Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" Frozen

edesio writes with a snippet from debian-news.net, trumpeting an announcement from the ongoing DebConf10 in NYC: "Debian's release managers have announced a major step in the development cycle of the upcoming stable release Debian 6.0 'Squeeze': Debian 'Squeeze' has now been frozen. In consequence this means that no more new features will be added and all work will now be concentrated on polishing Debian 'Squeeze' to achieve the quality Debian stable releases are known for. The upcoming release will use Linux 2.6.32 as its default kernel in the installer and on all Linux architectures.""

Comments

Not sure

[junkwerks]

I like frozen squeeze.

sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

its just sad Ubuntu gets all the publicity when they just reap the benefits of Debian's hard work.
Debian all the way!

Re:sweet!

[keatonguy]

What a terrible attitude to have. The Open Source community is about shared effort for shared gain, not personal recognition. No matter the distribution that gets all the 'spotlight', it's Linux that reaps the reward, and the more ground Linux gains the better off everyone with a PC is.

Re:sweet!

[tpwch]

Thats not exactly true. A lot of stuff Ubuntu does/fixes gets sent back to Debian. Its a mutual relationship that they both benefit from. The same is true for many other debian-based distributions. And hey, its open source, the people who makes Debian want others to reap their benefits.

Re:sweet!

[FuckingNickName]

The Open Source community is about shared effort for shared gain, not personal recognition.

Have you spent a moment in the "Open Source community"? The majority of contributions to Linux are from profit-making corporations. Most of the remainder take glory in advertising their contributions for CV and geek cred. Certain projects are so cliquish that a friendly attitude (read "sucking up") to the core team is a far better way of being welcomed as a contributor than technical expertise.

My original post included specific project examples, but since the most political organisations also have the most time to loudly whine at their detractors, I thought I'd remove them. I can think of at least one major open source Unix distribution the central developers of which seem to deliberately so poorly document their work that getting up to sufficient speed on what they do to make a positive contribution requires mentorship.

FWIW, Debian as a whole doesn't suffer so much from this problem. I guess because it doesn't attract the glamour-seekers, nor does it consider itself elite. If politics is a hindrance there, it's more about idealism than personal power struggles.

Re:sweet!

[ShecoDu]

And ubuntu's community has to spend time dealing with the newbies, that's a huge weight off of debian's shoulders, it's a symbiotic relationship.

Re:sweet!

[blair1q]

I don't get why anyone is surprised that doing things with people turns political.

Re:sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

True. Where you have people, you have people problems.

Re:sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

Because sometimes we like to pretend that people aren't complete fucking idiots.

Re:sweet!

[FuckingNickName]

Pretty much this. And just because everything is somewhat political, it doesn't mean every venture is as bad as every other.

Like women and unlike wine, all man's endeavours grow more wrought with bitterness over time.

Re:sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

The Open Source community is about shared effort for shared gain, not personal recognition

Just remember that the next time you're still in your cubie at 22:00 on a Saturday. The OP hit that nail. Hard.

Re:sweet!

[mat128]

Mod this guy as informative! Having worked with Ubuntu developers on some bugs, I can say that non-Ubuntu specific fixes are sent upstream where they get commited.

Re:sweet!

[blair1q]

What you mean "we", partisan?

(I love it when my point proves itself...)

Re:sweet!

[blair1q]

Pretty much this. And just because everything is somewhat political, it doesn't mean every venture is as bad as every other

True that. I'm pretty sure Thomas Jefferson knew what politics was when he made it the basis of our political system...on purpose...as though it was going to solve problems we used to and no longer have.

Like women and unlike wine, all man's endeavours grow more wrought with bitterness over time.

Depends on your time scale and your skill in choosing either one.

Re:sweet!

[LingNoi]

Its just sad Debian gets all the publicity when they just reap the benefits of upstream's hard work.
Upstream all the way!

Fixed that for you.

Re:sweet!

[Nimey]

Having a friendly attitude != sucking up, necessarily.

I had to learn this the hard way, back when, so pay heed: politeness is a social lubricant. It gets in the areas where different peoples' rough edges would otherwise rub and create friction, and it costs nothing to be polite.

For example, a few months ago I opened a bug report with $LIBRE_PROJECT asking for help making a Windows build, or whether they'd be kind enough to start releasing Windows builds of the stable tree, rather than an occasional build from an unstable branch. After a bit of back and forth - the guys who weren't involved in making the Windows build were a bit rude - they eventually pointed me to the non-obvious way of compiling their code, and eventually their Windows guy started releasing regular semi-stable builds (the Win build isn't quite there yet).

A little politeness as social lubricant, and I might have helped some other poor schmuck who wanted a free Windows program that does what $PROJECT does.

Re:sweet!

[http]

This is a mistaken view. Even if Ubuntu support was always effective, there is no weight taken off Debian. Every community has to deal with noobs.

In the real world (specifically, the irc support channels), there's a chronic problem: a fresh Ubuntu user realizes that they're not getting help in #ubuntu, so they come to #debian, because, well, Ubuntu is based on Debian, so you #debian people know how to fix my problem, right? right? Much time is lost trying to help them when their problem is particular to Ubuntu before they accidentally let "Lynx" or "Meerkat" slip out. It's so chronic that there are bot factoids to explain why we can't help them if they are not actually running Debian.

Of course, not all Ubuntu users experience this, but they probably stay with Ubuntu.

Re:sweet!

[buchner.johannes]

The Open Source community is about shared effort for shared gain, not personal recognition.

Have you spent a moment in the "Open Source community"? The majority of contributions to Linux are from profit-making corporations.

Not true for the Linux Kernel. Most of the contributions to Linux come from individuals without a company. After that are unknown contributers. Then companies.
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/sites/main/files/publications/linuxkerneldevelopment.pdf

Re:sweet!

[buchner.johannes]

We discussed what Ubuntu gives back here: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/08/01/0326208/First-GNOME-Census-Results

If you want to see some Ubuntu criticism, search for Greg Kroah-Hartman Linux Plumbers Keynote, where he explains why distributions based on other distributions aren't really helping development.

Re:sweet!

[icebraining]

One of the projects to accomplish that is Utnubu.

Re:sweet!

[spikeb]

not true of GNOME (see the GNOME census)

Re:sweet!

[Menacer]

Individuals without a company and contributors with unknown affiliation add more to the Linux kernel than any _individual_ company, but that does not negate the statement that "the majority of contributions to Linux are from profit-making corporations". Red Hat, Novell, and IBM together make more Linux kernel contributions than all of the unaffiliated and unknown-affiliation contributors combined.

The document you appears to have misread even includes this sentence: "It is worth noting that, even if one assumes that all of the 'unknown' contributors were working on their own time, over 70% of all kernel development is demonstrably done by developers who are being paid for their work."

Re:sweet!

[tyrione]

Morton works at Google, Viro pops up as basically an alias: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Niels_Olson/Al_Viro, Miller works at Red Hat, Baechle at MIPS, etc.. You just gave a list of Corporations and actual top developers all working for those corporations. Thanks for reinforcing the prior fact that the bulk of the kernel code is paid directly or indirectly by corporations.

Re:sweet!

[sjames]

The Ubuntu community has also produced some decent documentation and howtos that apply well to Debian.

Re:sweet!

[myowntrueself]

I guess because it doesn't attract the glamour-seekers, nor does it consider itself elite.

I think that Debian suffers from a different form of elitism; the elitism that says "if we release something thats broken to stable we won't fix it because its *STABLE*"

The problem, as I've seen it over the last 10 years as a Debian sysadmin, is that Debian is not run as a business; it doesn't have customers, it has users.

If you want to use Debian in enterprise you NEED a really good engineering team; its really risky to use Debian in the small/medium business eg with sole-sysadmin because when Debian release something thats broken it STAYS broken and you need an internal engineering team to fix, patch and maintain the fixes.

This is why I am encouraging my employer to go with Redhat instead; because Redhat is run as a BUSINESS, they understand the needs of business. For Redhat you are not just a user, you are a CUSTOMER and that actually counts for something.

Re:sweet!

[dirtyhippie]

In the real world (specifically, the irc support channels)

You lost me right there :)

Re:sweet!

[DarkIye]

You're right. That's always come quite naturally to me, so I've got a history of being surprised at how nice people are in spheres where I've been told by others the only way to get ahead is to 'suck up' or be someone's bitch in an unspecified but theoretically humiliating way.

Re:sweet!

[micheas]

I guess because it doesn't attract the glamour-seekers, nor does it consider itself elite.

I think that Debian suffers from a different form of elitism; the elitism that says "if we release something thats broken to stable we won't fix it because its *STABLE*"

The problem, as I've seen it over the last 10 years as a Debian sysadmin, is that Debian is not run as a business; it doesn't have customers, it has users.

If you want to use Debian in enterprise you NEED a really good engineering team; its really risky to use Debian in the small/medium business eg with sole-sysadmin because when Debian release something thats broken it STAYS broken and you need an internal engineering team to fix, patch and maintain the fixes.

This is why I am encouraging my employer to go with Redhat instead; because Redhat is run as a BUSINESS, they understand the needs of business. For Redhat you are not just a user, you are a CUSTOMER and that actually counts for something.

You might look at the php disaster in RHEL 5.x

Basically, Rackspace is pleading with Redhat to compile pcre with unicode support, and Redhat seems to be saying wait until RHEL 6

php in RHEL is so far behind that many open source and closed source php applications do not support the ancient version of php in RHEL because of the known security issues. (yes Redhat claims to have backported security fixes, but that does not mean that the latest versions of your software support the version of php in RHEL that php does not support.

Of course some of this is the fault of the php project, but still, I think you are suffering from a grass is greener on the other side of the fence syndrome.

