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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.
For those who don't need the rock-stable, but somewhat out-of-date reliability of Potato, but want to give Debian a bash, try the testing (AKA woody) release.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).
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.
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.
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.
der dee der.
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?
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.
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.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.