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Debian

Debian Lays Out Freeze Plans For Woody 89

Posted by michael from the pun-all-you-want,-we'll-make-more dept.
impaler writes: "Looks like Woody is frozen. LWN has a message from the Woody release manager, saying it is frozen. So, I guess it is finally frozen. Hopeful in less than a year Debian 2.3/3.0 will be out. Yay. Well, really lots of yay. Nice gui installer(even though I'm fine with the text one) and automatic hardware detection(something I like...especially when installing Debian on a box you know almost nothing about its hardware i.e. at an installfest)." And it looks like the Debian Release Manager has absolutely, positively staked his life on releasing Woody no later than July 8, 2001, so we can set our clocks now and hold him to his sworn word.
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Debian Woody is Frozen More

Debian Woody is Frozen

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  • One of the marks of a mature OS. I'm glad to hear that a major linux distro has it...

    FWIW, Mandrake 7.x has automatic hardware detection as well. Other distributions probably include it, but Mandrake 7 is the only one I've used since Redhat 6.2 a couple of years ago or so. This worked out great one day last week; I had a short in my keyboard (PS/2) port which rendered it unusable. This would have been a big problem (obviously) but I found that for some reason, I could plug the keyboard into the mouse (PS/2) port and the BIOS recognized it fine!

    Of course, now the problem was I had no mouse. What I did have was a spare serial port, and so digging through my Box O' Tricks, I found an old serial mouse. I plugged it in, booted up Mandrake 7.1, and sure enough .. it told me that it had found a new serial mouse, set it up for me, and that was it. It worked fine in both the console (gpm) and in X, and required no further work from me.

    Now Windows users are probably reading this and saying "Big deal." But for Linux, it is a big deal, because this is exactly the kind of thing that Linux needs to get broader desktop acceptance. It never ceases to amaze me how far we supposedly "powerless" open source developers can come in such a short amount of time.
  • If you have less than 8 megs on it, a version of Debian (2.0?) has a low memory installer disk. I had to use this on my 4 meg laptop. In fact I installed Debian entirely from floppies and it works wonderfully. For some reason Debian have dumped the lowmem boot disk now, which is a real shame since the Debian on my laptop is a bit crusty now.

    Why did Debian drop this? It's the ONLY distro I could find that would easily install on my laptop. Found instructions for Slack but they were mostly incomprehensible.

    Of course, if your system has a lot of ram all this is irrelevant.

  • Hey, I plan on installing Woody on my k-RaD Vic-20. Over tape drive! USING C-15s! AND NO BLOODY DOLBY, EITHER!

    Wuss.

  • to honor the zeal and enthusiasm of Linux users.
  • No need to say sorry. Just be glad that they didn't announce their frozen woody on Valentines day.
    --
  • How dare you assume they read the article?
    --
  • How so? He's pointing out that an operating system these days should be able to detect new hardware as it is added to the system. Windows 95 and up do this, and it is nice when it works. I've had to fight with the feature at times, but it is for the most part of a good thing, and an especially good thing for people who don't want to figure out what chipset their cheap, remarketed hardware actually uses.

    (That threw me for a loop when I first started on Linux. I had to figure out that knowing the model number of your Reveal sound card is worthless. I had to peel the Reveal stickers off of the chips to see who actually made them.)

    Having another distro (besides Redhat/Mandrake) do this is a nice thing.

  • Release date NOT stated (Score:3)

    by dap24 ( 13340 ) on Friday February 16, 2001 @07:18PM (#425153) Homepage
    It hardly looks like the Debian Release Manager "has absolutely, positively staked his life on releasing Woody no later than July 8, 2001" after viewing the following statements in the message (too lazy to read it?):

    "So, a theoretical (and overly optimistic) timeline: [timeline follows]"

    "Now, those dates are obviously not realistic: it's questionable whether there'll even be alpha-quality i386 boot-floppies by the end of this month; ..."