Personally, I am leaning to Debian SID and Fedora as my preferred distributions for running web apps. FreeBSD upgrades without console access are not well supported so I am not a big fan of using it on leased servers, but otherwise it is easy to keep the application stack up to date. I don't dislike gentoo, but it has never "felt right" which I guess is just personal work habits or which OS you learned on or some other non-objective thing.

Re:sweet!

[TheRaven64]

FreeBSD upgrades without console access are not well supported so I am not a big fan of using it on leased servers

I'm not sure what you mean by this. I took a FreeBSD machine through every release between 4.7 and 6.2 without console access doing source updates. The newer freebsd-update tool makes it even easier - just run a single command and do a binary update. I don't think I've ever updated a FreeBSD system in a way that could not be done via SSH. What is the 'supported' update process that does require console access? It doesn't seem to be either of the ones that I found in the FreeBSD Handbook...

OpenBSD recommends booting from the install CD and doing the update from there, but I've never had any problems doing the update the long way - they provide a list of commands to type, you just run them. I used to have a colocated Mac Mini running OpenBSD, and I took that all the way from 3.7 to 4.4 without any console access. Each update took a few minutes and two reboots (only one required in practice, but two may be required in theory, and it's worth an extra thirty seconds of downtime to avoid needing some remote hands time with a technician in the colo), and this was with the 'not recommended' procedure.

Re:sweet!

[TheRaven64]

Is Greg Kroah-Hartman in some kind of competition with Ulrich Drepper to see which one of them can alienate more of the Free Software community?

Re:sweet!

[micheas]

I have had about a 95% success rate for doing upgrades without console access.

Which sort of sucks that one out of 20 times the server just goes away.

The only supported upgrade is if you do it in single user mode. Although this seems to be understood to not be a completely realistic assumption by the FreeBSD team, so this may change.

Re:sweet!

[jez9999]

It gets in the areas where different peoples' rough edges would otherwise rub and create friction, and it costs nothing to be polite.

Not necessarily. Continuing to be polite to an arrogant, mean-spirited oaf costs you self-respect and dignity... and may well exacerbate the problem by giving them feedback that their behaviour is OK. It's certainly worth trying to be friendly at first, but after a while if I feel I'm not getting anywhere I will lose patience and tell them a few home truths about people skills.

Re:sweet!

[ThePhilips]

The majority of contributions to Linux are from profit-making corporations.

Does anybody still remember the times when corporations were like "we just hire people so that they concentrating on what they already do full time"?

I can think of at least one major open source Unix distribution the central developers of which seem to deliberately so poorly document their work that getting up to sufficient speed on what they do to make a positive contribution requires mentorship.

RedHat? That never was a secret really. And they were first to break the mold of "people do what they already do" to "we pay money so we say what you do".

Though I'm not sure what you mean by the mentorship. RedHat doesn't hire developers that easily. They spare themselves mentoring newhires by always trying to hire people who are already experts in the piece of software. That also gives them greater (often full) control over the project. Two birds with a single stone, but can easily ruin the OSS side of the project. The end result that contributing to the RedHat or Fedora is pretty much impossible task.

Debian as a whole doesn't suffer so much from this problem. I guess because it doesn't attract the glamour-seekers, nor does it consider itself elite.

Because they are not for-profit organization which is actually made of people who like to do what they do.

Re:sweet!

[jonadab]

> its just sad Ubuntu gets all the publicity when
> they just reap the benefits of Debian's hard work.

Whose fault is that?

Ubuntu arguably exists, or certainly became as popular as it is, because the Debian people went into some kind of coma or something and completely stopped producing stable releases for several years.

At a time when cutting-edge distros were all moving to Linux 2.6 and conservative distributions and ones that hadn't been updated lately were still using 2.4.x, the Debian installer was asking users if they wanted to try the "new" 2.2 kernel, which might not be totally ready for prime time yet, or stick with the tried and true 2.0 kernel.

Other packages were similarly ancient. If you wanted to install an application that wasn't included in the distribution, or a newer version of some key application, well that was just too bad, because there was no way anything would compile against libraries that old. Reasonable people had pretty much given up on Debian. The word "stable" became a joke. Debian wasn't just stable -- it was of purely historical interest.

Ubuntu came out with an actual release, and people flocked to it, for obvious reasons. Then *another* Ubuntu release came out, and *more* people moved to it. The rest, as they say, is history.

Some of us moved back to Debian when sarge finally came out, but we half expected to end up moving back to Ubuntu, because we didn't really expect the next release to come out in a reasonable timeframe. After the experience we'd just had, we were pretty jaded. The next release (etch) was a little slow in coming too, so some of us were pretty nervous for a while about whether we'd be able to stay with Debian. It wasn't until Lenny came out that I was able to really settle down as a Debian user.

So you might say this news that Squeeze has frozen is "welcome news".

Re:sweet!

[cp.tar]

I really wonder why some people seem to hate the notion of companies paying developers to work on Linux.

Yes, Linux is an excellent example of how successful open source development can be. Especially in the sense GNU HURD isn’t.

The fact that most development comes from various companies should be counted as a success of Linux.
I mean, think about it. Unlike other operating systems, developed either by monopolists or by relatively small communities, Linux is now a result of joint effort of both numerous independent programmers and several large companies. All scratching their own itches, all working on making Linux better, all sharing their improvements with everybody else.
This is also the greatest success of GNU: without the GPL, there would have been no strong incentive for everyone to share their improvements (even though it would be a good long-term strategy; the modern corporate world is more interested in quarterly statements, it seems).

Re:sweet!

[Nimey]

This is true - there's always a pathological case around to prove that rules are meant to be bent.

Re:sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

For-profit companies are into that 'shared effort for shared gain, not personal recognition', too. It's obvious they are in a shared effort, the gain is shared, too, and personal recognition is not paramount to them, because most of their clients and shareholders don't give a damn about their contribution to free software. They contribute because that make their own products and services work better, so they can profit more.

And when a hobbyist contributes to the Linux kernel, he can get his wifi card working with his OS, or recognition, or fame, or a job, or a bit of happyness; but it's still the same 'shared effort for shared gain' thing.

Re:sweet!

[petermgreen]

At a time when cutting-edge distros were all moving to Linux 2.6 and conservative distributions and ones that hadn't been updated lately were still using 2.4.x, the Debian installer was asking users if they wanted to try the "new" 2.2 kernel, which might not be totally ready for prime time yet, or stick with the tried and true 2.0 kernel.
You exagerate. When 2.6 first came out the current version of debian stable was woody which offered either 2.2 or 2.4.

Still I agree that debians longest release cycle ever came at about the worst possible time.

Re:sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of Linux syadmin needs an engineering team to maintain a custom built package? Especially after 10 years of experience! Ten years ago you would never find Debian packages in stable for all of the services you wanted, and you often would custom build things like Apache, even if there were distro packages available. If you need a whole team of engineers to extract and ./configure a package's source then you really should switch to Ubuntu or Windows Server.

It's very easy and straightforward to roll your own .deb package if you need to redistribute it. There are tools that can extract a source package, let you build it the way you want, and then repack it all into a .deb file.

I've never seen a broken package in Debian stable, but I only use a small fraction of the ones that are available. Debian policy only allows security fixes to the stable tree, so if one did get in there I know they wouldn't fix it. In that case RedHat may listen to you a bit more but they sure won't break their distro for a single customer either.

Re:sweet!

[sigaar]

You make it sound like the Ubuntu people aren't putting a lot of hard work into it. A lot of the work Ubuntu does on the desktop finds its way back into Debian. As a die-hard Debian user of more than a decade, I can assure you the default installations of Gnome and KDE on Debian improved like never before since Ubuntu/Kubuntu came on the scene.

Re:sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

There are tools that can extract a source package, let you build it the way you want, and then repack it all into a .deb file.

That there may be, but are there decent HOWTOs showing this?

Re:sweet!

[idle12]

From the handbook it suggests you drop down to single user mode (see #4): http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/makeworld.html pfft, I usually skip that step and just shutdown anything important (dbs, mail, www, etc); but could get all wacky. Anyways, now days you can get IPMI on a lot of servers/motherboards. I like SuperMico, nice solid boards and IPMI that works "good enough". HP also has nice ilo cards (but more costly to get an HP server).

Re:sweet!

[TheRaven64]

Ah, I've always ignored that - just set the flag preventing new logins, kick everyone off, stop all services in /usr/local/etc/rc.d/ and then do the update. Or, on my desktop just do it without stopping everything. I've had more problems upgrade Postgresql than I have upgrading the FreeBSD base system.

I now use a Xen VPS that does provide me with console access (serial console and VNC video console), but the only times I've had to use it were after the host machine died and I needed to manually fun fsck because the automatic version didn't fix everything and prevented the boot from working. I'm actually running -STABLE on that machine, and do source updates periodically to get the latest updates to the Xen HVM kernel and, although I do often watch the reboot on the console to make sure there are no problems, I've not had to intervene yet.

A frozen squeeze

[Culture20]

is called a slushy, smoothy, orange julius, or a lemon shakeup.

Re:A frozen squeeze

[Anonymous Coward]

It's also called "insurance against infertility". Still thirsty?

Took long enough _

[dosius]

Weren't they supposed to freeze 6 months ago?

-uso.

Re:Took long enough _

[tpwch]

Debians policy is always that fixing problems takes priority over release schedules. They don't release a half-finished product. They'll wait years if its required to get things the way they want it.

Re:Took long enough _

[al3k]

Debian operates under the "It's done when it's done" philosphy. I usually just disregard deadlines when they mention them

Re:Took long enough _

[John Hasler]

Supposed by who?

