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!"

freebsd

[timmarhy]

if you want something like debian that isn't as cutting edge but stable, use freebsd it's far better. i admin'd freebsd boxes for years and it was a joy to work with.

advice for upgrading a server?

[bcrowell]

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:Sigh, JPG screenshots

[jay-be-em]

png is far better than jpeg for images with lots of gradients and solid colors like screenshots than. Compare similarly sized screenshots using png and jpg -- jpg will be full of artifacting.

If you were complaining about someone using pngs for photographs you'd have a point.

Re:Still not ready

[clang_jangle]

Debian isn't ready for the desktop?

Nowhere did I say that, but since you ask: depends upon whose desktop. I put my Mom on Ubuntu, and wouldn't dream of putting her on Debian. I'm not going to teach her to use synaptic, much less apt. Plus the drivers, default configs, and things like the Ubuntu update manager make all the difference for the non-geek user. Personally, I do use Debian for several of my desktop machines, but I was using it back when we had to install with dselect, so I know the CLI well enough that Ubuntu just feels a bit bloaty to me. Not that it's bloaty for a non-geek, who's probably used to winXP. It's all relative.

Iceweasel is named that way due to Mozilla

[Sipper]

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

Re:Dependencies are annoying.

[mvdwege]

apt-cache show <packagename>. If it's a meta-package, the Debian devs are usually good enough to provide that in the description. In fact, the standard phrase goes something like "This is a meta-package that depends on all other packages to facilitate install. It can be safely removed after install."

Mart

Re:Iceweasel is named that way due to Mozilla

[Qzukk]

Wow, the author set up the POTS modem. When is the last time you had to use one of those?

Plenty of people still live in parts of the world without anything faster. But PPP isn't only for POTS, plenty of DSL services use PPPo[AE].

I think it's well past time to create a ppp-client package (conflicts with pppd) that has pppd configured the way that the 99% of the users who aren't modem pools will use it (for instance, not demanding a password from the other end of the line). Bonus points if the code starts diverging from the original pppd to become more client friendly (like having just one password file rather than chap and pap files, and sharing the user/pass configuration with the chat dialup script).