Debian 7.0 ('Wheezy') Release Planned For 1st Weekend in May 226
An anonymous reader writes with this good news from the Debian developers who have been working hard to release the next version of the distro: "We now have a target date of the weekend of 4th/5th May for the release. We have checked with core teams, and this seems to be acceptable for everyone. This means we are able to begin the final preparations for a release of Debian 7.0 — 'Wheezy'. The intention is only to lift the date if something really critical pops up that is not possible to handle as an errata, or if we end up technically unable to release that weekend (e.g. a required machine crashes or d-i explodes in a giant ball of fire). Every other RC fix that does not make it in time will be r1 material. Please be sure to contact us about the RC fixes you would like included in the point release!" Of particular interest to casual users, from the list of changes in 7.0: "Debian wheezy comes with full-featured libav (formerly ffmpeg) libraries and frontends, including e.g. mplayer, mencoder, vlc and transcode. Additional codec support is provided e.g. through lame for MP3 audio encoding, xvidcore for MPEG-4 ASP video encoding, x264 for H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video encoding, vo-aacenc for AAC audio encoding and opencore-amr and vo-amrwbenc for Adaptive Multi-Rate Narrowband and Wideband encoding and decoding, respectively. For most use cases, installation of packages from third-party repositories should not be necessary anymore. The times of crippled multimedia support in Debian are finally over!"
Freeze (Score:2, Funny)
xfce 4.8! finally!
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The point of Debian is not to get the latest goodies quickly, but that what you get will work and continue to work well as long as it is supported. Unfortuneately it's not supported for very long time, but it's still very impressive given that it's essentially just a non-profit project.
Re:Freeze (Score:5, Interesting)
Being stuck with Xfce 4.8 is particularly galling since the default desktop for Wheezy is the unutterably awful GNOME 3. Xfce 4.10 will be OVER ONE YEAR OLD when Wheezy is released and it is absolutely crazy not to have 4.10 in Wheezy.
I'll grant you that even Xfce 4.8 is vastly superior to GNOME 3, but it is very unfortunate not to have 4.10, which has some significant enhancements; the one I find most welcome is FINALLY the ability to configure desktop icons for single-click activation.
I "get" the emphasis on stability, but now we'll be stuck with a badly out of date Xfce for a lengthy period until Wheezy is replaced. And I can SORT OF understand the decision to reverse course on what was once the plan for Debian to change the default desktop from GNOME 3 to Xfce (though I still on balance disagree with it and find it regrettable).
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There's a repository for that: http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=248917%23p248917
What is most painful though is the old version of libc they are stuck on (2.13), half of all the Humble Bundle games won't work because they were compiled with something newer, so I'm thinking of switching to Mint or Arch this weekend.
Re:Freeze (Score:5, Informative)
one thing with the recent developments in Debian is that once Wheezy is released, we'll start working hard on the next release, Jessie. And while unstable may finally be unstable for a little while after the release (while people upload a bunch of new packages), I have had a lot of success running wheezy while it was in testing in the last two years. I suggest that people interested in the "latest and greatest" install wheezy, then upgrade to jessie (testing) when it stabilises a bit after the release.
That's what I will do anyways. :)
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Re:Freeze (Score:4, Informative)
... since the default desktop for Wheezy is the unutterably awful GNOME 3.
And in Debian Gnome3 now has a dependency on NetworkManager.
Users of the Wicd networking manager should be aware of this, because NetworkManager conflicts with Wicd. Neither Wicd no NetworkManager work when they're both active, and at the moment there's no warning about this nor instructions on what to do about it. :-(
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You can always add the experimental repository to your source list, and install Xfce 4.10 from there.
Debian pretty much always has the latest software available. You just have to look further than the "stable" set of packages. You can even have packages installed from different sources simultaneously.
I have my system installed from "testing", and pick various packages from "unstable" and "experimental". It works beautifully, and is very stable, regardless of the source names. I also have the option to r
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It's a STABLE RELEASE. Stable releases are only good for servers. If you want to use Debian on your desktop (which I imagine is the case, as I can't see why you would want a DE on your server), even running Testing is quite conservative.
I tried running Debian Stable on my laptop back in '08 - I believe it was Etch at the time. I don't think they even had packages for my wireless drivers. Didn't take long to figure out that I had to point apt at Testing instead.
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I take back what I said. Apparently, even unstable is still on 4.8. Sheesh!
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/xfce/ [debian.org]
Nevertheless, it's not that nontrivial to pull 4.10 from experimental.
