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For the Debian users, it's easy: http://debianplanet.org/?from=405

It just prevents evil corporate bastard or pakistani virus spreader from calling his CD of spyware, viruses and trojans "Debian".

It's way too late for this. It's been discussed half-heartedly for ages. I guess at one point they managed to get Trusted Debian to change their name, but then Bruce Perens immediately backpedaled with his "fair to all businesses" policy.

If Debian thinks they can take the route that Mozilla has, in trying to prevent others from releasing improved/modified versions of their software as "Debian", then they must be joking. In fact, ironically, Debian doesn't even abide by Mozilla's trademark policy. It's been suggested that it's not even possible for them to.

For Brandon, especially, to be pushing for this is completely ridiculous, since his employer does exactly what he's talking about preventing, by releasing Progeny Debian.

There's no "revising" needed. There is no trademark. Their original trademark "policy" along with whatever trademark they had has not been defended. It's been years since anybody even thought about it. And most who have tried, have come to the conclusion that no policy is better than any. It's too late.

Besides, everyone sees this for what it really is. Now that there is commercial value in Linux, and in Debian, everybody wants to have their hands in the pie. A few monied interests are working to make "Free" software a little less free, in the guise of "just protecting the community from abuse".

Well, I ask, what is this abuse exactly? Is it RedHat making a name for Linux? Is it IBM putting Linux in SuperBowl ads? Is it small groups like Trusted Debian taking what they thought was "Free" and improving it? Is it thousands of web hosters and developers using OSS to make a living, and guaranteeing that Free Software dominates at least one market instead of withering from non-use? Is it admins and small support companies working to put Linux and Debian on desktops against all odds? Are these the people who need to dot their "i's", cross their "t's", and watch their backs, lest some competitor gain control of the Linux trademarks and sue them into poverty?

When Bruce started his little group of people to support Debian, all hell broke loose. A third of the developers went with Bruce to carry on the tradition of separating business from OSS, a third jumped on board with Ubuntu, and the other third just sat around expecting money to fall into their laps.

Well, I have news for those developers: money isn't going to fall into your laps. Not from suing the people making money from Linux, not from extorting them, and not from threatening them with ridiculous license changes. If you want a job supporting Debian, developing OSS programs, or even selling Linux, they are out there. Go get one. Or, you can always do what thousands before you have done, make your own. Just don't sit in your house crying about "abuse", and expecting someone to bring money to your doorstep.

Oh, OK, you got me dead to rights! I'm pulling the whole thing out of my ass! That's why:

http://www.debianplanet.org/node.php?id=831 this unbiased review points out many of the same issues I had, and why:

http://eol.init1.nl/content/view/47/2/
this guy seemed to have an issue with it, and why: http://corelands.com/blog/?postid=4
this guy sees a problem, and why:

http://www.miketaylor.org.uk/tech/wxinmfpl/debian. html
This guy hits it on the head with why the whole apt system is screwed, and why:

http://www.debian.org/vote/2004/platforms/branden
this page of politics points to strife and
http://ianmurdock.com/?p=153
YOUR OWN FOUNDER EVEN SAYS THERE'S PROBLEMS COMPARED TO UBUNTU.

I especially like how you keep harping on reporting bugs through the proper channels. What, like you think I haven't tried? Then on that last link, Ian Murdock's weblog, I see: "One major difference between Debian and Ubuntu is that Debian users' imput is mostly ignored, whereas Ubuntu users are heard and respected." -quote, typos and all! So, tell me, "stevey", is that you deleting our input so that the PUBLIC NEVER SEES IT?

I'm hoping to God that this lying weasel I've been arguing with is somebody currently high up in the Debian chain of command. Because, to read Ian Murdock's weblog, this man [Ian] sounds like he originally founded a fantastic, kick-ass distro, which he then trusted to a pack of idiots who fouled it up, and he regrets it.

