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I use the Debian packaged Firefox (Iceweasel) from http://mozilla.debian.net/. It works just fine. I don't understand what all the hooha is about new releases of Firefox.

http://clang.debian.net/

Debian was first released in late 1995, please check here: http://timeline.debian.net/

we're not allowed to create special users or change the OS configuration

You're pretty much screwed as far as that OS is concerned. If you're really lucky there might be a copy of KDE installed with it's kiosk mode, or perhaps you can kill enough of the window manager to get it stuck (but that's supposed to result in the window manager restarting itself).

If you can't change the disk you're only option is to replace it. I don't mean physically, though that may be an option, I mean with live CD, usb or netboot

The Debian Live project allows you to easily create a live CD (or the other media) with your choice of packages; so easily in fact that there used to be an automatic service for it, upload the package list, download the ISO.

So install a minimal Debian with ONLY the bits you need turn it into a live image and boot it off the network.

Now, without getting into how much i dislike Pulseaudio (maybe because i'm an old UNIX fart, thank you very much), I think there are really serious issues with "The Journal", which I can summarize as such:

1. the problem it's trying to fix is already fixed 2. the problem isn't fixed by the solution 2. it makes everything more opaque 3. it makes the problem worse

The first issue is that it is trying to fix a problem that is already easily solved with existing tools: just send your darn logs to an external machine already. Syslog has supported networked logging forever.

Second, if you log on a machine and that machine gets compromised, I don't see how having checksums and a chained log will keep anyone from just running trashing the whole 'journal'. rm -rf /var/log What am i missing here?

Third, this implements yet another obscure and opaque system that keeps the users away from how their system works, making everything available only through a special tool (the journal), which depends on another special tool (systemd), both of which are already controversial. I like grepping my logs. I understand http://logcheck.org and similar tools are not working very well, but that's because there isn't a common format for logging, which makes parsing hard and application dependent. From what I understand, this is not something The Journal is trying to address either. To take an example from their document: MESSAGE=User harald logged in MESSAGE_ID=422bc3d271414bc8bc9570f222f24a9 _EXE=/lib/systemd/systemd-logind [... 14 lines of more stuff snipped] (Nevermind for a second the fact that to carry the same amount of information, syslog only needs one line (not 14), which makes things actually readable by humans.)

The actual important bit here is "User harald logged in". But the thing we want to know is: is that a good thing or a bad thing? If it was "User harald login failed", would it be flagged as such? It's not in the current objectives, it seems, to improve the system in that direction. I would rather see a common agreement on syntax and keywords to use, and respect for the syslog levels (e.g. EMERG, ALERT, ..., INFO, DEBUG), than reinventing the wheel like this.

Fourth, what happens when our happy cracker destroys those tools? This is a big problem for what they are actually trying to solve, especially since they do not intend to make the format standard, according to the design document (published on you-know-who, unfortunately). So you could end up in a situation where you can't parse those logs because the machine that generated them is gone, and you would need to track down exactly which version of the software generated it. Good luck with that.

I'll pass. Again.

Hear, hear. The biggest problem anyway is that people don't read their log-files. This Journal thing just seems to make them harder to parse.

Now, without getting into how much i dislike Pulseaudio (maybe because i'm an old UNIX fart, thank you very much), I think there are really serious issues with "The Journal", which I can summarize as such:

1. the problem it's trying to fix is already fixed
2. the problem isn't fixed by the solution
2. it makes everything more opaque
3. it makes the problem worse

The first issue is that it is trying to fix a problem that is already easily solved with existing tools: just send your darn logs to an external machine already. Syslog has supported networked logging forever.

Second, if you log on a machine and that machine gets compromised, I don't see how having checksums and a chained log will keep anyone from just running trashing the whole 'journal'.

rm -rf /var/log

What am i missing here?

Third, this implements yet another obscure and opaque system that keeps the users away from how their system works, making everything available only through a special tool (the journal), which depends on another special tool (systemd), both of which are already controversial. I like grepping my logs. I understand http://logcheck.org and similar tools are not working very well, but that's because there isn't a common format for logging, which makes parsing hard and application dependent. From what I understand, this is not something The Journal is trying to address either. To take an example from their document:

MESSAGE=User harald logged in
MESSAGE_ID=422bc3d271414bc8bc9570f222f24a9
_EXE=/lib/systemd/systemd-logind
[... 14 lines of more stuff snipped]

(Nevermind for a second the fact that to carry the same amount of information, syslog only needs one line (not 14), which makes things actually readable by humans.)

