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On the Heels of Wheezy, Aptosid Releases 2013-01
An anonymous reader writes "Right on the heels of Debian's 7.0 ('Wheezy') release, the Aptosid team is proud to announce the immediate availability of the 2013-01 release. Aptosid is a rolling release built on top of Debian's most modern branch Sid, providing the most up-to-date kernel available with patches and stabilization not yet seen in mainline, along with many patched Debian packages, all while maintaining 100% compatibility with upstream Debian (unlike other distros based on Debian). If you think Debian Stable is too old to be useful, give Atposid a spin!"
If you think Debian Stable is too old to be useful, give Atposid a spin!
Debian 7 is less than 24 hours into being the stable version, and went into release freeze status less than a year ago (2012-06-30). I'm endlessly amused by what people consider "old" these days.
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It has a script to update (Deliberately made to be as unreadable as possible.)
This is not true of aptosid. The update procedure is simply to stop X, run "apt-get dist-upgrade" and make sure what it wants to do seems sane before accepting it.
They don't use aptitude though or support it.
This is absolutely true and for similar reasons to why Debian has recommended using apt-get to perform the dist-upgrades between their stable releases. With sid you want to dist-upgrade and the predictable and consistent nature of apt-get is far better suited for this then aptitude which can often be too smart for it's own good.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
The summary includes one of the major differences, the kernel. Wheezy (and sid as of now) has 3.2, this aptosid release has 3.9. The aptosid kernel stays very close to vanilla mainline with the latest stable/important/security patches and suitably tuned for most desktop users.
Another major difference is the installer (and it's live system) which brings a coherent set of packages to start with and some initial configuration which helps make it more suitable for use as a sid system such as disabling the installation of recommended packages by default. The initial aptosid system is a clean sid system, such as you can get from debootstrapping, without the pain of bootstrapping or the baggage accumulated by starting from a stable system and upgrading it to sid.
As a result of not being tied to the Debian kernel and debian-installer it can also often adopt features ahead of Debian itself without breaking compatibility with sid. Examples have included ath5k support for a fully Free wifi experience, insserv support for parrallel starting of initscripts and support for installing on EFI systems. Of course it doesn't support everything d-i does nor all the architectures of the Debian kernel.
The aptosid manual is great and covers an awful lot of material from setting things up to maintaining your system, guiding you to keep a supportable system in the unstable environment. It's available in 14 languages at the moment.
The artwork of course is also aptosid's own, changing with each release. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and of course you can pick other art from the Debian packages or your own images for wallpapers ... though I never bother.
Finally there is a community which wants to support those running sid and a "fix.main" section of the aptosid repo which often includes some "hot-fixes" for issues which have cropped up in sid, helping to protect it's users, sometimes briefly just waiting for the next debian mirror push and sometimes for issues which end up staying in sid for a long time.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
As the uncle of an autistic adult who has been called a gimp by various ignorant and vicious people, and seen his face when it happened, I literally think of the people who insist in clinging to that name as the equivalent of the KKK or the Manson family. I will not use the GIMP, and remove it from all installs I do.
Really? KKK or the Manson family? I agree with most of what you said in your comment, but I feel dirty for agreeing with you after reading that idiocy. Your comment is incredibly insulting in its insensitivity to people who have been killed for being different, rather than merely insulted — and more meaningfully, to their survivors.
Anyone who defends the name of The GIMP is being lame. The GIMP is the poster child for why developers shouldn't name their own projects. But a cross-burning (or a lynching) it ain't.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I don't think the name is one bit of a problem on the other side of the pond; the only place I consistently hear complaints about its name seems to be Slashdot.
It's more of a storm in a teacup, which might give some people a stick to beat the GIMP with. As you say, it appears to be a Slashdot-only sort of thing.
The first page or two of Google results for gimp all point to sites for the Gnu Image Manipulation Program. Also, the entry in wiktionary for gimp suggests GIMP as an alternative, then lists some arcane meanings for the term, before noting its use in US slang from 1925, and then listing more arcane definitions. Despite living more than a decade in the US and Canada as an adult, I only heard people there use the term to refer to the image editor. Expletives and pejorative expressions were common enough, in many contexts, but never did I hear "gimp" used in that way.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Maybe you can answer this since the website doesn't. What is the difference between aptosid and just running sid?
Many things were listed before, but the biggest ones were not:
1. You can't install Debian Sid, since there is no installer for it. You need to install normall Debian, and then add the sid repos and dist-upgrade. Can be painful and very error-prone (see #2).
2. As much as people like to say that Aptosid (formerly Sidux) is pure Sid, it is not. The Aptosid maintainers/Debian developers try to hold off known to be broken version of packages.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
If you think Debian Stable is too old to be useful, you're a retard.
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