Debian's Testing Branch Nears Completion

DeviceGuru writes "With Debian Lenny (aka 'testing') poised to displace Etch as the popular Linux distribution's 'stable' branch possibly as soon as next month, blogger Rick Lehrbaum loaded the latest preview (beta 2) of Lenny's KDE CD image onto an available Thinkpad, and took it for a spin. How's it coming along? After detailing a handful of issues — and offering solutions for each (except Bluetooth support) — he concludes: 'Other than the need for a few hacks and fixes, my main complaint with it is its inclusion of way too many of KDE's rich set of applications, such as games, tools, etc.' From the looks of it, looks like Lenny might be the new 'Debian stable' soon!"

How can this be?

It's only been sixteen months since Etch was released, not three years! Something's wrong!

advice for upgrading a server?

I have a server running stable, and I don't have physical access to it. Does anyone have any practical advice on the safest way to handle the upgrade? Is a debian "stable" really stable when it first comes out, or is it better to wait a while? Basically, what I understand of the procedure is something like this:

1. Read the readme -- where do I find it?
2. apt-get update
3. apt-get dist-upgrade

I'm a little leery of this, since I've rendered ubuntu desktop systems unbootable by doing 2 and 3 -- and was told that it was because I should have done 1.

Re:advice for upgrading a server?

I am by no means an expert, however I have upgraded a couple of servers that I don't have physical access to.

I've normally tried to upgrade a server that I do have physical access to before upgrading the offsite server(s). So long as the server comes back up and ssh is still running pretty much everything else can be sorted out after a little time, the logs and google.

Ideally similar hardware.

Oh and googling around to see if anyone has hit problems doing the upgrade.

Re:advice for upgrading a server?

At least do a simulated dist-upgrade by using the -s switch before doing the "real" one!

      apt-get -s dist-upgrade

Sometimes, just sometimes, it'll catch things which might go wrong before they actually happen.

Good Point

Everyone becomes conservative with upgrades after the first time that a box 3000 miles away fails to come back up. Seriously, waiting for a remote reboot after a kernel update is always the longest two minutes of my life.

Even the headless boxes at my apartment wait for me to set aside time to haul out a monitor and keyboard if anything goes wrong during an update. It's better to assume that something will go wrong and be pleasantly surprised and ahead of schedule than to sit staring at pings that have been timing out for the last five minutes (while you think, maybe it's just taking a long time to init... yeah, right!).

And, regardless of what anyone says, a virtual machine test environment doesn't have anywhere near the complications that you get with heavy metal. A successful virtual machine test just means that nothing is assured to go wrong, nothing more.

Re:advice for upgrading a server?

Leave it alone and only apply the security updates. I have a server happily running sarge that I have no plans to change.

Ummm.. you know that sarge no longer gets security updates, right? :S (announcement [debian.org])

Does what it says on the box

OK, so the gentleman downloaded and installed the *KDE* version of Debian Lenny, and then says his main complaint "is its inclusion of way too many of KDE's rich set of applications, such as games, tools, etc."

I can understand that; I once installed Windows XP, but there were far too many Microsoft applications for my liking.

Iceweasel is named that way due to Mozilla

I read The Fine Article; a few comments on the author's article:

Iceweasel
=-=-=-=-=
One of the complaints is that he wants "real" Firefox rather than the renamed Iceweasel. Well, until the Mozilla Foundation says differently, that isn't possible. Mozilla withdrew their prior permission to ship Firefox with a replaced logo that fit the Debian Free Software Guidelines, and the only way to comply with both Mozilla and the DFSG was to rename the application. So if you want to complain about this, write to Mozilla. I think Debian totally made the right choice to rename.

Shorter explanation:
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_IceCat [wikipedia.org]
Longer explanation:
      http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=354622 [debian.org]

Playing a DVD
=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The author wasn't able to test playing a DVD; normal movie DVDs that use encryption won't play out of the box. This is because Debian cannot ship libdvdcss2 as part of the main distribution for legal reasons, same as other distributions. There are other external repositories (outside of the US) that contain libdvdcss2 -- but it may not be legal to import the package into the US. You might find some choices if you put "Debian" and "multimedia" into Google and see what comes up.

Modem
=-=-=-=
Wow, the author set up the POTS modem. When is the last time you had to use one of those? Gotta give him credit for going through that effort.

- Chris

Actually, no.

Like ubuntu, it is impossible for it to provide fellatio. As I understand it, you generally have to pay for that sort of service, and linux is (mostly) free.

Re:Actually, no.

Debian user here. What's fellatio?

Re:Actually, no.

It's another text editor.

Re:Actually, no.

It's called GNU/Fellatio in Debian. Fascist.

Re:Actually, no.

I tried Gnu/Fellatio once. She was okay, but I'm no longer allowed at the zoo.

This article is full of errors and bad advice

It's not Beta 2 of Lenny. Only the installation program is Beta 2. So that's a big mistake.

