Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 Released

emissary47 writes "The Debian Project is pleased to announce the release of Debian GNU/Linux version 3.0. Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system, which now supports a total of eleven processor architectures, includes KDE and GNOME desktop environments, features cryptographic software, is compatible with the FHS v2.2 and supports software developed for the LSB. The Release Notes are available here."

Comments

what can you say

[DopeThrone]

i dont see microsoft putting out anything that weilds that much power

Re:what can you say

[ShavenYak]

Yeah, this new Debian release kicks ass! Now the Debian users can have all the great software that was in RedHat 2 versions ago. Whee!!

Hell has frozen over!

[Anonymous Coward]

In other news... Hell has frozen over, pigs are flying, and the Chicago Cubs have won the World Series.

Re:Hell has frozen over!

[Chanc_Gorkon]

Amen to that! Sheesh! I thought it would never be released!

Re:Hell has frozen over!

[Richard_at_work]

i think those are waiting for Duke Nuken Forever to be ported to Linux....

Re:Hell has frozen over!

[Skyshadow]

...and Mozilla 1.0 has been released.

Oh, wait...

Re:Hell has frozen over!

[Abstrakt]

Hell has frozen over, pigs are flying

Aptly said! I was beginning to think we'd never live to see this day.

But seriously, a big thank you to all the diligent Debian people responsible for this!

Re:Hell has frozen over!

[nafmo]

It's all just an illusion.

Re:Hell has frozen over!

[Eccles]

Dr. Raymond Stantz: We mean real wrath-of-God type stuff. Plagues, darkness--
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave!
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes--
Dr. Peter Venkman: Riots in the streets, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!

Re:Hell has frozen over!

[BrookHarty]

Mozilla spell checker hasnt been released yet. Humm.

Re:Hell has frozen over!

[adamy]

Venkman said, "Human Sacrifice, Dogs and Cats..."

Possibly my favorice Ghost Busters quote...and that is one quoteable movie

Re:Hell has frozen over!

[Chicks_Hate_Me]

they didn't call it Duke Nukem Forever for nothing

Re:Hell has frozen over!

[Chris Pimlott]

Oh goodie, Duke Nukem Forever must be coming out any moment now!

Re:Hell has frozen over!

[ReelOddeeo]

Mozilla spell checker hasnt been released yet. Humm.

I'm much moore inturestid in seeing thu slashdot spel checkker released.

It has ben kept captiv for far to long. You know, the spelcheker that the editors use before posting artacles.

Re:Hell has frozen over!

[SailorFrag]

And TF2 might even go gold! (Looks around) Maybe not. :-(

Since we haven't heard anything from valve in a while, I don't think they're even close... what is comparable to hell freezing over and pigs flying, except about 10 times as amazing? Probably a new game from Valve. ;-)

Hey, they do a great job... but they do take a while.

Re:Hell has frozen over!

[sigsegv]

Hell has frozen over...the Chicago Cubs have won the World Series

I guess Boston winning the World Series is even outside the scope of hell freezing over.

Re:Hell has frozen over!

[Jonathan the Nerd]

...Riots in the streets, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!

-- The Ghostbusters explain why not to buy or use any Microsoft products.

Re:Hell has frozen over!

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a life (and a babe), sucker!

Re:Hell has frozen over!

[Anonymous Coward]

In completely related news, Debian users are still the bunch of elitist children they always have been!

Face it, Gentoo has beaten you in your own game.
*grin* Gentoo is the only model distribution to compete in the next generation of POSIX operating systems.

Believe me, and if you don't; you're already too arrogant to compete.

Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[RelliK]

Can any of the Debian insiders comment on what the future of Debian looks like?

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[noahm]

Can any of the Debian insiders comment on what the future of Debian looks like?

The whole point of Debian is that everything is done in the open. There's very little to be an "insider" on. Just subscribe to the mailing lists or read the archives and you'll be an insider.

Having said that, the future of Debian looks like a blue sky, with fluffy white clouds here and there. And a little flying saucer off in the distance.

noah

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[GlassHeart]

Having said that, the future of Debian looks like a blue sky, with fluffy white clouds here and there.

Damn, it's going to be Windows 95?!

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[noahm]

Damn, it's going to be Windows 95?!

Oh, that nasty low-res boot screen was supposed to be clouds. Christ, I never could make that out. ;^)

But I don't recall there being a flying saucer. We at Debian put a lot of thought into the value that the flying saucer brings. It's how we differentiate from the other products on the market.

Why I just posted this I'll never know...

noah

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[henley]

The future of Debian looks like the past.

There will be, lo, much wailing and gnashing of teeth because Random Cool Package vX+1 isn't in the STABLE release. There will be much complaining by users (of which I am one!) when RCP vX+1 takes longer than 15 nanoseconds to hit the UNSTABLE release, regardless of how complicated it is to support on N (where N>=11) different architectures.

In about 3 months time, there will be much complaining about how long the freeze for "Sid" is taking, and how out of date "Woody" has become (completely ignoring the fact that most people using Debian on servers are probably more than happy to continue to use "Potato" or earlier, just so long as they can apt-get from security.debian.org).

In about 2.5 years, there will be another announcement on /. announcing Debian 4.0.

And all through this, real honest-to-goodness users will be able to keep right up to the bleeding edge of free software just by adding a single line to their sources.list, and won't notice a thing.

By someone who's apparently been running Debian 3.0 for some time now (a number of days, anyway) and didn't even notice. Thanks, apt-get dist-upgrade!

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[Cro Magnon]

In about 2.5 years, there will be another announcement on /. announcing Debian 4.0.

Are you sure you haven't misplaced the decimal point on the years?

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[SK-null]

Sid will never be frozen. Sid (Still In Development) is always the unstable distribution. The new Testing distributio is sarge.
And hopefully, it won't take 2.5 years till the next version.

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[JensChr]

Just for the record:

Sid will never freeze. The next release will be named "Sarge".

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[dbarclay10]

Can any of the Debian insiders comment on what the future of Debian looks like?

Well, there are no real "Debian insiders". However, not everybody is an active member of Debian community, so I can explain a few things in that context.

First, before I go into what's being discussed with respect to Debian's very long release cycle, I'd just like to explain a few things.

Debian/stable releases are typically meant for server environments, and as a stable development platform. With that in mind, where tradeoffs are made, stability is favoured over the newest software available. "Stability" doesn't just mean apps that don't crash. It also means things that don't change out from underneath you.

System integrators, OEMs, businesses with a large base of deployed Debian machines, and developers of commercial, closed-source software all appreciate slow release cycles. A distribution which gets only critical updates over a few years is an easy distribution to target. Nothing will break for them, they can get to know the system extremely well.

For the server environment, well-proven applications will almost always be preffered. Where a newer package is required for some feature that they wish, options ARE available.

Debian is split into three trees. There's Debian/stable, Debian/testing, and Debian/unstable. Generally speaking, when a new package is uploaded to Debian, it first goes to "unstable" . After a suitable period of testing, and if there are no more bugs in the new package than the old package, it will be migrated to "testing". Actually, a lot more is considered, but those are probably the two most important aspects of the process.

So, first a package is uploaded to "unstable". If it's good, it's migrated to "testing". At an arbitrary point, when things seem pretty stable, "testing" will be frozen. Developers have ample warning of this; if a version of their package in "testing" is too old for their liking, they have the opportunity to update it before the freeze.

During the freeze, only important updates are made to packages. Security updates, updates which fix release-critical bugs, etc., etc.. When all the release-critical bugs have been fixed, the "testing" tree is made the "stable" tree, and we have a new Debian release. That's what we saw happen today :)

Once a Debian tree has been released, only important updates are made. If Debian/stable has OpenSSH version 3.4, and there's an important security fix made in 3.5, instead of 3.5 being uploaded, the fix will be made to 3.4, and a new update to that package uploaded.

This is all done in the interest of providing a robust, stable, easy-to-target distribution.

The "testing" and "unstable" trees will almost always have newer versions of packages than "stable". If a user using "stable" wishes a newer package, then they can either migrate to "testing" or "unstable", or simply install the newer package and its newer dependencies. Simple as pie.

So, really, a faster release process isn't strictly required. However, there are some very vocal parts of the Debian community which would appreciate a faster release cycle. I'm undecided on my own feelings, but there have been many, many, many suggestions.

Basically, they all revolve around freezing "testing" earlier than has been the norm. For more information, read the list archives at http://lists.debian.org/

For the rest of Debian's future? Package updates :) What else would be in Debian's future?
Thanks :)

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[papason]

IMHO .....apt-get under SuSE 8.0 is much more fun.

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[uhoreg]

So, really, a faster release process isn't strictly required.

A faster release process is required if we expect newbies (Debian newbies -- not Linux newbies) to install Debian and have a fairly up-to-date set of packages. Although testing is fairly stable, it is still possible to run into the odd packaging problem, which newbies could have a hard time figuring out. Plus the fact that testing has a serious security problem (security updates won't show up until about two weeks after they are packaged since they have to go through unstable first). But that's just my opinion.

What else would be in Debian's future?

Hurd and *BSD ports. (Hopefully both will be in sarge, though I'm not too confident about Hurd being there on time.) There are also rumors of a Win32 port, although there doesn't seem to be much work being done on that front. Then there's work on using Progeny's Debian installer as a user-friendly alternative/replacement to Debian's default installer. And they'll probably add a few more architectures to the mix too.

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[isorox]

Sid will never freeze. The next release will be named "Sarge".

Is sarge the same as sid is now? or the same as woody is, then is built on? I'm running sid at the moment, if I change to sarge will i be downgrading?

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[jsse]

You deserve modded beyond 5. You almost summarized all whines that Debian users made and gave answers to them.

I think we should add this post in FAQ(provided whinners care to read, that is). :D

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[joib]

Currently sarge == woody. Eventually newer packages will start to trickle down from sid to sarge, the same way the trickled down from sid to woody during the woody development. So yes, if you change to sarge you will be downgrading.

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[kubrick]

All true... except that 'sid' is to be the permanent name for the unstable branch, while the next distro will take its name from whatever testing has become now. Sid was the evil kid from Toy Story 1, given to strange experiments and broken toys... also, it stands for "still in development".

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[isorox]

and it'll always be like that, unless I forgo apt-get for the next 2 years so that sid now = sarge now.

I've gone to the dark side, and wont be going back. Still, kde3...

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[orkysoft]

Maybe you want to attract conspiracy nuts that distrust Windows with its "NSA_KEY" ;-)

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[Penguinshit]

Amen to the above.

I have Potato running on a couple of public servers (one under pretty heavy load) and they've all been stable as rocks.. we're talking polished marble here.

The lone exception was the time I rebuilt the kernel and forgot to run lilo. A 40 mile drive in the middle of the night will quickly remind you to NOT do that again.

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[Anonymous Coward]

I always see these Debian people talking about how powerful apt-get is, and how things get updated for them automagically. But what about authentication? When I update a RedHat package, I can (and *DO*) verify the package signature before unpacking it. How does apt-get deal with this need?

Surely you're not installing software directly off the internet without knowing for sure where it cam from. Or are you?

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[damiam]

Apt-get is capable of doing this, but it doesn't at the moment - thew infrastructure is not there to get every package signed. This is one of the things planned for sarge.

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[Buck2]

and they've all been stable as rocks.. we're talking polished marble here.

Perhaps you mean "stable as stone".

I'll admit that "stable as a rock" is the more common phrase, but then you follow it up with marble, which is not normally described as a rock. Maybe you could have said polished lava rock or something.

You suck. heheh

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[sinserve]

its is _NSAKEY.

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[austus]

No, if it was 25 they'd be talking about Debian Hurd ;P

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[DdJ]

A faster release process is required if we expect newbies (Debian newbies -- not Linux newbies) to install Debian and have a fairly up-to-date set of packages.

And why do we want that? I don't want that. Why should I give a rat's ass if Debian contains a "fairly up-to-date set of packages"? I want it to be a stable server OS. I want to be able to set it up and then proceed to ignore the "state of the art", getting actual work done instead of caring about software releases. As long as it's all basically POSIX and gets security-related updates quickly enough, who cares what the exact version numbers are?

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[Anonymous Coward]

who's "we"

i expect newbies to do whatever they want. i dont expect them to use debian, successfully the first time

the package system is incredibly easy to get a up to date set. modify apt/sources.list, slightly.
apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade. apt-get install kate evolution ...
those get you all the libs and stuff
i am grateful for the work of the debian team. i dont expect them to do anything, (except keep up the great work)

forget about the newbies. nothing is ever going to be simple enough for the lowest common denominator.

get over it.

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[Dunkalis]

Debian is a community effort, so if the community wants faster development, they can help. Debian is very conservative, and thats okay, as long as its stable and flexible, which it is.

HURD is not going to arrive for years. By then, everyone will haved moved from the Linux kernel to something else, and HURD will be horribly outdated. If we don't move from the Linux kernel, there probably will be a major technology change in the future. BSD ports is probably coming soon, in addition to the coolness of regular apt-get. It'll probably be something like apt-get src-install . I've never used Progeny, but it would have to be text-based and simpler then Debian's current installer, if thats possible. Debian is an example of powerful simplicity, and we don't need some flashy GUI installer to mess it up, sorry.

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[Captain Pedantic]

If you had used "kernel-package" to compile the kernel, you would have updated Lilo (or whatever) the moment you had installed the new kernel.

It is little touches like that which makes Debian the best distro for lazy people.

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[bockman]

Debian/stable releases are typically meant for server environments, and as a stable development platform. With that in mind, where tradeoffs are made, stability is favoured over the newest software available. "Stability" doesn't just mean apps that don't crash. It also means things that don't change out from underneath you.
.
I wonder if stable rules should not be relaxed a little, to includeupstream bux-fixing minior releases. I.e. if Woody ships with packge foo-3.0.1, and then comes out foo-3.0.2 which fixes a few non-critical-but-still-serious bugs,
shouldn't it be included in stable? Maybe not automatically, but in the next point release?
(maybe at discretion of the release manager?)

I know, many so called bug-fix releases actually slip inside also some added feature (starting with the kernel itself). But shouldn't this matter left in the (ir)ressponibily of mainstream developers?.
After all, it is _their_ software.

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[Xouba]

Well, you've just to check debian-devel to see what happens. There's a great deal of arguing (which often turns to flaming) in the lists about this issue. Every few weeks, someone posts his/her "True One Solution To Debian Release Cycles" (tm), proposing to change this and that to speed up release cycles. And it's always received with both flames and some enlightening posts. Though usually it's hard to differ ones from the other :-)

The main problems with release cycles, IIRC, are they many things that go "in the background". There's more to relasing a distro than updating packages and saying "Hey boys, we're frozen". There's work in auto-builders, in translations, in boot floppies (which, IIRC again, were one of the things that made woody be released with delay), and in general coordination of developers.

That's why I can't but freak out when I see people complaining on Debian. Hell, if there's something that you don't like, shut the fuck up and start helping. Many people seem to think that Debian is just "another distro", and don't realize the *big* effort all the developers are doing. Ok, so many of them don't have such a hard time because they maintain only a few simple packages (like me O:-)), but try to keep up with Mozilla, XFree, glibc or GNOME. It's hard work, believe me.

And besides: if you want updated software, you have the unstable branch. Shut up and use it if you want something new. Because for your production servers, you will do good with testing or even potato (remember, it's updated whenever a security problem arises, and usually in 24-48 hours).

Sorry for being so offtopic. I promise I started the post thinking about saying something useful :-)

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[orkysoft]

Whatever.

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[Briareos]

Having said that, the future of Debian looks like a blue sky, with fluffy white clouds here and there. And a little flying saucer off in the distance.

Why do I have the feeling that you've watched NieA_7 a little too often? ^_^

np: Burnt Friedman & Jaki Liebezeit - Royal Roost (Secret Rhythms)

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[sinserve]

Rewrite "Blow Me" in reverse polish.

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[jkramar]

testing has a serious security problem (security updates won't show up until about two weeks after they are packaged since they have to go through unstable first).

This is not quite right; according to http://security.debian.org/, and to my experiences, you can use apt to easily get the latest security updates. This requires a line such as

deb http://security.debian.org/ woody*/updates main contrib non-free

in your /etc/apt/sources.list file, and is no big deal. Mirrors do not exist, for security (my, what a coincidence!) reasons.

* replace woody with the branch of your choice

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[uhoreg]

security.debian.org doesn't say anything about testing, woody's security archive didn't appear until some short time before it was released, and my own experience is being corrected by Wichert (from the Debian security team, at least I think it was Wichert, but it was definitely someone who knew the security process) when I made a post on a Debian list stating that I thought that testing would get security fixes. Anyways, we'll see when the next security announcement comes, if it contains fixes for sarge. There should be one coming up soon -- a bug was found in PHP4. At least there is a sarge directory on the security server, so maybe things have changed since Wichert's comment.

Re:Didn't they promise to speed up release cycle?

[Penguinshit]

sometimes some of us just like to do it a bit more manually. It helps us feel more in touch.

I know I just dropped a big hunk of troll-bait.. flame away.