    "Let me note that again for anyone from the press that might be reading:

    THOSE DATES ARE NOT REALISTIC!
    [0]"

    ----
    I'm not stoned, I just chugged a pack of fUN dIP!
  • Ohh, VESA modes, I'm so impressed. X hardware detection is still gimpy. EX. I tried to set my monitor to 1152x864. Quite a nice, normal resolution. Yet X thinks that mode should only go up to 71Hz! (Yes, even though my XF86Config says 30-95 and 50-160).
  • has positively staked his life on releasing by July 8? if you read the article, he says that those are extremely unrealistic dates. he even says that before he starts listing them. sometimes i wish slashdot editors would read what's written carefully instead of glancing over an article and making an assumption.

    --
    you must amputate to email me

  • Re:yet another gui install ?? (Score:3)

    by ebenson ( 89328 ) on Friday February 16, 2001 @07:34PM (#425156)
    I have NO idea how this GUI installer rumor came about, it is blatently false. Woody will use the same boot floppies as potato does, and the debian installer project will also have a nearly identical UI (the text based curses menu like the current boot-floppies use).

    If slashdot (or the submitter) had bothered to actually read Anthony's message in its entirety they would have seen that 1) woody is not frozen yet. and 2) that there is no mention whatsoever of a GUI installer. what Anthony DOES mention is better packaging of GUI software such as KDE/GNOME type programs.

    here is a quote from the actual message where this silly rumor must have come from:

    Third, I'd really like to see Debian include some of the nice "desktopy" stuff that's coming out for Linux these days: office software, DVD players, games, KDE, Gnome, Mozilla and so on. I'd like to see the installer cope nicely with the hardware that goes with it, video cards and sound cards and TV cards and whatever.


    --
  • That's assuming I had an old box to do it on:)
  • Well, at least this explains why the only Score:5 post in this discussion is a troll: because there are honest people like yourself who probably get moderator points regularly but who just don't know better.

    Kiss The Blade, The Lover's Arrival, Urban Existentialist... there is a new breed of trolls who get their kicks by posting the "non-raving devil's advocate" post. They suck in a dozen replies giving the rebuttals which any educated Slashdotter (no, that's not always an oxymoron) knows by heart. The occasional Score: -1, Troll is more than made up for by the regular "Wow, he's not parroting the Slashdot party line, he must be insightful!" Score: 5 karma injections.

    To be fair, evil_one's user info doesn't show any such pattern of trolling. This is the big problem: the only way to tell a real troll from a simple misguided/uninformed but intelligent poster is to check out their past behavior.

    How so? He's pointing out that an operating system these days should be able to detect new hardware as it is added to the system.

    Yes, but he's doing so in a way that implies that hardware autodetection will just reach Linux for the first time in Debian 2.3/3.0! This is incorrect: some other distributions (e.g. Red Hat) have had hardware autodetection at bootup for at least a year, and many have had hardware autodetection at installation since before I started using Linux in '97.

    Windows 95 and up do this, and it is nice when it works. I've had to fight with the feature at times,

    Fun with Windows 98 first edition: Plug in an external (I don't know what brands... Zoom?; but it works on mine.) 56K fax/modem. Win98 autodetects it, but complains that no "56KModem" drivers are installed or located on the Win98 CD. Installing the "Hayes compatible" modem driver makes it work and connect at 56K, of course, but with every reboot you will be pestered for those "56KModem drivers" to handle the device on COM1 which Windows should realize it has a driver for.

  • Couldn't they just call their distribution "penis"?

    Wroot

  • No... it actually found the driver for my card. No VESA involved.
    ---
  • how is the 'bloat' from the wide array of debian packages any different from the 'bloat' of the wide array of stuff in freebsd's ports collection?

    I use linux and BSD, and I agree, use the best tool for the job.
    __ __ ____ _ ______
    \ V .V / _` (_-&#60_-&#60
    .\_/\_/\__,_/__/__/

  • I realized something when I first saw this headline. When you see the phrase "Debian Woody is Frozen," and it makes sense to you, you know too goddamn much.

    Time to drink off a few braincells.

  • "staked his life" (Score:3)

    by norton_I ( 64015 ) <hobbes@utrek.dhs.org> on Friday February 16, 2001 @04:51PM (#425164)
    What part of the "THESE DATES ARE NOT REALISTIC" enclosed in blink tags did you not understand?

