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."

Comments

OK, but...

[SchwarzeReiter]

does it run... Oh, never mind.

Re:OK, but...

[KiloByte]

does it run... Oh, never mind.

Don't laugh so loud, grasshopper. This question is adequate.
And the answer is: yes. K*BSD arches are in good shape, but none of them are release candidates for Etch. Nexenta (OpenSolaris kernel) gathered so much bad karma because of Sun's CDDL's intentional incompatibilities with GPL causing problems that Nexenta isn't going to be an official arch anywhere soon. Debian/Hurd isn't that bad, but too bad, Hurd remains just a toy for now. And Debian/Minix stays at the level of talks for now. It's only Debian/win32 which died completely.
So yeah, Etch does run Linux, but most likely Alien/Lenny/??? (Etch+1) will have K*BSD variants.

Re:OK, but...

[doti]

No.

It runs GNU/Linux.

Re:OK, but...

[david.given]

And Debian/Minix stays at the level of talks for now. It's only Debian/win32 which died completely.

Debian/Minix would be cool, but it'll probably have to wait until Minix gets a paging VM and support for the brk() syscall --- curreently there's no way for an application to increase its heap size once it's started, which rather screws over most normal Unix apps. (For example, in order to run a configure script, you have to have a copy of sh handy which has been configured with a huge heap.)

Debian/Win32 I mourn, though. That would have been amazingly useful. The only real competitor I know of is Cygwin, whose package management facilities are awful...

(Debian/BeOS ought to be pretty possible, at least in single-user mode; and Debian/Plan9 would... okay, probably not really work.)

Re:OK, but...

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

You don't need brk(), just a paging VM, and mmap().

Re:OK, but...

[Al Dimond]

Debian/BeOS and Debian/Plan9 would work just fine. You'd just have to accept that you were using an operating system that's not Unix, and not Not Unix either.

Creating a distribution of BeOS or Plan9 with the Debian mindset and many similar tools is certainly possible. However, in order to provide the true experience of either OS you'd need a dedicated team willing to write native programs in the style of those OSes and make sure that improvements made to the Debian/GNU Linux versions were reflected in their separate programs. The same thing is true of Debian/Win32 (except that they can't actually distribute Windows; perhaps Debian/ReactOS). Completely possible, but it's a lot more work than just porting things.

Debian turns me on.

[Reverend528]

Reading about this release is giving me a Woody!

Re:Debian turns me on.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, don't get your hopes up, the 2006 part could be a typo.

Re:Debian turns me on.

[ShadowLeo]

Don't be such a Hamm.

Re:Debian turns me on.

[betasaur]

Finally, I'll be able to scratch that etch...

Just in time for Christmas

[Elros]

I wonder if anyone will buy it for me...oh...wait

process

[slack_prad]

I've heard a lot about Debian's testing process. Can anyone explain how it works .. and what makes it so stable?

Re:process

[frovingslosh]

Sure. You can get Etch now. It's also called testing, and is very stable. There is also a newer "unstable" version that you can download and use, it is changing almost daily, but overall it is pretty stable in spite of the name. So by the time a version like Etch is officially "released" it is extremely stable, and somewhat out of date. I find that unless you are building mission critical process control systems that need to be extremely bug free, you are better off using the Debian testing version than the official release, particularly if you have newer hardware that you want to be able to use.

Re:process

[Homology]

In general, MORE TIME TESTING = MORE STABLE PRODUCT. And if it's not obvious already, Debian definitely takes their time testing.

The long testing part is due to the very big collection of thirdparty packages that Debian has, along with very liberal rules for package dependencies back and forward through various releases. I'm sure that is a major headache for the maintainers except for the "was-a-maintainer" that have left for something else.

So, long testing period does not imply higher quality with respect to other Linux distributions, or *BSD for that matter.

Re:process

[JohnnyBigodes]

MORE TIME TESTING = MORE STABLE PRODUCT

Or an outdated product, as I've come to realize. I have a rented server running Debian, which has given me nothing but headaches because some of the packages are horribly outdated, namely PHP5. I mean, PHP 5 is what, over two years old now, how come they didn't think it was stable nor tested? This is one of the reasons why the next server I rent will be running something else. Better to have "untested" (use that word carefully) stuff working than no stuff at all. Must be that "security-through-obsolence" paradigm rearing its head :)

Re:process

[Kjella]

Or an outdated product, as I've come to realize. I have a rented server running Debian, which has given me nothing but headaches because some of the packages are horribly outdated

I sure wouldn't want to have a debian stable server where I couldn't add a few repositories or pin some packages from testing. I like the stability of the groundwork, but you have to put some flexibility into it yourself. Debian stable is frozen in time, I'd say 18 month release cycle plus 6 months because they don't put bleeding edge in there to begin with, so being two years behind is by design. Honestly I wish I could jump between debian stable and ubuntu LTS... 9 month release cycle with long support on every version if I choose to hold back would be outstanding.