Neat!

[TriCCer]

I can't wait 'till Debian releases a stable version of Debian GNU/HURD ;)=

Re:Neat!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well considering the hurd doesn't even support filesystems over 1 gig or sound cards, and mostly consists of drivers stolen out of the 2.0 linux kernel i'm not sure why that would be so exciting.

Re:Neat!

[TriCCer]

GNU is GNU, I wouldnt call any of it stolen.


does anyone know of any other mayor GNU-dist that does HURD?

Re:Neat!

[Anonymous Coward]

Supposedly, they're aiming for Woody+1, so give it a couple of years.

Re:Neat!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh so now linux is part of the GNU project?

Sure when Linux uses tools from GNU project it has to be called "GNU/Linux".

So Hurd takes so many drivers from linux kernel (old as 2.0 version at that) then perhaps you best be called the HURD the Linux/HURD instead becuase without the linux drivers the hurd would support 2 kinds nics and ide hdds and that's it.

So next time you mention the Linux/HURD please use the proper name so that there isn't any confusion about where all the drivers came from, thanks.

Re:Neat!

[Anonymous Coward]

>So Hurd takes so many drivers from linux kernel
>(old as 2.0 version at that) then perhaps you best
>be called the HURD the Linux/HURD instead becuase
>without the linux drivers the hurd would support 2
>kinds nics and ide hdds and that's it.
That's stupid mostly because like Linux, the HURD is only a kernel. A very extensible, cool, and incomplete kernel, but a kernel. Thus, then the OS would be GNU/Linux/HURD, which is a mouthful.

Debian guys WAKE UP

[Anonymous Coward]

For God's sake! Please use more recent software, like XFree 4.2 and KDE 3. Maybe not yet Gnome 2, but especially XFree 4.2 is solid enough.

If Debian continues to be SO behind the times in the software they use, I am sorry, but Gentoo awaits for me around the corner.

It is so bad that the real community project, Debian, really fails to impress so much. :(

Re:Debian guys WAKE UP

[zimage]

One of the problems is that Debian stable has to run on many different architechtures and XFree 4.2 doesn't yet run on all of them.

Re:Debian guys WAKE UP

[shamu247]

Obviously you are a moron. I should leave it at that but I will defend debian so that others will not be turned off to the best distro because of the incredibly small size of your pen.. cough intellect. The reason for this is because gnome2, kde3 are not ready to be in a linux distro... Watch a mailing list and watch the bug reports... that stuff crashes often.. Are we microsoft? I think not. The debian ppl want there base to be stable. Thats why when you install woody (Debian 3) you are installing the stable version of debian. There is also Sarge(testing) that has newer stuff that has proven to be pretty stable and Sid(unstable) which I am running which has the newest stuff. Before you bash it try it and figure out what is offered by the Debian Project in a whole not just the release of this version. Jonathan Taylor

Re:Debian guys WAKE UP

[Anonymous Coward]

How about this... you dont like it, then dont use it.

Debian is a rock solid distribution with an awesome standing in the linux community. You cant beat its packaging system, support, structure, availability and number of packages.

you want to tell me what you use in X4.2 that you cant live without if you use 4.1? I hate using Gnome and KDE because they are resource hogs and slow.

I have been using debian since it was pre 1.0 because even then it beat the competition.. which was slackware and redhat pretty much. I am not going to change because you are using newer versions of something.

Besides.. the unstable section is almost always as solid as the stable section.. I can use that if I want to upgrade.

Re:Debian guys WAKE UP

[OrangeSpyderMan]

And when I see how many of our customers are still running solaris 2.6 and 2.7, Debian release times just don't worry me anymore...

Re:Debian guys WAKE UP

[Anonymous Coward]

Since you're posting this sort of troll, you probably already know the truth of things, but in case you don't, I'll fill you in.

Debian GNU/Linux releases for 11 architectures, and aims to stable on all of them. Most distros concentrate on one or two (gentoo is no exception), and those one or two tend to be x86 and if you're lucky PPC. They also tend to cater to people that are in the latest-greatest-p6-123123MHz-gamer crowd.

It's important to realize that with Debian, users of non-standard architectures are not second class citizens like they are on other distros. If I install Debian Stable on a machine that Debian claims to support, I can be relatively sure that the system will run smoothly and without issue. This is much more than any other distro out there can say.

When you say that XF4.2 and KDE3 are stable, you mean they are stable on the intel architecture, something no one debates. But being stable on intel is useless to the Debian release crew if it doesn't compile on Alpha, SPARC, HPPA, and any of the other supported architectures.

Another thing that non-Debian users seem to have a very hard time with is the notion of Stable, Testing, and Unstable. When you use some other linux distro, a release is very important because the lack of a central repository and coordination of packages makes partial upgrades a royal pain in the butt. This is fondly called RPM hell. Actually, it has nothing to do with the RPM package format, which isn't really that much worse than the DEB format, but rather the way APT handles package dependencies and such.

A Debian user can keep his system up to date over a reasonable net connection, and I'd venture that most desktop debian users don't much care when something releases, because they don't track stable. Because stable needs to be stable on 11 architectures, it is nearly always behind -- but it's as stable as a rock. If you run x86 and want the lastest version of everything, stable is not for you. In that case, it doesn't matter when Debian releases.

If you're a newbie, track testing, because it's more stable than unstable but has a lot of pretty new packages. If you're adventurous and want the bleeding edge, track unstable. Despite its name, it's still more stable than say, Mandrake.

Hopefully, you're less ignorant now than you were before. If not, then you're beyond help.

Re:Debian guys WAKE UP

[bitva]

that's why there's stable, testing and unstable.

Re:Debian guys WAKE UP

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want stability, run MS-DOS. It doesn't crash, unless your machine does, and requires practically no memory. It will even run on an 8086, since it's all 16-bit code.

What, MS-DOS isn't good enough?
Perhaps that's because stability alone isn't sufficient, having an OS that doesn't crash but isn't capable of doing what you want or need it to do is completely pointless. I don't know about you, but I use a computer for functionality, not stability. Functionality is a necessity, stability is a nice extra, unless you're running mission critical applications, in which case stability is also a necessity, but not more so than functionality.

Re:Debian guys WAKE UP

[shamu247]

Umm... I am pretty sure msdos is pretty easy to crash.

or.

It may not crash as a single user OS where one does not fudge around. Debian stable is meant to be a stable multiuser platform that can run all sorts of services. And it is supposed to be stable.

Again if you want more just install sarge or sid like everyone else.

jon.

Re:Debian guys WAKE UP

[po8]

I'm not unhappy because XFree86 4.2 is not in Debian stable. I'm not even unhappy because it is not in testing. I'm unhappy because XFree86 4.2, after 6 months, is not even in unstable. That's just bogus.

4.2.99.1? Forget about it.

Re:Debian guys WAKE UP

[IkeTo]

> Maybe not yet Gnome 2, but especially XFree
> 4.2 is solid enough.

I've been wondering that for long as well, until I see this page...

http://people.debian.org/~branden/sid/

Well, we already have build for hppa, i386, ia64, m68k, mips, powerpc and sparc. Well... 7 architectures... but we need 11...

Let's say "good job" to Branden rather than continuing to blame Debian for trying to get a semi-finished product "XFree 4.2" into a shape that is reasonable to be included into the main archive.

Re:Debian guys WAKE UP

[Isle]

Actually it is. It is just named differently.

All the important fixes in XFree 4.2 (was there anything but fixes?) have been ported to the version of XFree 4.1 in Debian Woody.

Re:Debian guys WAKE UP

[rweir]

An interesting fact about Debian is that a lot of the software is supported on more platforms by Debian, than they are by the upstream authors. XFree86 is one example of this, I'm sure there are others.

Re:Debian guys WAKE UP

[jdaily]

> I'm not unhappy because XFree86 4.2 is not in Debian stable. I'm not even unhappy because it is not in testing.
> I'm unhappy because XFree86 4.2, after 6 months, is not even in unstable. That's just bogus.

Well, it has been in experimental for over a month.

See http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2002/debian-d evel-200204/msg01343.html for some idea of the challenges of maintaining X for Debian.

Also check out the Debian changelog for X (/usr/share/doc/xserver-xfree86/changelog.Debian.g z). It may give you some idea of how much effort it took to fine-tune 4.1.

On the other hand, why am I wasting time on an asshole who derides others' work as "bogus"?

(Disclaimer: I work with Branden Robinson, the maintainer for X in Debian, so I have some appreciation for the amount of work he puts into X.)

Re:Debian guys WAKE UP

[po8]

I've been known to put a bit of work into X myself, so calling me an "asshole" is probably not productive.

OTOH, perhaps I misunderstand the Debian software distribution model. The way I always thought it was supposed to work, the downstream maintainer dumps things into unstable ASAP so that folks can start using them. Then they work on getting them ready for inclusion in testing.

I've never heard of "experimental" as a standard part of the Debian distribution process for an incorporated package. Indeed, I note that Branden has had to put together his own set of mirrors to distribute his experimental XFree86 release. IMHO his acknowledgedly valuable time and energy would have been better spent by letting the standard Deb mirroring process take care of this, by making 4.2 the unstable build at that point. But again, perhaps there is something I am missing about the process.

I understand that building X for Deb is a lot of work. And "bogus" was a poorly chosen word for the frustration I'm feeling: my apologies. But I am, to choose a better word, frustrated.

I install Debian on others' boxes frequently (a few times a week lately). For a substantial fraction of those installs over the last 6 months, I have had to build X from XFree86.org source to get folks' video cards working properly. And for 5 of those months, I didn't even have the option of trying an experimental 4.2 build out of Branden's home directory.

For my own home boxes, I long ago put holds on most of the x-related packages and just build XFree86 from CVS when it seems like I need to. That's part of my frustration: I know that Branden's work is helping XFree86 to work a lot better for folks on non-x86 platforms and with unusual problems. But I am not (and I think many others are not) in this situation, and I've generally had awfully good luck with XFree86 top-of-tree. I wish someone would Deb that regularly: I wish I had time to do it, or that I could find someone willing whom I could help.

So yes, I apologize for the pejorative tone of "bogus". But no, I'm not willing to drink "a nice cup of shut the f*** up" at this point. I and others have real problems; it is increasingly difficult for us to support other Debian users and our own X-related work.

Re:WRONG!

[noahm]

Please stop pre-announcing our releases, you morons! When we release we will GODDAMN FUCKING TELL YOU.

Uhh, we did tell them. In the announcement.

It is official, woody is released.

Re:WRONG!

[chrj]

Please stop trolling. Check out these links if your mom and dad haven't already pulled the plug:

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/20 02 /debian-devel-announce-200207/msg00011.html
http: //www.debian.org/News/2002/20020719
http://www.de bian.org/releases/woody/releasenotes

Debian is very well though out... plz discuss

[shamu247]

Debian appears to me to be very well thought out in comparison to other distributions. Everything seems to be done in a calm reasonable manner with the exception of my constant kick/banning from #debian on openprojects. Other distributions may throw in candy for the kiddies that is not ready but debian waits and in turn creates quality. Please discuss.. I cant wait for gnome2 to leave experimental and hit sid. Jonathan Taylor

Re:Debian is very well though out... plz discuss

[shamu247]

Bad things happen to good ppl? jon.

Re:Debian is very well though out... plz discuss

[Osty]

Everything seems to be done in a calm reasonable manner with the exception of my constant kick/banning from #debian on openprojects.

If you're the same vhost-kiddie Jon from EFNet (the one who caused the *!jon@* username ban in EFNet's #Linux), then I'm sure all of your OPN #debian kickbans have been legitimate and warranted. I'm just surprised that they let you back in just to kickban you again, rather than keeping you out indefinitely.

If you're a different Jon, then nevermind.

Re:Debian is very well though out... plz discuss

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, toys like kde3 (which is in RedHat, SuSE, Conectiva, Mandrake, etc.). It is hardly a toy or experimental, but it is not even on unstable yet.

Now that i can use apt on Red Hat (see freshrpms.net) the whole arguement for using Debian has gone away.

Re:Debian is very well though out... plz discuss

[sloth jr]

It's discouraging that major infrastructure pieces like XFree86 4.2.0 (out since January) failed to make this release, yet candy like Gnome 1.4 made it. This was, in my opinion, the first 4.x release that attained stability.

Re:Debian is very well though out... plz discuss

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian is like a minority controlled government.

The only stuff that gets through has been very well filtered by all the factions.

It makes it more conservative, any radical changes dont get enough "mindshare support" to go all the way.

Re:Debian is very well though out... plz discuss

[Anonymous Coward]

#Linux is full of egotistical shitheads who don't know their ass from a hole in the ground. There are a FEW good people there that are actually helpful and friendly, but most will just try to find some way to ridicule someone rather than just state "I don't know".

Plus they are ban-happy. For some reason, it seems my entire subnet is banned (no, it's not because of me. I hadn't been in the channel for over a year and when I tried to log in.. Banned). That's a LOT of people being locked out. But I guess that's not a total loss considering the "help" most people would get in that channel.

So, in summary: Fuck you channel #Linux. You're useless.

Re:Debian is very well though out... plz discuss

[schmaltz]

Debian is like a minority controlled government.

The only stuff that gets through has been very well filtered by all the factions.

It makes it more conservative, any radical changes dont get enough "mindshare support" to go all the way.

Excellent description of the Debian project, but United Statesians will mistakenly think "minority" means unwhite people rather than an N-party system, where N>2. The US, having a bipolar political system, tend to see issues in terms of "for" or "against" with not many gradations in between.

Re:Debian is very well though out... plz discuss

[Osty]

Plus they are ban-happy. For some reason, it seems my entire subnet is banned (no, it's not because of me. I hadn't been in the channel for over a year and when I tried to log in.. Banned). That's a LOT of people being locked out. But I guess that's not a total loss considering the "help" most people would get in that channel.

Are you sure you just didn't have your identd not running or misconfigured? #Linux requires you run ident (it doesn't matter if you fake your ident or not, just so long as you are running some ident). Otherwise, you'll be banned.

Re:Debian is very well though out... plz discuss

[Buck2]

Excellent description of the Debian project, but United Statesians will mistakenly think "minority" means unwhite people rather than an N-party system, where N>2.

That's funny, because I'm born and raised in the US and I didn't think that. I'm glad you were there to explain it to all of my friends, though, so I didn't have to.

Don't be so categorical, dickhead.

Re:Debian is very well though out... plz discuss

[Carlos Laviola]

#linux@efnet has had *!*@*.br banned for years. That's just stupid.

Re:Debian is very well though out... plz discuss

[Osty]

#linux@efnet has had *!*@*.br banned for years. That's just stupid.

Not when Brazil has absolutely no laws against computer crime at all. We're protecting ourselves, there.

Re:Debian is very well though out... plz discuss

[Knuckles]

pieces like XFree86 4.2.0 (out since January) failed to make this release, yet candy like Gnome 1.4 made it.

You are confused. Gnome 1.4 has been out since around April 2001. See this message to the gnome list

Re:Debian is very well though out... plz discuss

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get why many IRC servers (or channels) require identd running. Its so outdated... Especially when so many people are running on a single-user systems (Windows). And if you set your username to root, some servers deny you access because you shouldn't run as root; like you're some kind of idiot who would actually run IRC as root.

Re:Debian is very well though out... plz discuss

[CentrX]

but United Statesians will mistakenly think "minority" means unwhite people

Why would anyone think that?

Re:Debian is very well though out... plz discuss

[Carlos Laviola]

We have laws regarding computer crimes. What does that have to do with an enthusiasts IRC channel?

Re:Debian is very well though out... plz discuss

[droolfool]

Oh yeah. Those nasty brazilians! They are very dangerous. Can you imagine how bad can it be to let them get into #linux? IRC is REALLY dangerous.

One Brazilian guy talked to me these days. And I'm scared. They don't have laws against computer crime. Man, that's scary. I'm gonna sell my computer, it's too dangerous.

This slashdotting is *terrible*!

[Saint Aardvark]

C'mon, people -- I'm doing an apt-get dist-upgrade from work, and I'm getting 1000 kb/s download.

Can't you kids do a proper slashdotting these days? It won't work unless we all pull together!

Re:This slashdotting is *terrible*!

[jrl]

It's because we were all too busy cvsup'ing. :)

-- jrl

Re:This slashdotting is *terrible*!

[gmhowell]

Because the poozers on /. who actually use Linux use RH or Mandrake (because Mandrake is 'leet). FWIW, debian.org is slowing down quite a bit for web page stuff.

I'm getting things in order. Plan on sticking with Woody, and to hell with Sarge.

Re:This slashdotting is *terrible*!

[Anonymous Coward]

My ass. Are you downloading the iso from the next building over or something? I can't even load the frontpage.

Re:This slashdotting is *terrible*!

[Saint Aardvark]

ISO? Just apt-get dist-upgrade: I've already got a working installation. I had to download, I think, about 100 MB.

Re:This slashdotting is *terrible*!

[Pacorro]

That's because nobody cares about Debian on /.

Re:This slashdotting is *terrible*!