Re:Took long enough _

[Timothy Brownawell]

http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090729

The Debian project has decided to adopt a new policy of time-based development freezes for future releases, on a two-year cycle. Freezes will from now on happen in the December of every odd year, which means that releases will from now on happen sometime in the first half of every even year. To that effect the next freeze will happen in December 2009, with a release expected in spring 2010.

Re:Took long enough _

[Anonymous Coward]

That would explain being behind schedule on going to stable. It doesn't explain being behind schedule for not adding new features. New features don't fix problems, they introduce problems.

Re:Took long enough _

[Anonymous Coward]

With the "it's done when it's done" philosophy I don't even know why they bother with a release schedule. They'll never hit it. Though I guess you need to set some sort of goal, even if you know you're going to miss it just so you have something to aim for otherwise a release may never happen and you'd end up with something akin to Duke Nukem Forever.

Re:Took long enough _

[pathological liar]

... and they do. Except the point of the freeze is to focus on fixing problems so they can push out a solid, stable release.

What's the point of slipping a freeze date? (There's mailing list traffic from a while ago now saying that they were pushing back the freeze, so yeah, they slipped -- even if it's just from an internal date.)

Re:Took long enough _

[petermgreen]

Well the first announced freeze date for squeeze was part of an unpopular plan to sync up with ubuntu by having a very short release cycle. That was abandoned pretty quickly (unfortunately after that)

Asside from that there afaict are a couple of reasons to delay the freeze.

A big reason is what are referred to as transitions. A transition is a group of package updates (usually a new major version of a library and the various updates and rebuilds associated with it) that need to move from unstable to testing at the same time to leave testing in a consistent state (unstable is allowed to be in an inconsistant state, testing isn't). The release planners will have a set of transitions that they really want to get in for a given release, transitions can easilly get held up by build failures and other rc bugs and they don't want to do too many at the same time because then they become intertangled leaving the release team with one big transition which is even harder to make migrate.

Also they want to pick a good time to freeze. Freezing the application level stuff while there are still big issues to fix in core package won't affect the release date much while it will mean releasing with older versions of the application level stuff (which is the stuff that is most visible to users and often the stuff that needs the most security updates).

Re:Took long enough _

[John Hasler]

> What's the point of slipping a freeze date?

To get the rc bug count down to a manageable level and to complete complex package transitions such as major library upgrades.

Re:Took long enough _

[human-cyborg]

And thus Sarge was born.

Re:Took long enough _

[petermgreen]

(unfortunately after that)
That should have said unfortunately after it had been announced publically.

Re:Took long enough _

[Randle_Revar]

Yeah, that was never really an official policy. It shouldn't have gone out in the newsletter, or at least not worded as something definite. It was an idea one group had, and they thought they had enough support to do it, but they didn't.

Re:Took long enough _

[julesh]

http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090729

        The Debian project has decided to adopt a new policy of time-based development freezes for future releases, on a two-year cycle. Freezes will from now on happen in the December of every odd year, which means that releases will from now on happen sometime in the first half of every even year. To that effect the next freeze will happen in December 2009, with a release expected in spring 2010.

And, on the mailing list the next day: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2009/07/msg00001.html

Based on feedback of the community on the plan to freeze in December
2009 and the ambituous Release Goals we set for ourselves, we are
revisiting the decision to freeze December 2009.

We'll be consulting all key teams within Debian to see how their plans
and schedules can fit into a new timeline. Before the end of August we
hope to have finished this process of consultation and be able to
present the new plan to you.

And, following that consultation: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2009/10/msg00002.html

Proposing a new freeze date is not easy. Taking into account all of
the feedback we have received, both online (by e-mail, IRC) as well as
in person, and some challenging release goals we have set for ourselves,
we propose freezing in March 2010.

So, yes, the release team did propose a December date. The proposal lasted about a day before being dismissed, and was replaced with one in March. Admittedly, this isn't far off the 6 months the OP suggested this was late by.

OTOH, I'd suggest they're still on track to be able to meet their primary original goal, releasing to stable on a two year cycle (i.e. squeeze to be released on or around 26 June 2012), so slipping a few months in the feature freeze for the release is hardly a major problem.

Squeeze frozen?

[Merrlon]

But it's really hard to squeeze stuff that's frozen...

Debian GNU/kFreeBSD

[John Hasler]

Note the bit about "Linux architectures." Squeeze will include GNU/kFreeBSD: Debian running on top of a FreeBSD kernel.

Re:Debian GNU/kFreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny that Debian was always my favorate Linux distribution upon returning from the FreeBSD world, and now I find the best of both worlds... combined.

Anyway I would probably prefer the reverse: uFreeBSD/Linux + ports. But porting the ports collection would be a major hindrance.

Re:Debian GNU/kFreeBSD

[onefriedrice]

Anyway I would probably prefer the reverse: uFreeBSD/Linux + ports. But porting the ports collection would be a major hindrance.

So what you're looking for is something like Gentoo. It doesn't have the BSD userland, but it does have Portage which is comparable to ports but with even better package management tools (in my opinion).

Re:Debian GNU/kFreeBSD

[phoenix_rizzen]

Which includes native support for ZFS, along with a zfs-utils package to go along with it.

Re:Debian GNU/kFreeBSD

[just_another_sean]

It doesn't have the BSD userland...

But that's what he wants!

Not just Linux...

[0100010001010011]

GNU/kFreeBSD was supposed to be released with Squeeze. Nexenta is nice, but the package repository is severely limited.

ZFS, Jails, OpenBSD packet filtering. Oh My!

Even DebianMultimedia project already has kFreeBSD repositories available.

Re:Not just Linux...

[ducomputergeek]

My big problem with this is that FreeBSD is an operating system, kernel + userland. If you are just using the Kernel and not the userland, don't call it FreeBSD. It's just like OSX isn't FreeBSD because it used the BSD userland with a mach kernel.

"Linux" is just a kernel. When combined with the GNU userland tools you end up with a complete OS typically known as "distros" such as Red Hat, SuSE, Ubuntu, etc., but it's quite possible to have Linux without the userland, i.e. many embedded uses of Linux.

In 12 years of using various *iux's, I've used 4 Linux distros(Red Hat, CentOS, SuSE, Debain), but only one FreeBSD OS (different versions since 2.2.7).

Re:Not just Linux...

[Randle_Revar]

>don't call it FreeBSD.

that's why its kFreeBSD (notice the "k")
anyway, what else would you call it?

Re:Not just Linux...

[afabbro]

My big problem with this is that FreeBSD is an operating system, kernel + userland. If you are just using the Kernel and not the userland, don't call it FreeBSD.

No, we should call it GNU/FreeBSD.

(ducks)

Re:Not just Linux...

[LordLimecat]

anyway, what else would you call it?

I'd like to interject for a moment...

Re:Not just Linux...

[Galactic Dominator]

That's probably a more apt title actually.

BTW, your sig is wrong. BSD is free as in speech, some would argue much more so than the GPL with me being one. Quite frankly, trying to simply paint BSD as only free as in beer is asinine. Now which OS was it that was the first campaigned against binary blobs? I'll give you hint, it has BSD in its name.

Re:Not just Linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

GnuBSD obviously...

Re:Not just Linux...

[micheas]

That's probably a more apt title actually.

BTW, your sig is wrong. BSD is free as in speech, some would argue much more so than the GPL with me being one. Quite frankly, trying to simply paint BSD as only free as in beer is asinine. Now which OS was it that was the first campaigned against binary blobs? I'll give you hint, it has BSD in its name.

That is especially silly considering the price UC charged for netBSD on tape. (ftp was free of course)

Re:Not just Linux...

[TheRaven64]

Hardly surprising about Debian Multimedia, as the FreeBSD kernel actually has a sound subsystem that doesn't suck (i.e. OSS 4 interfaces, in-kernel low-latency mixing, per-channel volume controls, and so on). It makes me chortle slightly whenever anyone mentions pain with PortAudio or whatever this week's sound daemon of choice is on Linux. When writing code to play sound on FreeBSD, I just open /dev/dsp[W] and write audio data there, maybe with a couple of ioctl()s to set the sample rate, volume, and number of channels. With Linux, I need to link in a 1MB+ library that provides a set of interfaces that are much more complicated than the kernel interfaces and then hope that they don't change next week.

Unfortunately for developers, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD uses GNU libc, rather than FreeBSD libc, so you get all of the fun of working with a libc written by someone who can't read the C standard (see unistd.h and its use of reserved identifiers for inline function parameters) and requires a huge mess of -D flags to compile POSIX / SUS code.

Re:Not just Linux...

[truedfx]

Unfortunately for developers, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD uses GNU libc, rather than FreeBSD libc, so you get all of the fun of working with a libc written by someone who can't read the C standard (see unistd.h and its use of reserved identifiers for inline function parameters)

Well duh! Of course libc uses reserved identifiers for those. If it used non-reserved identifiers, it would conflict with valid user code.

and requires a huge mess of -D flags to compile POSIX / SUS code.

It requires one or more of the macros that, according to POSIX / SUS, the code needs to define. If the code (for convenience I'll include the build system in "code") doesn't define those macros, but does make use of POSIX functions, that's already a bug in the code.

Re:Not just Linux...

[TheRaven64]

Well duh! Of course libc uses reserved identifiers for those. If it used non-reserved identifiers, it would conflict with valid user code.

Nope, sorry, not true. Parameter names never conflict with identifiers in any other scope. Identifiers beginning with an underscore are reserved for the 'implementation,' which can be interpreted as including the libc as well as the compiler, however the GNU C standard reserves ones starting with a double underscore for the compiler, yet unistd.h (and other headers in glibc) are littered with parameters starting with double underscores. In particular, the __block parameter name means that you have to do hacky work-arounds if you want to compile code using blocks on a GNU platform. Meanwhile, this code work out of the box with any other libc implementation.

