Debian 2.2r4 (Potato) Released

codazzo writes "Debian 2.2r4 is out. As their website states, "The fourth revision of Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 (codename `potato') has been released. This point release, revision 2.2r4, mostly includes security updates, along with a few corrections of serious bugs in the stable distribution." " You can see the press release - or get it from the FTP list.

Comments

Where's 3.0

[The 14 year old]

3.0 (Woody) was frozen around July, and they said it would be ready around November. I guess that was just wishful thinking.

Re:Where's 3.0

[asuffield]

Uhh, no it wasn't. The base system was frozen, not the entire release. Have you been reading slashdot again?

Re:Where's 3.0

[HoserHead]

Firstly, Debian 3.0 will be released when it's ready - which means sometime in 2002.

Woody wasn't frozen in July, Policy was. The base base system was frozen later, in August. Everything else remains unfrozen, though those packages in 'standard' and many tasks (such as GNOME and KDE) should be on the block to be frozen pretty soon.

We're going about it in a different way this time; different parts of Debian are being frozen at different times. Because base and standard packages are more important than Priority: extra packages, they're being frozen first so all bugs can be shaken out and fixed.

For more information, search the debian-devel-announce archives or see the most recent mail from one of the release coordinators, Anthony Towns.

Basically, be patient. The reason that Anthony whipped together Debian 2.2r4 is simply because 3.0 won't be ready for a while.

Re:Where's 3.0

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to get 3.0 earlier, look at
http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/
and try to make and send patches.

Re:Where's 3.0

[Hater's Leaving, The]

Where do you get your supposedly up-moderation-worthy information from?

Debian do _not_ specify release dates in advance. It's ready when its ready, and not before. It annoys some, but it ensures the quality of the release.

Hmmm, actually, here's what Debian say:
"
As usual, no specific release goals are being set, nor will a release date be specified in advance. To put it simply, "Debian releases when it is time".
"

THL

Re:Where's 3.0

[The 14 year old]

Correct, but there has been lots of speculation that it would be ready sometime around November or December. I'm running sid (unstable) anyway, so i am not very worried about future woody releases.

Re:Where's 3.0

[Splork]

this is debian's fatal problem:

They -never- have an up to date stable release! I can't even compile half of the software out there today on potato without recompiling all of the necessary libraries as well because its own libraries are so old.

At that point i might as well just use a do it your self "distro" like slackware or roll my own.

Make a release, bugs included, and your users will be much happier.

Re:Where's 3.0

[child_of_mercy]

Oh for gods sake

for a workstation for myself I'll take mandrake

but for a production server doing mail or web or database work?

give me deb every time,

it just sits there and works, and when packages have security issues (as they always will) the update is hassle free.

And you can't say that about anyone else.

on a fast pipe I can have a debian server up and going inside of an hour. And once its up I can forget about it (aside from #apt-get update #apt-get dist-upgrade once a week).

Once every six months they get rebooted to take the new kernel, always without any hassle.

The bosses actually find it reassuring when I tell them the mailserver is coming down for 30 seconds for a reboot to take a new kernel.

So long as they only hear it once every six months.

Debian leaves me free to do my real work.

And putting the 2.4 kernel on is no problem if you really need that functionality.

If you want "vendor confidence & relationships" instead of understanding your system then debian will never be for you.

Personally I trust the debian team a lot more than the board of directors of any other distribution.

Re:First Potahtoe

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, let's just call it woody, which is what everyone is really waiting on.

Potato is a relic. Sure, I run it on my servers, but it's outdated so bad I feel the red of shame on my cheecks installing it on a new system.

Now, woody, otoh, that kicks ass. Sure, it's not the newest of everything, but it's new enough, and in my experience just as stable as potato.

Ouch

[A_Non_Moose]

3.0 (Woody) was frozen around July

Ouch, a frozen woody...and even in July...must be very cold where you are.

Seeing as Debian comes on a dvd, do you suppose someone is trying to dremel a disk down and install it on a game cube?

Re:Ouch

[Glytch]

I don't know about Linux, but I'll bet those NetBSD nuts are eager to try to make a Gamecube port. :)

Test woody

[RavenDuck]

For those who don't need the rock-stable, but somewhat out-of-date reliability of Potato, but want to give Debian a bash, try the testing (AKA woody) release. It's generally pretty stable (although there was a doosie with X not long ago that many people had problems with), and contains a lot of the latest and greatest software. Plus it comes with the quality and apt goodness that Debian is famous for.

I probably wouldn't run testing on a production server (although I certainly do run Potato on them), but if you're knowledgeable enough to cope with the odd dependency conflist or other problem, it makes a great desktop. Only problem is that security fixes might take a few weeks to make it into testing.

Of course, if you really want to live on the edge, Sid (unstable) is even more fun. Certainly not for beginners, however (Sid, that is, Debian generally isn't as difficult to install as its reputation suggests).

Re:Test woody

[CBravo]

Yes, I still don't have my fixed font fixed...

Re:Test woody

[Evil MarNuke]

Potato = boring, everything works, but very out of date
Woody = less boring, everything works, some cool toys
Sid = not boring, everything broken, all the latest toys, but damn, why the hell package A won't work when C is installed!! ALL i did was dist-upgrade to sid!!

Re:Test woody

[jlee007]

I find that Woody is quite stable - not perfect but only slight glitches from time to time.

It is possible to stay with Woody and only upgrade some packages from Sid. apt-get -t unstable works if you want to upgrade just a few packages. For more substantial upgrade (such as KDE), I find that aptitude works nicely.

Re:Test woody

[Malcontent]

Debian needs to find another way. Even the packages on woody are starting to get old. Anymore you have no choice but to run unstable and sometimes that can bite you in the ass.

What is needed is better isolation of the apps so that one bad app does not break the whole system. The idea that the entire system must be sealed off in order to achieve stability is plain wrong.

Either that or apt.preferences ought to be better implemented so that you can specify that you want to run stable except for apache,php,mysql and postgres for example.

Where's the stable kernel?

[Kenneth Stephen]

The last I heard, Debian was waiting for a stable kernel to appear. And please dont tell me that the 2.4 kernels were announced a while back by Linus - I have any number of machines (of varying hardware) on which 2.2 kernels run fine but the 2.4 kernels are unstable. Granted, 2.4.13 is billed as the stable kernel we've all been waiting for. However, given that it made its appearance only last week, I think we should excercise some patience. It will take a while to test all the OS packages with the new kernel.

Re:Where's the stable kernel?

[jilles]

It's not just the kernel. To get a reasonably up to date debian based desktop environment you have no other option then to install unstable packages of software that has had stable releases for over a year in some cases.