[dimator]

Seriously though, I shudder to think of the bandwidth requirements a project like debian has. I'm not even talking about a release day such as this. I'm talking about thousands of people, all around the world, apt-get'ing their asses off, 24/7, year round. Who the hell pays for all this juice?

Re:This slashdotting is *terrible*!

[bmoore]

To a large part: Universities. Many of the mirrors are run by colleges / college LUGS. Of course, that means that the money is coming from 1) Students 2) Government, and therefore all of us through our taxes. Just remember, when paying your taxes, you are buying a faster apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade

Re:This slashdotting is *terrible*!

[jsse]

We are not living in US and we don't pay any US' tax and we got them for free! Absolutely freeeee!!

Oh wait, we have mirrors here too....talking about community effort rather than 'sponsorship. :)

Re:This slashdotting is *terrible*!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's because they are running Debian servers. They must be able to handle a slashdotting.

Re:This slashdotting is *terrible*!

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck that, poozers user RH, Mandrake, AND Debian. Non-poozers use Slackware, FreeBSD or their own hand-written OS (like me).

Re:This slashdotting is *terrible*!

[prog-guru]

Especially with that recent libc issue that rendered the whole base system vulnerable >:|

Re:This slashdotting is *terrible*!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey bro, show me some links or source. I doubt you could write your own "hello world" program, much less an operating system. You sound kind of stupid(hrm, or American possibly); and that is my basis for evaluation.

This is good.

[Martin Marvinski]

I like the balance of distos. Some like Redhat allow you to try the latest and greatest, while Debian goes for the tried and tested. Linux has a distro for everyone!! This is consumer choise, where it proves that you don't need to be upgrading every year to boost MS's profits while subjecting you as a beta tester for a "final release."

Re:This is good.

[CentrX]

Well, actually, Debian allows you to try the latest and greatest, on the same level as Red Hat, and then allows you to also run the latest and greatest, stuff that's newer than Red Hat. So, if that's all you want, Debian has a branch for everyone. :)

No forced downtime?

[ebh]

OK, this may be a Stupid Question, but, the announcement said that, "As always, Debian GNU/Linux systems can be upgraded painlessly, in place, without any forced downtime."

How do you upgrade the kernel without a reboot?

Re:No forced downtime?

[Anonymous Coward]

Easily, just install a newer kernel package.

You said nothing about restarting the kernel image, just upgrading it.

Re:No forced downtime?

[Nothinman]

You don't need to update the kernel, infact I'm pretty sure the default woody kernel is still in the 2.2s.

Re:No forced downtime?

[Lemmy Caution]

System != Kernel. Comprende?

Re:No forced downtime?

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you upgrade the kernel without a reboot?

Why do you have to upgrade the kernel?

Re:No forced downtime?

[kenthorvath]

It installs the new kernel for you first. Then you choose to boot it at your leisure. No FORCED downtime.

Re:No forced downtime?

[Resist148]

come check out the wonders of apt-get dist-upgrade, you don't need a new kernel in order to upgrade all of the packages...

Re:No forced downtime?

[dex@ruunat]

Who said you need to upgrade your kernel?

Re:No forced downtime?

[Anonymous Coward]

you dont upgrade it,

there are 2things, a debian system..and a linux kernel, neither can survive without the other

Re:No forced downtime?

[the_real_tigga]

The kernel is probably the one and only package that you need to reboot for to have "changes take effect".

But you are not forced to do so. The system will continue to work if you don't.

Thus: no *forced* reboot.

You might want to check this before shutdowning in any case.

Re:No forced downtime?

[SquadBoy]

Debian *never* upgrades the kernel unless you ask it to. That is the only piece that you may have to boot in order to get other than that it is 2 commands like the ones I just ran on my servers and will be doing on my home machine later today. Now granted these where put on testing long ago and thus it is about a 6 package upgrade for the servers it will be a bit more for the home box. But in any case unless you need/want a new kernel it can be done easier than any other distro that I know of.

Re:No forced downtime?

[SpatchMonkey]

• How do you upgrade the kernel without a reboot?

I wonder if that would be possible .. swiping the kernel out from underneath all the processes and putting a new one in its place.

You'd need ways of retaining all the state data for each module during the change, and having it translated to the replacement modules. It would have to be done in a certain order, from least critical modules to most critical.

Very difficult to do I'm sure, and would require massive redesign of the thing. But wouldn't it be neat eh?

Re:No forced downtime?

[Mattsson]

You'll have to take the system by surprise.
Do something unexpected and then switch kernel while the system is still confused.

Re:No forced downtime?

[Da Masta]

Or you could just overwrite the current kernel in the file system. The kernel is loaded into memory, and there's no filelock on the actual kernel file (I have found out the hard way many times).

If you mean replace the kernel running in memory, I'd think even that's possible with a new function in the kernel that's running which simply wipes all the system memory and loads the new kernel (which would have to bypass some bootup code). Of course, if you wanted to save all your process data, it would be a tiny bit more work. ;-)

Re:No forced downtime?

[ArsonSmith]

yea Debian has that ability to. Check out:

Debian GNU/Hurd

Re:No forced downtime?

[swillden]

How do you upgrade the kernel without a reboot?

You don't. But systems running potato are almost certainly running a 2.2 kernel, which woody also supports, so you don't really have to upgrade the kernel.

If there's something in 2.4 that you need, then yes, you'll have to reboot.

Re:No forced downtime?

[Menthos]

You mean sort of like

up2date -f kernel

on Red Hat? That's one command. You'll have to have the -f (for force) there, since the kernel is by default in the package skip list and not to be upgraded unless you explicitly say so.

A bit shoddy, really

[AirLace]

Debian 3.0 Woody comes with KDE 2 and XFree86 4.1 while 3 and 4.2 are out respectively. This is a bit sad, seeing that even CygWin and FreeBSD have more up-to-date versions in their releases. Just think of how much effort it took Cygwin to port the packages to Windows before packaging them, for example -- yet despite this their releases are far more timely. The Debian packagers claim that there is a lot of intricacy involved in the packaging, and i'm sure there is, but I don't buy that people should have to use older software with known bugs, several months after the upstream authors have released their software. Sadly, it seems that the maintainers of the most popular packages also seem to be the slowest to react to new releases.

If Mandrake, RedHat, SuSE, Cygwin and FreeBSD, why can't Debian with its army of 2000 developers? It's so close to being the perfect distro, yet at the same time so far :-\

Re:A bit shoddy, really

[Anonymous Coward]

One reason is that Debian Woody works on 11 different architectures. Don't believe the same can be said for those other products.

Re:A bit shoddy, really

[twistedcubic]

It's so close to being the perfect distro, yet at the same time so far :-\

Maybe you should try Gentoo. You won't be disappointed.

Re:A bit shoddy, really

[Penguuu]

I'm happy that debian finally took kde2 to their release, but i'm wondering why can't they put kde3 in unstable... you have to download it from another site...

And with stable, i don't want all new and cool stuff that i want in my desktop machine (i run testing in my desktop), because stable is like it says STABLE, and that what people (i for one) want to have in my server.

Re:A bit shoddy, really

[Anonymous Coward]

You try getting all of those compiling and running properly on 11 different architectures.

Re:A bit shoddy, really

[topside420]

Stop complaining. Debian is *the* main body which ports XFree86 over to other architectures. Why would Debian want to release a distribution that works on only half of the architectures it claims to support?

Cygwin is only for architectures that Windows supports, which also happens to be the most common, so of course it isnt a big deal to release early.

Just realize that Debian's XFree86 team does much more than package it and distribute. They are the ones porting it over, not RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, Cygwin and FreeBSD.

Sorry if Debian doesn't fit your time frame, its not meant to fit anyones. It's meant to be done when its done, and thats the beauty in it. If you can't deal with that, either use unstable or use another distro.

P.S. - Unstable isn't as dangerous as people make it out to be. My unstable box has been running for over 250 days, and I update every day or two. If that is considered 'very risky' then what does that say about other distro's who claim to be stable? So don't say that we just use unstable as an excuse for slow package releases.

I am running KDE 3.0.2 and X4.2 and running Debian unstable, btw :)

Big thanks goes out to the Debian developer's, congratulations!!!!

-topside

Re:A bit shoddy, really

[Natural Selection]

I'll kill you.

Re:A bit shoddy, really

[kylegordon]

Apparently, the KDE3 guys are waiting for GCC3 to be put into the unstable branch before they proceed with KDE3. I have no idea why GCC3 is delayed though :-p

Re:A bit shoddy, really

[rweir]

IIRC, some of the Debian architectures are not even supported by XFree86. Overfiend (the Debian XFree86 maintainer) does the porting himself.

Why don't you WAKE UP?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are numerous reasons why KDE 3, Xfree86 4.2, Gnome 2, Openoffice, Mplayer, et al are not ready for Debian primetime. They are all outlined in the developer mailing lists, if you bothered to read them, and most stem from the fact that Debian developers do not release software that only builds on i386 or with certain 'golden' compiler releases.

In the meantime, installing from unofficial sources takes no more effort than adding lines to your apt sources.list. This information can be found at http://www.debianplanet.org if you were so inclined to look.

Re:Why don't you WAKE UP?

[the_real_tigga]

There are numerous reasons why KDE 3, Xfree86 4.2, Gnome 2, Openoffice, Mplayer, et al are not ready for Debian primetime.

Yes: They are buggy and they crash.

What other reasons are there?

Re:Why don't you WAKE UP?

[the_real_tigga]

sorry.

Re:Why don't you WAKE UP?

[Anonymous Coward]

If that was a reason. No version on Linux would exist today!

Re:Why don't you WAKE UP?

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno, it was plenty effective even without the closing tag :)

How do you pronounce Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it dee like deed, or de' like Deborah?

Re:How do you pronounce Debian?

[Osty]

Is it dee like deed, or de' like Deborah?

Considering the name "Debian" came from "Deb" and "Ian", I'm of the opinion that it should be pronounced as such. "Dehb-ee-un". Then again, we may just be wading into Holy War territory, like "Li-nucks" vs. "Lie-nucks" vs "Lee-nucks" (who actually says the last?).

Re:How do you pronounce Debian?

[jamie]

It's deh, like Deborah.

Re:How do you pronounce Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

it's Li-nucks Li like "lindows"

Re:How do you pronounce Debian?

[Per Wigren]

"Lee-nucks" (who actually says the last?).

I do!

Re:How do you pronounce Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

well is it nucks or nix?

Re:How do you pronounce Debian?

[Ether Trogg]

"Mandrake" /me runs for cover, skillfully dodging the incoming rotten tomatoes.

Re:How do you pronounce Debian?

[roguerez]

Outside the little 'world' called the US, a lot of people probably do.

Re:How do you pronounce Debian?

[King of the World]

Rhymes with orange. No, wait, rhymes with cynics. Lynics, rhymes with Lynicks.

Re:How do you pronounce Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

To Mexico... and FREEDOM!

Re:How do you pronounce Debian?

[Osty]

well is it nucks or nix?

Well, that obviously depends on whether you're talking about "Linux" or "Lunix", of course.

Re:How do you pronounce Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

everything outside of the US is third world. Now get back to fixing your indoor plumbing, eurotrash boy.

Re:How do you pronounce Debian?

[Dwonis]

"Lee-nucks" (who actually says the last?)

Doesn't Lee-nus or did he Americanise his pronunciation?

Re:How do you pronounce Debian?

[UnknownQ]

Actually in the sound clip I got it sounds like Lee-Nooks

Re:How do you pronounce Debian?

[Rysc]

I'm told Debian comes from two first names--Deborah, and Ian. So Dehbyahn, or Dehbiun, or maybe something else depending on how you like to say Ian.

Re:How do you pronounce Debian?

[ShavenYak]

Americanizing it would make it Lye-nucks, and he sure didn't say it like that in the audio clip I heard.

Re:How do you pronounce Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is pronounced "dubya".

Re:How do you pronounce Debian?

[Isle]

It comes from the names of our founder and his girlfriend. Debra and Ian.
But dont pronounce it Deb-ian!

Instead imagine this beautyfull extremly atractive young lady called Debi. A girl with so many suiters and worshipers that they have formed a cult, and by all are known as: "Debians".

I am a Debian too. ;-)

Should have been sooner ..

[andika]

8 days ago, it will be the biggest birthday present for me. What makes me almost cry is, a Debian mirror I maintain can't join this celebration due to hardware error :(

Re:Should have been sooner ..

[Anonymous Coward]

I just installed Gentoo on my laptop 1 day ago and 2 weeks ago i switched Debian for Slackware.

Bah, everything runs fine now. I am staying with my Slack now. I like it ! But never the less Debian is one of the best Linuxes i know ! apt-get simply R0X!

Re:Should have been sooner ..

[uhoreg]

Well today is (Release Manager) aj's mother's birthday, and I'm afraid she has priority over you. Sorry 'bout that.

Re:Should have been sooner ..

[Anonymous Coward]

just learnt that id = indonesia

very happy to hear from someone running (and maintaining a mirror of) Debian GNU/Linux in Indonesia

maybe you'd like to tell the slashdot crowd how popular GNU/Linux and in particular Debian is in Indonesia?

thanks

Re:Should have been sooner ..

[andika]

Linux is quite popular here, especially in universities. We like free things, because most of us are poor. About Debian, two most respected Universities in Indonesia use mostly Debian for servers in their Computer Center. ID-CERT and ID-ccTLD people are in love with Debian too. Outside of those, it's not so popular, not because of disrespect or never-heard-before, but apparently from so little need to do remote box maintenance and so few servers compared to desktop. And of course, Debian mirrors quality is low due to lack of bandwidth :-(

Debian Released Notes

[Grip3n]

(because it's getting Slashdotted like mad)

The Debian Project is pleased to announce the release of Debian GNU/Linux version 3.0. Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system, which now supports a total of eleven processor architectures, includes KDE and GNOME desktop environments, features cryptographic software, is compatible with the FHS v2.2 and supports software developed for the LSB.

With the addition of the IA-64 (ia64), HP PA-RISC (hppa), MIPS (mips, mipsel), and S/390 (s390) architectures, Debian GNU/Linux now supports a total of eleven architectures. It now runs on computers ranging from palmtops to supercomputers, and nearly everything in between, including the latest generation of 64 bit machines.

This is the first version of Debian to feature cryptographic software integrated into the main distribution. OpenSSH and GNU Privacy Guard are included in the default installation, and strong encryption is now present in web browsers and web servers, databases, and so forth. Further integration of cryptographic software is planned for future releases.

For the first time, Debian comes with the K Desktop Environment 2.2 (KDE). The GNOME desktop environment is upgraded to version 1.4, and X itself is upgraded to the much improved XFree86 4.1. With the addition of several full-featured free graphical web browsers in the form of Mozilla, Galeon, and Konqueror, Debian's desktop offerings have radically improved.

This version of Debian supports the 2.2 and 2.4 releases of the Linux kernel. Along with better support for a greater variety of new hardware (such as USB) and significant improvements in usability and stability, the 2.4 kernel provides support for the ext3 and reiserfs journaling filesystems.

Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 features a more streamlined and polished installation, which is translated into numerous languages. The task system has been revamped and made more flexible. The debconf tool makes configuration of the system easier and more user friendly. Debian GNU/Linux can be installed from CD, or from the network and a few floppies. It can be downloaded now, and will soon be available on CD-ROM from numerous vendors.

Upgrades to Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 from earlier releases are automatically handled by the apt package management tool. As always, Debian GNU/Linux systems can be upgraded painlessly, in place, without any forced downtime. For detailed instructions about installing and upgrading Debian GNU/Linux, please see the release notes.

This is the first release of Debian that is compatible with version 2.2 of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS). Debian GNU/Linux now also supports software developed for the Linux Standard Base (LSB), though it is not yet LSB certified.

Current Debian users may be interested to know that this release of Debian supports build dependencies, to aid in building packages from source, and apt pinning, to ease partial upgrades to our testing or unstable branch. This release of Debian features aptitude as an alternative for the venerable dselect program, which will make it easier to select packages. About four thousand new software packages were added to the distribution in Debian GNU/Linux 3.0.

Geeks, geeks, geeks

[Bouncings]

Releasing a peice of software on a friday afternoon, and we all celebrate. This is pretty geeky. Movies open on fridays, restaurants open on Fridays, clubs have happy hours on fridays. Good call, Debian! Clearly NONE OF YOU GUYS HAVE GIRL FRIENDS. geeeeeze.

"Honey, I can't. I have to be with Debbie this FRIDAY NIGHT."

Re:Geeks, geeks, geeks

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone point out the ironic hypocrisy of this troll, please ... I'm too busy shaking my head in disbelief to respond.

Re:Geeks, geeks, geeks

[Anonymous Coward]

They're trying to make their traffic less bursty
by maximizing the number of people who are too
busy to upgrade tonight.

Re:Geeks, geeks, geeks

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok. It's quite simple, really.

