Debian Sarge Coming Soon 284
daria42 writes "The long awaited 3.1 release of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution - codenamed Sarge - is due out next week on the 6th of June, according to the project's release team. Around 50 release-critical bugs remain to be fixed. One more update to Debian 3.0 will also be released prior to that date. And it's about time - the last formal release was back in July 2002. Debian 3.0 will probably be supported with security patches for another 12 months."
Starting the book now... (Score:4, Funny)
I take July 4th, 2007.
Re:Starting the book now... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Starting the book now... (Score:3, Informative)
The debate seems a bit similar to the discussion whether the new kernel should be 2.6 or 3.0 . Personally, bumping major
Re:Starting the book now... (Score:2)
Re:Starting the book now... (Score:2)
Re:Starting the book now... (Score:5, Interesting)
The most recent version is 3.14159, as the release numbers are slowly asymptoting toward pi.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Starting the book now... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Starting the book now... (Score:3, Funny)
And so you have just witnessed a "verbing", which is a noun, and so that was me "nouning" a verb. So the verb is now nouned, and thus "noun" can be adjectived as well.
I luv gramma. :-)
Re:Starting the book now... (Score:2)
Re:Starting the book now... (Score:2)
"Verbing weirds language."
Renounification (Score:3, Funny)
"It's not the verbing that weirds language so much, but rather, the renounification."
Grammar nazi, I believe you meant to say... (Score:2)
Re:Starting the book now... (Score:2)
You probably didn't know, but all nouns can be verbed. And of course, all verbs can be nouned too. Its even jargon filed [faqs.org].
Re:Starting the book now... (Score:2, Funny)
DNF? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:DNF? (Score:2)
Re:DNF? (Score:2)
But the devil has been rumoured to drive a snowplough to work. Apparently he is fixing bugs in autofs, mailman, hpa-tftp(d) [which in fact is a linux kernel UDP bug]. Add glibc compat module to this.
To name just a few (from my "what do I follow and have tried to fix locally" list).
Re:DNF? (Score:2)
Re:NO MORE OF THIS CRAP! (Score:2)
You can figure that comments like that are either going to be modded funny, redundent, or troll, and browsing with funny -6 will save you from having to read comments here (and everywhere
And the point is? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:And the point is? (Score:4, Insightful)
Jan
Re:And the point is? (Score:5, Informative)
One of the nice things about Debian is you don't need to reinstall. Most of the problems you experience upgrading testing/unstable every day have been ironed out for anyone attempting the mammoth 3.0->3.1 upgrade.
2) It will continue to do this.
Third party distros come and go. Progeny? Corel? Ubuntu is developing at lightning pace right now, but as it diverges from Debian and acquires legacy maintenance baggage of its own development will slow. Sometimes users are abandoned. I believe this happens frequently to RedHat users.
3) It's really really stable and it's really really big.
Other distros shotgun packages as well as architectures. They're also not necessarily as anal about bugs.
4) It's a concrete base and point of reference for third party distros.
Debian Testing has basically been a slow moving Debian Stable (without Security support) for the whole last year. With the release out the way Testing will become more unstable again for a while and third party distros will likely base their efforts on stable again for a while. It's important for Debian's future that this is made possible.
Re:And the point is? (Score:2)
And Xandros is far from having "come and gone". AFAIC they've got one of the best distributions going for the desktop, workstation, and server.
I think they've done the best in creating a Linux distribution with the user friendliness that most would claim does not exist in any Linux distro.
Xandros seems to be largely overlooked by the
Re:And the point is? (Score:2)
Re:And the point is? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:And the point is? (Score:2)
You just stated why it has a better chance for success than 90%+ of distos. It has some real money behind it with a clear focus.
You can have a problem all you want, but I bet even you will enjoy Xorg in Etch when it comes around. That shift will happen soon now that Srage is released and will go fairly smoothly because of work originally done in Ubuntu.
Re:And the point is? (Score:2)
good stuff... (Score:5, Interesting)
People need to remember that Debian is not trying to be Fedora or Gentoo. There are already numerous distros providing the bleeding edge with various degrees of config assistance/packaging options etc. Debian is offering the "must work" (as opposed to "just work" which seems less mission-critical) alternative, and its useful for someone to perform the heavy testing and fixing they do.
