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12.1 Termination. This License and the rights granted hereunder will terminate:

...

(c) automatically without notice from Apple if You, at any time during the term of this License, commence an action for patent infringement against Apple; provided that Apple did not first commence an action for patent infringement against You in that instance.

It seems I slightly mislead you - only patent-related lawsuits void the license. Here's a deconstruction of APSL-2.

Yes, that's a valid point. But, unless you have any local users, you're limited to just a few packages. It's a bit burdensome, but the @#$%^&* ISDN crap would take too many backports. I phased it out from all but one box so in theory I can downgrade to Woody, but, with the freeze promised in <10 days (yeah, sure) I'll just keep watching the security lists myself.

And security issues... :)

From the article:
"All I'm asking for is that all the clueless people stop talking about the cooperation between Safari/Konqueror developers and how great it is. There's absolutely nothing great about it. In fact "it" doesn't exist.'"

Apple is just another Mirosoft, only with a tiny market share. If I had to choose between Apple and Mirosoft, I'd pick Linux any day.

I'm not sure if I'm annoying my cow orkers, but if so, the pumpkin pie I brought in today went a long way to make up for it. Several have adopted Firefox or Mozilla at home and at work, so maybe I've done a little bit of good.

Not-from-scratch installation

There is no stable release (but it is still under rapid development). So, this would really be for your experimentation only. But you can run X & a few other apps.

"...and they run on more hardware than enybody else."

Believe it or not, it's the truth. See, for instance, the list of hardware donors, official mirror hosts, and partners (companies that have given significant resources to the project). I also know that the conferences have been sponsored by Lindows (excuse me, Linspire), and several prominent developers work for HP, Progeny, and Ubuntu.

Daniel

Believe it or not, it's the truth. See, for instance, the list of hardware donors, official mirror hosts, and partners (companies that have given significant resources to the project). I also know that the conferences have been sponsored by Lindows (excuse me, Linspire), and several prominent developers work for HP, Progeny, and Ubuntu.

Daniel

Believe it or not, it's the truth. See, for instance, the list of hardware donors, official mirror hosts, and partners (companies that have given significant resources to the project). I also know that the conferences have been sponsored by Lindows (excuse me, Linspire), and several prominent developers work for HP, Progeny, and Ubuntu.

Daniel

> STABLE in the Debian sense doesn't mean "it won't crash".. it means the package dependencies
> are stable; that you won't find missing packages. and that's ALL it means.

Actually, that's what testing means. Stable means they'll never bump to a new version if it
breaks backwards-compatibility.

http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/reference/ch-sys tem.en.html#s-dists

Sigh

Will you people ever learn?

Stable means that the release doesn't change around under your feet without warning. Stable recieves security fixes only. You can install Stable, and it will work for years and years. It is a stable platform that you can use to develop software, deploy accross a network, etc.

Unstable means that the packages *do* change around constantly. Unstable is where the Debian Developers upload packages that should be ready for a release. It is in a constant state of flux.

Testing is the next release of Debian. If a package has existed in Unstable for ten days, and no one has filed a release critical bug against it, it is moved into Testing.

The current codename for Testing is Sarge. Once the security and testing-proposed-updates autobuilders are brought online, and the RC bug count (see http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/) hits zero (either through bug fixes or package removals), Sarge will be declared Stable, Testing will be renamed Etch and everyone will breathe a huge sigh of relief.

Stable is just that, stable. If you don't get that then you're missing the point.

With stable you get patches and bug fixes, but not different versions with their changed funtionality and unkowns. That's what you want in a production environment, stablility, whether it's a server somewhere or on your desktop. And Debian delivers that.

If you want new things, then there are probably specific things that you have in mind, not usually a general desire to change everything randomly.

If you want, it's possible to maintain a mixed system, so that you have the new packages you want without otherwise messing with your production environment.

There you go, your done, the waitings over..