Until today, I thought somebody just must have been scarfing shrooms - how could a Linux Distro *possibly* be *this* *stinking* *bad*?!?!? But thank you, "stevey" for at last providing me with an explanation that approaches sense: Debian is deliberately being sabotaged from within. And it wouldn't surprise me a bit to find out that that sabotuer(s?) was paid by a commercial software company which views itself to be in competition. This isn't the only possible explanation, but by God it makes the most sense. And I was ready to let it go, before I met you. But I love a good mystery! So, yeah, I think I WILL dig deeper until I get to the bottom of this...lol...pile, whenever I get the free time.

People who really want to know every detail of what's going on when you stick Debian Sarge disk #1 in your machine and boot it can view all the complaints this guy claims I'm covering up, along with my aborted effort to write some kind of install guide for the home user (heck, I *did* get it installed, after all!), can find my report HERE:
http://aimlesslifehobbies.blogspot.com/

Debian Planet announces in their latest update that the sarge freeze is now official.

Hmmm...

amd64 will be supported by amd64 team, including Sarge. http://www.debianplanet.org/node.php?id=1223

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.

Seems that I confused Planet Debian for Debian Planet, and extrapolated from there. Apologies

I think it's just your particular crowd. Because nearly all online polls I've seen have GNOME and KDE combined having the majority of the market, with WindowMaker having something like 10% or so. I've seen this both on a OSNews and a DebianPlanet poll.

See the Debian Planet story back on the 16th. Which linked you to the announcement and also an interview.

http://www.debian.org/ports/
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/ports -status

Sarge in September?
http://debianplanet.org/node.php?id=1131

Hell, even Debian has it already. How slow can Microsoft be?

OTOH, here's an article from 4 years ago about Progeny. It looks like the vision was the same then, but they haven't gotten very far.

I've heard others elsewhere suggest that there should be a server distro and a desktop distro in Debian. I like the idea personally.

It was a thread on Debian Planet, and I disagree. It isn't a server vs. desktop problem. My parents want a stable desktop, I want the latest and greatest. My server needs to be stable, but it needs frequent updates when there are moving targets, typically SA and security tools. Well, I guess I'll just repost my post from the above thread...:

[...] There are many backports on my server, spamassassin, razor, chkrootkit and snort to mention a few, but also critical stuff like Exim 4, which I found I needed to combat all the MS viruses.

My own workstation runs testing now, and I find that testing is great for me now. My parent's Desktop, however, has actually less backports than my server: It's just KDE 3.0.5 and OpenOffice 1.0.2 there. They are experienced computer users, but they don't want to learn new things too often, so actually, the Debian release cycle is not bad at all for them. They'll get Sarge when it is released, but they'll probably follow the stable release cycle.

I think that in some environments, such as for example my old university department, where most people really need a stable system, not neat eye-candy, and the sysadmin has enough to do with supporting heavy number-crunching, the Debian release cycle is great too.

So, it is not a Desktop vs Server problem.

The thing is that you have to keep certain things uptodate, things that shoot against moving targets, such as spam and exploits, and those you need to release more often.

Additionally, we need something for those of us that want the latest and greatest (like I admittedly do on my desktop).

I feel that the componitized distro of Progeny is the way to go. The problem is that you would probably need to have several generations interoperating. For example, you want a base system that's rock solid, but occasionally, you need updates too, so you might need to support three generations of the base system.

Fast-moving stuff like SA and chkrootkit would need just a single generation, but it needs to work on many generations backward.

Things like KDE should also be supported with a few generations for those who want a stable desktop, in the case where you want the latest and greatest, it might require you do use a newer base system.

No, he confused nothing. Read this post for a little explanation on why it may not be such a good idea to use testing.

Article on Debian Planet.

If you want stuff up to date, but want to have something that would be considered "stable" by other distros, you run Sarge (or testing).

It didn't even garner a simple majority.

Even if the vote passed you still would have been able to install non-free software on your debian machine, you just wouldn't be able to install it from debian or a debian mirror. Kind of like the blackdown java packages right now.

if you try again in #debian you may get different results .. it depends on the time of the day and if everyone had a good lunch :) ...

Also

http://www.debianplanet.org/

Yeah, but Debian is no longer supporting nonfree software with their next (sarge) release. Doesn't that put XFree86 back on the Outs with Debian?

