A new revision of Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 “Woody” is now available: “This is the sixth and final update of Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (codename ‘woody’) which mainly adds security updates to the stable release, along with a few corrections to serious problems.
Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 updated (r6)
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I tried to use Woody but it was horrible experience. GNOME 1.4 included in Woody crashes so often that calling the system ‘STABLE’ makes me laugh.
I tried to take your comment seriously, but it was a horrible experience. Your comment is so far fetched that calling it a ‘TROLL’ makes me laugh.
Good to see this.
The Debian’s announce is this:
http://www.debian.org/News/2005/20050602
and for the curios some thouhgts at the dev ann list:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/05/threads.html
BTW so it will be time to see soon Gnome2.10.* in unstable…then!
It’s called stable because it doesn’t change.
I have to ask, why bother with a new release of Woody only a couple of days before Sarge is due to release?
Man… Debian is soo old in its “stable” not to mention even its its “unstable”
We use it as a development platform at work and I loath every minute of it.
Debian needs to get with the program and start being a little more swift with updates to its packages in relation to upstream vendors.
Unstable with gnome 2.8 instead of 2.10.1 ?
Stable install by default 2.2.x kernel!!!
Come on
How many distros are pulled over hot coals for being 1 point releases behind? Yet debian seems to be years behind and its prefectly acceptable and even considered “geeky” to run it.
Hrmmm
Unstable isn’t there for your personal pleasure.
Unstable is there to help develop Testing.
If Unstable deviates from Testing, then that messes up any patching and fixing – so when Testing goes into an imagined or real version freeze, Unstable practically does as well.
Debian releases are quality-based, not time-based. In order to bugfix, test and patch, you have to dig your feet in, say “wer are using this version”, and work around it – otherwise you could sit there forever saying “the next version of $package fixes everything”.
As for the traditional Woody-trolling, Debian 3.0 was released in July 2002 – with an established stable kernel by default (2.2.20), and a somewhat less stable newer kernel as an installer option (2.4.18). Debian 3.1, due for release in less than a week, follows the same pattern – 2.4.27 default, 2.6.8 selectable at install.
Only 12 more bugfixes until Sarge can be released:
http://bts.turmzimmer.net/details.php
This count has been steadily decreasing, so it looks like things are finally looking up for Sarge.
[i]Why bother with a new release of Woody only a couple of days before Sarge[i]
I’m sure there are still some reasons to install Woody… especially if you have binary-only packages of some kind (or just don’t trust shiny new relases). So, I guess this release is to tidy up all of Woody’s remaining issues, merge in security patches, and make a final release for those people who will still need to install it over the coming months.
I tried to use Woody but it was horrible experience. GNOME 1.4 included in Woody crashes so often that calling the system ‘STABLE’ makes me laugh.
———————————————————–
This either verges on “Troll” or “Funny”. Basically a 51 to 49 split on my part.
Unfortunately I wasn’t trolling and I didn’t want to be funny. That was my real experience.
But it looks like I’m not alone.
http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
Where the f^^& is the Sarge?
Woody is a dinosaur…
Where the f^^& is the Sarge?
Well it’s there allright,as a matter of fact i’m typing on debian-AMD64 (Sarge testing) right now.It’s compared to SuSE 9.3 on one of my other disks lightning fast,even with KDE.
Woody is a dinosaur…
I would prefer to call woody stable.
it’s finally gonna be release the 6th of this month i believe! so the waiting takes an end and all those who haven’t switched to ubuntu might be happy again as development will continue in sid
I agree that using Woody nowadays does feel ancient and such, and for anyone wanting to try out Debian I strongly urge them to forget it and skip to Sarge. However, take a look from another perspective. When was WinXP released? Yet people (usually) aren’t moaning about how dinosaur like that is… Debian should be commended for this at least, to continue supporting a release for this length of time. Heck, I know a number of people still happily running Potato servers, cause the thing just works. How many other distros can claim that length of support for a release (without charging a premium for being an “enterprise” distro)
yep! they wanted to get in one more release so they could then roll sarge over to stable…. so we should be good to go!
woody is fantatstic and in some ways i prefer it to the new stuff but I guess it is about time to move on…
Sarge has been frozen so if you wanted a decent debian install you should be installing sarge instead of woody…. I am using the iso’s that are a from a few weeks ago and everything looks super to me….
Debian is also working on adding newer version packages after the release for certain circumstances…in particular volatile packages… WOO HOOO
the word debian is blocked by our schools proxy.
anyways i heard X.org would make an apearance in the next unstable package set, any truth to that?
and maybe an official amd 64 port?
