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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.'"
I still remember my Woody days *sniff*
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
For a second there I thought maybe this was a late April fool's joke...
etch ships with CONFIG_IP_ROUTE_MULTIPATH_CACHED (experimental) enabled in the kernel. This breaks the multipath route behavior in iproute. As the google search shows, it is wreaking havoc with anyone using multipath and dual-wan systems. Those who upgraded this morning to the new stable may be in for a ride. This is a known and documented issue but cannot be found in debian's bug tracking system. This issue is not unique to Debian but it should not have passed through the release engineering for the new stable release.
Will I be able to have Debian perfectly handle [all] my basic multimedia requirements well by default? I would like to play Yahoo, CNN, ABC, BBC andd FOX video and audio by default. Let a slashdotter inform a soul.
Seriously though, this is a rather surprising bug to slip through.
Never eat more than you can lift -- Miss Piggy
Debian has turned into a political zoo of OSS dinosaurs, who are too big and too ancient. They spend lots of time arguing over political issues and raise barrier too high for hew developers.
During Debian Project Leader (DPL) election campaign candidates were almost in unison looking up to Ubuntu as an example on how to attract new users and developers. With Etch out and new DPL in Debian's goal can be summarized in one phrase: "Let's catch up with Ubuntu"
How Debian's brand new DPL wants to do this:
- rework website
- rework bugtracking system
- sex up the desktop, and
- encourage optional desktop releases every 6 months...
I wonder how they are going to do it... Especially the last bitI think this new Debian release is good news for Ubuntu which relies on it, so their next release can be on the 4.0 foundation.... but why would Debian want to compete with Ubuntu? They both have different goals in mind. I love Ubuntu to death, but with the 6 month release cycle, it feels like it's always advancing, but also not as stable as something that I would want to use on a server.
*looks around innocently*
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C1 bottles of beer on the wall. Take one down, pass it round... Oh, umm...
Debian's next testing version will be code named "Lenny" (from the movie Toy Story).
http://times.debian.net/1034-Release-update:-Etch
I just put it together and installed Sarge yesterday, and I'd rather keep things running stable on it after all that work. Does Etch have any showstopping bugs that would stop a 'apt-get dist-upgrade'? Will it fuck up my apache, proftpd, sshd, or smb servers? Anything I should really know before letting some 600 or so packages change?
Doesn't even include firefox...
:(){
Just to follow up, by "non free repository," you'll need something outside the normal Debian repo system -- probably Penguin Liberation Front, certainly nothing U.S.-based -- in order to get that software. (Although I think the Debian/Ubuntu PLF mirrors are down at the moment.)
In addition to Flash (patent issues) and the Win32 codecs (patents), you'll also need libdvdcss2 (DMCA) if you want to play DVDs, and you might as well get LAME if it's not in there by default (god knows -- probably patents).
Putting
deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org/ stable main
into your sources.list ought to work, but I'm not sure how actively that repo is maintained (it still lists sarge as the stable tree). The VideoLAN people likewise just have instructions for Sarge but hopefully that'll change soon.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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 !
The upgrade seems smooth enough, though it's rougher than woody -> sarge was for me. Then again, I'm running much more complex systems now.
/var/backups when you upgrade slapd, or it'll require some hand fixing and a db4.2_recover.
- squid may break if you use it for transparent proxying. It wants the "transparent" option after the listern directive(s) now to enable transproxying, but never used to.
- the xlibs upgrade does not go well if it can't remove everything in certain directories. In particular, having the jedit package installed screws this up badly. I had to do some manual fixing to get this working.
- Make really, really sure you have enough room in
- You'll probably want to use the maintainer's CUPS config, then re-configure it to your specs. The CUPS config has changed a lot and is not really compatible.
- cyrus delivery socket permissions may need resetting if you use cyrus & postfix.
Overall, though, for a system as complex as my servers, the process was largely fuss free.