Don't you fell better now ? .. Seriously, what's the deal with this Sarge release hysteria ? It's out there, I use it, it works, it seems pretty stable to me (in my case more than Ubuntu warty was)

The two relevent pages I can find at debian.org are this one listing companies that have donated hardware, bandwidth, etc., and this page saying that they recommend giving to Software in the Public Interest and the Free Software Foundation

The two relevent pages I can find at debian.org are this one listing companies that have donated hardware, bandwidth, etc., and this page saying that they recommend giving to Software in the Public Interest and the Free Software Foundation

The two relevent pages I can find at debian.org are this one listing companies that have donated hardware, bandwidth, etc., and this page saying that they recommend giving to Software in the Public Interest and the Free Software Foundation

takes the features of C++, and reengineers them so that one has the power and efficiency of C++, but with fast compilation, true modules, automatic memory management, cleaned up syntax, etc. http://www.digitalmars.com/d/

For performance of D, see http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/great/benchmark. php?test=all&lang=all&sort=fullcpu

Just to be extremely clear I'll add the package url:

http://packages.debian.org/experimental/devel/gcc- 4.0 //fatal

Just FYI: these problems are mostly solved. An official(!) Debian package is underway.

and put into your foes list. This post is copied from other posts

The ones that don't still use the LSB and FSH (File System Hierarchy) test suites, like Debian does.

So, exactly what distributions are we complaining about? Seems like the LSB and the FSH standard are seeing pretty widespread adoption to me!

Do you know what these license violations were? The links to the packages are all broken, presumably because the packages have been removed.

Yes, the reasons are listed here at the very bottom: http://people.debian.org/~joey/3.0r5/

• eemu, eemu-client - Bug#258921: License violation. Debian is not permitted to apply changes other than for paths and directories.
• gg-gnome, gg-gtk, gg - Bug#257620: Package can not be used anymore due to protocol changes.
• gstar - Bug#252885: GPL licensed with non-free component, hence not distributable
• xzx - Bug#240941: This package cannot legally distributed with its current license that forbids any modifications.

Yes. Scroll to the bottom of this page and read under the heading "Removed Packages".

Apple is Microsoft with tiny market share.

If I had to choose between Apple and Microsoft, I'd pick Linux any day.

Linux is just a kernel and we can get another one. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD for example.

No one has bothered to put together a BSD/linux yet. It might be because BSD sucks, I don't know; I don't know anything about BSD. But it can be done if anyone was interested.

The Hurd is not maturing nicely. All it can do at the moment is print out an exclamation mark with the banner program. With the decision to use a different microkernel they set development back by years. For the curious there is a Hurd live cd that does very little.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for Debian.
Especially in germany are a lot of organizations which were dissatisfied with SUSE services and switched to Debian.
According to Noèl Köthe's employer credativ, a company with strong Debian background, has made a SUSE to Debian migration for 30-40 organizations in 2004.

Apple laptops are effectively unusable for unix users.

I am a long-time Unix user. That means I need to have the Ctrl key to the left of the A key. This is a genuine need, not merely a want; it is based upon ergonomics. The Ctrl key is heavily used in unix, and it must be easily accessable. It cannot be off in the lower left corner of the keyboard where it is difficult to get at, and where it distorts the position of your left hand such that you can't easily type other keys while holding the Ctrl key down.

Apple desktop keyboards are now all USB. They are all OK. The CapsLock key can be re-mapped into a Ctrl key.

Unfortunately, even in this modern age, all Apple laptops have built-in ADB keyboards. The ADB keyboard is broken-by-design. It is, in general, not possible to remap the CapsLock key into a Ctrl key.

There are some exceptions, but they are horrible kludges. They are horrible kludges because the original design of the ADB keyboard was a horrible kludge. The correct solution would be for Apple to re-design their laptop motherboards to use built-in USB keyboards. This hasn't happened yet. If you run Linux, use Debian's solution. For Mac OS X users, uControl works. There are no solutions (that I know of) for either NetBSD or OpenBSD. Please note once again that the "solutions" above are in fact kludges, because of the original bad design of the ADB keyboard.

