A Look at Debian Etch Beta 3

An anonymous reader writes "The All about Linux blog has a down-to-earth review of the latest Linux offering from Debian — Etch Beta 3 which optionally sports a very intuitive GUI installer. The review looks ar the pros and cons of Debian Etch Beta 3 as well as what the Debian team could do to make this not-for-profit Linux distribution even more popular."

Re:More of the same.

[VGPowerlord]

it's been too long since Sarge imo

If you think a year and a half was a long time (Etch is due out in December), I'll remind you that there was almost 3 years between Woody [debian.org] and Sarge [debian.org].

Re:More of the same.

[Xordan]

Too true. I suppose it's a fair improvement then. ;) Some of the core packages that Sarge uses are over three years old however (e.g. glibc), and even though they are patched quite a bit it's quite antiquated in areas. Etch uses packages which were released a fair bit closer to its release date.

Beta 3???

[ajdlinux]

It's *not* beta 3, it's D-I beta 3. There's a difference.

How many people are running Etch already?

[VGPowerlord]

Thanks to a bug in base-config [debian.org] in sarge, apt-setup lines are created as testing. You either end up with a case of Frankenserver, or if you dist-upgrade, a complete etch install.

This was fixed in base-config 2.66 in June 2005. It's too bad that base-config remained at 2.53.10 for both sarge r1 in December 2005 and sarge r2 in April 2006.

In other words, anyone who installed Debian sarge and blindly did apt-get update; apt-get upgrade unknowingly upgraded themselves to etch, except for packages that required dist-upgrade or manual installation (i.e. kernels).

Re:How many people are running Etch already?

[Anonymous Coward]

i believe that was resolved with 3.1r0a

Informative is better than Intuitive.

[twitter]

The questions are the same and the layout is practically the same. The X-based installer is just as (but no more) intuitive than the curses installer.

That might be because computer set up is not intuitive. Device drivers, naming conventions and file system arrangement follow few conventions and there are many correct combinations. Worse, the user is at their ISP or network administrator's mercy for almost all of the network set up.

What Debian's installer has always done is inform. The Debian install is one of the most informative of Linux installs outside of Gentoo. It tells you what it's doing, offers hints for common situations and tells you where you need information from someone else.

Re:Screenshot button?

[thebluesgnr]

This is a beta. The button is there so if the GUI installer throws something funny on your face you can hit that button and submit the screenshot with a bug report.

'Beta'? Not really...

[yankpop]

Calling this a beta is misleading. Etch is currently the Debian 'testing' distro, which means it is undergoing constant, incremental updating. All the people that complain about the slow release cycle, or expect the packages included in this 'beta' review to be the same as what you'll download tomorrow, don't understand how Debian works.

The time between stable releases is indeed quite long, but when a new app version is released by the upstream developers it often appears in Debian unstable within a day or two, and from there into testing in the space of a few weeks. Which means you can have a (slightly) unstable Debian system that is at most days behind the most cutting edge distro, or an almost rock-solid Debian 'testing' system that is rarely more than a month behind. You're only stuck with the two year release cycle if you cannot tolerate any problems whatsoever. And if you are working on something that critical, you shouldn't be going anywhere near applications with less than 10 days of field-testing (the minimum to pass from unstable to testing) anyways, regardless of which distro you run.

yp.

Re:A review of the review....

[Xordan]

Any trivial changes (like version number inside the file) _are_ automatically merged correctly requiring no manual input - aka no screw ups. I believe apt does the same thing, but it just doesn't tell you (For system files generally, not fstab in particular if at all). Assuming you're running the testing branch and so you do have quite a lot of /etc files to update, it's still unlikely you'll make a mistake as long as you know what you're doing. Gentoo _has_ improved on this over the last year(s) however, and I do remember screwing my whole system when I was a newbie to Gentoo many years ago with a fstab update (and other etc files), so prehaps things have just improved a lot since you last tried it? I believe there was a 'Genbuntu' idea floating around to have a mix of Gentoo and Ubuntu. There's a thread in the Ubuntu forums somewhere...