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Debian Lays Out Freeze Plans For Woody
impaler writes: "Looks like Woody is frozen. LWN has a message from the Woody release manager, saying it is frozen. So, I guess it is finally frozen. Hopeful in less than a year Debian 2.3/3.0 will be out. Yay. Well, really lots of yay. Nice gui installer(even though I'm fine with the text one) and automatic hardware detection(something I like...especially when installing Debian on a box you know almost nothing about its hardware i.e. at an installfest)." And it looks like the Debian Release Manager has absolutely, positively staked his life on releasing Woody no later than July 8, 2001, so we can set our clocks now and hold him to his sworn word.
One of the marks of a mature OS. I'm glad to hear that a major linux distro has it...
.. it told me that it had found a new serial mouse, set it up for me, and that was it. It worked fine in both the console (gpm) and in X, and required no further work from me.
FWIW, Mandrake 7.x has automatic hardware detection as well. Other distributions probably include it, but Mandrake 7 is the only one I've used since Redhat 6.2 a couple of years ago or so. This worked out great one day last week; I had a short in my keyboard (PS/2) port which rendered it unusable. This would have been a big problem (obviously) but I found that for some reason, I could plug the keyboard into the mouse (PS/2) port and the BIOS recognized it fine!
Of course, now the problem was I had no mouse. What I did have was a spare serial port, and so digging through my Box O' Tricks, I found an old serial mouse. I plugged it in, booted up Mandrake 7.1, and sure enough
Now Windows users are probably reading this and saying "Big deal." But for Linux, it is a big deal, because this is exactly the kind of thing that Linux needs to get broader desktop acceptance. It never ceases to amaze me how far we supposedly "powerless" open source developers can come in such a short amount of time.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Why did Debian drop this? It's the ONLY distro I could find that would easily install on my laptop. Found instructions for Slack but they were mostly incomprehensible.
Of course, if your system has a lot of ram all this is irrelevant.
Synchronized cocks!
Wuss.
Carousel is a lie!
to honor the zeal and enthusiasm of Linux users.
No need to say sorry. Just be glad that they didn't announce their frozen woody on Valentines day.
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Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
How dare you assume they read the article?
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(That threw me for a loop when I first started on Linux. I had to figure out that knowing the model number of your Reveal sound card is worthless. I had to peel the Reveal stickers off of the chips to see who actually made them.)
Having another distro (besides Redhat/Mandrake) do this is a nice thing.
It hardly looks like the Debian Release Manager "has absolutely, positively staked his life on releasing Woody no later than July 8, 2001" after viewing the following statements in the message (too lazy to read it?):
..."
"So, a theoretical (and overly optimistic) timeline: [timeline follows]"
"Now, those dates are obviously not realistic: it's questionable whether there'll even be alpha-quality i386 boot-floppies by the end of this month;
"Let me note that again for anyone from the press that might be reading:
THOSE DATES ARE NOT REALISTIC!
[0]"
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I'm not stoned, I just chugged a pack of fUN dIP!
Ohh, VESA modes, I'm so impressed. X hardware detection is still gimpy. EX. I tried to set my monitor to 1152x864. Quite a nice, normal resolution. Yet X thinks that mode should only go up to 71Hz! (Yes, even though my XF86Config says 30-95 and 50-160).
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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you must amputate to email me
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you must amputate to email me
i read all replies to my comments
I have NO idea how this GUI installer rumor came about, it is blatently false. Woody will use the same boot floppies as potato does, and the debian installer project will also have a nearly identical UI (the text based curses menu like the current boot-floppies use).
If slashdot (or the submitter) had bothered to actually read Anthony's message in its entirety they would have seen that 1) woody is not frozen yet. and 2) that there is no mention whatsoever of a GUI installer. what Anthony DOES mention is better packaging of GUI software such as KDE/GNOME type programs.
here is a quote from the actual message where this silly rumor must have come from:
Third, I'd really like to see Debian include some of the nice "desktopy" stuff that's coming out for Linux these days: office software, DVD players, games, KDE, Gnome, Mozilla and so on. I'd like to see the installer cope nicely with the hardware that goes with it, video cards and sound cards and TV cards and whatever.