Posting on /., even at work or school or whatever (and not even as an anonymous coward, btw... he went to all of the trouble to register so people could know who he was and he could be aware of how much people like his ideas by rewarding him with "karma"), is extraordinarily geeky. And for the record, as of right now he has 240+ comments. I mean, that's far geekier than virtually anything else I can think of. For instance, a friend of mine, a network consultant who hasn't had a girlfriend/gotten laid in 15 years who is obsessed with Star Trek/Star Wars/hasn't used anything besides Linux in 5 years and who has a degree in mathematics called me a geek for even posting once on /.

Moral of the story is: Pot calling kettle black.

Here's a quote from his website, by the way:
These pictures are from my recent trip to San Antonio. They were all taken using 100 speed film FugiFilm, due to the mostly sunny weather during the days I decided to take pictures. Because of this, the images look okay at lower resolutions, but the high resolution images are a bit grainy. I also blame the photo lap I had these developed at, as I think they have lousy equipment to create photo CDs with. Anyway, unless I go to a good photolab and have them redone, only low-resolution images are available.

Curse that lousy equipment in the photo lap! Geez.

Re:Geeks, geeks, geeks

[hendridm]

Yes, we have no girlfriends because we enjoy messing with computers. But those people who choose a different hobby, like cars, skateboarding, or reading books have women waiting in line, right?

What does it matter what my hobby is? What matters is how you prioritize.

Guys with families mess with computers, but given a choice between paying for an anniversary gift and buying the latest phatness in computer gaming, most of them would choose the earlier.

Ok, I'm responding to a Troll, but I think this is the attitude of a lot of people here who aren't into everything posted here.

Re:Geeks, geeks, geeks

[horrrosss]

Releasing a peice of software on a friday afternoon, and we all celebrate. This is pretty geeky. [snip] Good call, Debian! Clearly NONE OF YOU GUYS HAVE GIRL FRIENDS. geeeeeze.

Why are you posting here then? Geek. ;)

/m

Re:Geeks, geeks, geeks

[zerOnIne]

"Honey, I can't. I have to be with Debbie this FRIDAY NIGHT."

since my fiance is named debbie, i can get away with this :) ... in all honesty, she thinks it's really cool that i use a distribution so closely resembles her name

Re:Geeks, geeks, geeks

[Xtifr]

What? You're surprised that Debian developers and users are geeks? What planet did you say you came from again? :)

In any case, note that the Debian developers finished in time to head off to the movies/restaurants/clubs (especially those of us on the left coast). It's the Debian users who are now faced with confronting their true geek natures.

Re:Geeks, geeks, geeks

[Anonymous Coward]

> since my fiance is named debbie, i can get away with this :) ... in all honesty, she thinks it's really cool that i use a distribution so closely resembles her name

I imagine Ian Murdoch's girlfriend felt the same way ;-).

Re:Geeks, geeks, geeks

[Bouncings]

Some of us are GEEKS BY DAY, normal people by night and weekend. You really should have figured this out by now. Sure, in college I was working till 3 AM on my own little projects, but those times are gone now, and my job supplies me with all the geekiness I need, 60 hours a week. During the rest of the time, I'm a normal American consumer. I doubt I'm in any kind of minority either. Taco is married -- remember that!

Anyway, my post did point out the obvious. The obvious, however, is something most slashdotters are often unaware of.

still-no-kde3-in-unstable

[n1k0]

Add these to your sources.list and be thankful for all the good things Debian _has_ that other distributions _don't_. ;)

deb http://kde3.geniussystems.net/debian ./
deb-src http://kde3.geniussystems.net/debian ./

...and see this page for more information.

niko

Re:still-no-kde3-in-unstable

[Dr. Sp0ng]

ARgh! No Alpha packages! I'd compile it myself, but downloading piles of source over dialup HURTS.

Anybody know of anyplace I can find precompiled Alpha debs of KDE 3?

Re:still-no-kde3-in-unstable

[n1k0]

I feel your pain, brother. I'm still running KDE2 'cause I don't want to burden my telephone line for eight hours. :-)

Re:still-no-kde3-in-unstable

[UncleFluffy]

They're around somewhere, can't remember where right now - check the archives of the debian-kde list, the sources.list line was posted there relatively recently.

So Pleased

[tacocat]

I have been working with a variety of distributions out there and have come to the conclusion that, if you want it to work and work well, the Debian is probably the most trusted distribution out there. If you want bells and whistles, then you need to go someplace else.

On thing I have to mention here. If Debian merged with GenTOO, then there would be no stopping them! Optimal package compiles coupled with the best package management system AND the BEST PACKAGE MANAGERS out there. Now that would be cool!

I have to hand it to the Debian folks. They have an excellent policy that puts quality and reliability in front of everything else. I can trust this distribution to work on machines that I can't even access directly.

Re:So Pleased

[Darth Troll]

Actually, I personally feel it'd be disastrous if Gentoo merged w/ Debian. There seems to be quite a bit of difference in their philosophies and I would see them clashing with one another.

Example: Gentoo concentrates on x86 architecture & optimization and they make no apologies about that. I do not think that such would sit well w/ Debian.

Re:So Pleased

[Anonymous Coward]

if the gentoo developers redesigned the debian website, that would be enough for me.

the kiddies are falling in love with the pictures not the content.

Re:So Pleased

[Bostik]

Yes, I have been following Gentoo a bit as well. A friend uses it, and has fallen in love with the idea of having hugely optimized linux binaries. I gave it a thought - having something like ports/portage for Debian packages would indeed sound good.

Then I came across this: apt-src is in the making. Imagine Debian's package and dependency system combined with ports. Instead of doing a dist-upgrade for binary packages, you would have the choice of doing the same thing, but automatically from source debs. This is already possible for individual programs:

apt-get -b source $package

does just that but doesn't do recursive builds. It only builds that particular package. Having all the build-dep packages built as well, that would indeed make a difference. Over time, it would allow to incrementally optimize all of the packages.

Personally, I'm thrilled.

Re:So Pleased

[ultrabot]

If you want bells and whistles, then you need to go someplace else.

I don't think so. Debian has the most bells and whistles, that you need to download seperately for other distros. What other distro ships with OCaml and Erlang?

Turn on your spare machine

[yerricde]

"Debian GNU/Linux systems can be upgraded painlessly, in place, without any forced downtime." How do you upgrade the kernel without a reboot?

Reboot != downtime. If you're running a high-availability server cluster, you can bring your spare machine up and have it do the job of each server in your rack until you upgrade your cluster to Debian 3. If you're running a workstation, reboot your machine over coffee break, or pull out your Game Boy Advance and play Tetanus On Drugs. Otherwise, I don't think a reboot at 3 A.M. California time is going to affect many users, especially if planned a week in advance.

Re:Turn on your spare machine

[SpatchMonkey]

On the contrary, 3am California time is in the middle of the average working day in the UK.

good lord

[Doktor Memory]

In one day we have had:

• Vorbis 1.0
• Perl 5.8.0
• ...and now Debian 3.0

REPENT, REPENT, THE END IS NIGH!

Re:good lord

[Anonymous Coward]

And before all this, there was Mozilla 1.0 - I just KNOW the apocalypse is soon.

Re:good lord

[HoBuster]

I'll bet Duke Nukem Fornever will be released tomorrow morning ...

Re:good lord

[b0bd0bbs]

And yesterday we had:
TurboLinux closing doors
Transmeta laying off %40 of staff

You win some, you lose some.

Re:good lord

[Anonvmous Coward]

Next thing you know, Nintendo will release a game system on time.

Re:good lord

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll know the apovcolypse has come when Mozilla is actually useable as a main browser with out having to switch to Ie for every other web site. Oh, and it has to not crash atleast once a day as it does not (Basically every other javascript command)

Re:good lord

[Wise Dragon]

Heck, I'm betting on Commander Keen 7

Re:good lord

[dimator]

Wasn't the GC only, like, 1 or 2 weeks late?

Re:good lord

[Anonvmous Coward]

Hmm actually it was a little late I suppose. Nintendo has a horrible track record. They promised back in 93/94 that the 'Ultra 64' would be out by 1995. (If you ever play Killer Instinct in the arcade, the announcer says 'Coming to your home in 1995, only on the Nintendo Ultra 64....') It came out in 96. The Game Boy Advance was a year late, although few people know that. The Super NES CD-ROM was so that that it never appeared. The 64-DD addon for the N64 was like 3 years late, and only came out in Japan. Umm.. There's also an endless list of games that were endlessly delayed or cancelled.

It's actually very common for games or systems to be delayed, but Nintendo's had it happen rather visibly so many times that people were stunned that the GC was only late by about a month. (if that long.) hehe

Re:good lord

[Rysc]

The Super NES CD-ROM did appear. It came out a couple years after it was initially announced, having endured a project cancelation at nintendo and many other delays. You know it as the Sony Playstation.

Re:good lord

[Anonvmous Coward]

Not exactly true. The Super NES CD Rom was inferior to the PS. The hardware was redesigned with the PS.

It was the experience with the SNES CD that lead to Sony's attempt to make their own game system. They're not regretting it.

Re:good lord

[jsse]

REPENT, REPENT, THE END IS NIGH!

We heard almost the same things when decades ago dufu in patent office said "people has just about discovered and invented everything." and a top dude of IBM said "The world would need about...3 of these" when first IBM computer made. :)

Re:good lord

[madcow_ucsb]

Along with Team Fortress 2...

Re:good lord

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Holy Fucking Shit about says it.

Re:good lord

[Eil]

I'm not too surprised that the Gameboy Color was released almost on time... it wasn't even a new system, just a regular GameBoy with a color graphics chip tacked on. :P

Along with you, I'm probably one of the few who remember the SNES CD-ROM. Also I recall the SNES satellite service which was reportedly poised to "take over" the Sega Channel. :P But again that ended up being a Japan-only release and from what I hear it failed miserably even there. The only notable thing to ever come out of it were a couple of Squaresoft minigames, if I recall correctly.

Re:good lord

[ShavenYak]

No, the apocalypse comes when GNU/Hurd 1.0 is released.

And ?

[Chexsum]

What is this sarge (testing) directory in ftp debian/dists directory. :)

Believe it or not, releases don't happen instantly

[Cardinal]

Debian 3.0 Woody comes with KDE 2 and XFree86 4.1 while 3 and 4.2 are out respectively. This is a bit sad, seeing that even CygWin and FreeBSD have more up-to-date versions in their releases.

Release processes do take time, and Debian woody's started long before KDE3 or XFree86 4.2 were released. It is not the policy of the Debian team to drop everything mid-release-prep and package the latest version of some package, regardless of how significant it may be. If that was the case, releases would take a great deal more time.

If you want to see the process go faster, feel free to step up and help out.

Long live debian!

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian rules!
Join the true revolution -- use a dist controlled by the people for the people.

Commercial distributions should not be trusted to organize the development of free software.

Re:WRONG!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it was a subtle but misguided attempt at humour, referencing the earlier story of Ogg Vorbis' 1.0 release - which was not actually released yet.

finally!

[iso9660]

At last!

Thanks to all the developers and package maintainers who have made this possible. Making a Linux distribution run smoothly is not easy work, especially not when it's one of the better, more thought-through distributions.

I've been using Debian since Hamm (2.0) now and I've always loved its simplicity, dpkg/apt, and the structure and sheer neatness of it all. I'm running unstable right now, so the release of Woody does not mean that I will do some massive upgrade, but it is still a good thing that it's finally complete.

Now, if I only had a fast connection I could download those cd images and burn them at once... being a modem user sucks :(

What is a GNU/Linux?

[mangu]

AFAIK, GNU is a set of applications software, and Linux is an operating system. From what I can gather, this "Debian" thing is actually the Linux operating system, to which the set of GNU applications have been adapted. The end result, with no disrespect intended to the many people who worked in creating the GNU software, is just "Linux", since GNU is an accessory. Indispensable, like tyres are to a car, but accessory nevertheless. Calling it GNU/Linux is as ridiculous as it would be for me to call my car a PIRELLI/Chevrolet.

Re:What is a GNU/Linux?

[Fluffy the Cat]

You can easily produce a Michelin/Chevrolet instead. Producing a reasonably featured Linux distribution without using a large amount of GNU software is somewhat more difficult. Do you really want to port BSD libc to Linux?

Re:What is a GNU/Linux?

[dvdeug]

The end result, with no disrespect intended to the many people who worked in creating the GNU software, is just "Linux", since GNU is an accessory. Indispensable, like tyres are to a car, but accessory nevertheless

If something is indispensable, it's not an accessory. And unlike tires, much of the GNU software is not replacable out of the box. There's no libc that can replace the GNU libc on Linux; libc4 and libc5 are both based on the GNU libc and don't provide all the nessecary functionality for a modern system. Linux compiles only with GCC; besides which, there's no other free C/C++ compiler that can compile most of the complex code that usually comes with Linux. The linker and binutils are in the same boat. Bash cannot be replaced on Debian; too much stuff depends on its features (for better or worse.)

Frankly, the name of the operating system in question is Debian GNU/Linux. While Linux versus GNU/Linux in general can be debated, Debian has taken a position on that matter, and for the name of our OS, that's what matters.

Re:What is a GNU/Linux?

[mangu]

much of the GNU software is not replacable out of the box

That depends on how you define "is" and "replaceable" and "out of the box". It's true that libc and gcc are indispensable to Linux as it is now, but they are, definitely, replaceable and other libraries or compilers could be used.

My point was that Linux is totally independent from GNU; it needs libraries and compilers, true, but these could come from Borland, Microsoft, Watcom, Symantec, etc, etc. In the same way, GNU does not depend on Linux. Before Linux existed, I used GNU under MS-DOS, with DJGPP. But I didn't call it "MS-DOS/GNU".

I believe in free software, and I think we should care about "advocacy", that is, presenting to the world the best things free software can do for us. And, frankly, this constant bickering on why it should be really "GNU/Linux" shows the worst of free-software users: childish ranting, always ready for a flame war. It's worse than Microsoft marketing, they, at least, have something to gain by their exagerations and distortions.

Re:What is a GNU/Linux?

[dvdeug]

It's true that libc and gcc are indispensable to Linux as it is now, but they are, definitely, replaceable and other libraries or compilers could be used.

Linux can be replaced with a BSD kernel (using Linux compatibility mode) in far less time than any libc or C/C++ compiler could be changed to do the job that GNU libc and GCC does.

Linux is totally independent from GNU

The only compiler that can compile Linux is GCC. That's a pretty strong dependency there.

this constant bickering on why it should be really "GNU/Linux"

There was no bickering here until you brought it up. If Debian wants to call their operating system Debian GNU/Linux, I hardly see how it's any buisness of yours.

Re:What is a GNU/Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

...and Linux is an operating system.

BEEP! Wrong, Linux is just a kernel. You've actually got things backwards, the linux kernel is an "accessory" (albeit a fairly vital one :) ) to the GNU operating system, hence why we can also have GNU/Hurd.

Re:What is a GNU/Linux?

[mangu]

If Debian wants to call their operating system Debian GNU/Linux, I hardly see how it's any buisness of yours.

Perhaps not any business of mine, but "Linux" is a registered trademark, and it's not owned by any "Debian" (whatever that might be). And, since Mr. Linus Torvalds, the owner of the Linux trademark, has gracefully let the free software community use his trademark, I don't think it correct that this "Debian" bunch of talibans kidnap the good Linux name by attaching to it other signatures.

What would you say if someone claimed it should really be "MICROSOFT/Debian", and started posting obnoxious spam everywhere insisting it should be called so?

Re:What is a GNU/Linux?

[Hope Thelps]

Somehow you seem to have missed the point that you are the one bickering about calling it GNU/Linux. You claimed that you hate this bickering.

1. Why did you start it.

2. Why are you STILL doing it?

Re:What is a GNU/Linux?

[Daniel]

My point was that Linux is totally independent from GNU

That might be an interesting point if Debian looked anything like a bare Linux kernel.

Cheers,
Daniel

(yes, IHBT..)

Why I am not using Debian...

[IdleTime]

Here is a small section from the "ground-breaking" news today:
For the first time, Debian comes with the K Desktop Environment 2.2 (KDE). The GNOME desktop environment is upgraded to version 1.4, and X itself is upgraded to the much improved XFree86 4.1. With the addition of several full-featured free graphical web browsers in the form of Mozilla, Galeon, and Konqueror, Debian's desktop offerings have radically improved.
Who the heck need another distro with OLD software?
Debian, do us all a favour and die...
If you really want to contribute to a distro, switch to Gentoo...
Debian is old even when it is new!

Yabba Dabba Do!

[m0nkyman]

finally my woody is stable!

Re:Yabba Dabba Do!

[m0nkyman]

I appreciate the karma points from the 'funny' moderations(*), but come on folks.... that joke is almost a year old (when we first thought our woodies would go stable)..

* - yes folks, with a five figure user ID, I've finally hit my karma cap.

Re:Yabba Dabba Do!

[Buck2]

I count 4 figures.

1: 7
2: 1
3: 0
4: 1

??

Re:Yabba Dabba Do!

[styrotech]

I thought you'd be happier that it is no longer frozen or in testing.

Re:Yabba Dabba Do!

