Debian 7.0 ("Wheezy") Released 191
First time accepted submitter anarcat writes "After two years since the last Debian release (6.0, nicknamed "squeeze"), the Debian release team has finally published Debian 7.0 (nicknamed "Wheezy"). A newly created blog has details on the release, which features multi-arch support (e.g. you can now install packages for both i386 and amd64 on the same install), improvements to multimedia support (no need for third party repositories!) and improved security through hardening flags. Debian 7.0 also ships with the controversial Gnome 3 release, and the release notes explicitly mention how to revert to the more familiar 'Gnome classic' interface. Finally, we can also mention the improved support for virtualization infrastructure with pre-built images available for Amazon EC2, Windows Azure and Google Compute Engine. Debian 7.0 also ships with the OpenStack suite and the Xen Cloud Platform. More details on the improvements can be found in the release notes and the Debian wiki." An anonymous reader points out (from the announcement) that "[t]he installation process has been greatly improved: Debian can now be installed using software speech, above all by visually impaired people who do not use a Braille device. Thanks to the combined efforts of a huge number of translators, the installation system is available in 73 languages, and more than a dozen of them are available for speech synthesis too.
In addition, for the first time, Debian supports installation and booting using UEFI for new 64-bit PCs (amd64), although there is no support for Secure Boot yet."
Well done guys! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Well done guys! (Score:5, Interesting)
I didn't realize that Debian was so user-friendly.
"Debian can now be installed using software speech, above all by visually impaired people who do not use a Braille device."
That's pretty awesome, when you think about it. Maybe add in memories of slaving your butt off to make drivers work while trying to install Linux, and the awesomeness is increased by a couple orders of magnitude.
I really want to see this installation - I'll download it soon. Stick disk into computer, boot up. "Computer - I want to use drive sda1 for installation. Use the existing virtual memory on drive sda3 please. Just use default partitioning on sda1, only use free space though. Yes, use enhanced security. I don't wish to join any networks. User name is Muppet. Password is CookieMonster. There will not be any other users. I choose the K desktop environment. Yes, go ahead. What? You didn't understand me? Very well - proceed."
Yeah, I've made it all up - but that's about the way it should go. Simple, to the point, and all verbal.
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Computer - I want to use drive sda1 for installation. Use the existing virtual memory on drive sda3 please. Just use default partitioning on sda1, only use free space though. Yes, use enhanced security. I don't wish to join any networks. User name is Muppet. Password is CookieMonster. There will not be any other users. I choose the K desktop environment. Yes, go ahead. What? You didn't understand me? Very well - proceed.
How do you feel about Computer - I want to use drive sda1 for installation. Use the existing virtual memory on drive sda3 please. Just use default partitioning on sda1, only use free space though. Yes, use enhanced security. I don't wish to join any networks. User name is Muppet. Password is CookieMonster. There will not be any other users. I choose the K desktop environment. Yes, go ahead. What? You didn't understand me? Very well - proceed.?
Took a whole lot of trying - Wheezy (Score:4, Funny)
Fish don't fry in the kitchen,
Beans don't burn on the grill.
Took a whole lot of trying
Just to get up that hill.
Now we're up in the big leagues,
Gettin our turn at bat.
As long as we live
It's you and me baby.
There ain't nothing wrong with that.
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Too bad it comes with built in regressions: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=658896
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Gnome is not my choice. :)
Good job Debian! my upgrades from Squeeze to Wheezy were painless, and soon I'll be trying a new install from a netinstall cd.
Debian and XFCE are all I need.
jaz
Why Debian? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why Debian? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why Debian? (Score:5, Interesting)
Without Debian there'd be no Ubuntu or Linux Mint since they both pull packages from the unstable (read: under testing / "current" ) Debian repos.
When you look that sentence and think about it, Debian's role has changed more towards being a professional backroom workshop for other distributions. There's absolutely nothing wrong with this, this kind of ecosystem seems to work great. But for many people it's not the main OS but more like a solid reference implementation. Just an observation.