I am satisfied that the Debian crowd is making moves to keep itself relevant with a new team leader, a new set of targets, and a release in the bag. Having been burned in the past by the "maybe it works" distros in the past, I will be seriously considering their future offerings.
On a slightly related tangent: just who do those Ubuntu guys think they are? They are releasing a Distro that claims to be Debian compatible, and yet their packages are not 3.5 years old. What's worse, they seem to be a popular distro. If this doesn't stop, we might have to cooperate with someone else in the Debian space! We might end up like (gasp!) Fedora, and have to deal with multiple repositories in a Bazaar-like fashion instead of doing things in the Cathedral-like fashion that we are accustomed to. Where will it all end?
Re:good stuff... (Score:2)
Re:good stuff... (Score:4, Informative)
Only Debian could call six months of feature freeze from Debian's unstable repository to be "bleeding edge". It's the same release cycle as fedora, except nothing ever gets upgraded but for security patches. Firefox is still at 1.02 even though every security patch has been backported (which makes it exactly 1.04) because of the phobia of changing version numbers lest something break.
Now on the pro- side: I was going to switch to Fedora myself, but these folks can't even be bothered to support my very common network hardware in their installer or port the ATI drivers to the current and only kernel version they support. Debian might move as slow as the tides, but they do lift all ships.
Re:good stuff... (Score:2)
Stability isn't such a bad thing on a workstation (I don't do "desktops") install either.
I haven't tried Ubuntu, I'm sure it's fine, but I've been really happy with Debian "unstable" in both server and desktop roles. It's not always necessary or even desirable to run the latest version of everything. Having the stable and reliable versions, with security fixes backported regularly, is ideal for many of us.
Re:good stuff... (Score:2, Informative)
Ubuntu is good for Debian (Score:2)
Yes, I know that Ubuntu isn't exactly Debian, but it's close enough to make my point valid.
Re:good stuff... (Score:2)
(No I don't contribute to FOSS, but others do)
Re:good stuff... (Score:2)
I run Gentoo on most of my servers; x86, x64, and sparc64. I have yet to have a problem with a daemon crashing/segfaulting unexpectedly after an upgrade. In fact, I don't think that I've had any problems at all with it. Sure, if you script emerge -u world in a cronjob each night, you're likely to have problems. But if you just monitor the Gentoo alerts with glsa-check -l | grep '\[N\]' (why don't they make that any option?), update them as they
What they don't tell you... (Score:5, Funny)
Wow ! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Wow ! (Score:2)
Re:Wow ! (Score:2)
Child Distro Effect? (Score:2, Interesting)
Thanks!
Re:Child Distro Effect? (Score:2)
Too late.. welcome Ubuntu... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Too late.. welcome Ubuntu... (Score:3, Insightful)
Brief mapping debian <-> reality:
Stable - Server
Testing - Desktop
Unstable - Testing
I've been running debian testing now for a long time. The only open service on my box is openssh, and I can pay attention to any security fixes for that one myself. For a desktop, that is really the only concern. Application vunerabili
Re:Too late.. welcome Ubuntu... (Score:3, Funny)
Follow the RC-bug count! (Score:5, Informative)
The June 6 date still depends on how fast the level will drop -- at the time of writing, it is at 17 RC bugs, it will have to be at 0 on June 3, so they have some work to do.
Security support is already in place, though, so there is not really a reason to hold off upgrading
Jan
Great news! (Score:2)
As much as I like Ubuntu, I'd love an consolidated repository under Debian control.
Re:Great news! (Score:2)
When you read Sketch, I mean Etch... You know, from etch-a-sketch...
It's morning, and I barely had my fist cup of coffee. Sorry.
MEPIS (Score:2)
etch is next (Score:5, Informative)
Fedora Core 4 (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Fedora Core 4 (Score:3, Funny)
Recently announced, Munich has choosen Debian (Score:5, Interesting)
You can read more about it here: Munich chooses Debian [zdnet.com.au]
Re:Recently announced, Munich has choosen Debian (Score:2)
Re:Recently announced, Munich has choosen Debian (Score:2)
Re:Recently announced, Munich has choosen Debian (Score:3, Interesting)
Only 12 months security support of old releases? (Score:5, Insightful)
only 12 months of security support for the old Debian release, after a new release has come out?
