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Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 Set for December
dolson writes sends in a heartening update straight from the Debian project's news page: "The Debian project confirms December 2006 as the date for the next release of its distribution which will be named Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 alias 'etch'. This will be the first official release to include the AMD64 architecture. The distribution will be released synchronously for 11 architectures in total.
At this stage, the upcoming release will ship with Linux 2.6.17 as its default kernel. This kernel will be used across all architectures and on the installer. A later version may be selected during a review in October.
New features of this release include the GNU Compiler Collection 4.1 as default compiler. X.Org will replace XFree86 as implementation of the X Window System X11. Secure APT will add extra security by easily supporting strong cryptography and digital signatures to validate downloaded packages."
does it run... Oh, never mind.
Reading about this release is giving me a Woody!
Badass Resumes
I wonder if anyone will buy it for me...oh...wait
I've heard a lot about Debian's testing process. Can anyone explain how it works .. and what makes it so stable?
Sent from my desktop computer
OK, I know that the various testing levels have had updated software for a while, but pushing this volume of changes to the mainstream distribution does seem like something of a shock. Debian's historic reliance on "tried and true" versions seems to be giving way (at least partially) to the realization that many people don't want to use it because it lacks significant feature updates.
I'm impressed.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Last I checked, Debian GNU/Linux didn't run terribly well on anything but x86 and ppc -- NetBSD was by far a better choice for something like a MIPS box or a VAX. Is that still the case?
--saint
you do have the admit that when they finally do move they move all the way (they are talking about a 2.6.17+ kernel for example)
Preview release is here
(with apologies to the debian developers... I couldn't resist)
Also current stable release of Gnome. However the next Gnome release is set around the same time. Debian project should push back their release until they can get the Gnome 2.16 in, otherwise they'll be having outdated software for a lot longer time. Which has been usually the case in the past. It would be only about days..
The world needs a stable distribution for servers. Seems Debian is risking its default model for stability in order to appear being updated often.
I wonder if Ubuntu has got something to do with it...
How many years passed between debian 3.0 and 3.1? The changes were big, and now in so much less time a whole number (4.0) gets released.
What are the differences besides using a recent kernel for the first time?
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
And just in time for 2007 too!
and a Happy GNU Year!
hahahahaha
Oh, you'rs serious???!!!!!
Nah, I'm just joking. I'm a debian user. I believe you.
Debian sarge has a near ancient feel for desktop use.
after mucking around With all those new desktop distros out there it will be refreshing to go back to good ole debian.
(Don"t give me that crap about apt-pinning, I know what it is, but I prefer simple apt-get freshness)
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
I thought debian only released in presidential election years...?
-math
It's been quite some time since I've tried Debian, but I remember the installer being pretty difficult. Does anyone know if this has been improved, and how it compares to other medium-difficulty distributions?
I found that 2.6.17, with the improved IO handlers, definately added a performance boost to my machines. The main headaches I've had with testing have revolved around X.org 7.x being quite a bit different from previous versions (more componentized) and issues with getting it to work with the NVidia stub (you need to tell it where to find the new lib location), etc.
However, all-in-all I've found that running Debian/testing has gone pretty well, and Debian/stable+backports has worked pretty well too. I'll be looking forward to when the features in testing happily merge back into stable.
Oh, and hopefully the rather-cool FPS Nexuiz will merge into stable as well, as it's pretty impressive to see something like that ending up open-source and available in the standard repositories (it's available in testing+ right now). It's also the first OSS app that's really given my graphics card a run for its money.
I'm currently running AMD64 Sarge with GCC 3.3.5.
If Debian want amd64 support they better do so ;-)
But it would take months for them to get gnome 2.16 tested properly (it has to be stable, right). By then firefox will be a few days away from a new release. Which will take months to test. By then a new version of KDE will be coming along. By the time they get all that tested and ready Gnome 2.18 will be a few days from being released.
There were major changes for Sarge, aka 3.1. Somebody pointed out that it should be 4.0, and everyone agreed, but it was too late in the release cycle to change it. They figured as long as it was higher than 3.0 it didn't really matter.
gnome has dependencies that would make a pile of poo proud. Really, package maintainers hate gnome.
