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Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 "Lenny" Released
Alexander "Tolimar" Reichle-Schmehl writes "The Debian Project is pleased to announce the official release of Debian GNU/Linux version 5.0 (codenamed Lenny) after 22 months of constant development. With 12 supported computer architectures, more than 23,000 packages built from over 12,000 source packages and 63 languages for the new graphical installer, this release sets new records, once again. Software available in 5.0 includes Linux 2.6.26, KDE 3.5.10, Gnome 2.22.2, X.Org 7.3, OpenOffice.org 2.4.1, GIMP 2.4.7, Iceweasel 3.0.6, Apache 2.2.9, Xen 3.2.1 and GCC 4.3.2. Other notable features are X autoconfiguring itself, full read-write support for NTFS, Java programs in the main repository and a single Blu-Ray disc installation media. You can get the ISOs via bittorrent. The Debian Project also wishes to announce that this release is dedicated to Thiemo Seufer, a Debian Developer who died on December 26th, 2008 in a tragic car accident. As a valuable member of the Debian Project, he will be sorely missed."
Still KDE 3.5 - so perhaps this will be the KDE user's distro of choice?
Need an ISP in South Africa?
Savor this moment guys, a Debian release is like a Solar eclipse, you are lucky if you get to see one in your lifetime!
Some first impressions on the release, screenshots and an explanation of the delay from Steve McIntyre, the Debian Project Leader, here: http://tuxradar.com/content/lenny-has-landed
He was a great hacker, it's nice to know that more people will remember him.
Don't do this. Squeeze won't be supported by the testing security team in the beginning: http://lists.debian.org/debian-testing-security-announce/2008/12/msg00019.html
Maybe I'm just overlooking the obvious, but where IS the Blu-Ray ISO image? I can see it mentioned in the SHA1SUMS file, for instance, but it doesn't appear to be on the cdimages server, neither as an ISO nor as a .torrent.
Good to see that in the time of bleeding edge releases-every-6-months distros there's still a choice that actually allows you to get work done.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Just reading this (Note I am not a Debian User anymore) has me noticing just how much the quality is in the FOSS field compared to MicroSuck, Adobemedia and any other company that's just in it for the money and not the technical perfection. Despite all marketing gibberish to the contrary.
While I've been using Ubuntu for it's ease of use in recent years and see Debian more as a kind of building kit when I need a more customized Linux setup, it is none-the-less a terrific feat to wrap up a product that meets Debians quality standards, as opposed to those of - let's say - Windows Vista.
Even the slashdot post on the new Debian has more content that a MS press release.
That all observed and said, congrats to the Debian crew for yet another release of a great OS and Software kit.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Honestly, if you're the kind of guy who uses Debian stable you certainly will stay with KDE 3.5 until at least 4.5.
Good to see that in the time of bleeding edge releases-every-6-months distros there's still a choice that actually allows you to get work done.
Ubuntu LTS is one such choice as well.
I made the mistake of upgrading to Ubuntu 8.10 from 8.04 LTS (and didn't like it), and now I need to go back. With Lenny out, it will feel less like a defeat if I install Lenny instead ;-).
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Duke Nukem Forever
You can't take the sky from me.
Not Lenny!
... and then they built the supercollider.
I'm obviously very happy about the Lenny release since my employer (part of Environment Canada) makes us use Debian. However, I guess there are "good" technical reasons, but I'm sad OpenOffice 3.x could not make it. One of our tech allowed us to install OO3 on our Etch machines. The result: 003 makes my Etch crash (the full OS, not just the app, to my entire surprise!). I'm not saying it's the same for everybody else, but it's a sad thing for me. (in fact, even 2.4.1 can crash Etch since I installed 3.0... and I'm no way knowledgeful enough to fix that problem :-/)
Why does computers have to be that complicated? ;-)
Animoog.org
I might be missing something here, but aren't there still 84 release-critical bugs open on lenny? I understand a number of them have been deferred to lenny.1, but I had expected this number to drop further before a release was made. Has Debian changed their release policy?