Re:Why Debian? (Score:4, Interesting)
To expand on this point: Debian enabled Ubuntu to exist, and Ubuntu got popular. There is a trend, though, that long-term Ubuntu users backtracks and find themselves using Debian instead - not least after Ubuntu's well publicized ideological and technical curiosities (Amazon integration, Ubuntu One, Unity, Mir, etc.).
It's not a zero-sum game, so Debian is enhanced by usage of its derivatives, even though e.g. Ubuntu has grown relatively larger during the years. It's just the system working - and Debian isn't going away.
The intercommunication under the Debian umbrella could always work better, though. In particular the one from Ubuntu towards the base maintainers in Debian. I always hate to see duplicate and unnecessary effort.
Re:Why Debian? (Score:4, Insightful)
I sort of fit into the group you're talking about.
My intro to Debian was through Suse. I've been a distro hopper all of my Linux life, but I settled on Ubuntu as my "household" distro, because it was easy to use. The wife and kids used Ubuntu for a long time. We broke with Ubuntu when Unity came along. Now, the household distro is Linux Mint Debian. I still use anything and everything, but at home, it's Mint.
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I'm one of those. I still have Ubuntu on my laptop (mostly because of the casual attitude to non-free drivers, which Debian's GNU purist philosophy makes more of a hassle), but switched the desktop to sid nearly a year ago now and am very satisfied.
Of course, using anything but the unstable branch of Debian would mean being
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If you want more recent packages, the use testing or Sid. You can even install packages from experimental. But your system will be less stable. (My general experience is that once or twice during a period when testing is developing towards stable, the system will be borked. So I maintain a separate partition that has Debian stable on it.)
That said, even Debian testing isn't really a bleeding edge as some distros. But it's the one I chose. (I'll probably switch to Debian stable VERY soon, as a new test
No, Debian is a free software OS via its manifesto (Score:5, Interesting)
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That others use Debian as their "backroom workshop" does not define Debian's true role, no more than one person using another person as a slave manifests that slavery as being the defining characteristic of that other person.
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I disagree with your statement that debain's role has changed "more towards being a professional backroom workshop for other distributions". Debian has stayed being what it has always been. It's just being used more as the foundation that supports the work of the facade builders and marketers that put a pretty face (or not-so-pretty Tammy Faye Baker clown-makeup face, if you want Gnome 3, imho) on top of all that and market it as if they made the whole thing.
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I agree that Debian is a solid implementation. But I disagree with your contention that it's more like a solid reference implementation. A "reference implementation" would imply that it is a demo of some of the capabilities of what can be done and that others are to build upon it. (whoops, the second half of that sentence is actually true! That's exactly what GNU's GPL licensing allows!) A "reference implementation" implies that it's built specifically just to be a partial implementation, which debian definitely is not. While others may build atop Debian, that is not Debian's sole purpose.
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For details on Debian's purpose, see Debian's own documentation about their "social contract" [wikipedia.org], or read about it on [wikipedia.org] articles about it.
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For info about how it started and about Debian's manifesto, read about the Ian who makes up the "-ian" half of "debian" [wikipedia.org] or read the original Debian Manifesto [debian.org].
Re:Why Debian? (Score:5, Interesting)
I always used to feel that Debian was a bit behind the curve in regards to included packages. 10 years ago there was really visible progress, like anti-aliased fonts in GTK or the X compositor, so I went with other distro's that were more bleeding-edge. The install and configuration also was a bit hardcore (it still somewhat is, where is my DrakX?).
Nowadays I feel it's just the right spot. No over-engineered crap like systemd or journald. You can easily disable pulseaudio. And everything and the kitchen-sink is available in the repositories. And for just Firefox or Chrome you can easily add packages. There's no real need for bleeding-edge anymore. Linux is mature and stable.
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Without Debian there'd be no Ubuntu or Linux Mint since they both pull packages from the unstable (read: under testing / "current" ) Debian repos.
