Why use Debian? One of the great things about Debian is the package management. Debian Sarge is one of the stablest Linux distributions. Netstatz promotes and supports Debian and ONMS with enthusiasm as best-of-breed tools in a changing world. In our experience deploying Linux solutions at Netstatz, Debian has proven to be the easiest to maintain and configure long term. Nothing is forever, and hopefully other distributions will begin to adopt the security, stability and ease of management that Debian has maintained for some time. Of course the Debian culture is the driving force behind this great distribution. There are now over 16,000 packages in the Debian stable distribution. The same up-to-date, secure and stable systems running Debian today, have been consistent performers for the last six years running on software RAID. Netstatz systems that ran Potato, and then Woody, run Sarge today, with no restaging and no unmanageable entropy. Debian systems consistently outlive the hardware they are deployed on, time and time again - and we are not just talking about disk drives.
The consistent performance of Debian is what makes documenting the process trivial. Everybody running Debian has the same experience, thanks to the hard work of Debian package maintainers in conjunction with upstream developers. Fours years after v1.0 of this HOWTO, not much has changed for Debian OpenNMS users in terms of operation and maintenance, but here is an update anyways.
Why use this Lyx/SGML format? LinuxDoc SGML is the closest to DocBook XML that requires nothing more than "apt-get install xxx" to create and maintain with Debian. When the Lyx template for DocBook XML is working via packages I will use that (the default template is still missing TOC). DocBook XML is the standard. LinuxDoc SGML is a very similar superset, and just works so nicely out of the box.
Debian Sarge (a.k.a stable), Debian Etch (a.k.a testing) and
Debian Sid (a.k.a unstable) are the three distributions maintained
by the
Debian GNU/Linux team. stable uses only the very tried, tested and true versions
of software. We like to think of it as e-commerce-bank-stable. No
new features other than security updates are added to the stable
distribution between major releases. This ensures the highest confidence
level in dynamic updates to the system where other operating systems
require software vendors to dictate a specific compatible release.
The unstable and testing distributions use newer versions of stable
software, often including dramatic improvements to the interface
and functionality. Desktop users who have previously been interested
in the latest version of other operating systems (a.k.a Dreamers
of Vista) will enjoy the cutting-edge appearance and functionality
of the testing and unstable distributions.
This document is for Debian Sarge (stable) users. The author's
experience is that unstable users only require a mailing-list in
addition to a working Sarge example. The simpliest way to get Debian
deployed is from a Debian ISO (bootable CD). The full Debian ISOs
are found easily via
LinuxISO.org,
jigdo as well as the now mainsteam form of distribution,
bitttorrents.
With the high bandwidth available everywhere, users may prefer to install from a Minimal CD, or set of floppies via the Internet.