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Debian 3.0r6 Released

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the old-favorites dept.

Polkan Garcia writes "The Debian group has released an update to the 'Woody' distribution of the popular GNU/Linux OS. From the site: 'This is the sixth and final 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.' More good news: r6 is the final update of woody, the new stable release is coming."

14 of 297 comments (clear)

  1. Ahem... by niko9 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    before the usual rants about debian begin....

    let he who has donated at least one line of code, cast the first stone...

    1. Re:Ahem... by Umbral+Blot · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Sure in theory we should all contribute before criticizing. However this is not practical. Want to criticise MS, go work for them. You hate SCO, go work for them too. BSD not what you want, go fix it. In my opinion it is OK to criticize something that you aren't a part of, as long as you make reasonable points.

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      Philosophy.
  2. Re:This begs the question... by jacquesm · · Score: 4, Funny
    last I checked... oh never mind


    On another note, I get the Debian bit and I know what linux is, but what's this GNU prefix ?

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    MP3 Search Engine
  3. I think it is a good idea not to update quickly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    As much heat as Woody gets from the Slashdot crowd, I think it is a good idea to have a stable release that doesn't update very quickly. Keep in mind that, as "old" as Debian is, it was released in 2002. It is no older than Windows XP (2001-2002 release) and is a good deal younger than Windows 2000 (1999 release). One of the servers I have an account on is a RedHat 7.2 machine, which is of the same era as the first Woody release. While I develop on Fedora Core three, I make sure my software compiles as is on a RedHat 6.2 system (2000 era).

    For servers and corporate desktops, an update every three years is a frequent update. I am glad that Debian has been current with security updates on this three-year-old release; I would rather have that than the updgrade treadmill Fedora has me on. (The Fedora Legacy project seems to be comatose) In fact, I'm going off of the treadmill--my next Linux will be CentOS (a no-cost generic clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux) which will allow me to have sane updates--once a year or two instead of once every six months.

    1. Re:I think it is a good idea not to update quickly by Elf-friend · · Score: 5, Informative
      XP wasn't eighteen months obsolete when it released. Yet that is just about how far behind everyone else Woody was when it shipped. Some people were willing to cope with that, since the project leaders promised a short turn around on Sarge (IIRC, they said they were aiming at under a year). Instead, here we are three years later, with Sarge still somewhere "out there" on the horizon, with packages even further behind than Woody's were when it released. I don't feel like waiting until 2008 before I can migrate to tools that other users have now.

      An additional point about the XP comparison: nobody shipped software requiring Windows XP in 1999, but that's exactly what happens with Debian. When the Linux version of Neverwinter Nights shipped in 2003, I couldn't install it on Woody, (and still can't, AFAIK) because of Woody's ancient version of gcc. I need Sarge to run that on a stable version of Debian. Here we are, two years later, and still it won't run on Debian stable. It will run on nearly any other distro's latest stable release (and on BSD), but not Debian stable.

      The Debian release cycle just keeps getting worse, and I see no end in sight for that. An update every three years might well be fine if the updates weren't falling further behind with each one.

    2. Re:I think it is a good idea not to update quickly by nihilogos · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The thing is, Debian stable is actually really, really stable. The uptime for a file / intraweb / domain server at a busy record store I part-time admin for is 454 days. It was installed 454 days ago. If this server goes down, the crappy stock system freezes (possibly corrupting data if someone is doing an order or receiving stock) all the checkout staff have to logout of their machines while large queues form at the counters, and generally it's a bit stressful for people.

      Why the heck should Debian compromise on its definition of 'stable' for people who want to play neverwinter nights? Especially as, like you say, you can just run sarge anyway?

      A big thankyou to all the Debian maintainers. May all your beers be cold.

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      :wq
  4. Re:This begs the question... by Teh_monkeyCode · · Score: 3, Funny

    I believe the term is "security through obscurity".

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  5. Re:Question (Maybe slightly OT).... by NeuralAbyss · · Score: 3, Informative

    See the homepage of the The Debian X Strike Force - X.org and Xfree86 guys.