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Yeah, I absolutely want to install the most stable distro there is, and then spend my time building my own software from source. NOT. Kind of deafeats the point.
I have, as it happens, built a lot of packages from source, and used add-on repos, but then why do I need Debian stable to do that? Might as well use current Arch, or something else leading edge and adventurous.
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No, I am sure it was discussed thoroughly. I'm not even convinced in my own mind that any of the decisions reached were wrong from the standpoint of Debian's methods and goals. I'm only sure that this has develoiped in (big subjective conclusion) an unfortunate way as regards some of the things that matter a lot to me.
Jeffersons (Score:2)
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...or it was named after the Toy Story character, as it is well known that is how they codename Debian.
Will they ship without a sudo that works with ldap (Score:3)
I hope they can fix http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=368297 [debian.org] before they ship.
It seems horrible in this day and age that a Linux would exist that couldn't get basic functionality with ldap working.
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Let's say that you want the same user accounts on all your machines. Then you often use some kind of directory service in larger installations, and LDAP serves that purpose very well.
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Hell you can even use it to authenticate against a Windows domain! Very helpful if you have to cooperate.
For example, my SVN server authenticates against the Windows domain, so everyone can continue to use their domain credentials seamlessly.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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You want to use NIS, be my guest
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sudo-ldap is kind of an out-lier; I've set up NSS LDAP I don't know how many times, against both OpenLDAP and Active Directory, and I've never bothered with sudo-ldap. I can see why people would but it is entirely possible (and IMHO just as easy) to not use it.
One thing that does bug me is that nslcd doesn't understand nested Groups in AD.
How do you authenticate to do sudo then?
The only think I can think is that you are authenticating locally instead of against ldap.
Crippled multimedia over? (Score:2)
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Or just install whatever dev header packages you need and compile it yourself against your current libraries.
Security improvements! (Score:3, Informative)
What's new in Debian 7.0
2.2.3. Hardened security
Many Debian packages have now been built with gcc compiler hardening flags enabled. These flags enable various protections against security issues such as stack smashing, predictable locations of values in memory, etc. An effort has been made to ensure that as many packages as possible include these flags, especially focusing on those in the 'base'-installation, network-accessible daemons and packages which have had security issues in recent years.
Now there are no reasons for using Ubuntu anymore. I do not remember being so excited ever!
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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I could give two cents about GCC compiler Hardening flags. Hell, the only interesting part of Debian is the fact its entire repo is gearing up to be LLVM/Clang compliant. The moment LLVM/Clang can compile Debian, RedHat, SuSE more acceptable Linux based distros is the moment big engineering firms switch the likes ANSYS, Catia, COMSOL, and others away from GCC and give themselves a celebration by welcoming LLVM/Clang with open arms. All of the work for OpenGL/OpenCL in the pipeline for MESA, and Video Driver
Donate... (Score:3, Interesting)
Multiarch? (Score:3)
Will we be getting a multiarch build (armhf+armel) of this one? I found some info that said there would be multiarch for x86 (64-bit+32-bit) but I can't find anything for arm.
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I am currently using the multiarch x86. It works fine for libraries, but you can run into problem with executables. You can install libfoo in both 64 and 32 bit. But you can not do the same with programs. That should be fixed in the future, but is broken for now.
armhf+armel, I do not know, but I'd assume it works just the same.
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Why would you ever install the same program for two architectures at once, barring an interpreter that heavily uses binary modules? That's not supported by multiarch, and it's explicitely a non-goal.
armhf+armel multiarch seems quite pointless to me as well, although it is supported. I for one have both i386 and armhf enabled on my amd64 box and i386 on my armhf one (you need external patches for qemu so wine can work, though).
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The reason I wanted multiarch for arm is that I've been trying to set up a Minecraft server which require will require armhf java for performance reasons. I also wanted to run it over Hamachi for security and some other reasons I won't go into. But yeah if the software is open source someone is going to compile it for both and in that case it's kind of pointless.
Why desktop Linux has not been a hit on the market (Score:2, Insightful)
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Define "casual user". If you mean a user who cares about this stuff, they probably understand it. If they don't care about this stuff, they may or may not understand it, but I don't see why it matters.
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Casual users can stick with their playskool products written by accountants and marketers. In all fairness, I suppose it's not inconceivable that you can have a manager with no technical experience, but one who is still able to create a well-engineered product - I'd think this is very rare. To counter, look at how MS is doing with Balmer at the helm. I'll just stick with engineering products written and managed by actual engineers and other experts in the field, thanks.