And that is really the strange thing to me, that Debian does so much work but don't want to put it in a product. Debian unstable is a rolling release, meaning at any time you can be hit with a major change. Not fun if you want to run any kind of stable environment. Debian testing is extremely variable over the course of a release cycle, being almost similar to unstable early and stable late in the cycle. It's good for people working on the next stable but doesn't balance freshness and stability for anyone e
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I think the tiered distribution approach is Wrong - eg. 'stable, testing, unstable' - regardless of which distribution we're talking about.
What I would like to see is something of the following:
* Each distribution has a 'core' - a set of packages which varies very little, but remains stable.
* each distribution has stable 'release points' for different application groups.
Basically, I might have a server which needs a well-tried kernel but I need up-to-date packages. I could always use backports, which fits 9
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They don't care if Debian gets mainstream acceptance, they just care about it doing the things that a handful of developers and elitists want.
That's one way of putting it ... Another is: they're making a distribution, for themselves, that they are happy with themselves. What's the problem with that?
(It also happens to be the case that a lot of non-members like me use Debian, but that's as far as I can tell a side issue.)
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The FreeBSD folks, for example, don't think it particularly important that you can run it as a desktop OS at -all-, they'll actively discourage people from it if you visit that travesty of an IRC channel
This is just completely false. FreeBSD folks want you to be able to anything you want with their system. Customize it to fit your needs. If you want a pre-built system complete with desktop and plenty of hand-holding -- which is what most new users want -- that's when PC-BSD is suggested. Personally I use FreeBSD on the desktop and I love it (running KDE 4.10.1 atm). It's not really hard to get setup, though time-consuming as a lot of stuff needs to be built from source. But that's what FreeBSD is, an
Re:Why Debian? (Score:5, Interesting)
Debian places a strong emphasis on stability compared to most distros. Instead of being on the bleeding edge they are conservative and try to provide a stable, bug free, and secure system
That generalized claim is wrong. Three prominent examples:
The KDE Workspaces/Apps releases 4.8.4 are less stable than 4.10.2. The 4.8.x releases as well as 4.9.x reached End Of Life quite some time ago and don't receive any bugfix any longer. 4.10.2 contains many bugfixes upstream doesn't bother backporting to older releases (at least not 4.8.x which is two versions behind).
Same with GNOME. I could understand if the package maintainers decided to use 3.6 instead of 3.8 because 3.6 still includes the Fallback Mode but 3.4 is old and unmaintained.
Xfce 4.10 is already a year old and 4.12 should be around the corner. 4.8 just unmaintained and lacks many crucial bugfixes from 4.10.
Not being cutting edge means not blindly jumping towards the latest dot-0 release. It means sticking to software with long term support (eg. Mozilla's ESR versions which regularly receive bugfixes).
However skipping releases that contain many bugfixes just for the sake of shipping >1 year old software has nothing to do with providing stability or security. On the contrary.
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Well, debian does backport all relevant security bugfixes. That aside, there will always be newer, bugfixed software. Debian stable focuses in being a bugfree distribution, not a distribution comprised only of bugfree software. Which means there are, ideally, no version incompatibilities nor out-of-the-box misconfigurations. Given Debian's almost inconceivably big repositories, that's quite the herculean task.
For the record, KDE has been stuck in 4.8.4 for about six months, since the freeze started, but sin
Re:Why Debian? (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, debian does backport all relevant security bugfixes.
No. Wheezy’s QtWebKit is stuck at version 2.2. QtWebKit 2.3.1 is out since a while featuring many important bugfixes of which none were backported: http://patch-tracker.debian.org/package/qtwebkit/2.2.1-5 [debian.org]
Debian stable focuses in being a bugfree distribution, not a distribution comprised only of bugfree software.
That's not what masternerdguy wrote.
if you campare it to, say, Fedora 17's or even Kubuntu 12.04's KDE 4.8, you'll realize how marvelously quirkless Debian's KDE is and why it pays to have stabler distributions.