Isn't that a bit short? If Microsoft had stopped supporting Windows 2000 in 2002 (one year after Windows XP came out), everybody would have gone NUTS about it.
Considering that Debian "stable" is targeted at users who are very conservative about upgrades, Woody should be supported for at least a few more years. IMHO.
bye,
Till
Re:Only 12 months security support of old releases (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Only 12 months security support of old releases (Score:5, Insightful)
Sarge is the new stable, the migration should be transparent on most installations. For those few installations that are so customised, or that had some kind of problem, they're giving a 12 month period to adjust and migrate.
Debian is not like Windows, you don't have to do a full installation to upgrade you system. The upgrades are a natural path if you keep your systems up-to-date with the repositories. That is one reason I love to use Debian.
Re:Only 12 months security support of old releases (Score:2)
"What do you mean oracle wont start now???!!!!"
Re:Only 12 months security support of old releases (Score:2)
Have you ever actually tried that? Its true that Debian might do a dist-upgrade better than any other distro out there, but its still *FAR* from being transparent, there is tons of stuff that breaks and works completly different with the new version. It might not be any issue at all in a @Home installation, but if you have a larger installation of Debian machines and a larger number of users you have quite a huge amount
Re:Only 12 months security support of old releases (Score:2)
in my experience, the cost of suppoorting an upgrade often outweighs the cost of the upgrade.
Testing before deployment takes time (Score:4, Interesting)
For individuals who don't have anything major to loose or anything special to worry about, sure. But not for large organizations with a support structure (help desk, local docs, procedures, etc.) that needs to be ramped up to support new changes. And not for anyone doing anything special or mission-critical that needs to test things before deployment. The rule in any production environment is "Test, test, test, and then test some more". You simply cannot just type "apt-get dist-upgrade" (or "yum upgrade" or any other variation on the theme) in the Real World, I'm afraid.
In general, I find that this whole concept (which is a major part of the disipline called "configuration management") appears to be alien to Debian people. When your business/mission is on the line, answers like "Just pull from sid" or "Just apt-get the fix" and so on just don't cut it.
Re:Testing before deployment takes time (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Only 12 months security support of old releases (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, the difference is that noone pays us Debian Developers to do the work. The security team is pretty small and their work is needed for the new stable release. But I'm sure that if you volunteer to do all the security fixes for 4-5 years, noone would mind too much (well, you'd have to pay for the diskspace too, of course, since this would mean that we'd probably end up with old-old-stable, old-stable, and stable...
Re:Only 12 months security support of old releases (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed on the whole 'too cumbersome to become a debian dev', though. I started the process once but gave up before I got too far. However, I don't see what being called a developer vs. committer ha
Re:Only 12 months security support of old releases (Score:2)
I hate to hold Ubuntu up as an example every time Debian comes up, but they've at least got the right idea: A new release every 6 months, supported for 18 months. They also have plans for an 'Enterprise' release every 12-24 months, sporting Debian-like stability testing.
Personally, I'd argue that even 18
Re:Only 12 months security support of old releases (Score:2)
Re:Only 12 months security support of old releases (Score:2)
Re:Only 12 months security support of old releases (Score:2)
If you want unpaid volunteers to support an already aged/creaking system for a few more years, you had better come up with something more persuasive than that!
Sam
Re:Only 12 months security support of old releases (Score:2)
J.
Re:Only 12 months security support of old releases (Score:2)
-one didn't upgrade PPP properly, leaving me with a machine without a net connection and unable to finish the upgrade (broken dependencies)
-another didn't upgrade some modules at all, exim was broken, most perl modules weren't installed, mysql was broken, apache was broken, some libs were missing (gd), and the upgrade process installed the wrong version of php4
-the last one worked
i like debian, all o
Re:Only 12 months security support of old releases (Score:3, Funny)
"Touching wood" has a totally different meaning.
Re:Only 12 months security support of old releases (Score:2)
Re:Only 12 months security support of old releases (Score:2)
Re:Only 12 months security support of old releases (Score:2)
What I like Debian for (Score:5, Insightful)
The only problem was getting networking going, but that was more to do with colinux and the pain with trying to create TAP devices on Win32. I sure hope that MS ship with TAP-Win32 in their next release. They really, really should.