The actual important bit here is "User harald logged in". But the thing we want to know is: is that a good thing or a bad thing? If it was "User harald login failed", would it be flagged as such? It's not in the current objectives, it seems, to improve the system in that direction. I would rather see a common agreement on syntax and keywords to use, and respect for the syslog levels (e.g. EMERG, ALERT, ..., INFO, DEBUG), than reinventing the wheel like this.

Fourth, what happens when our happy cracker destroys those tools? This is a big problem for what they are actually trying to solve, especially since they do not intend to make the format standard, according to the design document (published on you-know-who, unfortunately). So you could end up in a situation where you can't parse those logs because the machine that generated them is gone, and you would need to track down exactly which version of the software generated it. Good luck with that.

I'll pass. Again.

On the other hand, your Linux computer will probably be fucked if you turn it off in the middle of an important update.

Try: sudo dpkg-reconfigure -a

At least that's always worked for me when I need it to, should power fail, etc. Not to mention ext3/ext4 journaling seems much nicer than using NTFS and having to fallback to CHKDSK when such issues arise, (along with the occasional pre-emptive NTFS defrag).

Personally I find the overall cost of Windows as being too costly to use in my business.

man page for dpkg-reconfigure

Try one that has GNUSTEP on it. I have this one, but I do have the problem that I can only run it on CD - won't install as is (it's other drawback is that it defaults to zsh, and doesn't allow one to create user accounts). Best idea - start w/ Debian, and then install GNUSTEP on top of it. I'd have thought that GNUSTEP would be the default development environment for developers. Personally, I'd love a distro that offered me GNUSTEP and KDE as the 2 choices. With the latter, I'd get all the KDE apps, and w/ the former, I'd get an easy to navigate UI, and not have to go to the CLI often.

Link

There is a backport repository for current Iceweasel and Icedove versions: http://mozilla.debian.net/

I've found that the best way to manage Firefox updates on Linux now is using the Mozillateam stable release repo.

for Ubuntu:

https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/firefox-stable

for Debian:

http://mozilla.debian.net/

I've been using http://mozilla.debian.net/ it's nice when it works but left me with an unresolved xulrunner dependancy on one machine. so it's a bit brittle and unsupported, even though I was maybe in a time window where the maintainers were in vacation and didn't keep up.

Sure, If you are dead set on using just the supplied version in a desktop enviroment. This has been resolved with this method:

http://mozilla.debian.net/

add this to your sources.list:

deb http://mozilla.debian.net/ squeeze-backports iceweasel-release

and this will keep it updated to the latest released version.

I understand that a lot of people are upset with Mozilla doing fast releases upon the community but I am also scarred from the IE6 clusterfuck. Having a browser sit with swiss cheese holes for many, many years and the banged up band-aid jobs I have seen in corporate enviroments really makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a #2 pencil and take cyanide, It has been a bitch. I do not want to see this happen again.

What I do see taking place here is added features being incorporated under the hood of Mozilla. The GUI interface can be argued by all of us until the Sun expands in about 4.5 billion years and kills us all. For you pedantics out there, I know that we just might possibly be wiped by other things by then. ;)

Software will always be in-motion and it will always require the "adapt or die mentality". Enterprise's will always demand stability where as, us, normal comp geeks want features. This can all be resolved by following a standard(s) for the core browser, better API for the browser and for addons; which Mozilla does an ok job and let the rapid release schedule add it's features.Mozilla needs to add fine grain control to the browser for enterprise usage. I'm well aware of the enterprise Mozilla comment stated by one half cocked developer.

I have 10 different addons that has worked since 4.0 and I'm using 6.0 right now with no issues.

Sure, If you are dead set on using just the supplied version in a desktop enviroment. This has been resolved with this method:

http://mozilla.debian.net/

add this to your sources.list:

deb http://mozilla.debian.net/ squeeze-backports iceweasel-release

and this will keep it updated to the latest released version.

I understand that a lot of people are upset with Mozilla doing fast releases upon the community but I am also scarred from the IE6 clusterfuck. Having a browser sit with swiss cheese holes for many, many years and the banged up band-aid jobs I have seen in corporate enviroments really makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a #2 pencil and take cyanide, It has been a bitch. I do not want to see this happen again.

What I do see taking place here is added features being incorporated under the hood of Mozilla. The GUI interface can be argued by all of us until the Sun expands in about 4.5 billion years and kills us all. For you pedantics out there, I know that we just might possibly be wiped by other things by then. ;)

Software will always be in-motion and it will always require the "adapt or die mentality". Enterprise's will always demand stability where as, us, normal comp geeks want features. This can all be resolved by following a standard(s) for the core browser, better API for the browser and for addons; which Mozilla does an ok job and let the rapid release schedule add it's features.Mozilla needs to add fine grain control to the browser for enterprise usage. I'm well aware of the enterprise Mozilla comment stated by one half cocked developer.