And yes unstable actually means unstable. I've played around with debian on several occasions. The apt-get system is brilliant. Unfortunately its usefulness is totally countered by the complete lack of stable packages to install. I've actually managed to get KDE 2.0 up and running once. I just pointed the sources file to some vague http site of some guy who had bothered to create some packages. On several other occasions though I was less fortunate with installing e.g. xfree 4.0, gnome and several other mainstream stuff. I'm sure it is possible to fix if you know what you are doing but the whole point of apt-get is that it is supposed to take care of that instead.

Re:Where's the stable kernel?

[ggeens]

IIRC, there was a message on debian-devel stating that the default kernel for Woody would be 2.2.

There are already 2.4 kernels available in the archives, and (of course) the official release will include them as well.

Re:Where's the stable kernel?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been using the 2.4 kernels since about 2.4.5 and have been using them in production (grin).

Debian is gradually becoming less relevant. It seems that Redhat and Suse have the only distros that make any effort at staying current while having the resources to add the polish needed to attract new users.

In another year, Debian will be where slackware is today, an interesting anecdote in the evolution of Linux distributions with a small cult following, but no real mindshare.

Toodles.

Re:Where's the stable kernel?

[Anonymous Coward]

heheh. thats what people said during the whole slink debacle.
debian ain't going anywhere. unlike slackware, it's practically GNU.

Re:Where's the stable kernel?

[Genom]

I'm sure it is possible to fix if you know what you are doing but the whole point of apt-get is that it is supposed to take care of that instead.

Actually, it's not supposed to take care of *everything* for you -- it just takes care of most dependency issues, so you can concentrate on which software you want to run. You still have to understand what the software you're installing is going to do.

If there's a major problem with an often-used package (or set of packages such as KDE, Gnome, etc...) there's generally some press about it over on Debianplanet - as well as on the mailing list. If you're going to run "unstable", then you generally should check those places before you do any major installing, just to be safe.

As far as installing KDE2 -- Here's my install process (which has worked with "unstable" every time I've tried) from a 'clean' system:

• Install base system (stable)
  
• Upgrade base system (stable)
  
• Check Debianplanet for any caveats with the current packages
  
• Change /etc/apt/sources.list to point at unstable
  
• dist-upgrade to unstable (gives the "unstable" base system)
  
• install/configure xfree86 (should give you Xfree4.xx at this point)
  
• install kde
  
• install kdebase-crypto (to give konq SSL support)
  

Thusfar, that's worked for me on quite a few new boxes -- I don't play around with Gnome too often, so I can't help out there.

I guess the real bottom line is that just because an "easy-to-use" tool exists, doesn't mean that you can just be lazy about the stuff you install - you still have to keep up on what's broken at any given point. That's the drawback of "unstable" - if you want everything to "just work", then "stable" is the answer, although you'll get a lot of outdated stuff, it's been tested quite extensively. If you want newer stuff, but don't want the bleeding edge, then "testing" is where you should be, although I've found it tended to break a lot more than "unstable" when I tried it (this was a while back - maybe things have changed since then). "unstable" is for us bleeding edge freaks who want to run the latest versions of everything -- at any given time something could bust - but it's generally fixed within a day or so.

Re:Where's the stable kernel?

[jilles]

Well on the few occasions I tried this, it barfed out halfway with some unresolved dependencies. This kind of stuff shouldn't happen with stable packages but that's just the thing you have to use unstable packages or even testing packages and you may be confronted with this kind of stuff.

I want software that is known to be in a working state for over a year to install without much trouble. Apt-get can technically deliver this experience provided that there are stable packages. And there are none available.

Re:Where's the stable kernel?

[Floris]

First: debian unstable has KDE 2.2 right now. It works. (haven't had it do anything funny on me yet anyway)

Secondly: sid breaks now and then. Known fact. But that really isn't the only option.
You have:

stable -> potato
testing -> woody
unstable -> sid

Woody is the 'best of both worlds' choice: reasonable recent stuff without major instabilities or installation issues.

Finally: If you run into trouble, fire up your irc client and go to irc.debian.org (irc.openprojects.net) channel #debian. If the people in that channel can't help I'd be very surprised. Some of them plain ROCK.
Besides, most big issues get posted there pretty much instantly, either in the subject or by means of the bot called 'apt'. That one is also a big repository of good / fun / interesting / useless factoids and oddball enhancements.

Floris

Re:Where's the stable kernel?

[Idimmu Xul]

And yes unstable actually means unstable. I've played around with debian on several occasions. The apt-get system is brilliant. Unfortunately its usefulness is totally countered by the complete lack of stable packages to install.

Unfortunatly very true, which is why i run unstable.. i occasionally update to the latest unstable, but i always check in the debian irc channel to see if their are any known issues first so that things dont get fskd up. The few problems Ive had with unstable have been easy to fix

Unstable isnt for mission criticle servers, but for me its great, as I get to check out the latest X or evolution etc without any effort \o/

Re:Where's the stable kernel?

[jilles]

Using debian in a production environment requires that you use something stable. So consequently since there is no stable debian desktop environment with reasonably modern packages, debian is no option for somebody who wants to use a linux desktop in a production environment.

I tried installing a debian desktop a few weeks ago (I've maintained a debian server in the past so I'm not exactly ignorant). I installed the potato base system, did an upgrade, pointed the sources file to testing, did a dist-upgrade and then launched tasksel and just selected the X environment (nothing else). Then hit enter and tada some conflict and it didn't install. So far I had done nothing special so you can't blame me for doing anything wrong.

Surely it is possible to fix it. An option would be to skip potato entirely and go with the woody boot floppies or something but I didn't bother (too lazy, I know). If I had really wanted I would have probably gotten it in a working condition at some point. The point however is that apt-get rarely works as advertised due to the fact that the packages are untested and immature. For stable it is great, maintaining a potato server is a piece of cake (been there done that).

However on each of the occasions I tried testing or even unstable I ran into stuff that was non trivial to fix. I keep reading about how painless a dist-upgrade to woody is but I have so far been unable to verify this claim on any of my systems. Each time I try I run into issues with some of the packages which either prevent me from completing the dist-upgrade or leave me with an unusable system.

I'm sure support is great on the mailinglists. But unless you have a serious amount of time to waste, mailing lists are no option if you just want to get a system running. Just scanning through archives for your particular problem easily takes up hours. And waiting for a sensible reply generally also takes some time (even though some people are really quick in replying).

The whole point of using debian is apt-get as long as it works it is great as soon as it doesn't work you are on your own.

Re:Where's the stable kernel?

[Fjord]

Debian is no option for somebody who wants to use a linux desktop in a production environment.

I actually believe the exact opposite. Debian is the best environment for workstations. The default listings in /etc/apt/sources.list are just defaults. Because of this, you can change them to point to an internal server. Then an admin updates packages on the single internal server (once tested) and they get pushed out to the workstations. Individual workstations can be rolled back if need be.

Note that I am talking more along the lines of where there are 100+ workstations or where security is a real concern.

