Debian 4.0 'Etch' Released

An anonymous reader writes "Earlier today we discussed the possibility that Debian Etch might be released soon. Well, according to debian.org, it has already happened. Etch has been released: 'The Debian Project is pleased to announce the official release of Debian GNU/Linux version 4.0, codenamed etch, after 21 months of constant development. Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system which supports a total of eleven processor architectures and includes the KDE, GNOME and Xfce desktop environments. It also features cryptographic software and compatibility with the FHS v2.3 and software developed for version 3.1 of the LSB.'"

Comments

Is it 1997 or 2007 ?

[Muki]

As I was recovering from a spring flu, I was bored enough and decided to upgrade from sarge to etch on my trusty old 600Mhz 256MB Compaq Deskpro. For the most part it went smooth and nice, but what amazes me is why the X stuff is still somewhat awkward. Hardware is certainly not bleeding edge. Maybe I'm just without a clue after a decade of professional multiplatform unix administration, but it sure beats me why X stuff still needs to be this clumsy - we're in year 2007, aren't we - ? Recently I installed two Dell 2900's at work and with Fedora FC6 it was surely as smooth as ever could be. Now someone jumps in and tells that 'Debian is not intended to be easy'. OK, but how is this intended to boost anyone's productivity to battle with stuff that was perhaps ok back in the early 90's ? Debian is such a stable (pun intended) and rock-solid platform to run servers on, I sure like it, but I'd like to see some minor refinements in getting wheels to roll. Used to run sarge at work, used to set up sarge systems for friends small businesses and home use, but have since then moved on to Fedora due to these unnecessary issues. Beat the living daylight out of me but I just don't feel like attacking the xorg.conf or XF....conf with vi anymore "cool" these days. Especially on very common hardware. Other than that, thanks for the debian folks for the release !

Re:Is it 1997 or 2007 ?

[krmt]

We know it's a pain, and it's a major goal for the next release. The Debian X Strike Force burned the entire release cycle moving first from XFree86 to Xorg, and then from the monolithic Xorg to modular Xorg. By the time it all that was finished, about a year and a half had passed and there was a few months to polish things up for the release. During this time, essentially an entirely new team was built up (only one person from the team that worked on XFree86 in Sarge is still an active member) and there was huge changes as the entire codebase was repackaged for 7.0 and we moved from a private SVN repo to git.debian.org, which was no small feat while we did our best to keep the updates coming at a good pace.

So expect to see some improvements to this stuff in the next year or so. A lot of work is happening at X.org to improve autoconfiguration, and Debian is moving to help develop it and deliver it to the users. Lenny is going to be really exciting from this point of view.