    He didn't stake a beer on that date, much less his life.
  • It was the buisness end of the FSF, the address that they give on everything you see. It is in a different place than where RMS is, that place, I guess, is somewhere by MIT.
  • No, I don't mean the VESA driver, I meant the screen modes. The VESA standard makes a list of common resolutions and refresh rates and most VESA-compatible hardware supports those modes. XFree, instead of detecting the modes itself, simply relies on these VESA standard modes. Thus, if you're preferred mode isn't part of the (extremely limited) set of standard modes, you have to write your own modlines (or steal the automatically generated ones from your BeOS installation ;)
  • >Woody will NOT have a GUI installer.
    >What fever dreams prompted impaler
    >to write that, we will never know.

    Oh! What a relief!
  • Why not just set it to "testing" or "unstable" instead?
  • Hullo... Am i in a dream ? so now finally i can use debian on my pc. The last time i installed it, it took me around 8 hours to complete the installation (an exaggeration, but then the time was more than normal ;-), and it still doesn't work.

    I ended up installing 7 kernel's, with each of them rewriting lilo.conf during install, and tell you what.. it was fun ;-)

  • The Woody release manager made a post [debian.org] back in December discussing the issues with getting Woody ready for a freeze. One of the big ones was that the GUI Installer (debian-installer) was "still quite a long way from being usable to do installs...." In addition, he stated that "boot-floppies will take at least a few months simply to work with woody, let alone to improve at all."

    Since the discussion in yesterday's freeze proposal focused on getting boot-floppies working with Woody, and since the post from two months ago discussed either getting debian-installer finished or getting boot-floppies updated for Woody, I'd say the chances of debian-installer being included when Woody is released are slim.

  • Firtly, yeah! Why? Because Debian is starting to do what I thought they should do for some time now. Release cycles should be done in phases. I cannot agree more with the outline that AJ has set up. The one thing I would add to that would be, "And when we finally release woody as stable, we will start all over for the next release."

    If it so happens that by the time that Woody is released in toto, that the next generation boot floppies are still not ready for release, we fall back to the versions used in the last release. I know that no one will want to do this, and thus we may have the motivation to finish up TNG-boot floppies, but why would we ever want another 1.5 - 2 year release cycle?

    The first steps have been made: "testing", autobuilders, and phase-based release freeze. Now, let's keep it going w/a 12 month continuous release cycle.


    --

  • Duh. Must've missed that part in the man pages... Thanks!
  • With XF 4 (which is in woody) there isn't as much of a need for modelines as there used to be.

    It would also be nice if magicfilter was a default install with lpr/lprng (it's just a suggested package now).

    --
  • When I visited the FSF, the one Hurd box they had was frozen. =)

    My Hurd box has had 3 or 4 months of uptime, so I have no idea what the hell the did to it.

    The FSF production machines all use Debian now.
  • Back it up or shut your trap.
  • Debian Woody is Frozen - I wager my life the team waited a very long time to see that headline. Geek humour :)
  • Worship the comic!

  • Woody is NOT frozen (Score:3)

    by lazarusL ( 13104 ) on Friday February 16, 2001 @05:50PM (#425178) Homepage Journal
    How to say this without sounding like a troll?

    Woody is most definitely NOT frozen, and /. shouldn't proclaim lies as headlines.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • It's a joke. Lighten up.
  • Luxury.
  • Well, at least this explains why the only Score:5 post in this discussion is a troll: because there are honest people like yourself who probably get moderator points regularly but who just don't know better.

    Well, I do think the info about QNX was "informative" (though not worth +5). Small OSes tend to have small lists of compatible hardware, and I rather not spend a day trying to install something just to find out if it'll work on my machine. QNX is advertised as being better than most in this area, and I was glad to see some confirmation.

    "How so? He's pointing out that an operating system these days should be able to detect new hardware as it is added to the system."

    Yes, but he's doing so in a way that implies that hardware autodetection will just reach Linux for the first time in Debian 2.3/3.0!

