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Debian 8 Jessie Released
linuxscreenshot writes: After almost 24 months of constant development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 8 (code name Jessie), which will be supported for the next five years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and the Debian Long Term Support team. (Release notes.) Jessie ships with a new default init system, systemd. The systemd suite provides features such as faster boot times, cgroups for services, and the possibility of isolating part of the services. The sysvinit init system is still available in Jessie. Screenshots and a screencast are available.
A little? GNONE is garbage these days that you avoid with a 20ft pole. If you want to run some other window manager, like blackbox or xfe, then GNOME apps are terribad. There is no window title because they no longer use standard calls to create their windows.
I basically removed things like Evince and replaced it with much more usable qpdfview, and that is only because of terrible user interface in GNOME.
Just did an install in a vm. No. There is no option to choose an init system. systemd is default. If you want to use sysvinit, you have to do it via a pre-install script which basically means, netinstall.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
People be aware of some caveats upgrading. Been testing it in the last year, and using it since news year eve in less critical systems in production. systemd has to be pinned to -1 or your servers will get upgraded to it without any interaction from your part. Beware also that Apache configurations change. Some configurations might get broken. libjpeg8 was missing and docker.io still is; backports may solve this. Apache configurations changed a lot. Be also aware that things get installed by default, for instance I had to delete rpcbind from most of my servers. Be also aware open vmtools gets a little confused after the upgrade and needs to be upgraded explicitly.
I have been using Gnome 3 on Fedora for about a couple years now, and I honestly can't understand why people don't like it. In fact, I don't really feel like using other UI's anymore because Gnome 3 is too efficient. Yes, it still has its quirks. The title bar is a little big and gets obnoxious when you maximize some applications, but I'm willing to accept that in order to get everything else it offers.
The best thing about Gnome now is that it doesn't get in my way. Switching apps/windows is easy. All the useless crap I don't need to see has been taken off the screen. The application launcher is nice, though nothing particularly innovative because anyone who has used Mac OS X or Windows 7 knows what it's doing.
I'm guessing that people who don't like Gnome 3 never really learned how to use it, like people who say they hate vim. Learning how to use Gnome 3 isn't even that challenging in itself, as the main keyboard shortcuts are very standardized. Launcher and window behavior are exactly what you'd expect them to be. It's fast and sleek, end of story.
Also it can't be denied that the desktop has undergone appreciable improvements with literally every release. Two years ago the keyboard layout switcher was broken, but now it works beautifully (this feature is important to me because I switch layouts a lot). Fedora 22 has just gone into beta, and if you want to see what Gnome is like now then you can give that a spin. Like I said, I don't use anything else anymore, although when I want to remember what using Windows XP was like, I'll load up KDE or XFCE or LXDE or something. Plus if you're really that attached to Gnome 2, Gnome 3 got a "classic" mode several releases ago which basically duplicates Gnome 2's UI features. You'll get your drop-down app menu back and the little task bar at the bottom.
I've used it in production for five years (5!) now. Just because Debian is slow to adopt new technology doesn't mean that it's untested. People have used systemd in real-world production systems on other distributions since 2010, and has been around for a couple of years before that.
Really, that long? Funny, because according to the systemd Wikipedia page the initial release was March 30th, 2010. The Wikipedia page itself wasn't started until August 2010, and Poettering's systemd announcement, where he mentions having an "experimental" init to compete with upstart (which had been around years before systemd) is dated April 30th, 2010.
That means that, no, it wasn't around a "couple years before" 2010, and wasn't added to any distro repositories until a year later, so your claim to have been using it on "production systems" for "five years now" is just as much bullshit as the claim that systemd existed years before 2010.
The only way you've been using systemd in production that long is if you're from the future and using systemd-timetraveld.
Ok. Yes. It seems to work. Just append this to the end of the boot string after pressing tab and you'll have a sysvinit system:
preseed/late_command="in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core"
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
Anecdote 1: I've just timed a Debian Jessie single CPU hard disk based VM install with BTRFS as the filesystem, a GNOME 3 desktop where the user is auto logged in boot and where an autostart script records the time. Here are my rough systemd and sysvinit results (times are from after the kernel core finished to when the GNOME script ran):
sysvinit (apt-get install sysvinit-core)
First boot: 20 seconds
Second boot: 18 seconds
Third boot: 19 seconds
systemd (apt-get remove sysvinit-core)
First boot: 15 seconds
Second boot: 16 seconds
Third boot: 15 seconds
sysvinit averages 19 seconds, systemd averages 15.33 seconds. In this case it does appear that systemd booted the system faster.
Anecdote 2: Same as above but where the VM's disk is sitting wholly in RAM. Time for sysvinit dropped to 5 seconds and the time for systemd dropped to 4 seconds.
My personal guess is that the more you are running, the slower the disk the more likely systemd is to benefit you. You don't say how you did your comparison though or what type your "disks" were. If your comparison was between different versions of Linux distro then it could simply be that the previous version did less (which is always the fastest way to boot)...
Another anecdote: a few years back I saw Slackware systems at a University converted over to systemd. Boot times (which involved waiting for multiple NFS mounts) went from over three minutes to down to less than a minute because more of the waiting was done in parallel.
So now you're worried that someone will be able to hack systemd by making it exit a poll(2)?
systemd pid 1 may have sockets opened and bound but it doesn't read from them. How are you going to hack that?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
I am just saying FreeBSD is a system made by sysadmin to sysadmins and not overrun by political bastardos. I sincerely doubt they will go the same route.
The co-founder of FreeBSD have already stated that systemd is a good thing and it is exactly what FreeBSD needs for the future:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
There are already *BSD developers working on this, including a systemd compatibility layer. So yes, FreeBSD will have a systemd clone init system, and binary log files too, it is only a matter of time.
Just upgraded my hobby server from Wheezy to Jessie. sysvinit was upgraded and remained as the init.
The only bits of systemd in the system are the libsystemd* libraries.
Maybe you have a service which has some systemd dependency?
This beta crap has been imposed over us unnecessarily and politically. Debian also got out of its way and is updating all servers to systemd without our asking, and without any visible dependencies, breaking configurations in the process. This is far more than "noise", what you have is fellow technicians and users, your customers and peers, for christ sake, telling you they are not happy. Many of us that have been months already using Debian with systemd pinned a testimonial that this would not be a required situation. To add insult to injury, everyone that speaks about this tabu is told to suck it up, man up, or that just is making noise. This is the antithesis of Debian and opensource. Debian and linux in spirit is about choice and flexibility, and many of us deflected from Windows and other flavours of Unix just because of that. We have been betrayed and sold. To the ones that say this was a consensual and democratic process. A true free and open process would be to include a choice at installation/upgrade time between the choices. If I do have a choice on the web server, on the DNS server, on the mail server, even on the kernel, on the shell that I deliver for my users, despite having defaults, than why, for christ sake, is systemd being rammed down our throats? Get a grip you and honestly, fuck you all. xxxx
No, you don't have to do it with preseed. Just sudo apt-get install sysvinit-core. At any time, for the entire lifecycle of your installation. You can switch back with sudo apt-get install systemd-sysv at any time too. Change back and forth at will; I have, and whilst I initially had big problems with it, Debian's packaging now even has filled in the gaps that the systemd project themselves seem uninterested in fixing, such as full crypttab support/compatibility that the old sysv/cryptmount ecosystem had supported.