Sorry, but your first sentence is completely wrong. The amendment to remove support for non-free in Debian didn't even get a majority, let alone the 3:1 majority it would have required to win. See these links: Debian Planet, official Debian vote results.

It is true that no one on Debian's X Strike Force has intentions to package any of the XFree86 releases that the new license is applied to. But since Debian is an entirely volunteer project, conceivably a developer who really wanted to embark on this thankless task could do so, although the packages would probably have to go into non-free.

sigh, so much for moderating this discussion...

Hi. You've got two independent issues here.

First of all, your statement about nonfree in sarge isn't exactly correct. The developers recently held a vote about this and voted to reaffirm their support for the nonfree section of the archive.

Second, you are right that XFree86 is on the outs with Debian. At least, that's my understanding. Putting it in nonfree is something I never thought about, and I suppose it's possible (maybe if there's a DD here, he/she can say whether it is or isn't). But I'm not sure what the point would be; if all the GUI apps in main are built using the libraries from an X.Org release, what would you use an XFree86 in nonfree for?

Hopefully, a DD will step in and comment if I've missed something here.

I don't think the above is any sort of right answer, but I think it is as valid an indicator as counting the apparent OS of http servers by domain name. Both skew results horribly in certain directions, combine the two though and your starting to see a broader picture. Also I seem to have found an error in the table I posted here, not sure where it came from (somewhere in copy, paste/special and sort in ooo.org I suspect). The order is unaffected and the figures are relatively/comparitively similar (though the growths are generally a bit higher). I discovered it when I was making a posting on Debian Planet.

I had the same problems with the 2-year release cycle. I'm convinced this is due to the core OS being held back from release while every random application with a critical bug is stabilized (the tail wagging the dog), and the apps should be decoupled a bit. That is, something like how FreeBSD does it with a solid core, and the add-ons in ports which is a separate tree.

From the review linked above, Libranet looks like it would be the best option for my purposes (from a technical standpoint, anyway - it even has XFree86 4.3!). It's $64 for the "Home/Small Office" version.. It looks like there are some non-free components included, though.

don't forget make-kpkg!!!!!

I love debian mostly for the dpkg and related tools. I tried the latest red hat recently just for kicks and I really missed dpkg. I get great download speeds and it's easy to use.

For a really good debian resource check out http://www.debianplanet.org/

As mentioned in order comment Wichert Akkerman has setup a page explaining the current situation at http://www.wiggy.net/debian/

Notice that you will not find a note in the www.debian.org web server since until all the servers are being restored and are back online a public note (giving more details than the previous announcement) is being postponed. Also, the infraestructure used to build up the web site (english + all the translations) is part of the compromised servers.

OK, this might be redundant by now (there wasn't any replies when I started writing this), but I post it anyhow in case it has additional information:

Debian GNU/Linux always has at least three releases in active maintenance: "stable", "testing" and "unstable".

There is different ways of getting Debian. A new way of installing is prepared for Sarge, but works for other versions too I think.

/Spam .

Drupal has had a book module in the core distribution for atleast a year. In drupal terms, this allows you to author any node (blog entry, forum post, image , story etc.) and attach it in relation to the book. (based on taxonomy). Each of these pages has revision control and can optionally go into the submission queue. It is possible to set it up even more extensively ... whereby you can use the groups module to give certain users different rights depending on which topic they are editing etc.

Some Examples :

• Drupal Handbook.
• ENC 1101-B3 & B4: Writing for Discovery.

Drupal is an incredibly well thought out content management framework that aims to be as extensible as possible. I use drupal to run several of my personal sites , and have been using drupal for more than a year now. The deanspace campaign makes use of it, aswell as several large websites such as kerneltrap and debianplanet

I saw this posted on Debian Planet a few days ago and already downloaded a copy.

Unless you speak German, or are very familiar with the GNOME interface you're going to have a hard time using this. Booting with lang=en and setting your session type to en_US still won't switch the language to English. Now I have a nice coaster with "GNOPPIX 0.5" written with a Sharpie on it.

