Debian 7.0 ('Wheezy') Release Planned For 1st Weekend in May 226
An anonymous reader writes with this good news from the Debian developers who have been working hard to release the next version of the distro: "We now have a target date of the weekend of 4th/5th May for the release. We have checked with core teams, and this seems to be acceptable for everyone. This means we are able to begin the final preparations for a release of Debian 7.0 — 'Wheezy'. The intention is only to lift the date if something really critical pops up that is not possible to handle as an errata, or if we end up technically unable to release that weekend (e.g. a required machine crashes or d-i explodes in a giant ball of fire). Every other RC fix that does not make it in time will be r1 material. Please be sure to contact us about the RC fixes you would like included in the point release!" Of particular interest to casual users, from the list of changes in 7.0: "Debian wheezy comes with full-featured libav (formerly ffmpeg) libraries and frontends, including e.g. mplayer, mencoder, vlc and transcode. Additional codec support is provided e.g. through lame for MP3 audio encoding, xvidcore for MPEG-4 ASP video encoding, x264 for H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video encoding, vo-aacenc for AAC audio encoding and opencore-amr and vo-amrwbenc for Adaptive Multi-Rate Narrowband and Wideband encoding and decoding, respectively. For most use cases, installation of packages from third-party repositories should not be necessary anymore. The times of crippled multimedia support in Debian are finally over!"
Re:Kernel (Score:5, Informative)
Debian will run Linux kernel 3.2.39 [debian.org]
Debian can also run on the FreeBSD kernel. It looks like Wheezy will support both 8.3 [debian.org] and 9.0 [debian.org] kernels.
Re:Kernel (Score:5, Informative)
The Linux flavour will use Linux 3.2 with a couple of backported features.
http://womble.decadent.org.uk/blog/whats-in-the-linux-kernel-for-debian-70-wheezy-part-1.html [decadent.org.uk]
http://womble.decadent.org.uk/blog/whats-in-the-linux-kernel-for-debian-70-wheezy-part-2.html [decadent.org.uk]
http://womble.decadent.org.uk/blog/whats-in-the-linux-kernel-for-debian-70-wheezy-part-3.html [decadent.org.uk]
Security improvements! (Score:3, Informative)
What's new in Debian 7.0
2.2.3. Hardened security
Many Debian packages have now been built with gcc compiler hardening flags enabled. These flags enable various protections against security issues such as stack smashing, predictable locations of values in memory, etc. An effort has been made to ensure that as many packages as possible include these flags, especially focusing on those in the 'base'-installation, network-accessible daemons and packages which have had security issues in recent years.
Now there are no reasons for using Ubuntu anymore. I do not remember being so excited ever!
Re:Wheezy (Score:5, Informative)
The product is officially known as "Debian 7.0". Wheezy is just a code name.
Re:Kind of sad (Score:5, Informative)
It's 2013 and your finally advertising non broken media support. Even Gentoo has had working media support built in for years, I think if this is one of the selling points of Debian then it's time to move on, your trying to get me to take the Honda N360 off your hands instead of the race car.
I think you're laboring under the mistaken assumption that this reflects on the general state of Debian. The truth is that media support is a very specific issue, which, IIRC, was caused by intellectual property issues. For most other things, Debian has had a very complete and high-quality selection of packages. For proprietary media formats, they basically had none - although getting support for those was as simple as adding a repository that provided them (change one line and run a command, or do a couple of clicks - whichever you prefer).
In particular, the "broken" media support was not an issue with Debian generally being broken (it hasn't been) and it also wasn't an issue with Debian being behind other distros (Debian stable tends to have old software, but that is by design - if you want newer software, you can use backports, unstable, experimental, or third-party repositories).
This is one of the major reasons I could never stick with Debian, I need stuff to work, be up to date and ready to go out of the box, Debian is built off legacy packages in an attempt to claim stability, when in reality it's just outdated in it's release mode.
By all means use the distro that works best for you. For me, that's Debian stable, because I want to minimize the amount of time I spend on maintenance. There is a trade-off between having newer software and having more testing performed on that software, and a trade-off between minimizing system maintenance effort and running up-to-date software, and I'm happy with how Debian stable makes these trade-offs. Every other OS I've used has had a higher maintenance burden.
Re:Freeze (Score:2, Informative)
There's a repository for that: http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=248917%23p248917
What is most painful though is the old version of libc they are stuck on (2.13), half of all the Humble Bundle games won't work because they were compiled with something newer, so I'm thinking of switching to Mint or Arch this weekend.
Re:Freeze (Score:5, Informative)
one thing with the recent developments in Debian is that once Wheezy is released, we'll start working hard on the next release, Jessie. And while unstable may finally be unstable for a little while after the release (while people upload a bunch of new packages), I have had a lot of success running wheezy while it was in testing in the last two years. I suggest that people interested in the "latest and greatest" install wheezy, then upgrade to jessie (testing) when it stabilises a bit after the release.
That's what I will do anyways. :)
Re:What changed? (Score:3, Informative)
These bugs, along with all the links they contain, is a good starting point:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=522373 [debian.org]
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=592457 [debian.org]
My guess...Debian got legal advice which gave them enough courage to go ahead...and it included the instruction not to publish the details of said advice. See also:
http://www.debian.org/legal/patent [debian.org]
http://www.debian.org/reports/patent-faq [debian.org]
Re:Freeze (Score:4, Informative)
... since the default desktop for Wheezy is the unutterably awful GNOME 3.
And in Debian Gnome3 now has a dependency on NetworkManager.
Users of the Wicd networking manager should be aware of this, because NetworkManager conflicts with Wicd. Neither Wicd no NetworkManager work when they're both active, and at the moment there's no warning about this nor instructions on what to do about it. :-(
Re:No avidemux?, paper cuts not present in Ubuntu (Score:2, Informative)
We rely on volunteers to add software to Debian. People who want avidemux in Debian (like yourself) haven't bothered to package avidemux yet. Perhaps you would like to help improve multimedia in Debian and join the multmedia team?
http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Multimedia
Please report bugs about the issues you found:
http://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting