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

[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.