It requires one or more of the macros that, according to POSIX / SUS, the code needs to define.

Which would be fine, except that the glibc man pages don't say which functions are from which standard, so you need to hunt around looking for every symbol. If a function comes from 4BSD but was later adopted by POSIX and SUS, what do you define? If you define the POSIX macro, then you may find that you've suddenly hidden a load of other things that were working correctly. There are some really fun cases where no combination of the public macros expose all of the features that you want and you need to define some of the glibc internal ones.

On other platforms, the macros work in a much more sane way. Everything the libc supports is exposed by default, but if you are writing portable code then you can define a specific set of standard macros and it will disallow anything not in those standards.

Re:Not just Linux...

[truedfx]

Nope, sorry, not true. Parameter names never conflict with identifiers in any other scope.

They conflict with macros. Users are allowed to define macros before including standard library headers, and often do. I'm not familiar with GNU C coding standards, so you may have a point that __len should be _Len according to that, but as far as the C standard and POSIX care, either is fine.

Which would be fine, except that the glibc man pages don't say which functions are from which standard,

glibc doesn't include man pages, so firstly, your complaint isn't with glibc, and secondly, the ones on my system, as provided by man-pages, do. For example, from `man send`:

CONFORMING TO
4.4BSD, SVr4, POSIX.1-2001. These function calls appeared in 4.2BSD.
POSIX.1-2001 only describes the MSG_OOB and MSG_EOR flags. The MSG_CONFIRM flag is a Linux extension.

If a function comes from 4BSD but was later adopted by POSIX and SUS, what do you define?

If you're writing in the POSIX subset of glibc, you define the POSIX macro.

If you define the POSIX macro, then you may find that you've suddenly hidden a load of other things that were working correctly.

So you're not limiting yourself to POSIX anyway, and the problem isn't glibc's POSIX support, it's how to combine POSIX with glibc extensions.

There are some really fun cases where no combination of the public macros expose all of the features that you want and you need to define some of the glibc internal ones.

_GNU_SOURCE should make everything from glibc available. What are you using that isn't exposed by this macro?

Re:Not just Linux...

[massysett]

Unfortunately for developers, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD uses GNU libc, rather than FreeBSD libc,

Last I heard Debian was going to switch to eglibc, which of course still isn't FreeBSD's libc. I don't know what the status of that is though.

Re:Not just Linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, about debian-multimedia, I believe you should read the talk about why using alternative repository for the Multimedia packages sux.

Re:Not just Linux...

[Randle_Revar]

That sounds like a BSDish kernel made by Gnu

Re:Not just Linux...

[Randle_Revar]

GNU plus Linux

Debian?

[timeOday]

That's, like, Ubuntu for poor people, right?

Just kidding. I like debian but switched to Ubuntu years ago seeking more up-to-date packages. But I find all the config files etc in Ubuntu a little hard to work with (providing simplicity for the user makes things more complex behind the scenes, which isn't good if you like to fiddle around behind the scenes). Is debian any more up-to-date these days?

Re:Debian?

[John Hasler]

> Is debian any more up-to-date these days?

Since Ubuntu is derived from Debian, Debian necessarily has always been more "up-to-date" than Ubuntu.

Re:Debian?

[tpwch]

Compared to a few years ago, yes, debian is a lot more up to date. I'd recommend running testing, or unstable if you know what you're doing. Stable doesn't get updated after release except for critical fixes like security updates (which is the way its supposed to be, so you can throw it on a server and not have to worry about a future update breaking things), but debians testing and unstable quality is higher than the stable of most distros.

Re:Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't used either in years, but when I did use Debian experimental, there were still many missing/unupdated packages in Debian that Ubuntu already had. But this is to be expected - most of the packages were stuff only a KDE/Gnome user would care about - and it usually wasn't that far behind.

Re:Debian?

[orange47]

well there is a reason its called Stable. i have had a lot of problems with Testing so don't use it at work or similar.
my problem with latest update on Testing is amarok not working (in gnome). bah

Re:Debian?

[tpwch]

Most of the time when ubuntu needs to update a package they first check if debian has an updated version, and most of the time it has. And if you compare the package count of the distros debians is higher. It happens, but is pretty rare, that ubuntu adds some package that debian doesn't have for some reason. You've probably come across a few of those. You shouldn't be running experimental. Things that gets put in experimental are things that are known to be very likely to break stuff. Its mean for debian developers and people who want to help test things and report bugs only. And even they don't install all of experimental, just the packages they want to test. Chances are you didn't run experimental unless you know a lot about how the package system works, as you have to specifically specify that you want stuff from experimental when you install or update a package, just adding it to the repos doesn't do it. Its pretty unlikely that you got a system working with no problems if you really did install all of experimental.

Re:Debian?

[tpwch]

Well, report the bug then. =)

I've run unstable for years without any major problems. But then I know how to fix problems I encounter, and I don't run gnome or kde =P

Re:Debian?

[iYk6]

Is debian any more up-to-date these days?

I use and prefer Debian Stable, but if you place a high value on the latest packages, then Debian Stable is not for you, and never will be. I have used Debian Testing for a couple of years or so, and I have tried Ubuntu a few times, and from what I have seen, Debian Testing is slightly more up to date and more stable than Ubuntu. I agree that Debian is easier to configure.

Re:Debian?

[petermgreen]

While ubuntu is derived from debian that doesn't stop them from packaging newer stuff than in debian. The big name stuff is often newer in ubuntu's development versions than in sid. More obscure stuff will generally be either at the same versions or newer in sid than in ubuntus development version.

Debian and ubuntu have very different release cycles. Ubuntu makes a release every 6 months and releases are prepared one at a time. This fast turnaround means more up to date software at relase time but also means little time for things to settle and bugs to get rooted out. Ubuntu won't delay a release unless there is a cripping issue with a package they consider particulally important.

Debian's release cycles on the other hand are generally on the order of two years these days and they tend to spend a large amount of time at the end of that release letting things stabilise and working on the bug count.

Things got particularlly bad a few years back. The sarge development cycle was debians longest ever and it came at a time when linux in general was improving a lot for the desktop but it still gets annoying near the end of a cycle.

Re:Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its pretty unlikely that you got a system working with no problems if you really did install all of experimental.

Yes, the system was installed as unstable, and everything desktop related was experimental. This used to be the only effective way to get a working KDE4.0 install running on Debian. Ubuntu had much better desktop support all around, and openSUSE was leagues ahead of Debian for KDE. But that was a long time ago.

Re:Debian?

[swillden]

Is debian any more up-to-date these days?

Debian is always as up-to-date as you want it to be. It's just a question of which version you run.

Debian "stable" goes in cycles. Shortly after a release, it's fairly up to date. As time goes on, working towards the next release, packages get a little dated because they are intentionally not updated. Security and bug fixes are applied but no upgrades or new features -- this is why they call it "stable", because it doesn't change.

Debian "testing" is a less cyclical and tends to stay fairly up to date all the time. The exception is during a freeze, like the one we just started. Since the current testing is being morphed into a new stable, it has just stopped receiving updates, and won't start again until the new stable version is released.

Debian "unstable" is always quite up to date. All new features and packages are introduced in unstable first. Don't let the name confuse you -- it's about as reliable as most distributions' released versions. It's "unstable" in the sense that it gets constant updates, which means that things are always changing. Every once in a blue moon, a change will actually seriously break something for a day or so. Maybe once every 3-4 years in my experience.

Debian "experimental" is more of a layer on top of "unstable", and it is what it sounds like: experimental. The Bleeding Edge.

In addition to those versions, you can mix-n-match a bit by running stable plus backports. That allows you to keep a very stable, consistent base platform, and just pull in newer versions of particular packages, as needed.

I switched from Debian to Ubuntu three years ago, but I'm very seriously considering switching back. My theory was that Ubuntu LTS releases were roughly equivalent to Debian stable, and that regular Ubuntu was somewhere between testing and unstable. The second half of that works out sort of okay, but using Ubuntu LTS as an alternative to Debian stable is a bad choice. The upgrade path from one LTS release to the next is horribly painful, because you have to upgrade to each intermediate release. And, in practice, I find the every-six-months big-bang upgrades more intrusive and problematic than the continual, incremental upgrades on Debian testing or unstable.

All in all, after giving Ubuntu a good try, I think I'm going back to Debian stable on my server, Debian stable+backports on my laptop and Debian unstable on my desktop.

Re:Debian?

[petermgreen]

Most of the time when ubuntu needs to update a package they first check if debian has an updated version, and most of the time it has.
That's probablly true for the more minor stuff but the big name stuff like glibc, gnome, kde etc is often newer in ubuntu's development version than in debian unstable and sometimes newer than even experimental.

as you have to specifically specify that you want stuff from experimental when you install or update a package
You can pin the whole of experimental at the same level as unstable and therefore cause apt to install stuff from it automatically (you can even pin it higher but thats a bad idea because often older versions get left in experimental after unstable is updated). I've done it in a chroot but never tried it on an independent system.

Re:Debian?

[Tubal-Cain]

Well, in unstable, Firefox^WIceweasel is on 3.5.11. 3.6.x is in experimental. The 4.0 betas aren't on the radar yet.

Re:Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

I once slashed my wrists while trying to learn dpkg on Potato.

Re:Debian?

[Tubal-Cain]

XP leaves it up to you and the third party updaters to keep your software current.

Re:Debian?

[Tubal-Cain]

The man pages are a much more effective resource.

Re:Debian?

[ffreeloader]

I haven't used either in years, but when I did use Debian experimental,

Ummmm.... You used a Debian release designed for Debian devs to use for integrating packages into Sid, and then complain that it was incomplete?