Too bad too. The only reason to get this over Knoppix or Lnx-BBC is for GNOME. Save your bandwidth for a few versions at least until the English support gets fixed. This is really a "too early to be slashdotted over" release, and they're going to lose a lot of potential users because of it's current condition.

It's also missing vital tools that all other live cds have, namely the ability to set up TCP/IP. The GNOME Network thingy didn't work, dhclient didn't work, there's no pump.

Gnoppix has potential to fill a nice little niche in the community, and when it's ready it'll be cool. But unless you're planning on helping out as a developer, wait on this one.

A year ago there was a lot of talk about Debian losing mindshare . Nowadays I see a Debian story on slashdot every month. Usually most of the posts are complaints about the installer or the age of the packages in tthe stable distribution, but at least I can feel assured that my favorite distribution will not be forgotten in a near future.

Not too long ago, I tried to install Gnome on a Debian Woody system via these instructions

The instructions you were trying to follow describe how to install an unofficial (i.e., not-supported-by-the-Debian-project) backport of Gnome 2.2 to woody and, in fact, the the page containing the instructions also contains feedback from a number of other users who attempted to follow them and ran into dependency problems.

Your criticism of the distro and the packaging system seems a bit unfair, since (1) it was clear going in that other users had been having problems with the packages and (2) the (unofficial) packages hadn't been subjected to Debian's usual quality-control process.

And that is one of the big weaknesses of Debian - you don't have that option of downloading a CD with a bunch of most often used packages. You have to go with either full network install, or buy all 7 CDs. I imagine that's a big deterrent to many people out there who may want to try out this great distribution otherwise. And by the way, if you want to know how much software can fit on one CD, look at the list packages in Knoppix 3.2. It's really amazing - it has practically everything any normal user would ever need on a Linux box. With a CD filled with .deb packages like that, no user will find himself downloading more than a handful of files by http apt-get. One good step in that direction I saw recently is Bonzai Linux - it's a 180M CD image of Debian-based distribution that has KDE 3.1.2 and some other usefull stuff - all in 180m iso image! And it is great at hardware autoconfiguration. However, Bonzai isn't Debian per se, whereas I would like to see similar effort for the official Debian...

Debian geeks may find Bytemark in the UK to be agreeable.
You get a full UML virtual machine to play with.

I'm not using them myself, still thinking about it.
I found them via this Debian Planet Article

> this puts GNOME's market share at ~ 43.5% and KDE's at ~ 29%.

Trying to deduct the desktop's market share from distribution share is ridiculous. If a distribution ships both why do you assume that the default is used? Btw, can you name a single only-Gnome included distribution? Compare that to the available only-KDE included distributions. You assume every Debian user prefers Gnome which according to this poll is not the case. You assume that RedHat is used as desktop system, but perhaps it's primary used for the 40% non-workstation system and has no desktop environment installed at all? You can't tell unless your statistic counts the desktop environments like the Gentoo user statistics where KDE leads.

• Machall - best..webcomic...ever (updates: "tues, thurs, sat" but more like when he gets around to it)
• Penny Arcade - a very popular, and very funny gaming comic (M W F)
• Megatokyo - a well drawn comic with a strong story mangaish (M W F)
• Ctrl-Alt-Del - cut and paste, but always funny (Daily)
• Something Positive - kinda cut and paste, but often very funny (daily)
• Real Life - cut and paste, but still a pretty funny gaming comic (mostly daily)
• Calvin and Hobbes - rereleasing C+H online, 10 years delayed...my personal fav (daily)
• Errant Story - a well drawn, story based modernish fantasy comic (updates every other day or so)
• Angst Technology - a game software firm and their antics (updates almost daily)

• (as if you need the link)Slashdot
• CBC News Canadian news from the CBC
• Debian Planet good debian news
• Footnotes GNOME news
• Ars Technica another tech site, often has interesting projects too...
• Anime News Network exactly what the name implies.
• Unconventional Conformity a blog.
• The Weather Network - for my local weather
• 
  
  And well, thats about it. That I check frequently at least. I do like webcomics and strongly suggest that you check out Machall Megatokyo and Errant Story if you don't already though! And then there's also everything2 but its not news and I can't check it daily (or else I would do nothing all day but read!) its too good at just drawing you in. And the anime turnpike to go browsing through Anime fansites...

