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.

Comments

GUI INSTALLER?

[tcd004]

Real geeks install their software by hand!

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

Re:GUI INSTALLER?

[DeadMeat (TM)]

Magnetized needles? Ha! You don't know how good you've got it.

You kids today complain about having to download the CD image over a 56kpbs modem connection. Why, when I was a kid, we dreamed of 2400 baud modems. "Some day, far in the future, you might live to see 300 baud modems," our teachers told us. Sure, we had modems then, but they were only 1/2 bit per second (2 seconds per click/beep), so it was usually just easier to pick up the phone line and say "0, 1, 0, 0, 1 . . ." And plus you didn't have to worry about line noise that way, which ate up 3/4 of the bits we sent.

Plus, we didn't have those new-fangled CD images either. We just had disks that were 3 feet by 3 feet and only stored 16 bytes of data. And you usually lost 14 of those from bad sectors. And our drives couldn't do any of that fancy writing stuff -- oh no. We had to shift the magnetic bits around ourselves. At least that made downloading disk images easy, because the magnetic bits were so big you could flip them like DIP switches, and you only had to speak 128 0's or 1's over the phone.

And a GUI installer? The monitors we had just had 2 pixels, and each pixel was 6 inches wide, because that was the smallest they could make them. We didn't have any fancy GUI installers or those shoot-em-up games, 'cause we only had a 2x1 resolution. But we had "Guess Which Of The Pixels Is Going To Light Up Next", which is still a better game than all the new FPSes combined.

And we had to walk 2000 miles to the closest computer store to buy it, because there was only one of those back then. And it was in the desert. We had to walk uphills both ways, too.

Is it really frozen?

[Liam]

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.

No, woody is *not* frozen

[joey]

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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Automatic hardware detection!

[evil_one]

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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