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Debian Lenny Installer RC1 Arrives
Posted by
timothy
on Thursday November 13, @05:30PM
from the not-lenny-from-of-mice-and-men dept.
from the not-lenny-from-of-mice-and-men dept.
nerdyH writes "It appears that Debian 5.0 (aka "Lenny") will soon take its big binocular eyes out into the wider world. Only two months later than expected, the Debian project has completed the first release candidate of Lenny's installer. Featuring much faster installation from "live" CDs, and expanded support for ARM-based devices such as NAS servers, Lenny has gestated for 19 months, compared to 21 months for the previous "Etch" release. Lookout, world, Debian releases are picking up speed! The download is here."
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[+]
Debian Maintainer Hints At September Release for Lenny 117 comments
nerdyH writes "The Debian project's maintainer, Luke Claes, announced in an email Saturday that he will freeze the 'testing' or 'Lenny' tree, in preparation for a new stable release of Debian Linux in ... September! The freeze means that open source software developers have only a couple more days to package any applications that they want to be included in the next release of Debian — and by extension, in the inner sanctum source lists of distributions such as Ubuntu that are based on it. After the freeze starts next week, Debian maintainers will turn their attention to 364 release-critical bugs, and half-a-dozen high-priority goals. Given the work to be done, is September really feasible? Lenny always was a little slow getting back to his right place ..."
[+]
Debian's Testing Branch Nears Completion 216 comments
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!"
[+]
Bugs Delay Release of Debian Lenny 227 comments
A. B. VerHausen writes to tell us that over 200 release-critical bugs continue to push back Debian Lenny's release date. Originally slated for a September release, there is still a long road to be traveled before Lenny sees the light of day. Project leader Steve McIntyre says they may consider dropping some packages for the release if they continue to cause problems, and while an end of October release is the goal, only time will tell.
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why bother with a liveCD? (Score:4, Informative)
Lets be honest, almost everyone interested in Debian won't be put off by its already excellent text based installer. Has it suddenly become 'old fashioned' or something?
Anyone of the livecd liking type is likely to be better off with Ubuntu. Well I think so anyway.
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Re:why bother with a liveCD? (Score:5, Interesting)
Nope, I disagree. I have no problems with a text installer, but I still think the live cd installer is a useful feature. I'd prefer to use that if I have the option.
I just think it is nice to have the option to do something with the computer while it's installing. Installing is I/O heavy, so i.e. surfing the web or playing a little game does not slow it down.
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Re:why bother with a liveCD? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:why bother with a liveCD? (Score:4, Interesting)
Poor old Knoppix, really was the first to prefect the whole LiveCD thing and now its commonplace amongst distro's most people forgot where it really came from.
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Re:why bother with a liveCD? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yggdrasil? [wikipedia.org]
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Re:why bother with a liveCD? (Score:5, Funny)
Oh go fuck yourselves mods!
Dude, if we could do that, we wouldn't be here modding comments, would we....
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Re:why bother with a liveCD? (Score:5, Informative)
I've been a Lenny user for at least 6 months and performed a number of server and desktop installs with some versions of the new installer.
The most important part of the installer that has changed for the better is you can easily start the installation by selecting from gui and text options from a menu. The Etch installer you had to type something to start the installer.
The Lenny installer runs circles around the Ubuntu installer. Among other cool details you can configure LVM, or software raids prior to the disk formatting and installation.
I got KDE4 packages from http://kde4.debian.net/ [debian.net] Absolutely the best way to go for kde4.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm using Debian know. But I would switch to whatever Distro that allowed me to run Compiz Fusion (or even Beryl) on a Nvidia card without sacrificing a large portion of my life to researching "how?".
I'm NOT a linux geek. or a windows geek, for that matter. But I have been running slackware since 95, maybe 94, was a solaris & hp-unix sysadmin before I turned to the dark side and went primarily into Wintel-related jobs. If it was simple, easy, or even moderately difficult to do, I could do it.
But I just
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone of the livecd liking type is likely to be better off with Ubuntu. Well I think so anyway.
You don't need a full LiveCD to do a graphical install, so I don't see what that has to do with anything. Has it occured to you that it might be nothing to do with the installer?
I have gone through plenty of text based installers over the years without issue, they're basically exactly the same as the graphical installers, just the graphical ones aren't as fugly. What's wrong with wanting to make things look better? Not 1337 enough for you?
For me it's always been about being able to test out the distro with
Don't install Lenny! (Score:5, Funny)
It has very poor mouse support.
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Re:Don't install Lenny! (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh come on mods, this was funny! I think someone needs to get a little culture [wikipedia.org].
It's well known that Lenny does not do well with mice. Or puppies, for that matter.
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Re:Don't install Lenny! (Score:4, Funny)
Or women...
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Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Or bullets to the back of the head...
Lesbian Denny? (Score:2)
Ok, am I the only one who read Lesbian Denny?
I should cease my attempts at speed reading...
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Ok, am I the only one who read Lesbian Denny?
Thanks.
I administer a whole bunch of Linux servers and I'm never going to be able to get that out of my head.
I'm going to be ringing up hosting providers and asking if they support "Lesbian Denny".
I'm going to be emailing software vendors and asking if their product runs under "Lesbian Denny".
I'm going to be posting on mailing lists asking if anyone's succeeded in installing the latest build on "Lesbian Denny".
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
My bad. I guess not many /.ers would like to read about lesbians rather than debian... ;)
I would swear there would be Ubuntu & Opensuse fans here
Re: (Score:2)
given that the words "Lenny" and especially "Debian" are a good deal more important to most of us
You realise you're talking about a bunch of geeks who stereotypically have never seen a real life woman? Slashdotter's, new poll:
[ ] Lesbian
[ ] Debian
We'll let the masses decide.
What about bugs? (Score:2)
What about release critical bugs? Currently there are 173 of them:
http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/ [debian.org]
I thought that they won't be releasing next version before they are fixed. And even with optimal speed it looks like it would take at least 1,5 months to get them all fixed.
And some estimate that it would be 2009-06 before the release happens:
http://blog.venthur.de/2008/10/07/lennys-release-date/ [venthur.de]
Re:What about bugs? (Score:5, Informative)
Most of those bugs are not in the installer. If you read the summary (not even the actual article, just the summary) carefully, you'll note that this is a release candidate of the *installer*, not of the whole distro. I would imagine the distribution as a whole is probably still on schedule for the originally promised timeframe of "when it's ready".
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Re: (Score:2)
Oh, come one...like that's ever stopped Microsoft or Apple from releasing an OS. Case in points: Windows Vista, OS X Leopard. Both of these had serious issues on launch, to put it mildly. The only difference is that with Debian, we can look up what the bugs are because Debian is honest. Anyway, if Debian fixed all those bugs, then they'd never release anything -- look at what those bugs are, most of them are in packages in debian, which relies on the package maintaine
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The point is that the variety of open distributions give you the choice between mature and immature. Debian has long been an extremely reliable distribution and I hope it stays that way. There's no point in Debian existing if its releases are buggy like Ubuntu's. They should take as much time as they need to get it stable, because that's what Debian is for in the first place.
Using Lenny now (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
debian is great for everything.
ubuntu is great for laptops that want an easier way to get 2.6.27 running their wireless until testing gets un-frozen.
that's the only reason i'd recommend ubuntu for longer than a week
SNI support in Apache? (Score:3, Interesting)
Do the versions of Apache and OpenSSL support SNI so we can have virtual hosts with SSL?
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The net installer keeps breaking when they play with the repo signing keys. Don't use a net installer for testing. Try this RC instead.