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Debian to Run on AMD64
dark-br writes to tell us TechWorld is reporting that the next Debian release will be able to run native on AMD64 processors for the first time. From the article: "The GNU/Linux 4.0 operating system, also known as "Etch," is planned for release in December, the group said. It will also have new security features, including encryption and digital signatures to ensure that downloaded packages are validated."
They've finally caught up to Ubuntu.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
This is great news! I do contracting work for Maas Digital, and we have a 30-CPU renderfarm running a weird combination of Debian-32 and Red Hat 64 bit binary overlays. This should simplify things immensely!
At my other job (lylix.net), we had to move away from Debian to Gentoo for this reason (among others), so it's good to see it finally being
Now that's a progress! After Linux 7.0 and Linux 10.0 we finally can expect GNU/Linux 4.0. Congratulations to whole Debian Team for great improvement in Linux (cough! GNU/Linux) versions numbering.
What does this mean, exactly? x86-64 support? How will the distro run on Intel chips that support EM64T?
I for one, welcome out 64bit Etch overlords... provided they can overtake Red Hat and company.
Stupid question: What does the 4.0 mean?
I'll probably be modded down for this...
More to the point it will be using 2.6.17 as the boot kernel. In other words, transparent support for SATA chipsets and (therefore) the ability to create a bootable raid set straight from the iso.
It might not sound like a big deal, but it's the only reason I'm using etch right now.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
*joke rimshot*
---southpaw
The slashdot summary is almost the whole article text from a ad-ridden page.
And nothing screams "hey, we want your traffic for free!" more than the submit to digg and submit to slashdot links bellow the small article...
Debian has unofficially supported native AMD64 64bit mode
for months. It didn't make it to the previous
official release (3.0?) although it was already usable by then.
Although it's great that Debian's finally on the x86_64 bandwagon, it's a bit delayed. They've lost a lot of share to other distros that have been able to adapt to 64-bit computing such as SuSE, RedHat, Ubuntu, Gentoo, etc. Coming from an era in which Debian was one of the top three distros, it'd be a pretty impressive testament to the Debian community if they can resurrect it to near its former glory.
They finally cought up to the product of an extremely lazy software company that only releases a new os version twice a decade...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
I've been running Debian on an AMD 64bit notebook from Fujitsu (the FMV-BIBLO NB80JN) since about a week after the notebook was released (more than 2 years ago). It was crummy at first, plenty of odd software that didn't really run well or at all, but now the only things that don't run in 64 bit mode are the software that doesn't run in 64 bit mode on any system, like OpenOffice and Wine. To tell the truth I haven't attempted to use OO.o and Wine on this box for well over a year, so that may be different as well. So I suspect Debian has supported AMD64 for quite a bit now, they are just now happy enough with the support level they are making an "official" release.
http://www.debian.org/News/2005/20050811
Although Sarge (the current Debian stable) was not released with AMD64 support, it was added as an official, fully-supported architecture two months after the release -- way back in August of last year. TechWorld didn't read the recent news announcment correctly.
Debian has gone from one of the most vibrant and important Linux distributions to something that basically only gets in the news when it's running late on something. Once upon a time it offered us a choice between cutting edge unstable and super-solid stable; now even the unstable is year[s] behind even relatively mainstream competing distributions, and the stable version is only free of bugs in the same sense that corpses don't get diseases (i.e.: you have to pretend rigor mortis and maggots don't count).
At what point do we just give up on Debian?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Excellent, great to see such a great server distro getting even more support ^^ Anything to lure people away from the evils of the Microsoft Server edition.
Debian is relevant for the stability and completeness image of Linux among other things.
:/) users should remember that especially considering you're last few releases have been out right painful in some regards for example 5.10 released with gcc that didn't match active kernel and 6.06 releasing with an alpha graphical installer as default to name two huge ones off the top of my head.
... personally I think they are mad (I use sid) ... though they like the choice to do so and that is what Linux is all about. Also Debian has had x64 for awhile just not officially supported outside of testing which most Debian desktop users use as standard. (*If this post seems flamish I apologies, it's a bit hard to tell as my eyes are seeing red after a long fight with a BlackBerry server.)