[m0nkyman]

Actually, having it go stable after a lot of testing is good too....

Re:Yabba Dabba Do!

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet you've been waiting a long time to say that. :)

Re:Yabba Dabba Do!

[reverius]

Yeah, but it's such a relief not to have a painful frozen woody!

Re:Yabba Dabba Do!

[m0nkyman]

I'd moderate you up, but I'm installing my stable woody...

Arrrrrgh

[molrak]

and I just burnt Debian isos two days ago! Guess I just spent a dollar on some fancy looking coasters.

Re:Arrrrrgh

[Ziviyr]

I always burn this stuff to CDRWs.

Though now I'm on a campaign to permanently burn the i386 binaries and source disks to 2.2r7. Mainly because my luck with Woody up till now has been atrocious.

Troll Alert

[Cardhore]

Please don't moderate this troll up further. None of those programs is only buildable on x86. None of those programs needs a "golden" compiler (whatever that is). The parent is simply lying.

Re:Troll Alert

[Anonymous Coward]

openoffice NEEDs gcc 3.1 --- debian not switched to this yet (next big job)

kde also needs gcc3.1 for some architectures, see above.

gnome2 is partially in or in experimental. it hasn't gone fully in because it needs to work better along side gnome 1.4, 'cause gnome 2 sucks still.

he's not lying. you are stupid.

Re:Troll Alert

[Cardhore]

Hey dumbass, It's not the softwares' fault that it needs a correct compiler. Also gnome2 rules. You are stupid.

Re:Troll Alert

[mickwd]

Ever tried to build MPlayer from source ?

With GCC 2.96 ? Or 3.0 ?

a step backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who has actually read Linux kernel code realizes how truly simpleminded and backwards the code is compared to mature operating systems like BSD. Linux is truly a step backwards. We need to band together and work on BSD so the state of computing can progress forward and not fall prey to this NIH let's reimplement everything all over again syndrome.

Re:a step backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

BSD isn't an operating system you ass bandit.

Yes hopefully someday "BSD" (by this i assume you mean the three different operating systems with the letters BSD in their name) will actually have smp support for more than 2 cpus, journaling filesystems and other advanced features required of an operating system in a server role. Equally amazing would be for 2 of these operating systems to support more than 2 architectures, something only one of the backwards "BSD" systems has been able to acheive.

Better yet, get Conectiva

[mangu]

With Conectiva, you have the benefits of apt-get, with up-to-date packages. Best of both worlds. Better yet, you can ask for support around the internet without having to read endless rants on why it's really GNU/linux and all that shit...

Re:Better yet, get Conectiva

[TobyWong]

Yes because we all know upon installing debian you are forced to accept an EULA which says you will read political linux rants....

whatever

Re:Better yet, get Conectiva

[Buck2]

U R Dum!

You DO Have to! I installed Deb1An on my 'put4r and I HAD to read taht stuff!!

Micros [soft]

[Imcrius]

Microsoft doesn't have the balls to release an opensource op, their too greedy

Kernel Sn(u|o)bbery

[Snafoo]

The release notes for x86 indicate that the thing
ships with 2.2.20, with an optional 2.4.x for the bleeding-edgers, with (as explanation) a catty remark about the Debian developers not considering 2.4 a 'stable' branch.

Admittedly, I prefer Debian for the work that I do mainly because of the stability. But really -- 2.4 has been utterly reliable since ~2.4.14. Isn't this just a little paranoid? C'mon, folks, the thing is solid! I mean, the VM subsystem hasn't been completely re-written in *months*! ;)

Re:Kernel Sn(u|o)bbery

[Benley]

I believe that the reason for a 2.2 kernel by default comes mostly from the extremely large number of architectures supported in this release. On some of the eleven architectures, 2.4.x is not as stable as it should be (or so I hear), so they went with a 2.2 by default. Please note that there is *nothing* keeping you from installing 2.4.18 or whatever other kernel you want on Woody - in fact there are prebuilt binaries if you wish to use them.

Re:Kernel Sn(u|o)bbery

[spacey]

2.4 is in no way stable yet. There are so many combinations of hardware that cause it to flake its not funny. I'm not saying that the hardware that I've had problems with is perfect, but I've got a laptop that didn't crash until I put 2.4 on it, and I've got a SMP desktop that didn't crash until I put 2.4 on it. And mostly what I got for each was a longer compile cycle :(

-Peter

Re:Kernel Sn(u|o)bbery

[jcoy42]

2.4 is in no way stable yet.
/me thinks he was kidding..

Re:Kernel Sn(u|o)bbery

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention, when I build the kernel from the Debian kernel-source, it has an annoying "feature". When I insmod my network card driver, the kernel complains (incorrectly) that the driver will taint the kernel with a non-compliant license. Then the kernel promptly crashes when I try to bring up eth0.

It works 100% fine with a kernel downloaded from kernel.org.

Last time I checked, Donald Becker's drivers were under the GPL: ftp://www.scyld.com/pub/network/natsemi.c

Debian's overzealousness about being "free" goes way too far sometimes. It doesn't keep me from using my system: it just makes it a pain in the ass.

Re:Kernel Sn(u|o)bbery

[GrenDel Fuego]

Admittedly, I prefer Debian for the work that I do mainly because of the stability. But really -- 2.4 has been utterly reliable since ~2.4.14. Isn't this just a little paranoid? C'mon, folks, the thing is solid! I mean, the VM subsystem hasn't been completely re-written in *months*! ;)

Stable since 2.4.14? Except for 2.4.15 which caused massive file system corruption.

Re:Kernel Sn(u|o)bbery

[mcelrath]

This is has nothing to do with debian. This is a kernel feature, added some months ago, so that kernel developers could sort out bug reports (ksymoops) from folks running binary drivers from those who are not. In other words, if you used the binary-only NVIDIA driver and it crashed, the kernel developers don't want to help you track it down. It's nvidia's problem. Reproduce the bug without installing a binary-only module and they'll be happy to look at it though. ;)

The reason some clearly-GPL modules get the "tainted" message is that it just took a while to propegate the GPL-licensed symbol to all modules. It does not affect the operation of the kernel in any way. (and again, has nothing to do with debian)

-- Bob

Re:Kernel Sn(u|o)bbery

[mojumbo]

actually, that was 2.4.11

Re:Kernel Sn(u|o)bbery

[Cro Magnon]

I thought 2.4.11 was the one that furbared SuSe's installer. 2.4.15 caused FS corruption on shutdown, possibly because of the greased-turkey!

Re:Kernel Sn(u|o)bbery

[Dwonis]

2.4.15 *also* broke filesystems on umount. I learned the hard way.

Re:Kernel Sn(u|o)bbery

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I was building the module from source so I guess I have a repro case.

Maybe I wasn't clear enough so here goes my complete steps, cause I'd really like to sort this out:

- The module was *not* binary-only. I built the module from source for each kernel. In other words, boot up kernel #1, build module, reboot to debian-kernel, rebuild module.

Both kernels were version 2.4.18.

- Then, between more reboots, I tried installing each module on its respective kernel. Only the "debianized" stuff produced the warning message.

- Finally, bringing up eth0 (via pump) caused a kernel exception on the debianized stuff, but not the standard one.

My gut feeling is that the Debian kernel or a portion of it was out of date somehow - maybe back to a time when Becker's driver was not under the GPL? I don't know the history of his driver licenses so I have no way to verify this.

Any ideas?

Re:Kernel Sn(u|o)bbery

[Buck2]

The average /. reader is an idiot. Half of /. readers are below average. Are you scared yet?

No.

If /. readers are all below average then you would expect a high percentage of idiots.

How about:

The average /. reader is an idiot. Half again are below the /. average. Are you scared yet?

??

Re:Kernel Sn(u|o)bbery

[SmittyTheBold]

Uh...the original .sig made much more sense than your version.

Re:Kernel Sn(u|o)bbery

[Buck2]

Ok.

Re:Kernel Sn(u|o)bbery

[Sentry21]

Debian 3.0 has support for 11 architectures, while your comments of stability apply directly to maybe one or two. Fact is, 2.4 is unstable (enough to warrant exclusion) on several of the 11 arches, and in order to avoid having to support two different kernels and installer systems, they went with what works.

You can use 2.4 if you want, just grab the 24bf netinst image and away you go.

Hmm... Does anyone else think it's worrying that the Linux VM system has had more overhauls in the last five years than Debian has? Peculiar...

--Dan

Re:Kernel Sn(u|o)bbery

[morrisde]

The 2.4 kernel is very close to stable for x86 architecture, but don't confuse "very close to stable for x86" with "stable for all architectures".

I, for instance, use a few Sparc systems, of most note a SparcStation20. The system has dual processers, and must (ideally) run RAID-5. The 2.4 kernel series just will not work in this setup...system uptime could never reach more than 2 days before the sytsem did a kernel panick and stuck its toung out at me.

This is just one example of the many reasons the 2.4 kernel cannot be considered even remotely as stable as teh 2.2 kernel. True, support for the latest hardware forces some people (primarily x86 boxes) to use the 2.4 kernel, but for rock-solid stability, you still need the 2.2 kernel.

And face it: Debian is NOT about the absolute latest and greatest packages, but about availability and maximum stability.

Suck it up and accept the fact that the 2.4 kernel is still has a lot of troubles, just not any that the bulk of the Linux user-base can see.

Re:Believe it or not, releases don't happen instan

[Cardhore]

I simply don't buy it. It's not like the Debian people are writing the programs. All they are doing is compiling them and packaging them, which doesn't take much time in the grand scheme of things. So this "dropping everything mid-release" sounds like a bunch of nonsense. If you want to see progress check out Gentoo.

Darn

[Cro Magnon]

Now I can't joke about Stale Potatos & Frozen Woodys

Re:3.0?? Laugh....

[Kindaian]

What do you think a version number on any software means? Do you think microsoft released 2000 windows? (actually it may have... but that's not the issue here lol)... Cheers...

Just wait a little bit.

[Benley]

There is no KDE3 in Unstable yet because everyone has been waiting patiently for Woody to be released. Just wait a little bit, and it will start to appear. Along with Gnome 2, I expect.

Re:Just wait a little bit.

[damiam]

Unofficial GNOME 2 packages have been available since the betas, and it's been in sid for a while now.

Re:WRONG!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it was a 20 second throwaway flamebait, that got two (2) biters. haha!

Re:Already a year out of date.

[Cardhore]

Yes. Debian pretends to be stable by not upgrading its software. That's just an illusion, though; you end up with the old, unfixed bugs still being in the software. Does that make it more stable? I don't think so. Additionally, those who express this or a similar viewpoint are marked as trolls on Slashdot since some Debian fanatics can't accept reality.

How is it?

[ZeLonewolf]

Has anyone tried this yet? I'm currently using SuSE 8.0, and I'd like to know if anyone 'in the know' would recommend a switch...

Re:How is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, do it.

Re:How is it?

[Phil Hands]

Most Debian users have been running almost exactly this for ages, as "woody" or "testing" --- It works rather nicely.

That's the point with Debian, you get to choose when to abandon rock solid reliability in favour of shiney new features, and most of the time it doesn't even degrade your reliability.

People seem to miss the point that Debian stable is meant to be STABLE. If you want to install a box in the middle of the desert, 100s of miles from anywhere, then you want it stable, and you don't give a damn about which version of KDE you use. If you want the latest KDE, just grab it out of unstable, or of off the KDE Debian package maintainer's bleeding edge archive --- It's your chouce. If it kills your machine, you get to press the reset button, but generally it won't, and if it does, it's what you decided you wanted, and you get the joy of filing a bug report, and helping to fix the problem.

Would I recomend a switch? Well, if you're happy with SuSE, and you don't care about Software Freedom, then SuSE is a fine distribution, unfortunately YaST is non-free software, so I'll never use it, and SuSE doesn't have apt-get, which makes any other feature they might have pale into insignificance in my opinion. Obviously, I am biased though :-)

Re:How is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're kidding, right? Debian and SuSe are worlds apart. SuSe is always modern and up-to-date. Compare Debian to a 2 or 3 year old release of SuSe. That is roughly the equivalence. It would be very hard for a SuSe user to adapt to Debian. It would be like a trip in the wayback machine.

Re:What about the install?

[SilentStrike]

I agree. I dunno why the parent post is at -1, but it's exactly what I experienced. I started using Mandrake about a year ago. I got used to the enviroment a bit, and really started liking it.

I was used to the pain of RPM dependencies, and after the initial install of Mandrake (which is done internally completely by RPM), I wouldn't use RPMs much by myself. When installing new software, I'd first check the software manager (which has a nice search for non-installed stuff on the Mandrake CDs), and failing that, go directly for a source .tar.gz from the net. Sadly, I think it is the easiest option for a installing a lot of the software out there. Tracking down endless lists of dependencies on rpmfind, only to be confused over which of the 10 different similairly named RPMs to pick from is simply not that fun.

I heard about how great apt-get was. So I figured I'd try to install Debian 2.2. Ouch... not a good idea. I did manage to get it installed.. kind of. Running windowmaker (used KDE almost exclusively in Mandrake, and never anything other than KDE and GNOME) at 640x480 with 256 color on a monitor that supports 1280x1024 because my year old GeForce 3 wasn't supported with the old version of X shipped with Debian. It would have been ok if I had an internet connection, I'd installed the Nvidia drivers a couple times, but I couldn't even figure out how to get the net connection working. No netconf.. :(. Needless to say, it was back to Mandrake for me.

One can't experience the greatness of apt-get if they can't make it through the install :(. I've heard it said that the install is so bad because you only have to go through it once, but failing at the install one time makes the system unusable.

What a coincidence...

[Anonymous Coward]

This fellow seems to pronouce it that way too.

damn damn damn

[RestiffBard]

I'm halfway through a 56k download of woody. damn it. damn it. arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Re:damn damn damn

[CentrX]

So?

Re:damn damn damn

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm halfway through a 56k download of woody. damn it. damn it.

So it takes you a long time to get a Woody? I would suggest reading some pr0n magazines...that should speed things up.

Re:damn damn damn

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, be happy. The differences are minimal.

Full Metal Woody!

[niko9]

Drill Sarg: Whats your name scumbag?!?!? Private: Sir, private woody, sir! Drill Sarg: BULLSHIT! From now on your name is private STABLE!!! Do you like that name ?!?!?!?! Private: Sir YES Sir!!! Drill Sarg: Well there's one thing you won't like private stable, they don't serve gcc 2.96 and KDE3 on a daily basis in my mess hall!!!!! Private: Sir, yes, sir!!!!

compiler -- GNU compiler kit 3 supporting Java?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does Debian 3.0 include version 3 of the GNU Compiler Kit? Hope so. I am trying to decide between Debian and Gentoo Linux distributions.

Re:compiler -- GNU compiler kit 3 supporting Java?

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian developers know java is uncool on non-l33t so it was not included.

I mean java is just for suits dude!

Free Software people only need C and Python!

What's wrong with you square?

Re:Believe it or not, releases don't happen instan

[fidget42]

It's not like the Debian people are writing the programs. All they are doing is...

Did I just hear someone volunteer to help with the next Debian release?

Re:Believe it or not, releases don't happen instan

[steveha]

I simply don't buy it.

I frankly don't care what you "buy" or not.

When Debian releases, they release for more platforms than anyone else: x86, Alpha, PowerPC, Sparc, 68K, ia64, etc. etc.

When Debian releases "stable", they have done enough testing that you can really count on it to be stable.

The above items take some time. Stabilizing a new version of XFree86 in particular takes time, since the XFree86 guys only test on x86.

All they are doing is compiling them and packaging them, which doesn't take much time in the grand scheme of things.

Why don't you join the Debian team and show them how it's done? Since you're such an expert and all. After all, I'm sure the Debian guys are all idiots, just wasting time for no reason, and with someone like you on board they can get releases out in no time at all.

By the way, new stuff shows up in Debian's "unstable" branch very quickly, because just compiling and packaging stuff doesn't take all that long in the grand scheme of things. It's Debian's stable branch that is legendary for taking a long time to update.

If you want to see progress check out Gentoo.

I'm glad you like it. But Gentoo and Debian are not the same thing; both have pluses and minuses compared to each other.

steveha

En ensam kvinna s�ker en man

[DrunkenPenguin]

New debian is out, well, that's cool and all, but I got to admit, it is waaaaay cooler to listen to DOM ANDRA song by the best band in the whole world - Kent from Sweden! I am a finn, and I do not understand all of the lyrics of Dom Andra (although swedish is our second official language in finland), but I got to admit, this is THE BEST SONG I have ever heard! Thank you Sweden, I love you!

Re:En ensam kvinna s�ker en man

[Anonymous Coward]

We do own, don't we?

KDE 2.2 ?!?

[Oxide]

Alright... I know about this testing stuff and how long has woody been on but KDE 2.2 ? I mean come on, Redhat 7.3 was released before this one and it came with KDE 3.

This is supposedly a major upgrade (2.2 -> 3.0) you'd think the least one can get things like the latest desktops. Not all of us use Linux as servers only.

