Linus on Debian: WTF?

So I am reading an interview with Linus Torvalds, and they ask him which distribution he runs, and he comes out with:

…the only distributions I tend to refuse to touch are the “technical” ones, so I’ve never run Debian, because as far as I’m concerned, the whole and only point of a distribution is to make it easy to install (so that I can then get to the part I care about, namely the kernel), so Debian or one of the “compile everything by hand” ones simply weren’t interesting to me.

Far be it from me to contradict the gospel, but that is just plain wrong. I used to use Red Hat, and now run Debian. While I switched because of the licensing, I was amazed at how great apt-get is. It makes maintenance so simple. My machines are totally up to date, and I spend almost no time doing it (unlike with Red Hat). And I am absolutely not a “compile everything by hand” kind of guy either.

This comment really lowered my opinion of him. It makes me think there’s more than a grain of truth in other sour grapes.

Installing png2ico on Debian Etch

It is pretty simple: these are just my notes so I don’t have to think next time I do it.

Download from http://www.winterdrache.de/freeware/png2ico/

chdir /usr/local
tar -xvzf png2ico-src-YYYY-MM-DD.tar.gz
apt-get install libpng12-src
make

My Online Png To Icon converter is just a wrapper around this.

VMWare server will not run after Debian Etch updates

VMWare didn’t start after I installed the latest Etch updates. The error message is printed to the terminal, which is pretty useless if you’re starting it from the GUI. Anyhow, the fix is pretty easy:

apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`
/usr/bin/vmware-config.pl

I guess the update had a new kernel and VMWare needed to re-install its hooks.