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Debian

Debian 3.0 (Woody) May 1? 335

Posted by CmdrTaco from the best-gets-better dept.
dex@ruunat noted that this morning, in a message to the debian-devel-announce mailing list, Anthony Towns, Debian's Release Manager, wrote: "I'm becoming increasingly confident in woody's release readiness. So, to go out on a limb: Debian 3.0 (codenamed woody) will release on May 1st, 2002." Congrats to all the debheads putting this thing together. I have a blank CDR waiting ;)
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Debian 3.0 (Woody) May 1? More

Debian 3.0 (Woody) May 1?

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  • There's still time to get Apache 2.0 in there!! :)

  • Yes! (Score:3, Funny)

    by corebreech ( 469871 ) on Saturday April 06, 2002 @10:13AM (#3295222) Journal
    I'm confident in my woody as well, so much so I'm ready to release it too!
    • Ah but what license is you're woody going to be released under?

      Can you recompile you're woody after its been 'released' ?

      Still confident about releasing you're woody ?

      Hadn't you really better wait till you're girlfriend gets home ?

      After all you're woody might be up against 'stiff' opposition...

    • I'm confident in my woody as well, so much so I'm ready to release it too!

      See what one AC replied [slashdot.org] to my comment [slashdot.org] in the past discussion [slashdot.org], very good one.

  • is that I loathe and detest dselect. It's meant to be the advanced option, but I cannot abide the awful choices for navigation keys, the entirely illogical page layout, and the horrendous switching of views that goes on every time you hit a key or try to select or de-select a package. I've given up even trying to understand it, and just take whatever the hell it wants to install. Afterward I go through with apt-get remove/update/dist-upgrade/install, in that order.

    Don't get me wrong -- this is a minor bitch about an otherwise great distro, and it's very much IMNSHO. I seem to be moving more and more to FreeBSD these days, but whenever I need or want Linux I always pick Debian. It's easy, it's stable, I absolutely love apt-get install/dist-upgrade, and and and...yeah, it's pretty much all great. I think I'll be waiting w/CD-R in hand, too.

    (One other minor complaint, something I found on my box at work: why the hell does suidperl conflict with lynx? I had to install lynx from source, because Debian kept removing it when I installed suidperl for a webmail package I was testing. Anyone?)

    • Re:The only complaint I have about Debian (Score:5, Informative)

      by macshit ( 157376 ) <snogglethorpe AT gmail DOT com> on Saturday April 06, 2002 @11:13AM (#3295410) Homepage
      Check out the aptitude program (you'll have to install the package of the same name) -- it's really good and getting even better fast; the author really seems to be on the ball (it used to be pretty bad, so if you tried it before and dismissed it, try it again). Not only does it provide a great full-screen apt interface, but it also has a command-line mode that improves on apt-get!

      This is the package management interface that debian's been waiting for, IMHO.

      [another alternative is `deity' (ne `console-apt'), but though it's rather colorful, the UI basically sucks; aptitude is much better.]

      • Re:The only complaint I have about Debian (Score:5, Informative)

        by macshit ( 157376 ) <snogglethorpe AT gmail DOT com> on Saturday April 06, 2002 @12:07PM (#3295580) Homepage
        Since I really do think aptitude rocks, I'm going to reply to myself to point out a few of the cool features it has, beyond the nice user interface:
        • It tracks which packages were installed `automatically' (e.g., to satisfy a dependency). If such `auto' packages later become unnecessary because nothing depends on them anymore, they will be uninstalled automatically.
        • It has a powerful and useful search system -- you can search not only for package names, but for descriptions (and other package fields), various special attributes, and boolean combinations of these things. For instance, the search string `(lib)~i!~M!-dev' will find packages who's name matches the string `lib', and are installed, and were not automatically installed (see above), and who's name doesn't match the string `-dev'.
        • These search expressions can be used not only in interactive searches (which, incidentally, are incremental, like Emacs's isearch), but also to limit the set of packages displayed, or to perform various operations in command-line mode. I could use the command `aptitude remove "(lib)~i!~M!-dev"' to remove all packages matching that expression (but I won't, since that it happens to match libc6).
        As you can see, although aptitude is great for the non-expert user, because of the simple and intuitive interface, it's not just for them. Even when I want to install something from the shell, I now always use aptitude's command-line interface instead of apt-get, because of the above features.