Re:Where's the stable kernel?

[jilles]

So basically that requires an administrator that composes his own distribution (I'd like the debian people to do that sort of thing). In the real world administrators don't have time for that sort of hobbyism. They will just deploy a red hat/suse/whatever image that may or may not be tweaked a bit prior to distribution. Doing so they deploy reasonably well tested software that contains recent, stable versions of all packages.

Debian would be ideal for workstation environments if they'd bother to keep their distribution up to date. What's currently in testing will be obsolete by the time it is finally marked stable (i.e. irrelevant for most users). I consider this a fatal flaw in the way the debian project works. It just takes too long to get stable, production quality software integrated into debian.

Testing/unstable is nice to play with if you have the time to kill to fix the inevitable problems that will pop up. Patching together a usable stable system however is way too difficult for any real life usage of debian. Besides, using unstable packages sort of counters any security policy you might have.

If the debian project wants to matter on the desktop front they will have to address these issues. I'm sure there are a lot of people like me who would like to use a debian desktop but can't be bothered too much with testing or unstable stuff. If a system administrator can compose a stable, up to date desktop environment (which is what you claim), surely the debian project can do a better job and release it to their users.

Re:Where's the stable kernel?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the other guy was trying to say is that you have local package-pool and that is the base for all the servers and workstations. But before you're going to upgrade you need to test if everything works and also think about debconf for example. So if your local testing is working right then you're going to upgrade your servser and workstations. It has nothing to do with hobbyism. It has everything to do with being a real world admin. Also another thing, debian has been growing sinds potato. It has many brand new packages, new security stuff, documentation is growing. And yes its taking a long time, but remember, debian is the biggest distro on the face of the earth. It has a reputation to hold high, debian stable means stable. And no other distro is maintaining 10 linux hardware-ports, 1 hurd port and over 5000 packages. I don't see redhat pulling this off and if we are pushing the redhat release schedule to debian you get a real mess. But there is also another side, technologie is improving and things like autobuild-deamons are working, testing is completly automated and also software developers are growing and start more and more to build beter software that is more compliant with standards.

Re:Where's the stable kernel?

[jilles]

So you are saying the only way to use debian is to do the testing yourself because debian has such high standards? I hope you see the contradiction here. Obviously the reason there is no stable version of debian you can actually use (without going through some extensive testing) is that debian is so large and has to be tested for all platforms.

So, all I'm saying is that debian is not a viable option unless you want to invest time in testing/tinkering with the packages. In other words it is not a general purpose distribution.

Right now I have no use for debian on my desktop because it is too unstable/unusable. Dll hell is nothing compared to debian unstable. Red Hat may not be ideal and may not be available on all platforms and may not include everything and the kitchen sink (even though it does a great attempt at doing so) but it does offer a set of recent packages that have been tested to such an extent that it will work under most cicumstances (unlike debian unstable).

I suggest that debian splits their packages in essential (kernel, base system, X, Gnome, KDE and essential development stuff) and optional (anything that is not needed on the average server or desktop system -> 80% of the packages qualifies as such IMHO) and evolve them separately. That means that if you need optional you probably have to either use an old core release or use the latest stable core release and invest some time in copiling the optional stuff you need. IMHO this is much better than to have to scavenge stable versions of essential stuff just to be able to install debs of some not so frequently used stuff.

If the need arises, there could be more optional releases. It is simply divide & conquer that is being applied here, nothing fancy. Obviously the intgration effort explodes if you increase the amount of packages. Doing integration testing on 5000 packages is rediculous and has shown to be unfeasible.

Ordinary users shouldn't have to wait two years for stuff like KDE 2.x being integrated into debian because some very obscure packages need to be tested with it. The KDE people do a pretty decent job of testing their stuff and integrating their release code shouldn't take much longer than a few weeks at best. If it takes longer you are doing something wrong because in this period the KDE people will find & fix more issues than the debian people.

Re:Where's the stable kernel?

[Fjord]

So basically that requires an administrator that composes his own distribution (I'd like the debian people to do that sort of thing). In the real world administrators don't have time for that sort of hobbyism.

No, in the real world, this is a job requirement. Real corporate environments don't let users install whatever they want. Admins purchase software and then install it on machines. This is the same model that is used now, only there is more automation to it (I won't say it's completely automated. That is a pipe dream).

What do you call it when you have a network of windows machines with all the same versions of Internet Explorer, all the same versions of Office, all the same ftp software, all the same database apps: it's a windows distribution, maintained by the administrator. I fail to see the difference, and I certainly fail to see how you think that having the computers sync to an outside source is appropriate. Yes, the admin will have to keep on top of the security patches that are put out, just like a windows admin needs to put service packs in place. Yes, the admin will have to download the new versions of the software used on the network, just like a windows admin. These procedures are in place for security, however, not because "it's the way it is".

Re:Where's the stable kernel?

[jilles]

"Real corporate environments don't let users install whatever they want. Admins purchase software and then install it on machines."

Yes, they don' go and assemble their own linux distributions from a zillion apt sources. Instead they'll get something that is known to work reliably (i.e. definately not debian unstable)

Re:Where's the stable kernel?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please make a concerted effort to run and experience Debian before you post to a Slashdot article about it again. You just sound ignorant.

Re:Where's the stable kernel?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please take the trouble of getting an account on slashdot before posting anything. You sound like an ignorant troll who doesn't really have anything usefull to add to the conversation at all. Just like me so I'm posting AC + no score so I won't bother other people who of course (like me) read slashdot at +1. For those who don't, sorry.

To address your comment I have maintained a debian server as well as successfully installed and configured slackware, mandrake and red hat distributions. I've wrestled with debian on several occasion, wasted some perfectly good bandwidth at updating my debian distribution to testing and unstable (only to find that it fucked up, I even experienced apt-get seg faults). I would call that a concerted effort.

Basically I'm slightly more educated than most joe average users. If it doesn't work for me you can rest assured it will most definately will not work for joe average. Proof me wrong if you like.

BTW. I'm not making a technical comment on apt-get (I actually like the way it works), just the way the debian project is run. A good package manegement system is completely useless without reliable source of up to date, well tested packages. Currently the debian project is unable to supply such packages and is therefore completely useless to all but a tiny group of elite debian hackers who think they are gods because they've memorized the dpkg manpages (which need a rewrite badly because they are incomprehensible for mere mortals).

It's a pitty, Debian could be a great system but it currently isn't and unless something changes it will continue to suck badly. It's a free country, so by all means disagree but at least address the issues instead of flaming me.

Re:Where's the stable kernel?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for replying, I appreciate you taking the time to read AC posts. As for my trolling -- I know, I'm pretty immature sometimes.