Let's see:
- There's Gentoo for the script kiddie/ricer set
- RedHat for the clueless corporate types who're lost if they can't use a purchase order to obtain it
- Fedora for the lost souls who haven't yet figured out that it's never going to recover from RedHat's abandonment
- Suse is a German distro owned by Novell -- see RedHat
- Ubuntu is an ancient African word, meaning "I can't configure Debian" (as someone's sig once said)
- Lots of other small distros with funny names that won't be around in two years time
OK, Slackware is great for hobbyists, I'll give you that.So anwyay, which are the distros we're supposed to be taking seriously? Besides Debian?
Try having the CDs mailed to you -- you'll get higher bandwidth that way. 'Course, the ping times suck.
They could instantly surpass Ubuntu by pretty much adding all the stuff Ubuntu does (it's all FOSS anyway, right?), but making these small changes:
1. Give users an option to use commercial drivers right off. The new Ubuntu is doing this, but the implementation is still a little rough around the edges, and it's not at all clear that commercial drivers are frequently better than the FOSS ones, which is certainly true for GPU issues.
2. Default to Iceweasel and Icebird. Debian does this already, so they are a leg up. True FOSS is true FOSS, right? And for some dumb reason Ubuntu still defaults to Evolution.
3. Make it even easier to turn on compiz/beryl. Still pretty hard even in feisty, requires xorg.conf editing and such... Lame.
4. Make the default menu look more like windows. You know: "Start" menu, Quicklaunch, App running display (with preview), System Tray, Clock/Calender. Eliminate the top bar that gnome defaults to.
5. Have four potentially different wall papers for each desktop. The first distro to do this is ahead of the Linux Pack.
6. Include some really good foss games. You know, games with 3d sound and video, and online multiplayer. Urban Terror is free (as in beer). Use that one, till a better full FOSS alternative comes along. Hell ioquake3 with the original quake 3 demo files would be better than what most distros ship with.
7. Have Iceweasel, Icebird, Pidjin, Tomboy Notes, and Open Office Writer automatically in the quick launch.
8. Make it REALLY EASY to get EVERY CODEC.
9. Install Wine, and while you're at it, fix wine so that you can easily create a launcher on the desktop to any windows app, running under wine, that runs like intended right off the bat.
10. Have a gorgeous theme by default. For some reason the Ubuntu crowd is obsessed with shit brown. This is the part that is easiest to beat Ubuntu on.
Do this, and Debian will be THE distro for everyone, and easily supplant Ubuntu, Windows, and Mac OS X.
Do it not, and remain the odd arcane distro that only a few back room IT nerds use while half assed FOSS OSes (that duplicate each other's efforts, and rarely work that well out of the box) continually lag behind the corporate behemoths that have already got themselves pre installed on 90% of sold computers as it is (Windows/Mac).
I mean, or just stay private and personal, and to hell with saving the world, which seems like the current Linux mantra.
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Ubuntu users do. Ubuntu completely relies on the Debian upstream packages for each release. Ubuntu them patches everything and submits the patches back to Debian. You could argue that Ubuntu could do all this by itself but Debian is massive and is known for its high packaging standards which is a good thing. Ubuntu and Debian, at the end of it, are two different things with two different goals. Debian wants stability, Ubuntu wants the latest technology and packages. Ultimately, Debian should still be important for servers and Ubuntu for the desktop. Just don't dismiss Debian yet.
If we can hit that bull's-eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards... Checkmate.
Yeah, it should run fine on that machine. I've run Debian on a 120MHz Powermac 7200 and a 1.33GHz G4 Mac mini, and it was sweet on both.
Any PowerPC based computer should run Debian fine.
"Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
I've witnessed attempts by various individuals to fundamentally alter the goals of Debian. Most common is trying to make Debian a more "desktop-oriented" distribution. Good attempts turn out as separate distributions. Honestly, that's how it should stay.
See, Debian not only welcomes child distributions, it thrives on them.
http://www.debian.org/misc/children-distros
At some point in time, I would encourage consideration of Debian's slogan, "The Universal Operating System".
