FVWM 95 is a fast and small window manager, emulating the look of Windows 9x.
Unlike commercial distributions, Debian is produced by a non-profit organisation called Software in the Public Interest. Volunteers all over the world help to maintain the system, and the distribution has acquired considerable respect from experienced users in the community. The text-mode installer is available in mono or colour, so Debian can be installed on very old systems that don’t have colour displays. This is a good idea and a refreshing change from the new, jazzy installers we’re seeing everywhere else.
Are you experienced?
From the very start, it’s clear that new users would find this heavy-going. The Cfdisk partitioner assumes plenty of knowledge and there’s little of the hand-holding you get with others. Conversely, you’re constantly prompted and alerted as to what the installer is doing, which is a world apart from the ‘do everything automatically’ idea behind distributions such as Corel.
The installation takes some time because after choosing one of the package categories (desktop, development workstation and so on), you have to sit through the post-install configuration and occasionally answer questions for each package. Debian uses the DEB format, which is similar to RPM. However, with the extensive Dselect package management tool, adding and removing software is straightforward. The best feature of all is APT (Advance Package Tool), which enables the entire system to be updated with just a few commands. After experiencing incompatibilities with RPMs from various distributions, we were glad to see such painless upgrading and package control. On the software side, Debian is showing its age. The supplied kernel is 2.038 – not even from the 2.2.x series – and XFree86 is back at 3.3.2. An old version of Gnome is supplied, along with several window managers, such as Enlightenment Window Maker and FVWM.