[vox-tech] YAST equivalent on Debian?

[Jonathan Stickel]

Bob Scofield wrote:
> I've been doing a lot of thinking about the use of Debian for newbies and 
> bewbies.  Bill's directions to Pete on how to set up "My Computer" on KDE 
> takes care of one thing.  Something like YAST would take care of another.  
> And something that partitioned as easily as YAST and Mandrake would be still 
> another.  
> 

I believe synaptic has already been mentioned on this thread.  Is it 
what you want?  I use it to manage Fedora installs (via apt-rpm in the 
background).


> Of course I do not expect much sympathy from Debian users for this type of 
> computing.  But after Ken's answer to my question about apt upgrading to new 
> versions of open source applications (eventually to Open Office 2.0, for 
> example) I marvel at what Debian is up to.  It is clearly economically 
> suicidal for commercial distros to have apt.  While Debian is considered 
> geekware, it has tremendous potential to the non-technically inclined.
> 

Yes, of course, "rolling updates" completely eliminates upgrade 
purchases.  The concept is not totally revolutionary, though. 
User-based linux distros have been doing it for some time, Debian and 
Gentoo being the most prominent.  I'm able to do rolling updates with 
Fedora, now too, which is a hybrid user-base, commercially supported 
distribution.  Even commercial companies offer rolling updates under 
yearly contract licensing rather than single-purchase licensing.

Jonathan