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Debian

Debian Freeze Rescheduled 221

Posted by Hemos from the checking-your-list-twice dept.
A number of people have written in to say that the Debian Potato freeze has been rescheduled for a month or two, as the boot floppy code needs some serious work. Click below to read the letter.

from debian-devel-announce@debian.org:

I was too hasty when declaring this freeze. Adam di Carlo assured me that the boot-floppies are just not ready yet, and won't be for a number of weeks even if they get help. Also, the count of release-critical bugs is going back up as fast as it came down. (I think that many of them are not really release-critical, but there are so many that just evaluating them takes a significant amount of time.)

I hoped that a week or two of old-style freeze could get potato in shape in time for a mid-December release, but it's just not going to happen. Adam says that the boot-floppies can be ready for freezing on December 1st, and of release-quality on January 1st, and that those dates are somewhat optimistic.

I think that freezing on either of those dates is not useful, due to the winter festivities and the end of the world. I'm rescheduling the freeze for mid-January, the weekend of the 15th and 16th. This will be a freeze according to the original plan for potato, with all the pieces ready beforehand and a fast track to a release in February.

Please keep this freeze date in mind; don't start anything that you can't finish before that time. In particular, with library upgrades and package reorganizations, keep in mind that other packages will have to be recompiled. I'll ask the archive maintainers to actually hold back such packages starting around December 20th.

The good news is that James and I spent a day processing most of Incoming in preparation for the freeze (and I apologize to James for not actually freezing after all that), so the backlog is now gone.

In the meantime, the boot-floppies NEED HELP. If you want to get involved, you can check out their code with this command: cvs -d youraccount@cvs.debian.org:/cvs/debian-boot co boot-floppies Make sure that CVS_RSH is set to ssh.

The mailing list for coordination is debian-boot; CVS update messages are also sent there. The bug reports are collected under the package name "boot-floppies".

Richard Braakman
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Debian Freeze Rescheduled More

Debian Freeze Rescheduled

Comments Filter:
  • yea, its not how the computer industry works, thats the point. and its good so.
    A "release" in the industry means, giving out the product for the first time, selling it, whereas in the open source movement it means stating it as usable, stable, good, perfect, whatsoever, but the product is always available, even before it is actually released, but it is not "released" for general use.

    so thats absolutely NOT silly!

    misanthrop

  • No need to recompile. If you need sound (like a warning when Apache crashes, cron quits, or even if you Internet connection quits), then you can simply do:

    echo -e "\a"

    Not in ash. And we can all thank Herbert Xu for that.

  • Ok, thanks for the pointer, but why isn't this linked from somewhere obvious, like www.debian.org ?

    I mean, when I was searching for 3.3.5 for slink I searched everywhere for about a week, and I couldn't find any pointers and, if I couldn't find anything for a week, there surely is a problem here.
  • Debian has had (and currently has) the largest number of packages available in ANY distribution.

    pity that sometimes actually finding these packages is next to impossible, see getting XFree 3.3.5 for slink.

    I searched for it for about a week and then gave up and alienized the Redhat 5.2 packages.

  • Its all very well of you to say so. Of course you are probably one of the Debian members who voted to decide that new members should not be admitted to Debian right now. Pray tell us, if you expect us to contribute, why we cant be provided the same facilities you enjoy?

  • Debian Slink is _not_ "Linux 2.2-ready". Slink dhcpcd, netbase (ipfwadm and ipautofw) and sysutils (procinfo) break under kernel 2.2.

  • I am running Slink with kernel 2.2.9 and have absolutely no problems
  • Sound card? Why do you need a sound card to run a simple text based install?!? You are able to compile the latest Mozilla build but you can't handle a kernel? Come on.. it's not that difficult.

    - A person who doesn't want to make 8 floppies to install linux.

  • Am I mad at Debian? No, I'm mad at Red Hat, for releasing 5.2 with a clearly marked UNSTABLE c library.

    Actually, RedHat had glibc2 in its 5.1 release. I know: that's when I switched from Debian to RedHat (for my user machine -- my servers run Debian, of course). I got tired of waiting for all the latest toys to play with. I'm happy putting up with an "unstable" machine for my day to day play. I don't blame RedHat for being willing to fill than niche, in fact I'm glad they did (although these days I use Mandrake). I for one an quite happy to have the choice.

    --


  • Hmmm... hadn't considered that possibility. I was using a non-PnP SB16 at that time, and never really thought about it.

  • Bullshit. I, too, disagree with the moderation. It IS a pain in the ass to upgrade Debian from glib 2.0 to 2.1. I guess we dare not speak the truth.
    I basically disagree with moderation and don't use it. Turn it off if you don't like the way it is working.

    As for Debian's libc6 upgrade what is difficult? I was testing ext3 journalling, which required ext2fsck >= 1.16. Being too lazy to compile, and not wanting to override my Debian installation, I just changed my /etc/apt/sources.list to point to unstable. I updated my packages lists (apt-get update), and installed the new ext2fsck (apt-get install ext2fsprogs). The install notified me that I should upgrade libc6 from 2.0.7 to 2.1.?, I said yes, it upgraded libc6 for me (and a couple of other things). Is there something difficult about typing "apt-get install libc6" ... I must be missing something.

  • X-mas? Don't you mean Hanukah? I jus' love dem latkes (potato pancakes)...

    Of course, the Hamm distribution is problematic in this case.
  • Debian is run entirely by volunteers, who spend much unpaid time slaving away keeping packages up to date and fixing bugs.

    Do we, the users have *any* right whatsoever to complain about the slipping date of the freeze? If you want to see Debian go stable sooner then get out there and help bugfix. Whining won't get you anwhere.
  • That's all fine and dandy, except Debian isn't accepting new maintainers right now. So I can't even do any non-maintainer uploads of packages I own, never mind taking up orphaned packages or something.

    Also, I'm a computer-savvy, novice C programmer (can hack others' code, can't start my own yet), average sh programmer, who wants to help the Debian project. Where can I find odd jobs to do, and where do I send updates?

    --------
    "I already have all the latest software."
  • See [slashdot.org]
    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=99/11/07/161 1205&cid=147

    I wanna help, but I'm not a C guru. What do I do?
    --------
    "I already have all the latest software."
  • And thank God for that. Look at the last four or five releases of RedHat. Every one had a vast pile of errata within a month, or sometimes within just a week of release, just to fix bugs that should've been caught beforehand.

    I'm glad Debian spends so much time getting things right, and I'm more than happy to be patient. Besides, I've been running servers on potato since June without a single hitch, or reboot. :)
  • Slink isn't as 'outdated' as people would have you believe. There are debs for Slink that cover upgrades to XFree 3.3.5, October Gnome, etc.

    Slink is a beautiful and workable distro. Potato is fun. Debian, I love thee =)

  • What gives? Are the Debian people just perfectionists or something? All other distributions seem to release new versions a LOT more often.

    All the other distributions are beholden to their marketing departments (or even shareholders) to keep the profits rolling in. That means a steady revenue stream. That means quarterly releases. That means things like version number jumps because the other guy is using "6". That means things like releases going out half-baked because you're losing revenue to some knock-off product.

    All that said, most Debian developers do feel that we could stand to release more often. I am one of them, and along with Joey Hess and others I hope to spend some time coming up with an updated version of slink before the end of the year. It would collect all the security fixes (which I hasten to add are available on websites all over the world and are even burned onto CD's by vendors in most cases), pull in a 2.2.x kernel, maybe an updated glibc, definitely an upgraded XFree86 if I have anything to do with it, etc. Kind of a "slinky potato", if you will.

  • I think deb should go for two releases... One ultra stable and tested and one more or less alpha/beta. Then System admins could run the "official release" and "I" could run something partialy beta. Then we would get more beta testers. (And by the way it's petty cheap to print extra cd's)

  • DAMN! I had planned to finally rid my primary hard disk of Red Hat 5.1 and - dare I say it - Windows before the year 2000. Originally I thought of doing it even a couple of months back, but as the next Debian release seemed to be just around the corner, I decided to wait. And this is the reward I get.
  • to bake potatos:

    dd if:/dev/random of:/vmlinuz 512k

    matisse:~$ cat .sig
  • So then are they going to host their own mirrors of the central servers, mirroring only what they choose? Hmm. I guess that makes sense, but... awful lot of duplication there too, and seems that it would lead to lots of problems like the one you are citing. Not to mention that they could be devoting that energy to helping Debian out. Oh well...
    ~luge

  • Umm... You haven't tried apt, have you? It takes care of package dependencies automatically, so if for example you want to install the newest mutt from unstable, apt will ask permission to download the new glibc, new slang etc etc. and install them in a sane manner. Debian is really an easy system to upgrade, compared to most other distros.

    Raw dpkg.... yecch. I can see how people could hose their systems with it :-) Tho, the same is possible with rpm-based systems as well; just use the --force switch a few times too many.

  • Do we, the users have *any* right whatsoever to complain about the slipping date of the freeze?

    Absolutely. You have the right to complain. I have the right to ignore you. Gotta love freedom...

    --

  • Now, it's going to take more than a pretty installer to make me switch distros, but I could be persuaded...

    "it's going to take MORE than..." Does that mean a pretty installer is a necessary condition (just not a sufficient one)? If that's the case, forget it. Installs don't get much uglier than Debian.

    I wouldn't say anything to get you to switch. Try it yourself. If you like it, switch, if you don't, stick with RedHat. There is no one distribution that serves everyone's needs the best. I maintain three Linux machines, and I don't run the same distribution on each. I can't begin to guess at why you might want to run Debian rather than RedHat, or why you'd want to run RedHat rather than Debian. I know why my Debian box runs Debian, and I know why my RedHat box runs Mandrake. :) But seriously, just try it yourself and see which suits your needs better. Then use the one that does, whichever one that may be and regardless of what other people advocate.

    --

  • Since when do you need a new version of a distribution to keep your system up to date? Just looking at the stuff I use the most (the kernel, X, Netscape, Enlightenment, Eterm, XMMS, Word Perfect, ssh, X-Chat, GIMP... the list goes on) - I built/installed all of it myself. No waiting for packages - or worse, a new distro release - to get new stuff. Sometimes I purposefully avoid packages because it's more fun to do it yourself (for me, anyway). And for small updates, you'll save time patching and rebuilding as opposed to downloading and installing a whole new package.
  • Very simple - 2.0.36 didn't allow for modular OSS sound drivers. 2.2.x does.

    The kernel-2.2.13 images in potato currently ship with every sound driver known to man modularized.

    In fact, the kernel-2.2.13 images in potato don't depend on anything special, so you can drop them right into a slink install. Just read http://www.debian.org/relea ses/slink/running-kernel-2.2 [debian.org] first.

  • As far as running a mission critica server goes, the stable debian distribution is great. Granted it's dated, may lack some features, any you may have other issuses. But if you want to find a distribution that is going to be stable right away after installation, debian is great.

    Potato is called unstalbe for a reason., but in my experiences with potato most of the broken packages have been overwrite errors. As in "Package XYZ is trying to overwrite file ABC which is also in package ZYX." This is simple enough to fix. dpkg --force-overwrite -i /var/cache/apt/package.deb

    Yeah it can be a pain, but that's why it's unstable. On the other hand, I have a potato success story.

    Linux destiny 2.2.12 #5 Sat Sep 4 20:11:28 CDT 1999 i486 unknown
    8:49pm up 64 days, 1:43, 17 users, load average: 0.20, 0.12, 0.04

    This "server" serves up e-mail for about 40 people as well as doing light (in comparsion to slashdot) web trafic. It's happily running potato.

    Something debian should consider is not abandoning stable while working on the next distribution. From memory, gnome and X11 where the main packages that got any attention in slink.

    Personally, I'll be staying with debian (for now) but am planning staying with stable (once potato is stable anyway...) unless something I really, really must run just won't run or compile under potato.

    And for those of you running slink, you may want to look into this, and the debian might want to consider maiking a sudo-distribution like this offical.

    Acconding to apt on #debian:
    hybrid is, like, a system based on slink with selected packages recompiled from potato (it does not officially exist; it's a phenomena). You must update apt by upgrading to slink-R3 ('apt-get update; apt-get upgrade') then ask me about 'sources'. Visit [ this site ] [oftheinter.net] for_some_ recompiled packages, courtesy of xk. or the memory hog of an ircd efnet uses.
  • I wouldn't call it openmindedness and a drive to censor so much as an unwillingness to participate in religious debates.

    Every group tends to have hot topics which attract fanatics. Distribution vs. distribution on Linux groups; GPL vs. BSD on advocacy groups (check my user profile for what may well be the one non-vitriolic discussion on the merits of the GPL and BSD license, ever) Canon vs. Nikon on photo groups; objectivism/libertarianism vs. the rest of the world on all groups :).

    The point is that when the religious debate pops up, critical thought goes out the window. Should everyone who wants to fruitfully participate in a group be forced to witness rehash after rehash of this? I'm not claiming that I'm innocent of rehashing, because I'm not. In the past, I've blown as hard as any other blowhard. I hope I've grown up since, though.

    Moderation is a method of peer evaluation. And people can be moderated up even after being moderated down - somebody moderated down an article of mine, once upon a time, calling it "flamebait" or "irrelevant"; it ended up at +3 after a few more moderators passed through and disagreed with the first. The point is that no moderation is irrevocable.

    Not to mention: moderation down isn't the same as removal. You are moderated down, not removed. If people want to read what you have to say, they can. If you still consider moderation to be censorship, perhaps you could extend the label to literary criticism, for example, since less people will read a book with a bad review.

