The installer in Woody is already a lot better than the one in Potato, but still lacks the sort of flexibility most people need. Adding hardware detection using Discover and Mdetect would preconfigure hardware-related packages, but still leave the flexibility to partition the disk, etc. just the way we like it. For those who want a graphical installer, there's a PGI-based install CD too. Thanks Branden! This is just what we need to show the corporate world how easy it is to adopt Debian!:-)
PS: The Woody CD-1 image found on most European mirrors appears to be non-bootable. Even if I boot from floppy, the installer constantly complains that some packages on the CD are corrupt. Meanwhile, the non-US Potato rev.7 CD-1 always boots flawlessly. Could anyone fix this?
Saving Soviet domain HOW-TO: ssh icann; su root
on
See Ya .su
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· Score: 5, Funny
I thought this was obvious?;-)
Why no Linux drivers for IPSec Ethernet cards?
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Ask Donald Becker
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· Score: 2, Informative
I wanted to start using crypto-enabled Ethernet, only to find that Donald Becker has not made drivers for these and that he asks people to directly contact 3Com or Intel for their non-GPL drivers instead. What's preventing Don from writing his own GPL drivers for those cards? Is there some US crypto export restriction law that directly forbids it? The same condition appears to affect several Gigabit cards too: please contact the manufacturer for their non-GPL driver. What's the deal?
P.S.: if you don't like the country's political climate, then [...] why don't you just move to China or Russia
Enough with that kind of bullshit, will ya? Just because someone disagrees with the political majority doesn't mean they suddenly feel like leaving their homeland and starting anew in another country.
United-States is every American's country, whether he or she agrees with the majority on anything at all or not. As such, every American has the right to see its country reflect values they hold dearest. Just because someone does not have enough cash to lobby Washignton does not make them any less deserving of having a country that fullfills their dream.
The same truth applies to every country. Every citizen has the right to demand from their country to be true to its wishes, even if those wishes are not those of lobby interests or of the political majority. You cannot demand that every person who doesn't agree with the majority leave the country for another one. This is their country too, even if they don't agree with you.
Besides, there's no telling whether an expatriate will be welcome elsewhere either. Relocation, while it can sometimes have hugely positive aspects, has its share of burdens, such as forever being the unwelcome foreigner who needs yet another work permit and who won't likely ever land citizenship, because he or she came from the wrong country in the first place.
turning off whois for the.gov TLD is the same as saying we don't care about your security, only our security.
Congratulations, you have just produced a "ma and pa" compliant definition of National Security.
Seriously, what else is new? When it comes to governments, civilians don't count; if saving the president or its goons is at stake, sacrificing "ma and pa" (and a whole planeload of them, at that) is always perfectly fine. They even call that "colateral damage".
Funny how citizens are not allowed to accidentaly get a cop or politician killed and call it "colateral damage" too... Democracy? Bah, who's kidding who?
I just bought a new hard drive, and the smallest thing I could get was 40 gig. What the FUCK do I need 40 gig for unless I'm an MP3 freak? I wanted to get a small, rock solid drive. I got something bigger than I need, insanely faster than I need, and I just hope to god it lasts a while [...] Fuck size. I want reliability.
Despite the excessive use of foul language, I have to say: Amen!
This problem is even more noticable on SCSI drives. Not only are you paying twice the price of IDE, you also are forced to purchase twice the (already excessive) storage capacity. Meanwhile, neither IDE or SCSI is worth a hoot nowadays, both die well ahead of their time.
What hard-disk manufacturers really should do is split their product lines (regardless of IDE or SCSI technology) in two: small 2 - 4Gb drives for workstations and gateways, then larger drives for servers. In both cases, there should be a clear goal to provide two quality tiers: cheap but not much guaranteed, versus slightly more expansive with 5-year warranty (same as it once was).
eMac available outside educational world
on
Switch Different
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· Score: 1
Good that they changed that "for students only" license reminescnet of the Next box. However, their 1099 USD price doesn't compute. By the time I check out local Finnish retailers, I actually goes for 1500 EUR, instead of the expected 1150 EUR.
As the the keyboared shortcuts on Mac, yep, I know them. I simply find the X11 3-button trick much more efficient; it also happens to be supported on every UNIX variant I have tried. So, you like CTRL-something shortcuts, I prefer X11 mouse actions; Apples and Oranges (pun intended). To everyone their own cup of tea.
I indeed dream of a TiBook... with 3 buttons!
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Switch Different
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· Score: 0, Troll
The day Apple will adopt the 3-button mouse and copy/paste methods of X11 is when I will buy myself a Mac. Until that day, screw Apple; a single-button mouse or touch pad doesn't cut it.
Yes, I love Macs (I always have, ever since the first Classic in the 80's). No, until recently, I could never afford even second-hand ones. Now that I have the money to buy SGI stuff if I want, I still think that the 3-button X11 system should be standardized throughout the computer industry, on all OS platforms. Having Jobs listen to its users and release the eMac with a non-educational license would help too, for my home desktop. Since the TiBook doesn't support the 3-button X11 methoods, I'm checking out PC alternatives to use with OpenBSD on X11, instead.
As soon as a Canadian citizen has lived abroad for 2 years, all of his rights are taken away; only the passport remains [1]; no more voting rights, social security coverage or anything else left.
Canada is also a country that sees fit to consider over half of East Europe as potentialy dangerous, refusing its citizens entry into Canada, even when it's the case of folk musicians and dancers supposed to accompany the Estonian PM for a diplomatic visit in Canada. In retaliation, those East European countries make it excessively complicated and costly for Canadians to visit. Meanwhile, Americans and EU citizens can pretty much go anywhere they want without a visa.
Whoever thinks Canada has ever been a democratic country is seriously brain-dead. With its "first past the poll" electoral system and campain financing laws that purposely cap the maximum amount non-traditional parties can spend on advertising, Canada has always guaranteed that traditional parties remain in power, in alternance, while preventing minority voices to even as much as get heard, let alone ever getting any seat at the Parliament in Ottawa.
Taking the above facts into consideration, I consider myself a slave of the Canadian government, being forced to retain its annoying citizenship, which causes me more troubles than I can bear and yet gives me no benefit whatsoever, while simultaneously being prevented from acquiring citizenship by an increasingly foreigner-hostile European Union. Unfortunately for Canada, Russia is an easy place to sell a Canadian passport that is still valid and an even easier place to get lost. Fortunately for me, I speak Russian and live less than an hour from the border of the St-Petersburg district. [2] You do the math.
[1] Let alone the fact that getting a new passport from abroad is a serious pain in the ass, since they let the nowhereland called Quebec impose complicated procedures for proving one's birthplace, without requiring the said nowheremen to establish a system to have it all handled by the Canadian Embassies abroad, pretty much forcing one to temporarily return to Canashit to handle it all in person.
[2] Too bad the cold war is over. With such a hatered for Canada, a taste for anything expansive and exotic, a knack for languages, not to mention excellent IT skills, I would have been the perfect double agent. *sigh*
The same per-seat license problem affects their Connector plug-in for the Evolution mailer. When my previous employer contacted Ximian to try to bring them to offering site licenses or other more suitable options than their current per-10 or per-25 packs, they were completely inflexible. From what I could get of our mail exchanges, while the Ximian coding team comes from a Linux background and understands the issues, Ximian's sales and marketting drones really don't have a clue at grasping the culture that goes with the free software world. [flame]Then again, am I the only one who has a problem with Miguel's teenage dream being to become a Microsoft software developer, only to end up Redmondizing Linux by porting C# and by developing.NET for Linux?[/flame]
Comment: Perhaps one thing you overlooked is contacting all those companies you did coop with? At any rate, you seem to me like a technicaly-capable guy, but are obviously lacking human skills (no offense meant).
Anyhow, papers (CS degree or certification, they're the same, really) may or may not mean anything to an employer, depending on where you apply and who you talk to.
If your CV is filtered by HR drones, they will be counting the accronyms and degrees systematicaly - the more the merrier - because they don't know the technical field where they are working at all, so their only reference is certs and degrees, from well-known corporations and universities. If they spot the same buzzwords they overheard at the last board meeting in your CV (be that MIT, MCSE, Linux, Java, etc.), you're in business, otherwise, they'll have this clueless look in their face and shove your rag into the shredder.
