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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.
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.
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.
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!
Debian keeps Linux looking beyond ix86 and to some extent GNU looking beyond Linux. The new installer will also (hopefully) keep Linux working on (most) pieces of hardware lying around instead of just the latest whiz bang desktops and servers that the other distributions maintain support for.
Most other distributions do one or two things better whilst restricting your options in other ways. Debian tries to do it all and generates a lot more work for itself because of that. But everyone will benefit in the end.
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).
Conservitive yes, but only in the sense that the stable disturbution is rock solid. The packaging system is excellent, and the actual quality (i.e. setup scripts on install) of the packages included is by far the best out of all the distros. It's not a great distro for those who want/need the latest build of something, but that's what their testing and unstable versions are for. Their testing version is usually fairly current, equivilient to what most distros pump several times a year. Unstable is the bleeding edge branch. it's Usually very current. I've run it on my desktop for years, other then the occasional packaging goof it's been great.
I'd suggest checking out the latest sarge installer release. It's much friendlier then the previous installer.
I work for a company that makes Linux "embedded" systems. First choice (and only choice) - Debian. One of our servers mirrors the Debian FTPs early in the morning, one hour later all the desktop machines sync with it. All the servers run Debian stable and rely on the security fixes. The systems that we sell all have stable on them too. The development platforms run on testing, and for the hardcore users, we also use unstable. Everything works fine. Sometimes an unstable machine will be, well, unstable, but I have never seen a "stable" give any problems whatsoever. In the beginning we made sure that the updates went well. 3 years later, we don't even bother looking. The installer is text, granted. dselect is a nightmare for beginners, granted. But the systems work, as in really, really work.
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.
There are GNOME and probably KDE front ends for apt, even in stable. The main problem I have with dselect is that many packages don't have a descriptive enough description, so I don't know whether I want it or not.
Meta-packages for one-click selection of a typical desktop, development or server machine á la Mandrake would make life easier for the new user, but I think Debian users want the control. All distributions targeting the same audience would be boring anyway.
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."
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
What is good with debian is that it's STABLE.
Not arguing at all, but would like to say that, for me, the cool thing about Debian are all the little packages scripting weird stuff I'd never think of. For example, want to try out Debian with The Hurd, NetBSD, or FreeBSD kernels on another partition? Just apt-get install crosshurd. Run crosshurd and your system is bootstrapped for you and ready to boot into.
Put identity in the browser.
It works on very low-spec hardware (because it doesn't depend on fancy graphical installation or maintenance tools). I have it running on servers down to P5/100 spec, and running well as a desktop OS on P5/133 machines. (Plus tremendous stability and availability on a very large number of hardware architectures, but those have been mentioned by others. Oh, and the fact you never have to install it on a machine more than once; just seamlessly upgrade.)
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
You can do the same with yum on RedHat/Fedora > 7.3. On the other hand, Debian is very bad to install with - lousy support for software RAID, bad X support, very few drivers for fancy SCSI controllers. The scripting support on the installer isn't great comapred to kickstart, and it does it without graphics. You can end up with a 2.2 kernel if you're not carefull. It's a lot of work. There's a good selection of packages available if you know where to look. RedHat/Fedora has weaknesses in the number of packages available, and the hyper release cycles, but so far we haven't switched.
So Debian's added support for installing onto software RAID now? Last I checked, they didn't. That's what one of the complaints is about. Debian is way behind every other distro in useful features like this. It's not 1995 anymore.
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