And the mistakes continue.

The advice to remove iceweasel and replace it with Firefox is crazy. Iceweasel is 99.99% Firefox, and the version that comes with Debian is optimised to use libraries and other software in the distribution (like spell check). If you follow the advice and use the mozilla version of firefox, you lose this integration.

Some sites "sniff" for browser type, and iceweasel is not detected as Firefox (wsj.com, google docs). This is easily fixed by going to about:config, searching for useragent, and changing "iceweasel" to "firefox".
All firefox extensions that I know of work with iceweasel.

To install acrobat reader, just add the http://www.debian-multimedia.org/ [debian-multimedia.org] repositories, and add the package acroread with Synaptic or apt-get.

Re:Dependencies are annoying.

'kde' is just a metapackage: it depends on the packages in that list (directly or indirectly). There's nothing wrong with leaving those other packages installed. The new apt/dpkg conventions try to help you remove cruft, so they let you remove those packages with `apt-get autoremove`. Instead of that, install a few that you need by hand to remove them from the list. When you don't see any in this list that you want, then run auto-remove.

Re:Dependencies are annoying.

But KDE is simply a metapackage much like ubuntu-desktop, for example, if you want to install KDE you simply do sudo apt-get install kde, removing the package KDE only removes the KDE metapackage.

The only point of the KDE metapackage is to provide a 1-click install for KDE.

Re:Dependencies are annoying.

Read what apt says.

"The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:"
This does _not_ mean they're going to be removed.

"The following packages will be REMOVED:"
Only that specific convenience meta-package gets removed.

To further illustrate this, check this line:
"After this operation, 41.0kB disk space will be freed."
Somehow I think KDE takes more than 41.0kB, don't you?

If you really wanted to remove the kde meta-package together with all the dependencies that it pulled in (so all the things you didn't explicitly apt-get install yourself), you'd use "apt-get autoremove kde".

Re:Dependencies are annoying.

Wait, your OS of choice has 50MB of extra stuff? Oh God, th world is ending! How will you possibly manage if you can't free up that massive portion of your dozens and dozens of GB of storage? It's a travesty! We should lynch the developers!

Re:Dependencies are annoying.

Some of us already live in the future and use SSD on our laptops. Every gigabyte here is precious, since there's often not dozens, hardly even one dozen.

Funny, that doesn't sound like the future to me. Sounds more like you're living in a solid state version of 1997.

Re:Sigh, JPG screenshots

Just look at the icons in this shot [deviceguru.com]. The fellow is running more proprietary code than some windows boxes I've met. Just be glad they aren't .bmp or, even better, .wmf format.

Re:Sigh, JPG screenshots

Please can you tell us more about the windows boxes you met. What are they like to talk to? Are they overly trusting? I bet they're the polar opposite of the OpenBSD boxes I met. The conversation went like this:

Me: Hi guys! Enjoying the tofu at this conference?
OpenBSD_box1: Who the fuck are you?
OpenBSD_box2: We don't know you, get lost before we beat you to a pulp.
OpenBSD_box1: He's leaving, but let's beat him anyway!
OpenBSD_box3: Hey! He's still conscious! You guys are such slackers!

Re:Sigh, JPG screenshots

Forgive me I'm a fucking idiot :)

Re:Still not ready

Hacking to get Wifi working, hacking to get PPP working, hacking config files to get sound working properly and no bluetooth. And Freetards will have everyone believe GNU/Linux is ready for most people's desktops. Sorry, but it's still failing in this market.

Debian is mainly used as a server OS, it isn't generally held up as a shining example of how Linux is ready for the desktop. It is fairly widely used in production environments, and by developers and other geeky types, and it is considered an excellent stable base for other, more specialised distros. Like, for example, Ubuntu -- which is more than "ready" for the desktop.

Yeah, yeah. -1 Truth. Mod me down, but some of you Freetards will read this, and you know deep-down that it's true. We really need to stop shoving GNU/Linux down people's throats, until it's ready for the desktop.

In order to criticize in a meaningful way, one needs to know the subject at hand. Otherwise, you're just trolling and making inappropriate noise. And really, "freetards"? What kind of "tard" does that make you then? :) [HINT: This is a geek forum.]

Re:freebsd

ROFLMAO : If i want debian that ISNT as cutting edge? With the super fast release cycles of debian stable whizzing out of the gate so fast I too say : Slow Down, lets not get carried away!

Re:freebsd

I resent that. I'm personally looking forward to the new release of Debian. I've been hearing good things about KDE3, so I'm hoping that it's stable enough to be included in this version.

I also hear that some mysterious issues with OpenSSL have been fixed by Debian developers, which could save us from memory leaks and increase performance. Personally, I'm amazed that the OpenSSL devs haven't fixed this issue themselves yet.

Obviously, this distro is where all the exciting new development action happens. I'm very excited to be on the bleeding edge with Debian!