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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."
Who wants to enter our sweepstake for when Debian 3.2 will be released? Pick a date, and if you're the nearest, you'll win ... well, nothing.
I take July 4th, 2007.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Does this mean thaat Duke Nukem Forever is coming out soon too? Or just that hell has frozen over?
Not to troll, but what is the main advantage of sarge vis-a-vis other distributions based on the debian unstable/testing tree (like knoppix/ubunto and a dozen other main ones)
Releasing Sarge will be hugely cathartic for Debian, it will get a monkey off of their back so they can move forward on the reduced platform list.
People need to remember that Debian is not trying to be Fedora or Gentoo. There are already numerous distros providing the bleeding edge with various degrees of config assistance/packaging options etc. Debian is offering the "must work" (as opposed to "just work" which seems less mission-critical) alternative, and its useful for someone to perform the heavy testing and fixing they do.
I am satisfied that the Debian crowd is making moves to keep itself relevant with a new team leader, a new set of targets, and a release in the bag. Having been burned in the past by the "maybe it works" distros in the past, I will be seriously considering their future offerings.
On a slightly related tangent: just who do those Ubuntu guys think they are? They are releasing a Distro that claims to be Debian compatible, and yet their packages are not 3.5 years old. What's worse, they seem to be a popular distro. If this doesn't stop, we might have to cooperate with someone else in the Debian space! We might end up like (gasp!) Fedora, and have to deal with multiple repositories in a Bazaar-like fashion instead of doing things in the Cathedral-like fashion that we are accustomed to. Where will it all end?
...is that the original release date was around 33 B.C.
I can see herds of pigs flying over a completely frozen hell!
Could someone tell me how long until this trickles into the debian based distros?
Thanks!
which runs on my desktop, at the moment.. after being 4 yrs with Debian..
here: http://bts.turmzimmer.net/details.php
:)
The June 6 date still depends on how fast the level will drop -- at the time of writing, it is at 17 RC bugs, it will have to be at 0 on June 3, so they have some work to do.
Security support is already in place, though, so there is not really a reason to hold off upgrading
Jan
http://www.debian.org/releases/etch/index
Fedora Core 4 is also scheduled for June 6.
Banu
You can read more about it here: Munich chooses Debian
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
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.
Hmm 50 is an over-estimate (maybe it wasn't when the story was submitted); according to http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/ there are only 28.
To prevent some Debian trolling I want to clarify some facts about the release model used by the Debian project.
Debian always provides a stable distribution. This distribution is guaranteed to, yes you guessed it, be stable. That is if you install Debian stable on a server you know that you won't have to update configuration files because the application has changed its internal format and suchlike.
This does not mean that the stable distribution is never updated, in fact Debian has a security team that fixes security bugs and backports security fixes from newer versions of a package.
The stable distribution has a quite slow release cycle, but there is no reason for a desktop user to run the stable distribution. You can run either the unstable distribution, that regardless of its name is quite stable, or you can run the testing distribution.
The unstable and testing distributions have really large collections of packages and are updated each day, updating your distribution is as simple as typing:
A desktop user can also opt to run a Debian-derivative like Ubuntu.
Linux debian 2.4.18-bf2.4 #1 Son Apr 14 09:53:28 CEST 2002 i686 GNU/Linux
Three years between point releases, 3.0 -> 3.1, is just much too long to wait.
There were 5 point releases since Woody.
The step between Woody and Sarge is similar to those between Win95 and Win98 -- and just like products of the Evil Empire, the gap is three years.
Having a release every a couple of months is good for a desktop-only release with all the newest bells and whistles -- but for a server, I expect something that can be installed and largely forgotten.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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.
Yes, but I've paid for Windows 2000. I can move to sarge for free with a simple dist-upgrade.
Does anybody know if it will allow creation of LVM2 volumes during install?
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.
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
After Sarges release there will be nice new things coming to unstable:
;)
KDE 3.4
GNOME 2.10
gcc 4.0
xorg 6.8.2
python 2.4
Long live Debian
Well, the difference is that noone pays us Debian Developers to do the work. The security team is pretty small and their work is needed for the new stable release. But I'm sure that if you volunteer to do all the security fixes for 4-5 years, noone would mind too much (well, you'd have to pay for the diskspace too, of course, since this would mean that we'd probably end up with old-old-stable, old-stable, and stable...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What version of Windows are you using? For me, the coLinux installer (0.6.2) created those for me. I might have told it to, but I had more difficulty getting my firewall to play nicely than configuring the networking.
...they should have named this release "Godot".
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
For those of you that are curious, the actual email that Andi Barth sent out is here.