And when you look at openSUSE, your whole argument falls apart: openSUSE is also relatively conservative but still manages to bring recent GNOME, KDE SC, and Xfce releases to its users. That's because the openSUSE maintainers decide on a case by case basis (eg. they waited a while to adopt systemd or Plymouth) instead of blindly picking only old software.
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And webkit is explicitly cited in the wheezy release notes as something that is not covered by their security guarantees. The only webkit browser that receives security attention is chromium; if you want to use some other webkit browser, you do so at your own risk. This is a reasonable stance to take for an organization with limited resources, particularly considering how niche the affected browsers are.
QtWebKit is not a single browser, it's the HTML rendering used by almost all KDE applications (excl. the few that still use KHTML).
And I don't see any reason in refusing to ship an important bugfix release that does not need any cherrypicked backporting. It simply proves that Debian is not as secure as masternerdguy claimed.
Considering that QtWebKit 2.2 is the version Debian users are stuck now for the next two years without any update in sight, Debian can be considered extremely dangerous.
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You've got a choice here.
1. Always new, only new. Welcome your new bugs every so often by impaling yourself on them (no idea how that works, really).
2. Might be not latest but you don't need to fix random bugs out of nowhere. If there were bugs you deal with them once and forget about it until next release.
Second one is Debian stable. It might not have appeal to you, but it does for many of us who don't feel like fixing random upstream bugs _all the time_. And those DEs, they sure as hell do have those.
As if you would fix any bugs...
GNOME 3.4, KDE SC 4.8, and Xfce 4.8 are End Of Life and don't receive any bugfixes at all any longer and all those releases fixed more bugs than they introduced regressions. Dot-0 releases are the ones with regressions and these are gone by dot-1.
Claiming that the fixed bugs are not important is simply denying reality. Especially in KDE land where 4.7 introduced the new generation KMail and 4.8 is only the second release with it. 4.9 and 4.10 fixed loads and loads of bugs in t
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Sure, sure, the recent 100% CPU load on screenlocking bug on KDE 4.10.x for some people was really fun, I suppose.
No idea what you're talking about. I tried googling it but found nothing.
I have no idea what kind of "crucial for productivity" you need to update that often from the damn desktop /environment/.
I was referring to PIM applications. If you could read, you'd knew that.
As for the PIM if you value your crucial thing - just don't use KDE PIM period. It's just that bad.
Kontact 4.10 is great: http://www.muktware.com/5567/future-and-kde-pim [muktware.com] – 4.8 however was only the second release with the new foundation. It contained bugs related to mail filtering. These bugs are all fixed in 4.9.x or 4.10.x, as far as I'm aware.
Evolution 3.6 also bought nice improvements.
As for non-PIM productivity applications: GNOME Boxes 3.4 is a mere t
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What alternative would you propose that allowed you to have both a stable distrubution and experiment with the bleeding edge as well? We all know that you can get just about any software to run with a ./configure ./make and ./makeinstall....but still, what other distro do know that takes the time to ensure that everything else that worked before you executed those commands will still work after?c
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I would look at RHEL for some interesting ideas. The system itself is very stable, but some components are allowed to change. You don't really need a new version of ls of libfoo, but most users will appreciate an updated Firefox. They also backport a lot of new features and drivers to their kernel, so that it can be installed on new hardware many years after the initial release. We use Debian in some parts of our organization, and it's often not trivial to get Debian stable to run on a new machine two years
Re:Why Debian? (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux has been historically considered a good OS for servers, where uptime and stability are very important. Don't forget the Debian project goes back really far, 1993 or so if I'm not mistaken.
Once you have a server running that many people depend on, you become change-averse to it, because change = risk. So having mature, well-tested, stable software is more important than having the latest and greatest.
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Right, but at some point you have to upgrade.
That's where debian really shines. Second to stable software is the ability to cleanly and easily upgrade without too many hickups; Debian is, in my experience, better than pretty much everything else in this regard.