Debian has been and always will be an operating system that equally (as in equity) targets all applications; that's why child distributions are necessary, and why Debian Unstable is so damned important. Child distributions are required to pull the Debian project in a productive direction. Debian Unstable is required to tie the required functionality of child distributions together and, in turn, propagate the benefits to all parties involved.
It doesn't make sense to take a piece of software to any sort of bleeding-edge when it will be deployed world-wide on Debian servers and Debian routers. Furthermore, the fact that a child-distribution is already working to "sex up the desktop" is evidence that Debian need not take initiative in such a direction; it's already involved.
I use Debian, because nothing else meets my needs.
I have two friends, both of whom have recently switched to Linux for everything except a few games that can't be handled with Cedega. I didn't push them into it, they just grew frustrated with Windows and knew that there were alternatives. One installed Debian (AMD64 + ia32 chroot even!) and I elected to install Kubuntu (Edgy 32-bit) on the other's as I figured it would be more noob-friendly. The guy who uses Debian said "It starts off broken and you fix it, but then it stays fixed, while Windows starts off fixed but then breaks itself." He also liked that it would warn him about doing something stupid, but would trust him enough to let him do it anyway. He's now perfectly happy with it, rapidly flipping a Beryl/Compiz cube around to IM people while playing WoW. He uses Unstable, he runs beta software, he fiddles with things. Don't get me wrong, the Ubuntu friend definitely preferred it over his struggles with Windows. He told me, when he found himself booting into Windows to play WoW that he would ask himself "Why can't Windows be Linux?" The problems come because Ubuntu is just less flexible than Debian. First, it supports a much more limited set of packages officially than Debian. This requires adding the universe and multiverse repositories, because he didn't want only the most useful packages, he wanted to try anything that sounds interesting. Cedega wasn't working well with WoW and the three of us thought it might be because of the 8xxx series drivers being installed instead of the 9xxx series. Now the Debian versions of these were only available in Experimental, but with some help from me, the Debian guy was able to install them easily enough, and nothing broke. In Ubuntu however, only Feisty had the 9xxx series. From experience, I've learned that you can't just upgrade one or two packages to a newer version in Ubuntu like you can in Debian. Things like libc6 change versions from release to release, and the whole system has to be upgraded. I figured that Feisty should be near enough stable that upgrading to it wholesale should go pretty well. We even used the update manager provided with Ubuntu. Incompatible packages ended up installed, as versions were moved into and out of Feisty (I think), and right now his system is usable, but will require some extensive fixing by me to get apt working again. The lesson? Ubuntu is great if you do what they expect you to as a normal desktop user. If you want to do something less common, it's not as flexible as Debian and can get in your way.
Debian - Gives the user control to choose what they want to use, more packages more options..
Ubuntu - Makes most of the initial choices for the user..
Debian - manual configuration of a lot of items..
Ubuntu - a bit better at auto-configuration of hardware.
Debian - Etch 20,400+ Packages in the official repository
Ubuntu - Fiesty I think it's around 6000 Packages but can't find a stat anywhere to confirm exact munber.
Debian 13 hardware Architectures i386, x86-64, PowerPC, 68k, SPARC, DEC Alpha, ARM, MIPS, HPPA, S390, IA-64, AMD64, Intel EM64T
Ubuntu 3 Hardware Architectures i386, AMD64, PowerPC,
I've used child distros in the past an always ran into problems. I would then switch to the parent distros to get away from the problems.. So I use Debian rather than one of it's numerous children to prevent a repeat of my previous experiences. http://www.debian.org/misc/children-distros
far...out
in this case, all they had to do is not enable equal cost multipath caching.
read the linux kernel mailing list. read what others are saying about this option. it's been in the kernel for 4+ years without any maintenance. it's broken and everyone knows it. the guys are like, "yeah it's broken and it's fucking up multipath. we'll get rid of it in 2.6.23 for sure"
there's no reason why debian kernel builders should have made the conscious decision to _enable_ equal cost multipath caching. it gains you absolutely nothing, and it actually fucks up the multipath that works fine when you have it off like you should.
again, this is something that debian conspicuously enabled that broke an already working functionality. and it that regard, debian made a mistake.