Re:process

[LincolnQ]

I find that unless you are building mission critical process control systems that need to be extremely bug free, you are better off using the Debian testing version than the official release, particularly if you have newer hardware that you want to be able to use.

You can do this if you like, I guess, although I would feel a little uncomfortable: My rule is "stable whenever it matters to someone else". I use testing on my own machines, but I've definitely found myself in situations where testing was broken (usually just due to large upgrades like libc6 or something, but still, more broken than I wanted to deal with) -- or, if the whole archive isn't broken, you can still get upgrades forced on you that change the behavior of the system in unpredictable ways and make you unhappy. Generally, the increased stability of "stable" is worth it to me and my users when I'm doing any sort of administration.

It's useful to note that in the uncommon-but-not-rare case where you or a user wants a package upgrade from testing or later, you can very easily use apt to pull down the source and build-dep, compile it for your system and install it as a package with very little hassle. Do this for the packages where it matters, and you have a mostly stable system with the features you need.

Re:process

[JackieBrown]

I find unstable more stable than testing. The fixes hit there first without the 10 day delay to enter testing. Most errors can be avoided by reading when you type apt-get dist-upgrade. If it says remove something you need say no.

Re:process

[A.K.A_Magnet]

"Stable" is a reference to the packages. Debian stable means you won't get 20 new packages or packages updates every week (and that's optimistic, on testing or unstable, you get that much on a daily basis). You only get security updates. It has nothing to do with software stability, except that the process makes the software in Debian stable .. well very stable! For example, Ubuntu is Debian testing made stable: they get a snapshot of Debian testing every 6 monthes, they fix some of the bugs (critical, hindering normal usage), and then they freeze it (the only updates are security updates, just like with Debian Stable; to be fair, Ubuntu's work isn't that simple, the main part of their work is to make the distribution the way they want with a top-down approach, ie they want some feature or something to look different and they do it). The difference is that Ubuntu's stability process is very weak compared to Debian's, but certainly good enough for most desktop users. That's what "stable" means in the "Debian Stable" sense (that's the same meaning in a "stable" API, ie an API that won't change anytime soon), and it's needed on production systems (you don't want daily updates that can break everything). Great for desktops, mandatory for servers. Debian Sid (to be Etch) is primarily meant for Debian developers.

Re:process

[zootm]

It's just a matter of priorities, really. There's a balance to be struck between having the newest stuff and having a stable distribution. The stable branch of Debian just balances its priorities very strongly towards stability. It's up to the user to decide whether that's what they want from their operating system. If not, there is other branches of Debian, and other distributions entirely, which can be used. Allowing wild variation in philosophy like this is one of the redeeming features of the "distro soup" that exists.

Re:process

[Respect_my_Authority]

Just use backports.org. It has up-to-date packages ported from Testing and compiled for Stable. Including PHP5.

http://backports.org/

Re:process

[gpuk]

Why not just grab the latest v5 source from www.php.net and compile it yourself? That way you get the latest version and you control exactly what features you get (e.g. PEAR support / CLI support / PDFlib / libxml etc.)

Just because there isn't a package for something doesn't mean you can't have it. In fact, for things like php, apache, mysql, ftpd - it is almost always better to compile yourself from source. This way you maximise the apps efficiency and arguably enhance security as you disable any feature you don't need/want.

Debian running current software?

[Martin Blank]

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.

Re:Debian running current software?

[frovingslosh]

They are not pushing a volume of changes into the distro all at once. They are just saying that in December, Etch, which you can download and install right now (or better yet, do a "net install") will be called the official Stable release. Sarge, the current stable release will be retired (well past time). Newer versions will become "testing" and "unstable". I've been using Etch, it is pretty nice. But I expect that with it's "release" in December I'll stop using it and move on to the new "testing" version. The official Debian release tends to show it's age too much and the testing version is actually very stable.

Re:Debian running current software?

[shawn443]

Depends on what you call a feature. I don't care if my ssh gateway can easily mount a digital camera. I think the best feature is the stability for my servers. Sometimes the cutting edge software is too cutting edge and not necessarily better. I don't second guess their methods when I can apt-get in total confidence. In my opinion, Debian is probably the best OS for serious server duty. I would stack it up against OS/2 or any of the other proprietary server OS's. I also use Debian for my desktop (XFCE). I wouldn't install it on a newbies machine though, so I readily concede that point.

Architectures.

[saintlupus]

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

Re:Architectures.