        • It tracks which packages were installed `automatically' (e.g., to satisfy a dependency). If such `auto' packages later become unnecessary because nothing depends on them anymore, they will be uninstalled automatically.

          Is this a feature of aptitude, or of the package database? If I install aptitude today, will it tell me which packages were automatically installed using apt-get?
          • Unfortunately it's a feature of aptitude, not the underlying apt libraries -- so if you use apt-get to install something, you may end up with automatically installed stuff that isn't marked as such.

            Also, as you guessed, when you first start out using aptitude, all of your previously installed packages will be considered `intentionally installed'.

            However, one result of aptitude's cool search system is that it's not too unpleasant to go through and retroactively mark those things which should be marked `auto' -- the example search string I gave in my previous post actually is one I used while doing that:

            aptitude markauto "(lib)~i!~M!-dev"

            of course in practice I used slightly more hairy search strings, and had to tweak the results, but it was surprisingly painless -- and to tell the truth, rather fun. However newbies had better use aptitude from the start, since they might not be so amused by this kind of thing... :-)

            Hopefully this functionality will be moved into the apt libraries in a future release.
    • I dunno, I installed using dselect on Debian about 4 years ago when i was 14.... I didn't find it a problem. Mind you I only had 16 packages because I downloaded it on a 28.8
    • I can't be the *only* one who liked dselect, and has never seen anything that does what it did (does) nearly as well--now can I? OK, the hostility I received when asking ab out a fix for the inability to search from a remote screen was annnoying (hostile response was that it was a ncurses bug, and therefor not his problem--even though it froze the session beyond recovery), but aside from that, the ability to choose *which* program to use to satisfy dependencies was nice.


      portinstall in FreeBSD is getting some of that now, but still needs some refining (such as listing all the choices before asking you one by one whether or not to install them :).


      Still, dselect wasn't enough to keep me with debian. Between the politics and the age of the packages, I got fed up. Now there is the "testing" distribution, but there used to be no middle ground between a hopelessly out of date stable and the unstable distro that you could count on knocking out your system about twice a year.


      hawk, happily with FreeBSD for the last few years, but still using debian on smaller older systems

  • I did a fresh install of Woody (debian/testing) on one of my machines this morning and it seems the pine and pico sources have disappeared from the packages list. Yes, I do use non-US and non-free packages so that can't be the problem.

    For the rest, it runs quite well, but I still prefer debian/unstable because of the more recent packages.
    • From [debian.org]
      http://packages.debian.org/unstable/editors/nano .h tml
      "GNU nano is a free replacement for Pico, the default Pine editor. Pine is copyrighted under a slightly restrictive license, that makes it unsuitable for Debian's main section. GNU nano is an effort to provide a Pico-like editor, but also includes some features that were missing in the original, such as 'search and replace', 'goto line' or internationalization support. As it's written from scratch, it's smaller and faster.
      "
    • try this package: http://packages.debian.org/testing/admin/pine-trac ker.html
    • The pine source is in ... a source package! That's right, the source is in the (non-free) archive, just no binary packages. Unfortunately, this means you can't install it in the standard way (yet), but you shouldn't have much trouble with

      apt-get build-dep pine
      apt-get source --compile pine
      dpkg --install *.deb

      There's also a pine-tracker package, which apparently reminds you to upgrade when appropriate. I hope the standard tools make this unnecessary some day.

    • I actually had trouble with this in Potato over the weekend, and I found something interesting. While all the mirrors (that mirrored source packages as well) had the pine source in there archives, the package listing did not list it. I don't really know why this would happen, but I checked around and found a mirror that had it listed and used that one.

  • What you won't get in woody... (Score:3, Informative)

    by m0i ( 192134 ) on Saturday April 06, 2002 @10:55AM (#3295359) Homepage
    Not planned:
    -KDE 3.0
    -Apache 2.0
    -XFree 4.2

    Not good, eh?

    • Re:What you won't get in woody... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Daniel Stone ( 535956 ) on Saturday April 06, 2002 @11:01AM (#3295380)
      Why the *hell* is this not good?