In which language is the word “Debian” regarded as profanity or something illegal? Why would it be blocked?
and why does it matter about xorg?
Well I can’t comment on the stability of Debian on the Desktop, I use Ubuntu for that.
Only one distro is good enough to replace my ageing Slackware servers which are a PITA to keep up-to-date / upgrade in comparison. Sarge? are you their yet?
FALL IN!
Why did they choose linux 2.6.8 over 2.6.11.11 ? There is no good reason for that. 2.6.8 was a relatively unstable release. 2.6.11.11 has benefited from 11 bugfix releases, and 2.6.11 was already considered more stable than 2.6.8, so there’s no doubt that 2.6.11.11 is much more stable.
Likewise, why did they choose 2.4.27 over 2.4.30 ?
And the list goes on and on. K3B, OpenOffice… are packaged without the latest bugfixes. There is also no reason for choosing KDE 3.3.2 over 3.4.1 : contrary to what the version numbers seem to suggest, 3.4.1 is more stable than 3.3.2. Also, XOrg 6.8.2 is more stable than XFree86 4.3.0, as long as you don’t try the newer features like Composite.
‘Stable’, contrary to what Debian leaders believe, is not synonymous to ‘old’, especially when software gets improved over time.
You could have started replacing those servers the 3rd of may. The day of the freeze. None of the important server software had show stopper bugs.
@broken windows
When Sarge releases, AMD64 becomes official for Sarge+1 (Etch) – and all packages in unstable which are currently “old” get updated, including Xfree86 -> XOrg.
@Gaston
When new versions are released, any number of regressions are introduced. As a random example, cx88xx.ko will not compile on kernels 2.6.11 or 2.6.9, but will compile on 2.6.8 or 2.6.10. Higher version numbers do NOT equate to more stable – just look at Ubuntu 4.10, with its mozilla-firefox-1.0PRrevertedto0.93 version.
See my earlier argument at http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=10733&offset=0&rows=15#38… if you have difficulty understanding this.
It’s pretty much the only distro I know of that I can install and know that nothing is going to be broken by major upgrades for at least 2 years. I also know that security is taken seriously. There are a million bleeding edge distros for people that want the latest greatest. Personally, I’m very happy that there’s at least one that I won’t have to go to my boss and say, “sorry that our intranet software is broken, upstream just updated 450 packages, the ruby cgi library works differently now, so I’ve just gotta change 300 of our programs real quick.”
It’s really simple Gaston:
– QA takes time. You can’t possible know all the bugs of a release and it’s packages, a week after it has been released.
– All the software in a distro is interconnected. You can’t be sure if a non-official KDE add-on for release 3.3 is buildable and useful for release 3.4. About the kernel: it isn’t updated because the debian-installer and all the packages it depends on need to be rebuild and need QA for 11 archs when the kernel is updated.
And to be fair: the release has been delayed to much, all the Debian Developers are aware of this fact.
the school district here blocks a lot of linux sites… dont ask, i dont know. i hav a feeling we are getting a price break on M$ software or sumthing for it though.
the 2.6.x.y releases only contain bugfixes for which there can be no doubt that they don’t bring regressions. For example, a requirement is that the patch must change be less than 100 lines of code. So there’s little doubt that 2.6.11.11 contains no regression over 2.6.11. Now, if you know a regression in 2.6.11 that’s still not fixed in 2.6.11.11, it’s about time you mention it to the developers. If the cx88 maintainer doesn’t fix the problem, consider cx88 as unmaintained, and one can’t slow a whole distribution just for one unmaintained driver.
I find it far more likely that linux news sites are categorised as “entertainment” and those are blocked by who ever administrates that proxy. MS conspiracy theorists please restrain yourselves.
Do you know anything that would be broken by upgrading OpenOffice to 1.1.4 ? K3B to 0.11.23 ? perl to 5.8.6 ?
At some point you have to admit that 3-number releases are bugfix releases and that they generally don’t bring regressions. I know some K3B releases have been buggy, but 0.11.23 has been there for some time and doesn’t bring any regression over 0.11.20.
Concerning interconnection : then why is it that other distributions manage to present the latest software, yet be stable ? Ubuntu, Arch linux and Slackware are stable and up-to-date. The point is that the “interconnection” argument is only theoretical. In practice, a skilled distribution maintainer will always find a way to present the latest software.
There are a couple of reasons why I dumped Debian: sometimes a new release is necessary for hardware support. New applications also typically require new libraries, and it is a pain tracking down or building those dependencies yourself (testing and unstable only partially account for that).