You Ubuntu (I say this typing on a Ubuntu box
Besides all desktop users don't want bleeding edge
I ate your fish.
Does this mean that apt-get will support two architectures on the same system (32 bit and 64 bit)? Or, will the user only be able access 64 bit repos on a 64 bit machine?
I guess the submitter of the article didn't know that the people who ask the "does it run linux?"-question are actually joking...
Perhaps you'd like to name drop a few more companies while you're at it!
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Since well over a year...?
gluon:~# uname -a
Linux gluon 2.6.14 #4 Mon Oct 31 16:19:12 CET 2005 x86_64 GNU/Linux
My main machine at home is an AMD-64 machine running Debian unstable. Debian has been running on AMD-64 for some time now, but there's never been an official release with it as yet.
The mailing list for the AMD-64 port was created on May 25, 2003.
No kidding. Good on Techworld for reporting this, but the propagation to Slashdot seems quite redundant. Even if typical slashdot readers didn't know that Debian's had amd64 in its testing distributions for ages, to the point where it only just missed out getting into Sarge, it was already reported in this summary, after all!
I'm a debian user -- I've been a Debian amd64 user for more than a year -- and I like it. (I still wouldn't suggest running AMD64 unless you're prepared to be a beta tester for a variety of desktop applications.) But it's hardly new. As you point out, Ubuntu's been been doing it for a while, too. As with a lot of things, Debian and Ubuntu feed off each other. (Ubuntu gets Debian's package base and stability, Debian gets ports back from Ubuntu adjustments (such as the Openoffice amd64 port, which I think has been primarily Ubuntu-driven).
Now AMD should try returning the Debian favour :)..
-- "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" - TAE --
Running Debian/Sarge for i386 architecture on an AMD64 machine I wonder which steps I need to do if I want to change to AMD64 architecture with the new stable release in December. I guess apt won't have the arch-update command, but does it mean "reinstallation" or is there some smart strategy to migrate from i386 to x86_64?
Debian has a Sarge (current stable) version that runs on x86-64 natively. It's just not a official port. AMD64 wasn't around long enough to make it.
Ubuntu is Debian, basicly. It's based on Debian, but more importantly it's basicly a snapshot of Debian Unstable (aka Sid) with latest Gnome packages and some Ubuntu add ons.
You know how when you enable 'universe' and 'multiverse' repositories those are all almost pure Debian packages recompiled for Ubuntu.
People here on Slashdot.org who come out of the woodwork every time Debian is mentioned and say ignorant crap like how Ubuntu is 'stealing' Debian's 'market group' just don't realy know what they are talking about.
This is the POINT of Debian. This is why there is such a paranoid licensing review and such. It's designed specificly for other people to use it for their own purposes without those other people having to worry about covering their asses legally.
Ubuntu and Debian are very mutually benificial. Without Debian Ubuntu wouldn't be able to spend all that time working on supporting users and providing polish.. and without Ubuntu there wouldn't be all this neat new stuff being ported back into it.
It's time we got past that A vs B attitude and grow up a little bit.
"This will be the first official release to include the AMD64 architecture."
Anyone can "stand up for what they believe", but it takes a very brave individual to change what they believe. - Loundry
Yeah.... woohoooo... first linux distro that supports the AMD64!
oh wait...
Seeing I've been running it on my AMD64 system for what seems like an eternity... :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Ubuntu is easy, Gentoo is flexible. Debian manages to give you the opposite.
Do you know, that Debian has 8 ports (additionally to 10 main official ports), which has not been released officially, because they have compiled only e.g. 90% of packages (from 15 000 packages). You usually do not need any package from missing 10 %.
This is old news/dupe: Debian told that on their announcement about 4.0 ( http://www.debian.org/News/2006/20060724 ), to which slashdot has linked in a previous article (http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/24 /1830228 )
The summary is wrong. It's not misleading, or sensationalist, or vague - just plain wrong.
It's wrong in such a way that it causes half the comments to be explanations of why it's wrong (the other half are about how the poster dumped Debian long ago, and no one cool uses it anyway, and how they love Ubuntu/Gentoo/Vista/MacOS 9 etc., and besides Debian is teh sux).