    Found this link from the Project Leader's page

  6. Let's don't get ahead of ourselves by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny
    More good news: r6 is the final update of woody, the new stable release is coming.

    That sounds good, but I hope that they're not just succumbing to deadline pressure and shoving this thing out the door half baked.

  7. Re:This begs the question... by ajlitt · · Score: 3, Funny

    You see son, when a Stallman and a distro love each other very much...

  8. Forgot a word by abulafia · · Score: 3, Funny
    His retarded what?

    His retarded Debian? His retarded red hat? His retarded devil?

    Speak up.

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    I forget what 8 was for.
  9. We tried trolling... by Urusai · · Score: 3, Funny

    An employee suggested to me that we troll on a few Slashdot topics as an evaluation. I was skeptical at first but he explained the benefits of trolling on Slashdot instead of wanking off in a dark closet. I decided to let him troll in 5 topics to see how the trolling got on. Besides, our IT manager had been trolling Slashdot at home and he hadn't reported any problems - why not try it on with our employees?

    Once he'd got the employees up and running with Slashdot trolling we let them try it out. It all seemed fine to start with: The Slashdot trolls were a pretty good replacement for trolling on yiffy/slash-porn forums like we'd used to before and the employees could still wank in their closets as normal.

    Alas it did not stay that way. After a few days, I had lost count of the number of complaints received from slashbots. Posters got wise to the boilerplate. The final straw came when one poster modified our troll post to make fun of us, destroying the 70 pages of troll feeding we had been working on (subsequently, the poster was modded up.)

    Needless to say, the Slashdot community, having been stagnant for half a decade, offered no support whatsoever. I made the employee go back to wanking in his dark closet and lets just say he's not with us anymore.

  10. Re:Debian support for modern CPUs by darkcompanion · · Score: 3, Informative

    There is Debian support for AMD64; it's currently waiting to be included into the official Debian archive once Sarge has been released (probably next week). Currently, the AMD64 port consists of an unofficial archive containing a complete 64bit binary port of both unstable and testing distributions. The AMD64 Debian site has even netinstall iso's. See http://www.debian.org/ports/amd64/

  11. Re:apt-get by swillden · · Score: 4, Informative

    I thought that apt-get had was unable to handle multiple architectures on a single system, which prevented a fully integrated 64 & 32 bit version of Debian. Has that problem with apt-get been solved yet?

    Yes and no. The "biarch" system has been working for several years to support both 32 and 64 bit Sparc software. That same technology could be used now to support mixed 32/64-bit code for AMD64 processors, but Debian developers have opted not to do that. Instead, the new multiarch system will support an arbitrary number of architectures, very flexibly. That will not only address the AMD64 issue but it will also make handling of other x86 subarchitectures easier.

    Currently, there are some Debian packages that come in multiple flavors because they benefit significantly from processor-specific optimizations. The kernel, for example, comes compiled for 386, 586, 686, K6, K7, amd64-generic, amd64-k8 and em64t, plus SMP versions of most of those. Mplayer also comes in multiple versions, though not as many. This is handled by having a big list of kernel-image and mplayer packages. With multiarch, you'll be able to specify that you have, say, an AMD64 processor, and then apt-get will understand which subarchitectures will and will not run on your system, and which subarchitectures are preferred. Then you can just pick generic packages and the system will install the best version. It will also handle situations like mozilla and flashplayer. If you install mozilla on an AMD64 box, you should probably get a 64-bit version for best performance. However, if you want flash to work, you have to install the Macromedia plugin and it's 32-bit, so you have to install a 32-bit version of mozilla so that it can use the 32-bit plugin. The new multiarch system will handle all of those dependencies for you.

    So apt-get is perfectly capable of handling a mixed 32 and 64-bit system now, but only if the package maintainers set things up carefully (which is what most other distros must do). Debian has opted to forego such a "manual" solution and instead wait until the elegant and flexible general solution is done.

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