Just for your information, Ubuntu takes a snapshot of Sid(unstable) and works on it for 6 months before it's released. During that 6 months Debian is adding new packages and new package versions to Sid on a regular basis. Packages move from Sid to testing after 10 days unless there are severe problems found during that 10 day period. This means both Sid and testing have never versions of software packages than an Ubuntu release will have when it's released.

Most Debian users will run either testing or Sid on their desktops and thus will have newer software versions than an Ubuntu user will have. And, they will continue to have newer/updated versions of software installed during every update. Debian stable (what Squeeze will be when it is officially released) is used mostly for server installs because of its package stability.

Re:Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never had this kind of experience running Windows XP over the same period of time

How many testing versions of Windows XP did you install over the same period of time?

Re:Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

Slackware.

Re:Debian?

[Sam36]

You have it the other way around. Debian is ahead of ubuntu. You are probably referring to debian-stable, which is mainly for servers. I have been using debian-testing for about 4 years now. I have never had to do any kind of update cycle/reinstall. It is always up to date. http://christi.ath.cx/ubuntu_vs_debian.html

Re:Debian?

[mat128]

Try running Microsoft's equivalent to it -- oh no wait, you can't.

As a side note, you probably learned with your experience of things breaking, with windows you probably learned how to fix some problems using GUIs, third party apps and limited logging capability.

Re:Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

Over the years running Debian testing, I've had X break, I've had email break, I've had DNS taking 5 seconds on every call, and I've had Java networking break. I've never had this kind of experience running Windows XP over the same period of time.

Over the years running Windows, I've had virii, I've had malware, I've had BSODs, I've had DRM issues, and I've had thousand more problems I won't enumerate here. I've never had this kind of experience running Linux over the same period of time.

Re:Debian?

[radish]

The upgrade path from one LTS release to the next is horribly painful, because you have to upgrade to each intermediate release.

That's only true for non-LTS releases. You can go from one LTS to the next and skip the intermediate releases.

Re:Debian?

[mat128]

I switched from Debian to Ubuntu three years ago, but I'm very seriously considering switching back. My theory was that Ubuntu LTS releases were roughly equivalent to Debian stable, and that regular Ubuntu was somewhere between testing and unstable. The second half of that works out sort of okay, but using Ubuntu LTS as an alternative to Debian stable is a bad choice. The upgrade path from one LTS release to the next is horribly painful, because you have to upgrade to each intermediate release. And, in practice, I find the every-six-months big-bang upgrades more intrusive and problematic than the continual, incremental upgrades on Debian testing or unstable.

Not anymore, you can directly upgrade from LTS to LTS.

Re:Debian?

[Raenex]

The equivalent of X, networking, and email are built-in to Windows and security updates are provided automatically. Drivers are provided by 3rd parties, but Windows offers me options to get updates for those too.

Re:Debian?

[Raenex]

None, but back when I ran Debian stable it was way too out of date to be useful. With Windows, most software comes with packaged installers and works with the stable version. With Debian, the choice was to either run old software, build it myself, or run testing.

Re:Debian?

[petermgreen]

With windows apps are still supporting XP and often even 2K and 9x. Hardware vendors are also still providing drivers for XP as long as you buy machines from thier buisness ranges. This along with microsoft's security update policies means that you can run the same version of windows for a long time (several PCs worth of time) while updating application software as desired.

With linux on the other hand if you want to upgrade your application software you pretty much have to either.

1: upgrade to the latest stable release (which may well not get on with your hardware in which case you are SOL) and hope someone has made a baackport (sometimes they will more often they won't). Even if you don't want new software you have to upgrade every couple of years (at least on the non-enterprise distros) to keep getting security updates.
2: run a testing release (what most debian desktop users resort to doing), more chance of breakage but also more chance of getting it fixed before it gets frozen in stable for the next couple of years.
3: try and build the software from source which is sometimes easy but frequently frought with problems.

Re:Debian?

[timeOday]

Yeah, IIRC I got frustrated with Woody and went to Unstable before Sarge made it across the finish line. It also seemed like debian did not have any reasonable support for proprietary software (NVIDIA drivers, vmware... even mp3 files IIRC). dpkg on my Unstable system got hopelessly confused and the install was trashed.

I switched to gentoo since it had a lot of momentum (critical in staying both up-to-date and stable - lots of eyeballs and fingers at keyboards) and thinking local compilation would provide more flexibility to mix & match versions of everything, so I could update packages more selectively. But not really; basically you can install whatever you want but that doesn't mean it will work. In the end even firefox wouldn't run (though it built just fine!)

I just updated another system from Ubuntu 8.04 to 10.04 (which requires a brief stop at 9.04) and happily the system survived. Most of my customized config files don't work on my new software versions. That's life, but I sure get sick of reconfiguring exim.

Re:Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

The equivalent of X, networking, and email are built-in to Windows and security updates are provided automatically. Drivers are provided by 3rd parties, but Windows offers me options to get updates for those too.

So basically, you're comparing Debian testing to XP.

You're a trollish little cunt, aren't ya?

Re:Debian?

[swillden]

I tried that. Even with the --proposed switch, it still only offered me the step-by-step upgrade path. I thought about just editing my sources.list and going for it, but chickened out.

Re:Debian?

[Raenex]

And you're too stupid to read the rest of the thread. Good thing you posted as Anonymous Coward.

Re:Debian?

[tpwch]

Must have been quite a while ago then. I don't remember kde 4.0 ever being in unstable, the debian kde devs maintained a separate repository with the kde 4 packages before they got added to unstable:

http://qt-kde.debian.net/

Re:Debian?

[icebraining]

You didn't spend much time searching, have you?

You are running Debian stable, because you prefer the stable Debian tree. It runs great, there is just one problem: the software is a little bit outdated compared to other distributions. That is where backports come in.

Backports are recompiled packages from testing (mostly) and unstable (in a few cases only, e.g. security updates), so they will run without new libraries (wherever it is possible) on a stable Debian distribution. I recommend you to pick out single backports which fits your needs, and not to use all backports available here.

http://backports.org/

Re:Debian?

[hairyfeet]

If you are talking about APT, there is either Filehippo Update Checker, or Securina...take your pick. Both will keep all the third party stuff up to date, and Windows update takes care of the rest.

Since others have posted their linux rants, and I have more karma than I know what to do with, and hopefully some Linux devs might actually read this, here goes...WTF is it with you guys and the God damned CLI? Huh? It is fricking 2010 already! On a server, yes I'm all for it, use it myself, great for scripting or squeezing that last bit of performance, but on a desktop? It sucks ass! my 67 year old father installed windows 7 all by himself, and a PC genius he ain't. All he had to do was answer THREE basic questions, and Windows found ALL the drivers for his hardware, and even gave him a popup on first boot that told him he needed an AV and pointed him to a page with free options. When I got there all I had to do was go to Ninite.com and install Firefox and Flash. TADA! All done!

Let us compare to my last Linux installation, shall we? First a bunch of questions about partitions that an average user would have fucked up royally, finally get to the desktop and...WTF!!! NO Sound, my Wireless don't even exist according to it, and my screeen resolution is fucked and the GUI for some reason won't stick. Is there an easy button to search for drivers with a GUI, like there has been since XP with windows? NO!!! I have to go trawl through forums (first fail, no normal user will do this) hunt for fixes where I have to know EXACTLY what hardware I have (second fail-normal users don't have a clue about hardware revs) and then get this pile of CLI gibberish where I have to "tweak it" becuase it was written for hardware Foo rev a and I have Foo+1 Rev f (third fail and you're out- normal users would have better luck winning the lotto than pulling this off) and then pray to the Linux gods all this shit worked, which BTW it didn't on the wireless, so I FINALLY get it all done and it says there are updates...okay, no biggie, I update Windows all the time, so I let them download and install and...WTF AGAIN! It broke my fricking sound and video AGAIN!!!

Honestly folks this is bug fucking nuts, and why I won't put Linux machines on the shelves at my shop. You have to be a serious masochist to deal with Linux on a desktop. Is it REALLY so much to ask to have a simple GUI for when drivers are missing/don't work? Or to have a stable driver level ABI so every update don't cause the whole damned thing to fall down like a house of cards? I know Linus don't like ABIs, but frankly I've read his arguments and they boil down to "I don't like them so piss off" which is a pretty lousy argument for something that could fix the driver clusterfuck. I mean what company is gonna want to support you VS Windows, when they can write ONE driver for Windows and be good for a decade, or write for you and keep guys rewriting the driver to fix it over AND over AND over again!

So as I retailer I WANT to sell your product, I really do. The better security and lower price would be good for me and my customers. But right now Linux is a bug fucking mess on a desktop: No easy way to tell what works hardware wise and what don't, updates breaking shit left and right, no easy non CLI way to fix it when it does break, which means more returns and more costs for me. I'm sorry but at $35 an hour it only takes 3 hours to equal a copy of Windows Home, and as I found out running 4 machines with bog standard hardware and Linux Linux can blow through 3 hours like shit through a goose. Nobody in consumer land gives a shit about "free as in freedom" and as far as they are concerned Windows is free too (since it is a hidden cost) so the "free as in beer" don't work either. All they care about is "is it easy, is it fast, does it work"? And right now IMHO unless you are a CS grad or have infinite time on your hands Linux on the desktop don't. Server is a COMPLETELY different kettle of fish, so please don't reply with server successes, because we are talking consume

Re:Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks very much for this post! I've been happily running Debian stable for a year or so (actually about 4 if we're counting non-desktops), but I've never really understood the demarcation between the upper versions (unstable vs testing vs experimental). Though I'd like to add that you can use apt-pinning to use less stable versions alongside more stable versions (and apt-get -t target-version install packagename to force a different version). It does tend to result in a lot of errors with dpkg/apt (library/version conflicts), but only for attempts to install packages which aren't anyway in stable - that is, you're essentially running stable proper *plus* whichever goodies from the others deign to work with installed stable libraries.

