Debian Sarge Coming Soon

daria42 writes "The long awaited 3.1 release of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution - codenamed Sarge - is due out next week on the 6th of June, according to the project's release team. Around 50 release-critical bugs remain to be fixed. One more update to Debian 3.0 will also be released prior to that date. And it's about time - the last formal release was back in July 2002. Debian 3.0 will probably be supported with security patches for another 12 months."

Comments

Only 12 months security support of old releases?

[Tillmann]

Hi,

only 12 months of security support for the old Debian release, after a new release has come out?

Isn't that a bit short? If Microsoft had stopped supporting Windows 2000 in 2002 (one year after Windows XP came out), everybody would have gone NUTS about it.

Considering that Debian "stable" is targeted at users who are very conservative about upgrades, Woody should be supported for at least a few more years. IMHO.

bye,
Till

What I like Debian for

[DrXym]

I started playing around with colinux (a user mode Linux that runs on Win32) and needed a root_fs. Lo and behold I found a debian 3.0 root_fs. This was enough to get me going, but the packages are really ancient. So next I changed all the sources to Sarge, and grew a beard while updating. Now I have a spiffy Debian 3.1 all running at something like 90% native under Win32!

The only problem was getting networking going, but that was more to do with colinux and the pain with trying to create TAP devices on Win32. I sure hope that MS ship with TAP-Win32 in their next release. They really, really should.

Re:This has taken much too long.

[Sinus0idal]

Yes those are the STABLE releases, and it takes that long to ensure that they are STABLE. When Sarge is released most of its packages will already be out of date, but STABLE. If you want to use debian on the desktop, do a minimal stable install, change your apt.sources to unstable, and do a dist-upgrade and install the packages you want. You'll end up with your ubuntu/knoppix'y type desktop system with up to date releases.

I wish people would stop moaning about stable! It isn't a desktop distro! It is for those that want to do an 'apt-get install apache' and KNOW it won't fail. That means a lot to admins.

Re:Only 12 months security support of old releases

[vhogemann]

It's just a matter of issuing "apt-get dist-upgrade" on the console, and your Woody box will became a Sarge box.

Sarge is the new stable, the migration should be transparent on most installations. For those few installations that are so customised, or that had some kind of problem, they're giving a 12 month period to adjust and migrate.

Debian is not like Windows, you don't have to do a full installation to upgrade you system. The upgrades are a natural path if you keep your systems up-to-date with the repositories. That is one reason I love to use Debian.