      KDE3 is not yet tested enough for a Debian stable release, trust me. Neither are the debs, packaging issues can play a significant part in some problems. I'm personally waiting for 3.0.1 or 3.0.2 before I start deploying it throughout work, although I tracked KDE3 CVS for some time at home (I can deal with segfaults, and it makes it easier to package if you only have to make slight changes every time, instead of being hit with one big lot in the tarballs).

      apache2 is NOT NOT NOT ready for prime time. I would not deploy this in a Debian stable release; luckily, neither would Thom. When I maintained it, I always said it would wait until after woody, and luckily it will. The GA was only announced today, and so Thom would have to upload it as NEW, which means it wouldn't make it into woody, even if it could. Even offering it side-by-side with Apache 1.3.x in a stable series is irresponsible.

      As for XFree86 4.2, Branden's been too busy with fixing up 4.1.x to do 4.2.x well. XFree86 is one of those dead core packages that need to just WORK every single time, and cannot screw up. There was never enough time to give it the thrashing it needs; I think that having XF4.1.x in a stable series is a pretty sweet effort; Branden deserves a pat on the back. He has a reputation for quality, well-tested packages, and I somehow doubt he'd shatter that this close to a release. Plus, we'd all rip his arms off and beat him to death with the limp end if he did.

      Thanks for listing the good points of Woody.
      • "I think that having XF4.1.x in a stable series is a pretty sweet effort"

        Slackware's had it in 8.0 since 8.0 was release, way back on the 20th of June, 2001.
        • Debian does changes to the code, applies patches to make it work (including bugfixes/security patches that are sent upstream but not yet included in that release), and ensures that everything follows the Debian packaging guidelines. Debian code is sometimes vastly different from regular code, and it needs to be tested. In the case of XFree, with the most complicated build system and source tree I've seen since... well, ever, fortunately, it takes a long time to make sure everything works.

          Slackware, on the other hand, compiles XFree, tars it up, and puts it on the CD. It does not have to be maintained, patched, updated, or tested. This is ok, if that's what you want, but Debian does a lot of work and a lot of changes, and it can require a lot of testing.

          This is why Debian is widely regarded as a quality distro. No releasing alpha software in stable releases, no jumping version numbers to look competetive, just code, quality code, quality distro. Slackware lets you worry about that on your own.

          --Dan

      • Re:What you won't get in woody... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Overfiend ( 35917 ) on Saturday April 06, 2002 @09:46PM (#3297389) Homepage

        As for XFree86 4.2, Branden's been too busy with fixing up 4.1.x to do 4.2.x well. XFree86 is one of those dead core packages that need to just WORK every single time, and cannot screw up. There was never enough time to give it the thrashing it needs; I think that having XF4.1.x in a stable series is a pretty sweet effort; Branden deserves a pat on the back.

        Well, I myself am not exactly thrilled that woody won't have 4.2 in it, but:

        • As you said, I've been busy with getting 4.1.x stable. For Debian, this means much more than it does for some vendors. In woody, we support 11 architectures: alpha, arm, hppa, ia64, i386, m68k, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390, and sparc. For how many of these machine architectures do Slackware, Mandrake, or Red Hat have 4.1.x, let alone 4.2, available? XFree86 themselves don't test or prepare distribution tarballs for several of these architectures. Debian is the de facto portability laboratory for XFree86 on Linux. Sure, I'll grant you that a lot of people, the kinds with the overclocked Pentium 4's and the latest GeForce card, really don't care about portability, or supporting architectures they've never heard of. But portability is important to me and it's important to Debian. I refuse to treat non-i386 users like second-class citizens. Those who want CVS HEAD, are best advised to learn how to check it out and type "make World". I'm sure that Pentium 4 overlocked to 3 GHz will compile the X source tree pretty quickly. :-) The single most amazing thing about all the hate mail I've received for not having 4.2 Debian packages ready -- aside from the fact that I started receiving it about two days after it was tagged upstream -- is that people seem to be laboring under the delusion that I have some kind of secret tools locked away in a vault, and that I am the only person who has the power to create packages. Sure, I'm probably better at doing XFree86 debs than most people, since I've been doing it for so long, but there's no great secret. I'm sure that with half an hour of manpage reading, a reasonably intelligent person can learn everything he needs to produce XFree86 4.2 debs for himself that will work well enough to satisfy his impatient self. Hey, I like to see the latest and greatest of everything, too -- that's why I use apt-listchanges, but I don't go haranguing the Debian developers to package up a new upstream version when I can clearly tell that they're working on other things for the project.
        • On a related note, 4.2 just plain won't work on some of Debian's supported machines because we need the PCI Domain support, which is currently a branch in XFree86 CVS and did not make it into the 4.2 release. So for us, releasing 4.2 doesn't just mean releasing 4.2. It means releasing 4.2 plus some very large patches in very critical parts of the server code. You really, really want a good long opportunity to shake that sort of thing out, since Debian's 4.2 may not behave exactly as XFree86's 4.2 does.
        • I don't just package the thing tagged xf-4_2_0 and leave it at that. I track hotfixes commited both to the latest release's branch and to HEAD, and incorporate them into Debian's packages if they work and if they make the packages better from a quality standpoint. Ask ATI video card users about 4.2.0 and "composite sync" sometime. (This isn't to dog the XFree86 Project. Software has bugs. Software releases with bugs. But, knowing about the default composite sync issue which affects so many users, it would be irresponsible of me to ignore it.)
        • I didn't expect it to take until May for woody to release. Back in January, I felt sure that there was no way Anthony Towns would accept 4.2 into woody; when I sounded him out at the time about it he sounded kind of skeptical. Needless to say, the longer it takes woody to release, the worse a decision this is, but I don't have control over the release process. (Strictly speaking, Anthony doesn't either -- meaning, he can declare a release, sure, but he can't force people at gunpoint to fix the remaining release critical bugs. And Debian's philosophy has been to release when "it's ready", not when some marketroid tells us to, and thus just live with whatever whopper bugs happen to be in the release that day.)

        So, that's why XFree86 4.2 isn't in woody.

    • It's the price of rock-solid stability. If you want "latest-greatest", then run Debian unstable. Just because its called unstable doesn't mean that its definitely going to be unstable, but running Debian stable definitely means that you are running one pure rock-solid stable and secure Linux.

      If I was going to show Linux off to my friends, I would show them Debian stable. Tons of great easily installed free software, all ontop of an ultra stable, ultra secure OS.

      Crashing or getting hacked doesn't make for a great first impression.
  • Last time I installed Woody, about 2 months ago, the kernel was still at 2.2.20. Have they finally gone 2.4.x yet?

    (I've sinced moved on to Unstable and use my own kernel)
  • For those of you who are unhappy with the purity aspects of Debian there is at least one place [marillat.free.fr] that I have found that has some unofficial packages like mplayer and the flash plugin for Mozilla.

    I haven't had any problems with the packaging that has done by the maintainer.

  • I want journalled filesystems on Debian! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ttfkam ( 37064 ) on Saturday April 06, 2002 @12:30PM (#3295654) Homepage Journal
    Yes, I have heard that there are bf- prefixed images that have the 2.4 kernel and ReiserFS/ext3 support.

    I have been patient with Debian. I have been persistent with Debian. I come bearing the news to Debian webmasters everywhere that the "bf-something Woody install" is not obvious. Not only in name obscurity when a Debian newbie would only know to look for 2.2 or 3.0 disc images, but also in placement on the website.

    I have gone searching in vain for this bf-something install. I have looked in all of the obvious places on the website under such topics as "Getting Debian," "Debian on CD," and ""Download with FTP." This is bullshit. If this is everyone's definition of publically available, I must have missed that day of class. I even download some of those potentially nifty netinstall CD images in the hopes that they simply weren't labelled correctly with the magical bf- prefix.

    Believe me, I have gone through a lot more effort than most casual visitors to the Debian site would have gone through. Unfortunately this is one area that Debian could learn from RedHat, Mandrake, SuSe, et al in that the others provide an iso image, you download it, you burn it, and off you go. If the newer install with the updated kernel works so well, why hasn't the old installer been mothballed? Why would the old installer be offered? If the new installer has problems that preclude its replacement of the old installer, then the appropriate answer to my previous post would have been "they're working on it and it should be ready when 3.0 is released."

    Is it a work in progress? Sure! I acknowledge that. I am used to that. I have no illusions that any Linux distribution is without its rough edges. But how much effort is it really to have in the download area, clearer instructions for creating a up-to-date install disc? All I see is the same old crap that makes me jump through hoops and auto-detects nothing (another gripe that I will forget for now simply because I know my hardware well enought to answer the endless series of questions) while making use of journalled filesystems far from the simple case it should be.

    By all means, prove me wrong. By all means, show me an obvious link that demonstrates me to be a dullard who cannot read a web page. I am not above humility. Otherwise I will assume that a clean and complete Debian install is bullshit, must first be excavated by a Debian veteran who knows how to find it, and/or is of no use to the general public. Debian may be a great distribution, but that's pointless if most people can't install easily without sacrificing popular features (like journalled filesystems) or hunting through mailing list archives without really knowing for what they search.
    • I sit in on #debian on OPN. Almost all the helpers (myself included) have been helping guide people through ext3 upgrades since Alan Cox included it in the -AC kernel tree.
    • If you go to the Debian netinst-page (http://people.debian.org/~ieure/netinst/), and read the release notes, you'll see that if you select option 3 when you boot, you'll get the bf2.4 image. I did this myself, and it works. When you format the drive during install, you can select ext3.

      As mentioned in the faq, you need a system that supports "ElTorito" to get this menu. Your options are to edit the CD-image so it boots from bf as default, download the floppies, or install 2.2 and upgrade. You don't need to compile the kernel, btw, you can just use dselect, and select one of the many precompiled 2.4 packages.

      I have used various Redhat and Mandrake versions for the last 3 years, but recently switched to Debian, and have never looked back.
      • At long last! Not the most elegant or obvious solution (in my opinion) but quite acceptable under the circumstances (I already have copies of the netinstall CDs).

        Thank you very much!
        • It does quite clearly state this on the Netinst CD webpages and on the on-disc texts that the discs have multiple boot images.

          BTW you could have asked nicely.

    • Re:I want journalled filesystems on Debian! (Score:5, Informative)

      by GoRK ( 10018 ) on Saturday April 06, 2002 @03:12PM (#3296210) Homepage Journal
      You obviously haven't looked in the directory which contains the woody install disk images, because it's plain as day. The instructions for finding this and a description of what it's about are in the "Installing Debian/GNU Linux 3.0 (woody) for i386" guide that IS linked to from the woody webpages, which are linked from an obvious place on www.debian.org. Here is the direct URL since you're so dumb: http://www.debian.org/releases/woody/i386/install. en.txt [debian.org]

      Here is the url to take you directly to the bootable 2.4 disk images.
      http://http.us.debian.org/dists/woody/main/disks-i 386/current/bf2.4/ [debian.org]

      ISO images for woody aren't provided yet since the package list is currently changing; however, the instructions on the debian CD site and the scripts there will make you an ISO of this unrelased software easily. If that's not enough for you you can try some premade images from a source like http://www.linuxiso.org/debian.html [linuxiso.org] Hell, there's even DVD images floating around. You can buy a preburned one here: http://www.linux-cd.com/store/cgi/store.cgi?client =14491123&action=serve&item=woody.html [linux-cd.com]

      Premade ISO's won't be available for woody until it is released. "Official" ISO's are available for previous relases from the official site at http://www.debian.org/CD/ [debian.org]. Minimal images designed to replace a set of boot floppies, "netinst" cd's, are also linked to from that site at http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/ [debian.org]

      I find it ironic that you seem to be capable of writing a novella about how inept you are at reading. You seem to know exactly what you want, but since www.debian.org doesn't show it to you in big bold letters on the front of the page, why you didn't click on the search button is entirely beyond my comprehension.

      I will give to one of your points: that the default installer can be improved. For the woody release, it was decided "if it ain't broke don't fix it." The next release will contain a better one. If you really can't wait, make a woody netinst cd with the Progeny installer. Or can you not type "apt-get install pgi" successfully? Someone will probably make one of these available with the progeny installer after woody's release.

      Think you can put together a better debian website? Why don't you sign up [debian.org]?
      • You obviously haven't looked in the directory which contains the woody install disk images, because it's plain as day.

        Mmm hmm... I grant that I could have been more diligent here. I guess I'm just used to every other major distribution not needing a manual for their install -- self explanatory, complete, and all that. But yes, I needed to RTFM here.

        ISO images for woody aren't provided yet since the package list is currently changing; however, the instructions on the debian CD site and the scripts there will make you an ISO of this unrelased software easily.

        Very good point. My primary focus was on the netinstall images for precisely this reason.

        You seem to know exactly what you want, but since www.debian.org doesn't show it to you in big bold letters on the front of the page, why you didn't click on the search button is entirely beyond my comprehension.

        Yes, by all means, type in "ReiserFS" into that search box. Please tell me how many documents I must go through in order to find relevent info. But I digress, my main complaint was the fact that Debian's installer is about three or four years behind Caldera, RedHat, SuSe, Mandrake, etc.

        I finally finished getting through the network install (writing this with a Mozilla nightly on Woody) and I must say it was one of the most painful experiences I have had with Linux in years. My god, setting up BIND with a few domains was easier than that and that is by no means a compliment.

        I will give to one of your points: that the default installer can be improved. For the woody release, it was decided "if it ain't broke don't fix it."

        Nice. If it actually gets through the install without crashing, no matter how likely you are to meet a minotaur during the process, it ain't considered broke.

        If you really can't wait, make a woody netinst cd with the Progeny installer. Or can you not type "apt-get install pgi" successfully?

        Much akin to telling a Linux newbie that they're stupid for not knowing to type "ls" at the bash prompt or why the current directory isn't in the default execution path. Wake up! Before you mentioned it, I had no idea what the Progeny installer was or where to find it or that I should have been looking for it in the first place. The reason you know this is because you use Debian, are familiar with Debian and its satellite distributions, and have known it for long enough that you forget that others don't know it yet.

        While you're at it, why not go yell at some 5th graders because they don't know how to solve Algebra problems yet. After all, since you know Algebra, they should be expected to know it too.

        Think you can put together a better debian website? Why don't you sign up?

        Good point. Although I think Debian would be better off having this Progeny installer worked on. The best installer is one that doesn't require documentation to use in the simplest case. Note: I am NOT saying that documentation isn't important. What I was looking for what something akin to RedHat's "Workstation" or "Server" install. Hell, I would have settled for something as easy as the "Custom" install. But in the end you're right. I should put my code where my mouth is and help out.
      • Or can you not type "apt-get install pgi" successfully?

        At the time? No. I had to install it first. Hi chicken! Meet my good friend, Egg.

  • May Day (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 06, 2002 @12:50PM (#3295723)
    A fitting release date, since everyone knows all Debian users are commies.
  • One of the things Debian people were supposed to fix was the abyssmally slow release cycle. Well, it's still abyssmally slow.
    • That'll be fixed in the next release of release-manager.deb
  • Looking at:
    http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/dists/woody/m ain/b inary-i386/Packages
    I see both gcc 2.95 and gcc 3.0 are included as part of the standard packages. But my question is this:
    which version of gcc will be used to compile the binary (precompiled) release of Debian 3.0?
    • Short answer: Whichever each package maintainer prefers for each package. I.e. whichever produces the best and most stable code.

      Long answer: Different architectures that Debian has ports or in-progress ports for may be unfit under the 2.95 compiler (SH4 comes to mind. Ugh. 2.95/sh4 sucks). Different architectures can specify default compilers or overrides for package compiles, as can the packages themselves. 'gcc' will normally run 2.95 out of a stock woody install unless you change your app-defaults to run the gcc-3.0

      Quibble: Both compilers produce working and interoperable code. It's not like a lib compiled with gcc-3 will have problems being linked with a program compiled with gcc-2.95. It is logical and quite a good thing to have both choices. I think you'll find that other binary distributions are compiled with a myriad of gcc's.
  • If you are interested in trying Debian out, but are afraid of installing it, then try out PGI [progeny.com], the graphical autohardware detection Debian installer [progeny.com]. Make sure to check out the screenshots.

    In my opinion, once the default Debian installer becomes idiot-proof, Debian will take over as the lead Linux distro.

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