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Debian Linux

Debian 8 Jessie Released 442

Posted by Soulskill from the onward-and-upward dept.
linuxscreenshot writes: After almost 24 months of constant development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 8 (code name Jessie), which will be supported for the next five years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and the Debian Long Term Support team. (Release notes.) Jessie ships with a new default init system, systemd. The systemd suite provides features such as faster boot times, cgroups for services, and the possibility of isolating part of the services. The sysvinit init system is still available in Jessie. Screenshots and a screencast are available.
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Debian 8 Jessie Released More

Debian 8 Jessie Released

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  • systemd vs initd (Score:5, Funny)

    by Pikoro ( 844299 ) <init@in i t . sh> on Sunday April 26, 2015 @12:38AM (#49553593) Homepage Journal

    here we go...

    Guess it's time to change my email address...

  • File manager without file, edit, view.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Blaskowicz ( 634489 ) on Sunday April 26, 2015 @12:44AM (#49553607)

    The screenshots aren't looking bad but that Gnome quest for removing menu bars goes a bit far. What if you find yourself with no free space in a file manager window to right-click on. I tell people to use "Edit / Paste" or "File / Create a new folder" in that case.

    • Re:File manager without file, edit, view.. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 26, 2015 @01:08AM (#49553661)

      A little? GNONE is garbage these days that you avoid with a 20ft pole. If you want to run some other window manager, like blackbox or xfe, then GNOME apps are terribad. There is no window title because they no longer use standard calls to create their windows.

      I basically removed things like Evince and replaced it with much more usable qpdfview, and that is only because of terrible user interface in GNOME.

      • GNOME applications works just fine with other desktop environments and window managers. What used to be the biggest concern, the app menu, is no longer handled by adding a separate menu bar in the window with just for that menu. Instead, most applications show it as a button in the headerbar when not run within GNOME.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Sam for me. Evince was one of the last gnome applications I was still using but after a recent upgrade, I discovered that the UI was redesigned and was mostly useless. I tried various alternative pdf viewers and I discovered Zathura. No UI there. Everything is done via keyboard shortcuts but its fast and the mouse is only used for copying, to follow links (double click) and scrolling with the wheel. The keyboard shortcut seems mostly inspired from emacs and vi and they can be redefined.

        • The UI was redesigned but it still has the capabilities of the old UI, if you're willing to look for things in another place. Most things were moved to the app menu and the drop-down menus in the top-right corner of the viewer window. Keyboard shortcuts are of course still there.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by fnj ( 64210 )

            Or I can use okular, and I don't have to GUESS how to do things. It's all discoverable, un-hidden menus, just like the days when people used to believe in standards.

            • They are not hidden, they have just moved to another place. The top-right corner is quite common nowadays to put these. Even Firefox has that now so it should be discoverable.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by vga_init ( 589198 )

        I have been using Gnome 3 on Fedora for about a couple years now, and I honestly can't understand why people don't like it. In fact, I don't really feel like using other UI's anymore because Gnome 3 is too efficient. Yes, it still has its quirks. The title bar is a little big and gets obnoxious when you maximize some applications, but I'm willing to accept that in order to get everything else it offers.

        The best thing about Gnome now is that it doesn't get in my way. Switching apps/windows is easy. All the u

        • Re:File manager without file, edit, view.. (Score:4, Insightful)

          by jcdr ( 178250 ) on Sunday April 26, 2015 @02:29PM (#49555917)

          I have multiples machines, each with a different Desktop: Gnome 3, Unity, XFCE and MATE.

          My biggest problem with Gnome 3 is the fact it's not designed to work well with multiple windows overlapping and spread on a lot of virtual desktops. I usually have more than 100 windows on about 40 virtual desktops. This kind of use is a nightmare with Gnome 3 or Unity because the respective position of the virtual desktops change dynamically so it's impossible to map in the brain. The second problem is the upper left corner switch that place each widows in a random order impossible to memorize, so totally useless for me. The next problem is the animations and effect that make everything slow and distracting. The next problem is the panel extension that are difficult to select because of big catalog of similar entries, and rarely a good quality both in term of usability and in term of look. Finally the menu really hurt on big screen like 4K because it open from the left of the screen but the sub-menus are on the right of the screen. This menu take so much place that it require a lot of mouse translation to do almost anything. Whats totally ridicule is that even by displaying so few items on a 4K screen, this menu is not even able to display the full name of all application because it truncate it to the size of the icon. So no, I really don't like Gnome 3 (and Unity that share a lot of same bad design).

