Chris Frost writes
"The Debian Project began the freeze of its next distribution release, 2.2, today." Hit the "Read More..." link to read the full press release. This has been a long time coming, and it's good to see another stable release in the future. I've been running potato for some time now, and I'm eagerly anticipating woody, the next unstable release.
------------------------------
The Debian Project
press@debian.org
http://www.debian.org
Martin Schulze
January 16, 2000
------------------------------
The Code Freeze for Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 has begun
"The code freeze for the next Debian release, code named "potato", has
begun", says Richard Braakman, current Debian Release Manager. He
expects the freeze process to take about two months.
Until the new version is released, there will be three distributions
available on our servers: `stable', `frozen', and the new `unstable'.
"The new `unstable' distribution, code named woody[1], was created
today", continues Richard. The `frozen' and `unstable' distributions
start out with the same set of packages. While `unstable' will be
updated rapidly, `frozen' will have only bugfixes applied in
preparation for its release.
[1] Debian releases are code-named after characters from the movie Toy
Story. Woody is the main character, the cowboy action figure.
>> About Debian
The Debian project is an organization of many users who volunteer
their time and effort. Its tasks include maintaining and updating Debian
GNU/Linux which is a free distribution of the GNU/Linux operating system,
and the development of the Debian GNU/Hurd operating system.
>> Contact Information
For further information, please send email to the Debian Press Team,
press@debian.org, or visit the Debian homepage at
http://www.debian.org/"
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This is why I use redhat: no frozen potatoes.
Maybe if I had a microwave card for my computer, I wouldn't care, but I find it's too much trouble to constantly be heating and stirring those frozen potatoes. They take forever to heat up, and even after that, they don't always have that even consistency.
So I use RedHat 6.0, even though I don't know if I have to microwave a "Hedwig" or not. (Hedwig? Is that an alien from Star Control 2?) However, I guess if I used Debian, I could just try to Slink around the whole issue...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
There's nothing wrong with an installer that has an expert mode, a normal mode, and install wizard. Again, to deliberately exclude those not already deep in the fold is the very definition of elitism.
I just don't see it. There are several different distros that all give you a good Linux system. Some are targeted at professionals, some to business, and others to novice home users. There IS a need to make the home versions more friendly, and it appears that the work is being done. Perhaps you should write the perfect install wizard for novices?
One thing I DO know for certain is that all of them are easier than SLS was when the kernel was in the 0.9x versions. Of course having to download off of a BBS at 9600bps didn't help either.
(Disclaimer: I'm not a Debian developer; I just hang out on the mailing lists and in the new-maintainer queue..)
There are two things to note:
First, this isn't an official "Debian strategy", although many users end up doing it; in fact, it's a periodic occurance on debian-devel for someone to start a huge thread predicting the End Of The World As We Know It[tm] due to the slow release schedule, and for just about everyone else to agree that things need to speed up. There are several proposals to restructure the archives and make it easier to cut new releases more often; it looks like (I believe) they'll be in place before Woody.
Second, this isn't as much of a problem as you think, as long as you aren't being charged for modem time and/or bandwidth. I've tracked unstable for long periods of time over a modem. The trick is to set up a cronjob to download stuff in the middle of the night. Also, if you want to use less bandwidth, you can download less frequently than once a day (say, once every week or two) or upgrade individual packages that you want a newer version of.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
A startup company named RedHat has announced that it is shipping a new distribution of the Linux operating system. For unknown reasons, it has chosen to number this version 6.0.
:)
Sun Microsystems, a new contender from Palo Alto, California, has released a hitherto unseen operating system, Solaris.
And finally, a dark horse company named Microsoft in the city of Redmond, California, has announced that it will soon be releasing an operating system known as "Windows", with versions starting at 2000.
Daniel
PS - apologies if you didn't mean what I thought you meant
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Wait for the official potato release -- the boot-floppies are still in progress (do they even work right now?) I think 'base via http' is going to be in the final version if it's humanly possible, from what I've heard on the list :)
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
You touched on the point without seeing it. In a world where we're used to nothing lasting forever, wouldn't it be nice to have control over how long things last?
Free software gives you that. As long as there are a few people interested in running it, there is sufficient force for it to be maintained. You don't have to put up with some marketing department discontinuing your favorite product.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I'd like to see more work on gnome-apt. A panel full of check-boxes is all you'd really need to set all the flags that dselect manipulates. The calls are there in libapt.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
There will doubtless be some humor around the code-name of the next unstable version. You can refer to downloading it as "getting a woody" :-)
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
In the interests of collecting all the flood of "look, beavis, he's anticipating wood" jokes in one place, and simultaneously preventing the uninterested from having to read all of them, I request that all such jokes be submitted as replies to this.
Thank you for your consideration.
Given the pedigree of Debian, I'm a bit bemused at my own experience with it around the time of the hamm/slink transition. After many years of running various RedHats and a couple of years of Slackware prior to that, I didn't expect many surprises. In fact, I expected even greater stability, if that were possible, because of that super pedigree thing (not really possible, since I never had any instability nor any other trouble with RH, but I expected good things anyway).
Alas, I persevered for 4 weeks during which I had to update numerous libraries (some repeatedly) in order to get Netscape and other quite normal stuff to work, always following the appropriate installation procedures for the item in question. Towards the end of this period, things got so bad that not only would Netscape no longer work properly, but the GIMP wouldn't come up at all. In utter frustration, I dumped the whole lot and went back to RedHat.
I have no idea what went wrong but it did, badly. This doesn't concern me too much personally (I'll try again when potato is released), but I can't help wondering how Linux newbies are coping with Debian, as opposed to Debian newbies that are fully-fledged Unix old-timers. If I managed to screw it so thoroughly then there must be quite a bit of rope available for hanging oneself in the distro.