    Funny, when he said "Corel did a good job on my P75, but it's all stock hardware." I assumed he was talking Linux and not, say, Word Perfect. My mistake, I guess.

  • I demand a recount! Seriously, if it isnt frozen it might go bad...
    I'm here all week folks, thank you very much
  • Time to set my source.list file to sid :-0
  • Did anyone else catch the original title of this post:

    "Debian Woody is Frozen"

    That just sounds dirty...
    ...oops... betcha I just got filtered!


    -- Phenym
  • Hello.

    How would be the best way to help out the testing
    of the boot-floppies.

  • GUI INSTALLER? (Score:4)

    by tcd004 ( 134130 ) on Friday February 16, 2001 @04:32PM (#425187) Homepage
    Real geeks install their software by hand!

    Clench a magnetized needle, (which you must magnetize yourself) between your thumb and forefinger, and carefull magna-etch the data of your program onto the surface of your hard drive platter. Don't leave any fingerprints on the platter, and for god's sake, leave your static electricy elsewhere! Use of microscopes is generally frowned upon. Come on! Like you can't feel your way through those sectors!

    Bunch a crybabies.

    tcd004
    The guts of the PENTIUM 4! [lostbrain.com]
    Stockphotos [lostbrain.com]

  • Ahhhh. Now I understand what you mean. If it used them, I don't know. I do know that it said here: you can use the banshee driver, or the VESA driver. I clicked banshee, and it asked me what resolution and refresh rate I wanted, and then did a test, a-la win98's "Your screen will be restored in 15 seconds..."

    I want to see X do that stuff...
    /me goes off to hack away at his refresh rate setting for 640x480... no point watching DVDs in 400x300!
    ---
  • Both Storm & Corel Linux are based on Debian, and Corel is dropping linux (supposedly) and I thought I read Storm is gone (but can't find a mention of it on their web page), it'd be nice if they gave their fancy installers and any other 'enhancements' to the Debian team to do with as they please. Especially considering whose work they've been using.

    On the other hand, Debian w/ 2.4.1, Xfree86 4.*, KDE2, & the latest Gnome would be great(er). And the text based installer w/ Deb is not that hard ... hell if I can install Debian who can't?

  • All in all, the updating was a little troublesome, but at this point, nothing to worry about. The upgrade from Potato->woody was as normal as any other upgrade I've done (except that most other upgrades I've done don't require 400 megs of downloads =:P)

    ~Sentry21~

    (The e-mail address shown works as-is, no need to change)
  • July 8, 2001 my ass. HURD will be finished by the time Woody is finished.
  • or, use the text version of the installer that will still undoutbly remain!
  • installing a kernel-image.deb does not change lilo.conf. It does update the /vmlinuz and /vmlinuz.old symlinks, which is why I modify my lilo.conf to use /boot/vmlinux-x.x.x directly.
  • Kernel 2.4?????? if so reiserfs support? devfs? assorted goodies support?
  • isn't "Frozen Woody" == priapism?
    ________________________________

  • Is it really frozen? (Score:4)

    by Liam ( 39474 ) on Friday February 16, 2001 @05:10PM (#425198)
    Did anyone actually read the referenced message? It doesn't sound to me like it's frozen - for each of the three parts (base system, boot floppies and standard packages, optional packages), testing comes first, then that part will be frozen.

    Is this a correct? If so, it seems like a big difference from being frozen.

    And a lot better than the previous practice, I might add.
  • This made me think of when I visited the FSF in Boston over the summer. I asked if they used HURD on any of their computers, not realizing how incomplete is was, and it turned out, they didn't even use debian! They used redhat on the computers that I saw.

  • Freeze HOWTO from the guy who gave you testing (Score:3)

    by bfree ( 113420 ) on Friday February 16, 2001 @05:52PM (#425200)
    Since Woody became testing the nature of a freeze has changed. Now instead of freezing a codebase and trying to test it til it's stable, there is a start point already present (anything that has made it into testing). To quote:

    So, what I've been thinking, and what I'm (belatedly) proposing, is to roughly invert the test cycles and the freeze itself, so that instead of freezing everything then doing test cycles to work out where we're at, we instead choose some part of Debian to test, test it, and, if it's good enough, freeze it. Once everything's successfully tested and frozen, we release.

    The three main test cycles I think we'll need are as follows:

    1. The base system
    2. Boot-floppies, standard packages and tasks
    3. Optional and extra packages
    This is a proposal as to how Debian should move from where it is now to a released woody and as the following quote shows it's about time to
    Now, I've screwed up a bit here, because I haven't taken the time to properly discuss how we're going to do the freeze.
    I have to say I think that the testing distro is going to do wonders for Debian and the problems it has had (old packages in stable). A release with Kernel 2.4, X4, Kde2, mozilla1.0 in 2001 would stand up respectebly to anything anyone else has done to date, and I'll take a Debian release over a commercial release any-day (a la mozilla V nutscrape 0.6!=6.0, but 1.0~=6.1)
  • By the time woody actually freezes (unlike /. saying it is frozen) ... most likely!
  • Right. It is a process that goes in phases. First the base system is thoroughly tested, and development will stop. At this point the base system is considered 'ready to ship', and will not be patched unless patches are REALLY important.

    Then the installer is tested, fixed, and considered 'ready to ship'. No more fixes are used to patch the installer unless it is really important.

    Lastly the optional add-on packages are patched, fixed, and made ready to ship.

    The freeze should be considered a process, not a state of affairs. This indicates the beginning. The end of the freeze will occur at the release.
  • "One of the marks of a mature OS" This is a troll, right? Why was it modded up as informative?
  • Not everyone makes OS decisions based upon the latest Slashdot opinion poll. :)

  • Re:Automatic hardware detection! (Score:3)

    by volsung ( 378 ) <stan@mtrr.org> on Friday February 16, 2001 @05:59PM (#425205)
    Kudzu

  • Re:GUI INSTALLER? (Score:4)

    by DeadMeat (TM) ( 233768 ) on Friday February 16, 2001 @06:34PM (#425206) Homepage
    Magnetized needles? Ha! You don't know how good you've got it.

    You kids today complain about having to download the CD image over a 56kpbs modem connection. Why, when I was a kid, we dreamed of 2400 baud modems. "Some day, far in the future, you might live to see 300 baud modems," our teachers told us. Sure, we had modems then, but they were only 1/2 bit per second (2 seconds per click/beep), so it was usually just easier to pick up the phone line and say "0, 1, 0, 0, 1 . . ." And plus you didn't have to worry about line noise that way, which ate up 3/4 of the bits we sent.

    Plus, we didn't have those new-fangled CD images either. We just had disks that were 3 feet by 3 feet and only stored 16 bytes of data. And you usually lost 14 of those from bad sectors. And our drives couldn't do any of that fancy writing stuff -- oh no. We had to shift the magnetic bits around ourselves. At least that made downloading disk images easy, because the magnetic bits were so big you could flip them like DIP switches, and you only had to speak 128 0's or 1's over the phone.

    And a GUI installer? The monitors we had just had 2 pixels, and each pixel was 6 inches wide, because that was the smallest they could make them. We didn't have any fancy GUI installers or those shoot-em-up games, 'cause we only had a 2x1 resolution. But we had "Guess Which Of The Pixels Is Going To Light Up Next", which is still a better game than all the new FPSes combined.

    And we had to walk 2000 miles to the closest computer store to buy it, because there was only one of those back then. And it was in the desert. We had to walk uphills both ways, too.

  • Many a Viagra user has said much the same thing. DEBIAN it all to HELL! My woody's frozen!

    Ok obvious... :-)

    --

  • Actually, the Debian woody installer will be using the Mandrake Hwdetect libraries, because they are so good. I don't know about them using kudzu though.

    -------------
  • unstable rawks...

    xfree 4.0 plus xlibmesa3 plus kernel 2.4.x with the right modules = DRI OUT OF THE BOX! no recompiling no downloading anything by hand no editing configuration files! (at least on a g400)
  • Register on slashdot and turn off signatures. And yes, you will be able to post at +1 and maybe you will even get some karma for your support for the president of chad who we all respect so much :-)
  • "And a GUI installer? The monitors we had just had 2 pixels, and each pixel was 6 inches wide, because that was the smallest they could make them. We didn't have any fancy GUI installers or those shoot-em-up games, 'cause we only had a 2x1 resolution. But we had "Guess Which Of The Pixels Is Going To Light Up Next", which is still a better game than all the new FPSes combined."

    my dear god, that is hilarious.

  • According to my last scan with console-apt, Woody makes use of libc6 v2.2.1, which I'm led to understand is a fairly major departure from potato's libc6 (2.1.3). There are some things in Woody I really want, so I'm inclined to upgrade now, but I have no idea how much stuff the new libc6 will break.

    Anyone have any experience along these lines?

    Schwab

  • I hear Woody has remarkable *uptime*.

    Sorry,

    -atrowe

  • I have to say I think that the testing distro is going to do wonders for Debian and the problems it has had (old packages in stable). A release with Kernel 2.4, X4, Kde2, mozilla1.0 in 2001 would stand up respectebly to anything anyone else has done to date, and I'll take a Debian release over a commercial release any-day
    For a server, Debian still kicks ass. KDE2.1, Mozilla 0.x/1.0 and XFree86 4.0.x don't really matter to me for the webservers I run at work. I might not have all the fancy new features that RedHat 7.0 users have, but from what I can tell, I don't seem to have the problems they're suffering from either. Like most Debian users, I'll admit pretty much the sole reason I use Debian over anything else is APT.

    Honestly, though, I do prefer Debian's methodology for updating programs... Sometimes it's just safer to use an older, known working version with backported security and bug fixes than always update to the latest version. I've been bitten more than once by a routine package upgrade between minor revisions (one of them was PHP4), which broke one or more features I was depending on. For most Debian packages (except PHP), this isn't a problem, because you're still using the same version throughout the life of the version.

    Debian is not without it's problems (one could say that dselect is one of them), but it's friendly package handling features is not one of them. Even the rather small 'feature' of distinguishing between removing a package's executables (but not configuration), and purging all traces of the package (executables and configuration) has saved me on more than one occasion. The only thing I wish apt-get could do is reinstall an installed package (for when you do something really stupid, or when fsck finds errors in a file related to such a package), since removing it (and usually all dependancies) and installing it again can be really painful when all you need is the files extracted again.

  • Sounds nice. I recently installed Debian on an old pentium and needed to install most of it over the net so had to get the network card working but didnt know what it was. After a few educated guesses It was up and running but automatic hardware detection would have been one less headache for me.
  • what will happen to the old 486 i do not want to waste ?
  • I'm glad this story was posted. I was going to start downloading Debian ISO's this weekend, and on a crappy dialup connection (what can I say, I have a lot of patience) it would take a damn long time.

    I guess now I just have to wait a few months before I can get the horrible Redhat 7 off of my machine. I've been using Redhat for two years now and I'm totally sick of it. Version 7 is unstable (had to reinstall once as it died for no reason), unrealiable (X hangs requiring a power cycle) and the dependencies are totally hosed.

    Debian Ahoy! is all I have to say...

  • Are penguins just frozen woodpeckers?

  • Are you talking about the server or a desktop? You must have forgotten that many people use Linux as a desktop OS, myself included. Linux has more support for diverse hardware than any of those unixes.
  • I have to use Linux for my job )and I work from home). I would gladly give FreeBSD a try if I could.
  • This was a SYSTEM crashing freeze. No keyboard input accepted. I tried ctrl-alt-bs many times, no response.
  • Also take into account that you need to at least double time predictions given by a software engineer, that would bring us a fresh frozen woody in about 2003 (based on the very rough estimate of about a year in the article), so maybe it will be running kernel 2.6 :)

  • No, woody is *not* frozen (Score:5)

    by joey ( 315 ) <joey@kitenet.net> on Friday February 16, 2001 @07:16PM (#425223) Homepage
    The number of innacuracies in this article is very high.

    Woody is NOT frozen. We have a timeline, which calls for a freeze beginning in April. The timeline is plastered with "THOSE DATES ARE NOT REALISTIC!" warnings.

    Woody may or may not include hardware autodetection, but the code's not there yet. The next-generation debian installer project (which I lead) WILL have hardware autodetection, but it will not be a supported installation method for woody.

    Woody will NOT have a GUI installer. What fever dreams prompted impaler to write that, we will never know.
    --
  • Worst/best thing about it is that it's true!
    Gotta write a Java applet for that game.

    FP.
    -- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
  • The editorial says it all:
    So, I guess it is finally frozen. Hopefully in less than a year Debian 2.3/3.0 will be out.

    Anyway, who cares? I've been running woody for month now and it hasn't failed on me once. As a matter of fact, the last 'apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade'-cylce I did was yesterday.

  • I've been running debian with reiserfs, lvm and devfsd for a while now. works well. running 2.4.1 at the moment, no more patching reiserfs into the kernel :)
  • no, that just makes you lame.
    ________________________________

  • Re:Automatic hardware detection! (Score:3)

    by Fluffy the Cat ( 29157 ) on Saturday February 17, 2001 @05:19AM (#425228) Homepage
    Progeny [progeny.com] already have a Debian based system with a very nice hardware autodetection system. The beta versions have been able to pick up everything on the various pieces of hardware I've tested it on. They also have a very cool tool for installing multiple systems with the same setup without having to do each one by hand - install on one, set up a DHCP server or a file containing MAC addresses and networking information, create floppies for every other machine, boot them all, come back and find that they've installed everything and configured themselves in the same way as the first machine.
  • yeah, i hear that you get a free copy of woody.
    ________________________________
  • Try removing it via:
    dpkg --force-depends --remove package
    apt-get -f install package

    Hope it helps
  • Upgrading to glibc 2.2 isn't really noticeable, for most people. As far as testing it is concerned, most developers run it, and numerous users all around the globe (and I do mean numerous).

    AFAICT there aren't any major bug reports being filed because of glibc transition anymore, either, which is a good sign.

  • Automatic hardware detection! (Score:4)

    by evil_one ( 142582 ) on Friday February 16, 2001 @04:47PM (#425232) Homepage
    One of the marks of a mature OS. I'm glad to hear that a major linux distro has it... Corel did a good job on my P75, but it's all stock hardware.
    What REALLY impressed me was the QNX [qnx.com] demo. It installed on my system, automatically loaded drivers for my mouse, cdroms, etc, then it automatically set up their mini-X on my Voodoo 3 at 1024x768 (NO MODELINES!!! Woohoo!) and what REALLY knocked my socks off - It even set up my printer, I was able to print Sluggy Freelance [sluggy.com] on my Epson Colour 740 by simply hitting the print button! All this in 15 minutes!
    Anyway, automatic hardware detection will rawk. I've got about 15 different computers a month that get debian installed on them. (Or re-installed, due to hardware failures, etc.)
    I think that the Debian guys deserve a big slashdot hug.
    ---
  • The only thing I wish apt-get could do is reinstall an installed package (for when you do something really stupid, or when fsck finds errors in a file related to such a package), since removing it (and usually all dependancies) and installing it again can be really painful when all you need is the files extracted again.

    apt-get --reinstall install packagename

  • I'm not claiming this guy is informative, however calling him a troll begins go into a realm where things are quite fuzzy. At best, his post is a random opinion (like 80% of the posts on Slashdot) of little substance, and certainly no information.

    The whole "troll" thing is starting to become as overused as "Communist". You can accuse anyone of being a troll for being controversial or just ignorant.

    Frankly, I wouldn't put much stock in the moderation. At best, it would be a measure of coherence and style, but usually it's just a product of shameless appealing to the masses (either those who hold the mythical Slashdot party line, or those despise it and enjoy promoting the "underdog", even if its proponent is content-free). I wouldn't worry about it much.

    As an aside, I have noticed an increase in info-trolls (info-whores?) who try to gain karma, or just be annoying, by posting counterfeit informative posts. They try to sound knowledgable, but post totally bogus info. Most everytime they're caught, which is satisfying to know. Of course, you still shouldn't believe everything you read on Slashdot. :)

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