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Ethan
That's assuming I had an old box to do it on:)
Synchronized cocks!
Well, at least this explains why the only Score:5 post in this discussion is a troll: because there are honest people like yourself who probably get moderator points regularly but who just don't know better.
Kiss The Blade, The Lover's Arrival, Urban Existentialist... there is a new breed of trolls who get their kicks by posting the "non-raving devil's advocate" post. They suck in a dozen replies giving the rebuttals which any educated Slashdotter (no, that's not always an oxymoron) knows by heart. The occasional Score: -1, Troll is more than made up for by the regular "Wow, he's not parroting the Slashdot party line, he must be insightful!" Score: 5 karma injections.
To be fair, evil_one's user info doesn't show any such pattern of trolling. This is the big problem: the only way to tell a real troll from a simple misguided/uninformed but intelligent poster is to check out their past behavior.
How so? He's pointing out that an operating system these days should be able to detect new hardware as it is added to the system.
Yes, but he's doing so in a way that implies that hardware autodetection will just reach Linux for the first time in Debian 2.3/3.0! This is incorrect: some other distributions (e.g. Red Hat) have had hardware autodetection at bootup for at least a year, and many have had hardware autodetection at installation since before I started using Linux in '97.
Windows 95 and up do this, and it is nice when it works. I've had to fight with the feature at times,
Fun with Windows 98 first edition: Plug in an external (I don't know what brands... Zoom?; but it works on mine.) 56K fax/modem. Win98 autodetects it, but complains that no "56KModem" drivers are installed or located on the Win98 CD. Installing the "Hayes compatible" modem driver makes it work and connect at 56K, of course, but with every reboot you will be pestered for those "56KModem drivers" to handle the device on COM1 which Windows should realize it has a driver for.
Wroot
No... it actually found the driver for my card. No VESA involved.
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Desperation is a stinky cologne
I use linux and BSD, and I agree, use the best tool for the job. .V / _` (_-<_-<
.\_/\_/\__,_/__/__/
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make world, not war
See call for volunteers -- woody boot-floppies.
I realized something when I first saw this headline. When you see the phrase "Debian Woody is Frozen," and it makes sense to you, you know too goddamn much.
Time to drink off a few braincells.
hot foreign sheep.
What part of the "THESE DATES ARE NOT REALISTIC" enclosed in blink tags did you not understand?
He didn't stake a beer on that date, much less his life.
It was the buisness end of the FSF, the address that they give on everything you see. It is in a different place than where RMS is, that place, I guess, is somewhere by MIT.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
No, I don't mean the VESA driver, I meant the screen modes. The VESA standard makes a list of common resolutions and refresh rates and most VESA-compatible hardware supports those modes. XFree, instead of detecting the modes itself, simply relies on these VESA standard modes. Thus, if you're preferred mode isn't part of the (extremely limited) set of standard modes, you have to write your own modlines (or steal the automatically generated ones from your BeOS installation ;)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
>Woody will NOT have a GUI installer.
>What fever dreams prompted impaler
>to write that, we will never know.
Oh! What a relief!
Why not just set it to "testing" or "unstable" instead?
I ended up installing 7 kernel's, with each of them rewriting lilo.conf during install, and tell you what.. it was fun ;-)
The Woody release manager made a post back in December discussing the issues with getting Woody ready for a freeze. One of the big ones was that the GUI Installer (debian-installer) was "still quite a long way from being usable to do installs...." In addition, he stated that "boot-floppies will take at least a few months simply to work with woody, let alone to improve at all."
Since the discussion in yesterday's freeze proposal focused on getting boot-floppies working with Woody, and since the post from two months ago discussed either getting debian-installer finished or getting boot-floppies updated for Woody, I'd say the chances of debian-installer being included when Woody is released are slim.
Firtly, yeah! Why? Because Debian is starting to do what I thought they should do for some time now. Release cycles should be done in phases. I cannot agree more with the outline that AJ has set up. The one thing I would add to that would be, "And when we finally release woody as stable, we will start all over for the next release."
If it so happens that by the time that Woody is released in toto, that the next generation boot floppies are still not ready for release, we fall back to the versions used in the last release. I know that no one will want to do this, and thus we may have the motivation to finish up TNG-boot floppies, but why would we ever want another 1.5 - 2 year release cycle?
The first steps have been made: "testing", autobuilders, and phase-based release freeze. Now, let's keep it going w/a 12 month continuous release cycle.
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assert(expired(knowledge));
Duh. Must've missed that part in the man pages... Thanks!
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
With XF 4 (which is in woody) there isn't as much of a need for modelines as there used to be.
It would also be nice if magicfilter was a default install with lpr/lprng (it's just a suggested package now).
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Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
When I visited the FSF, the one Hurd box they had was frozen. =)
My Hurd box has had 3 or 4 months of uptime, so I have no idea what the hell the did to it.
The FSF production machines all use Debian now.
Back it up or shut your trap.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Debian Woody is Frozen - I wager my life the team waited a very long time to see that headline. Geek humour :)
Worship the comic!
Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Woody is most definitely NOT frozen, and /. shouldn't proclaim lies as headlines.
Does woody now have shrinkage because it is frozen?
It's a joke. Lighten up.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Luxury.
I demand a recount! Seriously, if it isnt frozen it might go bad...
I'm here all week folks, thank you very much
Time to set my source.list file to sid :-0
Je ne parle pas francais.
Did anyone else catch the original title of this post:
...oops... betcha I just got filtered!
"Debian Woody is Frozen"
That just sounds dirty...
-- Phenym
Hello.
How would be the best way to help out the testing
of the boot-floppies.
Clench a magnetized needle, (which you must magnetize yourself) between your thumb and forefinger, and carefull magna-etch the data of your program onto the surface of your hard drive platter. Don't leave any fingerprints on the platter, and for god's sake, leave your static electricy elsewhere! Use of microscopes is generally frowned upon. Come on! Like you can't feel your way through those sectors!
Bunch a crybabies.
tcd004
The guts of the PENTIUM 4!
Stockphotos
Ahhhh. Now I understand what you mean. If it used them, I don't know. I do know that it said here: you can use the banshee driver, or the VESA driver. I clicked banshee, and it asked me what resolution and refresh rate I wanted, and then did a test, a-la win98's "Your screen will be restored in 15 seconds..."
/me goes off to hack away at his refresh rate setting for 640x480... no point watching DVDs in 400x300!
I want to see X do that stuff...
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Desperation is a stinky cologne
On the other hand, Debian w/ 2.4.1, Xfree86 4.*, KDE2, & the latest Gnome would be great(er). And the text based installer w/ Deb is not that hard ... hell if I can install Debian who can't?
I have a very small mind and must live with it.
-- E. Dijkstra
All in all, the updating was a little troublesome, but at this point, nothing to worry about. The upgrade from Potato->woody was as normal as any other upgrade I've done (except that most other upgrades I've done don't require 400 megs of downloads =:P)
~Sentry21~
(The e-mail address shown works as-is, no need to change)
July 8, 2001 my ass. HURD will be finished by the time Woody is finished.
or, use the text version of the installer that will still undoutbly remain!
Kernel 2.4?????? if so reiserfs support? devfs? assorted goodies support?
potato
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Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
You are on the way to destruction.
nal 11
isn't "Frozen Woody" == priapism?
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"I'm the King of the Trolls!"
Did anyone actually read the referenced message? It doesn't sound to me like it's frozen - for each of the three parts (base system, boot floppies and standard packages, optional packages), testing comes first, then that part will be frozen.