I have 10 different addons that has worked since 4.0 and I'm using 6.0 right now with no issues.

I happily use Iceweasel 5.0 for Debian Squeeze: http://mozilla.debian.net/

• * The Free Shapado package behind http://ask.debian.net/ (and their other sites)
• * The OSQA package behind http://lockergnome.net/ and others

I don't know if you're morally opposed to backports, but I've had great luck with: mozilla.debian.net. I just install google chrome straight from the tap, though.

deb http://mozilla.debian.net/ squeeze-backports
# apt-get install -t squeeze-backports iceweasel

Iceweasel 4 on Squeeze/Wheezy is fun. Fuck your newfangled installer.

Derivative distros should adapt themselves to Debian, not the other way around.

See for example the whole Launchpad auto builder infrastructure, great for building stuff for Ubuntu, but wanna build something for another Debian based distro or even Debian itself? Tough luck, that stuff is Ubuntu only.

Maintainers can upload their source packages to Debian Mentors and get them into Debian, which will then be pulled by the other distros.
If the maintainer chooses to go through Ubuntu's incompatible platform, what are the Debian developers supposed to do?

Sun had good reasons for reasons for going with the CDDL, and Oracle has equally good reasons for sticking with it.

Yes, keeping Linux out on purpose:

In the words of Danese Cooper, who is no longer with Sun, one of the reasons for basing the CDDL on the Mozilla license was that the Mozilla license is GPL-incompatible. Cooper stated, at the 6th annual Debian conference, that the engineers who had written the Solaris kernel requested that the license of OpenSolaris be GPL-incompatible. "Mozilla was selected partially because it is GPL incompatible. That was part of the design when they released OpenSolaris. [...] the engineers who wrote Solaris [...] had some biases about how it should be released, and you have to respect that"

http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/debconf6/theora-small/2006-05-14/tower/OpenSolaris_Java_and_Debian-Simon_Phipps__Alvaro_Lopez_Ortega.ogg

the fact that nobody bothers doing this

http://zfsonlinux.org/

On the other hand, if you're hellbent on Linux and not too invested in the kernel

That makes no sense. Linux _is_ the kernel. Do you mean GNU?

Debian CUT == Constantly Usable Testing.

A recently started project in Debian with a similar goal of a rolling release (along with an idea of installable snapshots).

http://cut.debian.net/
http://lwn.net/Articles/406301/

otoh screenshots are relatively easy to come by (hitting Wiki is often enough); then there's also one thing which gives pretty good idea, for the curious.

Not only has it NOT been a problem for years...device drivers in Linux...there are literally more device drivers for linux than ANY operating system in the history of computers.

The problems with proprietary hardware are easy to avoid...don't purchase proprietary hardware, ever.

Two great sources for PC hardware that will run anything are ZaReason and System 76. Avoid any company that is stupid enough to pay a Microsoft Tax (can you say LinPro as they use hardware that is rigged to only work with Microsoft Windows and break under Linux.) as they are using hardware that will not work readily with all Linux distros.

You can even install Windows on them if you want, but all the hardware is configured knowing from day 1 that it will run under Linux. If the hardware will not run under Linux, it is not used...problem solved.

To add an additional layer of security, learn about hardware, and for any company that ships hardware that will not work with Linux and refuse to immediately fix it or provide information so others can fix it...do not buy any hardware or software from them for a minimum of 7 years since the last "Linux-Show-Stopper" event. If we all did that, no company would dare release BS hardware that does not work with Linux on day 1, as they would lose your business for 7 years, with the clock getting restarted at each new occurrence.

Thus their words NO LONGER MATTER, only their actions! If after 7 years of good behavior, once again add them to your list of bonafide companies to do business with. For definition of bonafide, see O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000)

This is slightly off topic, but there's a certain form of irony here.

Licensing issues is the reason that Linux has no ZFS support.

True. But what's the reason for that?

In the words of Danese Cooper, who is no longer with Sun, one of the reasons for basing the CDDL on the Mozilla license was that the Mozilla license is GPL-incompatible. Cooper stated, at the 6th annual Debian conference, that the engineers who had written the Solaris kernel requested that the license of OpenSolaris be GPL-incompatible. "Mozilla was selected partially because it is GPL incompatible. That was part of the design when they released OpenSolaris. [...] the engineers who wrote Solaris [...] had some biases about how it should be released, and you have to respect that".

Quoted from wikipedia, original source for the quote.