          XFCE and MATE are extremely efficient and blazing fast for my use case. There make easy to map in my brain the respective position of a lot of virtual desktops. The panel widget are coherent and easy to select in a small list of entries but with a lot of features of each entries. The menu is the most simplest possible, but display the full name of all the applications, require a minimum of space so it's fast to use with the mouse and is easy to customize. No animation, no effect, just maximal speed. Finally there perfectly scale on a 4K screen without any disadvantage. And i like the windows tab menu with a useful text into each tab describing precisely what's is in each related window.

          Put simply, Gnome 3 idea is big graphic and small or no text. What I need is small icon and a lot of text.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      You should thank them for doing something new [linuxscreenshots.org], without simply copying other systems [wikimedia.org].

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ssam ( 2723487 )

      Install MATE desktop ( http://mate-desktop.org/ [mate-desktop.org] ), if you want the full GNOME2 style, or just the MATE apps if you like GNOME shell, but want a full featured file browser (caja), pdf viewer (atril), text editor (pluma) etc.

  • The systemd suite (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Hognoxious ( 631665 ) on Sunday April 26, 2015 @01:38AM (#49553717) Homepage Journal

    The systemd suite

    Stop. That's the problem, right there.

  • Systemd wins? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 26, 2015 @01:40AM (#49553723)

    If systemd is in Debian, we might have consider that it won, even though there was a ton of backlash. Time to go read the docs on that animal, or I'll be plain old granpa neckbeard a lot sooner.

  • Is that proven? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dbIII ( 701233 ) on Sunday April 26, 2015 @02:46AM (#49553861)

    The systemd suite provides features such as faster boot times

    I haven't seen any sign of that anywhere and I saw the opposite on a eeepc by about half a minute when I put a newer distro with systemd on it. Is there any proof or are the faster boot times just on the wish list?

    • The systemd suite provides features such as faster boot times

      I haven't seen any sign of that anywhere and I saw the opposite on a eeepc by about half a minute when I put a newer distro with systemd on it. Is there any proof or are the faster boot times just on the wish list?

      It has been significantly faster for me. Anyway the reason is that it can run multiple scripts at the same time which sysv couln't (though upstart did something similar).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dbIII ( 701233 )
        Considering how it blocks (with no output as to why) if a filesystem is not present is it REALLY doing enough in parallel or just enough to have race conditions in the binary logs?
        • blocks or goes through a time out process waiting for it to come online? Have you checked journalctl for the output, its a very comprehensive journalling system.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gmack ( 197796 )

          This is the correct behaviour. If a filesystem doesn't mount, it will hold off on anything that depends on the filesystem working. I can't imagine why you would want it any other way.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dbIII ( 701233 )
            Yes - the correct behavior as Lennart sees it is to halt and wait for the user to insert a rescue CD.
            I don't see that as correct myself but he has a desktop perspective inspired by growing up after Win95 and not paying much attention to server environments.

            • Re: Is that proven? (Score:2, Informative)

              by gmack ( 197796 )

              it does not halt and wait for a rescue cd. It waits for the set timeout to expire(5 mins afik) but dont let facts get in the way of a good troll.

              • Which is not the correct behavior for a headless server. The correct behavior is to start anyway and for any user processes that depend on access to the unavailable filesystem to exit with a -1 status and log whatever perror() spits out to standard error, at which point it is clear to the sysadmin what happened and without having the other stuff on the box held up. LP really must have grown up with Win95, because real Linux servers often do more than one thing at a time and hold more than one service at a t

    • Systemd vs sysinit boot speed anecodote (Score:4, Informative)

      by Sits ( 117492 ) on Sunday April 26, 2015 @05:20AM (#49554167) Homepage Journal

      Anecdote 1: I've just timed a Debian Jessie single CPU hard disk based VM install with BTRFS as the filesystem, a GNOME 3 desktop where the user is auto logged in boot and where an autostart script records the time. Here are my rough systemd and sysvinit results (times are from after the kernel core finished to when the GNOME script ran):
      sysvinit (apt-get install sysvinit-core)
      First boot: 20 seconds
      Second boot: 18 seconds
      Third boot: 19 seconds
      systemd (apt-get remove sysvinit-core)
      First boot: 15 seconds
      Second boot: 16 seconds
      Third boot: 15 seconds

      sysvinit averages 19 seconds, systemd averages 15.33 seconds. In this case it does appear that systemd booted the system faster.

      Anecdote 2: Same as above but where the VM's disk is sitting wholly in RAM. Time for sysvinit dropped to 5 seconds and the time for systemd dropped to 4 seconds.

      My personal guess is that the more you are running, the slower the disk the more likely systemd is to benefit you. You don't say how you did your comparison though or what type your "disks" were. If your comparison was between different versions of Linux distro then it could simply be that the previous version did less (which is always the fastest way to boot)...