[Yes, of course it was all my fault. I'm merely wondering how it was possible for it to happen at all, against a backdrop of more than just a little experience and a total lack of such problems with other systems, spanning Linux, many Unixes, and BSD. Very bemused.]
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
It's a cool idea to say "grab the CDs of the (heavily dated but rock stable) release version, and tell apt to download the upgrades" but when most of the packages have gone through several releases, this more or less means downloading the OS from scratch. Trivial on a T1, non-trivial on a modem.
The one thing that I've thought that separated Debian from the rest was not how SLOW the releases come, but how quickly they come.
.x releases.
.x release to .x reelase, maybe they should just use whole numbers for release versions?
A "stable" release is thoughly tested, sometimes TOO thoughly tested =) But when you have something that's critial on being rock stable, these are they way to go to start. And if there is a program that you need a later version because of mroe functionality, you can do that too.
Tou can just as easily update packages buy pointing to "unstable", or now "woody". I can get updates to programs AS THEY ARE RELEASED. I don't have to wait for the distro to update everything themselves every couple months. Or if I really need something, hunt down a package, or get teh source and compile myself. I can just type "apt-get dist-upgrade" and my system is the latest it can be.
And with the large number of packages, I can be sure that whatever piece of free software(speach and beer), that they will ALL update with that one command. And I can rest assured that although I didn't compile that myself, it's not only a safe program to run, but it's configured to correctly work on my system. How can you go wrong? The more packages the better.
So, waiting for a release for the most part is a moot point. You can install Debian whenever you want, and have the lastest of everything, or have something that's thoughly tested(MUCH more then other distros). And, "unstable" for the most part, as alot of people will tell you, is alot better then other distros
Just one thing though, Debian "stable" releases change so much from
As a long-time Debian user myself, I think that it's great that potato has finally gone into release after so many delays, but it looks to me like the exact same thing as last year is happening: slink (debian version 2.1) was released in early march, with the 2.0 kernel, even though the 2.2 kernel had been available for some time.
Considering that the 2.4 kernel should be out in the near future (another month and a half or so) and the freeze is quite likely to last at least that long before a release is made, how long before debian catches up to the newer kernel series?
Will there be an updated potato using 2.4 after the new stable kernel is released, or will we have to wait another year to catch up again?
--Cycon
(Incidentally, I have been using potato as the OS on my primary without any problems for months now, but it's the servers that I have to manage that I'd rather see kept up to date...)
Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms
You don't actually run a system with the vendor-provided kernel, do you? I have 2.2.13 running on slink and potato systems just fine -- in fact, the potato system is using 2.2.13 with the ext3 patch.
Of course compiling and replacing the distribution kernel is non-issue, but the problem with having an entire distribution released with an older kernel is that you lose the ability to add in and use certain features that are only available with the new kernel.
For instance, a linux firewall is controlled by ipfwadm for the 2.0.x series kernels, ipchains for the 2.2.x series kernels, and there will be a new system (whose named elludes me for the moment) for the 2.4.x series of kernels. In order to administrate a newer kernel you need different tools, and therefore different packages.
A better example perhaps would be USB support in the 2.4 kernel. With a release based on the 2.2.x series of kernels you lack USB support for items which may be of use during an install -- such as the keyboard, or mouse (for setting up X graphically). I may be wrong, there may be a patch for USB kerboards under 2.2.x, but I think you get the idea of where I'm going by now.
Simply put, I by no means wish to critisize the debian project for any issues that have aroze in getting potato out the door, I think everyone there is doing an outstanding job, considering the volunteer-based nature of the distro (as opposed to the corporate-funded efforts of Redhat, SuSE, Caldera, etc.) -- However I *do* think that having the latest kernel permits certain conveniences as far as default packages and installation set-up goes.
--Cycon
Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms
One of Debian's primary goals is system *stability*. This is boring for the technically competent home user, but utterly critical in the enterprise.
Potato will lose little by not providing the new kernel by default - it is easy to upgrade your system later. However it keeps a kernel with a year's worth of field testing on it. Bugs undoubtably still remain, but it will be many months before 2.4 is as stable as 2.2 today.
The same thing applies to XFree86 4. By staying with the current XFree86 3.3 version Debian will lose some new features, but it will have a well tested X subsystem. If things go well people can upgrade later, while corporate users aren't affected by 4.0 (relative) flakiness.
Finally, an analogy I often use is to hiking gear. The whole purpose of hiking gear isn't to "look cool" (although that's always nice), it's to get me into the remote backcountry *and back.* That's why I might test out new gear on local trails, but I use ratty old gear when I'm going to be many hours away from help. The cost of a shoe falling apart isn't $100, it's a bloody foot torn to shreds by hiking barefoot in the Rockies for miles, so I stick with things I know are reliable even if they're slightly outdated.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
It's not really a matter of "installing a new system". RedHat gives you this feeling by having you shutdown your computer, boot from the new distro floppy, and do an "upgrade install". And it's certainly a lot better than, say, installing Win98 as an "upgrade" to Win95.
/etc/apt/sources to point to the new FTP directory. Now, whenever you update your packages, you'll get them from the new directory. It's a much smoother process than anything else I've ever used. This is a testament to its great package management system.
:), it asks you:
With Debian, the difference in which version you use is in which FTP (or HTTP) directory you choose for your package source. To "upgrade", you simply change your
When Debian upgrades a package, if it notices that you've changed any files (such as edited configuration files, which is to be expected
1. Keep your version of this file? (default)
2. Install the version from the new package?
3. Show the difference between the 2?
This is only a small example; it's really quite nice. Debian is also nice to use in the same manner as you (eg, install the base 28M system, and compile everything else yourself).
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.