I've personally got a physical machine that's been kicking around since Debian 2.0 but is now on Debian 7.0 as of last week. Despite running quite a few different services and having some pretty ugly alien'd packages installed, the upgrade process has
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As someone that is new to Linux I've always found Debian to be somewhat weird. I guess a lot of Debian users uses it since they are used to it.
Hard to comment on since you don't say what you find weird. It's easy to think "weird" about anything that deviated from your own favorite Unix.
But as a new Linux user, why would I use Debian when the software is so old and outdated? We're at Firefox 20 and Debian has only version 10. OK that Firefox revs every six weeks, but you get the point.
Actually I don't. Let's assume your software is on average one year old as you use Wheezy. Software kind of worked one year ago too, you know? It's not as if 2013 was a year of great breakthroughs in computing which obsoleted everything done in the 1970--2012 timespan.
And if you feel it was, perhaps you're better off running Debian testing or some other bleeding
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And if you feel it was, perhaps you're better off running Debian testing or some other bleeding-edge distribution, and reserve time for dealing with the "bleeding" aspect of "bleeding edge".
Yup, this is why I keep coming back to Debian. If I need latest browsers, I can add those repositories and update directly from the vendor. But now that I'm not pushing the edge of released software chasing after working 3d drivers, etc (the '99 thru '01 era, with 3dfx being the only real way to Quake/Quake2/Quake3 un
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No Linux distro is for everyone.
I'm comfortable enough in Linux to appreciate the inherent stability of Debian. Debian has historically been more difficult to install than some more popular distros. It's a bit more difficult to administer than those more popular distros. But, the difficulty isn't extreme - it just takes a bit more thought.
Constant updates aren't always a "good thing". Sometimes, updates break things. Sometimes, updates that don't actually break anything introduce new attack vectors. S
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We're at Firefox 20 and Debian has only version 10.
Actually, we're at Firefox 17, the next release after 10. You also see glorified trunk snapshots from time to time.
This is still better than Chrome which doesn't do releases at all.
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Re:Why Debian? (Score:4, Informative)
From the Debian perspective there was only Firefox 10 ESR and Firefox 17 ESR. Since the freeze was made before 17 was released, version 10 was included.
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I use Debian because it works. I don't know of an alternative that can say that. I've used Ubuntu for a year or 2 on 4 different boxes because I mistakenly thought it had not become just as stable as Debian. Boy was I wrong; all of those Ubuntu boxes now run Debian again since none of them managed to survive an upgrade without totally fucking up all kinds of things. I have one Debian box that I installed back in 1999 or so. I still works flawlessly.
The additional user friendlyness provided by Ubuntu is dwar
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Only your install media, production servers, and kiosks run Debian stable. Everyone else gets testing, except for machines where you don't mind some breakage, and you deploy sid. Sid is usually quite up to date, testing is usually not much worse than most static distros. Stable is outdated because it is exactly that; STABLE.
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Debian is stable. It's for people who don't necessary want things to be the newest possible. It's not "old and outdated" if it still works, is still being maintained, and still has security patches. Once you've got a version of Debian that works, then it would be logical to stick with it. Why turn your Linux into a experiment in seeing how often you can update it without something breaking?
If it's not the style you prefer then at least be glad that you get a choice.
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I agree. In ten years of Debian on all my machines, I can count the numbers of 'catastrophic' failures of apt-get or aptitude on one hand, and those were all a dist-upgrade when something MAJOR changed and I didn't catch it before upgrading. IOW, there was clear wording available to warn me to wait.
Debian Sid is a perfectly acceptable day-to-day OS for desktop use, IMO.
I've also almost NEVER had a problem updating a Stable Distro to Testing, or Sid.
Debian mostly, just works. I enable non-free sources, an
Missing Apache 2.4 (Score:4, Insightful)
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Apache 2.4 might also have new bugs. It's a good idea to have it go through unstable and testing before hitting the next stable.
