A Look at Debian Etch Beta 3

An anonymous reader writes "The All about Linux blog has a down-to-earth review of the latest Linux offering from Debian — Etch Beta 3 which optionally sports a very intuitive GUI installer. The review looks ar the pros and cons of Debian Etch Beta 3 as well as what the Debian team could do to make this not-for-profit Linux distribution even more popular."

Comments

More of the same.

[Xordan]

It's nice to see Etch moving closer towards release, it's been too long since Sarge imo. Although there's a new shiny installer which seems to give lots of (easy) control over how you set up your system, there seems little else other than updated packages. This might not be a bad thing however, if the time taken between the Sarge release and this one has been put into making a generally rock solid distro. For many people, being able to rely on having no stability problems is very important. So I think Debian should stick to this path. Moving towards making it user friendly for the linux newbie as the article suggests isn't a good plan unless they have devs sitting around with nothing to do. There are plenty of distros out there which provide for these people (e.g. Ubuntu).

Intuitive Gui installer

[Reverend528]

I'm a debian user. I'm not trying to troll. But, it's the same damn installer. The questions are the same and the layout is practically the same. The X-based installer is just as (but no more) intuitive than the curses installer.

Re:I have net-installed debian over a phone line

[deek]

The final installed image was less than 600 MB (excluding the package cache, which I apt-get cleaned).

That's what I love about Debian. It's wonderfully easy to optimise the package combinations. You could probably get it down even further, if you use the deborphan command to figure out all "leaf" packages (i.e packages that aren't dependencies for others). Then you can cull down the ones you don't want, rerun deborphan again, rinse and repeat. Also very useful for culling bloat in the system, from extra software installed over time.

This was more than a year ago however (not that Debian changes that fast)

This has to be the one myth about Debian that has almost every other Linux user suckered.

For these people, here is a rundown of the many different faces of Debian. You can choose four different types of Debian:

• You can opt for the slow, barely changing except for security updates or the occasional point release, extremely stable distribution. Called 'stable', of course. Currently nicknamed 'sarge'.
  
• You can choose the quite new, not rigorously checked but has had a good workout, still more stable than most distribution. That's 'testing'. It's nicknamed 'etch' right now.
  
• You can adopt the very new, sneeze and you'll miss an update, I live in interesting times distribution. It's named 'unstable', but should probably be called 'Most likely fine, but we're not guarantueeing anything'. Has a nickname of 'sid'.
  
• Or you can go for the bleeding edge, running with scissors, smoke me a kipper I'll be back for breakfast distribution. That is experimental. No nickname that I know of. It's not a complete distribution itself, as it contains only a few hundred packages. It has to be piggybacked onto one of the previous three. If you wanted to install XOrg 7.1 though, this is what you'd have to use.
  

  Then, as if that wasn't enough, you can selectively include packages from all four distributions, by specifying a default dist, and specifically apt-getting from one of the four. Personally, that's what I do on my machine, using 'testing' as a base. I've also been known to set this up on some servers I maintain, if they desperately need a newer php or something like that. Works like a charm.

  So as you can see, Debian can change rapidly. Very rapidly. It all depends on what you choose. It's just that the Debian "releases" are always of the 'stable' distribution. Hence this common misconception.