IMO it's most likely that there was an explicit intention of being Linux incompatible as well (meaning, not just because it happens to be GPL licensed). After all, why would Sun give such a gift to its greatest competitor? I think that it doesn't really matter what Linux was licensed under, the license for ZFS would be guaranteed to be incompatible with it anyway.

No, seriously, you are forbidden by the license to re-license GPL code under non-GPL licenses, even if they are stricter... see sections 1, 2, 6, and 10 of the GPLv2.

That's kind of the point of it, yes. I'm not sure what you mean by "stricter" here though. Additional restrictions, like for instance non-commercial usage only would bring it closer to a proprietary license, which is entirely against the intent of it. If you mean things like the AGPL, it would be very difficult to figure out which additional restrictions would be allowable due to favouring what the GPL tries to accomplish, and which wouldn't due to going counter to it, and write some sort of rule that would allow the former but not the later.

The ZFS issues? The term for this is "hoist by your own petard."

Nope. The term for this is "hoist by Sun's very intentional decision to make it be that way".

After all, if Sun were all about complete freedom they would have went with a BSD license. It would have been very easy and they wouldn't have needed to spend time on making yet another license. There must be a reason why that wasn't suitable.

http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2010/debconf10/low/1252_How_We_Can_Be_the_Silver_Lining_of_the_Cloud.ogv

It's at 3.0.6, and in stable (lenny).

http://packages.debian.net/lenny/iceweasel

HTH

Useful info? That digitizor website included a useless "trivia" list to make the article seem bigger. Seem. Fine, if there has to be a news-post, link to the official debian.net post: http://news.debian.net/2010/08/16/happy-birthday-debian-2/

Also http://thank.debian.net/read_thanks

If you want to say thanks:

http://thank.debian.net/

Is there -any- possible reason for this ./ article to link to http://digitizor.com/2010/08/16/happy-17th-birthday-debian-and-some-interesting-history/ instead of linking to the _official_ birthday page: http://thank.debian.net/ Also, like kwebbles mentioned, it's really sad you sad to bring up Ubuntu. It's Debian's birthday, you insensitive clods.

Must have been quite a while ago then. I don't remember kde 4.0 ever being in unstable, the debian kde devs maintained a separate repository with the kde 4 packages before they got added to unstable:

http://qt-kde.debian.net/

With the help of http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1743318&cid=33152326 and the anti-Slashdot-parser version of the relevant part of my .vimrc you can find at http://paste.debian.net/82317/ the above example would look like:

>---printf("testing 1 2 3 %d %s",$
>--- var1, var2);---$

Note that I added three trailing whitespaces just to show how easily _that_ particular suckage can be avoided with the help of a proper setup.

Gah... Slashdot eats "HTML tags", i.e. the left angle bracket after "precedes:" and the left angle bracket F2 right angle bracket is removed.

This being Slashdot, you are neither warned about this fact nor are you sent into preview mode automagically.

The full, non-Slashdot-garbled, code can be found at http://paste.debian.net/82317/

> People who indent with tabs should be shot. Indent with spaces all you want and I can view it the way IT WAS WRITTEN.

People like you are part of the problem. Use tools properly, don't complain about them when used wrongly.

Use tabs for _indentation_ and spaces for _formatting_.

If you use Vim, you want

set copyindent
set list
set listchars=eol:$,trail:-,tab:>-,extends:>,precedes:
map :set invlist
ounmap
imap :set invlista

Unfortunately, I can't paste the UTF-8 listchars version on Slashdot. See http://paste.debian.net/82316/ for that part. Ironically, pasting said code converted the tabs to spaces.

Except nspluginwrapper doesn't seem to handle flash 10.1 very well. For example, don't right click on the flash test at http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/ Sadly nspluginwrapper's web site and subversion repository have fallen off the net.

solution is to use latest firefox 3.6.4;explained heayah: http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=53036

In the words of Danese Cooper, who is no longer with Sun, one of the reasons for basing the CDDL on the Mozilla license was that the Mozilla license is GPL-incompatible. Cooper stated, at the 6th annual Debian conference, that the engineers who had written the Solaris kernel requested that the license of OpenSolaris be GPL-incompatible. "Mozilla was selected partially because it is GPL incompatible. That was part of the design when they released OpenSolaris. [...] the engineers who wrote Solaris [...] had some biases about how it should be released, and you have to respect that"

http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/debconf6/theora-small/2006-05-14/tower/OpenSolaris_Java_and_Debian-Simon_Phipps__Alvaro_Lopez_Ortega.ogg

Gnustep is a Fosdem yoyo. Each year they meet at Fosdem, then some development takes place.

http://etoileos.com/
http://io.debian.net/~tar/gnustep/

GNUStep needs a decent theme.