And you know what - when Windows slows
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Debian is hardly aimed at casual users. You may be familiar with its far more popular offspring, Ubuntu and Mint, which are built especially for that market. Debian remains firmly in the domain of professionals and enthusiasts; and that is a group who need catering for too
How come we have media support? (Score:2)
Have they finally come up with a free solution for media playback? Or have they compromised on their principles?
Re: How come we have media support? (Score:2)
Yeah, I thought that the lack of support was over patents...
What changed? (Score:4, Interesting)
Does anyone know what changed to allow Debian to add MP3 and other libs? There has never been a technical problem with including them, but Debian has always tried to avoid violating patents by distributing patented (or claimed-to-be-patented) software.
I'm glad they've been able to take this step, just wondering what happened.
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I think you'll find that it's a matter of degrees of danger rather than "claimed-to-be-patented? yes/no"
Point taken. But it doesn't answer my question. What changed?
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These bugs, along with all the links they contain, is a good starting point:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=522373 [debian.org]
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=592457 [debian.org]
My guess...Debian got legal advice which gave them enough courage to go ahead...and it included the instruction not to publish the details of said advice. See also:
http://www.debian.org/legal/patent [debian.org]
http://www.debian.org/reports/patent-faq [debian.org]
Multimedia's still damaged. (Score:2)
LibAV's a badly forked version that's several revisions behind FFmpeg. Plus, this is Debian -- non-free codecs like H.264 are stripped out and are probably really supported by a seperate non-free repository.
I'd rather strip LibAV out and compile my own version of FFmpeg for faster encodes.
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LibAV's a badly forked version that's several revisions behind FFmpeg. Plus, this is Debian -- non-free codecs like H.264 are stripped out and are probably really supported by a seperate non-free repository.
I'd rather strip LibAV out and compile my own version of FFmpeg for faster encodes.
Agreed. Debian fucked up Handbrake options, not to mention VLC is a clusterfuck half the time if one uses the LibAV from Debian. Use the Debian Multimedia debs elsewhere and you can that Debian legally unclean but more useful solution.
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Apache2.4? (Score:2)
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Its stable its been out over a year, have any distros picked it up yet?
My last annoyance with Debian. 2.4 has been sitting in Experimental and utterly useless without current PHP5 support and much more. I've never seen the purpose of packaging highly visible applications within a distro only to leave them useless for months on end.
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It's included in Slackware 14.0 and Slackware current.
But there is a bug in "htpasswd" (bug 54735 [apache.org]), which has not been backported to the "2.4.x" branch yet.
No avidemux?, paper cuts not present in Ubuntu (Score:2)
I made an installation a week ago (a basic one from network boot) and apt-get install avidemux got me.. nothing. So, they're now boasting about multimedia but it's missing quite an obvious piece of software that is simple enough to use even if just for grabbing an extract of a video. :
I also suffered a few silly things
- The netinstall iso doesn't work if put on a USB drive with unetbootin. Had to install a tftp and dhcp server on another box. I didn't try the big CD and DVD images. This is a bit of a proble
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We rely on volunteers to add software to Debian. People who want avidemux in Debian (like yourself) haven't bothered to package avidemux yet. Perhaps you would like to help improve multimedia in Debian and join the multmedia team?
http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Multimedia
Please report bugs about the issues you found:
http://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting
I would like to have a upgraded wine now (Score:2)
But that's me
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Toy Story.
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Yep, they've taken all the names of the characters in Toy Story 1. Well, except for Buggy, but thye didn't think that would be appropriate. So now they have moved to characters from Toy Story 2.
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I appreciate their using Sid for development, but part of me thinks Buggy would have been just as appropriate, and hilarious at the same time.
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Go cry about it somewhere else
Re:Wheezy (Score:4, Insightful)
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How about "Longhorn"? A grossly overweight beast who is destined for the slaughterhouse but will endeavour to leave massive piles of bullshit on your fields before it goes. There's a good code name for a product.
On the other hand, Windows XP Embedded had the code name of Mantis [theoatmeal.com], which fit it nicely.
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Likewise, when I head over to Ubuntu.com, click "Download" in the upper right corner, and then Ubuntu Desktop, it says 12.10, no code name here either. Now, there are few places where the codename will appear, but it's not in extensi
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At least the Ubuntu release names tell me the order in which they are released. When people talk about Debian releases, and they often do so without mentioning the release number, I often have to search the web to figure out whether they're talking about something old, current, new, or very new.
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Clearly the marketing message being conveyed is "We don't have marketing here. We have engineers."
Re:Wheezy (Score:5, Informative)
The product is officially known as "Debian 7.0". Wheezy is just a code name.
