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.

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.