I mean, what the fuck, ScuttleMonkey?
sic transit gloria mundi
First, this is just an announcement that 64bit support will be included in a stable branch, and secondly.. how many people truly benefit from 64bit?
Not to be negative, but I'm yet to see any benchmarks showing a marked improvement (for general PC usage) from going 32bit to 64bit. All it really does is let you use more RAM (REALLY not useful for the average desktop user at this time) and perform 64 bit calculations natively (really only useful for scientific applications, certainly useless for desktop users 99.99% of the time).
On the downside, binaries become larger (64bit addresses instead of 32bit) and old binaries may have to be emulated (if using a 64bit-only CPU).
Still, I guess it'll excite some desktop users, wanting the "full functionality" from their brand new 64bit dual-core system. Personally, I only went to a x86-64 chip recently because it was the best price/performance chip I could find - 64bit processing had and continues to have no positive influence on my computing experience.
P.S. Sorry to be so negative, but I'm sick of hearing all this phwoar! stuff about 64bit, when it really isn't that exciting. Guess I haven't had my morning coffee yet..
Will program for karma.
What Debian mean by "stable" and "unstable" has about as much to do with how likely the software is to fall over, as what RMS means by "Free software" has to do with how much it costs. Stable or Unstable refer to the distribution, not the packages within it.
Debian Stable {each release is codenamed after a character from the movie Toy Story} is a release that stays, well, stable. It contains software that has been proven ultra-reliable on a dozen different architectures; and, as far as possible, nothing will adversely affect the operation of anything else. Security patches get backported in, but the main requirement is that nothing should change too much as long as Debian Stable is current. Doing a simple apt-get update && apt-get upgrade will never break anything if you are running Stable. When a new Stable is released, it invariably includes automated migration tools to deal with new configuration file formats &c. These run transparently as part of the upgrade process, ensuring as smooth a transition as possible.
Debian Unstable {aka SID, for "Still In Development" and also named after the destructive neighbour} is a release that is constantly changing. It is the combination of packages that is unstable, not the software itself: Unstable contains software that is believed to be mostly reliable on at least some of a dozen different architectures. However, due to the fact that the packages in Unstable are updated one-by-one rather than all at a time, there is the possibility of incompatibilities creeping in: one piece of software can affect another. It's also possible that APIs and configuration file formats may change.
Somewhere between lies Debian Testing. Once a package has proved its worth in Unstable, it moves to Testing -- but not until. If necessary, packages may remain absent altogether from Testing while compatibility issues are resolved (in which case, you will have to get the Stable or Unstable source code and build that; one or the other usually works). Eventually, Testing will be used to create a new Stable.
Debian Unstable or Testing are the best releases to use for desktops. Stable is really only for servers in co-lo, where you cannot get physical access to the machine to reboot it if it goes Tango Uniform. Thanks to Debian's rigid enforcement of the Free Software Guidelines (which went on to become the Open Source Definition), it's also very easy to keep everything "i-tal" on a Debian system.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I run Debian unstable on my home computers and Debian stable on my servers. That way I get lots of experience reparing debian, while having very reliable servers. It works quite well, in that every time another stable release is made, I already know the ins and outs of it and I'm ready to fix it in the freak chance that it would break.
Never eat more than you can lift -- Miss Piggy
now that was fast. i thought debian would need another 10 years to hop on that wagon... well at least on the rails, if they are not withered away already. i mean wtf is wrong with debian and those friggin sysadmins using it? on my university, they are using debian for years. i don't mind if i have to use firefox 1.0.8 instead of 1.5, but 1.0.4? eclipse 2.x? heck i'm trying to get some WORK done there too from time to time. for me, one of the strengths of open source is it's rapid development and even though my love for the bleeding edge caused me some serious cuts, there's a always a golden cut, which should make it on the work horses of the working men's desk, but try to argue against security with a sysadmin.
I've been running a debian MPI cluster for, ooh, two years now.
Ok, it wasn't simple getting everything to work, as it wasn't in the stable release, but I got there in the end.
In all that time it hasn't had any problems, nd only needed rebooting when the mchines were moved once.