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Actually, that's untrue -- most developers don't even know the version number, operating exclusively on the name. "7.0" is just a random number someone in the release times increments in an arbitrary manner and slaps on. This pops up on debian-devel roughly once a year, but a flamewar never lasts long.
Besides, 2000 < XP < Vista < 7 < 8 is that obvious and sortable too, isn't it?
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I agree, from now on it should be named after Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. How about Dopey?
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Why would you want a wizard?
Just edit config files like a big boy.
Pick your smtp server and edit the files. Not like there is a lot to it.
Re:I hereby request an easier mail/http server set (Score:5, Insightful)
What, exactly, is wrong with
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It's not all that hard, but you do know you can run Webmin on top of Debian?
Don't leave webmin hanging out on the internet and you should be just fine. Firewall it and use SSH tunneling to access.
Re:Kernel (Score:5, Informative)
Debian will run Linux kernel 3.2.39 [debian.org]
Debian can also run on the FreeBSD kernel. It looks like Wheezy will support both 8.3 [debian.org] and 9.0 [debian.org] kernels.
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What, GNU Hurd won't make it to stable again?
By the way, I'm already migrating (I'm writting at /. while my server downloads packages). New asterisk and postgres. What's not to like?
Re:Kernel (Score:5, Informative)
The Linux flavour will use Linux 3.2 with a couple of backported features.
http://womble.decadent.org.uk/blog/whats-in-the-linux-kernel-for-debian-70-wheezy-part-1.html [decadent.org.uk]
http://womble.decadent.org.uk/blog/whats-in-the-linux-kernel-for-debian-70-wheezy-part-2.html [decadent.org.uk]
http://womble.decadent.org.uk/blog/whats-in-the-linux-kernel-for-debian-70-wheezy-part-3.html [decadent.org.uk]
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Hurd didn't make the cut for the wheezy release, apparently the hurd porters plan some sort of unofficial release alongside wheezy but what form this will take (hurd is not and never has been in testing for wheezy) has not been made clear.
AIUI kfreebsd will be included but is still considered to be a "techology preview" rather than a full production release. They seem to be shipping both 8.x and 9.x kernels.
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We have to wait until both the hurd guys come back from holiday to find out :)
The difference in philosophy between linux (thanks for the patch, looks good, I'll merge it in) and hurd (you want to contribute, where's your doctorate? You call that a doctorate? It's not fro
Re:Named in honor of... (Score:4, Funny)
Weezie Jefferson. Movin' on up, to the east side!
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Incoming Disney lawsuit in 3...2..1...
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Debian's been named this way since, well, forever.
You can't sue for use of first names, especially when they are common or adjectives.
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I pick tested and works well any day over bleeding edge.
And what do you mean by broken media support?
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The times of crippled multimedia support in Debian are finally over!
Bleeding edge can work just fine, just be careful what you install.
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I'm actually just quoting the post:
The times of crippled multimedia support in Debian are finally over!
It says crippled, which isn't the same as broken. All they sya there is that the multimedia support has been improved.
Bleeding edge can work just fine, just be careful what you install.
When I install something it is installed in parallell on hundreds or even thousands of machines. It is kind of important that we can rely on that the software we use continue to not only work well but work well consistently.
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I wish it was that simple. We've tested it and it just doesn't work. We want to be able to install a system today, tomorrow or even a few years from now and reliably get the same result. You need stable packages to do that.
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No, it is/was caused by long release cycles (2 years or longer between stable releases) and the Debian group's dedication to truly Free software. The finally found something they find to be morally acceptable, and it is in the next release after they found it.
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You don't have to install them if you don't want. At least they don't include "non-truly-free-patent-encumbered" codecs by default.
Kinda agree (Score:5, Insightful)
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Security updates usually don't break compatibility, and when they do it is clearly advertised.
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Re:Kinda agree (Score:5, Insightful)
I have quite a lot of Debian workstations that I also want to just work, otherwise the users using them won't be very productive that day.
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I have quite a lot of Debian workstations that I also want to just work, otherwise the users using them won't be very productive that day.
Agreed. Debian workstations work fairly well. [Occasionally I have to build a newer kernel for new hardware, but I can deal with that.] I like that things are stable during the release cycle.
Re:Kind of sad (Score:5, Informative)
It's 2013 and your finally advertising non broken media support. Even Gentoo has had working media support built in for years, I think if this is one of the selling points of Debian then it's time to move on, your trying to get me to take the Honda N360 off your hands instead of the race car.