If your CV is read by your upcoming boss, he probably doesn't give a flying hoot about all the papers, but wants to hear you talk about what you know of their technology, what your previous jobs (even coops count!) were and will often consider any involvement in a free software project as valid experience.
This being said, I will refute what other people in this thread have said about employers wanting to see that you can think for yourself. Know who you are talking to! If your upcoming boss is the kind of introverted geek who has even less faith in his technical skills than in his womanizing skills, anyone that seems to know anything that he doesn't know will be percieved as competition and immediately shelved! Insecure bosses hire dramaticaly lesser drones for fear of competition, it's a fact.
That had been bothering me ever since the first few scenes where we see them in training on Camino and then it clicked once I got home:
I recall seeing an early artistic sketch by Ralph McQuarrie in 1977 where the stormtrooper's uniform looks exactly like those worn by the clone army. AFAIR that was for some possible poster design and had appeared in Starlog or some other Sci-Fi fanzine.
The fact that they know (and so do I) that libXm.so.2 is Motif (or any of its clone) does not excuse them from not knowing how to make Debian packages. Now, you stop the trolling and crawl back into your cave.
So I installed the final Opera 6.0 release and, surprise, it still complains that:
opera-static recommends libXm.so.2
libXm.so.2 does not appear to be available
I have both posted on Opera's bug report site and previously e-mailed their tech support on this a dozen times and still get the same clueless answer that "there is something wrong with the Debian dependencies". The correct answer is that Debian dependencies are not file-based but package-based. For some reason, Opera people do not appear to have the brains to understand this simple concept and thus Opera still insists that a recommended file is not instalable, where it should instead look if a series of possible packages known to provide the file are available.
First, let me start by saying that stable just doesn't cut it for anything but a server anymore.
Then, what many have missed is that I insist throughout my post that I am talking about corporate desktop environments, not your overpaid fat hacker's souped-up 2 GHz AMD Impossibilium with a 4-D graphics card and a surround-dick sound card.
To answer a third post, no, Potato doesn't cut it on the corporate desktop. You won't find the Evolution (except for the i386 version packaged by Ximian) or the OpenOffice one needs to replace Windows and aging UNIX variants on workstations with Potato, for starters.
To answer yet another post, yes I should care about what the corporate world defaults to and yes I should worry if I cannot offer Debian as a solution when setting up IT infrastructures for corporate customers. Right now, I cannot recommend any Debian release (potato, woody, sid) to my customers asking for desktop packages, because: a) Evolution builds only exist for potato/i386 and is still a work-in-progress b) OpenOffice is barely at an unstable release stage. In a nutshell, my customers would not mind Debian if it had what they needed; it doesn't, so they ask for Red Hat since that distro is advertised to have what they need.
Finally, no, deciding not to update Woody for a few days is not an option. Security fixes are not released separately for testing, only for stable; if I wanted to just install the security updates for Woody, there wouldn't be any as of yet.
Those [KDE 3.0, Gnome 2.0, XFree86] are your pet projects, but someone else might want a new version of (insert favorite package). The solution is to release distros more often, not to further delay the next distro release.
I fully agree with that, if you read my previous post until the end. Unfortunately, people in charge of the Debian project seem to insist upon freezing a distro until the next snapshot... which usually means in about 2 years.
My main point concerns those killer apps that would make Debian the desktop Linux distro of choice, instead of constantly relagating it to server setups. Right now, KDE 3.0 and Gnome 2.0 with its faster Nautilus, along with XFree86 4.2, is what's on every desktop user's lips, along with Evolution and OpenOffice.
That's why I suggested that we either wait a few more weeks until those packages are fit for release, or otherwise implement a faster release schedule that would allow integrating them within 6 months from now, not in two years. Otherwise, we can kiss Debian goodbye as a desktop choice. If you don't understand what I mean by that, ask the Opera or Ximian people when they expect to have Woody packages ready, you'll see what I mean (and those are companies willing to support Debian).