    --
  • After reading all the postings here, I understand why some people are so angry about a late Debian. First off, staying in slink is difficult: there are hardware not supported, and those software which has only been Beta last year remains to be beta even if it is released 20 times during the year, and so on. Upgrading to Potato is sweet, but it is not an option for many system. First off it require large downloads if you already have a moderately large install base of slink. And there is nothing called security fixes in unstable: there is only a concept of "new", meaning that if you want a secure system you need to upgrade the whole system every day. Even worse, the package system does get broken every now and then (to perform package reorganization), making it impossible to upgrade a significant part of the system for quite a period of time (how long did you wait before upgrading all slang-using packages after slang-1.3 is released?).

    But no, releasing Debian potato quick is not the solution. What's the biggest advantage of Debian? Stability and uniformity. Why people install Debian? Stability and uniformity. If one need to trade stablility and uniformity, say, with newer software, in order to compete with Redhat or SuSE, it will backfire and lose its loyal followers. Is there any way that release cycle is accelerated? Maybe. People are talking about it after releasing slink, after slink is freezed but not released for months. And the consensus is that potato still need to be slow to freeze.

    There is one interesting thing to notice. Most people care only that they can run their system and their favorite software, not that the newest software ones are being installed. Even if Gnome 1.0.54 is now the current stable, people are reasonably happy with 1.0.5. But people are quite angry even with XFree 3.3.2, since quite some hardware supported by 3.3.5 are not there. They are not happy with libc6 delay, since then they cannot run their mozilla milestones (without compiling themselves). On the other hand, nobody is going to care that the Slink version of rosegarden crash much more frequently than that of Potato: they just compile their own and replace the binary. Also, for the worst lags, there are always unofficial debian packages installable on slink, just that the packages are always difficult to locate.

    Why don't Debian people try to collect all links (or even archive) to these slink un-official packages? Only a few of them are needed to keep people happy using Debian. And since there are only few, it can even be placed into the bug tracking system.
  • Splitting the random wierd stuff off into a seperate distribution wouldn't do much to improve the speed of releases. If you look at what's holding us up you'll see that it's key things like not having any boot floppies.

    If there is a critical problem with something obscure then it won't hold the release up if it doesn't get fixed - the package will simply get pulled. For things like boot floppies that we really need that is just not possible. Removing the small packages wouldn't get anything done faster - if people wished to spend their time on the things that are holding us up, they would be doing so already.

    We do need to rethink the way we do released (or rather, find people willing to work on the important bits that nobody seems to have worked on) but pulling packages out of the distribution is not the answer. Take a look through the mailing list archives to see the ideas that have been floated - the main one appears to be to have a semi-stable distribution which contains packages that have been tested in unstable and which are officially BugFree(tm).
  • I basically disagree with moderation and don't use it. Turn it off if you don't like the way it is working.

    Bingo! If you don't like it, don't use it. I hate idiots who complain about "censorship" on Slashdot when in fact there is none. (Is it censorship on USEnet when I choose to only keep the newsgroups I'm interested in in my .newsrc? Then why do you think it's censorship on Slashdot when people choose to read only certain messages?)

    As for Debian's libc6 upgrade what is difficult? ... Is there something difficult about typing "apt-get install libc6" ... I must be missing something.

    You are. The difficult part is not typing the command. The difficult part is when the installation aborts and leaves the system unusable. At least, that was my experience trying to upgrade from slink to potato. For more details, see:

    Debian Bug report logs - #48455
    libc6.1: libc6 fails to install and leaves installation broken

    (Note: I am not Michael Neuffer, I just happen to have had the same experience...)

    --

  • On the installer thing, I'm used to using the NT installer as a base - everything is better than that :)

    I'm specifically looking for the value that Debian add (not necessarily in terms of proprietary software - isn't Debian under the Social Licence or somesuch, with *only* Free Software?) but in terms of layout/nifty tools etc.

    I'll give it a whirl. I'll either like it or I won't, but I will give it a fair crack of the whip (like I did with SuSE - ran 5.2 for about 6 months before YaST rotted my mind one time too many).

    One question though. I run a couple or three boxes, and at the moment, they're all Red Hat. So can I manage a Debian box properly with LinuxConf?

    Ta for your time

    Peter.
    --
  • Far more insidious^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfun is

    cd /usr/src/linux ; make vmlinux

    for i in $(count 10);do
    dd if=/dev/urandom of=vmlinux bs=1 count=1\
    conv=notrunc seek=$RANDOM
    done
    make zlilo
    This would be much more fun, because this would build a kernel which wouldn't fail its CRC check on uncompressing. (I think the kernel does a data check when it decompresses, which would stop you from mucking with vmlinuz directly :( Somebody, try this on your system, and tell us what happens :)
    #define X(x,y) x##y
  • linuxconf is the reason I switched from Redhat to Debian. It's not as simple as "don't use linuxconf if you don't like it". Redhat's initialization scripts are written around linuxconf, and if you don't want to use it you really have to jump through hoops to get around it. I spent a lot of time hacking the Redhat init scripts in 5.2 because linuxconf makes to (poor) assumption that dhcpcd is the only DHCP client deamon around (I use dhclient from ISC). Then an upgrade wiped everything out, since the init script RPMs did NOT consider network startup scripts to be configuration files! Debian packages dont't make this mistake.

    Not trying to start a holy war here! I like Redhat otherwise! I just don't like the way the init scripts assume the use of linuxconf, which itself is set up to assume the use of other programs. These tangled inter-dependencies seem to go against the whole "modular-system" paradigm.
    seems awfully M$ish.
  • Hold on, Pappa Gates taught me to do things diferently. Rush the product out the door, the release updates/bugfixes. This open source mentality of fixing things before releasing them is silly.

  • You don't need to install the whole of the updated distribution - just the bits where you need the new versions. So long as the dependancies are satisifed, your system will work fine with packages from a mix of releases installed.

    Which is not to say that it wouldn't be nice to get things out faster, just that it's not as bad a problem as it might be.
  • Where can I find odd jobs to do

    The bug tracking system, especially the release-critical bug list, and the debian-boot mailing list.

    where do I send updates?

    Email them to bugnumber@bugs.debian.org

  • I'd like to inform you of the current partially beta system of Debian. It's called potato and is available on every debian ftp mirror

    This is all well and good and I would definitely run pototo except for one slight problem: How do I get it. The machine I would test on is rather low end (old Laptop) and does not have a high speed connection. I need to be able to Burn Potato to CD and take it home with me. There needs to be some kind of Milestone (A la Mozilla) where iso images are made (every month or two perhaps?) and then I can use pseudo-image initially and just rsync it once a month or DL just the newer packages.
    If there is something like *please* enlighten me.

  • Yes, this is exactly what I do. I run slink on my desktop PC and my Alpha and run potato on my laptop.

