway.

Ubuntu (LTS or not) does not intentionally receive any update that `breaks' the system in the way you mention it. Have you actually *used* Ubuntu? I ask because if you had used it you would know that the Ubuntu repositories are most definitely not the Debian repositories, that you should not even attempt to mix the two (barring some very specific apt.get wizardry), and that there is such a thing as a “Debian Import Freeze” and it is before the first alpha is released. You will, therefore, never get your updates directly from Debian Sid or testing if you run a release version of Ubuntu; and Ubuntu LTS means that you get updates on your software for a longer period. Also LTS releases are based on LTS kernels which typically means the kernel of (next) RHEL. In casu 10.04 ships with 2.6.32 for that reason.

I've used Ubuntu on and off since 6.06LTS right up to 9.04 where I gave up and moved on to better things. 6.06 was the one I stuck with for the longest. That was a decent distro back in it's day. It's later on that it all went very pear shaped.

Yes I'm aware that the Ubuntu and Debian repos are not the same - but thanks for the info. I did not suggest mixing Ubuntu repos, that would be insane, I was talking strictly about Debian. You would not need "apt-get" wizardry" (or aptitude wizardry even) to mix repositories in Debian by the way. Mostly it depends on how you set up your sources.list. Though there are more elaborate ways to go about it yes.

The latest 'stable' kernel is 2.6.33-3 according to kernel.org. Sid and Squeeze uses a stock 2.6.32, but there is a 2.6.33-1 currently in the experimental repo which has some advantanges where the xorg radeon driver, DRI and KMS are concerned - among others. 'buntu 10.04 LTS also uses a build of 2.6.32. So kernel wise they're the same.

I think the main problem here is the myth "debian is difficult" or "debian is out of date" or "debian does not play well with proprietary software". You need to actually try it out properly before coming to those conclusions. If then you still think "tried Debian preferred Ubuntu", that's up to you of course.

[Tellos Athenaios]

The reason Kubuntu is more 'up to date', is because it's not stable, thoroughly tested software and Ubuntu are known for pushing through untested software before it's ready (believe me I know). Yes you're getting something 'newer', but you're also getting something that's far more likely to break - and break it does.

KDE 4.4 should be in Sid soon - it wasn't last time I checked (still 4.3.5 I think?). Last I heard they were holding off due to the problems most other distros were having with it. Most of those problems have been ironed out now. It gets released "when it's ready".

IIRC the reason why KDE 4.4 is not in Sid yet is probably because of the fact that Debian has far more architectures for which a package must build correctly in order to be included; and at least one of those builds didn't make it to the finish line. And yes there *were* some annoying bugs in KDE 4.4 but those have been resolved. The other issues were in fact the Qt 4.6 threading bugs (segfaults). That too, is resolved, the version you'd need is 4.6.2 I think. Or at least it is resolved in Kubuntu 10.04 updated on 28 April 2010.

And no, having had KDE 4.4 I'd rather not go back to KDE 4.3.4. I guess I am just not patient to wait for 4.4. in Debian; knowing that by that time I can get a decent working 4.5 on Ubuntu. I run a simple AMD64 architecture; I couldn't care less about failing-to-build-on- alpha|mips|itanium|other-processor-I-do-not-own.

Debian Stable is used extensively for servers, including webservers of course where security patching and stability is a must. If you've ever tried Stable, you'll know that as a desktop it's also rock solid and dependable. As I've touched on before, backports are the best thing about Lenny. You can get most of the latest packages from Sid and Squeeze and put together a decent desktop with most if not all of the packages that you want. Mrs Asai's PC runs Lenny with backports and is nothing but dependable. I'm toying with the idea of upgrading it to squeeze though.

I have. Debian Etch (stable) was my very first Linux desktop. I thought it best to play it safe and get myself something ... “stable”. Stuff should work when it's stable, right? I found out quite quickly that just about every bit of useful documentation/guides I really needed to make things actually work (wireless, codecs, dvd menu systems) involved the ubuntu forums, particularly the posts made by more seasoned contributors. ... It was one of those things.

Oh yes, I knew of (and from time to time still use) the Debian wiki. It is useful for very specific driver related stuff. (Here is firmware blob x_y_z it works with kernel A_B-15 thru A_B-27, but for later kernels you need firmware u_v_w instead) It is much less useful for “I am new to this, help me with a guide” type of problems.

I've never had an "unrecoverable installation" from either fglrx and certainly not ndiswrapper either. If fglrx causes hard lock up, it's usually because you installed an fglrx module that wasn't built for your specific kernel. This is actually the circus that has happened a few times with Ubuntu at dist-upgrade time. In fact with any proprietary closed source drivers it's pretty much unavoidable.

Certainly it is. The entirely closed drivers are the very worst. But Debian does nothing to aid you with such drivers at all. This is a good thing from the “freedom” side of things: it provides an incentive to use & improve open source drivers. This is fine. But the bad side is that open source drivers do *not* always have feature parity with the closed ones. You still don't get proper power management with your ATI card if you do not use fglrx, for one thing. 3D acceleration is another such issue. For someone new to the entire circus, unaware of many of these issues I think the better offering is to accept closed source drivers if freely redistributable.

But it is not just those drivers themselves; it is also firmware. For instance to make your wirelss card work chances are you *will* need to install proprietary firmware. Where do you get this firmware, you ask? Well from the internet. It is certainly not part of a default installation. Which means that by default you end up with... incomplete drivers. That is a less than an ideal situation.

I found out more about that when I decided to quit Ubuntu for a while after a harddisk failure (aging, cheap laptop quality thing) and tried Debian Squeeze: you can't run the iwlwifi/iwlagn driver by default because... firmware is missing. When I tried to set up Squeeze on my grandma's laptop after similar failure I found out the same holds true for the p54pci/p54usb drivers (prism54): you need to download firmware in order to get it working. On Ubuntu: you don't. It's all part of the stock Linux kernel distribution (linux-firmware) but Debian takes it out because it isn't FOSS software. It is a purely “political” choice. At that time I certainly considered it the worse choice, too at least from the technical P.O.V..

So to me that statement that “if you want an easy time on Debian, renounce & lose your proprietary ways” is still very much valid. It is *not* trivial to find out about the right wiki page; it is *not* trivial to find out exactly what driver you need. The first depends on the latter; and the latter depends on quite a bit of knowledge about your hardware: such as the original manufacturer of the controller chips... With cheap commodity hardware that is not at all obvious.

The man page for xorg.conf is called 'documentation'. It's a config file and thus the man page needs to be extensive. These days in most cases you can get away without an xorg.conf anyway.

I've used Ubuntu on and off since 6.06LTS right up to 9.04 where I gave up and moved on to better things. 6.06 was the one I stuck with for the longest. That was a decent distro back in it's day. It's later on that it all went very pear shaped.

Yes I'm aware that the Ubuntu and Debian repos are not the same - but thanks for the info. I did not suggest mixing Ubuntu repos, that would be insane, I was talking strictly about Debian. You would not need "apt-get" wizardry" (or aptitude wizardry even) to mix repositories in Debian by the way. Mostly it depends on how you set up your sources.list. Though there are more elaborate ways to go about it yes.

In order for you to use a specific distribution version of a package you must either pin or set the preference 'scores' of that package; as well as enabling any additional repositories required. Otherwise you would simply end up with a newer version of *everything*. The usual reason for doing this kind of thing is to run a modern system; *except* for a specific subset of functions. For instance running PHP 5.1 on Ubuntu 10.04.

Now I sincerely do not understand where your updates to wreck the LTS come from, anymore? I've been using 8.04 until 9.04 and never had any upgrade wreck anything. I've used 9.04, quickly upgrade to 9.10 to 10.04 because of the X + ati driver issues. Currently looking forward to getting proper power management in the driver with 10.10, plus KDE 4.5.