It’s not that we necessarily want the latests and greatest versions, it is just that the development model used by most open source projects makes it necessary. That’s a great part of the reason why some people expect bleeding edge software for Linux, but don’t demand it for Windows. (For example, you can get drivers for older versions of Windows, rather than replace the X server. You can also add a new application without a program demanding the latest version of a library.)
You make a good point. For example, ATI users want Xorg 6.8.2, so Debian’s choice of sticking with XFree 4.3 is bad for them. And no, ATI’s FGLRX driver is not good because 1) it causes crashes on many systems and 2) it’s closed-source, and I thought Debian had high ideals of freedom.
The reason I use Debian testing for more than a year now is because I disagree Ubuntu, arch and fedora are as stable as Debian testing and above that they package less software. Slackware might be stable but packages a teensy subset of software (on only one architecture) compared to debian. BTW upgrading Perl or any other development platform can certainly break some software, because there is always some script that DEPENDS on small bugs that are fixed in a bugfix release.
there is a difference in what other distros call stable and what debian calls stable….
I have never had any trouble with hardware support in debian, yes you often have to install the right packages or modconf the correct modules but then resta ssured it works, wish I could say the same thing about my dell truemobile(orinoco) wirleess card ubuntu. I mean where do you think ubuntu gets all its goodness from…. play with the gateways “drugs” all you want then when you are ready step up to the pure stuff
debian pure…
Sticking to Xfree 4.3 is indeed unfortunate. I expect it to be the single most asked question from sarge newbies in the coming months/years. I’m using 3rd party X.org packages at the moment.
ever wonder why your system takes forever to startup, all that probeing and auto detetcting everything… wonder why my debian is ready to go in no time, cause I TELL IT exactly what I got and what I need and boom….wheeeeeee
that so many think having two DE is a waste but yet are all for splitting Xfree…. just dont get it
of course competition is good and I think it threw a lot of attention to X so maybe some money pouring in and competition will be good….
XFree is no longer relevant, Dawes saw to that by changing the license. However, that is a good thing since XFree was never really open until xorg forked. Also, the only major OS to still use it other than Debian is NetBSD, which also has xorg port. XFree has a webpage that lists dists which use it at http://www.xfree86.org/distros/ but it mostly lists niche dists that very few people use.
i said nuthing about linux news sites. (some are, some arent blocked)
http://www.debian.org
http://www.mandrakelinux.org
and other linux specific distro sites are blocked.
why is everyone switching? honestly? Are there good technical reasons? Is it simply the license change? I dont see the licnese change as anything horrible! Seems still to be about as free as it can be….
I had a quickie article on this one time. I’m not really sure that I follow their reasoning on this either:
http://www.jroller.com/page/jsight/20050220#linux_classes_of_stabil…
I’d rather they stick with XFree86 then xorg… xorg is badly broken for multilingual keyboard support:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=152183
“If you use the ca_enhanced keyboard layout, you can not combine it with any other layout due to limitations in Xkb currently. The Xkb maintainers have been exploring solutions to this problem for about 2 years now, but no solution has come forth.”
Debian is not only moving to X.org “as soon as possible” after the Sarge release but they are also moving straight to the new *modularized* X.org distribution that will be easier to maintain and debug than the monolithic X.org that most distros currently use. Trying to get the modularized X.org ready before the Sarge release would have delayed the release too much but the next stable Debian release, Etch, will very likely sport a fully modularized and carefully tested version of X.org.
http://necrotic.deadbeast.net/svn/xfree86/trunk/debian/local/FAQ.xh…
I think it’s time for Xfree86 to update that page.
I was captured by this:
Rubyx Linux object-oriented ruby is its scripting language.
Well it points to something about cars…:D
modularized xorg… Thanks for the linky
very interseting – dont know how i missed that…
so they do consider that a “advertising clause” WOW… seems a bit strict to me but I am a big believer in RMS as well as Debian so…….I see I see…….
You could have started replacing those servers the 3rd of may. The day of the freeze. None of the important server software had show stopper bugs.
Naa, I’m waiting for a local (South Afican) mirror to get the ISO, otherwise I waste precious international bandwidth (we only get 3gb a month)..
You only have satellite links in South Africa? There will be 14 ISO images for sarge. Twice as much as woody. Buying a set, or doing a net install are IMHO the only real options. Downloading all ISO’s will take forever.
”
How many other distros can claim that length of support for a release (without charging a premium for being an “enterprise” distro)
”
CentOS?