Debian 6.0 Released In GNU/Linux, FreeBSD Flavors

itwbennett writes "After two years of work, the Debian Project has announced the release of Debian 6.0. 'There are many goodies in Debian 6.0 GNU/Linux, not the least of which is the new completely free-as-in-freedom Linux kernel, which no longer contains firmware modules that Debian developers found troublesome,' says blogger Brian Proffitt. And in addition to Debian GNU/Linux, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is introduced as a technology preview. 'Debian GNU/kFreeBSD will port both a 32- and 64-bit PC version of the FreeBSD kernel into the Debian userspace, making them the first Debian release without a Linux kernel,' says Proffitt. 'The Debian Project is serious about the technology preview label, though: these FreeBSD-based versions will have limited advanced desktop features.' The release notes and installation manual have been posted, and installation images may be downloaded right now via bittorrent, jigdo, or HTTP."

Comments

to put it bluntly....

[Anonymous Coward]

FUCK YEAH!

Re:to put it bluntly....

[arivanov]

Fuck no

Does not hibernate on PowerMAC - I need to refile this one, the bloody BTS bounced it
Sound on powermac does not work
Wifi on cheap RTL based adapters does not work
Kernel throws kernel-level malloc failures on GigE if you get a fast enough card and no swap

Granted that is not as bad completely broken NFS which was the previous release, but still not where Debian used to be.

I am going to wait for R1 this time, no thanks

Re:to put it bluntly....

[Anonymous Coward]

America?

Re:to put it bluntly....

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you STO, bruvva?

All

[Anonymous Coward]

All hail the almighty Debian Overlords :)
BTW .... posting this on a fresh installed Debian 6 System .... it rocks :D

Re:All

[Hognoxious]

Huh? I'm still waiting for 5.0 to finish compiling!

Re:All

[furbearntrout]

Oh, I'm sorry; this is Debian. You seem to be looking for Gentoo. Two posts down, take a right. Can't miss it; listen for quad-cores thrashing.
~~~

Re:All

[Hognoxious]

I just knew I was doing something wrong!

NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[aaaaaaargh!]

I used to run NetBSD on an old PP Mac booted from a zip drive in the nineties. It was running great but since then I haven't looked at it again. I know that the 3 free BSDs (open-, free- and net-) are security audited and support old hardware very well. But I wonder what advantages the kernel itself brings. So my potentially stupid questionis:

What's the advantage of running Debian with a BSD kernel instead of linux?

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[aaaaaaargh!]

A well, FreeBSD kernel is what I've meant, of course...sorry!

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[Anonymous Coward]

ZFS and DTrace come to mind, but those are only the easy examples.

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[vlm]

What's the advantage of running Debian with a BSD kernel instead of linux?

If you want to make money, and don't want to contribute back to the free software economy, its easier with a BSD license than a GPL license. Other than that...

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[bk2204]

You can find some of the reasons here. Among them are ZFS, jails, and pf. I've used Debian GNU/kFreeBSD in the past and found pf significantly easier to use than iptables and tc.

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[snookiex]

They also point to a benchmark made in Phoronix. here is an excerpt from the conclusions:

Of the 27 tests that were carried out with our first Debian GNU/kFreeBSD benchmarking session, in 18 of the tests Debian GNU/Linux 32-bit was faster than Debian GNU/kFreeBSD 32-bit. However, with many of those 18 wins, the GNU/kFreeBSD results were very close to the GNU/Linux numbers. With the 64-bit versions, Debian GNU/Linux did even better and was in front 23 of the 27 times compared to 64-bit Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. These 64-bit results were certainly quite interesting and it looks like the FreeBSD kernel can be better tuned for a 64-bit environment. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD 64-bit though did have strong advantages with the x264, 7-Zip, and Gcrypt CEMLLIA256-ECB Cipher tests over the Linux kernel.

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the advantage of running Debian with a BSD kernel instead of linux?

If you want to make money, and don't want to contribute back to the free software economy, its easier with a BSD license than a GPL license. Other than that...

Quite an oversimplification.

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[MrLint]

Considering that companies seem to have difficulty of dealing with the code publication surrounding the Linux they use in their products, it has always befuddled me as to why they didn't 'just use' BSD instead.

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[tomhudson]

It's kind of funny that you talk about jails being an advantage ... from your link:

the upcoming reiserfs and xfs, or

definitely jailed, and a real killer :-)

... but don't you think you could come up with something a bit more recent? Linux has changed a bit since then.

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[vlm]

What's the advantage of running Debian with a BSD kernel instead of linux?

If you want to make money, and don't want to contribute back to the free software economy, its easier with a BSD license than a GPL license. Other than that...

Quite an oversimplification.

Yet, not bad for just 27 words. If you can do better given that constraint... A laundry list of unique features, license differences, and the (very few) device drivers that work better under BSD than linux, would probably be too long and complicated to be a "summary".

I would go further and state its within the set of questions where if you are able to successfully implement the answer, you are capable enough not to need to ask us the question, or alternately its within the set of questions where if you actually needed to know the answer, you would have already figured it out via very hard experience on linux, although knowing it is a bad question in advance would probably have been impossible because it would have taken more data to evaluate the question than to answer it...

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[rtfa-troll]

... it has always befuddled me as to why they didn't 'just use' BSD instead.

To be honest, believing exactly the argument you gave companies mostly they did until the last few years. However, you never knew about out because they didn't publish the code. The reason for this is that there is no need to and if they do release their code, their competitors can use it, so their lawyers advise them against. After a few years they either get so wildly successful (JunOS / OSX / Microsoft TCP/IP stack) that they keep their own completely proprietary branch and never help anyone else or they get abandoned (IPSO / AlchemOS / BSDi / SunOS / etc. etc.)

The thing is, that the because of the effects of copyleft, the Linux people cooperate and release code and so, even though the resources put into Linux are much less, there is less duplication and so more is achieved. This has become much more visible recently with Android and other successes and means that corporate types have begun to see copyleft as a platform which makes limited cooperation with potential competitors possible and safe.

If you are choosing a system for your own platform, this becomes a good reason to choose an AGPLv3 base as much as possible and, if you have any proprietry code, layer that separately on top. Your work on the commodity underlying components can be safely released and will move forward with the rest of the community. Whatever investment you put in will be preserved instead of becoming obsolete.

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[Morth]

Are they using glibc or the freebsd one? Because one of the developer advantages of the BSDs are that kernel and libc are more in sync. Ie. there's no system calls in libc that are not in the kernel, and vice versa.

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a terrible understatement of what BSD is. All BSD flavours are separate operating systems with multiple pros and cons compared to GNU/Linux. This applies to them as a whole, and to their kernel. For one, the BSD kernel supports ZFS natively, without ZFS-FUSE that is required on Linux. I'm not sure if Debian GNU/kFreeBSD supports that, but it's something Linux can't do yet, and FreeBSD's kernel can. And that's only one of the gazillion differences.

The difference in licenses is also more important than what you said. Copyleft's aim is much bigger than attempting to stop commercial projects that don't want to contribute back. In fact, that's not its aim at all. The lack of copyleft has a much bigger impact than that, for one it allows better compatibility between free software components, for example it allows you to combine BSD and ZFS legally (which is problematic with GPL).

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[Chemisor]

So why is ZFS the only feature ever mentioned? I don't care about ZFS, only servers want that. What does BSD have that normal people want?

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Android isn't a particularly good example a they made their own fork and aren't contributing anything back. And even if companies do use linux, they can (and do) lock it down. They can (and do) use binary blob drivers for important parts

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[Joe Jay Bee]

One of the things I appreciate most about it is the proper OSS sound support, with mixing that actually works out of the box without having to deal with shit like PulseAudio or the clusterfuck that is Alsa.

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[clydemaxwell]

your defense of your oversimplification: "yeah, but it's simple!"

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[Hatta]

I like those advantages. What I really want to know is what the disadvantages are. Is all my software likely to work on Debian FreeBSD?

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[TheRaven64]

Working, in-kernel, low-latency, sound mixing is another one. No messing around with portaudio or ALSA, sound Just Works(tm).

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[TheRaven64]

So why is ZFS the only feature ever mentioned? I don't care about ZFS, only servers want that

Indeed. There are absolutely no use cases for ZFS that aren't on the server. For example, no average user would want easy-to-use snapshots - being able to easily revert a file from an earlier version is a server-only feature. They definitely wouldn't want to be able to do simple incremental backups just by streaming the disk changes with something like zfs send / receive - only server users care about that. Data integrity is probably an enterprise feature too - no one on a desktop wants checksums in their data, because data loss only matters to enterprise users.

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[BrokenHalo]

Android isn't a particularly good example a they made their own fork and aren't contributing anything back.

Sad but true. But I guess none of us should be surprised at the presence and actions of freeloaders.

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that modern Linux kernels have native namespace supports for process groups and network interfaces, the two things that most differentiated FreeBSD jails from plain old chroot jails, and it is trivial to implement a Linux userland to do FreeBSD-style jails (been there, done that, unfortunately it's under NDA). Also, Virtuozzo/OpenVZ are a Linux re-implementation of FreeBSD jails with some additional features such as tighter resource limit controls and have been around forever. ZFS is definitely interesting though.

Some other reasons you might be interested in the FreeBSD kernel:

1) FreeBSD handles heavy loads better than Linux, at the expense of absolute performance, whereas Linux is heavily optimized toward providing fast performance under ordinary loads. Remember, BSD could handle 20 users on a Vax 780 -- roughly the equivalent of a 33mhz 80486 processor as far as CPU horsepower went (the I/O system was much better though). 2.6.3x does a lot better than earlier Linux kernels if you turn on the pre-emption switches (but note that there are some device drivers that roll over and die under heavy load if you do that), but I got Slashdotted while running FreeBSD on a 450mhz Pentium II with 128Mb of memory and all that happened was that it got very.... very.... slow, to the point where attempting to load the web page led to a timeout. But I could still log in and change the entire web site to a simple static page in order to get the web site back online. Then-extant Linux versions would have simply fallen over and died.

2) If you are creating an embedded special-purpose device, the licensing of the FreeBSD kernel is much more amenable to your business model. You can modify the kernel extensively without having to release your changes as GPL.

But to get those with FreeBSD, you have to deal with the FreeBSD userland, which is BSD vs. GNU based and lacks a modern packaging system. FreeBSD's packaging system is crude and primitive compared to Debian's and makes handling things like software upgrades very painful. So somebody apparently decided, "hey, FreeBSD kernel goodness with Debian package management goodness, what's the downside?" and did a cool hack.

WIll I run it? No. I've already updated my web/email server to Debian 5 but it's a Xen virtual machine. I'm considering switching my big fileserver (the one I use Xen on to run Windows on its own dedicated video card) from OpenSUSE 11.3 to Debian 5, but since I'm running Xen will of course stick with the Linux kernel, which in any event has much better device driver support than FreeBSD has. I think it's good news that Debian 5 has native Dom0 support for Xen -- this will make the jobs of ISP's and other virtualization users much easier (KVM is getting there but is still rough around the edges and I'd be hesitant to deploy it into a production environment) -- and Debian's popularity with hosting companies is going to continue to soar. For a server you want to just install and forget, Debian makes a lot of sense... set up an apt-get in a cron job to automagically install updates, and just forget the thing. But the FreeBSD kernel hack? Well, that's just cool.

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[GiMP]

Ever hear of TimeMachine on MacOS? Well, ZFS provides a similar feature to roll back changes, without the hassle of actually backing up your system. There is even a pretty Gnome UI. Of course, ZFS simplifies performing the backups, too.

Oh, did I forget to mention that despite the complexity of ZFS, the performance is stellar? Yes, it vastly out-performs traditional filesystems. Of course, that is compared to UFS on Solaris, but then again, that filesystem is on par with or faster than EXT3 (faster with logging, on par otherwise)

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[LurkerXXX]

I want ZFS on my desktop. Mainly because I understand what ZFS is. You might want to read up on it.

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[iggymanz]

to answer that, we have to be like the audience on The Tonight Show, and yell "Which Software Is It!!??"

so, what do you run?

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[Randle_Revar]

Dunno about tc, but shorewall makes iptables nicer (but still not as good as pf, IMO)

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[RLiegh]

Exactly! Not to mention that only enterprise users have the ram and CPU capacity to handle ZSF. There's also the fact it's not stable or supported outside of Solaris and the only graphical tools are in an old version of macos.

On the plus side, with FreeBSD you have the ability to download the entire source tree and look at it, or compile the whole thing with a few commands (make buildworld or sth, i don't remember). Also, Linux is dying and BSD will be the next big thing.

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some software that is released in binary only form won't work. The most notable thing would probably be flashplayer. There is a linux compatability layer that can support some products, though.

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[toejam13]

Agreed. Take a real-world example: F5 Networks line of local area and wide area load-balancing products. Since the beginning, they have used some BSD variant as the base of their product (NetBSD 1.x, BSDi BSD/OS 3.1 and 4.1, FreeBSD 3.x) for BIG-IP and 3DNS. Their kernel patches and userland utilities were all closed source.

Eventually, they ran into a wall: BSDi was dying and FreeBSD didn't have the SMP performance they needed. Moving to GNU/Linux was an option, but the GPL would have forced them to move their code to userland (taking a heavy penalty while moving in and out of supervisor mode). Waiting for the SMP rewrite of FreeBSD that was underway was an option, but the timeline was murky and nobody knew how it would perform. So F5 Networks went with option three: create a custom closed-source microkernel called TMOS that sits above the Linux kernel and avoids the issue of GPL completely. My understanding was that it was a PITA to implement, but it leaves the Linux kernel untouched. As part of the rewrite, they renamed BIG-IP to LTM and 3DNS to GTM. That is their current offering today.

The Citrix Netscaler and Secure Computing's Sidewinder firewall are just a couple of products that continue to use FreeBSD because it was an easier path. AFAIK, F5 Network's path was a unique one.

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[m50d]

For me, stability. Linux 2.6 has gotten worse and worse, wheras I recently switched to FreeBSD and it's been rock solid. ZFS is nice too.

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeBSD has binary compability with all linux software, unless it uses unported libraries.

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[KugelKurt]

I have no problems with ALSA.
From time to time I try PulseAudio but it always gives me stuttering sound.

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[BitZtream]

Uhm, there are never any syscalls in libc that aren't in the kernel since ... you know ... syscalls are ... calls into the kernel. You can't make one the kernel doesn't support.

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[Morth]

There can be if glibc is newer then the kernel. This was a common problem back when epoll was new (for a year or so), you had to actually try to call it to see if it would work or not. So either you had to make a test program in your configure script or support the case of epoll failing.

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[EsbenMoseHansen]

If you really want snapshots, LVM is probably easier and works on all filesystems, though recently I have had a bit of fun with btfs, which also offers checksums. Truth to tell, I can't remember the last time I've had data corruption on my drives. Even the times where HDD have failed, I have been able to copy off the data (if SLOWLY), and I haven't noticed corruption yet.

The trouble is to come up with a good usecases for snapshots on the desktop, especially since a good backup solution is still needed in case of hardware failure. The only thing I use it for is to keep a "pristine" Debian sid+stable around for building packages, so that I know for sure that I only depend on what I think I do. I know one who takes a snapshot before upgrading, so that he can revert... cool, but perfectly achievable with LVM.

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[TheRaven64]

If you really want snapshots, LVM is probably easier

A comment like that implies that you have never worked with ZFS. Snapshots are simple, are constant time, and don't have a performance overhead, and don't require any preconfiguration. A fairly typical ZFS setup has a cron job that takes snapshots every hour and preserves hourly ones for a while, daily ones for a bit longer, and then monthly ones, so you can always go back and find the file that you deleted by mistake.

and works on all filesystems

So does ZFS, if you decide to run another filesystem in a ZVOL (but why would you? We're talking about end users.

The trouble is to come up with a good usecases for snapshots on the desktop, especially since a good backup solution is still needed in case of hardware failure

zfs send / receive makes backups trivial to a NAS. Just take a snapshot, and you can then send all of the deltas between that snapshot and the previous one to a remote drive, over SSH (for example). Then, on the NAS, you also have the snapshots, as well as the latest version, so you can revert to earlier versions easily.

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[EsbenMoseHansen]

A comment like that implies that you have never worked with ZFS. Snapshots are simple, are constant time, and don't have a performance overhead, and don't require any preconfiguration. A fairly typical ZFS setup has a cron job that takes snapshots every hour and preserves hourly ones for a while, daily ones for a bit longer, and then monthly ones, so you can always go back and find the file that you deleted by mistake.

I haven't benchmarked it, I admit, but neither have I noticed a performance overhead with either LVM snapshots or btrfs. Neither requires any preconfiguration, except installing it in the first place (same as ZFS). I suppose I could setup a cronscript like that, but given that I already have a cronscript due a backup to a remote server, why should I bother? I could enhance this using LVM to get an "frozen" image to backup from, but in reality, what I have works fine, and is dead simple. I like simple. But no, I have not used ZFS because it doesn't work in Linux except through fusefs, which I do not have good experiences with.

The trouble is to come up with a good usecases for snapshots on the desktop, especially since a good backup solution is still needed in case of hardware failure

zfs send / receive makes backups trivial to a NAS. Just take a snapshot, and you can then send all of the deltas between that snapshot and the previous one to a remote drive, over SSH (for example). Then, on the NAS, you also have the snapshots, as well as the latest version, so you can revert to earlier versions easily.

Again, you could easily do the same with LVM or btrfs, but in reality, you can skip both an just use an ordinary backup system like rsnapshot. Again, why make it more complicated? In both cases, you risk backing something up in the middle of some undefined state of some program, leaving (part of) that backup unusable. I like the *idea* of backing up from a snapshot, but I must admit that I could not write a real business case for it off the cuff. Perhaps research can be found that shows one is better than the other in practice.

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[vlm]

I'm much more interested in data integrity than performance, much like 99.999999999% of admins. The remainder appear to be folks running web caches.

ZFS folks refuse to discuss that, for some odd reason. All I hear about is features that I don't have, have never had, could otherwise reimplement or work around, or can't implement due to corporate culture / established procedures, yet have made fat stacks of cash in the past without ZFS.

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is, that the because of the effects of copyleft, the Linux people cooperate and release code and so, even though the resources put into Linux are much less, there is less duplication and so more is achieved. This has become much more visible recently with Android and other successes and means that corporate types have begun to see copyleft as a platform which makes limited cooperation with potential competitors possible and safe.

All of android except the (forked) Linux kernel is released under a BSD license. Even their C library is BSD licensed. I almost suspect they chose Linux as the base kernel just so they could say they were running Linux.

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[GiMP]

Reliability

Just because performance is better, doesn't mean that data integrity is lower. Data integrity is great with ZFS, too.

Everything is checksummed, in ZFS and these are checked on every read. In a multi-disk pool, ZFS will automatically detect and auto-heal corruption. It goes above and beyond what a normal RAID-1 would do, for instance, while also supporting this on a RAID5-like configuration.

Epic fail

Perhaps why you haven't heard good things about ZFS reliability is because there were many cases of early adopters losing their pools - their data. Largely, these issues were due to lost log devices. Prior to version 19, you could lose your entire pool and data through the loss of a log device. Using separate log devices, however, was not the default configuration and the documentation on this feature was clear of this limitation (and suggested mirrors of log devices). Following best practices, or using the defaults, and not doing the ZFS equivalent of "rm -rf", your integrity should be fine.

Needs change

Really none of the major features in ZFS can be easily reimplemented or worked around. Needs change. Data gets bigger. Virtualization happens. For instance, some of the needs of virtualized environments can only be solved by ZFS or its more expensive brethren, and ZFS still does better than a good number of its more expensive alternatives.

The closest readily-available alternative to ZFS would be a logical volume manager and none of the DAS options really come close at all. I stress the importance of snapshots and backups because these are things that have become increasingly difficult to perform with the size of today's data and the relatively slow growth of disk and network performance. I've seen traditional setups and workarounds, they usually end up with throwing lots of money into additional disks, arrays, and controllers; or 12+ hours of daily backups; or really high-level filesystem operations that don't work in many environments such as with TimeMachine on the Mac, or with an incremental rsync. The latter isn't practical in many environments, such as virtualization where VMs are given individual block devices or loopback files; ZFS works block-level.

If you have hundreds of thousands of dollars to sink into a commercially available SAN filer, then you might have a case that ZFS has no place. However, for those that do not want to throw that much money into a solution, ZFS is far superior to the alternatives. Yet, this thread was supposed to be about desktops and small servers, not large enterprise deployments -- and that is the thing, ZFS brings enterprise features to the small office. Because needs change, those features are becoming increasingly important.

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[rtfa-troll]

Actually Android is a perfect example. The GPLv2 is just on the edge of being a strong enough copyleft license; sometimes good enough, often not. Unfortunately, Linus has repeatedly weakened it further, both by supporting Tivioisation and by supporting linking binary blobs. Now that weakness is coming back to haunt Linux. Android is not just failing to contribute it's actually sucking part of the life from Linux.

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[evilviper]

and if they do release their code, their competitors can use it, so their lawyers advise them against.

This is complete nonsense. Prefer the GPL? Okay, release your modifications under the GPL. Its been done over and over again. You think every utility in a linux distro was written from scratch when bsd versions were out there? of course not.

Pretty much all the standard protocols came out with BSD/MITX licensed implementations. NFS, X11, and SSH come to mind.

BSD is the same as ever. Quietly driving the world forward. There's no shortage of corporate contributors to FreeBSD. Linux just makes a better story, so the press gives it a lot of attention. After a few years, that has led to some major network effects. Same reason a joke of a database like MySQL gets so much attention, while PostgreSQL goes quietly along, running in the core of many mega corporations.

After a few years they either get so wildly successful (JunOS / OSX / Microsoft TCP/IP stack) that they keep their own completely proprietary branch and never help anyone else or they get abandoned (IPSO / AlchemOS / BSDi / SunOS / etc. etc.)

And what's with the Sun hate? SunOS may have died, but a few people might still be using a little thing called NFS. Sun contributed TONS back to the open source community, and naming a project here and there that they kept closed won't change that.

This has become much more visible recently with Android and other successes

If I didn't realize people would take you seriously, it would be absolutely HILARIOUS that you've singled out Android as the great FOSS success, and yet complain about Darwin being proprietary in the same breath.

Yes, this is exactly what I was talking about in regards to press of BSD vs GPL/Linux... When iPhone took over the world, we weren't hearing what a vindication it was of BSD. But when anything Linux-based gets slightly popular, even trivial nonsense like basic WiFi routers, roll out the screaming fanbois...

Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage?

[rtfa-troll]

Your response seems to be to a strange bunch of things I didn't say. I shall pick some random points that I can understand enough to make a useful reply to.

and if they do release their code, their competitors can use it, so their lawyers advise them against.

This is complete nonsense. Prefer the GPL? Okay, release your modifications under the GPL. Its been done over and over again. You think every utility in a linux distro was written from scratch when bsd versions were out there? of course not.

I just didn't say any of the things you seem to be answering here. Maybe I wasn't clear?

After a few years they either get so wildly successful (JunOS / OSX / Microsoft TCP/IP stack) that they keep their own completely proprietary branch and never help anyone else or they get abandoned (IPSO / AlchemOS / BSDi / SunOS / etc. etc.)

And what's with the Sun hate?

This is one of the most bizzare questions I have ever been asked. I thought Sun was great. I loved SunOS. I even came to accept Solaris. What are you even replying to? I mentioned SunOS as abandoned, but the reason for that was not Sun's fault. However, if BSD had been GPL licensed then SunOS likely would have too and could have continued till today; probably as part of the standard BSD system.

SunOS may have died, but a few people might still be using a little thing called NFS. Sun contributed TONS back to the open source community, and naming a project here and there that they kept closed won't change that.

A bunch of things where the fact they were released under the BSD license ended up benefitting Microsoft and killing Sun. In the end with Java they ended up with a mad bureaucracy in the JCP. Had they just been consistently GPL from the beginning I think they would have had fewer problems.

This has become much more visible recently with Android and other successes

If I didn't realize people would take you seriously, it would be absolutely HILARIOUS that you've singled out Android as the great FOSS success, and yet complain about Darwin being proprietary in the same breath.

I can show you several examples of Android based independent OS releases. I believe that OpenDarwin "died a lonely death". (please feel free to correct me if there is someone else who has released a consumer ready Darwin based OS). What this means is that in practice normal people can have homebrew versions of android and can develop on them and cannot do the same with Darwin.

Yes, this is exactly what I was talking about in regards to press of BSD vs GPL/Linux... When iPhone took over the world, we weren't hearing what a vindication it was of BSD. But when anything Linux-based gets slightly popular, even trivial nonsense like basic WiFi routers, roll out the screaming fanbois...

I think the difference is that normally the Linux devices mean there's a chance for further interesting hacking (see Linksys L series routers for example) whilst the BSD based systems basically just end up as embedded, unalterable systems where the best hope is to jailbreak. Who cares what's inside if you can't touch it? I think this is, to be honest the biggest problem with Linux being stuck with GPLv2. There's a definite space for someone to launch a hardcore AGPLv3 OS on which web/cloud based solutions could be safely released.

Well done!

[cavok]

Thanks to all the involved people, we have another cornerstone of the Free Software.

Good job Debian team

[JackieBrown]

This looks like a solid release. I only use stable for as long as it takes for the new queue to start start dumping back in Sid but I appreciate the hard work that has gone into this.

And the new artwork really rocks. I was shocked to see plymouth working out of the box with my nvidia card. The consistency from grub to kde launch is really stunning and makes the whole bootup feel seamless.

Re:Good job Debian team

[aldm]

It's up and running! The installer (expert install) asks better questions. In order to have access to non-free docs (GNU FLD) you need to accept this when apt is configured. If every piece of software that I usually use works, than I'll squeeze Squeeze in an Compaq Armada 1540DM (80MB RAM), which runs Lenny now. Hopefully it won't itch as Etch did!

I love it!

[no known priors]

I'm a Ubuntu user, but I know where it comes from. Debian has been the dream operating system of mine for ages. Easy to install thousands of packages, stable, safe, etc. The only trouble is, when I first tried to install it in 2007, I couldn't get it to work with my wireless card. Ubuntu just worked. I'm going to guess that it wouldn't work now either; my wireless card is one of those Intel ones with the locked up firmware so that I don't start spamming the airwaves... (If I recall correctly the software is ipw2200, or similar.)

Anyway, one thing I note from the press release, is that it is still including OpenOffice.org 3.2.1. I wonder when they'll get LibreOffice (Ubuntu will get it in the 11.4 release).

Great job Debian!

Re:I love it!

[vlm]

I'm going to guess that it wouldn't work now either... (If I recall correctly the software is ipw2200, or similar.)

So, you bothered to link to a page explaining in extreme detail both that it works, and exactly how to do it line by line, but you're guessing it wouldn't work?

I think you're trying to write in a very complicated manner that you're not sure if your laptop has a ipw2200? I have second hand knowledge that the instructions on the wiki do work quite well if you're unfortunate enough to own a ipw2200 card.

Re:I love it!

[mmj638]

it is still including OpenOffice.org 3.2.1. I wonder when they'll get LibreOffice

Debian's OpenOffice uses patches from Go-OO (now merging with LibreOffice) anyway, so in some ways it is already more similar to LibreOffice than to stock OpenOffice.org. It opens .docx documents very well, for example.

This is also true of Ubuntu's, and generally other distros' OpenOffice packages.

LibreOffice itself came into existence too late for an actual LibreOffice version to make it into Debian 6.0.

I expect it will be a smooth and uncontroversial transition from Debian 6.0's Go-OO enhanced OpenOffice to Debian 7.0's LibreOffice. I'm guessing they'll no longer use the OpenOffice.org branding for that particular variation of it though.

Re:I love it!

[Anonymous Coward]

The firmware may be in the non-free section of the repositories. Non-free is not included by default, but it can be included if you want it, so I would suggest that the chance of this release (with non-free) installing for you is higher than you imagine.

The wiki page you linked to even states "It's now also available in the nonfree-firmware tarball which we build regularly on cdimage.debian.org. Supply this blob on a CD/floppy/USB drive etc. and d-i will do the right thing." So I'd say your chances might actually be quite good.

Re:I love it!

[no known priors]

Eeh, two things. 1) I'm not sure what card I have, it just works at install time in Ubuntu. 2) I meant that I'm not sure that it would work at install time, I guess I should have been more specific. And I didn't actually bother reading that page, so...

At the time, early 2007, I had wireless-only Internet access at my then home ("a mental asylum -- old", I like to say), and I had to go at least five KMs to get wired Internet access. I downloaded Debian using MS Windows, installed it at home, and then fuxed around trying to get wireless to work in a library a long way from home. In the end I just downloaded and installed Ubuntu, and it just worked. And, apart from a few minor hiccups every now and again, it continues to just work.

It maybe that Debian would also "just work" now (assuming I could get wireless to work), but two things prevent me from trying it. I've become accustomed to having frequent updates to everything (yes, unstable, yes), and I can't be bothered messing around with the guts of my OS any more. I'm past those days.

Re:I love it!

[clang_jangle]

That's the whole reason Ubuntu exists though, for people who lack the time or ability or whatever to just install and configure Debian (which exists for people who lack the time or ability or whatever to just build gentoo, which exists for people who lack time or ability or whatever to just create their own private distro from scratch, which of course is for people who lack time or ability or whatever to just go ahead and code their own custom OS using vi or emacs...).

Re:I love it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Emacs is an OS. All it lacks is a decent editor.

Re:I love it!

[the Atomic Rabbit]

Wow, how original.

Re:I love it!

[chichilalescu]

which of course is for people who lack the time or ability to just go ahead and setup the universe properly...

(I know, I'm just being a parasite, but I couldn't resist)

Re:I love it!

[ffreeloader]

Yeah, you just need to run the "expert" installation routine to get to it.

To others reading this, don't let the "expert" tag fool you. All it does is give you more options to choose from, if you want them. If you don't want/understand the options you can still use the same defaults the "regular" install routine uses within the "expert" install routine.

Re:I love it!

[vlm]

I'm not sure what card I have, it just works at install time in Ubuntu.

pop open a terminal, "lsmod | grep ipw2100" if you see something you have a 2100. "lsmod | grep ipw2200" if you see something you have a 2200.

Take a look at the output of dmesg, it'll probably have a lot of verbal sorta-english commentary on your wireless card.

If I knew more Ubuntu, I could probably tell you how to figure out which firmware files it has installed and loaded.

Does it count as a "google hack" to flip the laptop over, find the model number, and google for that and the words "debian install" or "linux wifi"? Maybe that would be too elite for the average "google hack".

An interesting addition to future releases would be some kind of "as it boots" analyzer to grep for known troublesome devices and provide commentary, such as that wiki URL if certain strings are seen in dmesg or lspci. For all I know, d-installer already has that, I haven't installed in quite awhile (Debian being one of the few (only?) OS available in the entire computational world where upgrading from previous releases just works)

Re:I love it!

[Longshanks197]

Any installation that requires additional firmware will need to have the firmware available during installation. See the Debian wiki http://wiki.debian.org/Firmware for installation instructions. They even have a special netinst image that will pull the correct firmware.

As for LibreOffice, it is in the experimental archive and I would imagine will be in sid very soon. Of course it won't hit stable until 7.0 but most desktop users aren't going to wait that long. Especially if/when sid gets a 2.6.38 kernel with the new 200 line patch.

Re:I love it!

[roman_mir]

Why do you need another OS if you already are running emacs?

Re:I love it!

[asvravi]

vi or emacs?

Re:I love it!

[potHead42]

using vi or emacs...

Which of course is for people who lack time or ability or whatever to use ed.

Re:I love it!

[Seumas]

In other words (from personal experience):

Slackware, Gentoo, Debian, etc - are especially great if you're a young geek who has plenty of time to enjoy debugging and playing with everything to get the simplest functionality out of your system (like sound or the right resolution to display properly on your screen).

Ubuntu is especially great if you're an older geek and you need to be doing actual work rather than spending two entire weeks figuring out why an obvious LineMode configuration isn't working and your screen resolution is still totally screwed despite it and fighting against countless hurdles to get sound cards working properly with all of your applications, etc.

Both are entirely valid and I wish I had more time in my life to keep being the first guy, but many (and it's growing every day) need to spend less time configuring and tweaking and working around bugs in linux and more time doing our actual work or projects (or working on our own bugs in our own software).

Debian was my first real linux, about twelve years ago. It powered a really big project that I ran for more than a decade, almost flawlessly. Development can be glacial and Debian foundation bureaucracy can be navel-gazing and counter-productive . . . but god damn, the outcome is something to aspire to. And now, I can get a lot of that with someone else's spit and polish in Ubuntu.

Gentoo, on the other hand. Well, it's good that there's a linux-based outlet for obsessive compulsives. :P

Re:I love it!

[kthreadd]

And if you really want to run LibreOffice there's nothing stopping you from download and install it yourself in /opt. It's a very simple process explained in the accompanying readme file. It's something like "cd into the directory and run dpkg -i *.deb".

Re:I love it!

[hidden]

I'm pretty sure modern versions of the debian installer do work with the intel wireless cards. Plus, if you download the full install disk, rather than the net install, you actually don't need network until after the install is done.

Re:I love it!

[jgrahn]

In other words (from personal experience):

Slackware, Gentoo, Debian, etc - are especially great if you're a young geek who has plenty of time to enjoy debugging and playing with everything to get the simplest functionality out of your system (like sound or the right resolution to display properly on your screen).

I installed Squeeze a few weeks back, and I didn't have to touch a thing to get sound and graphics to work properly. Same with Lenny before that, actually.

Re:I love it!

[Spykk]

If you fall into the first category and you haven't tried Arch yet I can't recommend it enough. Arch is intensely customizable but is still backed by a solid package manager and a huge repository of user submitted packages. It is probably a little too bleeding edge for a production machine but if you want to try the latest releases on your personal desktop Arch is fantastic.

Re:I love it!

[ladoga]

pop open a terminal, "lsmod | grep ipw2100" if you see something you have a 2100. "lsmod | grep ipw2200" if you see something you have a 2200.

That only works if the module is already loaded. Much better way to check the model would be to use lspci.

$ lspci | grep -i wireless 04:02.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 2915ABG [Calexico2] Network Connection (rev 05)

...and yes the ipw2200 driver works out of the box with Debian and firmware is not needed. If it was it's just one apt-get install firmware-ipw2x00 away and even before (around 2004 when I started using linux) it was pretty straightforward to compile and install. Not much harder than posting on slashdot and complaining that it doesn't work out of the box.

Re:I love it!

[Jimmy King]

It's funny that you mention using Ubuntu because you don't have time to troubleshoot weird stuff with Debian. I started with Slackware and ran it for years and built most stuff from source, so Debian of course feels like no work at all to set up, maintain, etc. most of the time anyway. I've never had weird bugs to work around in Debian except with Tomcat that I can remember.

I realize I'm an edge case here and not the norm, but I'm actually setting up Debian servers at work because I didn't have time to work around craziness in Ubuntu. I was preparing to move from RHEL to Ubuntu but my test run failed miserably. The dash shell handles system() calls differently than bash. We've got an in house developed app at work written in Perl that has a master daemon process that uses system() to fork off a child process to handle connections as needed. Unfortunately with dash, those new processes aren't actually children, they're their own process. So the parent has no idea what's going on with children (as they are not children now), only one connection at a time can be handled while the rest whine about the tcp port being in use since they are no longer children, the start/stop script can't find children, etc

Of course Debian is moving to the dash shell it seems, but they do provide a way to have bash be the default shell whereas I couldn't find a way in Ubuntu. I'm going to test to see if dpkg-reconfigure dash works to change the default shell for Ubuntu one of these days.

Re:I love it!

[petermgreen]

That's the whole reason Ubuntu exists though

Afaict the main reason ubuntu exists is because shuttleworth had his ideas on where he wanted to take linux and unlike most people he had the resources to seriously take it in his own direction rather than just fiddling arround at the edges. Further at the time Debian was in a crisis of ever increasing release cycle length with some people seriously wondering if the sarge cycle would ever end so there were a lot of debian "refugees" to give him an initial userbase.

Re:I love it!

[deek]

I'm a Debian user of around 15 years. I think you'll find that Debian has changed somewhat. Or maybe it's just the xorg system. It's much better than XFree was, at just working automatically from scratch. I haven't had to fiddle around with an X config file for years now. Sound also just works.

While Ubuntu is definitely the more polished desktop experience, Debian has become very good at getting things to work automatically, and dare I say, it's much better at being able to customise a system to how you need it. They're both great systems, and I'd say they compliment each other. Ubuntu fills the desktop criteria well, and Debian is just a pleasure to use in a server system.

Re:I love it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Anybody without the ability to google for such a simplistic issue should be allowed to even use a computer.

Re:I love it!

[marcosdumay]

I've installed Debian every time I decided to change a system's hard disk*, so it is not such a big time sink. Compare that with the number of times one needs to install Ubuntu just to stay current. Also, there are some years since when Debian didn't work perfectly out of the installation. Recently (the last 4 or 5 years), I've had more problems with Ubuntu, altough I only tried to install it one one computer.

Now, compare that terrible time sink that is installing Debian every decade or so, with daily administration and installing random software. Those huge repositories are quite helpfull here. And not everything in them works well with Ubuntu (specialy if you don't reinstall it every so often).

* Currently, on 3 computers, just at home, sometimes there were more, some times less. Last time I changed a system's disk I didn't go into the trouble of reinstalling it, tough, and just copied everyting in place. Yeah, you have to create /dev/null and /dev/console, also you must reinstall grub/lilo, but it's all. I think it will take more than a decade for me to reinstall it on the future.

Re:I love it!

[Richy_T]

Debian is the bees knees until something goes wrong. Then your server won't boot or there's a package that can't upgrade without dependency issues or will conflict and uninstall another essential package that your application depends on.

I still like Debian overall but it's sure bit me a few times. I've never had those issues with Slackware but it can take longer to get where you're going.

Re:I love it!

[vlm]

Ubuntu is especially great if you're an older geek and you need to be doing actual work rather than spending two entire weeks figuring out why an obvious LineMode configuration isn't working and your screen resolution is still totally screwed despite it and fighting against countless hurdles to get sound cards working properly with all of your applications, etc.

How does one get to be an "old geek" without learning that 15 seconds of googling before purchase can save "two weeks" of suffering?

Its kind of like training yourself to do cosmetic and orthopedic surgery on yourself, rather than simply not hitting your thumb with the hammer.

Re:I love it!

[clang_jangle]

In other words (from personal experience): Slackware, Gentoo, Debian, etc - are especially great if you're a young geek who has plenty of time to enjoy debugging and playing with everything to get the simplest functionality out of your system (like sound or the right resolution to display properly on your screen).

I installed Squeeze a few weeks back, and I didn't have to touch a thing to get sound and graphics to work properly. Same with Lenny before that, actually.

Yes, he seems to be talking as if it's 2002. Any modern distro will do sound, video, and wireless pretty painlessly on most hardware nowadays. Been like that a few years now. But of course all it takes is a few people with oddball systems to have to run a command or two and the freaking sky is falling, loonix is teh suxxorz, etc... Bah -- fine with me if they want to use Ballmer's Botnet.

Re:I love it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Arch doesn't even have package signing and some of the larger mirrors have been compromised in the past. Sorry, but any Linux distribution that doesn't have package signing can't be taken seriously. Even OS X and Windows handle updates in a more secure manner.

Re:I love it!

[Anzhr]

Try LMDE's live CD. If everything works, install it. LibreOffice and so on will come into testing once Sid is finished with it.

Re:I love it!

[Anonymous Coward]

$ man chsh

--
DUH!

Re:I love it!

[Jimmy King]

That's the user's login shell which is different from the system default shell. The system default shell is always /bin/sh which these days is a sym link to another shell. On Ubuntu that other shell is /bin/dash. In theory I could have just changed the symlink myself, but who knows what unexected issues I would be causing by doing so when Ubuntu clearly intended for me to be using dash as the default shell.

Re:I love it!

[Jimmy King]

I should clarify the above. /bin/sh is what is used by all the start up scripts and possibly other system stuff. In Perl in the very least when you make a system() or exec() call it always uses /bin/sh. I suspect other languages probably are doing the same, but cannot guarantee that.

kFreeBSD notes link broken.

[yeltski]

Nice release notes. I love FreeBSD myself, for its unified and thorough quality, but I work where CenOS/RHEL is the standard. I've managed to force the install of Ubuntu Server on the web server, because I need some of the latest packages. Can someone explain what the advantages of the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is?

Re:kFreeBSD notes link broken.

[Anonymous Coward]

ZFS

Debian website UI

[Anonymous Coward]

I shat bricks when I realized that the Debian website UI was UPDATED! WOW! About time; They've had the same interface for 13 years...

Re:Debian website UI

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately the new interface doesn't look any better than the old one. Change for change's sake.

Re:Debian website UI

[ifiwereasculptor]

Damn! Now I'm flabbergasted too. Of course it's as ugly as the old one, since it's meant to be used even by text-only browsers, but it's still very cool.

Re:Debian website UI

[Anonymous Coward]

Being usable by text-only browsers has nothing whatsoever to do with design. Design and underlying function are completely separated since CSS works more or less flawlessly in all major browsers. And yes, even IE6 knows enough CSS to make usable sites look nice. Although *this* isn't worth the effort anymore ...

That said, the trend goes towards unusable websites again, alas.

Re:Debian website UI

[Anonymous Coward]

which part of clean and clear do you find ugly?

Re:Debian website UI

[Seumas]

It has been awhile since I last visited it, but it looks like the same old site, with a different banner at the top.

Re:Debian website UI

[bedouin]

I personally hate website updates just for the sake of updating. The old one worked fine.

Re:Debian website UI

[deek]

Damn it Jim, they're engineers, not graphic designers.

Re:Debian website UI

[Anzhr]

Spacefun. It's actually less hideous here than in the boot and GDM splashes. Another good reason to never reboot and seldom logout.

Works well, but significantly higher requirements

[drinkypoo]

Squeeze has significantly higher minimal install requirements than Lenny, to the point it wouldn't fit on my Dockstar or my Dt360. So if you are using Debian because it's small and light, don't upgrade.

Debian/BSD love nest found in Route 40 flophouse.

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is the way I'd go if I had to run "Linux". Thankfully, I get to use the whole FreeBSD enchilada. This release allso gives the Slashdot comics something to joke about after they've been flushed out of the Poconos.

Yeah!

[xgadflyx]

I have been using "sid" for forever and a day to make sure that I had all the new "features" in a timely fashion. With all that Squeeze ships with out of the box, I can now run stable and still be functional. Great job. Is this not one of the fastest Debian release cycles?

Re:Yeah!

[icebraining]

Is this not one of the fastest Debian release cycles?

Not really. It's been two years since Lenny, which was two years after Etch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian#Release_history

Re:Yeah!

[petermgreen]

Is this not one of the fastest Debian release cycles?

Looking at the list of debian releases this cycle was actually the second-longest.

FTFY

[drinkypoo]

ZFS and DTrace come to mind, but those are the only easy examples.

First release without a linux kernel??

[Anonymous Coward]

What about Debian GNU/Hurd?

Re:First release without a linux kernel??

[guppysap13]

GNU/Hurd has never been released in Stable. It is available in Unstable, but isn't complete enough for them to upgrade to Testing and Stable yet. GNU/kFreebsd however, is now an official Stable release with Squeeze (6.0).

Re:First release without a linux kernel??

[petermgreen]

To get into a debian release a new port has to go through several stages

1: someone has to create the port, get the basics working etc.
2: the porters must demonstrate it is appropriate for the ftp masters to accept it into unstable (this step often involves flamewars)
3: the port must demonstrate sufficient archive coverage, be sufficiently up to date*, have a usable installer (preferablly a port of the debian installer), have porterboxes and buildds availiable etc to get the release team to accept it into testing
4: the port must get established in testing (this takes time as binaries for the new port can only move to testing when
5: the port must survive the release process

Hurd got over step 2 a long time ago but has never managed step 3. In particular LARGE volumes of the archive still fail to build on hurd.

* By which I mean the binaries in unstable must have been successfully built from the most recent source in unstable. This is important for testing transitions because all ports are supposed to have the same version of each package in testing and the testing scripts enforce this by preventing transition until the packages in unstable are in sync (the testing scripts can be told to ignore this for a given package or architecture but it is not something done lightly)

KDE 4.6

[Anonymous Coward]

now that debian 6.0 is released, will we have kde 4.6 in the official repositories?. those packages are not even in experimental.

Using Squeeze

[freddieb]

I have been using Squeeze for a while now. It's a great package. I was just reading the debian/freebsd wiki. Interesting idea. I may try that in one of my kvm machines. Personally, I love Debian's long stable cycle. The current version is very up-to-date with the latest php (php-fpm via dotdeb), etc. I did compile a 2.6.37 vanilla kernel and that works just fine however, I am using the standard kernel as I could really see no difference on my server. Great job!!

Re:Using Squeeze

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are running an x86 you should really be using the bigmem version. It features PAE which allows the use of the NX bit.

Some CPU microarchitectures dropped from Debian...

[ornia]

It's interesting to note, that while Debian has traditionally supported more CPU microarchitectures than any other mainstream GNU+Linux distribution out there, they have decided to officially stop supporting multiple microarchitectures with the release of Squeeze. The dropped architectures are alpha, hppa, and arm, the latter of which is replaced by the new "Embedded" ABI of ARM, which Debian calls armel.

Although kfreebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64 have been added, these are not true new CPU microarchitectures in and of themselves, as they are compiled to standard x86 and x86_64 respectively, but obviously with the fairly radical change of not using Linux at all with a different GNU libc requiring all packages to be recompiled. This is the same situation as we have traditionally seen in the never-officially-released hurd-i386 port of Debian (which makes sense to call Debian GNU I suppose, as the Hurd kernel is part of the GNU project already) which seems to be missing so far with Debian 6.0 so far, pending a decision to potentially drop it as well.

All in all, amazing work by all in the Debian project. It remains an incredibly impressive feat that such a project can have no corporate oversight or ownership yet maintain such an impressively influential, relevant, and useful place in the operating system ecosystem. Even with dropping a couple of architectures, Debian still supports more computer types than most people even know exists, and continues to provide package updates that many many other operating systems base their repositories from. Also wonderful to see the website be updated!!

I'm still waiting for my 6.0

[DarkAnt]

Go Go CentOS Team!
I guess cheering isn't quite as effective as contributing.

Re:Some CPU microarchitectures dropped from Debian

[Nimey]

In Debian's defense, there haven't been any Alphas built for many years, and I'd expect the same to be true of HPPA, which IIRC was replaced by Itanium.

Snore

[Anonymous Coward]

Staid, boring Debian updated!

Sun rises in West!

Politicians now honest!

Are they mad?

[Moldiver]

Are they mad at Debian? The thing that annoys most on Linux are the gnu-parts in the userland. Why should someone with a nice and well-designed bsd-userland use the gnu-tools instead?

Or is this some kind of âoewe can do itâ?

Re:Are they mad?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't use it then. You're not forced to and you have a choice. Personally, I can't stand BSD's userland tools and prefer GNU's.

Re:Are they mad?

[hedwards]

To be honest, that puzzles me as well. The big advantage that pretty much everybody else has over Linux is that they consider the kernel and userland to be tied together with only minor patching to the OS between releases. It makes it a lot easier to do performance tweaking and bug fixing if you have control over the entire base install. It also means that if you send into the mailing list with a problem you can concisely tell them what OS version you're running and they'll have a reasonable understanding of what your software environment is like. If you get a kernel panic you're still likely to have to have to look at the core that you get to figure out what exactly happened, but that's mostly because drivers vary from machine to machine.

Re:Are they mad?

[Anonymous Coward]

Weird, whenever I find myself on a system with a non-GNU userland, I wanna scream and pull my hair out. I'm looking at you, Solaris.

Re:Are they mad?

[wouterke]

It's a bit of both, really

There's certainly a factor of 'because we can' in there, but it's also a matter of preference. I know plenty of people who prefer the FreeBSD userland, but I also know plenty of people (myself included) who've tried both the FreeBSD and GNU userlands and preferred the latter. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is certainly not for people in the first group.

Also, since many of debian's postinst scripts assume a GNU userland (and are allowed to do so by policy), shipping the FreeBSD userland as default would not have helped the port.

Re:Are they mad?

[kthreadd]

Install the companion software. That includes the GNU userland located in /usr/gnu.

Re:Debian/BSD love nest found in Route 40 flophous

[icebraining]

So if you had to run Linux, you wouldn't?

Debian6.0 squeeze screenshots Tour

[Anonymous Coward]

Find screenshots tour for Debian6.0 in this link

Re:Debian6.0 squeeze screenshots Tour

[Anonymous Coward]

Very exciting.

Re:Debian6.0 squeeze screenshots Tour

[Seumas]

Wow, in all the years I used Debian, I barely ever used a window manager. To the point that when you sai d"here are some screenshots", I was expecting a page full of screenshots of the command line (which is where I literally spent 99.9% of my twelve years with Debian). Seeing Debian used with a window manager like that almost feels like going to a strip club and seeing your sister come out on the stage!

Re:Debian6.0 squeeze screenshots Tour

[FrankNFurter]

It gets worse - Debian has a graphical installer now. I felt dirty using it to give Squeeze a try in a VM earlier.

Re:Debian6.0 squeeze screenshots Tour

[Eunuchswear]

Seeing Debian used with a window manager like that almost feels like going to a strip club and seeing your sister come out on the stage!

So, did you get a boner?

You can tell us.

Re:Some CPU microarchitectures dropped from Debian

[snookiex]

This "Armel" flavor is used, among other things, as a base for Maemo (and I guess for MeeGo too).

yay. two more variants that nobody will want.

[IGnatius T Foobar]

It's always amusing to see Debian fans complaining that the end users are always going for Ubuntu instead of "hey, why not choose Debian, it's the original and it's the best!" when Debian keeps making moves like this. It's already bad enough to think that a new Linux user would want a browser called "IceWeasel" or would understand that it's really just Firefox renamed because of some silly branding/icon tiff with the mozilla folks. Now they'll have the additional enjoyment of having a bunch of useful drivers removed, or even enjoying the wonderfulness of a nonstandard kernel!

Listen, it's ok to do stuff like this if you're really into teh sooper 100% free as in freedom rms-approved purity, but don't subsequently go complaining when ordinary end users don't want it because it's unusable to anyone other than a free software hacker.

Re:Some CPU microarchitectures dropped from Debian

[drinkypoo]

If you're going to drop Alpha, why not drop m68k?

What are we supposed to do with our old Alphas? Just set them on fire? Not that I have one any more.

Re:yay. two more variants that nobody will want.

[tyrione]

It's always amusing to see Debian fans complaining that the end users are always going for Ubuntu instead of "hey, why not choose Debian, it's the original and it's the best!" when Debian keeps making moves like this. It's already bad enough to think that a new Linux user would want a browser called "IceWeasel" or would understand that it's really just Firefox renamed because of some silly branding/icon tiff with the mozilla folks. Now they'll have the additional enjoyment of having a bunch of useful drivers removed, or even enjoying the wonderfulness of a nonstandard kernel! Listen, it's ok to do stuff like this if you're really into teh sooper 100% free as in freedom rms-approved purity, but don't subsequently go complaining when ordinary end users don't want it because it's unusable to anyone other than a free software hacker.

FreeBSD is building its tree using LLVM/Clang as well as GCC. I look forward to seeing Debian FreeBSD and all those packages giving the option of both LLVM and GCC. There will be plenty of people using them and I assume one LLVM 3.0 is out that Ubuntu will seriously be peaking in on what's going on with it.

Re:yay. two more variants that nobody will want.

[Anonymous Coward]

but don't subsequently go complaining when ordinary end users don't want it because it's unusable to anyone other than a free software hacker.

I think this is a big exaggeration, Debian is not unusable unless you are a free software hacker. I'm not one (I actually dislike GNU/zealots) and I find it very usable.

Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

Great timing. I used Debian for many years, and have been using Ubuntu lately. With all stupid Ubuntu decisions lately, like commercialising the downloads and replacing gnome's GUI with their own crap, I'm about ready to go back to Debian.

Re:yay. two more variants that nobody will want.

[johnw]

Can you provide an actual example of Debian fans complaining in the way you indicate, or is it all in your imagination?

Debian tends to be the way it is because Debian users (and builders) like it that way. Of course they do end up being rather smug as well, but complaints about those who choose to use lesser distributions are notably absent.

Re:Some CPU microarchitectures dropped from Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're going to drop Alpha, why not drop m68k?

What are we supposed to do with our old Alphas? Just set them on fire? Not that I have one any more.

It's volunteer work, so I guess it's a matter of having enough people interested in the platform
and willing to do the work.

Re:yay. two more variants that nobody will want.

[Anonymous Coward]

So Debian should degrade the entire OS for the care about newcomers? No thank you. Ubuntu does that pretty well already. Isn't that enough?

Re:Some CPU microarchitectures dropped from Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

m68k was dropped from Debian stable and remains only available through old stable releases and debian unstable. Ditt fate for Alpha and HPPA.

Re:Works well, but significantly higher requiremen

[DieByWire]

Squeeze has significantly higher minimal install requirements than Lenny, to the point it wouldn't fit on my Dockstar or my Dt360.

I'm running squeeze on a dockstar right now by booting from a USB stick. Some smart people made it easy for the rest of us.

Re:yay. two more variants that nobody will want.

[ffreeloader]

What a load of bs.

I started with Debian as total Linux noob back when Woody was the official release. I've stayed because Debian stable is so stable, and because the APT system is about as good as installers get. I've never had to wonder whether something wasn't working because it was buggy, or because I lacked the requisite knowledge to configure it correctly. That alone made learning Linux much, much easier and far more straightforward. I'd used a couple of other distros before I heard of Debian, but even simple things in the gui didn't work on them because of bugs and I got very frustrated with them. I never knew if any problem I ran across was a bug or because I'd done something stupid. With Debian I could know with a high degree of certainty that the problems I encountered were my own stupidity, not someone elses.

Debian was a breath of fresh air compared to all the bugs in other distros and Windows. I've played with Ubuntu a few times, but always abandoned it because it's not gotten any better over the years. It's always buggy, buggy, buggy. If I wanted a buggy OS I would have stayed with Windows. And, I find fewer bugs and newer software in the vast majority of cases in Debian testing and unstable than I do in Ubuntu.

Re:yay. two more variants that nobody will want.

[loufoque]

It's already bad enough to think that a new Linux user would want a browser called "IceWeasel" or would understand that it's really just Firefox renamed

It's already bad enough to think that a new Linux user would want a browser called Firefox.

Re:yay. two more variants that nobody will want.

[wisty]

Debian fans don't really care. They want a nice, predictable, stable server. This goal is antagonistic to having an exciting new dev box, which is what Ubuntu is for.

Re:yay. two more variants that nobody will want.

[rl117]

You should be aware that Debian is not allowed to use the trademark "Firefox" and also have the ability to apply patches such as security fixes(1). It's not called "Iceweasel" out of anything but necessity. You think this is a Debian-specific issue? Well, no, it's actually a major problem for all other distributors as well(2).

1
2

So the links are 5 years old, but the issues surrounding the trademarks haven't changed or gone away. Distributions shipping "Firefox" have abrogated their ability (and responsibility) to be able to apply changes and security updates to the software without the explicit concent of Mozilla Corporation.

Not exactly free software when it comes on those terms, is it?

Regarding the kernel, I assume you're referring to the non-free firmware removal. Maybe you haven't been fully informed that the non-free firmware was actually removed from the upstream kernel sources as well. As a result, the Debian kernels are far from "non-standard", they are standard!

Regards,
Roger

[FFS Slashdot, it's 2011 and you still can't handle UTF-8!]

Re:Some CPU microarchitectures dropped from Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

m86k was already dropped with the release of lenny, so two years ago.

modernisation

[Anonymous Coward]

I am delighted the Debian project has moved to more modern communication media such as blogs and identica, it was about time!. Although I found a bit spamming all the information in the identica feed and I would have rather having this in a post in the Blog.

Most RC-free release in a long time

[gringer]

I'm amazed that they stuck this release freeze out long enough to get the RC bugs for the testing release down to what looks like the lowest since the graph began tracking testing in 2004 -- I would like to believe that this means squeeze will end up being the most stable/reliable release so far.

Now that the release is done and the freeze is over, an upgrade of the Linux kernel (from 2.6.32 to 2.6.37) in unstable should be soon to follow. Also, Firefox (probably 3.5.9 -> 4) and LibreOffice (OOO 3.2.1 -> LO 3.3).

Re:Works well, but significantly higher requiremen

[MattBD]

I tried that on my pink PogoPlug but couldn't get it to work - install seemed to go fine but couldn't log in via SSH afterwards. Maybe that's why - could be Squeeze is too big for my PogoPlug. Might be worth trying it with Lenny instead.

Re:Some CPU microarchitectures dropped from Debian

[hedwards]

I'm guessing that there are more developers interested in maintaining the m68k port than the Alpha port. Or at least that's how that typically goes. Unless you've got a strange OS like NetBSD which is obsessed with running on absolutely every possible architecture from mainframes to wrist watches, some platforms tend to not have enough people with the hardware and interest to keep updating the branch.

Kernel in userspace?

[Frankie70]

'Debian GNU/kFreeBSD will port both a 32- and 64-bit PC version of the FreeBSD kernel into the Debian userspace

I don't get this? How can a kernel be in the userspace?

Re:Kernel in userspace?

[JonJ]

They're not running a kernel in userspace but that they are replacing Linux with FreeBSD while keeping the GNU userland from Debian GNU/Linux.

Re:Kernel in userspace?

[Tacvek]

Correct. The sentance "Debian GNU/kFreeBSD will port both a 32- and 64-bit PC version of the FreeBSD kernel into the Debian userspace" is very poorly worded.

Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is the kernel of FreeBSD but the same userspace as in all Debian ports.

Re:yay. two more variants that nobody will want.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's always amusing to see Debian fans complaining that the end users are always going for Ubuntu instead of "hey, why not choose Debian, it's the original and it's the best!" when Debian keeps making moves like this.

What moves? This is a release announcement. Do you mean that Debian should stop releasing stable versions?

It's already bad enough to think that a new Linux user would want a browser called "IceWeasel" or would understand that it's really just Firefox renamed because of some silly branding/icon tiff with the mozilla folks.

So go complain to Mozilla.

having a bunch of useful drivers removed

There are no drivers purposefully removed, FAFAIK. Are you referring to firmware, perhaps?

a nonstandard kernel!

Nonstandard? Are you referring to the kfreebsd kernel? It is very much standard as released by FreeBSD. Or do you mean the firmware-split in the Linux kernel? That feature has been upstream for years. Or maybe you mean that it's a non-NTOS kernel? I guess you're right on that one, but most Free people would consider that a plus.

Listen, it's ok to do stuff like this if you're really into teh sooper 100% free as in freedom rms-approved purity, but don't subsequently go complaining when ordinary end users don't want it because it's unusable to anyone other than a free software hacker.

Listen, it's ok to use any Linux you like, but don't subsequently go complaining when ordinary distributors release a Free operating system that you woudn't use.

Oh, and regarding Ubuntu: please get back to me when Ubuntu releases a supported server variant that runs on my NAS.

Compelled by FSF diff than by church or gov't?

[perpenso]

What's the advantage of running Debian with a BSD kernel instead of linux?

If you want to make money, and don't want to contribute back to the free software economy, its easier with a BSD license than a GPL license. Other than that...

That's a somewhat FUD'ish response. There are plenty of BSD users who contribute back. I'd say that one advantage is that you don't have a 3rd party (FSF) dictating terms to you, in particular a 3rd party that is on a quasi-religious campaign. I know the FSF claims otherwise, but they are not the free'er license. Restriction are restrictions, whether or not those restrictions have a socially beneficial goal and are altruistic. As GPL v3 introduced some controversy and drama, what will GPL v4 introduce. Some may not want to have to deal with it.

Now I realize some GPL fans are probably feeling their emotions rise and some zealots have already stopped reading and have started composing their flames :-), but if a church or government was compelling you to do good and altruistic things would you consider that freedom? Why is being compelled by the FSF any different?

Re:Compelled by FSF diff than by church or gov't?

[del_diablo]

Lets say your company adopts a BSD project and a GPL project.....
The difference is that on the GPL you can only keep the code in house if you do not want to give out improvements.
BSD? Rip, sell, earn money, do not contribute back.
Or... at the least you can do that. Which does not help the community.
But yes.... zealots are fun.

Re:Compelled by FSF diff than by church or gov't?

[perpenso]

Lets say your company adopts a BSD project and a GPL project..... The difference is that on the GPL you can only keep the code in house if you do not want to give out improvements. BSD? Rip, sell, earn money, do not contribute back. Or... at the least you can do that. Which does not help the community.

Well for a limited definition of "helping the community". GPL'd projects have directly benefitted by incorporating BSD code and indirectly benefitted from the knowledge and experience of UC Berkeley's pioneering work in developing a *truly* free and open UNIX implementation. Apple, Sun, SGI and other have advanced the world of computing using BSD based code *and* they have also given back in various ways *including* giving code to the community. For example Apple HFS, which I believe has been incorporated into FreeBSD. And some have argued that some GPL folks take without giving back. One key BSD developer writes:
"GPL fans said the great problem we would face is that companies would take our BSD code, modify it, and not give back. Nope -- the great problem we face is that people would wrap the GPL around our code, and lock us out in the same way that these supposed companies would lock us out. Just like the Linux community, we have many companies giving us code back, all the time. But once the code is GPL'd, we cannot get it back. Ironic."
http://kerneltrap.org/OpenBSD/Stealing_Versus_Sharing_Code

Basically I'm saying that the meme that GPL gives back and BSD does not is false. Things are far more complicated than that.

Re:Compelled by FSF diff than by church or gov't?

[Kjella]

I think the short summary is that I can't change OS X any more than I can change Windows, no matter how much BSD code is in it. There's no "open source" freedoms to BSD-derivatives.

Either you can say that those freedoms aren't important and that open source exists to produce such great derivatives and bring all software forward, open and closed source. BSD code is more of a toolbox for other developers than something normal users have access to.

Or you can say that those features are important, and that running *BSD using only BSD code is the ideal. That in fact most people should run the "pure" tools because that gives them greater freedom.

Neither of those positions really make sense to me. In the first case, you essentially do free work for the derivatives developing their product. In the second case, you want more open source code yet divert most of the development into writing proprietary forks.

As for the GPLv3 controversy, yes it became important because there's an important distinction between being able to fix your hardware and using the code in some other hardware. They used to be one and the same before signature checking hardware and operating systems. Linux may just like to look at what others are doing and improve his kernel, but I think what most people want is the ability to fix their own hardware. So while the prominence was great, I think the actual divide is minor.

Re:Compelled by FSF diff than by church or gov't?

[Pharmboy]

I think the short summary is that I can't change OS X any more than I can change Windows, no matter how much BSD code is in it.

To be fair, there is still Darwin. Apple only releases source now, and could do more, but that is still infinitely more than MS does with their source code.

Re:Compelled by FSF diff than by church or gov't?

[gratuitous_arp]

That's a somewhat FUD'ish response. There are plenty of BSD users who contribute back.

He was not arguing that the number of users who contribute is too small. If you want to use/improve code and *not* contribute back, it is easier to use code that is under a BSD license. Juniper and Apple are the two big examples of what he means. I'll grant you all of the contributions that these companies may have made over the years; to argue over what they have or have not contributed would be missing the point. The point is that the opportunity exists to take someone else's code, modify it, sell it, and never contribute back or tell your users what has changed, because this is permitted by the BSD-family licenses.

Arguing against this is analogous to arguing against a law forbidding murder (or theft, etc.) because hardly anyone does it anyway.

I know the FSF claims otherwise, but they are not the free'er license. Restriction are restrictions, whether or not those restrictions have a socially beneficial goal and are altruistic.

The GPL gives freedom to the community (or to the code itself) over freedom to individual users. I agree that this is not always conveyed accurately by the FSF. These restrictions are the very reason why I, and I suspect many others, license our code under the GPL or contribute to GPL software. A restriction is not bad simply because it is a restriction. Some restrictions are particularly good, which I will talk about later. You haven't argued against this yet, so I will assume you know what I mean. I can clarify if necessary.

I agree that a BSD license is more free. The freedom taken away by the GPL involves other people's ability to "leech" from the community. Everyone likes this except the leeches and those who simply don't want to be told what they may or may not do. I can understand both of these (very different) approaches to not liking the GPL, but I don't share either of them. (For the record, I am not suggesting that you are a leech; the argument you are advancing fits into the second camp.)

I don't *need* to be told not to leech, and I appreciate that I have a recourse against those who do.

if a church or government was compelling you to do good and altruistic things would you consider that freedom?

No, I would consider it the underpinning of a civil society. Not all freedom is good. For instance, giving other people the freedom to commit horrendous acts (child abuse, murder, theft, etc.) without retribution is not a good thing. Realizing this, many governments have laws against such things.

I do not need compulsion in order to act with, at minimum, a basic civility toward my fellow creatures, but I recognize that there are some who do -- we call them sociopaths.

Why is being compelled by the FSF any different?

Same thing holds for the FSF. I don't need to be compelled to see the value in the GPL. It expressed the wishes I have for my code very well. I think I am primarily glad that the GPL exists for these reasons:

1) I know that my code is legally protected against those would take advantage of me, my work, my code, and my community.
2) I have a legal recourse if others do attempt to take advantage of the above, and there are powerful, user-made organizations that can protect the community as a whole.
3) I know that the community will continue to thrive as a result of this security.

Re:Compelled by FSF diff than by church or gov't?

[Plombo]

That's a somewhat FUD'ish response. There are plenty of BSD users who contribute back. I'd say that one advantage is that you don't have a 3rd party (FSF) dictating terms to you, in particular a 3rd party that is on a quasi-religious campaign. I know the FSF claims otherwise, but they are not the free'er license.

The FSF does not control or even sponsor the Linux kernel. And the Linux kernel is the only component that is replaced in Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. As the name would imply, the FSF-controlled GNU software is still there.

Re:Compelled by FSF diff than by church or gov't?

[perpenso]

The point is that the opportunity exists to take someone else's code, modify it, sell it, and never contribute back or tell your users what has changed, because this is permitted by the BSD-family licenses.

It seems GPL enthusiasts have committed similar offenses and have taken from a community without giving back to that community. "Leeching" as you might say. One key BSD developer writes:
"GPL fans said the great problem we would face is that companies would take our BSD code, modify it, and not give back. Nope -- the great problem we face is that people would wrap the GPL around our code, and lock us out in the same way that these supposed companies would lock us out. Just like the Linux community, we have many companies giving us code back, all the time. But once the code is GPL'd, we cannot get it back. Ironic."
http://kerneltrap.org/OpenBSD/Stealing_Versus_Sharing_Code

Arguing against this is analogous to arguing against a law forbidding murder (or theft, etc.) because hardly anyone does it anyway.

Careful, you are dangerously close to demagoguery with a comparison to murder. A manipulative appeal to emotions not logic. Regarding "theft", I think *many* people around here would disagree if they were honest and applied their music sharing / RIAA arguments - basically there is no theft since no one was deprived of their property. A more appropriate analogy would be a law enforcing the 10% tithing to the poor that many churches recommend. OK, not a perfect analogy but certainly better than murder and theft. :-)

Re:Compelled by FSF diff than by church or gov't?

[gratuitous_arp]

Careful, you are dangerously close to demagoguery with a comparison to murder. A manipulative appeal to emotions not logic.

The analogy illustrated the problem with argument you gave; it was not comparing non-free software development with murder...

The first poster said that if you want to make money without contributing to the project, it is easier with a BSD license.

You said, rightly, that many BSD users do contribute back.

In my first two paragraphs, I stated that regardless of how many people or companies decide to contribute code back to the project, the potential for user exploitation exists within BSD licensed code.

The same argument you advanced could be used to say that a crime -- any crime -- does not need a law against it because it isn't often committed. The crime used as demonstration is unimportant (I intended the "etc" to convey this). The number of people who don't do a bad thing is not important; it's still a bad thing. The GPL folks want protection against such people because they don't want to be locked out of their code.

I will leave it up to the mods to determine if I was not clear enough. I think the rest of the post shows that I am not interested in manipulation, but a debate about the subject that has been raised.

It seems GPL enthusiasts have committed similar offenses and have taken from a community without giving back to that community.

In my eyes, the real danger that exists in the gap between the GPL and the BSD licenses are the companies who can take BSD-licensed code, modify it, and re-release modified binaries without source. For me, this is why I am extremely hesitant to contribute to such projects.

Under both licenses, anyone could grab the code and do whatever they want with it in-house or for personal use. Only under the BSD licenses (and similar ones) can you distribute modified code without telling your users what has changed. I'm surprised that Theo didn't take a stance on that, rather than on the code that he retained access to. His bigger problem seemed to be the thing with Alan Cox, which was a case of someone either not understanding or not caring about the license terms. Both are problems.

GPL people don't trust the huge companies to play nice -- not all of them do, and the rest of them are not all nice all the time -- and I don't particularly want them benefiting from my code if they aren't.

Re:Compelled by FSF diff than by church or gov't?

[perpenso]

In my eyes, the real danger that exists in the gap between the GPL and the BSD licenses are the companies who can take BSD-licensed code, modify it, and re-release modified binaries without source. For me, this is why I am extremely hesitant to contribute to such projects. Under both licenses, anyone could grab the code and do whatever they want with it in-house or for personal use. Only under the BSD licenses (and similar ones) can you distribute modified code without telling your users what has changed. I'm surprised that Theo didn't take a stance on that, rather than on the code that he retained access to.

Actually it seems that BSD developers like Theo take no stance on corporate use of their code because that is OK with them. Their goal is to improve the quality and security of end user's software in practice, take Mac OS X for instance - arguably the best and most successful desktop *NIX. They want to bring technical excellence to the computing world, not an ideology. Think of how much better the computing world might be had Microsoft adopted BSD code rather than rolled their own. The "leachers", corporate or GPL re-branders, are the cost that Theo and other BSD devs seem to accept in order to deliver this excellence. The stance he takes with the GPL re-branders seems to involve not so much the act of leaching but the hypocrisy it represents.

Re:Compelled by FSF diff than by church or gov't?

[EsbenMoseHansen]

As long as you call people who disagree with you quasi-religious, I will doubt your ability to look objectively at the matter at hand.

As for (L)GPL and BSD-licensed: Both are terms, both are written in plain English. You can take or leave either one, and no one can dictate anything except as stated in those terms. Remember, your freedom to carry guns might well curtail my freedom to walk in the park after dark: the world is not a simple place.

Re:Compelled by FSF diff than by church or gov't?

[Richy_T]

Remember, my unfounded fear of gun owners might well curtail my freedom to walk in the park after dark

FTFY

Re:Compelled by FSF diff than by church or gov't?

[EsbenMoseHansen]

Touched a nerve there, did I? Tell me, do you really believe that I should fear no gun owners at all? Even the mad, the sad and the jealous? Can you be such a fool?

But if you prefer, here is one the Americans seem to prefer: My freedom to shout "fire" in a crowded cinema curtails your freedom to be able to walk to the cinema untrampled. The world is not a simple place, with simple truths.

Lenny

[Frankie70]

Just finished an upgrade from etch to lenny a few weeks back!

Re:Lenny

[CAIMLAS]

Yeah, me too. The machine in question is a lowly 700Mhz Celeron with 386Mb and has been humming away happily for the better part of a decade (2002) - the original install was migrated from an older 233Mhz w/ 128Mb (Debian 2 or 3, I think), and it's been upgraded since that point. This, IMO, is one of the biggest strengths debian has: upgrades are literally painless to the point of never really needing to worry about it.

It's amazing how much longevity Debian releases have, even though they're considered 'old and behind the curve'. As long as the hardware in question isn't cutting edge in some fashion (eg. a new screamer of a workstation) I typically put Debian on there and it's happy for a couple years.

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you prefer the GNU tools? I'm genuinely curious, as I find that the BSD userland is much more pleasant to use and on the whole more complete too. Let alone better documented.

Still, you might have a point, so please elaborate.

Re:Why?

[Tacvek]

I find GNU Make generally superior to legacy Make implementations, especially if I am avoiding the autotools.For example, I can set up completely automated header detection and tracking, not needing "make dep" runs or the equivalent.

The GNU project's 'less' is my preferred pager, despite the fact that I don't use most of it's advanced features.

And then generally I prefer to have the GNU userland because mst of the utilities have extended features, that various scripts may be taking advantage of (the whole reason why having a 'gawk' application, or 'gsed' application is still relatively common on BSD systems). If I'm going to install GNU awk as 'gawk', and GNU make as 'gmake' anyway, why not just install them as 'awk' and 'make' and be done with it?

The documentation for GNU is generally just fine, as long as you reference documentation with 'info' rather than 'man', (info will display the TexInfo manual if present, and falls back on the man page automatically).

Of course I'd also be very interested to know about what you find incomplete about the GNU userland. (If nothing else it tells me to look for versions of those utilities in my distro. It is surprising hard to find any information trying to directly compare BSD and GNU userlands.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is generally true that the GNU tools have more functionality. I'm not sure why I said that the BSD userland is more complete, I can't remember typing that let alone why I did. But, and I know it is highly subjective, I think this extra functionality is not always as well polished and/or thought out. Can't quite put a finger on it, though, it may well be just 'feeling uncomfortable'. The BSD tools 'feel' more orthogonal, does that make sense? Maybe I'm just used to it and not as flexible as I once was... :-)

I stand by my assertion about documentation. The info tool is a monstrosity, and every time I used it the content was lacking also. Again, I have no specific examples and that makes this just an anecdote. Weak argument, I know.

So, to summarize, it may well be that I'm just less used to the GNU tools making me feel uncomfortable around them. That's my problem, not a problem of the toolset itself.

Last, as a pet peeve, I will tell you that I absolutely despise the long argument format that GNU uses. All that "tool --my-option=3 --dont-do-this --or-that-either" is just plain ugly... ;-)

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Last, as a pet peeve, I will tell you that I absolutely despise the long argument format that GNU uses. All that "tool --my-option=3 --dont-do-this --or-that-either" is just plain ugly... ;-)

being able to intermix option and non-option arguments is useful though.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

True. Maybe I should give GNU another honest try.

How about that, maybe this old dog can learn a new trick! ;-)

Re:Why?

[Tacvek]

It is generally true that the GNU tools have more functionality. I'm not sure why I said that the BSD userland is more complete, I can't remember typing that let alone why I did. But, and I know it is highly subjective, I think this extra functionality is not always as well polished and/or thought out.

I'll buy that. The newer stuff does tend to take a more expansive view of the "one thing" an appication should do, and arguably that thing is not always as "done well" as the traditional unix utilities are.

Can't quite put a finger on it, though, it may well be just 'feeling uncomfortable'. The BSD tools 'feel' more orthogonal, does that make sense? Maybe I'm just used to it and not as flexible as I once was... :-)

They are definitely less orthogonal than the original Unix tools, which is sometimes convenient, but does make it easier to end up using the wrong tool for the job.

Re:Some CPU microarchitectures dropped from Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

The proper way of running Alphas is with OpenVMS. :)

Squeeze

[jazzmans]

Oh, Yeah.

finally updated my server from lenny to squeeze. Nice work Debian! I run sid on my workstations/netbooks/laptops, but stable is my server and 'friends' computer installs.

The new website is nice. Clean, simple.

XFCE for the win.

jaz

Re:Firefox Updates

[TaoPhoenix]

Wait, is this the reason that when I tried to upgrade Firefox "like normal" on ubuntu I couldn't do it without major new package component upgrades? I'm the arctypical nervous newbie, and I went to go get an update, and got back messages that it wouldn't update without other new pieces.

Re:Some CPU microarchitectures dropped from Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

m68k was dropped a long time ago. While it is true that official support has been dropped, they still exist in Debian sid (they haven't even been moved to debian-ports.org) and may come back if their situation improves.
Last but not least, there are other ports in preparation and some may become part of Wheezy:
http://www.debian-ports.org/
(at least there's an intent to move from armel to armhf)

Re:Debian/BSD love nest found in Route 40 flophous

[arose]

You can thank the people shouting down everyone using GNU/Linux or GNU+Linux. Here's a "Linux" (Debian will still act and feel like Debian, everyday usage wouldn't see any difference), that doesn't actually use Linux.

Re:Some CPU microarchitectures dropped from Debian

[chowdahhead]

They began the ARMHF port which will eventually add another architecture, when they eventually support it. Considering where ARM is going, this addition will be needed. Perhaps dropping some architectures is necessary to keep moving forward.

Re:Firefox Updates

[rl117]

This is one probable reason. If there's a security problem, then the distributor has the following options:

- wait until Mozilla releases a new version containing the security fix [but this may contain other, unwanted, changes]
- backport the security fix, but then get explicit approval from Mozilla before being allowed to make the release [may take too long]
- backport the security fix immediately, but don't wait for approval from Mozilla [but requires renaming to something other than "Firefox" to be compliant with the trademarks].

Additionally, Firefox and its related components are so complex and intertwined than it's often simply not possible to backport a security fix. In this situation the only choice is to upgrade everything to the latest version.

From Debian's point of view, you don't really want to push major new versions into a stable release, and especially for a security update. You want a minimal, targeted, testable fix which fixes a single issue only. That's one of the reasons why Debian chose to rename "Firefox" to "Iceweasel", because otherwise it is simply not permitted to release a security update.

It's also worth pointing out that distributors such as Debian also make changes to software to better integrate it into their system. "Firefox" would prohibit that as well, which is one reason why it's very much a standalone application that doesn't integrate properly into any desktop environment, and reimplements a whole bunch of the common functionality they provide.

Regards,
Roger

simpsons parody of the fishsticks gag

[iggymanz]

Homer: Look Bart! A Fresh Release of Unprocessed Ubuntu!

(I love Debian for servers, but for desktop Ubuntu is smoother)

The other way around...

[Anonymous Coward]

For the past few years I've been working on going the other way around from Debian/BSD. My system has a Linux kernel but a whole lot of BSD binaries (I've replaced GNU coreutils, tar, gzip, findutils, init, etc. with BSD versions).

Not everything can be replaced, but a lot of the userland works pretty well with BSD versions: some programs stupidly assume GNU tools and need to be patched, but it's been working fine.

Re:The other way around...

[godrik]

I actually see two main things coming out of the freebsd kernel on debian.

1/ having a really good kernel without the stupid port system.
I know that sounds like a troll. But I really elieve linux is a crappy kernel. It is supposed to be monolithic so everything got thrown in the kernel. And now, we realized it is not going to work, so we start using micro kernel types techniques such as network manager, udev, hal... That's not the way to go with a monolithic kernel.

On the other hand freebsd has an awful packing system in my opinion. I need to install weird packages all the time and I don't want to spend so much time compiling everything. I think debian really rocks at having a lot of packages that are overall well compiled with appropriate dependencies. I expect a lot out of debian/freebsd

2/ using a different kernel is likely to activate different code path. That's a great thing for debugging purpose. As parent said, that will help to find GNU dependent code and probably linux dependent assumption. That's a good thing for make our tools more reliable.

Debian: here is an attaboy from me!

Re:The other way around...

[Doctor O]

On the other hand freebsd has an awful packing system in my opinion

Nah. pkg_add -r [packetname] installs binary packages just as with apt-get install [packetname].

But I agree BSD is a bit lacking in documentation of everyday tasks such as upgrading software (both in ports and packages). For example, there's a multitude of ports dealing with port upgrading, but I find none of them intuitive. For some I never understood of which parts they consist and how to use them. In the end I just asked a BSD-savvy friend to set it up for me.

For the record, that was on 6.0 and it might have become better, but said 6.0 installation still rocks like gibraltar (it's a web and mail server), runs the current versions of everything (except FreeBSD itself, obviousy *g*) so there's no need to upgrade. I plan on playing with 8.2 when I have the time, but that's what's great with BSD - it runs and runs and runs and runs...

Oh and BTW, my old employer is still running the FreeBSD 4.8 box with exim as a mailserver. If my coworker didn't lie to me, it now has uptime of around five years of pretty heavy use.

Re:The other way around...

[badkarmadayaccount]

Someone please graft a CDDL style per-file clause, and header exemption (for binary modules without ugly wrappers) to AGPLv3, and start pushing it, I'm tired of this licensing schism.

Re:The other way around...

[badkarmadayaccount]

Sounds like someone just needs an apt front-end for pkg_*.

Software management

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing that makes FreeBSD so annoying for those who just want an install-and-forget server is that software updates/patches are a major production with FreeBSD. That's why I eventually went from FreeBSD to Debian even though, at the time, the Linux kernel frankly stank compared to the FreeBSD kernel. With Debian 5 just stuff the correct magic into /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/02periodic and it just happens. With earlier Debians just stuff 'apt-get update' into a cron.daily script and it just happens. I get an email from cron on my web/email/DNS server (running Debian Stable) every day about what did or did not occur (thus why I knew when I checked my email this morning that Debian 5 had moved to stable -- the update needs some user intervention so I had to go in via ssh and finish it), but by and large it's install-and-forget.

Re:Works well, but significantly higher requiremen

[iggymanz]

maybe sshd not installed? that's been the default of debian

try a

sudo apt-get install openssh-server

Hurray for Debian

[Dennis Sheil]

Debian has come a long way from the days when they were struggling to get sarge released. They are back on track schedule-wise.

I am happy that they are going to split free and non-free packages in an easy way. If some Stallman-approved free software distro does a fork of Debian, it can now be a small fork, allowing for greater cooperation between Debian and the fork.

I was worried squeeze was going to be released without my bug fix being applied. But with a few days to spare, they managed to get it in there, excellent!

While I use Ubuntu a lot, one of the many nice things about Debian is how agnostic it is. If you want a bare bones system, install one. If you want a robust system, install a lot of packages. Use Gnome if you want, use KDE if you want, use Gnome with both GTK+ and QT libraries installed, or KDE with GTK+ and QT libraries installed. Or use good old FVWM.

Re:Some CPU microarchitectures dropped from Debian

[iggymanz]

the last PA-RISC (aka HP/PA) was built in 2008.

Ah well, people running those can just switch to one of the BSD

Re:Some CPU microarchitectures dropped from Debian

[Randle_Revar]

m68k was dropped from the official release as of etch

Really excited, then...

[CAIMLAS]

I got really excited when I read this at first, but then I realized it's probably going to have many of the same bugs that the FreeBSD kernel has surrounding the various subsystems (jails) and drivers (recent Intel ethernet crashing, USB, etc. that still don't work for the better part of a year), as well as crippling limitations as it regards adaptability on filesystems (ext*, NTFS, NFS - all limiting) and the like.

i wonder if they managed to get ZFS to work fully with the userland utilities written? That would be the biggest point that might pull me over to give it a go.

Re:Really excited, then...

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian has the regular zfsutils that FreeBSD normally has (which, afaik, are ported from Solaris themselves).

Re:Works well, but significantly higher requiremen

[MattBD]

Logging in via SSH is the only way to get into the PogoPlug, so that's not an option, although I've remastered Ubuntu images in the past to include extra software so I could probably do the same with Debian. And I think it's something more serious than that - it doesn't request an IP address from the router so it could be networking is disabled. Doesn't matter that much as I've gotten the Arch-based Plugbox Linux working on it. It's just I'd rather use a Debian-based distro as Arch's repositories don't seem to be nearly as extensive - there's no procmail, for instance, and I'm using mine as a mail server.

asinine, but then again, it's Debian

[markhahn]

Debian is the socks-and-sandals distro, and this change lets them cast off that embarrassing reliance on the conformist, ideologically impure Linux kernel. WOO! great leap forward.

Will this complicate licensing?

[walterbyrd]

In the post scox-scam era, licensing is such a BFD. I have to wonder if there will any complications over conflicts between BSD and GPL licensing.

Re:Will this complicate licensing?

[Tacvek]

With the exception of code under the old 4 clause BSD license, all BSD licensed code is fully compatible with the GPL, so I'm having trouble picturing any problems, especially since even the FSF (who generally interprets the concept of derivative works very widely) agrees that a kernel's licensing in no way affects the userland.

Re:Will this complicate licensing?

[walterbyrd]

My understanding is that anything you put in GPL code becomes GPL. And GPL differs from BSD in that, BSD can taken and used in a closed source application.

Re:Will this complicate licensing?

[Cloud K]

This is what I've been wondering too. I thought Debian was pretty much THE official representation of GPL (it has the GNU/ and vRMS and everything). I don't actually know Stallman's views on BSD but I'd have thought he'd probably hate it because it can be used to assist the "evils" of closed source. Seems odd for the very core of the GNU/GPL flagship distro to switch to FreeBSD.

Re:Will this complicate licensing?

[Millennium]

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer. But as I understand things, code incorporated into GPL code only becomes GPL if it isn't already under some other license that doesn't conflict with the GPL (this is the whole "GPL-compatibility" thing). BSD-licensed code doesn't conflict with the GPL, so it doesn't become GPL, though to avoid confusion it should be clearly marked as being under a different license.

Re:Will this complicate licensing?

[DragonWriter]

With the exception of code under the old 4 clause BSD license, all BSD licensed code is fully compatible with the GPL.

That's certainly a popular claim, although by the text of both licenses, no form of BSD is GPL2 compatible, since both the 3-clause and 2-clause BSD licenses include terms that are not part of the GPL that are required to be followed in any distribution, and the GPL2 specifically prohibits adding additional terms. One of the changes with GPL3 was allowing additional terms of the type in the BSD licenses, so 2- or 3-clause BSD licenses are GPL3 compatible with appropriate additional terms.

Re:Will this complicate licensing?

[arose]

My understanding is that anything you put in GPL code becomes GPL.

More precisely, anything you combine with GPL code (as in the same codebase) has to not place additional restrictions on use or distribution. The 3 clause BSD is generally agreed to be compatible with that. In short, there wouldn't be licensing issues even if GPL code was added to the kernel, neither license restricts what you can run it with, so there really isn't a problem.

Re:Will this complicate licensing?

[Tacvek]

The usual handwave for BSD is to claim that the BSD licenses qualify as part of the copyright notice, which the GPL mandates must be retained. I would fully agree that is stretching things a bit.

The GPLv3 does definitely make things less ambiguous.

Re:Will this complicate licensing?

[DragonWriter]

The usual handwave for BSD is to claim that the BSD licenses qualify as part of the copyright notice, which the GPL mandates must be retained.

The GPL doesn't require retaining existing copyright notices on derivative works, it requires the creator of the derivative work to place a copyright notice. The BSD license (all forms) requires retaining the original copyright license and the licensing term require downstream licensees to do the same and a specifically-worded warranty disclaimer (with a different wording than the one required by the GPL.) The 3-clause BSD license also has and requires inclusion of an additional licensing term regarding endorsements (and the old 4-clause BSD requires yet another licensing term regarding advertising to be included.)

Its pretty bizarre to claim that the 4-clause BSD license with its additional terms is not GPL2-compatible but the 2- and 3-clause licenses, which also contain additional terms that must be included as licensing conditions, is GPL2-compatible.
 

Re:Will this complicate licensing?

[Tacvek]

The exact terms are "provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty". An appropriate notice for a derived work would inherently include the copyright notice of the original. Of course considering the BSD license to be a copyright statement that must be preserved is still questionable.

Under this sort of analysis the endorsement term is considered to not really be a condition of the 3-clause BSD license (despite the text clearly claiming it is a condition), but rather an explanation that you are not getting the right to use the names for endorsements or promotions, and since by default you don't have that right, you cannot use the names for endorsements or promotions.

I fully agree that that one is more or less patently absurd, but that does appear to be the logic. I'll point out that courts have devised even more absurd legal fictions in the past in order to reach the desired conclusion.

Re:Works well, but significantly higher requiremen

[iggymanz]

oh! now I see, no rs-232c port on that one, and if no usb-serial in kernel can't do that either

Re:Works well, but significantly higher requiremen

[MattBD]

Fortunately it's no longer an issue as just a few minutes ago I discovered the deb2targz tool, which converts deb packages to tarballs, and used that to install the version of procmail from Debian Lenny for armel, and it seems to work OK. Still wish I could get Debian running on the PogoPlug, but Arch will do.

old argument I know, but GNU/Linux?

[fikx]

"'There are many goodies in Debian 6.0 GNU/Linux " , really? wouldn't it be more a accurate to write it "GNU/Debian 6.0 Linux' or is it enough for the Linux kernel to use the GPL to make it GNU/Linux?

Re:old argument I know, but GNU/Linux?

[atomicxblue]

I'm surprised someone hasn't started calling it "GNU/Debian GNU/6.0 GNU/Linux GNU GNU GNU"

Re:old argument I know, but GNU/Linux?

[dondelelcaro]

GNU/Linux

GNU is the userland, Linux is the kernel. We distribute versions of Debian which do not use the Linux kernel, but use GNU userland, like GNU/kfreebsd. They're all Debian, though.

Re:old argument I know, but GNU/Linux?

[judeancodersfront]

We all know what it means, and most of us don't use it. It's just Stallman trying to ride a successful brand name.

Re:old argument I know, but GNU/Linux?

[dondelelcaro]

We all know what it means, and most of us don't use it.

That's perfectly fine, but your preference is entirely orthogonal to Debian's usage.

It's just Stallman trying to ride a successful brand name.

RMS doesn't have any authority over how Debian labels its distributions. You may disagree with his pressure on other people to acknowledge the work that the GNU project has done in making a Free Software operating system a possibility, but that argument is irrelevant to Debian's distribution naming policy.

Re:old argument I know, but GNU/Linux?

[judeancodersfront]

I'm not making an argument, I'm pointing out why GNU/Linux is used. If Stallman didn't throw a fit and demand its usage distros like Debian would just call it Linux. To say otherwise is intellectual dishonesty.

BS!!! Re:Well done!

[Anonymous Coward]

...another cornerstone of the Free Software.

You mean another cornerstone of Free Software bites the dust.

Debian Squeeze installs Microsoft's patent-trap MONO.

Period.

Re:BS!!! Re:Well done!

[KugelKurt]

Then delete Mono.

Re:BS!!! Re:Well done!

[EsbenMoseHansen]

Heres a pro tip for installing Debian: Do NOT select any of the suggested bundles, especially not "desktop". If you want to avoid Mono, install KDE or some other environment, or use Gnome without Mono.

Re:Some CPU microarchitectures dropped from Debian

[guacamole]

If dropping support for or delaying the release of some obscure and outdated CPU architecture makes releases faster, I'd say that's great. Debian always supported more architectures than other mainstream distributions, but they clearly placed more emphasis on hardware that most people actually use. There is still NetBSD and some other niix-like distributions for people with more outdated hardware.

Re:Works well, but significantly higher requiremen

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're running a system that's low on disk space, sometimes it's not possible to do a major upgrade (such as from Lenny -> Squeeze) because there isn't enough disk space left to be running the current Stable version and also download ALL of the packages in order to do the major upgrade.

For those occasions, it's possible to do the upgrade in steps. Usually what I end up doing is using the text-based Aptitude package manager to upgrade the lower-level dependencies first (such as libc6), and then when disk space is too low run 'apt-get clean' to get rid of the unneeded downloaded packages that have been installed, then repeat the process.

I don't know that this would have helped you, but I'm mentioning this as it wasn't 100% clear if this was an upgrade problem or an initial install problem.

  -- Chris

Re:Works well, but significantly higher requiremen

[drinkypoo]

You should be able to install debian from plugbox... My CA-42 cable skills came up short. Still not sure what that is about, maybe the cable I bought was just too lame. Or maybe I am, but I positively identified the ground and after that it's just RX and TX.

Fail

[GoochOwnsYou]

You do realise that Gentoo is the one that you compile.

back to the future ...

[juan_d_b]

"After two years of work, the Debian Project has announced the release of Debian 6.0.... that looks, well, like a 2 years ago release ... this release reminds me a lot the back to the future movies ...

FYI for my fellow kde 3 fans.... go get Trinity!

[Anonymous Coward]

And give her bottom a good spa.... ooo wait we are talking about linux....

Its ok, I thought the world was ending too, but then I found http://trinity.pearsoncomputing.net/ its a fork of kde3

I don't mind change, but i(we) are debian users, change is slow(stable), and only supposed to be for the better. (debian is getting a little hippy for me)

Re:Some CPU microarchitectures dropped from Debian

[lucifuge31337]

What are we supposed to do with our old Alphas? Just set them on fire? Not that I have one any more.

I think that's the point. As much as I like diving into old hardware, at some point I started getting rid of it because of space limitations and the simple fact that it's not feasible, even with new distro support, to do anything of consequence on it that can't be done cheaper (read: electric power) and faster on even the wimpiest of several year old cast off (free or nearly) servers and/or laptops.

Re:Works well, but significantly higher requiremen

[cafelatte]

Have you tried installing with LXDE as the desktop environment? That's much more lightweight than KDE or Gnome. I'm not sure of how significant the disk space saving is though.

This is great

[Trogre]

Thank you again, Debian team, for providing the most stable (in the no-unexpected-changes sense of the word) distro I know of.

One question though:
Grub 2 as default - for the love of all things good, why?

Re:This is great

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed on the Grub 2 bit. I found it so easy to work with Grub and maintain it and get rid of obsolete entries easily and add things as needed. Grub 2 is a real PITA to maintain.

Re:This is great

[Anonymous Coward]

because GRUB legacy blows horsecock

Re:This is great

[wouterke]

Because Grub1 is horrible.

See http://bugs.debian.org/grub (the open bugreports against grub) and, especially, http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=239111#237 (a particularly telling example) if you don't believe me.

Re:This is great

[Trogre]

Grub1 may be horrible, and Grub2 might have the cleanest code on the planet, but I have to ask, have you ever tried to actually configure Grub2? I'm going to assume not, otherwise you most likely wouldn't be making the case for it.

Grub1:

1. Has never given me issues that Grub2 could remedy. I do not use XFS so the above issue doesn't apply.
2. Has in exactly one instance conflicted with DRM software within Windows on a clients laptop, clobbering stage1.5 in the hidden post-MBR space. Grub2 also failed in exactly the same way on the same machine so no benefit was gained there. Grub-legacy went back on pretty quickly.
3. Has a sane configuration system. Grub2 has one of the worst messes of configuration files I have ever seen.

With apologies to Trey Parker and Debian...

[neiras]

Deb-i-aaaaaaaan...
Deb-i-aaaaaaaan...

Debian, FUCK YEAH
Releasin' again to save the motherfuckin' day yeah
Debian, FUCK YEAH
Freedom is the only way yeah

Pity those who use Ubuntu
Their purple desktops look like poo, yeah

Debian, FUCK YEAH

So lick my ports, and Squeeze my mouse ball,

Debian, FUCK YEAH

What you gonna do when we package you now,
it's the dream that we all share
it's the hope for tomorrow

FUCK YEAH

apt-get! FUCK YEAH!
Free kernel! FUCK YEAH!
Lackin' firmware! FUCK YEAH!
New Site! FUCK YEAH!
Space Fun! FUCK YEAH! ....

Original here.

Re:Some CPU microarchitectures dropped from Debian

[petermgreen]

If you're going to drop Alpha, why not drop m68k?
They already did.

There comes a point where the slow march of software "bloat" gets too much for older hardware and/or there is no longer sufficiant porters to keep the port in what debian considers a releasable state. It's sad but that is the way things go in a project like debian.

Arm was a special case because they kept support for the majority of arm devices but did so through a new port due to some serious deficiancies in the old arm linux port. It was always planned that offering two different arm ports in the same release was a transitional state that would only last one release.

Re:yay. two more variants that nobody will want.

[deek]

Actually, some Debian fans, like me, like to run the testing or unstable distributions of Debian, which gives the exciting new dev box feel. OK, I don't run pure testing; I pin my system to testing, and then pick and choose from unstable as I need. I've even installed the occasional experimental package. Sure, my system is a hodgepodge of packages, but it works and works well. I've had surprisingly few issues out of it, and where I have had issues, it's always been fixed by a package downgrade.

That's what I really like about Debian. It gives me choice to have the packages that I want, in a reliable and manageable manner. I can even download packages from source, and compile it on my system, if I were that way inclined. OK, not as easily as Gentoo or FreeBSD (the two other source systems that I've used), but the option is there.

Re:Some CPU microarchitectures dropped from Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

68k processors are still in mass production, and widely used.

No Alpha processors are in production, and few remain in use for the simple reason that anyone paying the $$$ for an Alpha did so in exchange for high performance, which they must now get elsewhere.

We get it already!

[atomicxblue]

GNU contributed code to Linux, but the fact of the matter is, the code has moved on from their original codebase.

Let's just call it Linux and move on...

/let the flame war begin! :D

Re:We get it already!

[marcosdumay]

"GNU contributed code to Linux..."

Thanks for clarifying upfront that you have no idea what you are talking about.

Re:Some CPU microarchitectures dropped from Debian

[aiht]

This "Armel" flavor is used, among other things, as a base for Maemo (and I guess for MeeGo too).

Nah, Intel based their Moblin on something RedHat/Fedora-ish, and Nokia joined in with that for MeeGo. No more apt-get for future Nokia phones. :(

Re:Some CPU microarchitectures dropped from Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

m68k was dropped before releasing Debian Etch.

Re:Some CPU microarchitectures dropped from Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no authoritative decision here. It is just that there was not enough work/effort put into alpha and HPPA, so it was dropped. Feel free to contribute some work on it, and it may reappear!

yes, im feeding the troll...

[tempest69]

Ok, I muck with this kind of garbage far too often. And saying that you can just google your problems away is a steaming pile.
I get thousands of results on what I'm looking for, the top results might be useful, often they aren't. The install information ALWAYS has some expectations on what is being done, and what is installed. The chance that the instructions are going to be exactly right for your box are pretty slim. Even something dead easy like the nvidia driver will whine about needing all sorts of stuff if you do a minimal or standard install. And the instructions don't mention jack about how to get kernel headers, or the right version of gcc.
So you try another google solution, and do what it says.. and eventually you have really mucked things up,, but you dont know why, xwindows starts but only shows blackness.
Have you ever tried googling for freezes, lockups, lags, and slowness ___ITS AWEFULL___. I'll take cryptic errors any day over googling intermittent slowdowns.

The Ubuntu nvidia install is a couple mouse clicks.


Storm

Re:yay. two more variants that nobody will want.

[Eunuchswear]

It's already bad enough to think that a new Linux user would want a browser called "IceWeasel" or would understand that it's really just Firefox renamed because of some silly branding/icon tiff with the mozilla folks.

I see many people have already given the utilitarian reason for the whole Firefox/Iceweasel thing, but we should not forget the matter of principle.

If Debian included Firefox not only would Debian not be able to distribute modified versions but Debian users would not be able to distribute modified versions. Debian refuses to remove freedom from its users. (This is why the suggestion that Debian get a special authorisation from Mozilla fell through - even if Debian was allowed to call their modified version Firefox Debian users wouldn't be able to modify it further and distribute in their turn).

Anyway, Squeeze includes Chromium so who gives a damn about Iceweasel anyway!

Re:yay. two more variants that nobody will want.

[Eunuchswear]

Debian fans don't really care. They want a nice, predictable, stable server. This goal is antagonistic to having an exciting new dev box, which is what Ubuntu is for.

Rubbish. What dev would want a system as out-of-date as Ubuntu? Devs use Debian Unstable.

Re:Some CPU microarchitectures dropped from Debian

[marcosdumay]

The dropped architectures aern't going away. They just didn't get to stable.

Good job Debian team Gnome problem that persists

[lsatenstein]

With Squeeze beta, (now current version) when I review a pdf with document viewer, after viewing a large file (example Postgresql PDF), then with the icons in Gnome, I am unable to logoff or to even poweroff. What I am able to do is switch user, and then bring Debian down. Of course, going to terminal mode and issuing a poweroff also works. But I have not found out why Gnome logoff and poweroff stops working. I will let you know what happens when I do a clean re-installation.

Re:yay. two more variants that nobody will want.

[Anzhr]

Anyway, Squeeze includes Chromium so who gives a damn about Iceweasel anyway!

That's how I decided what to do about Firefox and Iceweasel.

Re: he'd probably hate it

[neonsignal]

Having a different perspective on the best way to achieve freedom is not the same as 'hating' the revised BSD license. Why would Richard Stallman have a problem using software with a revised BSD license? It provides all the freedoms that he espouses. He would obviously believe it is better to distribute under the GPL, but despite trolling to the contrary, he is not forcing that on anyone.

And secondly, Debian is not the 'flagship' of GPL. The Debian philosophy is probably closer to the FSF one than many distros, but it is not in their list of free distros (though gNewSense is of course based on Debian). The Debian distro has always included components distributed under a myriad of different licenses, so nothing has changed. If anything, Debian has become more purist, now they have separated out the proprietary firmware blobs from the main distro.

Re:Works well, but significantly higher requiremen

[NorQue]

Squeeze works quite fine on my pink Pogoplug. Also couldn't log in after each cold reboot after my first installations in November last year, but according to a forum post at doozan.com that was related to a certain faulty kernel update which is fixed now.

Re:Works well, but significantly higher requiremen

[MattBD]

Cheers, I'll give that another go now, and see if I can get it working. Squeeze does introduce a lot of things that I like and already use on my Ubuntu desktop, such as byobu, and I like Debian-based distros a lot better than the Arch-based Plugbox Linux I've been using on it, so I'm eager to get Squeeze working on it.