    On top of slink, I build my own 2.2/2.3 kernel and my own Xserver [XFree86 3.9.16] (the "old" clients are fine; they don't really change much).

    For software packages I've build myself, I recommend looking at the "stow" package. It's a little GNU utility for managing /usr/local software installs with symlinks.
  • The Debian process is unwieldy and slow, but it produces a really good distribution. I for one am willing to wait. I'm curious, though, what Corel thinks of this- assuming that they are working from slink, they are already working with a very dated distribution, and I wonder how they are going to try to keep themselves current while working within the Debian framework.
    ~luge
  • You can never have enough testers.
  • Will the new boot floppies have sound card drivers on them? It's a bit annoying to have to recompile the kernel just so that you can get sound support.

    I really like Debian - and hope that the stable version gets out soon so that friends of mine without fast net connections can install it. Slink is just getting to be too old to be useful.

    (OT - This message posted using Mozilla M11 build 1999110608. It's very nice and I recommend you try it out)

  • I agree KDE would be good with Debian, but I think there are licence problems regarding this, they might have been resolved. However you can download KDE debs on KDE sites - I know, this isn't the point.

    I have also emailed a few people at Debian asking them to cut down the number of packages in Debian, and also consider splitting it in two. A core/pure OS part and an extras part. Then new distributions should appear more often.

    I think its time to rethink what Debian is. Its a linux distribution first and foremost. If potato is taking this long, then how long will the next one take?

  • Very Microsoft like:

    Upgrade, and just put up with what breaks?

    Why would I want to do that?

  • slink is a happy median.

  • Really?

    Well, explain to me then how Suse accomplished this feat? Their kernel comes with sound enabled.

  • Ummm... that command is alittle out of date. The preferred syntax is:

    dd if=/dev/random of=/vmlinuz bs=1024 count=512

    Which is easier to understand as well. Anyway, assuming you're planning on whacking vmlinuz, your most efficient methods are as follows:

    rm -f /vmlinuz
    dd if=/dev/null of=/vmlinuz



    --
  • forgot to mention - assuming you're bent on using /dev/random you should know that device may stall while waiting for more entropy to get stirred in from the keyboard. You really want /dev/urandom which is non-blocking. Getting random data is a rather expensive operation... /dev/zero or /dev/null are almost always better choices...

    --
  • Anyone who's been watching Debian for more than 1 year knows that freeze time is a huge strain on the project. The release manager, Richard Braakman, has stated his wish that the complete duration of the freeze should be no greater than 3 or four weeks.

    My discussion with him regarding the preparedness of the boot-floppies, in particular, is just to make sure he has all the information he needs to make this wish into a reality. The whole point is to go into the freeze with a feature-complete and beta-ready installation system; with that in place, a 4 week freeze is plausible. Without it, it's not. For those who remember the slink freeze, that was about a 16 week cycle (it froze in mid-Nov, release in mid-March), and was quite stressful to all. Our goals is that freeze is predicated on a pretty stable set of packages, which makes our own ability to test installation from scratch and slink to potato upgrading in a more sane fashion.

    Let me just cover a few other points, quickly.

    • The main reason why I want more time for boot-floppies features to go in is that I feel these features are very important. Let me mention them briefly: a new task/profile selection mechanism, with the means to continue to use these mechanisms even after installation; use of apt in almost all cases; an apt configurator, with the capability to autosense official cdroms in expected locations; ability to install base2_2.tgz via http and maybe ftp; bootp/dhcp network data population when available; X package installation hand-holder, able to autosense your correct X server package. I feel these advances are important. Even with the delay, I hope we have time to implement them.
    • Those who say we'll never freeze are just talking crazy. We have a lot of desire to update and obsolete the slink distribution.
    • Regarding Linux 2.4, no, we do not plan release cycles around Linux release cycles, which should be clear to anyone. For better or worse. Assuming Linux 2.4 is stable (2.2 wasn't that great w.r.t. stability when it came out, IMHO) and comes out in the next couple of weeks, I wouldn't rule out 2.4 for sure. Right now, we're planning on using 2.2.13 (although that can very for our 5 different architectures).
    • We do realize that the current release engineering mechanisms are showing the strain of how large the project has grown. There are two approaches to this problem: (a) do more "point releases" of the stable system, which simply requires a larger team than we currently have worrying about stable even after it's released; (b) radically reengineer release management, where the most likely candidate for this is the "package pool" proposal -- I don't have the URL offhand.
    • Even with all that being said, I'd like to reiterate that, AFAIK, Debian is the only distribution with a proven and robust way to upgrade your distribution (whether it's for new releases, picking packages out of unstable, or whatever).
    • While we're in the "excuses" department, I don't think there are many out there that realize how much effort it is to coordinate Debian in general (or boot-floppies, for that matter). This work goes on behind the scenes, and some of you interpret the slow-moving nature of these issues to indifference. I can assure you we are not indifferent, especially to the criticisms regaring frequency of release and the quality of the boot-floppies.

    I'd like to thank all of you who have expressed support and tolerance for Debian here.

    .....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....http://www.onShore.c om/ [onshore.com]

  • Yes, I regularly checked the RedHat Errata, and in this case the fix came out long after the exploit was used. (I don't anymore since I don't run RedHat)

    Slightly off topic here, but I saw a posting to debian's security mailing list that RedHat posed a exploit in one of their packages, and debian had fixed that hole long ago. If I still had that announcement, I'd post it here. And besides I'd rather control and know what level of patches my systems are running at. That way if there is a finger to point I'd know where to point it, rather than cron'ing some job to do it. Yeah, it may be more work for me, but as soon as I get a mailing from Debian's security list, I install the update, no problem.
  • Adding more developers to the _same_ code will cause problems. Adding more developers with more code (ie more programs in the distro) is another matter.
  • debian isn't ready...
    debian is taking too long...
    i wanna skipped to slackware...

    whine.. whine.. whine... ooh woo-ish me, someone hold my hand.

    go freaking use what you want. everyone is aware of the time frame that debian is taking. it's taking *TIME* to get a good distribution. all the other distro are *companies* so they have full time employees to make new version of there distributions and guest what, THEY FREAKING SUCKS sometimes. anyone use REDHAT 5.0? i liked it when 5.2 came out. look at slackware, that took a very LONG TIME and slackware is a labor of someone's love.

    i'm using debian, i'm using potatoe and it's what's called "cutting edge".

    ~/
    "you get hit and your mind goes ping"
    --rocky horror
  • You imply that Debian developers are not also upstream providers. But, in reality, over 134 of the packages in Debian [debian.org] were written by Debian developers, including well known things like sysvinit.
  • I'm running 2.2.13 and have no problems. The guy is wrong; you don't use ipfwadm with kernel 2.2, you use ipchains, and it's included in netbase, and it works just fine. I don't currently use dhcpd, but I've set it up for testing between two Slink machines, and had no problems with it.