By the time you get to companies whose traditional market is commercial Unices, Linux means Red Hat to them, because the product is well-known, supported by certifications programs and professional services. Trying to convince those companies to support anything else than Red Hat is a pure waste of time, because in supporting Debian they would need to produce packages using libs and compilers dated from two years ago, instead of using alien or whatever else to repackage existing binaries; you simply won't get any of them to go that far to begin with... until Debian manages to keep itself in sync with the rest of the Linux universe. Harsh reality, but true.
I honnestly don't mind it if Woody is a few weeks late from the ETA, especially if it's about making the build more consistant between all architectures and to ensure the security patches will be uploaded in a timely manner.
What I do mind is Woody being delayed, only a few weeks from when packages like KDE 3.0 and Gnome 2.0 would become stable enough for inclusion. Meanwhile, at the moment, Galeon and Mozilla don't build cleanly on all platforms, not to mention XFree86 4.2...yes, Branden explained that he must first smooth the process for all architectures and I agree with him, however...
What makes Debian support by makers of non-free packages so absent is because Debian stable distros are always 2 years behind everybody else, in terms of what version of glibc, XFree or kernel the stable distro is installing with. There are two solutions I can think of for that:
Release every 6 months, no matter what, like OpenBSD does. If a package doesn't make it to stable this time, the next possible slot is only 6 months away, not 2 years.
Allow upgrades to existing packages - or completely new packages - to be released within the release's lifespan, if they are built on existing libs available in this release e.g. if someone manages to get Evolution or Galeon to build reliably for all 11 architectures, using the libs released for Woody, then include it in Woody r1, r2, etc. in 6 months from now.
Otherwise, if we're gonna wait a few more weeks, we might as well give KDE 3.0 and Gnome 2.0 (not to mention XFree 4.2) enough time to slide from unstable to testing and be included with Woody. Nobody that needs Linux in a production environment can afford to wait 2 years for those to be released, at a time when they are just upgrading to Woody from their already much deprecated Potato. When it comes to that, the solution will be to crossgrade to Suse or Red Hat, if a desired package is not available the day Woody makes it to stable and becomes a priority upgrade on everyone's TO-DO list; Debian will be no more in yet a few production environments, if it looks like it's gonna be obsolete at birth again, the same way Potato was.
As for those who feel like saying Blah! Just point your APT sources to unstable, you'll always have the latest!, don't.
While testing is almost sufficiently stable for a production environment, it is a constantly moving target that would need to be upgraded every couple of days; this is simply impractical for a production environment, nobody has that much spare time on their hands at work.
Then unstable is, as its name implies, unstable; I've often had computers become partially incapacitated for a few days, because some new package was uploaded without its updated dependencies, making APT stop the upgrade process right after unpacking a few packages.
The solution to the perpetual Debian release lag is simple: release always, release often. Allowing new packages based upon existing libc or xlib to be released within the lifespan of a distro - not just bugfixes and security patches - is a must, at the very least.
As it doesn't support WMV files (Quicktime is already nice, though), its use is extremely limitted to me. Supporting de-facto standards like Windows Media Player simply cannot be avoided, like it or not.
Noticing Ximian's recent snafu with the Red Hat 7.3 beta, I wonder if they have learned their lesson and have been practicing safe Woody lately. I really don't feel like seeing my whole Ximian Desktop setup breaking again, just because Ximian developpers are not in sync with Debian development and prepared to release Woody builds overnight, the day Woody hits the stable branch.
On a related issue, will Evolution be built and released by the Debian people themselves, so that it can be available for more than just i386? That package really rocks and could make a Linux desktop not only a viable choice, but a mightily attractive one, for business people. Unfortunately, given Ximian's current attitude of not wanting to release Woody builds until Woody hits stable, supporting it is currently a daunting task, whenever someone offers Linux consulting services based on Debian and would not recommend Potato to any customer because of obsolesence issues...
This poster's point about journalling hits home. While I have applied the ext3/UDMA patch and recompiled the kernel, I really think that Woody should install a journalling-capable kernel by default. The user should not have to get around compiling his own kernel or installing a non-default kernel to benefit from journalling. Instead, a menu should allow selecting which fstype will be used to create the filesystems for the install.
