Debian Lenny Installer RC1 Arrives 81
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."
Using Lenny now (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Using Lenny now (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
Re:What about bugs? (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.
Re:why bother with a liveCD? (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 your hardware, or just seeing if the latest version is worth upgrading to. You can do that in a VM but that doesn't test with your actual hardware (depending on the solution you're using). The Ubuntu 7 liveCD would just lock up on my machine before it ever got into X, but 8.10 went right on through and even had support for my laptop's wireless card, keyboard backlight and function keys etc, so I knew the driver support was finally good enough.
LiveCDs or USB based distros are also useful for IT support stuff like verifying if some hardware isn't working because of Windows or because it's just plain broken; also for recovering files or performing other maintenance on an OS that won't boot, etc.
Re:A couple of months more, perhaps... (Score:2, Insightful)
Also Debian has release cycles, you know. But while Ubuntu's release cycles are inflexible and tied to arbitrary release dates, Debian's release cycles are more flexible and they can afford to wait until the release has actually become stable and ready.
You mention GNOME and Linux as examples that other projects should follow, but you should remember that the early GNOME2 releases were unusable crap, as were were the early Linux 2.6 releases. KDE4 also makes time-based releases now, and so far their releases have been crap. But once GNOME2 and Linux 2.6 matured, they started to make quite usable releases. And it looks like KDE4 will also mature soon, so I'd expect they'll too start making usable releases in the near future.
With distros it's a bit different, though. Distros package software from various sources, and they can refuse to include software that they consider to be just development previews (like early GNOME2, early Linux 2.6, or early KDE4). Distros can cherry-pick stuff that is known to work without problems, if they want to. Or they can include the latest and greatest versions of software and then put their hands together in prayer, hoping that everything works -- even if they haven't really had time to test it.
Ubuntu wants to include the latest versions of software in their releases (even in the so called "LTS" releases), and they have a strict release schedule they need to obey. Quite often this means that they don't have much time to test the software that they include in their releases. Ubuntu is also known to ship with pre-release versions of some popular software programs, even in the "LTS" releases. With such a misguided release policy, Ubuntu can never become mature enough to make releases that are actually stable and well-tested.
Debian, on the other hand, cherry-picks software that is known to work, and they also take time to carefully test software that goes into their stable releases. They only release when the developers think that all the serious bugs have been fixed and the release has really become stable. That's really the reason why Debian releases are so much more stable and trouble-free than Ubuntu releases.