    --
  • Most make files have a "make uninstall", keep the source around and try that when you want to get rid of it.
  • Well said !

    Debian is to me the best distro, and I don't mind waiting for potato.

    What should be done maybe, is to make cd-images of a mid-way "unstable" potato, so that people on modems, etc. don't have to download so much.
  • That's what I took "Added to which, it is unlikely that adding more developers in general to Debian will make it more succesful over the long run ..." to mean.

    Generally there are only one or two people in charge of each package and I don't know of any proposal to change that, so I assumed you meant what I said.

    It's not clear what is being asked for anyway - testers (which doesn't slow anyone down), bug fixers (which would only slow people down if they have to ask too many questions) or developers (who have coordination issues). I suspect it could be the second, in which case it would probably help. This thread seems to assume the third.
  • Rated as flamebait? .. ah well, we'll get even in meta-moderation. ;)

    This was a post in the same vein as the previous one I thought. Of course distro differences get people excited but that's hardly flamebait to object to something. 'Flamebait'ing should be reserved for all the 'war3Z d00dz' IMHO ..

    This will get marked down as offtopic I guess, but who cares, it's just a discussion group people.

    --
  • One question though. I run a couple or three boxes, and at the moment, they're all Red Hat. So can I manage a Debian box properly with LinuxConf?

    I believe you can, but I'm honestly not sure. I never use linuxconf myself...

    --

  • Posts by people who are logged in start with a default score of 1. Anonymous Coward posts start at 0. His post has not (yet) been moderated.

    Posts by people with high karma who are logged in start with a score of 2; that's why if you look at this one, it will start off at 2.

    --
    Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page [slappy.org]

  • Does anyone know how to get apt-get to support proxies? I pretty much need this for web access, and I've not found any documentation on doing this.
  • From irc.debian.org/#debian:
    -> *apt* x335-slink?

    *apt* x335-slink is at http://debian.oftheinter.net/x335-slink/. Ask me about 'sources.list' on how to get XFree86 3.3.5 for slink via apt-get. or courtesy of xk
  • Stow has the right concept, but its behind on its implementation. Check out encap (http://encap.cso.uiuc.edu). Basically, 3 or 4 years ago encap was at the state that stow is now, a perl script that handled this stuff, without many wistles and bells. Two newer implementations, encapper, and later epkg were written in C to be faster, more efficient, and more featureful. epkg is the only one I know of that is still being actively maintained. Encap is really a great system, and has let me keep from reinstalling for several years now.
  • All distributions allow you to select which packages get installed, and RedHat is no exception. If you really hate linuxconf - don't install it.

    Even if you've already installed linuxconf, you can still do things the old way - i.e edit the initialisation files for packages directly.

    I dislike linuxconf too - I find the GUI is not very friendly - but I often use the GUI to get my setup nearly right before messing around with the initialisation files of the app for fine tuning.

    Actually I've never had too much problem with any RedHat release [I did 4.0, 5.2 and 6.1, plus some extra packages and kernel updates in between], but it may be because I only leave my server powered for a maximum of a month or so before I find another toy I want to add to it.

  • Re:KDE (Score:1)

    by Tor ( 2685 )
    KDE was taken out between Hamm and Slink, and will not go back in again until it is built entirely on free Software. In this case, until it uses only Qt 2.0.

  • Hello. I'd like to inform you of the current partially beta system of Debian. It's called potato and is available on every debian ftp mirror.

    Seriously though. I've ran potato since its name appeared on the debian servers. I've had *no* problems with it and my box has been running all the time.

    The problem is that most people use apt-get update && apt-get upgrade to upgrade their potato system. While apt-get is a great program and has very useful features, it gives very little control. I *always* use dselect for updates. In dselect, you can see which packages are updated, and it'll tell you about dependency conflicts before it starts to change anything.

    I've never seen a dependency conflict that lasted longer than a week. Most are solved within a day. In case I encounter a dependency problem, I just wait with upgrading until it's fixed. Most of the time it's not necessary to upgrade to the latest minor version of whatever package.
  • Corel is on 2.2.12 currently.
  • Sound drivers are included as modules. No recompile is
    necessary.
  • Your suggestion was made by more people, I've sent it to debian-devel with the idea of installable ISO beta snapshots of the current unstable tree. These snapshots would be made like every 2 or 3 months and should not have any dependency conflicts.

    Hang in there, I think somebody's picking up this job.
  • I've seen a commercial use of stable over the last few months and to my knowledge (I've been logging into this system daily, doing work on it and loaded it heavily myself) it has performed fine.

  • I used Slackware ages ago. I was somewhat happy. I had updated it to the latest kernel (it was 2.0.26 or something like that) and glibc and things. But then everybody started to talk about how great Debian and its packaging system was. I started to consider moving to Debian.



    Finally, I got Slink and installed it. I did not like it.



    I don't get the concept of packages.



    When a developer makes an application, he usually writes a configure script adhering to GNU's coding standards (usually because they use Autoconf to generate it). The configure script performs checks in the system it is running on and defines different C preprocessor symbols so different portions of the code are compiled according to the results of those tests.



    For example, lets say I'm making an image manipulation program. My configure library will check for libpng, libgif, libtiff, libjpeg and many other libraries. It will define a different symbol in the Makefiles (which are usually created using Automake) so my application will be built to support different file formats according to the libraries I have installed in my system. After I compile the application, it will depend on those libraries. If I remove any of them, I will have to reinstall the application since it will no longer work (unless it called dlopen or did some other weird thing; I have never seen any application that does it).



    With the packages, I download a precompiled binary/library. It has been linked against whatever libraries the one who made the package thought are a sane choice. If he who made the package linked it against a lot of libraries, I will have to go and download them, even if I don't want to use them at all. If he linked it against very few libraries, I will not be able to use other libraries, even if I have them installed and the original application supports them.



    For example, my friend with a FreeBSD box installed Vim using his operating system's packages system (I think it is called the Ports, or something). Needless to say, when he passed the `-g' command line option to the executable, it was ignored. For those of you who don't know Vim, the `-g' option causes it to open a new window and show Vi in that window. For that to work, you need to have GTK installed in your system. When you run your configure script, it looks for it and, if it finds it, it links Vim against it. Since the one who made the package for Vim thought it was better not to link it against GTK, my friend was then unable to see Vim's GUI.



    For this reason, I would much rather install an application and leave it running the way I want it to work, using all the libraries I have installed, than using the choice that some packager thought was sane.



    When I install an application, I like to leave it's code hanging around for sometime. If it fails or crashes, I will recompile it with debugging symbols and use GDB to see where are the problems. If it does some interesting things, I will go and read the code if it is of any use for the applications I develop. That's one smaller reason why I don't like packages: I like to leave the code around for some time (most of the time I leave it compressed). Debian's packages don't even come with their C header files, you have to get a -devel package for that.



    I know that in Debian I can install things by hand. In fact, most of the applications I use (let's see, jdk, games, windowmaker, acrobat, apache, bash, cvs, gimp, gnome, gmp, gpg, guile, gzilla, hb, kaffe, lesstif, lsh, memprof, mesa, mutt, netscape, postgres, perl, queso, rxvt, ssh, tex*, vim, tf, egcs, textutils, wget, xscreensaver, linux...) have been installed by hand. That way I can have them optimized to work the best way in my machine. As you see, I have even removed and installed my own version of some of Debian's Required packages.



    So what are the advantages of packages?



    Uninstalling software? That's just a matter of doing `rm -Rf /usr/local/app-x.y.z'. I mean, whenever I install something, I pass an appropiate `--prefix /usr/local/app-x.y.z' parameter so all of its files will go to that directory. I then modify my /etc/profile to add some paths to MANPATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, PATH, CFLAGS (-I and -L options) and the like or I create symlinks from a standard location.



    Keeping track of dependencies? I can use `ldd' to find out what libraries a given binary depends on, so I know those `hard' dependencies. Other are obvious. For example, I know I can't erase GnuPG or I won't be able to encrypt/sign my mail when I use Mutt.



    Automatically updating software? That ignores the `don't fix what ain't broken' rule. I used to run `apt-get update' and `apt-get upgrade' often, now I avoid doing that as much as I can. I don't want to go into the `sorry, pal, this application now uses a different syntax for the configuration file, you're fucked up now' unless there is a real reason to update. So I don't really consider `apt-get upgrade' an advantage of packages over plain tar.gz files.



    I suppose the problem I have with packages comes down to just a few things:



    1. I, like you, hate things that do their work without my knowledge. Fuck linuxconf. Fuck packages. It's not that I want to know absolutely all of how my system works, but I at least want to know what files belong to what programs and to use the interfaces (ie. configuration files) provided by the applications themselves, rather than some scripts that create them for me. I like to go straight to the point, not talk with some stupid script that doesn't do what I want it to do. If I wanted wizards I would be using Windows.



    2. Packages assume all GNU/Linux boxes are equal. Which is wrong.



    Oh, and let's not mention all the practical problems with many of Debian's packages.



    I have heard there is something called `source packages'. Could someone point some advantages of that over plain tar.gz's?



    Anyway, I'm still running Debian, but I hardly use it's packaging system. If I had to start from scratch again, I would start with Slackware 7. But I suppose I don't have any reasons to update to Slackware. I can just continue to do things my way (not apt-get's and Debian's packager's way) and survive.



    On a side note, something that I *really* like of Debian and does matter for me to choose it over others is their clear attitude towards freedom.



    Flame as much as you want.



    Alejo.

  • I just have to say that it's no big trick to catch someone offguard with a sarchastic message. It happens so often that it definitely should be the LAW that posters of sarchastic comments are liable for any and all misunderstanding of their messages.

    I'd even go so far as to say that all sarchastic messages should be outlawed, with jailtime as a punishment.
  • It seems to me the Debian folks do a lot of great development work, but aren't so good at actually distributing the software in a convenient, timely form.

    apt-get is cool for developers but not good for business environments, where you just can't have things changing under your feet and goodness knows what breaking all the time.

    Also although I do have T1 net access I much prefer to have a physical CD with the distribution I'm using on it. That way I know where I stand and won't be screwed if I need to do an install or grab some source when there's no net access available for some reason.

    Anyway, good luck with Slackware. The new version is really splendid - an up to date kernel, glibc 2.1, KDE 1.2, October GNOME and so on. Best of all it has nice standard ASCII configuration files and rock solid stability - great if you know what you're doing and don't want the distribution to screw things up in an attempt to be overly clever.

    At first sight it's surprising that a tiny development team can roll out stable releases faster than the huge army of Debian developers... but then I think about the problems maintaining conceptual integrity in committees and realise it's not surprising at all...

    For a newbie I would recommend RH/Mandrake/Caldera instead, because the installers do a better job of holding the user's hand. The smart money's on Slackware though!

  • maybe it only functions during the business week. Weekends is when I shut most of my brain functions down. Have to reserve enough brain cells for alchohol consumption and stupid pet tricks, y'know.
  • Not only a rant, but borderline flamebait/trolling. I'll bite though.

    If Slink isn't your bag, why didn't you even TRY Potato? You say you're an experienced sysadmin. Potato is nowhere near the bleeding edge. The bleeding edge is where people download every new bit of software, compile and play. Debs don't even make it INTO potato until they've been playtested (they'll sit in Incoming before that)

    Horror stories from going Slink -> Potato? Do you realize that they don't even have a Potato base system? That even a bare Potato install is a Slink upgrade process (on a smaller scale)?

    Please, if you want to go to glibc 2.1, go read the docs on doing it for Slink. It's not difficult. Otherwise, try potato. It'll surprise you, I've never seen it crash. I'm on it RIGHT NOW.

    Some people..
    • don't force them to install an old distribution and then replace all those packages over a 56K modem.

    You don't need to install full slink and then upgrade all those packages to potato, all you need is the base system and then install potato rightaway. The base system is like 8 megabyte.
  • You're not in Gatesas anymore toto.

  • Installable snapshots of the beta tree available on CD isn't a bad idea. How are these distributed? Did you suggest this to the right people? (i.e. debian-devel)
  • No no, you're wrong. The proper response is to say "It's too big and development is out of control. Look how they can't release on time!". At least, that's what people say when Microsoft has to change a release date..
  • However, on the bright side, this gives me a chance to get my package into Debian before it freezes, meaning it could be in a Debian "stable" before the 21st century (2001). That's always nice. Well I hate to be the one to break this to you but the 21st century is 2000, 2001 is the 22nd ;)

  • Quit complaining and contribute! (Score:4)

    by Some guy named Chris ( 9720 ) on Sunday November 07, 1999 @02:24PM (#1554138) Journal

    Sheesh, so many people here saying "2.4 will be out before Potato", "Slink was out of date when it came out, and so will be Potato", etc.

    My favorite was the one saying Debian needs to speed up their bug resolution process. Don't you folks get it? If you want it to improve, you've got to help. Don't sit there complaining expecting some mysterious software overlord to fix all the little problems and hand you a nice new Debian distribution for Christmas. Get your hands dirty, fix some of the problems in the boot floppies, or shut up and don't complain when they don't get fixed as soon as you would like.

    Debian isn't some monolithic software corporation, it's people like you, like me, like everyone else who thinks that Linux is fun, that's it's a priviledge and a responsibility to give back. I know not everyone is a programmer, but each and every one of you can do something. Spend an hour writing a HOW-TO, or updating a man page, or trying to reproduce a bug, something, anything other than complaining on slashdot that Debian is delayed.

    Please, re-read the letter. They are asking for your help. So, if you really want Debian to succeed, quit being a consumer in the gift economy, and start being a producer. It doesn't have to be much, but anything is better than whining.

    Sorry, rant mode off.

    Some guy named Chris

  • agree with the moderation. Read some of the rebuttals, the man is basically just saying 'Debian sucks because it sucked for
    me and I didn't try to fix it'.

    I did try to fix it, but couldn't because, like I said, there is no document anywhere that explains how to update slink to glibc 2.1 without risking to hose the system I am subscribed to debian-user, and many, many, many times there are posts from people that tried this upgrade, failed, and wanted to revert only to find out that the dependency system didn't allow them to.

    Another thing that I tried to say, is that I just want to use linux, not to have to chase everywhere left and right to get something working: read below for my experience with X.

    I buy this matrox G400, I know that I need XFree 3.3.5 to get it to work and I thing, ok, no prob, I'll download as usual the X server from xfree86.org, stick it in /usr/X11/bin and I'll be set.

    Problem #1, the server on x.org is compiled against glibc 2.1 and segfaults on 2.0, this is the first time that this happens.

    Problem #2 NOBODY in the debian camp tried to create a slink, 2.0 version of the package, since everybody is so busy making potato so good.

    Now, after much looking here and there, I remember that redhat 5.2 used glibc 2.0, I fire up rpmfind.net and, look, there is a new 3.3.5 package for a distribution 1 major and 1 minor version old. I fire up alien, and now I'm up and running.

    I don't like red hat, like I said, but hats off to their support, I just wish that debian developers realized that not everybody runs the latest unstable revision just to be able to use X.
  • I use debian daily, so when you mention the security fixes, i wonder why they don't show up in apt-get update?

    Not by default they don't, but add

    deb http://security.debian.org/ stable updates

    to your /etc/apt/sources.list and they will.
  • your apt isn't new enough for that, you might want to ask how to get the newest version of apt for slink on a mailing-list.
    Debian's user community is pretty strong -- did you ever bother to take advantage of it or just decided to rant on /.?

    Like I said in another follow up, I am subscribed to debian user, and approximately twice a week somebody complains that the upgrade to glibc 2.1 hosed their system.

    Then somebody else posts that to upgrade to potato, you need the new version of dpkg/apt-get/foo-baah something, and even then there might be problems.

    Look, I need this system to work, I don't use it for fun, but to actually put the bread on the table, while it's true that I am in a ranting mood because of the XFree 3.3.5 screwup (read in the other post) I still find the debian development model to be fairly wrong.

    You can't have an extremely old, out of date, unsupported (for new software) distribution and a bleeding edge, sometimes screwed-up (anybody remembers the perl problems in potato a little while ago ? ) distribution that only developers use.

    People need to wake up and realize that a significant part of Linux's user base doesn't want to use Linux but use Linux to get some work done.

    I knew that I would be moderated down, because it seems that nobody can say anything about Debian/FSF/etc. without being grilled.

    I am very supportive of the open source model, heck, I started putting stuff I wrote under the GPL several years ago, so I have the feeling that I have the right to say that the emperor is naked when I see that it is.

  • Problem #2 NOBODY in the debian camp tried to create a slink, 2.0 version of the package, since everybody is so busy making potato so good.

    I beg to differ [oftheinter.net] :)

  • Debian really, really BLOWS (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    .....away the competition!

    All around, I think it's a very solid, friendly, powerful distrubution.

    The installation, while not perfect, has certain advantages over every other Linux installer I've tried.

    The package managment is quite cool. The praises of apt-get have been sung by enough people already, so I'll voice my support for the underdog, that little much-maligned workhorse named dselect. YES, the interface does take a BIT of work getting used to, so I wouldn't recommend setting up a Debian system for absolute computer newbies. YES, it can sometimes get slightly psychotic and try to do things you don't want it to do. But this is pretty rare! For the most part, it's a very powerful animal, and quite useful.

    The packages themselves are very nice also. The additional features they support over RPMs are quite cool, but I really love the default configs that come with the packages. It really does help reduce the learning curse... I don't have to spend hours reading documentation for a piece of software I know NOTHING about to make a functioning config file, Debian packages have a FUNCTIONAL config file right from the start, which I can tweak as I need, or completely redo once I've actually learned something about the program. Who has time to learn the structure of every config file on eir system? When I wanted to run an ssh server, but didn't really have time to read hundreds of pages of documentation ABOUT ssh servers, I just ran a couple quick apt-get lines, and I had a fully-functional ssh server configured and installed in just a few seconds. Sweet stuff.

    Hooray for Debian.
  • In the end, the choice of distribution is up to the end-user, and the choices are plenty. The software you utilize - down the core - are decided by your own preferences. If you aren't interested in this control, I don't see why you would want to be interested in a *nix system. And the term _distribution_ is very abstract, as opposed to the singular distribution of Windows 9x (concurrently)... if you upgrade to glibc 2.1 for example, and compile a new shiny kernel, and play with your startup scripts a bit Distribution X.x would hard to recognize.

  • Wrong. (Score:2)

    by Dast ( 10275 )
    Difference is, you can grab the newest, most bleeding edge devel debian any time you like.

    Knowing when to push back the date is a good thing. Especially when it isn't about trying to get people hooked on vaporware to kill your enemies.

  • Having used Debian for over 3 years I feel that i need to chip in here.

    A few little things.

    • Debian is by volunteers. They do this on their own time fore the entire communtiy.
    • Debian has had (and currently has) the largest number of packages available in ANY distribution.
    • If you don't like it, FIX IT! That's what open source is about.

    Also the largest part of the freeze being pushed back is the boot floppies. The change from 2.0 to the 2.2 series kernels is quite large. The kernels are of much larger size and even more hardware is supported. The team working on the boot-floppies has to be sure that they will have support for the hardware that it will be installed on.

    As far as the unwillingness to recompile a kernel that i have been reading. That's insane! Since most PC's have IDE drives those are compiled into the kernel. Well If i have an all scsi machine I don't want those in my kernel. They are wasting resources. And vice-versa. No distribution has the perfect kernel out of the box. And they shouldn't there are too many compile options and additional drivers.

    Debian has been a wonderful distribution to work with and a wonderful project to get involved with. These volunteers are still pounding away at code and makefiles and debian/rules files for all of you, for free and you all are criticizing them for not "shipping on time" It's postings like this that really upset me.

    One last little bit. Debian is a rock solid distribution a lot of that is in the "don't release it until it's ready" mentality. I am glad about this. Also security updates are available at security.debian.org So please at rtfm or at least ask around before making blanket statements about packages not being available.

  • Re:KDE (Score:2)

    by Mock ( 29603 )

    Maybe now they can include KDE. Or will that be for Debian 3 (err Debian 3k at the rate of development.

    You could just point apt to kde and grab it there...

