Slashdot Mirror
Updates From Debian
A couple of people noted that
"Linuxlookup.com is reporting the third update of Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (codename `woody') which mainly adds security updates to the stable release, along with a few corrections to serious problems. Those who frequently update from security.debian.org won't have to update many packages and most updates from security.debian.org are included in this update." Another reader writes "Looks like the Debian project just released
their old stable distribution (woody) with a huge numbers of security
updates, some removals and some less critical bugfixes. It's been a long
time that we had to wait for it, the last update was in November last year,
together with the break-in." And finally: pkarlos_76 writes "What's holding up Debian Sarge from release to stable? It's those lazy maintainers..... no actually it's just a few issues with security and bugs being quashed, and maybe you can help speed things up, especially if you are a maintainer, as your package will be left out if release candidate bugs are not fixed. Sarge Release Status Update available on Debianhelp . Even if you aren't a maintainer, any help with bug quashing, picking up orphaned packages or what not is always a Good Thing.
[droll] Obligatory: "I'd rather have the Buzz update" [/droll] Good to see the updates.
on my laptop... just finished downloading it via torrent. I can't be jiggered to wait for Sarge to come out in final form... How long has it been now in rc form??? I mean, they posted the teaser for Sarge two years ago!!! ridiculous...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I'm not that familiar with Debian so I'm wondering what's Debian's unique selling point? What does it do that others don't?
My impression of Debian rightly or wrongly is a rather conservative distro with a very rigid/ideological view on which licenses the will package.
----
I've used a handful of distributions (Suse, Mandrake, Redhat, Fedora Core 2, Slackware) over the years, but only dabbled a bit with each. I tried installing Debian woody yesterday for a project I'm working on, and got frustrated with the installation process. They should look to Mandrake or Fedora Core for an example of a streamlined installation process. I'm sure I'm just lazy when it comes to installing an OS, but I did sit through a Slackware install off before.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
We have 'recently' switched our servers over to debian (coming from redhat), because of the so-called stability etc.
We decided to go with Sarge (testing), as we where expecting a final release with security-fixes soon, and didn't wanted to have woody installed and becoming obsolete within a couple of weeks.
This was almost 7 months ago, and right it's not even in a freeze.
(Yes, I know, Debian releases when it's ready, but hey, atleast get the security team start having a look at the packages.)
No flaming (I love the ease in the distribution), just a bit disappointed.
Can't wait to get me a "woody"...
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
It's niche is being so out of date that hackers are no longer familiar with it's versions of packages.
It's news probably because Debian only does updates every 3 years...
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
Debian's strategy of rock-solid releases is something that makes the distro unique. It also doesn't make it much fun. If you want modern packages, you often have to hang out with the "unstable" crowd, rather than the "testing" crowd. But this is like being signed up for regular crotch-kicks, since unstable breaks systems on a practically weekly basis. This, plus dependency creep, makes anything but "stable" debian sort of a drag.
Stable Debian, on the other hand, is a nice thing. I've always admired Debian's power structure and community focus, but I've been so much happier with my hobby computer when I switched to a more "I-think-I'm-an-expert-but-really-I'm-an-idiot" distro like gentoo. For binary distros, I think there's a big pack of modern flashy desktop ones that eat Debian's lunch. Debian's idealism might end up side-lining it in the Linux world.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
Philosophy of Debian is impeccable!
But what I'd really like is the easy graphical installer.
So much easier to persuade people with!
And install of course!
Hahah what is funny is that if there is any news about old retro dying stuff, it is bound to be on the front page, except of course *BSD :-)
:-)
It is a conspiracy you know.
In all seriousness - debian sucks the same way as a swedish student doing illicit massage to help get through college - i.e. it is awesome!
If I didn't use SuSE I would use Debian. If I had another PC *it* would use Debian.
If I had a swedish student trying to earn her way through college....
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
for several years, then I got fed up with how outdated even a testing system is. I want a recent Linux distribution, not a system with old stuff, no matter how stable and secure it is. Maybe on my server system Il consider staying with testing, but there is no way in hell I ever install stable again.
To track unstable (like tracking -current in the *BSDs) _can_ give you some surprises, but rarely _does_. I use sid on my desktop since the time KDE wasn't in the distro (QPL problems). I haven't been bitten for some two years now.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Debian has so many packages and platforms that it is hard to release.
It is even crazier that a game like "Abuse" is listed as a release stopper. C'mon folks. We need a small core that drives the release schedule.
