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

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?

[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?

[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?

[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: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: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.

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).

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: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!