It doesn't stop there, though. Other things that make me think Woody could, once again, make Debian look as the forever obsolete distro and prevent it, once again, from achieving recognition outside the developpers' universe are:
X 4.1, instead of 4.2
Rationale: support for too many cards broken in 4.0 and 4.1, but restored in 4.2
ext2, instead of ext3
kernel 2.2.20, instead of 2.4.18
This is actually a catch-22, as most architectures just being added to Debian will start at (currently) 2.4.17
Honnestly, defaulting to the above is a must. The funny thing is, most of the above is already possible on Woody. Why not base the default install on them?
The second exhibit could be used to conclude that devices implanted by the feds to intercept keystrokes in order to gain access to an individual's encrypted file is criminal. How does "preventive detention of federal agents suspected of terrorist acts, namely several forms of system interference" sound to you?
The whole "I hate Jon" mentality tends to go overboard, lately. On this other popular site, people regularly mod submitted stories down, simply because "this sounds like Jon could have done it". Grow up! Disagreeing with one's writing style or opinions is one thing, but systematically whining every time Jon or someone with similar statements publishes a story is downright lame. Ditto for those stupid "BSD is dying" trolls. Use any OS you want, let others use the OS they want, and stop poluting the threads with your crap!
Slashdot Mirror
The installer in Woody is already a lot better than the one in Potato, but still lacks the sort of flexibility most people need. Adding hardware detection using Discover and Mdetect would preconfigure hardware-related packages, but still leave the flexibility to partition the disk, etc. just the way we like it. For those who want a graphical installer, there's a PGI-based install CD too. Thanks Branden! This is just what we need to show the corporate world how easy it is to adopt Debian! :-)
PS: The Woody CD-1 image found on most European mirrors appears to be non-bootable. Even if I boot from floppy, the installer constantly complains that some packages on the CD are corrupt. Meanwhile, the non-US Potato rev.7 CD-1 always boots flawlessly. Could anyone fix this?
I thought this was obvious? ;-)
I wanted to start using crypto-enabled Ethernet, only to find that Donald Becker has not made drivers for these and that he asks people to directly contact 3Com or Intel for their non-GPL drivers instead. What's preventing Don from writing his own GPL drivers for those cards? Is there some US crypto export restriction law that directly forbids it? The same condition appears to affect several Gigabit cards too: please contact the manufacturer for their non-GPL driver. What's the deal?
United-States is every American's country, whether he or she agrees with the majority on anything at all or not. As such, every American has the right to see its country reflect values they hold dearest. Just because someone does not have enough cash to lobby Washignton does not make them any less deserving of having a country that fullfills their dream.
The same truth applies to every country. Every citizen has the right to demand from their country to be true to its wishes, even if those wishes are not those of lobby interests or of the political majority. You cannot demand that every person who doesn't agree with the majority leave the country for another one. This is their country too, even if they don't agree with you.
Besides, there's no telling whether an expatriate will be welcome elsewhere either. Relocation, while it can sometimes have hugely positive aspects, has its share of burdens, such as forever being the unwelcome foreigner who needs yet another work permit and who won't likely ever land citizenship, because he or she came from the wrong country in the first place.
Congratulations, you have just produced a "ma and pa" compliant definition of National Security.
Seriously, what else is new? When it comes to governments, civilians don't count; if saving the president or its goons is at stake, sacrificing "ma and pa" (and a whole planeload of them, at that) is always perfectly fine. They even call that "colateral damage".
Funny how citizens are not allowed to accidentaly get a cop or politician killed and call it "colateral damage" too... Democracy? Bah, who's kidding who?
Despite the excessive use of foul language, I have to say: Amen!
This problem is even more noticable on SCSI drives. Not only are you paying twice the price of IDE, you also are forced to purchase twice the (already excessive) storage capacity. Meanwhile, neither IDE or SCSI is worth a hoot nowadays, both die well ahead of their time.
What hard-disk manufacturers really should do is split their product lines (regardless of IDE or SCSI technology) in two: small 2 - 4Gb drives for workstations and gateways, then larger drives for servers. In both cases, there should be a clear goal to provide two quality tiers: cheap but not much guaranteed, versus slightly more expansive with 5-year warranty (same as it once was).
'Nuff said.