Maybe this is why ubuntu forked.
I do love the long support cycle of debian. Can't afford to upgrade a server every year, which is the case for Fedora and friends
apt-get update && apt-get upgrade .deb package.
Everybody harps about packages being outdated, but oftentimes that means rock-solid stable (yes security fixes are carefully backported).
For those two reasons I don't dream of running any other distro on my servers. I also use it on my desktop machine, LAN gateway, etc. It's just so simple to maintain.
In the rare cases when I need newer version of a program, I first check http://www.backports.org/ and http://www.apt-get.org/, and if there's nothing I just download the original src tarball from freshmeat/sourceforget/etc and use dh_make to create my own
Overall I'm a very satisfied "customer". Only things I'm missing is a nice install CD/bootdisk that allows to install directly on RAID-1 root filesystem (like RedHat has been doing for some time), and a Usetnet newsgroup I can post to w/o having to sign-up for the mega-high-traffic Debian User mailing list (I tried following that list a couple years ago and soon decided I don't want to receive that much email).
My machine at home can run redhat, mandrake, suse, and even gentoo, but I can't for the life of me get any debian based distro to work on my PC.
During the base install I will get random package errors. I thought it might be my CD, but i've burned 10 at this point and verified the CRC, so maybe its my sony DVD burner that i'm using to read the disk for the install.
Here's my specs if anyone has a clue
p4 3ghz
intel i865perl motherboard
audigy 2 ZS
Samsung SATA 160 gig drive.
Gainward nvidia FX5900XT
Sony DVD burner
Nothing new or special. Tried doing a netinstall of sarge with the rc2 installer. Tried to ubantu (or however you spell it) and i'm going to try a knoppix chroot install tonight. I've tried other's but no luck on those as well.
Any ideas?
is the large number of packages it has. I used to use Mandrake, being a super user friendly distro, but I got tired of finding out that a program I wanted to run was not available as Mandrake rpm. I tried rpms that were made for Redhat and had problems. Also compiling from source didn't always work since the version of libraries would often be different.
The number of packages + number of platforms that Debian runs on is the largest...but I got tired of waiting for Sarge to be released. Ubuntu came to the rescue. Debian based + large number of packages if you add in Universe, and it covers the main platforms I'm interested in: PPC, AMD64, and legacy x86 (will be great to have PPC64 optimized someday too).
Plus the latest Gnome (which I'm liking much more now than KDE)!!!
It's also very stable and you can get by with a minimal of packages. The approach is to patch exisiting versions rather than force 'upgrades' to newer versions which may or may not change behavior (see PHP for examples of behavior changes even between point versions).
And it runs on quite a variety of hardware besides lame old x86. I've run classes for semesters off of old junker Macintoshes -- 100% availability, no downtime from course start until the hardware was retired for good the next year.
It's also very fast to install once you get used to it. (Don't use dselect) I've installed Debian for use as a web/cgi/database server on Pentium machines in under 15 minutes. Including some tweaking, however that needs a fast network connection.
It's easy to choose linux 2.2, 2.4, 2.6 or a custom variant Linux kernel. I've also read that you can drop in other kernels besides Linux, like BSD. Though I myself have not tried, but would like to read more about it.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
I always thought it was more like this:
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those that understand binary and those that don't.
"Genius may shine aloof and alone, like a star, but goodness is social, and it takes two men and God to make a Brother."
All debian varieties can use apt-get (and its partner tools) to contact the main debian repositories. The repositories have a *huge* selection of prepackaged applications/libs/etc that you can install with very little fuss simply by choosing "apt-get install NAMEOFPACKAGE." Alternately, there are CLI tools such as "aptitude" which one may use to select software from a categorical list of packages, or GUI tools such as "synaptic" that do the same in a graphical environment.
At regular intervals, you may "apt-get update" to update your machine's list of software known to debian. "apt-get upgrade" can then be used to upgrade to known newer versions, or apply security updates in debian/stable.
For software updates/installations that have configuration options, often you will get a curses-based interface which steps you through basic configuration.
Debian/stable: As most have mentioned, very stable, well tested, and generally out-of-date as far as new features etc etc (but with security fixes etc being backported). Automatic download/configuration of most new security updates via apt-get. Very nice for servers or other systems that you want to be reliable, but don't need a bleeding edge environment. Packages are generally well-tested against each other, so you have a good assurance that apt-get installing package B will not break package A.