Re:Debian?

[KwKSilver]

Use sid. First install sqeeeze, then add the sid (unstable ) repositories, # apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade. Have fun. Don't bother whining to sid developers if you break your system. You could also try Sidux, based largely on Sid with such testing as is necessary. Don't use anything but apt-get to install packages or dist-upgrade; Sidux doesn't support any other package management system. Oh and you should be in init 3 to dist-upgrade. Works well. Sis is sid though, and sometimes things break ... just like in *buntu.

Re:Debian?

[swillden]

Rather than using apt-pinning to pull packages from testing/unstable into stable, I'd suggest using it to pull packages from the backports repositories. That way you'll get newer software that's built against the stable versions of the supporting libraries.

Re:Debian?

[Trepidity]

Don't let the name confuse you -- it's about as reliable as most distributions' released versions. It's "unstable" in the sense that it gets constant updates, which means that things are always changing. Every once in a blue moon, a change will actually seriously break something for a day or so. Maybe once every 3-4 years in my experience.

While I agree with this, and run unstable myself (for the past 8 years or so), running it does require some degree of technical savvy when it comes to dependency resolution. Aptitude often gets things right, but it often doesn't, and you then have to figure out why trying to upgrade a package resulted in aptitude suggesting you uninstall 93 packages and page through the solution candidates. And sometimes you need to recognize when you should just cancel a particular upgrade, because it depends on packages not yet uploaded (sometimes dependent updates don't get uploaded at exactly the same time, especially if staging from experimental). It's not difficult per se, but I wouldn't recommend it to the average desktop user, since you lose a good deal of the "it just works" niceness of apt package management.

Re:Debian?

[sjames]

Well, yeah, that's why they call it testing rather than stable. Of course there's NEVER EVER been a bad update on XP that breaks zillions of systems...

Re:Debian?

[udippel]

Let us compare to my last Linux installation, shall we? First a bunch of questions about partitions that an average user would have fucked up royally, finally get to the desktop and...WTF!!! NO Sound, my Wireless don't even exist according to it, and my screeen resolution is fucked and the GUI for some reason won't stick.

Since you didn't post as AC - I would have known you're a troll -
1. Which year was that?
2. Which Linux distribution?
3. Which hardware?

Come on, you can't possibly dodge this question.

Re:Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since others have posted their linux rants, and I have more karma than I know what to do with, and hopefully some Linux devs might actually read this, here goes...

No offense, but that was not even remotely useful for any "Linux dev". I hope it made you feel better

Re:Debian?

[TheRaven64]

well there is a reason its called Stable

That is ships with packages containing known bugs, rather than the newer versions that fix them?

Re:Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian "experimental" is more of a layer on top of "unstable", and it is what it sounds like: experimental. The Bleeding Edge.

Actually experimental is just an archive of random packages that are being tested. It is not supposed to be a "real" distribution that you can install and run.

Re:Debian?

[andersa]

Debian "unstable" is always quite up to date. All new features and packages are introduced in unstable first. Don't let the name confuse you -- it's about as reliable as most distributions' released versions. It's "unstable" in the sense that it gets constant updates, which means that things are always changing. Every once in a blue moon, a change will actually seriously break something for a day or so. Maybe once every 3-4 years in my experience.

I think that is painting a bit too pretty a picture of it. It definitely breaks more often than that. Count on having problems whenever the build system or the core set of libraries are updated, or whenever a larger set of software packages are updated like KDE. In these cases you seriously need to know what you are doing or you will end up in a situation where your packages get caught it a dependency deadlock. Your old packages have been uninstalled and the new ones won't install because of some missing package.

This happens often enough in my experience for me to not recommend running unstable unless you know what you are doing and are prepared to look under the hood when the emergency eventually arises, because it will.

Re:Debian?

[Raenex]

And how many packages are available, and how frequently are they updated, compared to testing? I just did a search for my video card driver and it wasn't in there.

Re:Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian is always as up-to-date as you want it to be. It's just a question of which version you run.

Not when it comes to the Linux kernel. You have to roll you own if you want to be remotely update and secure.

Re:Debian?

[tpwch]

Whoops, I meant experimental, not unstable.

Re:Debian?

[hairyfeet]

NOT an AC (I fucking hate ACs, and consider them the cancer that is killing /.) and NOT a troll (just an EXTREMELY frustrated retailer who owns a little shop) so I will be happy to answer any questions you have...Which Distro? Ubuntu from 6-9.04, which BTW IMHO Ubuntu actually started going from bad to worse around 7. Sorry I can't give the exact .whatever, but I'm lousy remembering the .whatevers. As for the hardware? THAT is what really helped to piss me off, as we are talking about the most bog standard shit you see on ANY machine, we aren't talking some funky ass Chinese cap cards here. Here is the complete list if you are truly interested-

3 desktops and 1 laptop were used for me to decide if Linux would be worth carrying as an alternative OS in the shop. Since I know everyone can have a bad one (Just look at Vista...eeek!) I stuck with it from 6-9.04 hoping it would get better It did NOT. List as follows, and sorry I can't give exact hardware revs but these machines have since been sold and therefor I am having to work on memory here-2 AMD and 2 Intel CPUs, Sound was three Realtek (mix of AC97 and the new HD chip) and one Sigma (laptop), Video was two ATI (Radeon x1950, Radeon HD2 something onboard, one Nvidia (either a 5200 or 6200, low end desktop chip) and one Intel (965 I think, it was 9 something, shitty Intel onboard), network was two Realtek, one SiS, and one Intel, and wireless was a Broadcom but damned if I can remember the number of that chip.

I had various levels of trouble, from "GUI doesn't stick after reboot" to WTF! It don't work, on the following-Realtek, Sigma, SiS, ATI, Nvidia seemed to get borked and needed redo every update or two, trying to keep all 4 running I didn't bother writing a checklist of what failed on which (my bad) and the ONLY one that was able to run consistently was one I didn't even count in my test, because it was a circa 1999 P3 that frankly I couldn't give away. WTF? So there you have it. The most serious WTFs was sound, various degrees of network fuckups, video resoultion problems and the OS deciding to run the onboard and not the card, and of course wireless. I ran my tests with the mindset of "Can my average customer do this WITHOUT me having to deal with it?" and the answer was a giant NO they could not. This of course doesn't even bring into discussion the "How in the fuck am I supposed to shop for peripherals?" problem because most hardware compatibility lists I found were so old as to be useless since the parts described were no longer sold in Walmart. And before you trot out "But why don't you bundle?" dead horse, unless your last name is Dell and you are getting kickback that is the way to ruin. Nobody gives a shit about economies of scale, they want to know why the printer on sale for $40 at walmart will cost them $78 from you. There you go, enjoy.

Re:Debian?

[swillden]

I used Debian unstable as my primary platform from 2000 through 2007. What I described was my experience with it.

Re:Debian?

[udippel]

Now that interests me. Seriously. I'd even fork out some sen to actually see all this misery, but I'm close to the equator, UTC+8, and chances are that your shop is just too far away. Because I believe you, though I don't believe that I'd encounter the same problems. I'm really curious.
You see, I've been doing such things (installes) rather regular, and I actually did hear about what you described, a number of times. Though, when I was just sitting next to those having all the problems, it turned out, that the larger part (surely not all, beware), disappeared into vapor. A good number thereof simply induced by trying to imitate the windows install process just too closely.
If I ask you to sponsor my trip - possibly half around the globe - you'd call me crazy, deservedly. If I invite you with all your stuff here, likewise. Though I am convinced, you could offer some extra value to your customers, plus enter a niche market, by offering Linux (Ubuntu) to your customers, as choice of OS.
There must be someone closer to you, to look at your predicaments for a day or two, until the installs run as smoothly on your hardware as they are supposed to.

Re:Debian?

[ArsonSmith]

I ran Debian unstable for about 8 years with few problems, testing actually seems to have more problems then unstable does. I think it's the point where they try to force desired features with existing code, whereas unstable is just getting existing code to work with existing core. You do have to follow the planned updates though and watch for major changes and avoid them for a month or two.

Re:Debian?

[ArsonSmith]

Debian's definition of stable isn't as much "Doesn't crash" as much as "Doesn't change"

It is stable because if you install it and patch update it will be nearly exactly the same environment throughout it's entire life cycle.

So if you tell the Debain community, "It crashes when I do this." They'll say, "Don't do that." And maintain that functionality, or lack there of, until the next release.

Re:Debian?

[hairyfeet]

I found that Linux just ain't worth the trouble dude. Now if it works for you I'm happy, I really am. In school I ran a laptop with Xandros Business which purred like a kitten, but that costs as much as XP and is therefor pointless for the average consumer desktop. With Windows Defender and Comodo AV frankly once a PC leaves my door the only time it comes back is for hardware upgrades, and that is the way I like it. Consumers do NOT buy support contracts, so anything that goes wrong that first 90 days other than PEBKAC is YOUR problem.

In the end I think it comes down to $$$$$, I really do. Both MSFT and Apple spend serious $$$ on focus groups and R&D to make sure that the user has everything "just work" and nobody really spends squat on Linux desktop. Sure money is spent, but you look at the money trail it is coming from server companies FOR server enhancements, not desktop. I truly hoped that Canonical would do for Linux what Apple did with NeXT, but as we see with them investing more and more in server I truly believe they have realized desktop Linux is a turkey and a money pit and will abandon it to the community in 3 years, mark my words.

So I'm glad it worked for you, but for me and my customers it just turned into a nightmare from hell. Too many hoops, too many "fixes", too many hours wasted trying to get shit to work, and as I said it only takes 1 minute over 3 hours to be more expensive to me than a Windows Home license. In retail money is time and time is money, and Linux just uses too much time. Sorry.

