Debian 6.0 Released In GNU/Linux, FreeBSD Flavors 250
itwbennett writes "After two years of work, the Debian Project has announced the release of Debian 6.0. 'There are many goodies in Debian 6.0 GNU/Linux, not the least of which is the new completely free-as-in-freedom Linux kernel, which no longer contains firmware modules that Debian developers found troublesome,' says blogger Brian Proffitt. And in addition to Debian GNU/Linux, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is introduced as a technology preview. 'Debian GNU/kFreeBSD will port both a 32- and 64-bit PC version of the FreeBSD kernel into the Debian userspace, making them the first Debian release without a Linux kernel,' says Proffitt. 'The Debian Project is serious about the technology preview label, though: these FreeBSD-based versions will have limited advanced desktop features.' The release notes and installation manual have been posted, and installation images may be downloaded right now via bittorrent, jigdo, or HTTP."
Good job Debian team (Score:5, Informative)
This looks like a solid release. I only use stable for as long as it takes for the new queue to start start dumping back in Sid but I appreciate the hard work that has gone into this.
And the new artwork really rocks. I was shocked to see plymouth working out of the box with my nvidia card. The consistency from grub to kde launch is really stunning and makes the whole bootup feel seamless.
Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage? (Score:2, Informative)
ZFS and DTrace come to mind, but those are only the easy examples.
Works well, but significantly higher requirements (Score:3, Informative)
Squeeze has significantly higher minimal install requirements than Lenny, to the point it wouldn't fit on my Dockstar or my Dt360. So if you are using Debian because it's small and light, don't upgrade.
Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage? (Score:5, Informative)
You can find some of the reasons here [debian.org]. Among them are ZFS, jails, and pf. I've used Debian GNU/kFreeBSD in the past and found pf significantly easier to use than iptables and tc.
Some CPU microarchitectures dropped from Debian... (Score:5, Informative)
Although kfreebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64 have been added, these are not true new CPU microarchitectures in and of themselves, as they are compiled to standard x86 and x86_64 respectively, but obviously with the fairly radical change of not using Linux at all with a different GNU libc requiring all packages to be recompiled. This is the same situation as we have traditionally seen in the never-officially-released hurd-i386 port of Debian (which makes sense to call Debian GNU I suppose, as the Hurd kernel is part of the GNU project already) which seems to be missing so far with Debian 6.0 so far, pending a decision to potentially drop it as well.
All in all, amazing work by all in the Debian project. It remains an incredibly impressive feat that such a project can have no corporate oversight or ownership yet maintain such an impressively influential, relevant, and useful place in the operating system ecosystem. Even with dropping a couple of architectures, Debian still supports more computer types than most people even know exists, and continues to provide package updates that many many other operating systems base their repositories from. Also wonderful to see the website be updated [debian.org]!!
Re:First release without a linux kernel?? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Yeah! (Score:4, Informative)
Is this not one of the fastest Debian release cycles?
Not really. It's been two years since Lenny, which was two years after Etch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian#Release_history [wikipedia.org]
Re:Are they mad? (Score:2, Informative)
Don't use it then. You're not forced to and you have a choice. Personally, I can't stand BSD's userland tools and prefer GNU's.
Re:Works well, but significantly higher requiremen (Score:4, Informative)
Squeeze has significantly higher minimal install requirements than Lenny, to the point it wouldn't fit on my Dockstar or my Dt360.
I'm running squeeze on a dockstar right now by booting from a USB stick. Some smart people made it easy for the rest of us. [doozan.com]
Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage? (Score:3, Informative)
What's the advantage of running Debian with a BSD kernel instead of linux?
If you want to make money, and don't want to contribute back to the free software economy, its easier with a BSD license than a GPL license. Other than that...
Quite an oversimplification.
Yet, not bad for just 27 words. If you can do better given that constraint... A laundry list of unique features, license differences, and the (very few) device drivers that work better under BSD than linux, would probably be too long and complicated to be a "summary".
I would go further and state its within the set of questions where if you are able to successfully implement the answer, you are capable enough not to need to ask us the question, or alternately its within the set of questions where if you actually needed to know the answer, you would have already figured it out via very hard experience on linux, although knowing it is a bad question in advance would probably have been impossible because it would have taken more data to evaluate the question than to answer it...
Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage? (Score:4, Informative)
Are they using glibc or the freebsd one? Because one of the developer advantages of the BSDs are that kernel and libc are more in sync. Ie. there's no system calls in libc that are not in the kernel, and vice versa.
Re:yay. two more variants that nobody will want. (Score:5, Informative)
You should be aware that Debian is not allowed to use the trademark "Firefox" and also have the ability to apply patches such as security fixes(1). It's not called "Iceweasel" out of anything but necessity. You think this is a Debian-specific issue? Well, no, it's actually a major problem for all other distributors as well(2).
1 [lwn.net]
2 [fedoraproject.org]
So the links are 5 years old, but the issues surrounding the trademarks haven't changed or gone away. Distributions shipping "Firefox" have abrogated their ability (and responsibility) to be able to apply changes and security updates to the software without the explicit concent of Mozilla Corporation.
Not exactly free software when it comes on those terms, is it?
Regarding the kernel, I assume you're referring to the non-free firmware removal. Maybe you haven't been fully informed that the non-free firmware was actually removed from the upstream kernel sources as well. As a result, the Debian kernels are far from "non-standard", they are standard!
Regards,
Roger
[FFS Slashdot, it's 2011 and you still can't handle UTF-8!]
Re:Some CPU microarchitectures dropped from Debian (Score:4, Informative)
I'm guessing that there are more developers interested in maintaining the m68k port than the Alpha port. Or at least that's how that typically goes. Unless you've got a strange OS like NetBSD which is obsessed with running on absolutely every possible architecture from mainframes to wrist watches, some platforms tend to not have enough people with the hardware and interest to keep updating the branch.
Re:NetBsd kernel...what's the advantage? (Score:4, Informative)