Debian/unstable: No security patches for unstable packages. Instead, regularly updating will get you newer versions of software. Sometimes you get conflicts but ususally it is fairly stable. I've been using a debian/unstable desktop for quite sometime now... the worst problems I've had thus far is needed to manually select a different "automake" version for Anjuta to work, and having a package that wasn't from debian being broken by a gtk update (mainly because some quirky coding in said package didn't like the new GTK version).
Debian/testing: I haven't used it, but basically I believe it's supposed to be slightly more bleeding edge than debian/stable. Packages haven't been fully tested against each other, package updates/changes are more common.
Really, you could think of the above as something akin to freshmeat.net's software grading system, where 'stable' is often for "mature" software packages, 'unstable' includes "beta" or less mature, and 'testing' is very new or "alpha."
The only thing that confuses me at current is why my Firefox is only avaiable up to version 0.9.3, even in 'testing'...
In summary though, the concept that debian is for old/crufty software is bogus. This may apply to debian/stable, but unstable will keep you very up-to-date for most users.
This is great to hear. I recently deployed Debian on some production servers out on the internet and they have gone several months without even the slightest quirk or hiccup, under moderately heavy load. I was semi-new to Debian, and I use it on one of my machines at home too; on my desktop I use Gentoo.
:)
:)
People have a variety of opinions on any distribution, but I can't think of anything easier to maintain, and it's well-documented too.
I've heard some rumors about the Debian support community being a little crusty and curmudgeonly, but I wouldn't know because I've so far never needed to ask anyone for support. And I'm not that bright, so that says a lot.
On the other hand, I've met Debian users in other non-Linux forums who all have been nice enough folks.
As I update regularly, it appears from the release announcement that there won't be any added value to downloading and burning it, which is just as well.
The conservatism here has been a positive things for the server-related things I use it for. I've never tried using testing or unstable as a desktop (where I imagine you generally want to be a little less conservative) so I can't speak to that. However, when I get a new system to replace this miserable 1 GHz Celeron, I'll probably turn this machine into a Debian machine, since running Gentoo on it, with the attendant compiling, is increasingly painful given its speed.
(Though I'll run Gentoo on the new system
Side by side, they seem to cover two extremes of the spectrum, and work well in that regard, side by side. I haven't even been very curious about anything else but these two. But that's just mey opinion.
So, Debian is to coma as *BSD is to dying?
home
First of all, I am a happy user of Debian Woody on the desktops and servers. And let me tell you something: it is stable. And it is stable not only in the sense that the system per se has never crashed during 24h/day heavy load for years, but what is even more important for large networks and offices, it is stable in the sense that no API or system behaviour change while the patches are applied. There are no new featuritis after a stable Debian is released, no version of any program changes to a newer one with even slightly different interface or semantics. There are only isolated security patches. Period.
If any software has fixed a vulnerability in a newer version of the program, the Debian team backports that security fix to older versions, and that security fix alone. What does it mean? That in addition to the system itself being rock solid, I can be quite sure that my custom applications will not break after patching. And we all know that this is the real reason that makes administrators not patch their systems on time. No one will patch a system if the patches break everything, there would be no point, why not shut down the network in the first place and be done with it.
But with stable Debian this is a non-issue. And in my opinion, this the reason why real-world Debian installations tend to be generally more secure. As a Debian lover I would love to say otherwise, but Debian is not inherently more secure than Red Hat or Mandrake; Debian admins are not generally smarter than anyone else. Even the APT packaging system is not so important. It is not important who, how or with which tools applies patches. It is even not that important if those very patches are available after ten hours or ten days after disclosing the vulnerability. It is, however, important what happens after applying those patches. Does anything break? Does anything start working different than before? Does it need extensive testing and rewriting of local custom software? If the answer is "yes" then you can be sure that those patches will be rolled back and will not get applied for months.
That is the real issue. That is the real difference. So now going back to the question:
"What's holding up Debian Sarge from release to stable? It's those lazy maintainers..... no actually it's just a few issues..."
I would like to ask a more important question: what does it actually mean that Debian Sarge is released as stable? And as it turns out, it means changing the "stable" symlink from "woody" to "sarge."
That's right. Sarge is already released and you can use it before that symlink is changed if you need software newer than Woody. The only other thing that will change after the "release" is that feature updates will stop and only security updates will get backported. But the security updates are already available in Sarge, maybe even faster. The only difference is that before the "stable" symlink is redirected to Sarge, you are also getting feature updates of the software in addition to security patches. If that is not an issue for you, then nothing is stopping you from "releasing" Sarge today.