Is this a correct? If so, it seems like a big difference from being frozen.
And a lot better than the previous practice, I might add.
Liam Healy
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
"One of the marks of a mature OS" This is a troll, right? Why was it modded up as informative?
Not everyone makes OS decisions based upon the latest Slashdot opinion poll. :)
Kudzu
Ok obvious... :-)
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--hongpong.com
Actually, the Debian woody installer will be using the Mandrake Hwdetect libraries, because they are so good. I don't know about them using kudzu though.
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HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
Register on slashdot and turn off signatures. And yes, you will be able to post at +1 and maybe you will even get some karma for your support for the president of chad who we all respect so much :-)
According to my last scan with console-apt, Woody makes use of libc6 v2.2.1, which I'm led to understand is a fairly major departure from potato's libc6 (2.1.3). There are some things in Woody I really want, so I'm inclined to upgrade now, but I have no idea how much stuff the new libc6 will break.
Anyone have any experience along these lines?
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Sorry,
-atrowe
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
Sounds nice. I recently installed Debian on an old pentium and needed to install most of it over the net so had to get the network card working but didnt know what it was. After a few educated guesses It was up and running but automatic hardware detection would have been one less headache for me.
no sig.
what will happen to the old 486 i do not want to waste ?
I guess now I just have to wait a few months before I can get the horrible Redhat 7 off of my machine. I've been using Redhat for two years now and I'm totally sick of it. Version 7 is unstable (had to reinstall once as it died for no reason), unrealiable (X hangs requiring a power cycle) and the dependencies are totally hosed.
Debian Ahoy! is all I have to say...
Synchronized cocks!
Are penguins just frozen woodpeckers?
Are you talking about the server or a desktop? You must have forgotten that many people use Linux as a desktop OS, myself included. Linux has more support for diverse hardware than any of those unixes.
I have to use Linux for my job )and I work from home). I would gladly give FreeBSD a try if I could.
Synchronized cocks!
This was a SYSTEM crashing freeze. No keyboard input accepted. I tried ctrl-alt-bs many times, no response.
Synchronized cocks!
The number of innacuracies in this article is very high.
Woody is NOT frozen. We have a timeline, which calls for a freeze beginning in April. The timeline is plastered with "THOSE DATES ARE NOT REALISTIC!" warnings.
Woody may or may not include hardware autodetection, but the code's not there yet. The next-generation debian installer project (which I lead) WILL have hardware autodetection, but it will not be a supported installation method for woody.
Woody will NOT have a GUI installer. What fever dreams prompted impaler to write that, we will never know.
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see shy jo
no, that just makes you lame.
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"I'm the King of the Trolls!"
Progeny already have a Debian based system with a very nice hardware autodetection system. The beta versions have been able to pick up everything on the various pieces of hardware I've tested it on. They also have a very cool tool for installing multiple systems with the same setup without having to do each one by hand - install on one, set up a DHCP server or a file containing MAC addresses and networking information, create floppies for every other machine, boot them all, come back and find that they've installed everything and configured themselves in the same way as the first machine.
yeah, i hear that you get a free copy of woody.
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"I'm the King of the Trolls!"
One of the marks of a mature OS. I'm glad to hear that a major linux distro has it... Corel did a good job on my P75, but it's all stock hardware.
What REALLY impressed me was the QNX demo. It installed on my system, automatically loaded drivers for my mouse, cdroms, etc, then it automatically set up their mini-X on my Voodoo 3 at 1024x768 (NO MODELINES!!! Woohoo!) and what REALLY knocked my socks off - It even set up my printer, I was able to print Sluggy Freelance on my Epson Colour 740 by simply hitting the print button! All this in 15 minutes!
Anyway, automatic hardware detection will rawk. I've got about 15 different computers a month that get debian installed on them. (Or re-installed, due to hardware failures, etc.)
I think that the Debian guys deserve a big slashdot hug.
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Desperation is a stinky cologne