      Another anecdote: a few years back I saw Slackware systems at a University converted over to systemd. Boot times (which involved waiting for multiple NFS mounts) went from over three minutes to down to less than a minute because more of the waiting was done in parallel.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dbIII ( 701233 )

        went from over three minutes to down to less

        Something is definitely seriously wrong in that case. Are you sure it wasn't a change to autofs to mount them on demand instead of boot or using more correct NFS mount options that made the difference?

        The other bits are interesting and make your point but that final one is a somewhat pathological case.

        As for my example - a eeepc with an SSD but not a very quick CPU. Boot time with the stock distro (xandros) was about 15 seconds, around 45 with a cut down recen

  • Debian 8 so far, so good (Score:5, Informative)

    by ruir ( 2709173 ) on Sunday April 26, 2015 @03:04AM (#49553901)
    People be aware of some caveats upgrading. Been testing it in the last year, and using it since news year eve in less critical systems in production. systemd has to be pinned to -1 or your servers will get upgraded to it without any interaction from your part. Beware also that Apache configurations change. Some configurations might get broken. libjpeg8 was missing and docker.io still is; backports may solve this. Apache configurations changed a lot. Be also aware that things get installed by default, for instance I had to delete rpcbind from most of my servers. Be also aware open vmtools gets a little confused after the upgrade and needs to be upgraded explicitly.

    • systemd has to be pinned to -1 or your servers will get upgraded to it without any interaction from your part.

      Of course it gets installed, it's the default init system in Jessie. Most users would expect to have it installed when upgrading, considering that it's a major new feature in Jessie and meant as a replacement for sysvinit.

      Beware also that Apache configurations change.

      Apache went from 2.2 to 2.4, which in Apache speak is pretty much a major version change. There were lots of changes in 2.4, especially making the event-based mpm the default. But there's also a lot of other changes so expect that you have to go through and possibly change a lot of configu

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ruir ( 2709173 )
        First time I tested it, 1.5 years ago, systemd was not a welcome upgrade. And besides, it may very well be the default init system, however installing it in a production servers when there are no dependencies (no Gnome for instance) is just breaking things for the sake of breaking them. This is the first time, it would be thoughtful to be a transition time. Ha, and this also breaks modsecurity, I forgot.
    • Debian 8 has libjpeg-turbo, replacing libjpeg8 and matching most other distributions.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ruir ( 2709173 )
        The problem is the name change without updating other packages or creating a meta package. Thanks for the heads up, i will create a meta package manually.
  • Anything special to note here or is it safe to just run dist-upgrade from 7 and try if it boots?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ruir ( 2709173 )
      filter the threshold to 2 points and read my thread above.
    • Please read the release notes, there are various things that may need manual attention before you upgrade.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Keruo ( 771880 )
        Skimmed the notes and ran upgrade.
        After rebooting was greeted with nice grub rescue> file not found and grub_divmod64 symbol errors when trying to insmod normal.

        Some searching around ended up telling me the installer only runs grub-install on disk 1 of the RAID1 config, so off to bios to change boot order of the HDDs and reboot got be back up and running.
        • Sorry about that. Once you've recovered, consider running 'reportbug release-notes' to request an additional note about this gotcha. (I assume that there is already a bug report against grub).
  • get with it, run a manly operating system ya big Jessie [stir.ac.uk].

  • Systemd can be removed completely from Debian 8 (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    https://wiki.debian.org/systemd#Installing_without_systemd

  • Different opinions (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 26, 2015 @04:04AM (#49554021)

    Let's see here. First I heard "systemd" was coming. I had no idea what it was. Then, running Mint 17.1, I found out what it was, switched to Ubuntu 15.04 to find out. I had heard horror stories how bad it was but I thought the people complaining must be some "old lazy system admins" how learned something new 20 years ago.

    Ok, so here I am in Ubuntu 15.04. I see the shutdown/reboot process is fast. Why? Because the shutdown part of the reboot is fast, not the actual startup (compared to Ubuntu 14.10). I find out probable reason why it is that way. Normally processes are first sent the SIGTERM signal to make them quit in a controlled way. But that needs some waiting.

    Now I see the new behavior is to just reboot/shutdown without waiting. Any unfinished editing is lost, connections are torn down forcefully. Why? Because this is the way it should be: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2014-October/024452.html

    Then I read more about this attitude from Wikipedia: "For instance, Poettering has advocated speeding up Linux development at the expense of breaking compatibility with POSIX and other Unix-like operating systems such as the BSDs.[12][13]".

    I'm not anymore so sure about this. Personally, I will switch back to Mint until the regressions are fixed. What is the current progress and why do we have this type of "cowboy coding" process in place for standards and/or "de facto" functionality/dependencies? Why are there so many in Slashdot creating comments such as "Do you really think that systemd will kill your wife and eat your dog"?

    • Why are there so many in Slashdot creating comments such as "Do you really think that systemd will kill your wife and eat your dog"?