I don't know if you are trolling or not, but I'll bite
As explained in this pdf file about the debian kernel here, they remove non-free drivers. I understand why they do it, but I could see where it would be annoying if your hardware was effected. Here is a quote from the pdf:
On a related note, I sometimes get the feeling that they don't spend as much time polishing some of the rough edges off the kernel the way the Redhat people do with kernel patches and backports. But that is probably to be expected since they are (i'm guessing) mostly volunteers and not paid (like I'm sure the redhat engineers are). Regardless, I'm not looking a gift-horse in the mouth and I am thankful for their efforts. I'm a happy debian-stable user and look forward to etch.
Corrected Nexuiz link.
Well, considering that Apache2 is in the current release I don't see why it wouldn't be in the next. And so long as no major bugs show up against mysql, I don't see why it wouldn't go in either. Of course even Debian can't protect you from the massive load of bugs that the mysql devs call "features" :)
Oops, it's not Ubuntu, it's just plain Debian.
Apache 2.0 has been in Debian for ages. I'm afraid that you, sir, are a troll.
Also, the plans for 2.2 migration speak about having 2.2 as a replacement instead of putting it side-to-side, so no, Etch probably won't have that Apache 2.0 you want.
MySQL 5.0 was released in October 2005, Sarge in June 2005. So...?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
The last tim I checked, apt-get wouldn't support two architectures on the same install (i.e. 32 bit and 64 library paths). RPM does support this, which is why I ended up choosing Fedora at the time. Does debian 4.0 finally support this, or it still single architecture?
Hell, I hate Gnome. How come the "flamebait" posts are always the best?
Hmmm... so they're moving to GCC 4.1? Hmmph - Gentoo stable is still stuck on the 3.4 series, at least on x86 and most architectures (mind you, it is a source-based distro, and moving to a new GCC major version is a big thing). I thought Debian was supposed to be behind the times, and Gentoo was supposed to be bleeding-edge?
(Seriously, I run Gentoo unstable, but I've deliberately taken measures to avoid upgrading to GCC 4 - still not worth it IMO, at least until I can be sure most software will actually build successfully with it.)
is a bit sketchy.
---southpaw
At least when compared to MS. Three Debian releases between XP and Vista. And people say Debian is a slow mover.
Well, at least assuming that both "Etch" and Vista will hold their target dates... Is this a too bold assumption to make? Perhaps.
while true; do eject; eject -t; done
Unfortunately, stable and untesting are just terms that Debian uses to refer to the different releases. Debian testing is by far more stable than any version of Windows I have ever used, and for all pratical purposes it is Stable. They could just as well have labeled the Debian versions "new", "stable" and "old" than "unstable","testing" and "stable".
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
$ cat /etc/debian_version
/var/lib/dpkg/status
3.1
$ apt-cache policy apache2
apache2:
Installed: 2.0.54-5
Candidate: 2.0.54-5
Version table:
*** 2.0.54-5 0
540 http://ftp.nl.debian.org sarge/main Packages
540 http://security.debian.org sarge/updates/main Packages
100
Didn't PHP 5.0 come out <strong>after</strong> Debian 3.1 ("sarge") was released? Nevertheless, packages are available from <http://backports.org/>.
You said yourself in your own post, that you used an old debian with GNOME 2.6, and now you're seeing new features in the new debian and you're impressed with the progress debian is making.
Now, I'm not arguing that debian isn't making progress, but... oooooooh, they packaged the latest GNOME. Any distro that happens to package the latest GNOME also has made all the exact same progress you speak of. So that's kind of meaningless. GNOME has made leaps and bounds of progress in terms of usability, UI consistency, things like that... credit where credit is due man, this is GNOME making progress, not debian.
I'm running AMD64 SID with gcc 4.1.2 here.
Everything is stable and works well.
A lot of users were unhappy with the late release of Sarge, but now it looks like the development of GNOME and KDE have slowed down. At least the results are less visible. If GNOME continues at this pace then it is perfectly OK for me to live with a 18 month release cycle.
Whoever is going to use Debian for desktop can just stand back for a moment. Please go Ubuntu or something else or the testing releases.
Debian should have been the rock solid stable distro that can sit in a server with least maintenance to do against other distro who often break things, update configuration file structure suddenly and change the behaviour of an application than put only security patches back ported.
Sure, getting 2.6 kernel makes many SATA and whatnot to work, but who was making the release cycle? Why did 3.1 take so long and why is 4.0 coming out so soon with massive changes?
I'm starting to doubt Debian would keep up being the most stable solid for use with servers distro.