I hope this will help to understand why Debian users and developers are often outraged when people ask when the new version of Debian is released.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Maybe you are out of luck since in Sweden college is free for all and students get support from the state.
Is there a line for a debian security ftp site that I should have in my sources list for testing?
if there is any news about old retro dying stuff, it is bound to be on the front page, except of course *BSD
:-D
So in other words, Slashdot confirms; *BSD is alive.
And Debian sucks in a good way? *confuzzled*
I think I'll just stick to something that doesn't suck that well, but can be (ab)used all the time.
home
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
What exactly is so "ancient" about debian? I'm using unstable (which isn't quite as 'fresh' as testing) and I'm not nearly so far behind as people indicate:
Firefox: 0.9.3-6 (my primary complaint about anything being outdated, latest: 1.0PR has a lot of nice features)
Thunderbird: 0.83 (latest)
Perl-base: 5.8.4 (latest is 5.8.5)
Open-Office: 1.1.1-3 (1.1.3 is latest)
Blender: 2.34-1 (latest)
GIMP: 2.0.5-1 (latest)
PHP4-pear: 4.3.9-1 (latest is PHP5)
Apache: 1.3.31-6 (latest is 1.3.32)
Apache 2: 2.0.5-1 (latest)
GAIM: 1.0.58 (1.0.2 latest)
aMule: 1.2.6+rc6 (latest is 1.2.8)
GnomeMeeting: 1.0.2-5 (latest is 1.0.?)
It hasn't quite got that new car smell, but it's newer than my windows system and a heck of a lot nicer to update than many.
The main fallbacks seem to be on major version changes (php5, firefox is probably waiting on 1.0 rather than preview release, etc). For some of the above "testing" might even have newer versions.
I suggest trying to install directly from knoppix. You get a really messed-up debian but a working one. If Knoppix works then the HD install will; simple as that.
It is then easy to slowly upgrade everything to unstable or testing, recompile kernel if necessary (only if needed for modules, else don't bother).
Of course to get a "real" debian you will end doing a lot more work than simply installing it from the start (fixing those rc-scripts, removing half of the pacakges etc...) but at least "it works".
Make sure you have broadband because you'll end up installing the whole distro again, basically.
We've always been at war with Eurasia.
from the distro that time forgot
Servers are supposed to be "boring", "dull", "mundane", "reliable", etc.
I run a few Debian servers and they never give me any problems. Patches go in without any problems. They never do down. They just keep serving.
Gentoo is great on a desktop. But a desktop has completely different requirements than a server. A desktop can get by with an unstable app.
A server should not be running anything it doesn't absolutely have to and everything it runs must be rock solid. Debian gives me all of that on a server.
Maybe.
Knoppix on the desktop is awesome and it is Debian. One Knoppix CD + a USB toy and you've got it all.
Debian on the server may not have all the Oracle support and such that Red Hat does, but it handles just about everything else.
GUIs are vastly superior if you're doing a task which requires you to find one item among many, without proper search parameters. This may be a file you're trying to locate, or a configuration option. This is even more superior if this is a task you do rarely or only once.
CLI is vastly superior if you're doing rutine tasks. They are typically more flexible, have more options and offer more ways to manipulate and automate them. Auto-complete (a must) makes it about as easy to select files as in GUIs.
Of course, the G in GUI is mostly eyecandy. TUI (Text User Interface, think text-based menus), though rare, provide mostly all the functionality of GUIs, unless you're specificly doing something graphic like viewing/manipulating images.
What I really really do miss is more hybrid interfaces. Where you can do things graphically, and yet command the full power of a CLI. I don't see why it has to be an either-or. I don't mean 1:1 maps of CLI->GUI which are basicly eyecandy, but programs where the GUI is useful in itself, and the CLI readily available.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Install Woody base (stable) and quit after you have a base system
/etc/apt/sources.lst to unstable all the way through and do
Then change your
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
then, now that you're upgraded to unstable/sarge use aptitude to install all the other stuff you want from sarge respositories
I don't like installers, so I cannot help you with that :-) ;-) :
If Knoppix boots, you can try using debootstrap. My preferred way because you can install debian on nearly everything the way you want; it is nearly as flexible as the Gentoo installer. And you're lucky, this article just came out today
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=8675
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Oops, the 94-day machine is running 2.6.7-1. Until it's rebooted :-)
Bruce Perens.
Debian's biggest strength, and some would argue biggest weakness, is the Debian Policy.