OT: coLinux (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:OT: coLinux (Score:2)
number of RC bugs to fix (Score:4, Informative)
Preventing some Debian trolling (Score:5, Informative)
To prevent some Debian trolling I want to clarify some facts about the release model used by the Debian project.
Debian always provides a stable distribution. This distribution is guaranteed to, yes you guessed it, be stable. That is if you install Debian stable on a server you know that you won't have to update configuration files because the application has changed its internal format and suchlike.
This does not mean that the stable distribution is never updated, in fact Debian has a security team that fixes security bugs and backports security fixes from newer versions of a package.
The stable distribution has a quite slow release cycle, but there is no reason for a desktop user to run the stable distribution. You can run either the unstable distribution, that regardless of its name is quite stable, or you can run the testing distribution.
The unstable and testing distributions have really large collections of packages and are updated each day, updating your distribution is as simple as typing:
A desktop user can also opt to run a Debian-derivative like Ubuntu.
Not everything has to be years old either (Score:2)
In all that time, three things have broken and all of them were installed from sources other than Debian packages. I ha
Re:Preventing some Debian trolling (Score:3, Insightful)
There is a sad reason to not run testing: the testing distribution is the last one to get security updates; as I have understood this, unsecure packages from unstable can overwrite security fixed packages in testing. And I've seen people at debian-d
Re:Preventing some Debian trolling (Score:3, Insightful)
Rolling distros are perfect for boys living at their parent's basament which think they have a life because they know what the last version of KDE or Gnome or whatever program is.
They're also excellent for working professionals that prefer frequent and non-invasive minor upgrades to less frequent world-moving major upgrades. Rolling upgrades mean never having to reinstall from scratch and they also mean that application and desktop changes come in small, manageable chunks.
Rolling distros also allow
Hooray! (Score:3, Funny)
Linux debian 2.4.18-bf2.4 #1 Son Apr 14 09:53:28 CEST 2002 i686 GNU/Linux
Re:Hooray! (Score:2)
Re:upgrading from the installer kernel to 2.4.18 (Score:2)
My Debian machine isn't Internet-facing anyway, do you think I'm crazy?
The new installer (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The new installer (Score:4, Informative)
Finally (Score:5, Informative)
KDE 3.4
GNOME 2.10
gcc 4.0
xorg 6.8.2
python 2.4
Long live Debian
And in other news... (Score:2)
instead of sarge.... (Score:4, Funny)
The actual notice (Score:3, Informative)
Debian is Different (Score:3, Funny)
The Sarge release is great, but Debian's success is also in its franchisees. I remember a press conference where one of the marketing types predicted that there would eventually only be two major distributions. Robin 'roblimo' Miller piped up and burst his grand vision by asking 'Debian and who?' He got a laugh and made a point that continues to be made today. Debian is a fantastic laboratory to grow operating systems and the knowledge on how it happens is right there in its mailing lists, utilities and documentation.
Go Debian!
DaGoodBoy
It needs to be voiced (Score:3, Insightful)
As a hobbyist - I really enjoy *using* linux to serve webpages for recreational use, mp3s, ssh sessions, downloading torrents and learning about unix.
If I have to keep up with a continual stream of what I feel to be cosmetic and superfluous updates, that leaves me less time to do the things I enjoy. As far as security updates, debian does a great job of notifying users of security updates with their mailing list, debian-security-announce. When ever I get an e-mail from that list - I just run apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade, and all is well.
Then again, I'm the type of person who takes great delight in installing linux on a crusty old (but wireless enabled) laptop with no X and just alt-F[1-4]'ing for my 'window environment'. I don't *need* the latest release of gwingding or kflipflop depending on the latest libraries of whatever, so I am probably in the minority here.
Re:This has taken much too long. (Score:4, Informative)
There were 5 point releases since Woody.
The step between Woody and Sarge is similar to those between Win95 and Win98 -- and just like products of the Evil Empire, the gap is three years.
Having a release every a couple of months is good for a desktop-only release with all the newest bells and whistles -- but for a server, I expect something that can be installed and largely forgotten.
Re:This has taken much too long. (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish people would stop moaning about stable! It isn't a desktop distro! It is for those that want to do an 'apt-get install apache' and KNOW it won't fail. That means a lot to admins.
Re:This has taken much too long. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:This has taken much too long. (Score:2)
Re:This has taken much too long. (Score:2)