      Is it not obvious? Some people (mostly systemd supporters) are jealous of other (more normal, except perhaps here) users who are married with dogs. (I cannot comment on users who are married to dogs, but for them there is goatse.d).

  • systemd (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rl117 ( 110595 ) <`rleigh' `at' `codelibre.net'> on Sunday April 26, 2015 @04:17AM (#49554047) Homepage

    After using and developing Debian for 18 years, this is the first release I have no plans to use, all thanks to the gnome and systemd idiocy. It hasn't been a nice experience, seeing a system build up with loving care by so many people over so long being willfully trashed by a small handful of people. I for one have no interest in being RedHat's bitch; if I wanted to be, I'd be a suffering Fedora or CentOS user. Debian has lost its independence and freedom.

    I've been using FreeBSD for nearly 18 months now, and rarely boot up Debian on my systems or VMs. Going back 5 years, I'd never have imagined this is the way things would play out. Tragic.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ruir ( 2709173 )
      Well said sir, well said. I would be interested in knowing a little more about your FreeBSD experienced. If you have linked.in, click in my homepage and join me in linked.in. Regards

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rl117 ( 110595 )

        Sorry, I don't use linked.in; feel free to mail me if you like though!

        A short summary would be running a general-purpose NAS system with FreeBSD 10.1 at home with ZFS, NFS4 serving homedirs and other storage and a bunch of jails running PostgreSQL, build environments, kfreebsd, etc. And my main desktop dual boots FreeBSD 10.1 and PC-BSD, both of which work just fine. The only minor niggle is the GPU fan speed which needs tweaking due to running at full speed, but I run kde4, i3, fluxbox without any troubl

  • Thanks, Poettering. :(

  • Good-bye Debian. It's been fun, but you've changed, and not for the better.

  • not enough noise over systemd (Score:4, Informative)

    by ruir ( 2709173 ) on Sunday April 26, 2015 @09:44AM (#49554791)
    This beta crap has been imposed over us unnecessarily and politically. Debian also got out of its way and is updating all servers to systemd without our asking, and without any visible dependencies, breaking configurations in the process. This is far more than "noise", what you have is fellow technicians and users, your customers and peers, for christ sake, telling you they are not happy. Many of us that have been months already using Debian with systemd pinned a testimonial that this would not be a required situation. To add insult to injury, everyone that speaks about this tabu is told to suck it up, man up, or that just is making noise. This is the antithesis of Debian and opensource. Debian and linux in spirit is about choice and flexibility, and many of us deflected from Windows and other flavours of Unix just because of that. We have been betrayed and sold. To the ones that say this was a consensual and democratic process. A true free and open process would be to include a choice at installation/upgrade time between the choices. If I do have a choice on the web server, on the DNS server, on the mail server, even on the kernel, on the shell that I deliver for my users, despite having defaults, than why, for christ sake, is systemd being rammed down our throats? Get a grip you and honestly, fuck you all. xxxx

  • Btrfs? (Score:3)

    by Dwedit ( 232252 ) on Sunday April 26, 2015 @10:14AM (#49554891) Homepage

    Will Btrfs work well on this version? It says that the kernel is 3.16.7, and the newest kernel is 4 versions ahead, and the Btrfs wiki claims that it's best to use the newest kernel possible.

  • My summary on systemd (Score:3)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Sunday April 26, 2015 @12:50PM (#49555489)

    Already a little bit older, but still completely relevant:
    - There are no technical merits of systemd that are important or critical, just some convenience issues
    - Systemd is in hurried development, a stable feature set is nowhere in sight
    - The development leads are known incompetents with inflated egos and no communication skills
    - There are a number of design decisions that are very, very bad for security and stability

    At the same time I see:
    - Systemd is pushed strongly with emotional (not factual) arguments
        -> This is a coordinated and targeted propaganda campaign. A campaign focused on technical merits is not even attempted seriously.
    - Systemd opponents are ridiculed, insulted and their arguments are not taken seriously, very much SJW-style
    - Systemd is getting very hard to avoid

    I can only deduce that there _must_ be one of or a combination of the following going on:
    - Linux was getting too hard to hack and the intelligence community is pushing for systemd to fix that
    - Linux did not generate enough support revenue for Red Hat and this is intended to fix that
    - Red Hat wants total control over Linux and systemd is their attempt to establish that

    So if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, the most probable explanation is that it
    is a duck and hence I conclude that something nefarious is going on and the last three
    items are the most likely candidates IMO. I cannot believe that two known incompetent
    hacks with bad personalities can screw over a whole large tech-savvy community all by
    themselves. They must have significant, coordinated help, with significant propaganda
    and manipulation experience. Whether it is military PsyOps or just commercial PR, the
    effects are the same. And they are massively negative and destructive for Linux and
    its community if not repelled decisively.

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