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Re:Missing Apache 2.4 (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only this, but you can use the stable Debian version as a base to install / compile whatever new stuff you want (just work your way up the upgrade path tree), this way you can choose stability in some places and newest features in others. Despite sometimes having dependency hell, I've found it even more difficult to go the opposite direction -- Installing the latest stuff, then going after the more stable things in certain places.
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So how is it that you build your 'unstable' applications, using the Debian-approved package system (deb-src packages) from later releases? Or do you just download tarballs?
I've noticed that the latter of those two methods is something devs are particularly prone to, often for no apparent reason. Just last year I found a php package tarball overlay a developer had been using, with the PHP release date being from 2005-2006. He used it on every project he manned, and sadly, he wasn't the exception IME. In this
fire up your torrents! (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's your quick and easy way to give back. I don't code in c/c++, I hate writing documentation, so share some bandwidth and seed the torrents for a few hours or a few gb.
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Yup, but every little bit helps especially if you are in the early group.
I started the torrent just before my above post and for a while after getting the whole disk images (i did netinstall and cd-1 for both i386 and amd64) I was uploading at close to 3mb/s for a short while. They've dropped off slowly, down to a trickle of a few K per sec up, so I killed the off about 10 minutes ago. Still, 20gb worth of upload... 20gb I don't need, and 20gb that Debian (or whoever) doesn't have to pay for.
Released with EOL Firefox (Score:2, Informative)
I really like the emphasis on stability, but for web browsers I think it is a problem. Debian 7.0 ships with Iceweasel (Firefox) 10.0.12esr that is EOL. The security updates will be backported, but with the many changes to the next supported ESR, it may not be possible to backport all security updates. Considering that the browsers these days are major targets, I would rather have a possible more unstable browser, but a browser with the latest security updates.
This is only a problem if You want to use Debia
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That's true, but not a problem in practice. If Debian has to fix something themself they are usually able to do so.
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Yeah, I don't trust heavily patched packages for security. It's better to let the people who actually write the software do updates. You may remember the OpenSSL fiasco where a clever Debian maintainer decided to fix a "bug" and removed a major source of entropy. This resulted in every Debian user sharing about 32000 keys.
Amazing (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Outdated (Score:5, Insightful)
Heh, kernel 3.2... this OS comes outdated out of the box.
It's not outdated. It is well tested.
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Heh, kernel 3.2... this OS comes outdated out of the box.
It's not outdated. It is well tested.
Isn't 2.6 even more well tested?
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Sure, but the idea is not to necessarily ship the most tested software. The idea is that the software that is shipped is well tested before moved a major new version.
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There is a sweet spot (with that argument, we could say why not use 2.4). The thing is Debian is fantastic for certain things, such as servers or development workstaitons - things where you want to have something very dependable that's going to be solid. And Debian is solid, and their conservative approach means we run it on all our Linux servers.
Re:Outdated (Score:4, Funny)
Heh, kernel 3.2... this OS comes outdated out of the box.
It's not outdated. It is well tested.
Pro Tip: Guys/Girls: Do not use that phrase to describe your genitals.
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As a Debian user, I didn't notice the GNOME 3 switch because not everybody uses Linux as a desktop. It's fairly popular as a headless server.
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I've found that pulling tools together from desktop environments other than KDE and Gnome and just using a few of the indispensable apps from them is the best way to go. For example, I use Thunar instead of Nautilus or Dolphin. The simpler desktop environments tend to have more portable components, not as tied to their parent.
Then again, except for a web browser, e-mail, and feed reader, the majority of my time is spent on a terminal anyway, so I may be the outlier here.
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That will work for now, but over time many GTK+ 2 applications will migrate to GTK+ 3; and if GTK+ 3 is not a go on other desktops then that's a problem.
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Correct me if I'm misunderstanding something, but a particular application should not depend on what desktop environment is running, since Gtk is primarily responsible for drawing. They may not interoperate with other applications, but they should run.
Having said that, it seems like there are basically two ways to go if Gtk+3 applications won't run outside of Gnome. The one I hope for is that the smaller window managers will support Gtk+ 3 (or, conversely, distributions continue to support Gtk+ 2). The alt
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It's not that the software won't run, but that it will just look really bad at best. But it depends. Especially applications using the dark themeing is really bad and almost unusable. At least gnome-boxes had that issue when I tried it last week. The same program works just fine under Gnome 3. But it's a common problem among all GTK+ 3 applications and from what I understand the problem is in GTK+ 3 itself.
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That will work for now, but over time many GTK+ 2 applications will migrate to GTK+ 3; and if GTK+ 3 is not a go on other desktops then that's a problem.
?? Everything will move to GTK 3, obviously. It's a library to draw components. It will be supported everywhere. I'm running GTK 3 apps now on KDE, and they looks much, much, much more lovely than the GTK 2 apps. Get your facts right.
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Re:Outdated (Score:5, Interesting)
What if one is happy with one's desktop setup from last century? Mine has, more or less, looked the same since about 1998, although I've updated the underlying packages, e.g., I now use awesome window manager rather than icewm, and I now use rxvt with unicode. I still use gnuit as my file manager (the name changed from git because of the popularity of version control program). I've tried various other things on occasion, such as Gnome/KDE/XFCE/LDXE, but I always go back to my home rolled "desktop". I'm not a programmer (academic in the humanities), but still appreciate the control this combination gives me using my very rudimentary ability to write scripts using such languages such as bash and lua.
Best wishes,
Bob
Re:Outdated (Score:4, Interesting)
What if one is happy with one's desktop setup from last century? Mine has, more or less, looked the same since about 1998
Mine has looked the same since 1992 or so -- it's what I ran on Solaris at the university.
I still haven't understood what's the big deal with a desktop anyway. You need ways to move your windows around, a way (like a menu) to start your favorite GUI programs, and a way to logout. A way to lock the screen too if you have people around you. A clipboard, but that's built into X11. I can't come up with a lot more useful features, and yet there's all this heat generated by various desktops reinventing themselves and pissing people off.
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What does that mean? Should everyone be average, running identical things? What's wrong with not being like regular people?
It seems like some ACs here are promoting the idea that Linux should be about promoting itself and being new and cool in order to attract a big audience and thus destroy the proprietary operating system world. Instead quite a lot of people use Linux because it gets the work done for them, not for any political reasons.
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FOAD A/C. KDE is the desktop of choice. Gnome has always been an MS Windows wannabe with it's use of a registry and such shit. I'll take kde over it any day of the week because I can get stuff done. It's the entire reason I use Linux - I gave up fighting with MS about how to use MY Computer.
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I wouldn't put it like that. Gnome remains big because it toes the FSF party line the most closely despite its flaws. In a distribution that maintains an emphasis on having as much GPL as possible, Gnome gets top billing over KDE.
It always did seem a bit ironic to me that while promoting a GPL approach, Gnome felt like the least configurable desktop choice with the biggest "do it our way" style (granted, I haven't used Gnome in ages, so maybe it's improved).
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You seem to have a somewhat valid view of things.
I see things a bit differently though. Debian provides a solid backbone upon which to customize an installation. Debian doesn't necessarily have the time and resources to create their own desktop environments.
Want the best of two worlds? Install Debian, then install the stuff you actually want. Mate desktop might be a good start. That's what I'm using, thanks to Linux Mint Debian.
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You honestly think 3.2 kernel is OLD?
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Nothing wrong with kernel 3.2. If I had any serious gripe about this release it's the fact that it comes with XFCE 4.8. Since 4.10 released over a year ago, there's really no excuse for shipping a stable distro with the older version. Thankfully there are third party repos for thse of us who want to run stable, but with a reasonable version of XFCE.
Re:Outdated (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Upgrade Ubuntu ? (Score:5, Informative)
Ubuntu pulls packages from Debian unstable on a rolling basis, and then has their own release cycle. So the releases of stable Debian versions aren't that relevant to Ubuntu releases.