I mean, a serious network server doesn't need any X for sake, which means all Fedora and whatnot are just out of my way, when it comes to using them as real serving purposes. Now what should I use when Debian starts to be Ubuntu catch up distro? I would go back to some BSD sacrificing performance for the sake of better security model and less maintenance cost.
If you read all of the debian-devel-announce posting you will see that it does in fact contain a specific date.
ever heard of debian "testing" and "unstable"? i'd only advise running the "stable" version on a system that has to be rock-solid. In my experience, testing is perfectly stable (and i think that the stuff in debian testing is typically tested MORE than most distros test there "stable" stuff). ANd YES testing it includes PHP5.
And you forgot to mention that the latest porting project: Debian/Minix 3 is dubbed Preventa "Because if it becomes an official Debian port, it is probable that the sheer number of release critical bugs caused will prevent Debian from ever releasing again." :)
Theese are strange days indeed, when one of the best linux distributions plans to support Linus arch-enemy's creature.
BTW this completely in the spirit of Debian, the project is, in fac, not just a Linux distro, but "the universal OS", it is natural for the project to try to include different kernels.
I use Debian testing as my main desktop machine at home. They updated the Cupsys packages about a month ago. And now the bug list is so long that my machine hangs when I load said page into Firefox. I seriously doubt that all of them will be fixed before December. Most problems seem to be about GDI printers. But I have a trusty old Laserjet 4 and I need to reeinstall my printer every time I want to use it (I already filed the report). Sarge shipped with a bug in the printing system (most likely gs-esp was the culprit, but I don't know) that crashed the whole printing subsystem if you printed large sized pdf documents. I had a file server that I also used as print server that ran Sarge and because of a disc crash I reinstalled from scratch once and the problem was back.
So Etch would not be the first Debian that ships with a broken print subsystem.
A snapshot is taken of the 'unstable' suite, not the 'testing' one.
An "emerge -pve gnome" shows a total source code download of 592,129 kB atm (For a Gnome 2.14.2/Xorg 7 environment)
An "emerge -pve kde" shows a total source code download of 541,705 kB atm (For a KDE 3.5.2/Xorg 7 environment).
There are fewer packages for KDE in the Gentoo portage tree but thats because it's much more monolithic, there is however a modular set of packages for KDE. Either way the downoad size is almost the same, and i'd say their just as bad as one another to maintain.
I haven't run into many GTK apps that require Gnome libraries except maybe libgnomeui (provides additional widgets I think), which is small.
So quit trolling and think up something better than "make a poo proud" next time.
debian making a release within 5 years of a previous release? AND its a major version jump...
portfolio
I guess you've probably already solved this for yourself, but for the benefit of anyone else wandering by...
The dotdeb alternative repository has more up-to-date packages aimed at those running "LAMP" servers. It has PHP 5, Apache 2 and MySQL 5 packages (amongst others) that are quickly updated in response to new releases. I use it on my rented server where I provide hosting services to some of my friends and it has worked like a charm so far atop the base Debian Sarge.
This makes me wonder...
How much of this is due Cannonical/Ubuntu contributing back?
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
It means nobody will be able to place backdoored files onto the mirrors and edit the md5 sum list without someone quickly noticing! Pity they already hacked the Debian core dev server and backdoored Debian further up the tree .deb packages will actually be signed as well
Heh WHO KNOWS but at least apt secure is finally making it into the stable version. I am wondering if its only checking the Release.gpg or if the
At least they notice they get hacked and release the information that this has happened. Unlike what any company driven distro would be doing.
meridian at tha.net
2007
I don't think the number of bytes is the biggest issue for packaging here. The bigger issue is some of the deps for Gnome are used by other applications and might be upgraded seperately. Are you using mDNS or avahi? FAM or gamin? It's when you start making these changes and different patches that things start getting more difficult for packagers. FreeBSD users had to deal with a special Gnome upgrade script because it would break it if you upgraded in the conventional way. The biggest non-KDE* package is QT so that can make it easier for packagers.
None of this changes the end user experience (except if they have to jump through hoops at upgrade time) for either desktop but the argument that it's easier on packagers definitely has some weight to it in my opinion. Many of the packagers out there have done a great job on isolating these issues from endusers and you have to give them a lot of credit for all their hard work.
"i'd say their just as bad as one another to maintain."
And I'd say you probably haven't had the privilege of maintaining neither of them.
Anyway, you can ask, say, Patrick Volkerding which indeed used to maintain both of them about his informed opinion.