First, my site to see if any new pictures have been posted http://pihlopase.mine.nu/albums
http://slashdot.org
http://art.gnome.org
http://themedepot.org
http://freshmeat.themes.net
http://debianplanet.org
http://gnome.org
http://google.com
Then I usually log into Blackboard at school to see if I have any new assignments or if any messages have been posted since I last checked. Then it's off to my numerous webmail accounts with netscape.com, cup of coffee, hop on the bus, go to class. Sneak a peak at Slashdot while the teacher is not looking. lather, rinse, repeat

Debian can indeed be very political. I still don't understand their problem with the GNOME/Bitstream font licensing agreement, for one.

It's quite sad, really, watching innovation dies within Debian to be replaced by excessive political correctness. Debian used to lead in packaging (apt+deb) but now apt has been ported to RPM (see Conectiva and FreshRPMS), Mandrake has uRPMi, and the Fink project has co-opted apt/deb for binary distribution but added their parallel build-from-source-with-dependency system.

I have packaged quite a few RPMs in the past, mostly due to the lack of compatible RPMs after RH8 came out - but the horrible mess that is debian build scripts put me off. There are even some alternative packaging scripts for Debian, surely a sign of problems, but they never really take off.

Here's my wishlist as an ex-Debian, soon-to-be Fink user (for the second time, my first OS X experience was held back by the lack of vector instructions in G3):
- Peace among developers
- Debian Desktop to succeed in making Debian more customer-friendly
- Faster release cycles (I thought their new testing system was meant to do that)
- Compile from source a'la Fink

Peace,

I'm waiting for it to have over 4000 packages tested and available.
If you're talking about Debian, then ITYM <pinky pointingto="mouth">10 000 packages</pinky>.

Besides that, the task selector in the last few versions of Debian has been very simple to use. Dselect is still there, but only necessary if you need to install specific individual packages.

Don't get me wrong, I really appreciate the work that the i386-only Debian derivatives do. They provide valuable services and products that benefits Debian and the Linux community in general. But let's give credit to the Debian folks where credit is due.

Having said all of that, work is progressing on a new Debian installer which should be in the next major version of Debian.

I get "The node you are looking for does no longer exist or is not accessible without the proper access rights." when trying to access http://debianplanet.org/node.php?id=774.

The are some problems, for some reason LSB specifies a standard package, ie RPM
I do not know why, I see no reason for it, but obvious this is a problem for Debian, which has its own (imo superior) package (debs).

This article from Debian planet, is about a sudo package you can install, which depends on all the LSB stuff (thus gets them installed, with some caveats)
As to RPM, Debian wont move from debs, but I believe they make a wrapper so that dpkg can understand them, see /usr/share/doc/lsb/README.Debian.gz

I will not install lsb, cause it wants lpr (BSD print deamon) and I already use CUPS (a SysV print deamon), as well as other stuff.

Based on Debian woody 3.0, Knoppix 3.1 has KDE 3.02, OpenOffice.org 1.0, Gimp 1.2 and kernel 2.4.

Gew?nscht=Unbekannt Installieren R Entfernen P S?ubern Halten
| Status Nicht Installiert Config U Entpackt Fehlgeschl. Konf. Halb install.
|/ Fehler? (keiner) Halten R Neuinst. notw X=beides (Status, Fehler: GRO? schlecht)
||/ Name Version Beschreibung
+++--
[...]

Mandrake puts out a beta, and it gets front-page coverage, but Debian Woody finally goes gold, and Rob isn't all over it? I know there was a Debian article last week and all, but I'd think that after almost 2 years this would be a significant cause for cheerleading and celebration!

You hear me! Use the beta version of the PGI ISO, the graphical user-friendly autohardware detecting installer for Woody. Check out the website here, and the ISOs are at the first link (only 100MB download for the entire ISO).