Here's where I'm coming from: I presently maintain approximately 20 Debian servers (3 Woody, the remaining Potato) and a handful of workstations (Woody and Sid). Additionally, I have had significant exposure to Redhat through server administration and by participating in a project to port commercial Win32 software to Linux (which also exposed me to SuSE, TurboLinux and Mandrake).

As a side note, I originally started on minilinux and then Slackware. I was (violently?) opposed to Debian at first site, but decided it was worth giving a shot. After a painful process of learning how to use it effectively, I grew accustomed to it and over the years have seen just how consistent and effective the Debian development cycle is.

I think you don't give Woody enough credit. For as long as testing has existed, I have had *1* problem: telnetd didn't work after an upgrade. apt-get update/upgrade very shortly after resolved the problem. Beyond that, KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment, Mozilla, Apache, MySQL, Sawfish and a whole slew of other packages work flawlessly with very up-to-date versions. Infact, I haven't had to "reinstall" one of my personal workstations since Debian 2.1 (a few hand modifications to make things nice, but basically just following the dist-upgrade path). I don't know about you, but I think upgrading through two major revisions of libc6 is the sign of a superior distribution! Anyway, I still run Potato on most of my servers because it just plain works and I can feel certain that security fixes will be back-ported. Perhaps it doesn't have the latest version of MySQL, but it doesn't break either.

This has been MY experience with Debian. Perhaps yours has been different. I advocate Debian to my friends. They oppose it initially (like I did when I first saw it). Then over a period of time they keep witnessing how painless system administration of my servers is and how much frustration they have upgrading RedHat and Slackware, and they invariably take serious interest in Debian. I hope that some day you will to.

-anonymous

Re:Where's the stable kernel?

[jilles]

I'm sure you are an expert sys admin and obviously I'm not. However, debian doesn't work as advertised. The dogma spread by debian proponents is that you install a base system, point to testing/woody, do a dist-upgrade and happily live ever after. On all occasions I tried this it didn't work even with only very basic stuff like X selected. As long as you stick with potato you are fine but as soon as you move to testing you soon find out why it is marked testing.

(un)accepted packages

[Chocky2]

There's a list of which packages did/didn't make it in available at http://people.debian.org/~joey/2.2r4/full.html

just wonder....

[pecka]

when the woody comes out to replace potato as stable.

Re:just wonder....

[Anonymous Coward]

Best guess is sometime in 2002, I'm guessing mid-year.

[voice of Orson Wells here:] "We shall release no stable before its time."

Re:just wonder....

[Anonymous Coward]

With Debian's track record there is no chance it will be out before the 2.6 kernel is stable...

Re:just wonder....

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure its not, "We shall release no stable while the hardware it supports is actually used?" ;)

Unstable: Definatly not for the faint hearted

[dezwart]

Or those administering an office of 'sid' machines behind a 56K Modem. ;-)

Boss, boss, the pain, the pain!

Re:Unstable: Definatly not for the faint hearted

[compwizrd]

apt-move could be your friend if you let him into your life!

Re:Unstable: Definatly not for the faint hearted

[dezwart]

Already using that, and I don't know what I'd do without it.

Actually, got a double buffer set up. Download all the wanted packages on the master unstable workstation via an internal proxy and apt-move it to a local repisotory.

Debian, can I marry you?

Mirrow Mirrow on the wall.....

[JohnHegarty]

Austria (FTP)

Australia (FTP)

Bulgaria (FTP)

Brazil (FTP)

Czech Republic (FTP)

Germany (FTP)

Estonia (FTP)

Spain (FTP)

Finland (FTP)

France (FTP)

Croatia (FTP)

Hungary (FTP)

Italy (FTP)

Japan (FTP)

Korea (FTP)

Netherlands (FTP)

Norway (FTP)

New Zealand (FTP)

Poland (FTP)

Russia (FTP)

Sweden (FTP)

Slovenia (FTP)

Turkey (FTP)

United Kingdom (FTP)

United States (FTP)

Re:Mirrow Mirrow on the wall.....

[sydneyfong]

The big list is here : http://www.debian.org/misc/README.mirrors

Debian vs. Redhat

[timbck2]

I don't intend to start a "my distribution can beat up your distribution" thread here.... That said, I had a very negative experience with Debian recently. While trying to choose a Linux distro, I narrowed down my choices to Debian and Redhat. I didn't want to run a beta release of anything, but it sounded like Debian (Potato) would suit my needs. So I installed it. The installation itself wasn't painful (though I don't understand why it required two floppies to do a network install), but I soon discovered it didn't support my usb mouse & keyboard or my Matrox G450 dualhead video card. I futzed around for a day or two trying to get XFree 4.1.0 running, without much success. So I bagged it and installed RedHat 7.2 with no hitches whatsoever.

I'm fairly new to Linux (I prefer BSD, however), but not at all new to Unix on PC hardware -- I've been working with that in various forms for 12 years.

What's my point? Well, I guess it's that if hardware continues to change so rapidly, then for any given Linux distribution to stay relevant and useable it needs to keep up.

Re:Debian vs. Redhat

[Anonymous Coward]

sorry? and BSD autodetects all your hardware?
i don't get it. if you know how to setup a bsd box, surely digging around a little to get debian working (and it will support all you asked for - i've done it) isn't so much of a chore.
you trollin'?

Re:Debian vs. Redhat

[Nelson]

Again not in the distribution war vein but I've been kicking around the idea of CatB and wondering if Linux distributions are an area where the idea breaks down. The slick, up-to-date ones are all made by companies. Community efforts don't seem to work nearly as fast.

For the record I do have a machine that runs debian, I'm not bashing it but Mandrake 8.1 compared to the newest debian is night and day and I've had the mandrake for a while now. It's kind of a large scale organizational problem and perhaps it requires a really strong centralized leadership and workforce to create a good linux dist. fast. I don't know, just an idea.

Re:Debian vs. Redhat

[sydneyfong]

Actually Redhat 7.2 quality sometimes is more "beta" than Woody

Re:Debian vs. Redhat

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you mean "it" didn't support? Are you referring to Debian or your obvious inability to search the Internet for answers, RTFM and edit configuration files?

If you've been working for UNIX with 12 years I'm suprised you would expect this to be automatically snapped in place.

Redhat has made a lot of lame decisions -- and you call "Debian" in one of it's forms beta? Do you have any idea what you're talking about? Redhat at 7x switched to cutting edge C libraries and compiler. Totally unproven and breaking compatibility with existing applications (unless, of course, you like the idea of having two separate sets of libraries around to run anything that isn't in the latest RPM.) Oh, speaking of RPM, I assume you like the idea of downloading individual RPMs and running extremely reptitious commands to update your system or install some third party software to do this for you -- when you could have it built into the base installation system?

Debian does an incredible service to the community with their bandwidth provided for automatic package updating, and to denounce it because you are too lazy to configure X yourself is stupid.

