Debian 3.1 (Sarge) Released

Mister Furious writes "First, Apple switches to Intel, and now, equally shocking: Debian Sarge is released! Hell has officially frozen over! The scoop is from debian-administration.org: "The new Debian stable release, codenamed Sarge, has officially been released today. Several years of development since the last stable release, Woody, was released on the 9th of July, 2002 over a thousand developers around the world have helped make this release possible." Changes include Gnome 2.8, Firefox 1.0.4, Thunderbird 1.0.2, Apache 2.0.54 (1.3.33 is still available, too!), Postgresql 7.4.7, and more. The news hasn't hit the main Debian GNU/Linux site as of this article's posting. Congratulations to all of the Debian developers and contributors. Thanks for all your hard work and for a great distro!" Here's a link to the Debian Stable "Release" file.

Espectr0 points out an article about the release at Linux Compatible, writing "It is available on 14 (!) CD's or 2 DVD's. It includes XFree86 4.3, GNOME 2.8, KDE 3.3, Kernel 2.4.27, GCC 3.3.5, OpenOffice.org 1.1.3 and much others."

Excellent news!

[fernique]

The only thing frustrated me -- the number of Release-Critical [debian.org] bugs is not zero! Why is it so? Could anybody give the answer?

Habemus Debian!

[shywolf9982]

That's incredible. Now, Microsoft HAS to release Longhorn. C'mon, you can't let the Debian guys be faster than you....
Apart from jokes, I'm curious to know if Debian still holds a share of the "market". It was a gooddistribution, but a lil too static. I honestly think they should consider doubling the release speed, or atleast provide significant updates for a release from time to time (who said "and why not call 'em Service Packs?").

Re:Official announcement

[fbjon]

I think it says something about the Debian team, when announcements are made in 15 languages simultaneously. I can even read security reports in my native language!

Re:Excellent news!

[EinarH]

IIRC most of those are old bugs from installation reports. They are typicaly quite shallow, like some obscure and hard to reproduce bug in a controller or arch.

I would think that the team tried to work it out and didn't succeed. Sometimes you've just got to draw that line in the sand and say; that's it: Your bug is not important enough to hold back the whole release.

Congratulations to the Debian developers.

Toy Story connection?

[JeTmAn81]

I may be missing the obvious, but are Debian releases supposed to be named after characters from the classic Pixar animated film Toy Story? Woody, Sarge, etc...will the next one be Buzz Lightyear?

Impressive Accessability.

[tacocat]

Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 includes the efforts of the Debian-Edu/Skolelinux, Debian-Med and Debian-Accessibility sub-projects which boosted the number of educational packages and those with a medical affiliation as well as packages designed especially for people with disabilities.

I spent a weekend doing accessability evaluations on computers. The assignment was for Windows, but the teacher let me use Linux since that was all I had. Turns out my Debian-Linux distrobution had far more accessability features available than anything Windows had. If I had a microphone and a few cameras I could really go to town. But it is worth mentioning that the Linux community as a whole and Debian in particular has done a better than industry standard job at this>

x86_64 Support?

[imemyself]

I know its not 100% necessary to run on AMD64/EM64T processors, and it may or may not even give performance advantages yet, but I think its kind of odd that they have binaries available for pretty minor platforms but don't have any specifically for probably the second most popular after regular x86. I mean RH/Fedora, SuSE, Mandrake, and even Debian-based distros like Ubuntu have x86_64 support, its kind of surprising that Debian doesn't. (And I'm not saying I don't like Debian. I mean apt seriously kicks ass.)

Will x86_64 be "supported" in whatever will be the next Debian testing? And will Sarge's release mean that testing will rapidly be modernized? If so, I'm looking forward to it.

Re:Coincidence?

[Tony Hoyle]

1. autoconf tries to have logic for every single supported architecture within it, but of course it only supports the ones that were known at the time of building, and can't handle quirks. You have to build the in manually... compile flags can be particularly evil.. (Digital Unix take a bow!), plus multiple linux distros do things in different ways even if the core OS is the same (Redhat is particularly bad for this... if you don't include certain headers in certain orders if screws up eg. kerberos is dependent on SSL (or is that the other way around? I forget.).

A much better way would be for each distro/platform to have its own autoconf core, containing all the rules it needs for its paths, quirky library building, etc. That could be installed once by default then a simple autoconf script in each package that interfaces with it/reads config files/whatever will be able to do the right thing without (or rarely) having to do platform specific stuff in the package.

2. Libtool. The package that the 'rm' command was designed for. Tried to be all things to all systems and 90% of the time does the wrong thing (and on some platforms - HPUX, AIX - doesn't actually work properly at all).

Re:MODUP!

[Script Cat]

Yeah!
Using Bittorent my bandwidth maxes out not yours.
But that doesn't mean sarge isn't popular these torrents are lit-up.