Re:Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want an always up-to-date Debian, you are looking at either SID (it's released 3 times a day), or more probably at CUT (Constantly Usable Testing) which is a new project of having usable snapshots of Debian testing. Now, if you are running Ubuntu, more than 75% of it is made of Debian packages, so your "joke" isn't so funny: you shall respect DDs (Debian Developers) that are doing all the work so you can actually run Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is NOT a fork of Debian, it's a BRANCH, and we are working together. Only users are having flame wars, us DDs aren't that silly, Mark Shuttleworth even had a talk at the Debconf 10.

Re:Debian?

[Nimey]

Oh yeah. Before Woody finally got released after a couple years, Potato had been stuck with Mozilla Milestone 18 for an age, and everything else was pretty old as well. I'd been on Unstable for a while because I wanted the latest-and-greatest, but then a broken version of lilo got uploaded and I rebooted before a fix was issued - think I ended up reinstalling Potato then upgrading to Testing.

After that I was on Testing for my desktop PC until right after Sarge came out, whereupon I switched to Ubuntu anyway.

Re:Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

As a side note, you probably learned with your experience of things breaking, with windows you probably learned how to fix some problems using GUIs, third party apps and limited logging capability.

As a side note I run the compatability shim in Windows 7 when an app is broken and 90% of the time Windows will determine the correct configuration to run the application perfectly. We don't all have endless amounts of time to stare at lengthy logs and config files. Yeah I didn't learn how to compile anything at the end of the day but that's ok for me.

Re:Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or he could spend the 30 minutes to install Windows and let Windows Update get his wireless and sound working for him without needing a day or two and a close friend to "smooth over" the install.

I too have installed Ubuntu on enough laptops to have seen the same issues he described a few times at least, I don't know how you couldn't have seen any of them before. Maybe you just have more standard hardware down by the equator and Ubuntu works all out of the box. But I'm pretty far north of you and I can tell you that it's frusterating as fuck when Ubuntu doesn't even show a yellow question mark to indicate that your wireless card isn't working. You run three different tools and none of them gives you a straight answer as to weather or not it works and where it's broken.

The reality is that no consumers ever ask for Linux. They only know XP, Mac and Windows 7. Providing it to the consumer is as useful and interesting to them as a copy of FreeDOS. They want to run Office whatever, Facebook and e-mail, maybe some games. But they don't want to screw around with WINE or the command line or anything beyone an install wizard. If Windows is too mych they get a Mac. End of story.

Re:Debian?

[Artemis3]

In my experience when Debian releases a "Stable", its usually 2 years behind. "Testing" is usually 1 year behind, and unstable much closer to update, but often breaks. Ubuntu is usually just 6 months behind, with much less breakage than "Unstable", albeit a bit higher than "Stable". Ubuntu is really a snapshop of unstable at a given point, but Canonical makes it stable enough for release in months.

Ubuntu server LTS has nothing to envy from Debian Stable for servers; and in fact you can have a more updated and more solid server with Ubuntu Server than Debian testing/unstable, which seems to be in a permanent moving platform. Of course, Debian takes much much more time to test stuff, and the results (in "stable") usually pays, but its not perfect either, Example case: With Debian Etch, there is a stupid bug where if a machine loses power, grub becomes stuffed with a "savedefault" option which prevents booting...

With Debian, you usually wait 3 years between updates, vs 2 for Ubuntu LTS or 6 months for regular Ubuntu. Also, all the odd architectures supported by Debian makes it perhaps one of the best options there.

Also, you might want to know that you can update from LTS to LTS now, at last starting with 8.04: Network Upgrade for Ubuntu Servers

Freebsd has a different system, when they do a major version upgrade (called current), is not really expected to be "stable", until .2 or so. But in the meantime, you can be very up to date via the ports system (and benefit from a custom compile); or stick to the supported binaries, which seem to be about 1 year behind. Your choice.

Re:Debian?

[Artemis3]

Except the stuff Canonical puts in, such as Firefox, and the myriad of PPAs (Personal automated repositories) at launchpad which covers almost every software project. So you can choose which app to be really update and leave the rest of the system alone; and of course, old fashioned third party repositories and the odd precompiled package on web sites.

Re:Debian?

[orange47]

.. they might fix the old bugs but deliver 'new super bugs' that give real problems. I had only minor issues with stable. The real problem with it is that some functions are missing. You have to wait long time to get them. For example, it sticks with old version of openoffice so you cant open docx, or it had old K3B and you couldn't burn multisession.. etc

Re:Debian?

[Lord of Hyphens]

Yeah, I use Debian stable for its package stability in a lab environment. I liked Debian because it tried to do less than Ubuntu (which is good when you need to set up custom gear and know how it's done), and uses apt. I use FreeBSD on my home server because I like ZFS and the Ports collection and can't stand (Open)Solaris. I've grown to dislike Solaris for anything that requires extra software installs/compiles. ZFS is still a wonderous and "magic" filesystem, though.

Honestly, my experiences with Ubuntu lead me to liken it to Solaris 10 (from an admin's perspective) - so much work is spent on getting everything to work out of the box that when you have something you need to change, there's two stages of learning: how to configure it normally, and where the OS puts random crap. Getting LDAP authentication to work is taking a lot longer than it should be because I have to test configs against Solaris 10 (for our supply of UltraSparc workstations).

Re:Debian?

[Eunuchswear]

Use sid. First install sqeeeze, then add the sid (unstable ) repositories, # apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade. Have fun. Don't bother whining to sid developers if you break your system.

WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!

If you have problems with sid MAKE A FUCKING BUG REPORT!!!!!@#@#$$$!

That's what it's for.

That depends

[Anonymous Coward]

It kind of depends on which part of the male anatomy we're talking about

Re:That depends

[nacturation]

It kind of depends on which part of the male anatomy we're talking about

Are we discussing the testicicles?

Re:Dear God Why???

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this some type of reverse-GPL trolling? I keep seeing it appear on Slashdot. It seems like someone is angry at the BSD crowd, so they make up a bunch of insulting pro-BSD posts to make BSD developers everywhere seem stupid. Go away, please.

To the "unstable" user (badumtish), the freeze

[GeekDork]

means 6 months of retro computing.

I wish they'd just cut the bull and focus on unstable and testing.

Re:To the "unstable" user (badumtish), the freeze

[at_slashdot]

Why don't you use Ubuntu, that's what they focus on. Some people who like Debian bitch about Ubuntu that is this or that, but they should realize that Ubuntu is protecting Debian from people like you who want to make it less stable and more experimental.

Re:To the "unstable" user (badumtish), the freeze

[Anonymous Coward]

I think many people just want a distribution they can build from the ground up, without all the crap that ones like Ubuntu add, and Debian seems to fill that niche (more or less).

Re:To the "unstable" user (badumtish), the freeze

[RAMMS EIN]

``I wish they'd just cut the bull and focus on unstable and testing.''

You are free to wish that, but I fervently hope they won't do that. I love Debian stable: install it, configure it, and it will keep working for years. You get security updates, but no new versions and new configuration options that may break your working system, at least until the next version of stable is released. And then, Debian take great care to make the upgrade as painless and automatic as possible. If you want stuff to keep working reliably, Debian stable is one of the best options you have.

Re:To the "unstable" user (badumtish), the freeze

[Anonymous Coward]

You may prefer arch linux instead?

Re:To the "unstable" user (badumtish), the freeze

[Randle_Revar]

I don't. Although I do wish there was a way for unstable to keep moving without affecting testing during the freeze.

Re:To the "unstable" user (badumtish), the freeze

[couchslug]

"I wish they'd just cut the bull and focus on unstable and testing."

Why should they sacrifice QUALITY in order to do that, when you can just run Unstable, Testing, or another distro?

Re:To the "unstable" user (badumtish), the freeze

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu has too much moron insulation and it keeps piling up by the release.

Re:To the "unstable" user (badumtish), the freeze

[myowntrueself]

You get security updates, but no new versions and new configuration options that may break your working system

and any bugs that do make it into Debian 'stable' will remain unfixed no matter how bad they are unless they are security-related bugs.

Ie if the Debian package maintainers miss something critical (and, no shit, they *DO*) then they sit on their arses and do NOTHING to fix in that release.

Ie When Debian release to stable with bugs you are stuck with those bugs until the next stable, and even then the bugs aren't necessarily fixed.

Re:To the "unstable" user (badumtish), the freeze

[micheas]

You get security updates, but no new versions and new configuration options that may break your working system

and any bugs that do make it into Debian 'stable' will remain unfixed no matter how bad they are unless they are security-related bugs.

Ie if the Debian package maintainers miss something critical (and, no shit, they *DO*) then they sit on their arses and do NOTHING to fix in that release.

Ie When Debian release to stable with bugs you are stuck with those bugs until the next stable, and even then the bugs aren't necessarily fixed.

Just like RHEL and SLED.

Re:To the "unstable" user (badumtish), the freeze

[Maulkin]

Sorry, but this just isn't right. Point releases happen regularly to fix the most important bugs.

Released with no RC bugs?

[gringer]

all work will now be concentrated on polishing Debian 'Squeeze' to achieve the quality Debian stable releases are known for.

Like being released with a positive number of "release-critical" bugs, and that count going up over time. My guess based on past Debian release history is that we'll be looking at around 100 RC bugs at release time (it's around 500 at the moment).

Frozen?

[Anonymous Coward]

Great!
Mister Witwicky, could you please make sure this one stays frozen?

2.6.32... Squeeze same kernel as 10.04 LTS....

[anon mouse-cow-aard]

Mr. Shuttleworth maniacally rubbing his hands together... All your stability are belong to us!

Re:2.6.32... Squeeze same kernel as 10.04 LTS....