Re:Debian vs. Redhat

[Anonymous Coward]

i use mandrake for desktop (laptop) ... redhat was last choice ... debian i prefer on servers for its pretty to keep up2date ... anyway i made better compatiblity experience with freebsd ... but switched back to debian for comfort-facts .. its more easy .. and i dont want to spend years configuring ports ... at the moment i am running mad bringing up my mylex-raid under debian (i am clode to ;-) ) ,.. bsd never had any problems with that ... its a module mess in the compact configuration .. i also read that only RH and suse have that module under default-rescue-disc ... however .. debian rules (IMHO).. for its true GNU ...

Re:Debian vs. Redhat

[sydneyfong]

Debian seems to aim at making their releases as stable and secure as possible, while commercial companies who need to grab as many customers as possible tend to release stuff which are new and flashy to attract more customers.

A great thing about linux is that you get choice, and to some people who need stability and scurity having the newest software included is not always the best, since it takes time for the software to be tested and proved to be good enough for production uses.

Re:Debian vs. Redhat

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been kicking around the idea of CatB and wondering if Linux distributions are an area where the idea breaks down

I think reality is where the Bazaar breaks down. Not unlike other utopian philosophies, like Communism, Anarchism, etc.

Re:Debian vs. Redhat

[Anonymous Coward]

That simply isn't true (RH 7.2 being as beta-like as woody"). It is a LOT more stable. As a matter of fact, I have had 6 servers running 7.2 on a small apache farm generating 3 million pageviews/day. With the exception of updating the kernel to 2.4.13 and adding the redhat patches, I haven't had to do squat to them. These are 1RU dual athlon machines with a gig of memory. You'd think if there were any instability issues, these oddballs would trigger them. Nope.

Back in the day, I liked Debian, but they just don't keep current enough, especially for people like me who are too lazy to spend half their day chasing down new versions of key tools and fixing them all individually/manually. I prefer to spend my time USING my systems, not doing maintenance work that is more appropriately handled at the distribution/package maintainer level.

Regards,

Re:Debian vs. Redhat

[s.a.m]

Ok I do realize that you're relatively new to linux. However you did say you're not new to UNIX and in fact you use BSD.

If you even gave it half an effort you would have found your usb support easier to install than you think. All you had to do was look in the kernel config screen and then setup the usb is the misc section I believe.

Next time it would help if you read the docs

Re:Debian vs. Redhat

[Publicus]

I would have had the same problems had I not had the kickass help in #debian at irc.openprojects.org(net?). Debian is very straighforward, it's just the tools that set it apart take learning. Believe me though, as someone who has used Redhat, Debian is far superior, and can beat up any other distrobution out there. In fact, I'm just waiting for an excuse to replace Slackware on my desktop. If only that distro weren't so damn stable and easy to maintain. God damn quality, now I have to do real work! Wait, no, I have /., nevermind. :)

Re:Debian vs. Redhat

[swillden]

The slick, up-to-date ones are all made by companies. Community efforts don't seem to work nearly as fast.

For the record I do have a machine that runs debian, I'm not bashing it but Mandrake 8.1 compared to the newest debian is night and day

Which Debian version are you talking about, Potato, Woody or Sid? In my experience, Debian testing (currently Woody) is just as solid as RH-based distributions, and it's very up-to-date.

And if you want to stay on the leading edge, I don't think there's anything out there that moves as fast as Debian unstable (currently Sid). And don't let the "unstable" name fool you... it very rarely breaks and as long as you update fairly frequently, it's quite easy to back out the rare upates that do cause problems. I run Sid on three different desktop machines and Potato + selected bits of Woody on my server (if you want to do this, the first thing to upgrade is apt, because the new version of apt allows you to specify which distribution you pull from when you apt-get).

Debian gives you a range of choices between stability and newness. I think the only thing lacking is one more stage. I'd like to see an additional version between stable and testing that lags testing by maybe a month and gets security patches quickly. Running stable + bits of Woody is a reasonable compromise, though.

Finally, I always found that my RH-based installs were more out of date than I have been since I switched to Debian. Why? Because upgrading them required a reinstall that I was always reluctant to do. Maybe things have gotten better now, but I started with Mandrake 5.0 and stayed with the Mandrake distros until 7.2 and every upgrade had to be a reinstall/reconfigure.

With apt-get, debfoster and cruft, I don't expect I'll ever have to reinstall any of my Debian boxes until my HDDs die.

Re:Debian vs. Redhat

[Tachys]

sorry? and BSD autodetects all your hardware?

Yes it does. FreeBSD managed to autodetect my ethernet card for me while for Debian first I had ask on a mailing list which module I needed to load.

Re:Debian vs. Redhat

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, all open-sourced BSDs out there will autodetect and run with most commodity hardware with no problems at all. Unless of course you have some sort of monster gaming machine, in which case FreeBSD is probably the only way to go in that respect.

Re:Debian vs. Redhat

[Anonymous Coward]

Insightful????

While trying to choose a Linux distro, I narrowed down my choices to Debian and Redhat. I didn't want to run a beta release of anything, but it sounded like Debian (Potato) would suit my needs.......didn't support my usb mouse & keyboard or my Matrox G450 dualhead video card. I futzed around for a day or two trying to get XFree 4.1.0 running, without much success.

Maybe if you had done your homework, you wouldn't have had that "negative experience" - a quick look through the package database would have saved you the heartache. How the fuck can you say potato suits your needs when your needs included Xfree 4.1 and all of that other shit? Next time get some obviously needed help.

Re:Debian vs. Redhat

[shaka]

You don't need two floppies to do a network install.
One is almost always fine if you have fairly standard hardware and chooses the compact disc, which is only one disc and contains many many nic-drivers.
That said, people who expect a cutting edge dist for desktop use should not run Debian Potato. They shoud run Woody, which poses few problems, or Sid, which probably is the most cutting edge dist out there - I run it and only once have I ran into serious problems; actually only half-serious, it took a couple of hours to fix the problem and I didn't loose data or anything like that.
Debian rocks. That's all there is to it.

Re:Debian vs. Redhat

[-brazil-]

who should use Redhat when time and time again, their website posts vulnerabilities and updates.

Those who need some of the newer features more than they need "total" security and stability.

For the longest time, both BSD and Debian were free of any buffer-overflows or ANY exploits. [...] So now Debian has the honor of being the most secure operating system.

Um... yeah. Can I get some of what you're smoking? Or are you just unable to read: This
point release, revision 2.2r4, mostly includes security updates, along with a few corrections of serious bugs in the stable distribution.

when somebody wants to do *real* development work, then debian is the only viable solution.

Sorry, but in the real world, "total" stability or security is not required for development systems. Being reasonably up to date, however, is.

Re:Debian vs. Redhat

[timbck2]

> Actually Redhat 7.2 quality sometimes is more "beta" than Woody.