The latest 'stable' kernel is 2.6.33-3 according to kernel.org. Sid and Squeeze uses a stock 2.6.32, but there is a 2.6.33-1 currently in the experimental repo which has some advantanges where the xorg radeon driver, DRI and KMS are concerned. 'buntu 10.04 LTS also uses a build of 2.6.32. So kernel wise they're the same.

I think the main problem here is the myth "debian is difficult" or "debian is out of date" or "debian does not play well with proprietary software". You need to actually try it out properly before coming to those conclusions. If then you still think "tried Debian preferred Ubuntu", that's up to you of course.

I am not saying Debian is difficult. Quite specifically it isn't any more difficult than Ubuntu is. But in order to run the same software you'd run in an Ubuntu release you have to do a lot more hand holding than you would have to do on Ubuntu. So it is a matter of time & effort more than arcane skills.

[caravel]

I'm not a KDE user so I won't get into the whole KDE debate. I don't think the issue has anything to do with arch. though as some packages are relesed for a certain arch. and not available in others. I don't see it as an issue if a package is not released as soon as possible. Different distros have different ways of doing things.

I have. Debian Etch (stable) was my very first Linux desktop. I thought it best to play it safe and get myself something ... “stable”. Stuff should work when it's stable, right? I found out quite quickly that just about every bit of useful documentation/guides I really needed to make things actually work (wireless, codecs, dvd menu systems) involved the ubuntu forums, particularly the posts made by more seasoned contributors. ... It was one of those things.

No it does not involve the Ubuntuforums. You're actually looking in the wrong places. Sadly, anything you google for related to Linux in general these days will lead you to a mostly useless thread at Ubuntuforums. That does not mean that UF has all the answers - it clearly does not.

But Debian does nothing to aid you with such drivers at all. This is a good thing from the “freedom” side of things: it provides an incentive to use & improve open source drivers. This is fine. But the bad side is that open source drivers do *not* always have feature parity with the closed ones. You still don't get proper power management with your ATI card if you do not use fglrx, for one thing. 3D acceleration is another such issue. For someone new to the entire circus, unaware of many of these issues I think the better offering is to accept closed source drivers if freely redistributable.

Yes and no, the latest fglrx for the latest X server is available in the squeeze repos (and in the Ubuntu ones). The installation is very simple (via module assistant). I don't see the problem?

As to fglrx - unless you're gaming you don't need it. the foss driver is superior to fglrx in every respect expect for full screen OpenGL apps (games). If you just want 3D for compiz-fusion then the foss radeon driver is your best option - and it supports KMS, which fglrx does not. 2D acceleration on fglrx is also crap. Nvidia is another matter, they are the problem, but the Nouveau should be a solution to this. (or you can use the proprietary drivers which work well).

But it is not just those drivers themselves; it is also firmware. For instance to make your wirelss card work chances are you *will* need to install proprietary firmware. Where do you get this firmware, you ask? Well from the internet. It is certainly not part of a default installation. Which means that by default you end up with... incomplete drivers. That is a less than an ideal situation.

Sorry, but that's actually wrong as well. Proprietary Firmware was removed from the Linux kernel, not from Debian. To install it in Debian it's a simple matter of adding the non-free and contrib repos to your sources, then update package listings, and fetch the firmware-nonfree package and that's it.

I found out more about that when I decided to quit Ubuntu for a while after a harddisk failure (aging, cheap laptop quality thing) and tried Debian Squeeze: you can't run the iwlwifi/iwlagn driver by default because... firmware is missing. When I tried to set up Squeeze on my grandma's laptop after similar failure I found out the same holds true for the p54pci/p54usb drivers (prism54): you need to download firmware in order to get it working. On Ubuntu: you don't. It's all part of the stock Linux kernel distribution (linux-firmware) but Debian takes it out because it isn't FOSS software. It is a purely “political” choice. At that time I certainly considered it the worse choice, too at least from the technical P.O.V..