Take a look at Manoj Srivastava's superb essay on Debian Policy for more info. It's well worth the read.
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
and ugly and his mother wears army boots.
/kicks self for not reading the entire thread
Link to article was previously posted here.
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
Thanks for the information. Knoppix does boot up and works like a charm (well except sound, but that should be simple to resolve). I will give this a try tonight and see if it works for me.
There is a 2.4 series kernel in stable. If you want to installed it from disc use "bf24" as your install option instead of "vanilla" or "linux"
:-)
That being said, you don't use debian/stable if you want to be up-to-date, it's something like using windows 98 to avoid RPC exploits
intel i865perl motherboard
audigy 2 ZS
Samsung SATA 160 gig drive.
Gainward nvidia FX5900XT
Sony DVD burner
Nothing new or special.
I'd like to know what you consider "new" then.... Hell, my "new" computer is from 1999...
I've been running Debian on the same SMP machine since 1998 (since 2.0.30, I think): 6 years without a reinstall. I think it was potato or hamm or something back then, but though I've swapped out the motherboard and processors a few times since then (never the disk the OS is on), and had a few things break (a motherboard that then took out 2 processors, and before that a disk), that machine is the one I still use today (dual 1GHz Pentium IIIs).
I know a lot of people who run Linux, but I know of no one who can say that they have gone as long without a re-install. Heck, I have a puny 166MHz Pentium running Debian stable as a gateway, and the only reason it hasn't spun past the 497 day uptime rollover (for older kernels) a couple times is power outages (it runs 2.2.x, so it's not like I've missed kernel updates).
My only fear for the future is that the old 4GB Seagate SCSI disk (full height!) will finally give way, or I could go a decade with only the occasional apt-get dist-upgrade (I run 'testing').
That's why Debian is cool. My machines are for doing work, not testing toys.
I suggest you run Memtest86 and see if you have any errors in your system RAM. I just spent a bunch of time trying to install Ubuntu on a new computer, and finally ran Memtest86 and discovered that my brand-new RAM had an error.
You can run Memtest86 from the Ubuntu "live CD". Or you can download a special Memtest86 CD image from the Memtest86 site:
http://www.memtest86.com/
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Anything under a year old I would concider new. The chipset is almost if not over 2 years old. I've been using sata drives for a long time now.
I'd call new a system something like a LGA775 Pentium 4 or amd64 system.
In any case, this system is old enough to be in the lower half of pricing on most websites. I'd concider it a standard midrange pc if bought today. I'd call low end around a amdXP 2000 or intel equivlent. This is for desktop PC's of course. A small home file/mail/web server or router/firewall would not need to be so large at all.
A lot of people have replyed to me and the general consensus seems to think my dvd rom is to blame. I'll throw in a new one when I get home and post my results.
Am I the only one who read "their old stale distribution"?
I really have to thank you guys for the suggestions. I have a good feeling i'm gonna find the problem and get this resolved by the end of the night tonight.
What AMD64 Linux distribution would you guys recommend for use on a high-traffic production server with AMD64/Opteron CPUs? I'm currently looking into Debian's AMD64 port for Sarge (I know, not released yet), Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise, and Fedora Core. Which one of these is the most stable/robust? I'd prefer to go with a Debian-based distribution (due to their package management system), but of course stability is more important than convenience.
Thanks.
What do we have to do to install Debian on a new machine (not dist-/upgrade), and get GNOME 2.8 and Evolution 2.0? Do we have to wait for the Sarge release, and then build G2.8/E2.0 from source, thrashing around in dependency hell?
--
make install -not war
So... this is the third update to woody.
But it's not really a new distro - don't throw away your 3.0 CDs.
But people who have been regularly updating their stable machines will already have most of the stuff, and only need to download a couple of things.
So what exactly has been released?
How is downloading this new release any different from apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Debian is the Linux equivalent of Duke Nukem Forever.
So this should be cool, I'm looking forward to seeing what semi-new software makes the cut.
SAILING MISHAP
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Everytime a story is posted about Debian various slashdotter will: - complain about how infrequent updates come - how unfriendly the install process is - how many ass holes are in the debian community. All of these things are true, and I don't use Debian for these reasons, though I would like to for other reasons. Debain is about stability above all else, they make the distro for their own tastes, and they are about using only free software. To be fair, they live up to all of these things.
As a bonus, I didn't even wind up getting a 2.2.x kernel. I guess I was careful.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent