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Debian 7.0 ('Wheezy') Release Planned For 1st Weekend in May
An anonymous reader writes with this good news from the Debian developers who have been working hard to release the next version of the distro: "We now have a target date of the weekend of 4th/5th May for the release. We have checked with core teams, and this seems to be acceptable for everyone. This means we are able to begin the final preparations for a release of Debian 7.0 — 'Wheezy'. The intention is only to lift the date if something really critical pops up that is not possible to handle as an errata, or if we end up technically unable to release that weekend (e.g. a required machine crashes or d-i explodes in a giant ball of fire). Every other RC fix that does not make it in time will be r1 material. Please be sure to contact us about the RC fixes you would like included in the point release!" Of particular interest to casual users, from the list of changes in 7.0: "Debian wheezy comes with full-featured libav (formerly ffmpeg) libraries and frontends, including e.g. mplayer, mencoder, vlc and transcode. Additional codec support is provided e.g. through lame for MP3 audio encoding, xvidcore for MPEG-4 ASP video encoding, x264 for H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video encoding, vo-aacenc for AAC audio encoding and opencore-amr and vo-amrwbenc for Adaptive Multi-Rate Narrowband and Wideband encoding and decoding, respectively. For most use cases, installation of packages from third-party repositories should not be necessary anymore. The times of crippled multimedia support in Debian are finally over!"
Debian will run Linux kernel 3.2.39
Debian can also run on the FreeBSD kernel. It looks like Wheezy will support both 8.3 and 9.0 kernels.
The Linux flavour will use Linux 3.2 with a couple of backported features.
http://womble.decadent.org.uk/blog/whats-in-the-linux-kernel-for-debian-70-wheezy-part-1.html
http://womble.decadent.org.uk/blog/whats-in-the-linux-kernel-for-debian-70-wheezy-part-2.html
http://womble.decadent.org.uk/blog/whats-in-the-linux-kernel-for-debian-70-wheezy-part-3.html
This is true if you're using Debian on the desktop. As a production server, I want something that Just Works and Doesn't Change except for the occasional security fix.
Finding God in a Dog
The product is officially known as "Debian 7.0". Wheezy is just a code name.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
What, exactly, is wrong with
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Being stuck with Xfce 4.8 is particularly galling since the default desktop for Wheezy is the unutterably awful GNOME 3. Xfce 4.10 will be OVER ONE YEAR OLD when Wheezy is released and it is absolutely crazy not to have 4.10 in Wheezy.
I'll grant you that even Xfce 4.8 is vastly superior to GNOME 3, but it is very unfortunate not to have 4.10, which has some significant enhancements; the one I find most welcome is FINALLY the ability to configure desktop icons for single-click activation.
I "get" the emphasis on stability, but now we'll be stuck with a badly out of date Xfce for a lengthy period until Wheezy is replaced. And I can SORT OF understand the decision to reverse course on what was once the plan for Debian to change the default desktop from GNOME 3 to Xfce (though I still on balance disagree with it and find it regrettable).
Sorry, but unless it has APK's HOSTS file installed by default, I'm sticking with Ubuntu...
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
It's 2013 and your finally advertising non broken media support. Even Gentoo has had working media support built in for years, I think if this is one of the selling points of Debian then it's time to move on, your trying to get me to take the Honda N360 off your hands instead of the race car.
I think you're laboring under the mistaken assumption that this reflects on the general state of Debian. The truth is that media support is a very specific issue, which, IIRC, was caused by intellectual property issues. For most other things, Debian has had a very complete and high-quality selection of packages. For proprietary media formats, they basically had none - although getting support for those was as simple as adding a repository that provided them (change one line and run a command, or do a couple of clicks - whichever you prefer).
In particular, the "broken" media support was not an issue with Debian generally being broken (it hasn't been) and it also wasn't an issue with Debian being behind other distros (Debian stable tends to have old software, but that is by design - if you want newer software, you can use backports, unstable, experimental, or third-party repositories).
This is one of the major reasons I could never stick with Debian, I need stuff to work, be up to date and ready to go out of the box, Debian is built off legacy packages in an attempt to claim stability, when in reality it's just outdated in it's release mode.
By all means use the distro that works best for you. For me, that's Debian stable, because I want to minimize the amount of time I spend on maintenance. There is a trade-off between having newer software and having more testing performed on that software, and a trade-off between minimizing system maintenance effort and running up-to-date software, and I'm happy with how Debian stable makes these trade-offs. Every other OS I've used has had a higher maintenance burden.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
one thing with the recent developments in Debian is that once Wheezy is released, we'll start working hard on the next release, Jessie. And while unstable may finally be unstable for a little while after the release (while people upload a bunch of new packages), I have had a lot of success running wheezy while it was in testing in the last two years. I suggest that people interested in the "latest and greatest" install wheezy, then upgrade to jessie (testing) when it stabilises a bit after the release.
That's what I will do anyways. :)
Semantics is the gravity of abstraction