Good that they changed that "for students only" license reminescnet of the Next box. However, their 1099 USD price doesn't compute. By the time I check out local Finnish retailers, I actually goes for 1500 EUR, instead of the expected 1150 EUR.
As the the keyboared shortcuts on Mac, yep, I know them. I simply find the X11 3-button trick much more efficient; it also happens to be supported on every UNIX variant I have tried. So, you like CTRL-something shortcuts, I prefer X11 mouse actions; Apples and Oranges (pun intended). To everyone their own cup of tea.
The day Apple will adopt the 3-button mouse and copy/paste methods of X11 is when I will buy myself a Mac. Until that day, screw Apple; a single-button mouse or touch pad doesn't cut it.
Yes, I love Macs (I always have, ever since the first Classic in the 80's). No, until recently, I could never afford even second-hand ones. Now that I have the money to buy SGI stuff if I want, I still think that the 3-button X11 system should be standardized throughout the computer industry, on all OS platforms. Having Jobs listen to its users and release the eMac with a non-educational license would help too, for my home desktop. Since the TiBook doesn't support the 3-button X11 methoods, I'm checking out PC alternatives to use with OpenBSD on X11, instead.
As soon as a Canadian citizen has lived abroad for 2 years, all of his rights are taken away; only the passport remains [1]; no more voting rights, social security coverage or anything else left.
Canada is also a country that sees fit to consider over half of East Europe as potentialy dangerous, refusing its citizens entry into Canada, even when it's the case of folk musicians and dancers supposed to accompany the Estonian PM for a diplomatic visit in Canada. In retaliation, those East European countries make it excessively complicated and costly for Canadians to visit. Meanwhile, Americans and EU citizens can pretty much go anywhere they want without a visa.
Whoever thinks Canada has ever been a democratic country is seriously brain-dead. With its "first past the poll" electoral system and campain financing laws that purposely cap the maximum amount non-traditional parties can spend on advertising, Canada has always guaranteed that traditional parties remain in power, in alternance, while preventing minority voices to even as much as get heard, let alone ever getting any seat at the Parliament in Ottawa.
Taking the above facts into consideration, I consider myself a slave of the Canadian government, being forced to retain its annoying citizenship, which causes me more troubles than I can bear and yet gives me no benefit whatsoever, while simultaneously being prevented from acquiring citizenship by an increasingly foreigner-hostile European Union. Unfortunately for Canada, Russia is an easy place to sell a Canadian passport that is still valid and an even easier place to get lost. Fortunately for me, I speak Russian and live less than an hour from the border of the St-Petersburg district. [2] You do the math.
[1] Let alone the fact that getting a new passport from abroad is a serious pain in the ass, since they let the nowhereland called Quebec impose complicated procedures for proving one's birthplace, without requiring the said nowheremen to establish a system to have it all handled by the Canadian Embassies abroad, pretty much forcing one to temporarily return to Canashit to handle it all in person.
[2] Too bad the cold war is over. With such a hatered for Canada, a taste for anything expansive and exotic, a knack for languages, not to mention excellent IT skills, I would have been the perfect double agent. *sigh*
Subject line says it all.
The same per-seat license problem affects their Connector plug-in for the Evolution mailer. When my previous employer contacted Ximian to try to bring them to offering site licenses or other more suitable options than their current per-10 or per-25 packs, they were completely inflexible. From what I could get of our mail exchanges, while the Ximian coding team comes from a Linux background and understands the issues, Ximian's sales and marketting drones really don't have a clue at grasping the culture that goes with the free software world. [flame]Then again, am I the only one who has a problem with Miguel's teenage dream being to become a Microsoft software developer, only to end up Redmondizing Linux by porting C# and by developing .NET for Linux?[/flame]
Comment: Perhaps one thing you overlooked is contacting all those companies you did coop with? At any rate, you seem to me like a technicaly-capable guy, but are obviously lacking human skills (no offense meant).
Anyhow, papers (CS degree or certification, they're the same, really) may or may not mean anything to an employer, depending on where you apply and who you talk to.