Re:KDE 2.2 ?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am waiting for KDE3 since it came out (beginning of April). I was always a fan of Debian, but this has made me angry and I will remove their stuff from my PC and replace it with FreeBSD.
It is obvious that they want to prevent users from using KDE and force them to change to Gnome. There is no real reason to update libgtk everyday with daily builds, but not having time to build a package while already the 4th version (without a single Debian-release) is out.

Re:KDE 2.2 ?!?

[Dunkalis]

There are optional archives with KDE3. You CAN get KDE3 with Woody. I don't know the apt mirrors, but some other people have posted them here. Use GNOME, its better anyway.

Re:KDE 2.2 ?!?

[Wyzard]

Alright... I know about this testing stuff and how long has woody been on but KDE 2.2 ? I mean come on, Redhat 7.3 was released before this one and it came with KDE 3.

KDE 3 is out now, but it wasn't when Woody went under freeze. The point of Debian's "stable" release is to be stable, not to be flashy; the idea is "tried and true", not "latest and greatest".

RedHat 7.3 shipped with KDE 3. It also shipped with an unofficial, experimental version of GCC that they called 2.96, which causes compilation issues with many major packages. Would you want this running as part of, say, a compile farm? I wouldn't put my trust in a release that can't even compile Apache correctly.

Not all of us use Linux for servers only, but those who do want a system that's solid. If you want more bleeding-edge software in exchange for a bit of risk that things might not work on occasion, you should try Debian's unstable branch. I've been running it on my own machine for the past several years and I find it to be quite nice. And you can always install "stable" and then upgrade individual packages using newer versions from "unstable".

Re:KDE 2.2 ?!?

[Wyzard]

Debian is not trying to push you to switch from KDE to GNOME. Remember that each Debian package is maintained by a volunteer who builds new packages on his or her own time. Maybe there are more people working on the GNOME packages, or maybe they just work harder or something.

If you're not happy with the release schedule of the KDE packages, don't blame the volunteers who are doing the best they can within the constraints of other things going on in their lives - become a Debian developer and help them out.

Re:KDE 2.2 ?!?

[Isle]

This is supposedly a major upgrade (2.2 -> 3.0) you'd think the least one can get things like the latest desktops.

But it is a major upgrade. Debian 2.2 had KDE 1.2

Not all of us use Linux as servers only.

Then use Debian unstable.. It is more stable than any commercial distribution

Somebody did it....

[Goonie]

The Two Kernel Monte kernel module let you do just that for 2.2 kernels.

However, there can't have been much demand for it, because development ceased back in 2000.

Re:Somebody did it....

[SpatchMonkey]

Thanks for the link, that was most interesting.

And certainly a step along the way, but not quite what I meant. The idea is to replace the kernel without having to restart the kernel from scratch - that is, replace the kernel while leaving most processes intact.

this is great!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

well i think finally my weekend will turn back in a fest! :)

thanks to all debian developers :)

regards
-sh

Re:Already a year out of date.

[Vegard]

I know one's not supposed to feed the trolls, but bugs DO get fixed in the stable version. But unlike some other distributions, that just toss in a new package, that *might* break some functionality on a server, Debian backports the bug-fix. The version is the same, but the bugs - and ONLY the bugs - are fixed.

Re:Believe it or not, releases don't happen instan

[Anonymous Coward]

debian forces many programs to behave consistently and adds patches to extend portability and configuration.

gentoo tells packages to compile with a few gcc optimizations that don't make any difference anyway

Re:Believe it or not, releases don't happen instan

[jjeff]

Its not quite as simple as just packaging the programs.

They have to be packaged for and run perfectly on the 11 different hardware architectures that debian supports.

And the debian packages do more than just package these programs - they generally have to adjust the code in these programs (if you used debian and another distro you would notice how much more stable these packages are in debian than in other distros).

Plus all these developers are doing this voluntarily - so I think they are doing a great job speedwise with releases.

Re:Believe it or not, releases don't happen instan

[Anonymous Coward]

"I frankly don't care what you 'buy' or not."

on the other hand, who cares what you care about, either? like you're the arbiter of what is important. arrogant twit.

Figures.

[Fester213]

I originally planned to put Debian on this new computer, but I didn't want to wait forever for 3.0. On the DAY that I finish getting Gentoo installed, Debian 3 is released. Figures.

Well, gentoo is cool so far.

Re:Figures.

[kko]

No shit... I had just started to like OpenBSD 3.1 on my little VIA Eden (with a 533 MHz C3), and now Debian 3.0 is released... I am torn between both.........

Re:Figures.

[DavittJPotter]

Gentoo is compiling packages *right now* on one of my other PC's... do I stop it and start over with Debian... ? /em ponders

Re:Already a year out of date.

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian only backports security fixes you fucking liar.

Second, now instead of having a fully tested stable release of the software directly from the developers you have some hacked together debian version with all sorts of sketchy patches that *might* break some functionality on the server.

Happy Days

[Gyorg_Lavode]

I've been looking forward to trying debian on a computer i have. Now that it's released, I can download it at the end of next week!

Great work team. We /. because we love you. I can't wait to be able to try this out.

why

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it that anyone who voices disappointment with the antiquated versions of software in the release are modded down?

It's not legitimate to think that kde 2,2 is a might bit old?

I can't voice my opinion that Xfree86 4.1 makes debian unusable for people with newer ati cards that are only supported by xfree 4.2?

Should i lie and pretend i am impressed by the old outdated software in this distro?

You do realize when you mod someone down it doesn't actually change anything, debian will still be an out of date distro perpetual behind the times and forced to spread fud about "in order to be stable we have to incredibly out of date".

FreeBSD and OpenBSD are plenty stable and they are release every 6 months to a year, so what are you going to say FreeBSD is an unstable peice of shit like you do anything else that is more uptodate than debian?

Do you even listen to your own fud? "Oh that's more up to date than debian? well it must just be some unstable peice of crap then!"

give me a fricken break you little zealots.

wuhuuu

[rehabdoll]

just 1h after i finished downloading RC7.....

Re:wuhuuu

[Anonymous Coward]

hey ...you can still instal both :) go deb .. nerver enought

The end is coming!

[photon317]

Surely the 3.0 release is a hoax - they can't possibly have a stable release that includes the *current* stable kernel _and_ the latest XFree.

Re:The end is coming!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry it doesn't have the lastest Xfree. It has the old version from last summer, not the one from this year. But hey people who have 400$ radeon video cards aren't big on graphics or guis anyways, so they don't mind if they are stuck with the console becuase that old version of x doens't support their card.

Re:The end is coming!

[hereward_Cooper]

latest XFree != 4.1

=)

Coops

Installation's not so bad

[mcfiddish]

One can't experience the greatness of apt-get if they can't make it through the install

The first time I tried debian (I think this was Debian 1.3?), I got hopelessly confused by the installation and went back to redhat 4.2 and was much happier.

When 2.0 came out, I decided to give it another try, and struggled through the installation, and finally ended up with a nice system. But great as apt-get was, I felt it wasn't worth the pain.

Then I figured out the painless way to install debian: go through the installation and install the bare minimum that you absolutely need (this means no X!). Then once you've got that running, which is quick and easy, use apt for everything else you use. This has the side benefit that there's no wasted space on your drive.

Re:Installation's not so bad

[ratamacue]

Then I figured out the painless way to install debian: go through the installation and install the bare minimum that you absolutely need (this means no X!). Then once you've got that running, which is quick and easy, use apt for everything else you use. This has the side benefit that there's no wasted space on your drive.

Yes! That is the way to do it. dselect is not required for anything. Bypass it (in favor of apt) and your life will be much easier. If you're a current Debian user, it's even better: just run "dpkg --get-selections | awk '{ print $1 }' >package.list" to save your current list of packages. Then on the new system, "apt-get install $(cat package.list)" to have [most] of your previous software installed automatically. (There will be some hangups. Use the "--no-act" option and edit your package list accordingly. This is no big deal.)

Re:What about the install?

[Julian352]

Have you ever tried to use apt-get to testing, not even asking to go for the unstable. I had ATI Radeon (not the most supported of cards) working fine without a problem a year ago after I go my machine on the net. I didn't even need to start X until after I was able to upgrade to all of the latest stuff.

The whole point of Debian is that if you want stability, it's rock stable. But if your hardware is too new to have stable drivers, you have to sacrifice some stability and use the "testing" or "unstable" versions.

Your mental retardation is extreme.

[Lethyos]

Debian 3.0 Woody comes with KDE 2 and XFree86 4.1 while 3 and 4.2 are out respectively.

Big deal. Pretty soon, both the XFree86 and the KDE 3 situations will be rectified. So we've had to wait a bit longer. It's well worth it in my opinion since Debian makes installation and upgrade of all this software incredibly easy compared to ANY other operating system. If you want to go out and use something inferior, that's your own business. Eventually Debian gets current and once it leaps these major release hurdles, they stay current.

This is a bit sad, seeing that even CygWin and FreeBSD have more up-to-date versions in their releases. Just think of how much effort it took Cygwin to port the packages to Windows before packaging them, for example -- yet despite this their releases are far more timely.

The *BSD ports system is basically a nice way of organizing sources for programs. Very little effort is needed to add something to the system (this includes figuring out deps). So, it's not that big of a deal to see Debian lag behind BSD. Try again.

As for Cygwin, I'm trying to imagine how hard it is. Well, it just isn't. In the past few days, I've installed a lot of programs from source on Cygwin at work. None of them ever complained about not being in a real "unix" environment. Your statement clearly indicates that you've missed the whole point of Cygwin. Cygwin is designed such that it is not supposed to be hard to make packages of "unix" software for it. Duh.

The Debian packagers claim that there is a lot of intricacy involved in the packaging, and i'm sure there is, but I don't buy that people should have to use older software with known bugs, several months after the upstream authors have released their software.

Yes, it is infact intricate. Debian supports 11 platforms. Some are little endian, other big. Some are CISC, others MIPS. Some software (serpent cipher for example) only work on machines with certain endianness. As a result, this makes a dependency nightmare for the package maintainers. I'd like to see anyone else take on the job the Debian people have assumed and do 10% the quality of work.

As for using older software... well, fine, don't buy it then. It's well known in the IT world that you stick with the tried and true until the bleeding edge stops bleeding. A lot of shops know better than to jump right onto the latest version bandwagon because doing so destroys a potential resource of great value: watching other people fail in doing so. Knowing what your problems are when using software is better than using software and not knowing what problems you'll have. Again, duh.

Re:3.0?? Laugh....

[rizzo420]

actually... windows 2000 is windows nt version 5. windows me is version 4.9 of the 9x kernel. i have no idea what the hell winxp is. just a piece of crap in my opinion. but you're right... version number means nothing, it's just relative to the other releases of a single piece of software by a single company. aol seems to increase it's versions by 1 whole number everytime they make a slight change, debian makes big changes when they change their version number. i remember when 2.2 was release, i had originally thought woody was 2.3, but it's now 3.0, big jump, but there's probably enough changes to warrant the big jump.

Jigdo ISO creation tool

[bug1]

All those thinking of downloading the iso's you should do yourself a favour and have a look at jigdo.(1)

Jido downloads individual packages from mirrors and assembles the iso on you computer.

As someone who tried to download potato iso via a modem and use rsync to (attempt to) fix it up, i unreservedly recommend jigdo.

Its pretty easy to use as well.

1: http://home.in.tum.de/~atterer/jigdo/

There's something strange here

[njdj]

Release of Debian 3.0 is great news.
But those of us who have been regularly checking their web site in anticipation will be surprised, because the number of release-critical bugs has increased lately, and stands at 186 as I type.
Check for yourself - up from a low point of under 100 a month ago.
Back to the release notes: we understand Debian likes to be eccentric, but isn't it silly to provide the release notes in Catalan? The total number of speakers of Catalan, worldwide, is far less than the number of native Chinese speakers in New York (or even in Queens). And less than the number of native German speakers in Paraguay. The release notes are not provided in either Chinese or German.

Re:There's something strange here

[dvdeug]

we understand Debian likes to be eccentric, but isn't it silly to provide the release notes in Catalan?

That's the way Free Software works. Debian didn't hire translators to translate the release notes; they put out an email saying "anyone who wants to translate the release notes, here they are." Somebody translated them into Catalan. Nobody put the work into translating them into German or Chinese. That's just the way it goes. They'd be in all 5,000 human languages if we could, but we take what we can get.

In any case, you're being a little hard on Catalan. There's 9 million Catalan speakers world wide; it's not one of the top ten world languages, but it is one of the top hundred.

Re:There's something strange here

[Sentry21]

Debian is open-source start to finish, meaning, basically, that whatever gets done is whatever people want to do. If someone wants to translate the release notes (or entire distro) into Catalan, what's wrong with that? Chances are the person who did so did not do so instead of another language, like Hebrew, Sanskrit, Farsi, or what-have-you. If there had been no Catalan translation, that would be the only difference.

It doesn't hurt anything, so hey, why not?

--Dan

Re:There's something strange here

[solferino]

Back to the release notes [debian.org]: we understand Debian likes to be eccentric, but isn't it silly to provide the release notes in Catalan? The total number of speakers of Catalan, worldwide, is far less than the number of native Chinese speakers in New York (or even in Queens). And less than the number of native German speakers in Paraguay. The release notes are not provided in either Chinese or German.

yr comment shows that you do not understand th nature of a voluntary project

work in a voluntary project is only done voluntarily - no-one points to another person and orders them to do this or that

hence th fact that th release notes have been translated into catalan indicates that there was someone happy to do this task - a task which does benefit a community, albeit a rather small one

i would imagine that german and chinese translations will also appear quite soon - however this again will be done voluntarily, and not by someone ordering someone else to do it

i would also imagine that yr use of th word 'silly' is offensive to th person who did th catalan translation and who is providing real benefit to a section of th community however insignificant you consider it to be - perhaps you might like to contribute yrself rather than simply being irritatingly critical of work that has been voluntarily performed.

Re:There's something strange here

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you speak Chinese or German? Here is just the project for you :)

Re:There's something strange here

[tempfile]

Last time I checked, Barcelona was a town of about two million. What was the population of Paraguay again?

Re:There's something strange here

[Oskuro]

As many have said already, you don't understand what volunteer work means.
Debian's installer doens't have Grub support because no one volunteered to hack it while the installer wasn't frozen, for example.
There's no German release-notes because nobody in the Debian German l10n team wrote them, or they didn't do it on time. There's a Catalan translation because a group of people decided they wanted to do it... that's how it works...

And, by the way, you need to check some numbers before saying there's less Catalan speakers worldwide than German speakers in Paraguay. That's plain stupid... Catalan is spoken in 4 European countries: East/North-East of Spain, South East France, Andorra (official language) and a town in Italy.

Jordi Mallach,
coordinator of the Debian Catalan effort

Re:There's something strange here

[Anonymous Coward]

(Umm, does someone still read this?)

hence th fact that th release notes have been translated into catalan indicates that there was someone happy to do this task - a task which does benefit a community, albeit a rather small one

Well, in fact I, Ivan Vilata, (mostly) translated that. You see, njdj, some languages may be spoken by few people, but it is still nice for that people to see their computer talk it. We mean to be user-friendly, don't we?

Besides of that, one autonomous govt here actualy paid M$ for translating win into Catalan. We translators see the need of translating free sw and do it completely voluntarily, as Jordi noted. I personaly prefer not seeing those efforts as silly, but rather as an incentive to complete the other pending tasks, and to not leave a project if it can still be useful to someone.

BTW, I didn't feel offended ;) Now go and do that dist-upgrade!

(Oh how can I've been pulled into this?)

Re:There's something strange here

[njdj]

And, by the way, you need to check some numbers [sustance.com] before saying there's less Catalan speakers worldwide than German speakers in Paraguay. That's plain stupid

I'm not so "stupid" as to believe numbers on
http://www.sustance.com/catalan/ , a page whose stated purpose is the promotion of Catalan. Only in tiny Andorra (population: about 67,000) is Catalan an official language, and even there, 60% of the population speaks Spanish, according to Ethnologue

A volunteer, to correct you and another responder who claimed I didn't understand the concept, is not simply someone who works for free. That's a hobbyist. "Volunteer" includes the notion of being motivated mainly by the ideal of serving the organisation to which one volunteers. Debian is not best served by taking up space on its web page to promote Catalan. People who do that may well be "volunteers" in some organisation which promotes Catalan language and culture, but I would not describe them as Debian volunteers.

Re:There's something strange here

[Oskuro]

I'm sorry, but you still don't know what you're talking about. Catalan is only the official language for a whole language in Andorra, because it's the only country where it's spoken in the whole territory. Imagine there's some town in Russia very near to the Chinese border where people majorly speak Chinese. Isn't it a great idea to make Chinese an official language in Russia just for that? Same thing in Spain: Catalan is only spoken in a region of Spain, so it's just official in the affected regions: Pais Valencià, Catalunya and Balears (it's also spoken in the eastern areas of Aragón, but it's minor).
I guess you haven't been in Andorra, or even in Catalonia... you'd know that most of the Catalan speakers know Spanish too. You didn't like that "biased" webpage (first link I found in Google). Here's another one. So, are there 6M people living in Queens?