[captcha: prudence]
Unstable is unstable in the sense of changes happening semi-frequently, which you may not want on your production servers. But if your primary problem with Debian stable is that it doesn't get new software often enough, then presumably changes happening semi-frequently is precisely what you do want. And it gets bugfixes and security fixes first.
Despite the name, it's not where totally crazy experimental stuff that is more-likely-broken-than-not happens. There's a separate area, aptly named "experimental", for those packages. For example, the xf86->xorg change was staged in experimental for several months before being pushed to unstable after getting put into pretty good shape. OpenOffice 3 is undergoing a similar process currently, and will presumably be in good shape by the time it gets into unstable.
There is admittedly sometimes breakage in unstable, usually of specific packages, just because it's the newest widely used distribution: something'll never get to testing if it breaks in unstable. You can avoid even that, unless you really are the first person ever to encounter a particular bug, by using apt-listbugs to warn you of packages with major bugs filed against them, and delay upgrading those.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The debian press release on http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090214 mentions:
It also features compatibility with the FHS v2.3
(The press release for 4.0 did the same.)
However:
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#LIB64 tells me that
The 64-bit architectures PPC64, s390x, sparc64 and AMD64 must place 64-bit libraries in /lib64, and 32-bit (or 31-bit on s390) libraries in /lib.
What insensitive clod does break a lot of older software and claims to be compliant with standards when they aren't?
will there ever be a way to watch blue-ray movies legally on a Linux computer? ... it is simlply a major *effort* for the average user to ignore or work around all these problems.
I have been using Linux on my desktop for years now, but I am getting increasingly frustrated with the lack of drivers for all the things that get more and more "normal" in the Windows world: synchronizing mobile phones, loading maps into a GPS device, playing Blue-ray disks, operating TV-cards, security devices (e.g. chip-card readers) and other special hardware.
So it is not only a lack of game playing software or professional graphics software like Photoshop
And it seems for some of these problems there are major legal or other obstacles which I cannot see getting solved in the future.
Opinions?
Also do not forget that Debian currently seeks hardware donations.
Today I just decided to do an upgrade of my Debian server, to have the latest security and bugfixes. Instead I suddenly got hundreds of packages to update... well this explains why. I jsut have my sources pointing at stable, so that is updated now automatically.
A complete new stable release, interesting.
Not sure whether I should be happy with this or not. On one hand great to have a major update of some software, on the other hand I hope I'm not going to break anything.
And the only thing I was actually planning to do was install ldap and authentication over ldap!
Ever heard of doing apt-get after a minimal install? This isn't windoze where you have to take everything or nothing.
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
To put things into scale :
WinME->WinXP home 13 months (but at least it got home users rid of WinME)
Win2k->WinXP pro 20 months
WinXP->Vista 61 months (yup) (+2 if you count when it hit the shelfs)
Vista->Win7 announced for 2010, so that would put it at least 37 months
(that it before, delay get inevitably announced)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
You get world-class support for bugfixes, reasonable enhancement requests, package-interaction issues, and so on, often with new versions available within days of filing a good bug report. You get some of that in stable, but with a less satisfying lag until the next point release (or with more minor issues until the next major release).
That was really what blew me away when I switched in 2002 from running Windows 2000 full-time to running Debian sid/unstable full time. Complex issues like some program depending on a system behavior that had since changed weren't passed off as someone else's problem, or left for being fixed in the next version. Someone responded, often within hours, asking for details where necessary, we went back and forth by email a few times, they consulted with other maintainers if it was a multi-package issue, and a few days later the problem was fixed. In my day job, I don't get that level of support even for $600 software packages, even after an hour on the phone with inexperienced flunkies.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
``I wonder what the fetishism is with Debian stable ...''
It's one of the few releases for which a real effort is made to get all show-stopping bugs out one way or another. That's an enormous feat for a distribution that includes not only a complete operating system, but also more application software than any distribution I've compared it to.