Apple provides a technical note on how to remap the keyboard, but provides no solution to the hardware problems caused by the design of the ADB keyboard. This tech note helps foreign language users, but does nothing for the CapsLock/Ctrl problem.

Apple is (currently) ignoring Unix users! This is not merely speculation on my part. In an on-going email exchange I am having with an Apple employee (whom I won't name) in their marketing department, the Apple marketing person directly stated to me that Apple was catering to their historic Mac customers, and is purposely ignoring the Unix market. He also claimed that Apple would soon start paying more attention to the Unix market. I won't hold my breath. Apple has been ignoring Unix users for more than 15 years. I expect that trend to continue. (Also note that my Apple contact indicated that Macs would never ship with a 3-button mouse, even though Apple intended to port almost all X-window software and deliver it either on a CD/DVD or installed directly on each Mac's hard drive. How Unix friendly is a 1-button mouse with X programs that often require 3 buttons?)

Apple has now lost three opportunities to sell me hardware. I really wanted an Apple laptop for their superior battery life, and for the PowerPC with Altivec CPU. (The Altivec is vastly superior to the x86 line for DSP.) Because I can't live with the broken-by-design built-in ADB keyboard in all Apple laptops, Sony and IBM sold me laptops instead. If Apple fixes this problem, they will sell me a PowerBook next year; if they don't, I'll still be running OpenBSD on x86 hardware, and wishing I could use a Mac.

Please note that this is not a troll. I am not trying to anger Mac enthusiasts. Indeed, I am one

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The thread that discussed the APSL version 2.0 is here

Unfortunatly, there isn't a particularly good sumary of the problems with that license in the thread, if for no other reason than the thread goes on for a few hundred messages. The reason why I posted only the message from the bug is because Steve had actually sumarized the issues relatively well. As far as whether or not the license fails the DFSG, the debian-legal list never officially closes a question even when a summary is made. If new information is brought forward, anyone can revist an old question.

If you're still having a hard time understanding what actually occurred in this case, feel free to e-mail me, as holding a discussion in a weeks old slashdot thread is kind of annoying.

A couple of weeks ago I managed to fry my highend NVidia GPU (don't ask how). At the local 'puter store they only had a bunch of ATI's available at that moment and since it's not easy to use the machine without a GPU I had to settle for one.

I have to say, I've heard nothing but bad things about ATI cards under Linux as they're drivers are proprietary and rumored to be quite poor. Let me tell you, my X800 is working like a charm! It took me about 10 minutes to download the RPM from ATI.com, run it through alien and then install. It Just Worked.

Also the TV-out is awesomely overscanned form the get-go as opposed to the NVidias I have been using.

Sorry for the offtopic, but I am rather chocked that ATI has such a bad rep among you Slashdotters. Proprietary or not, the drivers works flawlessly for me.

(No I am not an ATI employee)

First, you have to carefully define exactly which software is part of the operating system. Windows includes almost no software out of the box, so security problems in widely-used Windows programs aren't considered to be OS vulnerabilities. On the other hand, Linux distributions tend to install lots and lots of extra software in addition to the base OS, and a vulnerability in any one of these extra packages is reported as a vulnerability in the distribution. For example, Debian had 11 security advisories for March 2005 (see http://www.debian.org/security/2005/), but none of them (with the possible exception of netkit-telnet and netkit-telnet-ssl) can really be considered problems with the OS. So you can't just compare the number of reported security problems in each OS, because the two numbers have vastly different scope.

I was just saying

You called my questions "stupid" and "trivial".

that the answer is available on google (albeit not in the first link, you have to dig a bit)

Once again, did you actually check your own answer to see if it worked well? A needle in a haystack is not a good answer.

I'm looking for a definitive answer from the Debian leadership-- all I could find ws some email posts from people who, until this morning, were complete strangers. Should I trust "Joe Schmoe" when he says x.org will be included after the Sarge release?

also in the Debian faq as someone pointed out.

Unfortunately, the answer is NOT in the Debian FAQ. It should be.

There is an answer in this other FAQ at 'deadbeast.net'. Until Brandan (and others) responded to my post, I had no idea what Deadbeast.net was, who Brandan was, or why I should trust either source.

Branden, thank you for listening. I know you are very busy, and really appreciate that you took the time to read my comments. Congratulations on the election.

I wish the best for the Debian community. My comments may be blunt, but I feel they are honest and reflect the opinions of many users.

While I understand why x.org won't be included in the testing/sarge or stable releases, I don't understand why x.org has not yet made it into unstable/sid. Is this caused by a lack of time & labor?

I've read a number of journals and articles on this subject, and people seem to be saying that x.org will be included into one of the branches after Sarge has become the stable release.

It seems like X.org could be included into the Sid/Unstable branch without affecting the stability of the Sarge/Testing branch. If x.org is not released into Unstable now, this will slow the adoption of x.org in the future.

I've heard rumors that this release policy will be changed after Sarge is released. Is this true?

There are a lot of different sites around depending on what you want:

• Debian help
• Debian Planet note not Debian Planet (Unfortunate naming collision there ..)
• Debian Forums - German
• Debian Administration

More can be found with your favourite search engine - disclaimer I run the last one on the list.

If you are bandwidth challenged (as I was until recently) then you have a number of options.

• Go with a distro that lets you do a netinstall and only download what you need.
• Go with a smaller distro. This is linux. You have the choice. Choose a distro that comes with everything. Choose a distro that fits on one CDROM. Choose!
• Work with the Fedora team to produce a netinstall version of Fedora (or pay someone else to do it for you.
• Get a friend with a faster internet connection to download it for you
• Pay somebody or another somebody to download it for you
• Buy a magazine that has a cover disc with the distro on it.

Disclaimer: Some options may be overly expensive or impractical due to your geographical location. Don't winge. Pick a different option.

A quick Google search does not show any Definate answers.

But yeah, things like this should be in the FAQ or perhaps the Wiki.

Thanks for the informative post. That clears things up.

I think I have found that page in the past, but back then I was just searching for some help with X.

Now here's my concern: I have no idea who Deadbeast is (There isn't a top level page -- which is wierd), how do I know it's not just wishful thinking?

If there was some link on debian.org's FAQ to the Deadbeast FAQ, then I would be less confused.

Although, I see Branden's page has alot of these links.

Wow, what an asshole.

That's exactly what I was talking about. I ask a question, and you bite my head off. If this is such a trivial question, then why isn't there a simple solution?

Perhaps you should try some of your solutions yourself, instead of blindly assuming they work well. A quick Google search does not show any Definate answers. There is no obvious, definitive answer on debian.org.

I see some mailinglist posts made by people who I don't know. I also see a bunch of sites which have no obvious authority in the Debian project. Where's the offical word from the Debian leaders? Why should I trust what some stranger says on the mailinglist?

This is why people keep asking.

If the Debian devs want people to stop asking this frequently asked question, perhaps they should drop the elitist additide and put it in the Debian FAQ-- that's why we have a FAQ.

You've obviously never attempted an upgrade from one version of SuSE to the next, the upgrade failing and being forced to do a complete reinstall? Or you think that waiting days for a Gentoo system to compile is acceptable? If one is an uber-1337 L1|\|ux hax0r, then why would one need to "buy support"? Does Redhat support 11 architectures?

BT is not very good (ie. kind of useless) for most of the packages in Debian. Most packages are less than 500kB. Very few run more than a few megs.

If you want to use BT to download Sarge (hopefully before Woody turns 3 years old), you'll be able to get them here,

http://www.debian.org/CD/torrent-cd/

Debian will also release on DVDs (I think it will have 1x and 2x density disks) so you don't have to download so many images.

After Sarge releases and the torrent gets on slashdot, that is when BT is best. BT for `apt-get upgrade`, well, not so great.

PS. For apt-get, use your local mirror http://www.debian.org/mirrors/. Please, all of you should not be using the main http.us.debian.org mirrors :) Most secondary mirrors are just an hour or two behind primaries. Many are listed as secondaries just because they only host a limited architecture set (eg. only i386 and powerpc).

BT is not very good (ie. kind of useless) for most of the packages in Debian. Most packages are less than 500kB. Very few run more than a few megs.

If you want to use BT to download Sarge (hopefully before Woody turns 3 years old), you'll be able to get them here,

http://www.debian.org/CD/torrent-cd/

Debian will also release on DVDs (I think it will have 1x and 2x density disks) so you don't have to download so many images.

After Sarge releases and the torrent gets on slashdot, that is when BT is best. BT for `apt-get upgrade`, well, not so great.

PS. For apt-get, use your local mirror http://www.debian.org/mirrors/. Please, all of you should not be using the main http.us.debian.org mirrors :) Most secondary mirrors are just an hour or two behind primaries. Many are listed as secondaries just because they only host a limited architecture set (eg. only i386 and powerpc).

1. Debian is not a company.
2. Debian has changed its release architectures after Sarge so that Etch is not slowed down by unknown, exotic and/or obsolete architectures.
3. Sarge is not ready NOW because of the large number of architectures. ARM has only 2 auto-builders now and hasn't even compiled the release of glibc that has to go into Sarge. After it finishes compiling, the archive will be frozen.

Everyone can start their own little distributions here and there, usually leaching off of distributions like Debian. They find a limited niche market and people start talking about "Debian dying". Well, I think we had that discussion before Woody as well.

Debian has a very large number of packeges available for it. As of right now, Sid has over 16600 packages. Distributions like Ubuntu do not maintain these packages. They are just managing the core (base) and a few other packages.

Anyway, release cycles every 3 or 6 months are not necessarly good. People using Debian want stability. Why do people on slashdot bitch about MS dropping support for NT or 98, yet they complain that Debian stable is 3 years old! Huh?

Woody ships with a 2.4.18 kernel. This kernel does not support SATA. Woody does not support 2.6.x kernels with module support out of the box. But you can install kernel 2.6 on woody. You can run woody on a SATA only system (can't install it from CDs though). Can you install NT4 or Windows 98 or Windows 2000 or even XP out of the box on a SATA only system? My latest, greatest XP installation does NOT detect my SATA chipset. I mean, WTF?

Anyway, as soon as Sarge ships, people will start trolling that it does not support PCE-48X or their modem or something.

People wanting RHEL software stability without the pricetag and still want to have security support would be using Woody for the last 3 years. I am using Woody on a number of machines. I don't have to worry about upgrades with unexpected bugs. I don't have to worry about sudden ABI changes or compiler changes or kernel changes or GUI changes or coputeguration changes or ... Many users prefer to use older software as opposed to constantly trying to re-learn some user interface just because someone thinks they need latest-greatest every 3-6 months.

So, why again is Slashdot population (I guess you can it that) complaining about Woody being stable less than 3 years, yet when it comes to MS, well, they release NT when? I think it came with IE 2!! And now that they drop support, people complain left and right about the need to upgrade..

Why are people here so hypocritical? You can run Sid with latest, greatest if you want. You can get latest Sarge installer here: http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/ There are many people that will be running Woody months *after* Sarge gets released.

</rant>

KDE 3.4 isn't being uploaded to unstable (sid) as it would complicate preparations for the upcoming (yes, still) Sarge release. However, (experirmental) KDE 3.4 packages are available by adding the following repository to your sources.list

deb http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/kde-3.4.0/ ./

These debs are built by the usual Debian KDE packaging team, and have (for me) worked out fine. See also the Debian KDE maintainers' page on installing KDE 3.4

That said, those who want to try out a Live CD with KDE 3.4 might want to take a look at the recent Kubuntu 5.04 (hoary) release.