I think you're laboring under the mistaken assumption that this reflects on the general state of Debian. The truth is that media support is a very specific issue, which, IIRC, was caused by intellectual property issues. For most other things, Debian has had a very complete and high-quality selection of packages. For proprietary media formats, they basically had none - although getting support for those was as simple as adding a repository that provided them (change one line and run a command, or do a couple of clicks - whichever you prefer).
In particular, the "broken" media support was not an issue with Debian generally being broken (it hasn't been) and it also wasn't an issue with Debian being behind other distros (Debian stable tends to have old software, but that is by design - if you want newer software, you can use backports, unstable, experimental, or third-party repositories).
This is one of the major reasons I could never stick with Debian, I need stuff to work, be up to date and ready to go out of the box, Debian is built off legacy packages in an attempt to claim stability, when in reality it's just outdated in it's release mode.
By all means use the distro that works best for you. For me, that's Debian stable, because I want to minimize the amount of time I spend on maintenance. There is a trade-off between having newer software and having more testing performed on that software, and a trade-off between minimizing system maintenance effort and running up-to-date software, and I'm happy with how Debian stable makes these trade-offs. Every other OS I've used has had a higher maintenance burden.
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Debian's multimedia has always been a bit weird... anyway it really wasn't that hard to add in the deb-multimedia repository.
Also, I hate to say it because I am a huge Debian fan, but even the newest offerings are a bit lacking if you have underpowered equipment - the deb-multimedia versions for wheezy work better on my ancient laptop than the official packages.
That said, for many of the file formats that require the special repository, you need to download a codec pack for Windows - same amount of effort,
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I run servers for people who pay me money. I run debian stable exclusively and watch the cash roll in.
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You are talking about debian stable, and calling it debian. Are you aware of those other flavours, testing, unstable, experimental? What about a chroot for some packages? what about running ubuntu packages depending on a different libc by using LD_LIBRARY_PATH and not having the rest of the ubuntu stuff shoved down your throat? What about linux mint debian edition?
But let's stick to stable. Who in his right mind uses a system like debian stable, whose software and data formats tends to stay the same, and up
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Redhat/Centos works just fine on a desktop (just like Debian.)
Hell Redhat sells licenses specifically intended for workstations!
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I would go as far as saying that Red Hat actually works better on desktops. It's often tricky to get Debian to run well on brand new hardware if stable has been out for two-three years, since it will often require new drivers that aren't available in the Debian kernel. Red Hat on the other hand continuously backports a ton of stuff into their kernel and releases it as part of their point updates (about every 6-12 months). This means that you can often install Red Hat on hardware which Debian won't run on, e
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Are you willing to post some instructions as to how you did this?
I'm running 6.0 now. I could use a newer kernel but I don't want to give up gnome 2.
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It uses the EDITOR and VISUAL environment variables, and falls back to vi if they're unset.
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IIRC, the default DE for Debian 7 will be XFCE, not GNOME.
Sadly, that change has been reverted, and wheezy installs the steaming pile of crap by default. To get working GNOME, you need to pull MATE from an external repository.
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Don't they still have a network installer where it bootstraps a minimal set of packages and then asks what DE the user wants to install?
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Which is exactly the kind of behavior you want from a stable distribution. The previous version included support for ext4 as well so that users could test it. It just wasn't the default.
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Here's what I've noticed after two weeks doing an expert install:
* base system looks awful. the console's font rendering is so old and ugly. I've seen some pretty looking screenshots around with sans and fixed fonts that look so nice and even on low res. Why can't debian use something like that ?
Agree, it just doesn't look great. But you can change it. Dpkg-reconfigure console-setup and switch to something more appropriate.
* Is that vim-tiny ?! what's wrong with vim ? Or is your 1.44 floppy not big enough ?!
Adds too many dependencies for the base if I remember correctly.
* Systemd shouldn't be an option, it should be the default. It's not just inane "modern" features. There's serious performance and design benefits.
That would be great, but unfortunately Systemd depends very heavily on Linux and Debian wants to be compatible with other kernels as well.
* where is my tmux ? why do I need to apt-get it ? I want my tmux !
Just install your tmux. It is in the repos.
* stop asking me about locales during install; it's en us utf8. I don't live in US and English isn't my native tongue and it's still en us utf8. ask me after the first login to set the locales but leave the default, the default.
Some people prefer otherwise. You can still change your per-user locale at any time.
* don't ask me about what to install. install the base system and ask me after the first login about installing the rest. it's a waste of time, space and resources doing anything else.
Waste of time? You must be stressed. Take a look at F