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More relevant would be, "When will LInux Mint Debian upgrade to this Debian release?"
Think I'll go browse the Mint Debian forum to see . . .
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Well, it's just now moving on: Debian's testing has been frozen since June 2012 [debian.org] for the wheezy release cycle. Now with the release having happened, it's unfrozen so new packages can start migrating from unstable again.
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So it is, so it is. I'm already updated, no sweat, no muss.
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No, Ubuntu does not pull from Debian "stable". Even a cursory look would tell you this is false.
I believe what they do is pull from either Debian experimental or debian sid (most likely). Even Debian 'testing' is more likely than 'stable', which is improbable at best...
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Worked just fine with apt-get. Did it on an installation that started out with 2.2 and that has been upgraded from version to version.
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Agreed, worked fine for me. Only downside was GNOME 3, but I switched to XFCE4 which does all that I need from a desktop.
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I managed to play every single game I have available for Linux on my Wheezy desktop (around 20-30), all of them with satisfactory performance.
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Re:Dated, old, irrelevant to many except the dieha (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Dated, old, irrelevant to many except the dieha (Score:4, Informative)
the fact that everyone who runs debian runs the testing version just makes my point
Except not everyone does. Most machines under my control run Debian stable, because I don't want any trouble from them. I just need them to do their job.
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Yeah, where I work, we are not allowed to run any testing versions. Has to be the supported stable versions.
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Good model -- Debian as an oak tree. Doesn't need 'watering', by the way, because it has such a well-developed root system!
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Im sorry but the concept of since its old its very stable is non-sense
Bad premise. This appears to imply that the goal is to run old stuff. The concept of "Since it has been tested well, it's very stable" is where Debian is. New kernel means everything needs retesting. Are you volunteering the time and equipment to run that kind of testing? And it's not just the kernel that needs retesting, it's all of the rest of the packages. (I haven't checked to see if they want to ensure that the kernel is the same rev on all platforms as well...)
Debian could ship a system with kernel 3.8 and the newer stuff that most distros use and be just as stable
Maybe. But without the testing to
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Im sorry but the concept of since its old its very stable is non-sense,
There's a difference between "It's been tested to actually work in under condition X with config Y" and being "old". Also, there's another name for a diehard... Hard to Kill.
3.2 supported longer (Score:5, Informative)
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You have a curious definition of "fact". I, for one, run Debian Stable on both my desktop and my laptop.
Why? That already exists in other distros. If I wanted cutting-edge, I could have it. I use Debian precisely because I got tired of all the constant changes and wanted some stability. Not stability in the sense of
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Debian does ship a system with kernel 3.8. It's called "experimental". I'm running Debian with this kernel, all packaged nice and neatly, installed using Debian's standard package commands.
Funnily enough, I hit a problem with it. My wireless card occasionally drops connection. Works flawlessly under 3.2, though. I haven't traced the problem yet, but when using my wireless, I boot up into 3.2 for the moment.
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A bit old maybe, but not outdated or useless. It is a supported file system.
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I thought it was still the FS of choice for flash drives, because no journaling, so less writes.
Though I think you can run EXT4 journal-less now, as an option.
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dd if=debian.iso of=/dev/usbdevice
Not exactly rocket science. Actually it's even simpler than writing it to a cdr.
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It's harder than to use Unetbootin, point and click and not destroy the USB drive's content in the process. Sadly that didn't work when I tried to do that with a Wheezy iso a few weeks ago.
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You need to use unetbootin 494 or earlier. I don't know what they changed to make later ones stop working for Debian, nor do I remember where I learned this fact, and since 494 seems to work for every linux distro I've tried (Suse, both types of Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora 17) I question whether that change even has a purpose.
Re:Linux 3.2? (Score:4, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel
Take a look at Maintenance. Linux 3.2 is the version with longest support: until 2015.