Many "64-bit" GNU/Linux distributions are actually partly-32-bit. There are directories /lib and /lib64 {with analogues in /usr and /usr/local} for 32- and 64-bit libraries. An application may be compiled as 32-bit and use the 32-bit libraries in /lib, or as 64-bit and use the 64-bit libraries in /lib64. You can tell whether a binary is 32- or 64-bit by doing ldd on it; if the hex numbers are 16 digits long, then it is 64-bit.
/lib64 is just a symbolic link to /lib. This is both Pure and Beautiful. If you want to run 32-bit software, the recommended method is to set up a chroot environment in which to do so. The thinking is simple: software which is "i-tal" can just be recompiled 64-bit native {except OpenOffice, which demonstrates some very dubious programming techniques based around the assumption that the word length and addressing space are exactly 32 bits. OpenOffice of course began life as StarOffice, a closed-source project, and shows just what sort of bad code people will write if they don't expect anyone else ever to see it. Apparently, removal of "embarrassing" code was what delayed OpenSolaris for so long, and look what they left in! How naïve would one have to be to believe that "choosing a suitable licence" is what's really holding up OpenJava?} and software which isn't "i-tal" can go and fuck itself.
Debian 64-bit is designed from the outset with all 64-bit libraries.
Ubuntu have just added 32-bit libraries, to enable 32-bit applications such as OpenOffice to run. I believe they are also using a 32-bit Firefox, to allow non-free plugins such as Flash to work. It's neither Pure nor Beautiful, but it gets half the job done. Personally, I'd like to see Ubuntu play a bit faster and a bit looser with some of the closed-source stuff: maybe actually reverse-engineer it for the benefit of the whole community, rather than just kowtow to obnoxious licence agreements.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Great news! I had better clear off that Gentoo distribution I have been running on it for 2 years.
an ill wind that blows no good
In ubuntu you don't even have to worry about it, just install programs with the lovely parameter --force-architecture and just run the fucking program! 32-bit Wine runs just fine like that on 64-bit Ubuntu. Don't people read the linux forums anymore, FFS? It even works with an old 16-bit software guitar tuner designed to run under Linux.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Unfortunately you can't mix 32-bit and 64-bit programs and libs, or so it seems.
YES YOU CAN.
Get Ubuntu.
sudo apt-get install --force-architecture (program name)
Works just fine. Wine, XMMS, and more. You now have 32-bit (and in some rare cases, 16 bit) programs and codecs running under 64-bit. I haven't tried to crash any of the programs yet, but I've yet to see any instability problems, either.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The "will support" part is outdated. I have been running debian on amd64 for months. Even sarge has amd64 support.
http://www.debian.org/ports/amd64/
The only difference is, really, that amd64 is on the official main mirrors for etch (and by that, I mean it has been for months).
It runs great.
I'm already running ubuntu on amd64; i wonder if this is an example of code crossing over from ubuntu to debian?
my whole life long. richard stallman even gave me a medal for it & invited me into his secret chambers of gnu-love. moo like the gentoo cow, naked like the ubuntu orgy, we did.
moo, said hte cow
I use the proprietary nvidia drivers on 64-bit Gentoo builds running on AMD dual dual-core and single-core opterons, Athlon64 (both dual and single core), and 64-bit AMD laptops. All work just fine, even with the most current (2.6.17-gentoo-r4) kernels.
:-)
Now granted, Gentoo requires a bit of build time (compiling from source), and if you haven't created scripts to automate the build process, requires a bit of manual configuration, but the ease of updates and maintenance make it well worthwhile, and the ability to use cutting edge software, and often difficult to install on other platform projects such as transcode, blender, mplayer, ffmpeg, etc. with ease makes the time investment well worthwhile. Being able to do this on 64-bit (and having done so for the last two years) is icing on the cake.
I've also had decent luck with Suse, but I find their older kernels, older software, non-obvious nvidia support (beyond the default 2d VESA) and binary-based updates a little aggrivating. However, a big plus for the impatient is a quick install that takes less than an hour, vs. a day or two to install Gentoo. The best of both worlds of course is to have multiple root partitions set aside, put Suse on one to get started, and build a Gentoo build on a second partition in a chrooted environment. Then, once the build is done, just reboot into the new Gentoo build and enjoy. Since you're running 64-bit, it's not like performance will be killed during the build.