Debian is a different kind of distribution compared to other popular distros. I wrote an essay on these differences here if anyone is interested. Bottom line in the essay; Debian continues to be more important as a community collection of tools and knowledge for building and distributing an operating system than as a standalone distro itself.
The Sarge release is great, but Debian's success is also in its franchisees. I remember a press conference where one of the marketing types predicted that there would eventually only be two major distributions. Robin 'roblimo' Miller piped up and burst his grand vision by asking 'Debian and who?' He got a laugh and made a point that continues to be made today. Debian is a fantastic laboratory to grow operating systems and the knowledge on how it happens is right there in its mailing lists, utilities and documentation.
Go Debian!
DaGoodBoy
My God! It's full of Voids!
While many complain about the long cycle time for major debian releases, I'd just like to voice the opinion that I *like*.. no *LOVE*...the fact that it doesn't change often.
As a hobbyist - I really enjoy *using* linux to serve webpages for recreational use, mp3s, ssh sessions, downloading torrents and learning about unix.
If I have to keep up with a continual stream of what I feel to be cosmetic and superfluous updates, that leaves me less time to do the things I enjoy. As far as security updates, debian does a great job of notifying users of security updates with their mailing list, debian-security-announce. When ever I get an e-mail from that list - I just run apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade, and all is well.
Then again, I'm the type of person who takes great delight in installing linux on a crusty old (but wireless enabled) laptop with no X and just alt-F[1-4]'ing for my 'window environment'. I don't *need* the latest release of gwingding or kflipflop depending on the latest libraries of whatever, so I am probably in the minority here.
I think the saying you are looking for is "knocks on wood".
"Touching wood" has a totally different meaning.
My Xbox Live Gamer Card
There is also the problem that even Debian Sid doesn't get updated once the freeze starts. In Sarge's case the initial "freeze" started late in 2003. So while some packages have been updated since then you end up still not having any version of Xorg in Sarge. Also there are no Gnome 2.10, or KDE 3.4 packages in unstable either since it has to be stablized in unstable so that it can go into testing for eventual release.
You people (especially the original poster) talk as if Debian owes you something (a release). Tell me, how much have each of you contributed to the debian project, economically or otherwise? Debian are doing its users (and users of its derivatives, like Ubuntu) a *favour* by releasing distros. None of you (well, except those who have contributed) have any authority to bash Debian for anything.
"It's just a matter of issuing "apt-get dist-upgrade" on the console..."
For individuals who don't have anything major to loose or anything special to worry about, sure. But not for large organizations with a support structure (help desk, local docs, procedures, etc.) that needs to be ramped up to support new changes. And not for anyone doing anything special or mission-critical that needs to test things before deployment. The rule in any production environment is "Test, test, test, and then test some more". You simply cannot just type "apt-get dist-upgrade" (or "yum upgrade" or any other variation on the theme) in the Real World, I'm afraid.
In general, I find that this whole concept (which is a major part of the disipline called "configuration management") appears to be alien to Debian people. When your business/mission is on the line, answers like "Just pull from sid" or "Just apt-get the fix" and so on just don't cut it.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I've seen a longer version (don't know where it came from) of the classic Calvin and Hobbes quote:
"It's not the verbing that weirds language so much, but rather, the renounification."
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
That's interesting, because OpenBSD only provides support for releases for 1 year, too. Some guy was making a big stink about it in the slashdot article on the latest release. I suppose I could spend the time to see how long FreeBSD provides free support, but I'm pretty sure it's going to be roughly the same.
Agreed on the whole 'too cumbersome to become a debian dev', though. I started the process once but gave up before I got too far. However, I don't see what being called a developer vs. committer has to do with being 'above human'. I think your rant was starting to fall apart about there.
I noticed in a couple of other threads on this article you have some unflattering things to say about debian. Is there something in particular about debian that bothers you, something that you want to get off your chest? Or is this just a case of 'a lot of people seem to like [item a], therefore I do not like [item a]'? I mean, (and this is kind of ironic), as I'm sitting here typing this I am wearing a t-shirt that says "Nothing is any good if other people like it", so I can understand if that's the motivating force. I mean, I know people that would run Windows everywhere if it had the marketshare linux does. I don't know, maybe I'm just getting too old for the internet, but I just don't "get" why someone who doesn't like debian, who obviously has no use for debian, would come onto a story talking about debian just to say, in essence, "debian sucks". Meh, it's probably because I have kids. When you only have a very limited amount of time allotted to 'computer stuff', you tend to focus on just the stuff that is actually productive. On the other hand, I just wasted five minutes typing this reply, so who the hell am I to talk about being productive?!?