This being said, I will refute what other people in this thread have said about employers wanting to see that you can think for yourself. Know who you are talking to! If your upcoming boss is the kind of introverted geek who has even less faith in his technical skills than in his womanizing skills, anyone that seems to know anything that he doesn't know will be percieved as competition and immediately shelved! Insecure bosses hire dramaticaly lesser drones for fear of competition, it's a fact.
That had been bothering me ever since the first few scenes where we see them in training on Camino and then it clicked once I got home:
I recall seeing an early artistic sketch by Ralph McQuarrie in 1977 where the stormtrooper's uniform looks exactly like those worn by the clone army. AFAIR that was for some possible poster design and had appeared in Starlog or some other Sci-Fi fanzine.
The fact that they know (and so do I) that libXm.so.2 is Motif (or any of its clone) does not excuse them from not knowing how to make Debian packages. Now, you stop the trolling and crawl back into your cave.
So I installed the final Opera 6.0 release and, surprise, it still complains that:
I have both posted on Opera's bug report site and previously e-mailed their tech support on this a dozen times and still get the same clueless answer that "there is something wrong with the Debian dependencies". The correct answer is that Debian dependencies are not file-based but package-based. For some reason, Opera people do not appear to have the brains to understand this simple concept and thus Opera still insists that a recommended file is not instalable, where it should instead look if a series of possible packages known to provide the file are available.
First, let me start by saying that stable just doesn't cut it for anything but a server anymore.
Then, what many have missed is that I insist throughout my post that I am talking about corporate desktop environments, not your overpaid fat hacker's souped-up 2 GHz AMD Impossibilium with a 4-D graphics card and a surround-dick sound card.
To answer a third post, no, Potato doesn't cut it on the corporate desktop. You won't find the Evolution (except for the i386 version packaged by Ximian) or the OpenOffice one needs to replace Windows and aging UNIX variants on workstations with Potato, for starters.
To answer yet another post, yes I should care about what the corporate world defaults to and yes I should worry if I cannot offer Debian as a solution when setting up IT infrastructures for corporate customers. Right now, I cannot recommend any Debian release (potato, woody, sid) to my customers asking for desktop packages, because: a) Evolution builds only exist for potato/i386 and is still a work-in-progress b) OpenOffice is barely at an unstable release stage. In a nutshell, my customers would not mind Debian if it had what they needed; it doesn't, so they ask for Red Hat since that distro is advertised to have what they need.
Finally, no, deciding not to update Woody for a few days is not an option. Security fixes are not released separately for testing, only for stable; if I wanted to just install the security updates for Woody, there wouldn't be any as of yet.
I fully agree with that, if you read my previous post until the end. Unfortunately, people in charge of the Debian project seem to insist upon freezing a distro until the next snapshot... which usually means in about 2 years.
My main point concerns those killer apps that would make Debian the desktop Linux distro of choice, instead of constantly relagating it to server setups. Right now, KDE 3.0 and Gnome 2.0 with its faster Nautilus, along with XFree86 4.2, is what's on every desktop user's lips, along with Evolution and OpenOffice.
That's why I suggested that we either wait a few more weeks until those packages are fit for release, or otherwise implement a faster release schedule that would allow integrating them within 6 months from now, not in two years. Otherwise, we can kiss Debian goodbye as a desktop choice. If you don't understand what I mean by that, ask the Opera or Ximian people when they expect to have Woody packages ready, you'll see what I mean (and those are companies willing to support Debian).
By the time you get to companies whose traditional market is commercial Unices, Linux means Red Hat to them, because the product is well-known, supported by certifications programs and professional services. Trying to convince those companies to support anything else than Red Hat is a pure waste of time, because in supporting Debian they would need to produce packages using libs and compilers dated from two years ago, instead of using alien or whatever else to repackage existing binaries; you simply won't get any of them to go that far to begin with... until Debian manages to keep itself in sync with the rest of the Linux universe. Harsh reality, but true.
I honnestly don't mind it if Woody is a few weeks late from the ETA, especially if it's about making the build more consistant between all architectures and to ensure the security patches will be uploaded in a timely manner.
What I do mind is Woody being delayed, only a few weeks from when packages like KDE 3.0 and Gnome 2.0 would become stable enough for inclusion. Meanwhile, at the moment, Galeon and Mozilla don't build cleanly on all platforms, not to mention XFree86 4.2 ...yes, Branden explained that he must first smooth the process for all architectures and I agree with him, however...
What makes Debian support by makers of non-free packages so absent is because Debian stable distros are always 2 years behind everybody else, in terms of what version of glibc, XFree or kernel the stable distro is installing with. There are two solutions I can think of for that:
Otherwise, if we're gonna wait a few more weeks, we might as well give KDE 3.0 and Gnome 2.0 (not to mention XFree 4.2) enough time to slide from unstable to testing and be included with Woody. Nobody that needs Linux in a production environment can afford to wait 2 years for those to be released, at a time when they are just upgrading to Woody from their already much deprecated Potato. When it comes to that, the solution will be to crossgrade to Suse or Red Hat, if a desired package is not available the day Woody makes it to stable and becomes a priority upgrade on everyone's TO-DO list; Debian will be no more in yet a few production environments, if it looks like it's gonna be obsolete at birth again, the same way Potato was.
As for those who feel like saying Blah! Just point your APT sources to unstable, you'll always have the latest!, don't.
While testing is almost sufficiently stable for a production environment, it is a constantly moving target that would need to be upgraded every couple of days; this is simply impractical for a production environment, nobody has that much spare time on their hands at work.
Then unstable is, as its name implies, unstable; I've often had computers become partially incapacitated for a few days, because some new package was uploaded without its updated dependencies, making APT stop the upgrade process right after unpacking a few packages.
The solution to the perpetual Debian release lag is simple: release always, release often. Allowing new packages based upon existing libc or xlib to be released within the lifespan of a distro - not just bugfixes and security patches - is a must, at the very least.
As it doesn't support WMV files (Quicktime is already nice, though), its use is extremely limitted to me. Supporting de-facto standards like Windows Media Player simply cannot be avoided, like it or not.
Noticing Ximian's recent snafu with the Red Hat 7.3 beta, I wonder if they have learned their lesson and have been practicing safe Woody lately. I really don't feel like seeing my whole Ximian Desktop setup breaking again, just because Ximian developpers are not in sync with Debian development and prepared to release Woody builds overnight, the day Woody hits the stable branch.
On a related issue, will Evolution be built and released by the Debian people themselves, so that it can be available for more than just i386? That package really rocks and could make a Linux desktop not only a viable choice, but a mightily attractive one, for business people. Unfortunately, given Ximian's current attitude of not wanting to release Woody builds until Woody hits stable, supporting it is currently a daunting task, whenever someone offers Linux consulting services based on Debian and would not recommend Potato to any customer because of obsolesence issues...
This poster's point about journalling hits home. While I have applied the ext3/UDMA patch and recompiled the kernel, I really think that Woody should install a journalling-capable kernel by default. The user should not have to get around compiling his own kernel or installing a non-default kernel to benefit from journalling. Instead, a menu should allow selecting which fstype will be used to create the filesystems for the install.
It doesn't stop there, though. Other things that make me think Woody could, once again, make Debian look as the forever obsolete distro and prevent it, once again, from achieving recognition outside the developpers' universe are:
Rationale: support for too many cards broken in 4.0 and 4.1, but restored in 4.2
This is actually a catch-22, as most architectures just being added to Debian will start at (currently) 2.4.17
Honnestly, defaulting to the above is a must. The funny thing is, most of the above is already possible on Woody. Why not base the default install on them?
The second exhibit could be used to conclude that devices implanted by the feds to intercept keystrokes in order to gain access to an individual's encrypted file is criminal. How does "preventive detention of federal agents suspected of terrorist acts, namely several forms of system interference" sound to you?
The whole "I hate Jon" mentality tends to go overboard, lately. On this other popular site, people regularly mod submitted stories down, simply because "this sounds like Jon could have done it". Grow up! Disagreeing with one's writing style or opinions is one thing, but systematically whining every time Jon or someone with similar statements publishes a story is downright lame. Ditto for those stupid "BSD is dying" trolls. Use any OS you want, let others use the OS they want, and stop poluting the threads with your crap!
Thank you, come again! What's the correct URL? Cut&pasted straight from your reply, but got a nice 404.