Debian's Testing Branch Nears Completion

DeviceGuru writes "With Debian Lenny (aka 'testing') poised to displace Etch as the popular Linux distribution's 'stable' branch possibly as soon as next month, blogger Rick Lehrbaum loaded the latest preview (beta 2) of Lenny's KDE CD image onto an available Thinkpad, and took it for a spin. How's it coming along? After detailing a handful of issues — and offering solutions for each (except Bluetooth support) — he concludes: 'Other than the need for a few hacks and fixes, my main complaint with it is its inclusion of way too many of KDE's rich set of applications, such as games, tools, etc.' From the looks of it, looks like Lenny might be the new 'Debian stable' soon!"

Comments

Does what it says on the box

[Twitchimus]

OK, so the gentleman downloaded and installed the *KDE* version of Debian Lenny, and then says his main complaint "is its inclusion of way too many of KDE's rich set of applications, such as games, tools, etc."

I can understand that; I once installed Windows XP, but there were far too many Microsoft applications for my liking.

Re:Actually, no.

[Compuser]

You need to get a (better) girlfriend.

Re:Dependencies are annoying.

[clang_jangle]

Some of us already live in the future and use SSD on our laptops. Every gigabyte here is precious, since there's often not dozens, hardly even one dozen.

Funny, that doesn't sound like the future to me. Sounds more like you're living in a solid state version of 1997.

Re:advice for upgrading a server?

[lakeland]

Every new stable is really well tested, I would expect it to work just fine.

Having said that, if you don't want it to happen then just change your sources.list from 'stable' to your release name.

If you don't have remote KVM I would be tempted to wait a week or so after release before upgrading - just to see if others have hit snags.

More games = more interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one (in addition to welcoming our KDE overlords) think it is great that games are being included by default. More distros need to do this. Every LiveCD should be able to show people that Windows isn't the only OS where you can waste time playing Solitaire. A LiveCD/default install that doesn't have this is probably going to feel like an incomplete system to the average desktop user.

Good Point

[Gazzonyx]

Everyone becomes conservative with upgrades after the first time that a box 3000 miles away fails to come back up. Seriously, waiting for a remote reboot after a kernel update is always the longest two minutes of my life.

Even the headless boxes at my apartment wait for me to set aside time to haul out a monitor and keyboard if anything goes wrong during an update. It's better to assume that something will go wrong and be pleasantly surprised and ahead of schedule than to sit staring at pings that have been timing out for the last five minutes (while you think, maybe it's just taking a long time to init... yeah, right!).

And, regardless of what anyone says, a virtual machine test environment doesn't have anywhere near the complications that you get with heavy metal. A successful virtual machine test just means that nothing is assured to go wrong, nothing more.

Re:Good Point

[petermgreen]

than to sit staring at pings that have been timing out for the last five minutes (while you think, maybe it's just taking a long time to init... yeah, right!).
Often when a linux box hasn't been rebooted for a while it can take a long time to reboot because the boot scripts decide that the filesystems need checking. On a big filesystem this can take quite some time.

Re:Good Point

[Phroggy]

Here's a tip: if you have a very large filesystem that is NOT your root filesystem, e.g. something only used for SMB or NFS sharing, kill the processes that need to access it, unmount it, and run fsck before you reboot the box. Those services will be offline for awhile, but they would have been anyway while fsck was running at boot time. This way, you get to see the progress (and any errors that come up), and the rest of the box doesn't have to remain offline for an hour or two after reboot.

It's not a bad idea to do this at regular intervals anyway. An hour of planned downtime after business hours every three months is significantly less annoying than waiting for fsck to scan your file server after an unplanned reboot (UPS failure, hardware replacement, etc.).

Re:Still not ready

[Hatta]

Debian is mainly used as a server OS, it isn't generally held up as a shining example of how Linux is ready for the desktop. It is fairly widely used in production environments, and by developers and other geeky types, and it is considered an excellent stable base for other, more specialised distros. Like, for example, Ubuntu -- which is more than "ready" for the desktop.

Really, Debian is meant to be all things to all people. It makes a wonderful server, and a wonderful desktop. You just have to be willing to configure it as such.

Re:Dependencies are annoying.

[shallot]

Run e.g. 'apt-cache show kde' and read the fine description. The same stuff is also available inside aptitude, or at http://packages.debian.org/anypackagename

Re:This article is full of errors and bad advice

[timrichardson]

The Debian browser (or this one, you of course have a choice) is iceweasel. That's its name. The Debian team decided that the branding of Firefox is too restrictive to meet Debian's licence for free software. The solution, iceweasel, is good enough, and that's why no one has added firefox to the non-free repository.

The lazy parties are those few websites that do poor browser sniffing. There are only a few sites that think iceweasel is not the same as firefox. The only one that bothers me is the wsj.com. So most websites either don't care about which browser you use, or correctly treat iceweasel and firefox the same. Somehow, a handful avoid the practices of the many, and make a mistake.