I believe you. Had I known that at the time, I would have pursued Woody more vigorously. But as it is now, I really don't want to invest any more time into getting this machine running -- it's been very stable so far (it *was* running Windows 2000!)

And yes, FreeBSD would have detected my hardware and worked right from the start; it was first choice over Linux, except I have to have Windows 2000 for a few things, so I'm running VMWare.

Re:Debian vs. Redhat

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never had to do a full upgrade by hand. THat's what RHN and up2date are for (if you buy the box,) or the autoupdate perl script (if you're cheap like me.)

Never had any problems.

Re:Debian vs. Redhat

[ethereal]

Yeah, that's why I'll never install Mandrake again - the install totally blew away all sorts of customizations that I'd done, essentially doing a reinstall except that it didn't recreate /home. KDE menus, etc. - all gone, and since I happened to be at that installfest by chance, I of course hadn't made adequate backups. So that machine only gets hand-upgraded from source or carefully-selected RPMs now, and any future machines will be Debian.

Re:Debian vs. Redhat

[derF024]

you obviously haven't used a debian system with apt, or you're talking out of your ass. I run Woody on 4 different machines, and apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgade is all the maintence i ever do. I've never had an issue with a debian package, i don't see how a package with issues could even make it into apt, and if it did, it would be pulled rather quickly. redhat 7.2 maybe up to date now, but what happens in a year when you've got 45 apps with local root exploits and some broken cgi ends up giving your 6 server farm away to a kid in malaysia. With debian, I never have to worry about that.

Re:Debian vs. Redhat

[wobblie]

If you don't want to run a "beta distribution" then stick with Red Hat's X.2 releases, the .0 and .1 releases are worse than Debian unstable.

Re:Debian vs. Redhat

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeBSD "autodetected" your card because it's a) not modular (yes, I know it supports loadable modules but they're not really useed yet) and b) the default has a load of drivers compiled into it and is huge. I can build a linux kernel that works the same way (hint: turn off loadable modules support, select every common piece of hardware to support). Modules a a bit off a pain to manage but at least you don't end up with one massive kernel sitting in memory.

You really should recompile a BSD kernel ASAP after install. A 50% reduction in size isn't uncommon.

Re:Debian vs. Redhat

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually Redhat 7.2 quality sometimes is more "beta" than Woody

This is, of course, absolute bullshit. It's regulary spread around by Debian fanatics to cover up for the fact that Debian stable moves like molasses and is still less stable than most redhat releases.

Re:Debian vs. Redhat

[timbck2]

Why should I have to build a new kernel just to support my mouse? I don't expect the base install kernel to support for example a newly-released RAID controller, but USB has been on every motherboard shipped at least since 1998!

And before someone calls me an idiot for running my system on the install kernel, I'm not -- I understand the value of a tuned custom kernel; I just expected the USB support to be there, as USB input devices have been commonplace for a while.

Re:Debian vs. Redhat

[Brummund]

I can't agree more with you. For a customer, we have three Debian Potato boxen running Apache, PHP, JBoss/Tomcat and Postgresql. The system is _stable_, no problems what so ever. I also use Debian for my laptop, file server and work station at home.

On my laptop and workstation I run unstable, but on the servers I run potato. I heartily recommend it. Although you have to invest some time investigating the debian tools, it pays back tenfold, IMHO.

(Of course, I'm pondering on getting Mac OS X for my new workstation, but that's another story. :-)

Re:Debian vs. Redhat

[Arandir]

yes, I know it supports loadable modules but they're not really useed yet

They are being used more and more. Looking at 4.4 it seems that my NIC, USB, audio and even agpgart are modules. It's not as modularized as say Mach, but neither is it in the dark ages.

You really should recompile a BSD kernel ASAP after install.

Ditto for Linux. I've seen 75% size reductions for recompiling Mandrake's default kernel.

Re:Debian vs. Redhat

[Anonymous Coward]

You honestly have NO idea what you're talking about, do you? You're just regurgitating some age-old myths that have no truth to them.

"BSD had a bug, so Debian is now the most secure" ? Nice logic there, and again, totally off-base.

Next time, actually USE a few different distros rather than just make blanket statements about them.

Re:Debian vs. Redhat

[blang]

Debain has 3 release paths, and if you did not get as far as recognizing that, your attention span is too short. At any given time,debian has production, test, and unstable.
Consider it 3 different distros.
Potato, the most rock solid distro there ever was, with lightning fast security updates.
Woody - more solid than most other linux distro's, at least the red hat kind.
Sid - bleeding edge.

Redhat on the other hand has no such consept. They'll slap together something and call it release 6,6.1,7.0 or something. But these releases won't even be properly tested. Red Hat out of the box used to be so full of root-exploits. A typical honey pot redhat system only lasted a few minutes before they were 0wn3d.
That's bad if their market is the linux newbie: a linux newbie is not expected to know how to lock down a system before plugging in the cable modem.

There is no possible compromise between stability, reliability and bleeding edge. You see the same thing elsewhere. Windows NT was available only for limited hardware choices, while 95 and 98 was supposed to support everything. NT was supposed to be reliable, and 95/98 was expected to crash.

To achieve good reliability, features have to be introduced with care, and regression testing must be extensive. If you can come up with a method that provides the highest reliability without sacrificing new features, you'll be a very wealthy man one day.

Debian is doing the right thing by maintaining these branches. In fact, that's the way the best commercial software shops do things, except they allow the end user to see only the stable version.

The moral: Don't buy any new and fancy HW for a production system. The HW is not production proven yet, and you won't be able to find a stable OS for it.

If you want the latest and greatest HW and SW, make do with less than optimal reliability, but don't go whining like a baby if something breaks or crashes.

Re:Debian vs. Redhat

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously haven't used a RedHat system with up2date, or you're talking out of your ass.

Up2date is pretty much the same thing as apt-get. It checks your packages, tells you which ones have upgrades and downloads/installs them for you if you want.

Re:Debian vs. Redhat

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried 2 different versions of Debian and had the same problem as the poster. X just wouldn't friggen install right, there were claims that dependencies weren't satisfied (this is in the initial installer) and the only way to get it to work was download the .tgz binaries and do it by hand. So much for the god-like apt that Debian users always brag about...

The initial point is that you have 2 distros in your hand,
Distro1:
Problems installing, shit don't work...
Distro2:
It installs fine and works out of the box.

In the end the systems are essentially the same, but one took a hell of a lot more work.

Gee, which one am I going to choose?? hmmmm.

Re:Debian vs. Redhat

[Anonymous Coward]

Shhh...we don't want to get the debian crew in even more of a tizzy. So what if they don't keep up with the rest of the world.

My MSDOS system with no TCP/IP stack is even more secure than your 2 year old debian system. So nya nya...

Re:Debian vs. Redhat

[oli_freyr]

Last time I checked (and it's been a while) potato had kernel 2.2 which didn't have sophisticated USB support.