Debian truely is the one true Linux distro. Its non-commercial, and developed by an open free internet community. Not only that, but Debian is superior to every other Linux distro. It is stable, easy to maintain, and it runs on any useful piece of computer hardware - no matter what platform that hardware is. Support Debian by simply spending the time to install and use it for your main Linux installation.

Apt-get makes upgrades/installations much easier.

I love it. But I was curious to see Ian Jackson, dpkg developer, say in this interview that he didn't think apt was so hot. Clearly Ian has a better perspective than I do. Can someone explain Ian's perspective? I don't really understand his objections very well.

Yeah, I was just thinking that as I read this article. I thought, "Debian supports every practical platform and then some... whats the big news about some other Linux distro supporting a non x86 platform?"

For those that want to experiment with a auto-hardware detecting graphical user-friendly installer for Debian should try the new (this is a beta release!!! be careful) Progeny Graphical Installer ISO images. This installer is based on the now defunct Progeny Linux installer. Good Linux software doesn't drop dead, but instead gets reincarnated.

Remember, Debian is not commercial and is purely community based. Helping beta test this new installer on all sorts of various systems will help.

Debian from source

Also, see this story on Debianplanet...

Even less informative than /. for a change, but hey. http://www.debianplanet.org/article.php?sid=650

I second what everyone else is saying, that no other distro follows in number with the kernel version, and that the maintainers of the distro decide if the change is major/minor, etc.

However/also...

From About Debian:
"Debian systems currently use the Linux kernel. Linux is a completely free piece of software started by Linus Torvalds and supported by thousands of programmers worldwide. However, work is in progress to provide Debian for other kernels, primarily for the Hurd."

The Debian GNU/Linux which is what most people refer to when they speak of Debian, but the Linux part, the kernel, is theoretically seperable from the rest of the GNU system.

For example, work is in progress for Debian GNU/Hurd which uses the GNU Hurd microkernel. There was also some discussion a while ago about Debian GNU/Win32, which if I remember correctly ran under/through cygwin. If you look around, there are also projects to run Debian on BSD.

So while these projects aren't as mature as Debian GNU/Linux, the idea is eventually you can have an almost identical Debian system running on various systems/kernels. Therefore, they couldn't tie the release to the Linux kernel version.

I second what everyone else is saying, that no other distro follows in number with the kernel version, and that the maintainers of the distro decide if the change is major/minor, etc.

However/also...

From About Debian:
"Debian systems currently use the Linux kernel. Linux is a completely free piece of software started by Linus Torvalds and supported by thousands of programmers worldwide. However, work is in progress to provide Debian for other kernels, primarily for the Hurd."

The Debian GNU/Linux which is what most people refer to when they speak of Debian, but the Linux part, the kernel, is theoretically seperable from the rest of the GNU system.

For example, work is in progress for Debian GNU/Hurd which uses the GNU Hurd microkernel. There was also some discussion a while ago about Debian GNU/Win32, which if I remember correctly ran under/through cygwin. If you look around, there are also projects to run Debian on BSD.

So while these projects aren't as mature as Debian GNU/Linux, the idea is eventually you can have an almost identical Debian system running on various systems/kernels. Therefore, they couldn't tie the release to the Linux kernel version.

Because as a sysadmin running mainstream packages is more beneficial to prepackaged things. The combination of Apache+PHP+PostgreSQL/MySQL is far better managed outside of the Debian process. If you can live with PHP 4.0.1 for a couple years than go for it.

I see your point. And yes, I've been able to live with PHP 4.0 for a couple of years, indeed (4.0.3, actually). PostgreSQL and MySQL from potato, too --never had a problem.

Sure, sometimes I need a newer version of some package (say, openldap). For those I usually pull the woody source package and build potato binaries. Check this article, it explains the basics on doing this trick.

The easy solution there is to simply build my own .debs and that is what I'll probably do in the future when I have more time to read the packages guide.

Man, trust me, is far easier to use the woody source packages. Building debs is not trivial.