Debian is not best served by taking up space on its web page to promote Catalan. People who do that may well be "volunteers" in some organisation which promotes Catalan language and culture, but I would not describe them as Debian volunteers.

Yeah, right. So let's ditch the Esperanto, Danish, Swedish, Indonesian, Estonian, Croatian, Greek, Turkish, Hungarian and Catalan translations, they are minor languages and they are not worth the hard disk or time to maintain. Let's force the people that work on those translations to work on English, French or Spanish translations instead, which are much more useful... The Catalan translations of Debian in Woody will make it available to many Mandrake users in Catalunya, because till now, Mandrake was the only distribution with an extended Catalan support. Does that serve Debian, or not? We are not trying to promote Catalan, we're just giving Catalan users more freedom to choose between Spanish, French or the new Catalan translations.

I do this.

[dark-nl]

I use Mozilla for all my web browsing, except when I use lynx for speed. It hasn't crashed on me in a month or so, and it seems to render all sites well. Of course I have no idea what they're "supposed" to look like on IE, but watch me not care.

Re:I do this.

[treat]

I use Mozilla for all my web browsing, except when I use lynx for speed. It hasn't crashed on me in a month or so, and it seems to render all sites well.

Please. I use Mozilla on two platforms - Solaris and Linux. It crashes on me on average about once every other day. This represents a *vast* improvement over Netscape, which was virtually unusable except that there was no viable alternative. It is certainly a monument to poor programming the sheer number of ways netscape/mozilla are able to crash.

So far as lynx, use links - it is as much better than lynx as Mozilla is over Netscape.

Re:I do this.

[Anonymous Coward]

--I have a slightly opposite experience. I run netscape all the time, it has never crashed. what I do get is when the cache starts to get full the pages start to render slowly, and I know to go to preferences and manually clear cache. I surf with images disabled and 3 megs cache so that usually lasts all evening anyway, so it's not a big deal to work around. I only use ram cache not disk cache. With mozilla, the pages load slow, I detest the wasted real estate with that side bar monstrosity, and the page "wiggles" all the time, it's jerky as it's rendering and displaying. Literally jerky. Note, still on last release moz though, haven't tried the newest version yet, sorta reluctant downloading big files on a rural dialup that's flaky at times.

Why all this is I do_not_know. I'm on an older ibm with a 200 PP and 224 megs ram. Been on the net since netscape started, always liked it, never seemed to have the problems most folks talk about. Of course like I said I keep images off mostly, and never surf with scripting turned on. don't like active scripting, too buggy and security problems. On my macs I use iCab, which to me is the best browser any platform I have ever used. It's faster page rendering with images on on a slower mac machine I have, a 166 powerbook with only 64 megs ram, than netscape, konqueror or moz on this linux machine. I more use the linux machine because I can surf and use xmms for netradio better than realplayer or quicktime and surfing on the mac, that's the only plus I see with linux so far as a casual surfer who isn't a "server". It's a lot harder to use than mac, but the gui is pretty adequate, I'm still struggling with command line and dependencies and what library lives in which county that is accessible in what language or whatever.

some people are born command line admins, I ain't one of them unfortunately... ;^)

Re:I do this.

[Anonymous Coward]

links is fucking crap. I can't believe anyone uses that piece of shit. Although it does have w3m beat nicely. w3m canes lynx for tables though...

Re:Believe it or not, releases don't happen instan

[Anonymous Coward]

me.

he talked sense.

All Praise to the Compiler!

[Junior Macintosh]

I was in the shower when this was announced. This is one of those moments you will tell your kids about in the future. Go Debian!

So, my only question

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the Linux kernel still in the main distribution, or is it in non-free where it belongs? If it's still in main and the "stock" kernel is still in violation of the GPL, perhaps we should organize a "Burn All Debian Linux" party since they're aiding in the violation of the GPL, and violating their own DFSG.

Now maybe the magazines will get it right

[MBCook]

Ignoring all the obvious "woot" stuff, I'm glad that this will finally get all the magazines in line. Most of the major magazines (non-linux) such as PC World, etc. have been comparing Linux distros lately. They always compare the latest RH, Suse, Mandrake, etc, and version 2.2 of Debian. They always mark it down (because it's so old), but never mention that "Woody" was right around the corner. Now maybe they'll do some fair comparisons.

And as we all know (except for the magazines) the branches of debian are like this compared to other distros:

• Stable - The version 2 versions ago, that all the bugs are out of, and it's rock solid
• Testing - The current version of every other distro. Currest software, current bugs, still great.
• Unstable - The beta version of other distro, it's buggy, bug it rocks.

Now all that's left to say is, I wonder what they'll do when then run out of Toy Story characters to name the releases after? Or if they switch, what they'll switch to?

Re:Now maybe the magazines will get it right

[transami]

your outline of the debian distro versions is right on, and upon reading it, makes me think that perhaps a renaming of them would be helpful for PR. a couple of notions:

commercially oriented:

stable => enterprise
testing => consumer
unstable => development

or something more fun:

stable => solid
testing => liquid
unstable => gas :-)

ideas, thoughts? do others see such a thing as an improvement for debian public relations?

Re:Now maybe the magazines will get it right

[Betrayal]

Now all that's left to say is, I wonder what they'll do when then run out of Toy Story characters to name the releases after? Or if they switch, what they'll switch to?

By the pace in which they release their distribution, I think we should take care of the 32 bit date problem first.

Re:Believe it or not, releases don't happen instan

[kraf]

When Debian releases, they release for more platforms than anyone else: x86, Alpha, PowerPC, Sparc, 68K, ia64, etc. etc.

It's nice and all, but what's the point ?
90% of the userbase is on x86 (guesstimate), not recognizing that is stupid and arrogant.
They could have released 3.0 on x86 first, and on all other platforms later.

If Linux had the same anal policies as Debian, we'd still be at 1.0.

By the way, new stuff shows up in Debian's "unstable" branch very quickly

*cough*...Xfree 4.2...*cough*...kde 3...*ok I feel better now*

I admire the ideals of the Debian people, but if they didn't have extremly practical tools like apt-get, most users wouldn't give a crap about this dist.

Great

[term_0z]

This is good, this is really good. .. but I am still running unstable.

Getting Drunk

[ecliptik]

Is anyone else going to get really really blasted simply because Woody is finally released? Or am I just weird like that?

Oh well, either well, congrats to the Debian team and here's toasting to you.

Cool

[roly]

Finally Debian is up-to-date.

Damn, I was just installing Debian 2.0 Hamm on an old 486 yesterday :(

Re:3.0?? Laugh....

[mgv]

actually... windows 2000 is windows nt version 5. windows me is version 4.9 of the 9x kernel. i have no idea what the hell winxp is

Win XP is 5.1, IIRC

Michael

to apt-get or not to apt-get

[eg]

that is the question.

From
http://www.debian.org/releases/woody/i386/ release- notes/ch-upgrading.en.html

3.3 Preparing Sources for APT

The recommended method of upgrading is to use apt-get directly

3.5 Upgrading using apt-get (not recommended)

Which one is it?

Can anyone please explain?

Re:to apt-get or not to apt-get

[Phil Hands]

3.5 is a thowback to the 2.2 release notes, at which time apt-get was still experimental (although it was rock solid back then too to be honest)

Just use the 3.3 procedure, or if you're worried, wait until someone gets round to fixing it (later today I expect)

Re:to apt-get or not to apt-get

[Phil Hands]

Er, correction to that.

I've just been informed that apt-get dist-upgrade is in fact not recomended, because if you don't know exactly what you're doing it has a tendency to remove half the packages on your system, and not bother upgrading. So you are left with a perfectly valid, but somewhat emaciated instalation at the end.

dselect on the other hand makes smarter decissions about things like "replaces" and "suggests" package interdependancies, and lets you resolve conflicts before going for the upgrade, so that is the recomended route, unles you happen to know better.

Of course, I didn't know that, because I know how to avoid getting bitten by apt-get, so don't tend to notice its teeth.

Sorry about the previous mis-information, please igore it (feel free to mod it into oblivion)

Re:to apt-get or not to apt-get

[edlau]

Even apt-get seems to be slightly broken. Fortunately with apt-get on the commandline it gives this warning. This is not a happy thing to see otherwise. The new release notes suggest using aptitude over dselect anyway.

WARNING: The following essential packages will be removed
This should NOT be done unless you know exactly what you are doing!
[long snip]
1 packages upgraded, 3 newly installed, 226 to remove and 3 not upgraded.
Need to get 1550kB of archives. After unpacking 258MB will be freed.
You are about to do something potentially harmful
To continue type in the phrase 'Yes, do as I say!'
?]

Just volunteerism

[Anonymous Coward]

The other languages will come. It's a volunteer effort, so you get translations for the translators that volunteer, and when they are finished.

Re:Believe it or not, releases don't happen instan

[Anonymous Coward]

"Not recognizing" that the world of computing is far broader than any single platform is far more arrogant and arguably more stupid. IMO, Debian developers don't get anywhere near the respect they deserve for their cross-platform development. It may not be important to you, but there are many people out there who feel differently.

Re:3.0?? Laugh....

[rikkards]

5.1.2600 to be precise

Unconvinced of benefits of gentoo's approach

[Goonie]

Show me a benchmark that shows a significant increase in performance due to gentoo's approach that can't be duplicated in Debian by downloading a couple of Debian source packages, editing a couple of files, and building some custom debs.

Weigh that against the inordinate amount of time it takes to compile hundreds of friggin programs, for most of which it doesn't really matter if they're 2% faster.

Re:Unconvinced of benefits of gentoo's approach

[cybrthng]

Gentoo enforces a knowledge of your system your building.

Sure a "desktop" may not have much performance increase since alot is already optimized, but imagine building and rolling your own Gentoo servers.

1. You know everything that is on them
2. You know how to build from scratch
3. *EVERYTHING* is optimized for your specific server, memory configuration and CPU's.

Heck, even in high end deskstop usage, the "ports" system Gentoo uses is superb.

Yeah, kde/x/gnome take a few hours, but come on, the beauty of linux is the ability to optimize the darn thing for your system.

Re:Unconvinced of benefits of gentoo's approach

[Anonymous Coward]

Gentoo is where the "l33t" fringe of linux went to after linux became popular and easy to use. Its not a distro for people who want to just sit down and get their work done. Its for people who have no life beyond their computer and want to micro manage every aspect of it.
Thank God the mainstream distros aren't like that anymore. I went through enough "learning" back in the 90's and certainly don't need to spend my time needless compiling my packages when I can just pick and manage my installed apps from a friendly package manager.

Re:Unconvinced of benefits of gentoo's approach

[Jerf]

My experience matches yours, mostly, but a couple of observations:

One: "Inordinate amount of time" is too vague. An 'inordinate' amount of CPU time is more-or-less irrelevant to me. emerge is faster then trying to deal with a src deb.

Two: On that vein, downloading and compiling a source deb was non-trivial when I did it for enlightenment. Fiddly bits here, fiddly bits there, once installed the .deb system didn't seem to know about it (it's good enlightenment was basically a leaf program)... it's not the same.

I have a little underpowered laptop that I have had both Gentoo and Debian on. Great performance gains were obtained in both by compiling enlightenment with a lot of optimizations. The speed's about the same, but guess which was 'fire and forget' and which was 'fiddle with it for a couple of hours'?

I happily trade hours of my CPU time for minutes of my time. I can tell you which is more valuable to me in this era of desktop supercomputers.

Your points are valid, but for many of us, the priorities say Gentoo's a good deal overall. (I've started taking to selectively setting CFLAG and CXXFLAG settings on packages I think will benefit, without getting too anal about it. Non-optimized compiling is often 3-5x faster, even for just -march=i686 -O3 -pipe.) Perhaps not to you... but that's why we have dozens of major distros.

Re:Unconvinced of benefits of gentoo's approach

[tacocat]

You will see some improvement.

With the exception of security upgrades, how often do you really need to do upgrades?

Compiling everything wouldn't be that bad once you knew the process. I figure I won't be upgrading XFree or KDE for a very long time anyways.

What is 2% of hundreds of friggin programs anyways? Doesn't that add up to something?

Wow, it is so NEW!

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Look at this kiddies!

the inclusion of KDE 2.2 for the first time

Wow! So cutting edge! Suse 8 had KDE 3 ages ago, now Slackware 8.1 is out and has it, and we should be excited that Debian has finally come out with support for a now quite obsolete version of KDE.

Heck if you want technology that is that old, go back to DOS. Or FreeDOS so you can still be a "Open-Source Supporter".

Hope this isn't modded as flamebait.

P.S. They are hiding the karma scores now. That sucks.

Re:Wow, it is so NEW!

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL when slackware is more up to date then you that's pretty sad.

Re:Wow, it is so NEW!

[Anonymous Coward]

well, either it IS flamebait or you are incredibly uninformed about the stable, testing and unstable versions of Debian.

Re:Wow, it is so NEW!

[Anonymous Coward]

The great thing about Debian is you can instantly aptget yourself from KDE 2.2 to 3 or GNOME 1.4 to 2. Or beyond.

Re:Wow, it is so NEW!

[CoughDropAddict]

Wow! So cutting edge! Suse 8 had KDE 3 ages ago, now Slackware 8.1 is out and has it, and we should be excited that Debian has finally come out with support for a now quite obsolete version of KDE.

The day that Suse or Slackware provides working binaries for 10,000 packages on 11 architectures it might actually be relevent to make comparisons like this.

Not to mention that the point of this statement was that KDE is being included in Debian for the first time, since last time Debian made a release it was illegal to distributed KDE linked with QT. Not that any other distros gave a shit about what was legal, and even more amusing was that everyone accused Debian of being biased against KDE, a claim that was dispelled by Debian's instant willingness to include KDE once the license on QT changed...

Re:Wow, it is so NEW!

[dboyles]

Hope this isn't modded as flamebait.

If I had modpoints, it probably would be.

Why? Because I feel confident that you know about stable/testing/woody, and therefore you probably know that getting Debian with the latest-and-greatest software is as easy as making a few modifications to the sources.list and running an apt-get dist-upgrade. You don't even really have to know what to put in your sources.list, there are hundreds of them floating around online. You can just pick and choose the parts you want.

Heaven forbid Debian's "default" release be meticulously stable. Shouldn't they include more cutting-edge software as opposed to the tried-and-true stuff? Wait, that doesn't make any sense. That's like arguing that distributions should ship with every desireable service enabled. Personally, I'm glad Debian doesn't ship with "iffy" software. If I want to take that risk, I'll spend two minutes adjusting my system to suit me.

oO0Oo

[BattyMan]

Is anyone else going to get really really blasted simply because Woody is finally released? Or am I just weird like that?

I've been looking for a good excuse all afternoon. Thanks.

Outdated versions!!! Re:Debian Released Notes

[axxackall]

For the first time, Debian comes with the K Desktop Environment 2.2 (KDE). The GNOME desktop environment is upgraded to version 1.4

Is this a kind of joke?

Most of available to download gnome packages will fail to build with such old Gnome.

That is the last thing saying me - you do right staying with Redhat, which v 8.0b works just fine.

Re:Outdated versions!!! Re:Debian Released Notes

[swillden]

Why would you need to build gnome packages? Just apt-get pre-compiled binaries.

Want newer Gnome stuff? Grab it from the testing branch.

Re:Outdated versions!!! Re:Debian Released Notes

[Buck2]

Is this a kind of joke?

No. These are old, well-tested packages. This is a stable release.

Re:Outdated versions!!! Re:Debian Released Notes

[axxackall]

possible reasons:

• pre-compiled binary was compiled with different option and I want to change it;
• pre-compiled binary was compiled with different libraries or I want to add another one;
• the bug is found and I want to try to fix it (obvious choice, isn't it?)

Generally - we talk about Linux and Gnome, open source systems. I have my right to get sources. And the only way to make sure that I have an appropriate source code (without fraud and without mistake) - to compile the source code and compare the result with original binary.

All arguments like you don't need sources are against GPL, BSD and other OSS licenses.

I will inform RMS if you will insist on your arguments that I dont need sources. Be afraid - I 'm warning you! :)

Re:Outdated versions!!! Re:Debian Released Notes

[axxackall]

These are old, well-tested packages. This is a stable release.

I would understand such arguments having apply to server packages. But we are talking about GUI. And this GUI is not embedded to the OS kernel, like in some very famous proprietary systems. In 99.99% of Gnome crashes all you need is to restart X11 - all server daemons will go on without problems. At least it's true on RedHat :)

Re:Outdated versions!!! Re:Debian Released Notes

[Buck2]

But the stable distribution attempts to eliminate even the 0.01% of cases you have allotted due to bugs in all packages across all platforms.

I once asked a question in #Debian.

I asked, "Why do bugs in packages which are obviously due to the program itself [menu options crashing the program, false advertising within the documentation, totally broken config parsing, etc], get reported to the Debian package maintainers? Don't package maintainers just package stuff up and put it in the tree?"