No, the nonfree firmware for most wireless chipsets is also available in the repos. It's a 10 second job to install it. Again - what's the problem?

Heh, it's not "political". You seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that Debian is a gNewSense type distro? It's not. It's actually more "legal" than political.

So to me that statement that “if you want an easy time on Debian, renounce & lose your proprietary ways” is still very much valid. It is *not* trivial to find out about the right wiki page; it is *not* trivial to find out exactly what driver you need. The first depends on the latter; and the latter depends on quite a bit of knowledge about your hardware: such as the original manufacturer of the controller chips... With cheap commodity hardware that is not at all obvious.

I don't mean to be harsh but, you can keep quoting that but it's not going to get any truer. It's actually as easy as hell to install proprietary packages in Debian (in fact Debian have been criticised for it by the Stallman brigade) - but I don't actually understand your point. It's also relatively easy to identify most hardware using lspci or lsusb. Personally I only have one troublesome piece of hardware in my entire system, and I had trouble with that regardless of distribution anyway. That being an rtl8185 based wireless adaptor. It actually works using the in built driver but not with WPA2. I got around his by simply setting it up with Ndiswrapper.

In order for you to use a specific distribution version of a package you must either pin or set the preference 'scores' of that package; as well as enabling any additional repositories required. Otherwise you would simply end up with a newer version of *everything*. The usual reason for doing this kind of thing is to run a modern system; *except* for a specific subset of functions. For instance running PHP 5.1 on Ubuntu 10.04.

I know... as I had stated in the previous post.

Now I sincerely do not understand where your updates to wreck the LTS come from, anymore? I've been using 8.04 until 9.04 and never had any upgrade wreck anything. I've used 9.04, quickly upgrade to 9.10 to 10.04 because of the X + ati driver issues. Currently looking forward to getting proper power management in the driver with 10.10, plus KDE 4.5.

9.04 was not an LTS. I wasn't talking about updates breaking the LTS in particular, I was referring mainly to dist-upgrades which are actually offered to all Ubuntu users on a plate via UpdateManager. This is usually when mayhem hits. Expect to read the usual "complaints" at UF when 10.04 is released to the masses. Though admittedly they'll probably get away without broken X servers this time around due to 10.04 being Squeeze based. The 8.10 to 9.04 upgrade was a disaster. I actually fell foul of that one myself because I was messing about with an Ubuntu 8.10 box at the time and decided to dist-upgrade. Now I'm not saying dist-upgrade works in Debian, in my experience it doesn't - not without a lot of hassle anyway, but in Debian you don't get "offered" it in updatemanager. Anyway the long and short of it is, that I had fglrx installed and when I rebooted - hard lock up. (i.e. "magic" key sequences were required to sync, unmount and reboot). That fact is, that myself and some other moderately experienced users will know the pitfalls, but the " 'buntu n00b" that installs fglrx from "restricted drivers" (or "hardware drivers" as I think it's called these days) will not know this.

I am not saying Debian is difficult. Quite specifically it isn't any more difficult than Ubuntu is. But in order to run the same software you'd run in an Ubuntu release you have to do a lot more hand holding than you would have to do on Ubuntu. So it is a matter of time & effort more than arcane skills.

No idea what you mean by "hand holding". I'm just not entirely sure you've run Debian for an extended period of time - certainly not enough time to get into it and appreciate it fully. I'm making no claims that Debian is user friendly - but neither is Ubuntu. To me Ubuntu is someone elses Debian set up, whereas Debian is the blank canvas. It runs everything I want and only what I want and is less bloated than Ubuntu. It's also not simply a matter of "time and effort", Debian (especially Squeeze or Sid) does require that you have a clue about what you're doing - Ubuntu is really a "beginners distro" and that's not a bad thing. Really it's all apples and oranges.

I will now respectfully bow out of this thread as I feel we're moving in circles. Sometimes it's best to "agree to disagree".