[afabbro]

Mr. Shuttleworth maniacally rubbing his hands together... All your stability are belong to us!

I just hope we can explain it to the girls

Sounds like good news to me!

[FridayBob]

In mid June I set up my latest server based on Squeeze with the expectation that it would go stable this summer. For a while I thought perhaps I had jumped the gun and would be stuck with a relatively unstable system for a longer period, but I guess not.

In particular, I'm happy with Squeeze because I could use it to get my Kerberos-OpenLDAP-OpenAFS system working on both the file server and workstations. Not that I've ever use any FOSS other than Debian for my server, but after my attempts failed to get the latest Ubuntu client to run the necessary client software for this (unfortunately) uncommon, but very capable distributed file system, I suspected the same Debian version for the workstation represented my best chance of success. And sure enough: it worked straight away! Ubuntu may have certain benefits, but it seems that if you want a desktop system that is a little out of the ordinary, Debian is still your best bet.

Re:Fuck Linux

[by (1706743)]

Put a fork in it.

That's been available for, uh, quite some time.

Or, were you suggesting this instead? Afraid you've been beat to the punch in suggesting it...

Version numbering...

[by (1706743)]

Perhaps this is a duplicate post, but does anyone else find the version scheme for Debian (and Ubuntu) a little confusing? I use Debian on my laptop and encounter Ubuntu in my line of work; figuring out which version precedes/supersedes which is somewhat of a pain. Is there any a priori reason why Sarge is older or newer than Squeeze? What about a Koala vs. a Lynx?

Although the upgrade process itself was more difficult for, say, Slackware, figuring out when to upgrade was pretty easy -- "I'm running 10.0, and 10.1 just got released. I guess I can upgrade."

Re:Version numbering...

[Maulkin]

Well, these are just codenames, Squeeze will be 6.0

Re:Version numbering...

[Anonymous Coward]

Code names are stupid.

Re:Version numbering...

[radish]

Well for Ubuntu they're both numbered and named. The numbers are year.month (e.g. 9.10 is October 2009) and therefore go up in the expected manner. For the names, they're alphabetical (or at least have been for the last 5 years), so Intrepid came before Jaunty, which was followed by Karmic.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DevelopmentCodeNames

Re:Version numbering...

[Anonymous Coward]

ABCDE Feisty Gusty Hardy Intrepid Jaunty Karmic Lucid

Random adjective + animal.

Re:Version numbering...

[omglolbah]

Which is a hell of a lot easier to remember than version numbers! :D

Re:Version numbering...

[petermgreen]

Debian code names don't really have much structure to them other than all being toy story characters and it seems recently getting into the more obscure ones.

With the exception of some very early releases (horay and warty) ubuntu codenames have going in alphabetical order breezy->dapper->edgy->feisty->gutsy->hardy->intrepid->jaunty->karmic->lucid->maverick

Re:Version numbering...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an Arch user. What is this "version" concept?

Re:Version numbering...

[sjames]

It's a little different, but this page gives you an ordered list of releases. More generally though, if you see news about a new stable, it will be newer than the one you already installed :-)

If you hear that Squeeze is stable and you're running something that isn't Squeeze, it's time to think about upgrading.

Re:Version numbering...

[neonsignal]

Debian releases are so far apart that you get pretty used to the release name before the next one arrives...

Re:Version numbering...

[sydneyfong]

I do. I lose track of the releases when there's just one in every three years. I mean, I've used Woody for so long that Sarge always seems to be the new release code name......

But then, tell me why XP is older or newer than Vista? And why 2000 is older than 7?

As for figuring out when to upgrade... you'll know when to upgrade as you grow impatient as the world moves forward and yet you're still using antique versions of software from 3 years ago... Or, if you're perfectly happy to keep the old versions, you'll get another nudge when the Debian security team announces that they no longer support the older version.

Re:Version numbering...

[Cochonou]

That doesn't work for Warty Warthog and Hoary Hedgehog, though.

Re:Version numbering...

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the fucking title!

"Debian 6.0"

A fine boid.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad ya happy with the squeeze.

hda support?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does the freeze include hda support again? Less then a few months ago a kernel update in squeeze changed ide addressing from hda to sda. Bricking my debian boot sequence. I heard a newer kernel would support hda addressing again. Which linux kernel is this?

I know that powerpc is suffering from a lack of maintainers but why break it so hard in the last minute? Doesn't dropping hda addressing also break all the symlinks on all architectures? Why repeat the mistakes ubuntu made years ago, even though hda support is available again? Or did I do a update and upgrade squeeze on the wrong day and does squeeze already address ide hd drives as hda again?

Re:hda support?

[gringer]

Less then a few months ago a kernel update in squeeze changed ide addressing from hda to sda. Bricking my debian boot sequence.

The recommended route is using uuid now, for example in /etc/fstab:

UUID=3e036498-60fb-44a9-a3d1-205a3ffaeb7d swap swap defaults 0 0

or something like this in grub:

linux /vmlinuz-2.6.32-3-686 root=UUID=903040df-e1af-4c1e-86e3-c954a30ce948 ro

You can also change the udev rules (/etc/udev/rules.d/) to rewrite particular drives as whatever you want, but who knows how long udev rewriting will be around?

FWIW, my laptop is using sdXY naming for partitions, but I think it's always been like that based on the comments in my fstab.

Re:hda support?

[Anonymous Coward]

This wasn't a recent change, he had to have been running a seriously out of date kernel to still have hdx partitions, that was pretty much done and over with by 2008.

Re:Debian = Apple

[mat128]

apt-get remove users-like-you

My future is Debian...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using Ubuntu since 2005. It was a good system, but it has gone down hill tremendously in the past two years. From tuns of audio issues (thanks to having PulseAudio forced upon me), to unnecessary bloat (like the new notify-osd service and so many others), it isn't right for me anymore.

Debian Gnome uses about 128 Megs of ram. When you have old shit hardware that only accepts DDR1, this is a godsend. Just provide a stable, fairly minimalist system that I can install only what I want on. If I wanted someone else making choices that I strongly disagree with regarding the system, I would just use Windows.

Every time I hear some fanboy say "Only professionals need low-latency sound", I want to rip my own hair out and run down the block screaming like a madman. :)

Re:My future is Debian...

[icebraining]

I just use Alsa+dmix on Debian Unstable. Works great.

Re:My future is Debian...

[metamatic]

Two suggestions:

1. Try Kubuntu (no Pulseaudio crapulence or notify-osd service, lower memory usage).
2. Install OSS 4.

Re:My future is Debian...

[petrus4]

Have you ever tried FreeBSD? I'm not trying to be an overly pushy evangelist, here; if you like Debian, keep it by all means. If you've never evaluated FreeBSD before though, I'd invite you to do so. I much prefer its' audio system to Linux's myself, and ports is a much more capable package management system than virtually anything I've seen for Linux as well, although apt-get can be good too, as long as the individual package is maintained by someone sane.

Re:Debian = Apple

[McGiraf]

apt-get remove users-like-you --purge

Why don't distros have Rails-like test suites?

[beachdog]

I am puzzled why the distribution building process seems to require a lot of hand work to verify that applications and major subsystems work as expected after there are changes made to the lower level libraries and operating system?

I am familiar with printing and sound breaking on Ubuntu. Ubuntu shows more problems after an upgrade than Debian. For instance, I have two Ubuntu versions on two systems right now. The older distro has a working application gthumb and the newer one has the function import within gthumb broken.

So what puzzles me is why don't distributions have a test system, like Rails does?

Could you explain to me, what part in the distro building process doesn't respond to the simple test suite approach?

Re:Why don't distros have Rails-like test suites?

[petermgreen]

Some stuff does get testsuited at build time and rebuild tests are done at least once per release but desktop applications are difficult to testsuite unless they were designed for it from the start and hardware dependent stuff is also difficult to deal with in a test environment because you would need so damn much test hardware.

Also even when testsuites do reveal problems there is the question of what to do about them. Fixing the underlying problems often isn't easy, especially if upstream is uncooperative. Again this is an area where debians long freezes help, it gives time for bugs to be investigated and upstream to be liased with. Sometimes (especialy in ubuntu but sometimes in debian too) build time test suites get either disabled or get thier "expected failures" list changed because they consider a test failre with no known real world impact (or where the known real world impacts are considered minor) a lesser evil than a package stuck in an unbuildable state.

Re:sweet! Mod parent up

[Cochonou]

He actually read TFPDF that was linked in the modded-up post. For this achievement, he deserves the mod points !

Re:Debian = Apple

[myowntrueself]

If only it were as simple to do 'apt-get --purge remove debian'

PS3 Eye user

[Yvanhoe]

Just my 2 cents : if you are using PS3 Eye webcams to do computer vision (the only webcam I know of that can refresh at 120Hz for less than $40) , this is not a very good news as a there is a bug in their driver for this webcam that is only solved in 2.6.34. But well, you know how to compile drivers, right ? ;-)

Unless you're on "the spectrum"

[tepples]

it costs nothing to be polite.

Unless you were born with a brain miswiring that makes it substantially more difficult to pick up on subtleties. I have been professionally diagnosed with such a syndrome.

Re:Unless you're on "the spectrum"

[Nimey]

Well, you know, I'm that way myself. My body language was largely incompatible with the populace's, and much hilarity did (not) ensue.

It's still that way, just not as bad. Easier for me to communicate via time-delayed text than face-to-face - thank the Great Old Ones for the Internet, which is where I met my wife.

Re:Unless you're on "the spectrum"

[Eunuchswear]

So try harder. You'll probably end up better than the people for whom it comes 'naturally'.

Being human is about being artificial.

Squeeze frozen, as well as

[Lodewijk]

Everytime a new Debian version gets frozen, hell freezes over as well.