The response was, "A bug in a Debian package is a bug in the distribution."

Debian stable attempts to have _all_ bugs ironed out or documented. I'm serious. This is different than RedHat [latest version] which contains an attempt to iron out a lot of bugs, but is spurred mostly by neat developments in the software they distribute. It's not good or bad either way, just different.

You've heard it a million times, but maybe it will register one day. :) Debian has a slow release cycle. This is because they want to document and/or fix all bugs before they release things. This takes a long time. They have a slow release cycle.

Debian unstable plus "unofficial" sources is newer than RedHat [latest version]. apt-get resolves a FUCKING SHITLOAD of dependency problems that develop using rpm.

It's simple, really. It's nice. It makes you happy. People like Debian because it makes them feel good to just type in "apt-get install ", twiddle their thumbs for the download period, and then use it. And it almost always just works. The times that it doesn't work, it usually means that there is no such package or you spelled it wrong, and more often than not you got the name wrong.

When this is the worst thing your distribution does, you're doing well. :)

Re:Outdated versions!!! Re:Debian Released Notes

[Phil Hands]

so, you want to recompile package foo, well first you need some source

apt-get source foo

or maybe some newer source

apt-get source foo/unstable

or maybe you need the source that became available 5 minutes ago, in which case you do one of the above, drop the new tarball in the current directory, go into the old Debian source directory, and run uupdate and maybe fix some patching problems in the new directory that got created for you.

Next, you need to build this stuff, so let's get in the source directory:

cd foo-1.2.3

oh, but we might need some other development libraries to build this, so lets grab what we need

apt-get build-dep foo

that's better, now we can tweak some source or options maybe, and make ourselves a package

debuild

right, so now we have a new package, so we install it

sudo dpkg -i ../foo-1.2.3*deb

and it gets installed (or maybe it has some dependencies, if you got this far, you can work it out yourself) just like it was an official Debian package, which means you get to remove it cleanly, etc. if the need arrises.

Who ever said source was difficult to play with in Debian? Debian is by developers, for developers -- we like source. That's why we're into Free Software.

Re:Outdated versions!!! Re:Debian Released Notes

[swillden]

Fine. Just use "apt-get source" instead of "apt-get install". You'll get a source tree which you can read, tweak and build to your little heart's content. And it will build clean as a whistle, every time (modulo syntax errors introduced by your tweaking, of course).

Did you really believe that Debian didn't distribute source? Get a clue...

My original point was that whoever complained about not being able to get apps that would build against Gnome 1.4 has never used Debian. Debian packages so much stuff that you rarely need to build anything if you don't want to. Obviously, you've never used it either, else you'd know that getting and building source is simplicity itself.

Re:Outdated versions!!! Re:Debian Released Notes

[Isle]

apt-get source --build foo

Is faster and works too.

Re:Outdated versions!!! Re:Debian Released Notes

[asteinberg]

Or switch to Source Mage and just type

cast foo

which will prompt you to get any dependencies, download, compile, and install everything, using optimizations specific to your computer.

Re:Outdated versions!!! Re:Debian Released Notes

[reverius]

Or switch to Gentoo and just type

emerge foo

which will prompt you to get any dependencies, download, compile with the options that you specified in the USE variable, and install everything, using optimizations specific to your computer.

Plus you don't have to pretend you're a freakin' Wizard just to use your computer. Some people don't like to confuse work with D&D. :)

Just playing Devil's Advocate, that's all...

Re:3.0?? Laugh....

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you think a version number on any software means?

You guys are the fools... didn't you see what he wrote. "...and the troll waits to see what kind of response this sarcastic troll post yields..."

Re:Already a year out of date.

[Wyzard]

Debian only backports security fixes you fucking liar.

No, Debian only backports security fixes as a matter of policy. Other bugfixes do get backported by the maintainers of their respective packages; read the changelogs. They just don't have a special team dedicated to the task like the security fixes do.

Second, now instead of having a fully tested stable release of the software directly from the developers you have some hacked together debian version with all sorts of sketchy patches that *might* break some functionality on the server.

You mean similar to the hacked-together patched-up broken "GCC 2.96" that's been part of RedHat for the past four releases?

If you're going to issue an update to fix a bug, it's better to issue a backport that incorporates only the bugfix (released from upstream, remember, so not exactly "sketchy") than to issue a whole new version that includes changes totally unrelated to the bug.

OT: Chicago Cubs? World Series? Hell fozen over?

[maynard]

Don't you mean the Boston Red Sox? When they win the World Series, you KNOW Hell hath frozen over! --M

Re:What about the install?

[Wyzard]

That's true, but the "stable" branch is mostly useful on things like servers, and who puts a top-of-the-line 3D accelerator in a server? "Unstable" really isn't very unstable at all; yes, individual programs break from time to time, but don't think you'll have things break down on you on a regular basis.

I run unstable most of the time, and I boot Windows about once every week or two to play games. Between those reboots, I'm running XFree86 4.1 at 1600x1200 on nvidia's drivers, running xmms, Gaim, Galeon, xchat, LimeWire, VMware, and myriad useful panel applets, for days straight. In the background I have Apache, SSH, CUPS, scanlogd, OpenAFS, fetchmail, samba, and a few others. Occasionally I'll fire up Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament. Last night my panel crashed randomly and then restarted with everything in its place, and honestly, that's the only crash I can remember experiencing all summer.

Re:How do you pronounce Debian, dumbass ?

[Lord High Troll]

I pronounce it: bhuggee boolsheit

Word.

[Buck2]

What happened to subject line troll?

Re:http://jamie.mccarthy.vg/

[Buck2]

Haha, you posted a response to a signature!

You're offtopic.

neener neener

OT: SuperNES CD-ROM

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually there were two SNES CD-ROM add-ons, one partnered with Sony and the other with Philips(?).

The one Sony helped develop turned into (wait for it) the Sony PlayStation after Nintendo bailed.

downtimezones

[yerricde]

3am California time is in the middle of the average working day in the UK.

If you have a lot of users in other time zones, then rotate the scheduled downtime through all the time zones.

He was murdered, and became the Chalk Line Troll.

[Anonymous Coward]

&nbsp
&nbsp
&nbsp

Re:OT: Chicago Cubs? World Series? Hell fozen over

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been longer since the Cubs won a world series than the Red Sox. Hell, at least the Sox have been competitive more than 5 years out of the last 50.

Use the Graphical Installer for Woody!

[Jagasian]

You hear me! Use the beta version of the PGI ISO, the graphical user-friendly autohardware detecting installer for Woody. Check out the website here, and the ISOs are at the first link (only 100MB download for the entire ISO).

Debian truely is the one true Linux distro. Its non-commercial, and developed by an open free internet community. Not only that, but Debian is superior to every other Linux distro. It is stable, easy to maintain, and it runs on any useful piece of computer hardware - no matter what platform that hardware is. Support Debian by simply spending the time to install and use it for your main Linux installation.

oh geez

[ironfroggy]

and my friend with broad band -just- finished downloading the previous stable release for me! 6 CDs... (3 binary, 3 source). release often, eh?

This is better than....

[deviantphil]

This is better than a Star Trek TNG All weekend marathon!

Running Debian on Sun Blade 100?

[Chicane-UK]

Hi Guys,

I own a Sun Blade 100, which I guess is a real basic entry level Sun box in that it has an IDE harddrive, and onboard ATI graphics. I have upgraded the HDD to a 40GB IBM Deskstar and it currently has 256MB RAM. Would Debian run ok on this? I have wanted to try out debian for ages but never really got around to downloading it - seeing as they do it for Sparc, my Sun Blade would be an ideal donor as Solaris drives me up the wall ;)

Re:Running Debian on Sun Blade 100?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it will run. See the following links for more information:

• http://sunblade100.wells.org.uk/cache/15.html
• http://lists.debian.org/debian-sparc/2001/debian-s parc-200108/msg00016.html

Re:Running Debian on Sun Blade 100?

[biglig2]

Try some googling... I quickly found http://sunblade100.wells.org.uk/cache/59.html who says she is running sid and is pretty happy with it; it feels faster than Solaris did, and only a few minor issues.

http://www.debian.org/ports/sparc/ is also obviously a good place to start.

security in "testing"

[Xtifr]

Plus the fact that testing has a serious security problem (security updates won't show up until about two weeks after they are packaged since they have to go through unstable first).

No, the package maintainer can assign a priority to a package. Default priority uploads will move to testing after a couple of weeks in unstable, but security uploads are normally assigned the highest priority, and should appear within a day or two. Just enough time to make sure it won't actually eat your system.

Ogg vorbis 1.0

[George_007]

And ogg vorbis 1.0 too!

Re:Believe it or not, releases don't happen instan

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't use the numbers game to argue in favour of debian's 11 architectures, because you'll lose. For every person arguing that debian needs 11 architectures I can find you three that think it's a bad idea.

Ofcourse, the only reason this isn't reflected in the actual debian distro is because the core debian developers still think debian needs 11 architectures. It's foolish. It's one of the main reasons for woody's long release cycle.

cool

[vesamies]

KDE really cool debian GNU/ addition. HPPA really cool thing too! debian kicks ass! crypto cool too!!!!!!!!!!!

Re:Believe it or not, releases don't happen instan

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the debian people ARE writing the programs. The guy who packages Xfree, for example, had to port it to a few of debian's 11 architectures, because XFree86.org doesn't even write for all of debian's arch's. That kind of work takes time, and lots of it. There's a technical, cross-platform, reason why xf 4.2 wasn't on debian for so long (there are test releases on the maintainer's site now).

In addition, almost every package in the debian package collection has patches added on top of the baseline version. Plenty of these go back to debian's policy guides which dictate behaviour for software, so programs don't get to just do their own thing. All window managers share one menu system, for example.

Why?

[mnordstr]

"For the first time, Debian comes with the K Desktop Environment 2.2 (KDE). The GNOME desktop environment is upgraded to version 1.4, and X itself is upgraded to the much improved XFree86 4.1. With the addition of several full-featured free graphical web browsers in the form of Mozilla, Galeon, and Konqueror, Debian's desktop offerings have radically improved."

Why does Debian always come with such old stuff? Fine, maybe KDE 2.2 is more stable than 3 but still...
The only thing keeping me from not using Debian is the oldish software... I'm talking about my workstation, for servers Debian is great.

Re:Why?

[Phil Hands]

Why does Debian always come with such old stuff? Fine, maybe KDE 2.2 is more stable than 3 but still...

Well, we test it until we're happy with it. This takes time. Time during which newer packages get released. Packages that generally get uploaded to Debian unstable (or in the case of KDE3, Debian experimental), then people like yourself that want to run that package have to go through the "trauma" of editing one line in one file (or using a cute point and shoot front end), and then they can pick and mix what software they want. Is that really so difficult to understand?

Other people may release things because their marketing department tells them to. Debian has the luxury of not having a marketing department, so we don't need to do that. That's why we use the word stable, to mean stable.

OK, it takes longer than it might if we were all being paid to do this, but who cares. It's so easy to select the versions of software you want, and select the level of instability you can live with, that there is no issue to be resolved here.

For example, you might want to run a known good version of postgreSQL on you machine to look after you accounts database (don't want to loose that) but be willing to run a cute KDE3 based database access tool to view that data, on the assumption that if it crashes, it probably won't have chance to ask postgreSQL to do anything too bad --- your choice, go right ahead. apt-get will even keep track of that, adn continue to upgrade postgeSQL from the stable branch, and kdata (or whatever) from unstable, or even http://freds.kde.emporium.com/debian/ say.

In summary, give Debian a try if you fancy it, but please stop coming up with spurious excuses not to, if you don't.

Re:Why?

[mnordstr]

"For example, you might want to run a known good version of postgreSQL on you machine to look after you accounts database (don't want to loose that) but be willing to run a cute KDE3 based database access tool to view that data, on the assumption that if it crashes, it probably won't have chance to ask postgreSQL to do anything too bad --- your choice, go right ahead. apt-get will even keep track of that, adn continue to upgrade postgeSQL from the stable branch, and kdata (or whatever) from unstable, or even http://freds.kde.emporium.com/debian/ say."

Ah, that I didn't know. I thought Debain was more static than that. Now I might have a reason to install it on a rainy day. Thanks =)

Re:Why?

[fingerfly]

Debian GNU/Linux is my favorite.

To my understanding, the version of KDE in SID (http://ftp.us.debian.org) is 2. Right?

Sorry for annoying u here.

upgrade potato - sid

[Anonymous Coward]

I just upgraded my potato webserver to sid.
(in former times I just upgraded to kernel 2.4, everything else was original potato)

upgrading took 25 minutes including download and there were absolutely no problems. This is what I really like on debian.

I don't care about long release cycles, I just need my server to be up and running.

thx to all the debian people for this well done job.

You read my mind N/T

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck does N/T means? I guess it is when you write something in the textbox to avid nasty scripts on Slashdot.

Discussion on kerneltrap

[Anonymous Coward]

The kernel developers have discussed it on this link.
It IS possible but would require hell of a lot work, so nobody is up for the task.

http://kerneltrap.org/node.php?id=284

Re:3.0?? Laugh....

[Anonymous Coward]

WinXP 2600 Hacker Edition... that's so elite.

kernel-package

[Anonymous Coward]

If you had used kernel-package(5) to compile the

new kernel into a .deb, installing this package

would've called lilo by a simple Enter to the question to do so. Or grub or whatever bootmanager

in installed the right way.

release maintainer's debriefring notes

[solferino]

anthony towns has posted a fairly detailed `retrospective' on th release of woody and an `introspecitve' on th future release of sarge here

What about Perl?!?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why didn't you mention my personal savior, Perl!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAGH! I shall now go and look for a PHP plug in for perl to interface with the C-binaries (through a C Perl module) to connect with the J2EE perl modules. I might even look for a standard C Perl plugin.

I enjoy writing ENGINES in a interpreted language that allows me to use as horrible syntax and coding practices as possible. I like using hacked bits as mission critical components. Hey! Once when I was a kid, I made a prototype house in my tree. It used cardboard, particle board and tarp. I use it now as not the basis of my current house, but as my actual house. Who needs real building materials, structural engineering practices and stability when I can just hack it together?!

what is 'elite'?

[Anonymous Coward]

are you sure you did not mean '1337'?

ah, the power of cheese... and rhetoric

[Anonymous Coward]

in a perfect world, where people did not have eternally large egos and play politician then the above posters statement about Debian being 'in the open' and there not being much to be an 'insider' on, would be true. However, this is one of those seemingly paradoxical situations. on one hand we have the fact that MANY know of some serious problems within the Debian elite. On the other hand, the fact we know so readily of this does in fact attest to a larger aspect of openness than is found in many other places.

Debians issues are not technical... I will just leave it at that.

huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

wtf is that about?

1 requires 2, 2 requires 3, 3 requires 1...

[Anonymous Coward]

such situations are at the heart of package problems. one solution would be for package maintainers and developers to show more discipline by not requiring new features to be dependent on a string (direct or indirect) of software that in essence requires the user to upgrade on a 10 or more to 1 basis (10 or more packages when all you wanted was 1). Perhaps by applying a method of categorization (like stable, unstable, etc but actually being consistent and logical about it) it could be possible (again with proper discipline) to avoid these dependency problems. I should not HAVE to upgrade 0.0.0.000.00001 version of various libs and such simply to get an update to my X-Windows crap.

This is as annoying as when a game for windows is in development for 3 or more years but then when released will not work for most people until they patch up to driver versions released 6 months after the game is released. WTF? Did the programmers have copies of these drivers when making the game?

control, CONTROL, you must learn control

[Anonymous Coward]

pleading to all package maintainers and the developers that produce the guts of those packages... PLEASE stop requiring the 'latest and greatest' unless it is absolutely necessary. If you buy a new Harddrive it does not REQUIRE you to upgrade your cpu, mobo, memory, etc. However if it uses a faster throughput like from ata-33 to ata-66/100 then you can be sure it will benefit from an upgrade of the i/o (the mobo)... however this is still OPTIONAL.

Contrast this to the frustration of not being able to upgrade to a faster cpu unless you get a new mobo, new memory and probably a new powersupply/case.

Please, when setting dependencies do not mix fixes and additions with unstable new functionalities and toys. (this is a two way street of course) If I am required to update some libs to meet the dependencies of packagex upgrade (a fix or maybe just FINALLY supporting my hardware) but those themselves are unstable and buggy or have their own dependencies on buggy and unstable software then that is a MAJOR problem. A problem that turns a very minor change into a major overhaul.

Please update the method of apt-get, dselect, etc so that NONE of them will get hosed or hose the system when upgrading and there is a failure (shitty package host connection/hosting, incomplete packages and their dependencies hosted (this one kills me :))

I mean, it is as if you actually TRY to make it frustrating and difficult. And for God's sake... PLEASE EXPLICITLY LIST PACKAGE SITES. I am tired of the hunt and peck game of trying to find all sites that have all the stupid dependencies necessary to get just one or two apps. Obscurity and ambiguity are not good.