Like many have said before me: install stable and apt-get dist-upgrade to testing on your desktop boxes. Then you get X 4.1 and kernel 2.4.13 (with USB support).

APT makes it definitely worth the (IMHO nonexisting) extra effort to use Debian.

Re:Debian vs. Redhat

[s.a.m]

I'm not calling you an idiot, and don't think that you are. But you don't have to build a new kernel, it's part of the initial kernel setup when you do the initial system setup.

Great - I updated from 2.2r3 to woody last night .

[Crspe]

There I was, having a problem with ssh that I just couldnt fix, so I thought I would upgrade to woody. The ssh version went from 1.2.x to 2.9.x (or something like that) and the problem disappeared! I mean 1.2 to 2.9 is a big jump - I am not surprised that it made a difference.

Are there any other linux distros which still have the 2.2 kernel as their current release version? Personally I would prefer to see woody released earlier instead of doing small patches to an out-of-date distro. I mean dont get me wrong, debian is great, I love it as a distro, its just that right now it seems a bit behind the times.

Careful

[Erasei]

This is not to be confused with Dan Quail's new release of Debian, which is potatoe.

Re:Careful

[syrinx]

This is not to be confused with Dan Quail's new release of Debian, which is potatoe.

And of course, Dan Quail is not to be confused with our former vice president, who is Dan Quayle...

Re:Careful

[billmoss]

you forgot the 'i'

Re:Debian is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

You should see a doctor. May I suggest Freud.

It's not dead. I get about 40 (woody-)updates each week. I got raiserfs on all partitions, linux 2.4.13, devfs and stuff. And it's quite stable too.

FTP sites list ?

[mirko]

Why would you need FTP, when you have APT ? ;-)

Re:FTP sites list ?

[B'Trey]

Perhaps you meant to say "Why do you neeed the list, when you have apt-spy?"

Ouch!

[gcondon]

Tough room.

corn on the cob

[celestial13]

what kernel is included in this revision?

my honest dumb question

[Anonymous Coward]

just did my first Linux install... how would I know which kernel I am using?

Re:my honest dumb question

[AsylumWraith]

The kernel version should show up right above your login prompt once the system is booted. If not, try "uname -a"

The output should look something like:

Linux shiva.adubn1.nj.home.com 2.4.7-10 #1 Thu Sep 6 17:27:27 EDT 2001 i686 unknown

the third field (in my case, 2.4.7-10) is the kernel version.

Re:my honest dumb question

[Anonymous Coward]

just did my first Linux install... how would I know which kernel I am using?

The command you need is uname -a

prompt$ uname -a

Linux dual.claar.net 2.4.2 #5 SMP Mon Apr 23 01:46:42 CDT 2001 i686 unknown

So I'm running 2.4.2

Re:my honest dumb question

[rodolfo.borges]

if you want to recieve a response,
then you should not post as an anoymous coward.
anyway, to see the kernel version, just do:

$ cat /proc/version

Re:my honest dumb question

[Anonymous Coward]

He got three responses, fool.

upgrading to r4

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been running Debian Potato for about 6 months now..APT has kept my installed programs up to date, I guess, but I never got around to upgrade to r3, or the r4 for that matter... Since there is no day like the present, I'd like to get started right away. My question is, however, will an apt-get dist-upgrade get all the latest deb's (r4 debs, that is) and upgrade me automatically to debian2.2r4? Or is this way too easy a disposition and are things more complex? Please enlighten me :)

Re:upgrading to r4

[nion]

My question is, however, will an apt-get dist-upgrade get all the latest deb's (r4 debs, that is) and upgrade me automatically to debian2.2r4?

That's exactly what it will do. Apt-get is great.

I predicted that this would happen

[JahToasted]

I knew that one or two days after I finished downloading the 2.2_rev3 iso (on a 56Kbs dialup!)that rev4 would come out... I'm gonna download the latest KDE now, so expect 3.0 to be released next week...

Re:I predicted that this would happen

[Anonymous Coward]

2.2r3 should only take around 5 minutes to rsync up to 2.2r4 with a 56Kb/sec modem connection. Please don't waste bandwidth and try to download the whole thing over again.

What testing is

[PhracturedBlue]

Anyone who wants to know what testing is for should probably read (from Anthony Towns): this

The doc is somewhat out of date, and testing hasn't worked nearly as well as they had hoped for it's primary task (shortening the release cycle), but it certainly fills the need of having reasonably stable packages that are still up-to-date.

Basically the important parts are:
> * New "testing" distribution
> This is a (mostly finished) project that will allow us
> to test out distribution by making it "sludgey" rather
> than frozen: that is, a new distribution is added between
> stable and unstable, that is regularly and automatically
> updated with new packages from unstable when they've
> had a little testing and now new RC bugs.
...
> * Testing updates to frozen is suboptimal: updates go into
> incoming, wait there for a while, get added to frozen,
> we discover they introduce as many release critical bugs
> as they solve, rinse, repeat. The "wait for a while" part
> is particularly suboptimal, but without it, it's not really
> a freeze.

The current way we do things is basically to build a new package, hope it
works as advertised, and let people test it. If it doesn't work, we repeat
as many times as necessary, or eventually just throw the package out.

A better way to handle this, which I suspect everyone's just spontaneoulsy
reinvented as the read the above, is to try to keep around a previous
version of the package that was usable. That way if the new packages don't
work, we can just keep the old one rather than having to throw it out
entirely.

That, essentially, is the point of the "testing" distribution: to contain
a consistent set of the most recent "believed-to-be-reliable" packages.

So the main point of this is to create a distribution that, essentially,
doesn't have any release critical bugs [5] and can be kept that way
with much less effort on the part of the release manager. That should
have a pretty profound effect with regard to speeding up the freeze,...

Read the whole thing, though. And remember that it's a year old, and things have changed a lot since then.

Re:Debian is dying

[well_jung]

You should see a doctor. May I suggest Freud.

May I suggest another doctor?

Security issues in "Miscellaneous Bugfixes"

[shani]

The "Fix for insecure regexp" and "Important security bugfix" in the "Miscellaneous Bugfixes" from the press release bother me.

I am subscribed to the Debian security mailing list, and use the security.debian.org site for apt-get of the latest fixes. However, if the fact that there are fixes that don't appear in any announcements is worrisome!

Hopefully it isn't as bad as I think it is, and they were just discovered as this release was on the way out the door. Still, a security advisory would be nice on these! :(

Re:Security issues in "Miscellaneous Bugfixes"

[Lathi-]

I've been keeping my potato server up to date. I just did the 'apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade' and only had 6 packages upgraded. I guess that would be expected. But yes, I've been waiting for security announcements on bugtraq.