[HomerJ]

Why would you want to run anything else on a VAX other than good ol' VMS? I wish someone made an Itanium laptop, so I could run OpenVMS on a portable.

Re:Architectures.

[delirium of disorder]

I don't know about VAX, but Debian runs great on MIPS and many other platforms. I installed and used it on several Sgi Indys and X worked fine, as did sound, networking, and all the hardware features I had used under IRIX. Some software was slower (gcc is notorously less optomised for MIPS then the commericial Sgi c compiler MIPS Pro), but more modern software was available. Most Debian packages are available for most architectures.

I also run Debian on PA-RISC for my shell server. Add an account for yourself and do a few apt-cache searches to see which packages are available. All the major desktop and server packages are there (various apache mods, firefox, gaim, amule, etc). I found Debian to provide more modern software then HP-UX or BSD for PA-RISC. Even most of the somewhat obscure Debain provided applications are available. I run Debian and Ubuntu on x86, OpenBSD and Solaris on SPARC64 (Solaris is better for SMP systems), IRIX and Debian on MIPS (IRIX is better for newer Sgis like the Octane2), and HP-UX and Debian on PA-RISC. Overall I've found Debian to be the most portable complete Operating Environment. I have not used NetBSD that much so I am not aware of it's current state. It has a reputation for portability, but seams to lag behind in terms of real world testing (many of the ports apparently consist of cross compiling code), and also doesn't seem to have as many packages as Debian. Overall it just looks less up to date then Debian or OpenBSD.

Re:Welcome

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[marciot]

Preview release is here

(with apologies to the debian developers... I couldn't resist)

Re:Preview Release

[creepynut]

You know, funny you should mention that. I've been using Ubuntu for at least a year, first tried it about 2 years ago. When Dapper came out I was amazed, all the configuration tools, menu editor, update manager and such.

I'd used Debian before, but not a lot, probably around GNOME 2.6 and lower. That all certainly wasn't there. Then, I decided to fire up VMWare and install Debian Etch just to see how things are moving. It was practically Ubuntu without the splash screen and Add/Remove Programs in the Applications menu.

Now, granted, I know that is certainly not the only thing the folks at Ubuntu have been up to, but it goes to show that Ubuntu isn't the only one making progress in the Linux world. Debian is still chugging along, faster than ever it looks to me, and Ubuntu is benefitting from that more than anyone.

Re:Preview Release

[Brunellus]

Flamebait, pure and simple. Listen up, Debianistas: the only hard and fast requirements are encoded in the licenses under which software is released. So, comrades, point to me how the ubuntu project (or any of the other Debian daughters, like, say Xandros) violate the terms of the licenses under which software in the Debian project is released?

How about "Not at all?" Take your bitterness, compact it into a pill, and swallow that.

The whole Debian/Ubuntu internecine bitchfest reminds me a lot of the communists I knew on campus--the Maoist faction couldn't even be seen with the Stalinist faction. Did anybody but them care? No. But I'm sure they had a lot of fun in their respective cell meetings, counting the meagre takings of their pamphlet sales (which had to be on alternate days, lest they have to share space with the traitors from the other side)

Re:Preview Release

[Lord of Hyphens]

I just converted my home server from Sarge to Dapper because I needed a couple of more current things (Python 2.4.3).

Now why exactly did you swap out the entire distro when all you needed was a few packages? Just curious. Why not double-check the dependencies on what you wanted and compile/install them yourself? It'd would've saved you a reconfiguration (at the very least). I believe you can upgrade any package you please. Well, except maybe for glibc. Upgrading glibc is pain.


My Linux install started life as Slackware 10.2 (2.4 kernel), but it sure doesn't look like it anymore.

Re:Preview Release

[creepynut]

Hey sorry if I came off as flamebait.

I'm an avid Ubuntu user, and I've been using it since Warty Warthhog. It's been my primary OS on my notebook since a bit into the Preview releases of Dapper Drake.

I love Ubuntu, and while I used to recommend Fedora Core, Ubuntu is all I recommend these days. However, I'm simply acknowledging the hard work the Debian team does. They're both great distros, but Debian lacks the Desktop polish I like in Ubuntu. Little things, like a splash screen and the community support is second to none.

I also know that Ubuntu contributes back to the community, and it does to a great job on hardware support, hence the "Ubuntu Hardware Database." My laptop has never run Linux so well since Dapper Drake was installed.

Ubuntu gets two thumbs up from me, and my post was 100% NOT flamebait.

Re:Preview Release

[Brunellus]

If Ubuntu has violated no license or broken no law, then would people do us the great favour of shutting the fuck up already? Goodwill is not enforceable. It may be desireable, but it is not a necessary condition for progress in the Free Software ecosystem. Is it just me, or is the Debian project moving a LOT faster now that the Debian Daughter Distributions--Ubuntu included!--have vastly expanded the pool of developers, testers and users?