    Actually, making a friendlier apt that makes it easy to temporarily point to websites besides Debian would be tres cool.

    What would be REALLY cool is if they were to add an extension to the packages file so that through file associations you can just go to the webpage of the author, click on the packages file, and have some apt-like program point there and install it on your system.

    Of course you'd want to have some sort of security (PGP or the like) to be sure some malicious site doesn't take advantage of that to plant a trojan in your system.

    Don't get me wrong - I love grabbing sources and compiling myself (mainly if I want to play with it a bit), but there are times when I just want the stuff installed with no hassles.

    We must also consider the caliber of users who will soon be flooding into the linux domain. They most certainly will NOT want to see so much as a shell prompt or any other text-based program on their machine.

    And so my wish list remains:

    - A minimal install that puts the BARE MINIMUM necessary to boot the system, do some file management and configuration, and install other programs if you want. Debian does this well already, but I think that with a little more tweaking they could get it even smaller.

    - A minimal X install that puts enough stuff to boot into KDE or GNOME or some plain old window manager. No games, no funky apps (well, maybe a text editor and a calculator). Can it be done in less than 50 megs? I think so...

    - A way to temporarily point to other distribution sources from program authors to get the latest and greatest. This should be able to happen automatically (with the option to turn the feature off, of course), and then have the distrib pointer point back to debian again when it has installed the package.

    - A nice touchy-feely GUI apt program that my grandmother could use.

    - a centralized way to configure all of the significant programs that tend to make up the "operating" system such as user management, mail, ftp, http, printer services, network config, hardware management and the like. NT does this fairly decently, though I think that it could be done much better.
    This would, of course, require some centralized body to devise sane standards for all to follow...

  • Ahahahaha! Gotcha dude! I was just being sarchastic! hehehe, that was too easy.

  • I know I want it - I just don't know why. Would some Debian users be able to tell me the main differences between Debian and RedHat?

    Principally, philosophy and organisation. But here are some very good pragmatic reasons to use Debian:

    1. Updates and upgrades. They work. What's more, the packaging system gets new software straight from your local Debian mirror (if you ask it to). So point your /etc/apt/sources.list at your local mirror, and forget worrying about whether you're up to date.
    2. Installing new software is a breeze. Installing GNOME under Debian was the quickest out of all of the platforms I have tried it - I downloaded and installed it in 5 minutes on my home system, with one command. Whoops, forgot to install xxx? apt-get install xxx. It takes seconds.
    3. Attention to detail. People really care when things don't work, and (most of the time) people that actually use the packages own the packaging of them. They will always report bugs to the upstream source, often fix them, and sometimes even take over the ownership of the actual source code.

    Personally, I don't really see an issue with Potato slipping. You can still install packages from Potato; libc upgrades on Potato actually work, no messing around, no reboot. It can be a little embarrassing telling people that they have to download an extra 10MB of files to get support for their brand spanking Matrox G200, but at least the option is there.

    To summarise all this: With Debian, you spend less time searching, installing and debugging software, which gives you more time to actually use it. If I really want to spend lots of time mucking around with software installation, I'll install Slackware. And if I wanted to spend lots of times debugging problems with the way software is installed, I'd install RedHat.

  • Dangit.. Every year it's the same thing... they promise us
    vegetables.. and then at the last minute, they take them away.
    We're hungry computer folks out here people....I don't
    care if they're frozen or not... I actually prefer them piping hot...
    with lots of cheese and sour cream w/chives... Yummmm ;>

    Do you think they could pass out holiday Ramen blocks in the meantime?
    Mmmmm... crunchy! :P

  • Re:It's a shame. (Score:3)

    by luge ( 4808 ) <<gro.yugeit> <ta> <todhsals>> on Sunday November 07, 1999 @11:26AM (#1554176) Homepage
    As long as developers are interested (which they clearly are- Debian has a horrible backlog of developer registrations) there will be continued Debian releases. No need to fret on that count. And while these releases are slow, stable is perfectly usable for the vast majority of serious work- and for those who have stability as only priority one and not priority 1, 2, and 3, there is always potato, which has died on me only once in several months of usage on two machines. Remember, apt-get dist-upgrade is your friend, and can give you a 2.2.x system within the hour if you are on a fast connection, and overnight otherwise.
    ~luge
    (BTW, methinks the release date for 2.4 is pretty optimistic too :)
  • I'm running kernel 2.2.9 on my Debian-slink system along with a number of other pieces not included in the distribution, none of which comes from the 'unstable' branch. One of the things I like about Debian is it doesn't get in your way if you want to download, compile, and install your own stuff.

    For those pieces I don't need the latest-greatest for, I use packages from stable- for everything else, I compile. No problem.

    I -have- downloaded pieces from unstable before, but I've always been disappointed with the results, and the same with importing precompiled binaries from non-Debian sources. There's always another library to deal with. Compile yourself and you know you're linked to the library version that you have.


    --Parity
  • I honestly thought about going to RedHat as well, but I already have so many bad experiences with it at work, that I honestly don't want to be bothered ( hint, I hate linuxconf, and generally speaking any gui program that does things behind my back)

    I generally agree with everything you've said, but just a note: don't use linuxconf if you don't like it. My main desktop box runs a mishmash of RH and Mandrake packages (was originally RH5.1 IIRC) and compiled tarballs. Linuxconf is pretty much useless to me, an annoyance, and ultimately a commented line in inetd.conf. I find bash and perl scripts to be far superior to GUI tools for my uses.

  • This leaves pretty much only slackware, maybe I'll give it a last try to update this debian box to glibc 2.1 if somebody posts here a guide on how to do it WITHOUT using apt-get (I'm on a modem here, and I'd like to download the packages first) otherwise in a few weeks when I'll have some time, I'll probably wipe everything out and install slackware from scratch.
    Doesn't apt-get -d -u dist-upgrade work for you? -d means Download only - do NOT install or unpack archives, it leaves the stuff in /var/cache/apt/archives, and you can install it afterwards by using apt-get without the -d switch.
  • It's actually much more inconceivable to include specialized hardware drivers for every possible configuration on the boot disks.

    This would A) Take up way too much room, (THESE ARE FLOPPIES!), and B) Put more duress on the system than needed. The boot floppies are to get your system up and running. Customization comes later. (Imagine placing furniture in a house before the walls are up.)

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • I suspect the previous poster converted to Alsa before the OSS drivers became modular. When I started using Alsa about 1 to 1-1/2 years ago, the OSS drivers were only just being modularised. This happened post 2.0.30odd from memory; I remeber reading Alan Cox's diary about his modular sound efforts and I was running 2.0.33 at the time. I think the developement kernels were over 2.1.100 when modular sound went in and Also has been going for a `long' time before either event.

    All that said, Also is better than OSS (and compatible!:), and is slated to replace OSS in the kernel tree sometime in the not too distant future (possibly in the 2.5 tree, but I don't know).

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