They should simply fork it as a MAC X Emulator and set the objective to get all MAC applications running. That would inspire developers.

Or you could try a Debian testing/unstable mix, so you get most packages from the somewhat more stable testing, but have the ability to install newer packages from unstable whenever you feel you need to. I'm using it right now, and it seems to work well.

Yes, I know I can use the backport, but forget it, last time I messed with KDE 4 (on Kubuntu) I found it was still lacking in a lot of really cool utilities KDE 3.x had and I'm just to lazy to recompile all the 3.x versions onto 4 myself. I guess I really have lost some drive as I've gotten older, I'll let someone else do it for me, and when they do I'll use it, and until the 3.5x is good enough.

BTW - kaudiocreator was near the top of that list, that was a stupid easy and useful program. Yes, I can do it other ways, and did for a while, but I kind of liked that one. Oddly, the change in interface was fine, I liked it, KDE4.x and I can get along fine, as soon as the utilities catch up.

Yeah. Super users my ass, more like free support drones. Now, on the other hand, if we were talking Free Software...

Say http://forums.debian.net/

I'm using Lenny right now (though Gnome), and I see both 3.5 and 4 available in Synaptic.

We shouldn't forget the Debian Live project which has live CDs for Gnome, KDE, XFCE, and LXDE.

almost as good:
ed

Great idea, but it needs some guidelines.

Yeah, guidelines like these would be great.

I've been a Lenny user for at least 6 months and performed a number of server and desktop installs with some versions of the new installer.

The most important part of the installer that has changed for the better is you can easily start the installation by selecting from gui and text options from a menu. The Etch installer you had to type something to start the installer.

The Lenny installer runs circles around the Ubuntu installer. Among other cool details you can configure LVM, or software raids prior to the disk formatting and installation.

I got KDE4 packages from http://kde4.debian.net/ Absolutely the best way to go for kde4.

If that was true, nobody would be running Linux, because to a first approximation zero percent of all PCs come with Linux installed.

The amount of users that run non-Windows operating systems tend to be insignificant statistics wise. The decision making used by the small amount of users in this area does not represent the majority of users at all.

For long enough for it to matter, falling further and further behind the Linux "we don't maintain a stable API, sometimes we break it deliberately" kernel?

I recall a German linux distribution called Roboter that did this (went dead about three years ago) and another one, which was a Polish made distribution called Sciana.

Dude, I've been looking for a NeXT-style linux distro for 15 years. I've got the original GNUstep CD, the one that was just source code and libraries, right here... from 1996. It never evolved into a distro.

It did, it's just such a horrible thing to install, http://io.debian.net/~tar/gnustep/install.txt

You're saying you've seen one that doesn't just look like NeXT. One that works like NeXT. One that REALLY works that way?

Oolite-Linux (made for the Elite recreation called oolite).

How about a video?

Wow, though, with ubuntu's fast release cycle that means they are supplying security/bugfix patches for over a dozen versions simultaneously?

If you count the variations, yes. Currently supported Ubuntu versions, not counting K/X/Edu/whatever-buntu:
6.06 LTS / desktop to June 2009
6.06 LTS / server to June 2011
7.10 to April 2009
8.04 LTS / desktop to April 2011
8.04 LTS / server to April 2013
8.10 to April 2010

uhm, what makes you think that debian testing has no support?

My apologies, it seems Debian has improved this since I jumped ship as there's now a Debian testing security team. When I last used it only stable had specific security fixes, getting a security fix into testing had to go through the unstable process and as packages could be stuck from entering testing so would the security fixes.

For production quality operating systems there is *nothing* better than release when ready. Given the sheer number of packages and diversity of platforms, all the Debian volunteers do a great job.

It remains the corner-case user who needs the latest and greatest release of any given package.

As an fyi, I've been running Lenny for at least 6 months as a clean-install desktop with no issues. Upgrading from stable to Lenny had issues for me. I've got two servers running Lenny without show-stopper bugs right now.

Lenny's got a really nice KDE4 in an unofficial repo at deb http://kde4.debian.net/ . I encourage users to check it out. Don't enter bugs against these packages in Debian though.

they have no forum that I know of

Debian Forums

The Debian forums are full of people who have no qualms about saying "Go troll somewhere else!" Even given that negative, I still prefer the Debian forums to the Ubuntu ones because I can't handle the kind of user who posts an error message which contains instructions on what to do, then asks what to do.

There's now a security repository for testing, just like there is for stable, and the repos are in a default sources.list if you install testing directly. http://secure-testing-master.debian.net/