We don't have to like each other. But it would be nice if we could appreciate what we mean to each other collectively.

Re:Preview Release

[gustavofranco]

Probably you're ack'ing our work on desktop environment task, a subset of the work in the tasksel package. Everybody else can benefit of this just selecting after base installation that they want the desktop environment! I'm directly involved on this and added update-manager and other stuff there. Feedback is welcome. :)

If you're using 'testing' you can do aptitude update && aptitude install desktop gnome-desktop . Enjoy! More documentation to come with a new desktop related web page soon.

Re:Preview Release

[GnuAge]

Did anybody but them care? No.

Ummm, you obviously didn't care or you would have realized that Maoists ARE Stalinists. MouseyDung and his acolytes never had a problem with ol' Uncle Joe, just with the Social Imperialists who rose to the leadership a few years after he died. The CCP still trots out a portrait of Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili on the side of the Great Hall Of The People on ceremonial occasions. Speaking of trots, it is probably the Trotskyites/ists that you are thinking of, not the Maoists feuding with Stalinists. As I said to a Sparticist buddy of mine "Sects, sects, sects, that's all you ever talk about."

Actually, the Stalinist iconography has always been a bit of an embarassment to Western Maoists. I remember a Maoist bookstore in Berkeley in the seventies (now a Fish'N'Chips shop, I believe) where if you bought four portraits of the great socialist leaders (Marx, Engels, Lenin & Mao, presumably) they'd throw in a fifth poster of the Late, Great Man Of Steel for free (a 50 cent value!) A bargain at half the price.

Why?

[Espectr0]

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?

Re:Why?

[pathological liar]

Official AMD64 support is a big one. The new kernel may-or-may not be necessary, depending on whether they backported the fixes for AMD64 to 2.6.8 or whatever they're stuck on currently. That's also important, because the bugs were pretty severe (random thread crashing.) SecureAPT is a nice touch as well. Xorg is a reasonable and probably not-too-disruptive change. GCC could be disruptive, but probably won't be that big a deal.

Re:Welcome

[TheUnknownOne]

And just in time for 2007 too!

Merry X(windows)mas

[Anonymous Coward]

and a Happy GNU Year!

Re:Merry X(windows)mas

[cerberusss]

Merry X(windows)mas!

[condescending unix computer user mode ON]
HELLO? it's either MerryXmas or Merry The X Window Systemmas.

[condescending unix computer user mode OFF]

Finally

[scenestar]

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)

is there an election or something?

[mathx]

I thought debian only released in presidential election years...?

-math

Re:is there an election or something?

[elzurawka]

Sometimes, when there is avery bad president, they choose to do it durring the congressional Elections

Big improvements

[phorm]

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.

Re:Improved install?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it improved a lot since Sarge and we will deliver with an optional GUI installer too. Preview screenshots at: http://osdir.com/Article7765.phtml

-- stratus

3.1 is the new 4.0

[XanC]

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.

Re:Improved install?

[frovingslosh]

I like the Etch installer, greatly improved over Sarge. You can try it now, just install "testing". Only problem that I had with it was that on a 4 partition system it refused to install Grub to the Linux partition where I wanted it and insisted in putting it in the MBR (clearly no good reason for this, since the older Debian Sarge install it replaced had Grub where I wanted it).

Re:Welcome

[Homology]

gnome has dependencies that would make a pile of poo proud. Really, package maintainers hate gnome.

Re:kernel

[HighOrbit]

i hope they didn't remove drivers from the kernel.... again.

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:

As the kernel is a core part of the Operating System it is in main And thus must comply with the DFSG Because of this, some source files are removed or modified This generally means the removal of drivers that include binary firmware blobs

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 link

[roger6106]

Corrected Nexuiz link.

Re:Improved install?

[creepynut]

Could that be because the installer is the same? :)

Is it Etchy Eft or Efty Etch?

[njchick]

Oops, it's not Ubuntu, it's just plain Debian.

Re:Can we also have...

[KiloByte]

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...?

Will this include biarch support?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Will this include biarch support?

[Rizzer]

Multiarch is currently under development, see http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2006/20/.
If I understand correctly, it will not be ready for etch (4.0), but the following stable release seems likely to have it.

Newer GCC than Gentoo stable

[makomk]

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.)

The exact release date for etch

[SFSouthpaw]

is a bit sketchy.

The relase cycle is speedy!

[dastrike]

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.

My rule is "stable whenever it matters to someone

[frovingslosh]

My rule is "stable whenever it matters to someone else".

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".

You're describing GNOME

[Feztaa]

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.

Re:Welcome

[baadger]

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.