In any event, all of this is to point out that Nvidia drivers work perfectly fine in a 64-bit environment, and that there are at least two distros that work with them perfectly. So enjoy your new 64-bit box!
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Let me start off by saying what many others have been saying here, but is worthy of my saying "Hear Ye!" - Debian Stable really is a good idea. There are machines that I maintain which are remote, and crashing them would be a really bad idea. They run just fine as they are, and in fact if it weren't for the need for security updates I would never update the software. That is what STABLE means! Not only is it thoroughly tested, but unless there's a really good reason to update the package, the maintainers DON'T. There's not enough of this thinking in the world, and I laud the Debian community for having the forethought to have the STABLE branch. It proves there's a lot of SysAdmins contributing input, as opposed to programmers wanting the newest shinyest things.
Where I think there is room for improvement is the number of branches, and possibly their names. "testing" sounds a lot less stable than it actually is. Perhaps 'testing' could be split into "production" and "testing", with "production" being what MOST people will use...something that we're pretty sure is going to work, that is reasonably recent, etc. Testing would become a release that people would run in order to help the debian community test, or in the case where they had to have the latest feature. Unstable would be the hackers playground, most likely run in virtual machines, with the latest and greatest stuff. "stable" would remain what it is, "For when it absolutely positively has to be up for a year"
I like it...but I'm not sure that they really thought through with the name "Etch" as "Etch" sounds so similar to the Japanese word "Ecchi" (japanese pronounciation of "H" which stands for "Hentai" and "Hentai" means pervert....though "Ecchi" also means sex).
I guess to some..Debian 4.0 on a AMD64 is "sexy".
"[..]including encryption and digital signatures to ensure that downloaded packages are validated."
Oh wow... what a step forward. This time, WinXP (and not *Linux) has this feature since years (tm). I guess if I would say that contrariwise, I wouldn't get modded down but tagged as funny.
FYI, there actually is now an AMD64 port of Openoffice, available in Debian packages (albeit still only in experimental) since about March. I don't rely on it personally just yet because I've found it to be very unstable, but it is getting there. It's linked from http://openoffice.debian.net/, though the actual 2.0.3 files can be found at http://people.debian.org/~rene/openoffice.org/2.0. 3/amd64/.
I'll accept that it could speed up that much, but I never saw a 64-bit binary. Is XP 64-bit just that much faster?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Actually Ubuntu does support quite a bit of reverse-engineering: I've actually had a partially good experience setting up my friends ... Broadcom ... wireless card under Ubuntu by following a nicely prepared guide based on fwcutter.
Don't believe in miracles -- rely on them.
You know, 99% of the time I have to reboot my Slackware box (from /current!) other than installing a new kernel is because of hardware lockup, because being a relatively cheap computer and pretty old computer I have, things get flaky at times (but right now I have 42 days uptime, lucky number?). Of course, if you read through the changelogs, Slackware current isn't perfect; there's often bugs and broken dependecies, but nothing major--all the critical stuff is very conservatively released. Not to mention newest Firefox and Thunderbirds are considered security updates, because they are. (something that Debian and Ubuntu needs to learn). The point is that you can don't need to go the either extreme and you can have both stability and relatively bleeding edge software.
Don't believe in miracles -- rely on them.
Anyone having luck using their Alpha graphical installer on VMware (or MS Vpc?) It's been excruciating slow for me and died every time. Where I volunteer they use Ubuntu Server (what a bastardization) where half the time you can't even kill Ubuntu without endlessly grepping ps ax. Shame on them.
Don't believe in miracles -- rely on them.
I use Slackware. When I notice something on the changelog I want, I type slackpkg update; slackpkg upgrade-all and choose the ones I want. Occasionally new config files arrive, in which slackpkg automatically diffs them and I decide what to do. Sometimes I get broken dependencies, in which the matter is resolved by installing the library, with slackpkg. Overall, I like this system much better than Debian's system of mandatory dependencies. In fact, unless you have some ugly code, ldconfig does the magic minor version upgrades will not break code. Upgrading 15 libs by notch just to get the latest Firefox? No thanks...
Don't believe in miracles -- rely on them.