#debian

[crisco]

actually, if you visit #debian make sure you read the little description thing for that channel, the gurus there can be quite nasty if you're asking the same question that the last 40 people asked. But other than that yes they are quite helpful.

Debian releases

[perrin]

I've always been thinking that releases for Debian is kind of useless for those of us with permanent connection to the internet. I'm running Debian testing and I'm almost entirely happy with the stability of that.

If Debian made yet another version that is a bit more conservative (say, a month testing instead of just days for "testing"), I'd recommend that to my friends instead of RedHat. There is no way I'll recommend them that outdated potato version.

Releases deserve to die.

Re:Debian releases

[rlangis]

Hell, even with a 56k connection my system is current on at *least* a weekly basis.

apt-get update ; apt-get dist-upgrade

For a system where uptime and security are the #1 concerns, potato suits me just fine. My workstation runs woody/sid. Potato with the 2.4 kernel packages and security sources.list updates is quite a nice little system.

Just keep 'er updated every week or so, and you'll have no problems.

which Debian should I use

[mrm677]

I plan on installing a Linux distro soon. I'd like to try Debian, however I want XFree86 4.1.0 and a 2.4 kernel. Can I download a Woody distro? Or should I get Potato and upgrade the parts I want?

Re:which Debian should I use

[Anonymous Coward]

You can do either. I've started from a potato distro and updated to Woody, but installing Woody over the Internet will also work. There are docs on the Debian site about this; have a look, and good luck :-).

Re:which Debian should I use

[mvdwege]

Ok, I hope you get to read this.

Do remember that upgrading a distribution is non-trivial, even though Debian does its best to make it as painless as possible. If you have the stomach for dealing with some minor niggles the procedure is as follows:

1. Install the stable distro ('Potato'), but only install enough to get networking going. The base installation with no further package selection should work if you're on a network, otherwise use tasksel to install the dialup utilities.
2. Edit /etc/apt/sources.list to include a line to the testing distro ('Woody') or if you're feeling adventurous, add unstable ('Sid'). Just copy the relevant lines that are already there, changing stable to testing or unstable as you see fit.
3. Run apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade. If all goes well, you should end up with your base system upgraded to testing or unstable (I don't know if you can upgrade straight to unstable yet. 3 months ago I had to upgrade to testing first).
4. Install the rest of your system using either dselect, deity or just plain apt-get install <package-name>.
5. Have fun!

If you do run into any problems, check the docs. If they don't help, or if you haven't got a clue which docs to consult, ask the debian-user mailing list, they tend to be friendly folk. If you have more preliminary questions, check my email on my user page.

Mart

Re:which Debian should I use

[mrm677]

Thanks for the advice!

I don't like Redhat/Mandrake because when I went from RH6.2 to RH7.1, I lost all of my custom configuration setups. I tried building my own Linux box without a distribution...I got everything working but quickly realized that maintaining it is not as fun as building it. I hope Debian's apt package system is what I'm looking for...

I'm looking forward to trying out Debian.

-Mike

Re:which Debian should I use

[mvdwege]

Ok. Glad to be of service. Two more things to look out for if you are going to try Debian though:

1. Debian does not autodetect your hardware. Make sure you have a list of what's inside your PC. Especially important are the relevant chipsets. Also, if you have gotten X to work on another distro, make a printout of your XF86Config file. You might need it.
2. If you do try 'unstable' remember that the instability does not refer to the software itself, but usually to the packaging system. 'unstable' is a nice distro, very up to date, but occasionaly things like duplicate files in different packages, or dependency conflicts arise. If you're not afraid of the occasional glitch, I'd recommend 'unstable'. Just be sure to track it by a few days, so you can watch out for the more critical bugs (someone already mentioned a patch in libpam gone awry, disabling login for a full day).

Mart

Sid's problems are overrated

[Mendax Veritas]

When I first started using Debian, I installed Potato. All the software was badly out of date, so I moved to Woody. A lot of the software was still out of date. So I moved to Sid. Everything worked. I'm happy.

Yes, from time to time something bad happens (the broken PAM package of last February of March being the worst incident -- it broke login!), but those usually get fixed up within a day. The more lengthy problems are usually caused by a package being reorganized or renamed such that everything dependent on it has to be rebuilt. This is currently occurring with the Python packages. So I have all the core Python packages marked "hold" until everything I need that's dependent on them is updated. It's a minor annoyance, but no big deal really.

So by and large, I'm very happy with Sid and I think its breakage problems are severely overrated, mostly by people who are afraid of living on the edge.

Woody *does* have some problems

[Anonymous Coward]

I would call the following a real, significant, problem in Woody. OK, there are some Sid bits on my box, but we are talking about components that are at the -9 (dash nine, not minus nine) stage and are fairly stable & debugged.

I'm talking about XFree86 4.1 (4.1-9) and KDE 2.2 (4th or 5th general bug-fix iteration, generally quite stable except one thing).

What is the exact problem you ask? Well, my KDE 2.2 KDM has some bad mojo with XF4.1 and cannot launch correctly. My screen flickers only to settle down into console mode. The only way I could get KDM to launch was to use KDE 2.1's KDM instead of 2.2. (I'm saying 2.1, but I can't recall right now. It's the version of KDE currently in Woody, the pre-2.2 one.)

I don't know, but to me, this is major stuff.

Debian Symbol looks like a rat tail

[Oswald]

Since I have decided I like Slashdot a lot better if I don't give a damn about my karma, I'll ask make this stupid observation: the Debian logo looks a lot like a "russet rat tail" in Asheron's Call.

And that gives me a nostalgia rush--it's been almost 2 years exactly since I started playing AC (and 18 months since I quit and 13 months since I started back, and 6 months since I quit again.) Anybody been to Nanto lately?

Re:Debian Symbol looks like a rat tail

[Anonymous Coward]

Nanto's nice enough, but there's a whole new big island and houses to play with now.... You know you want to go buy Dark Magisty...... :-)

Ko-chea/Ko-Chen

Re:Debian Symbol looks like a rat tail

[betis70]

So are you saying Asheron's Call is like smoking? Its easy to quit, I've done it a dozen times ...

Re:Debian Symbol looks like a rat tail

[eckes]

Actually the swirl is a heavyly discussed marketing instrument for debian to rule the world, you may look at ... for other market leaders facilidating the swirl to impress buyers.

Critique

I just wonder what exactly will be sold by debian :) Perhaps a good cup of tea to make the waiting more interesting?

Anyway, I do recommend to read "Debian weekly"

Debian Weekly

Greetings
Bernd
(Debian Developer, I admit :)

Re:Debian Symbol looks like a rat tail

[Oswald]

So, in Indonesia, the word for 'developer' is, uh, 'developer'? Since I'm reasonably sure there was already a word for 'one who develops', I'm guessing the English word is used to mean specifically a software developer. Must be an interesting bit of etymology there;)