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

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

[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

[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.

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.

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.