Sadly, both etch and lenny have been released with known release critical bugs. These bugs have not affected me, but I am still concerned that Debian is inching away from "release only when ready" towards "release with bugs if necessary to make the release date". I don't want that to happen; there are enough distributions that do this already!
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Debian testing is far more stable than Ubuntu and is regularly updated.
Debian testing and Ubuntu are both based on Debian unstable. It takes a while for testing to become "debian stable", and it also takes a while before Ubuntu becomes a "release". Moreover, it takes a while for an Ubuntu LTS release to get better - but if you give Ubuntu LTS some time to mature, it will prove to be extremely solid (this is what happened with Hardy), while still delivering relatively recent packages.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
While I'm happy to see that libapache2-mod-python at last supports python2.5, I'm very dissapointed that debian developers didn't include python2.6. Do we have to wait another 22 months for it?
If the debian folks think that python2.6 could cause problems they are free not to make it the *default* python. But not including it at all is insulting for the python development team. Most important, since python2.6 is considered a stepping stone to python3, it is also very inconvenient for those who want to start migrating their code to python3.
MicroSuck??!! Grow the fuck up child
Wow. Chill. You're getting a little worked up about that.
A little anecdote: I got a Laptop as a christmas present from my Company last xmas. I came with Windows XP preinstalled and an optional Windows Fister on a disk. I thought I might as well give it XP try, even though I've used Windows back in 2002 the last time for serious work. ... Ok, things do go haywire sometimes, no bad feelings. Forced shutdown, did powercycle, continued exploring WinXP. Looked fairly neat, even for someone used to a pimped out KDE 3.5 or Max OS X with Exposé. Then I noticed my HDD going krrr,krrr,krrr. Every second. Thought I allready had a virus, troyan or something. Then I thought - wait, this is Windows - it could be MS crap pounding my HDD. Asked my flatmate - no Programmer but a MS expert user and he basically said: Yeah, that's XP indexing stuff. Be happy you didn't install Vista, he'd been doing that constantly. Then he told me that XP doesn't shut down regularly if something in userspace tries networking or simular stuff and that a shutdown-hang can take up to 20 minutes. Then he told me what actually happens if MicroSHIT WGA thinks your licences isn't valid. 4 weeks nag popup, then a minimal mode in which you only can start Internot Exploder and ony visit the MS homepage with in order to buy a licence.
After 2.5 hrs. configuring it and installing all the tools I'd like to try out (Netbeans/JavaFX, Firefox, Flash CS3 & Flex SDK, etc.) and some other stuff it wouldn't shut down.
At this point I once again had enough of Windows and took the Ubuntu 8.10 CD I had prepared for such cases beforehand and installed it. Zero fuss. Nada. EVERYTHING on my brand new Dell Volstro 1510 worked right from the beginning. Wireless, Bluetooth, all the extra sensor buttons for the music player, bells, wistles and blingbling. Rythymbox I think the musicplayer is called, yes? I don't even know or care exactly, that's how flawlessly it integrates with the controlls. And I actually like Amorok and it's magnatune integration more! And Ubuntu actually doesn't hang on shutdown if I chose to turn of my WiFi inmidst of a session. ... Allthough VS does crash a little to often for my taste, but that's a different story ...
On it goes: This weekend I bought a super-brand-new Saitek Cyborg X 5-axis joystick full of buttons and stuff that looks like it came out of a starwars movie or something. Pluged it in, fired up VegaStrike and started using it. I didn't even have to install frigging drivers!
So, for the bottom line, pardon me, but I, a senior IT expert with 23 years of programming experience and - bets are ten to one - way more experience with various OSes than you - actually do think - after thourough personal experience at various occasions - that the recent OSes MS has been putting out are about the shittiest of core software-products I personally have come across lately. It isn't that MS does Desktop OSes on the side, you know? The term MicroSuck I therefore actually do consider quite fitting and appropriate. And no I am not an OS X nor a Linux fanboy. I just know a shitty software product and a bad company policy when I see one, that's all.
Glad we have settled that.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca