This is the seventh revision of Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 (codename ‘potato’) which mainly adds security updates to the stable release, along with a few corrections of serious bugs. Those who frequently update from security.debian.org won’t have to update many packages. On a related note, DebianPlanet interviews Ian Jackson, Debian personality and a current member of the technical Debian commitee as well as the author of dpkg.
Debian GNU/Linux 2.2r7 Released
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’d also like to add that those who frequently update from security.debian.org won’t have to update many packages. 😉
Those who frequently update from security.debian.org won’t have to update many packages.
🙂
Isn’t it about time for the official release? It seems that debian’s release cycles increase by an order of magnitude with subsequent release.
You have “Those who frequently update from security.debian.org won’t have to update many packages.” duplicated here, please remove one of them
Well, Jackson doesn’t pull any punches, that’s nice to see. In a recent thread, we were talking about why we always focus on what’s wrong with Linux instead of what’s right about it (or, to be more precise, what’s wrong with various distros, KDE, Gnome, etc.). Jackson, it seems to me, is doing the same thing here. I think the reason we do that is that Linux, at its core, is great, outstanding, solid as a rock. It is at the upper levels that the problems start. Jackson sees “inertia” as the big problem and I see what he means by that. And he has no hesitation to suggest a two tier strategy for developers – a bold comment. At any rate, I think he’s put his finger on a couple of major stumbling blocks. And, as I started this off with, it sort of came to me why we focus on the shortcomings of the various distros after reading his remarks.
Bar none, I think the biggest stumbling block for the Debian project is the length of its release cycles. Potato has been stable for waaaaay too long. 2.2R7 shouldn’t even be news at all… woody is way behind schedule. I mean, I love Debian, it is the only distro I will ever use, but they have to do something with their release cycle. This is starting to get a little ridiculous.
Double duplicate is now vanishingly gone.
What the hell is woody & potatoe? I mean, I’m sure it’s something simple, but Jesus Christ … do they try on purpose to confuse the hell out of people who are now at all this ?
http://www.debian.org/releases/
Unlike those wonderfully intuitive names for Windows products like Outlook, Quicken, Powerpoint and Excel
Okay, okay, Linux has the GIMP I know…
Actually – serious point – shouldn’t the stable release be called “Woody”?
I really dont see why people complain about woody taking so long to be released. They’ll release it once they think its actually *stable*, and i respect that. If you want to run it, go ahead, there is nothing stopping you, heck run Sid if you want. Unlike other distributions from what i’ve seen, the switch from 2.x to 3 in Debian is actually quite HUGE.
I really dont see why people complain about woody taking so long to be released.
Because I want to use it on a “production” server that is currently running potato, and I’m not going to put my job on the line by running a distro that’s still in the “testing” phase on a mission-critical server. I know most of you are saying, “I use Woody/Sid/Whatever all the time, and it’s solid as a rock”, but I’ll tell you that the beauty of debian stable is that it really truly is STABLE, and I can’t take any chances with anything else. I’ve had breakage of glibc on debian testing releases in the past, and it’s not a pretty picture to have management all over your ass asking you why the intranet is down and when it’ll be back up while you’re scrambling like a madman to find that rescue floppy you stashed in the closet somewhere.
So, don’t dismiss the true stability of stable as something trivial because a lot of companies can accept nothing less.
Hornsby : then be patient and wait till it becomes STABLE. The only thing people bitching about it being late can possibly be is make the developers mad and release a not-quite-stable woody to make people stop bitching. Know what i mean? Sure it would be nice if it would become the stable release, but you dont want to hurry it up too fast.
“Unlike those wonderfully intuitive names for Windows products like Outlook, Quicken, Powerpoint and Excel
”
Actually, that’s a good point. I mean, calling the consumer versions of Windows 95 & 98 and then releases a workstation Windows 2000, following that up with a consumer Windows ME? And WTF is Windows XP anyway
But, someone else said earlier in this thread that maybe sometimes we should talk abut what Linux does right, and I’m going to do that for a minute. Why? Because I just spent all day yesterday reformatting and reinstalling my dad’s Windows 2k box. With all of the spyware crap and the fact that he doesn’t defrag, Windows update, virus scan, ad aware, etc like I tell him to, I told him if he was running Linux, he wouldn’t have to worry about any of that.
He asked me how hard Linux was to learn and I told him that once set up and running, it’d be about like what he was used to, especially with Crossover Office running MS Word.
He seems pretty open to the idea … now if I can just become familiar with it enough to set it up for him, I could eliminate the ritual of cleaning up the Windows mess every 6 months
Of course, it’s kind of hard to commit myself to it, as I can’t switch because I use too many specialty apps that don’t (yet) have open source alternatives.
Problem is of course that a lot of the spyware comes with some cool applications which might not run – but then that might be a good thing?
And of course with Linux you’ll be free of the six-monthly defrag, but will have to do the six-monthly “get a new distro abd install it” (actually not too hard and you get some nice new apps with it too).
Best of luck – it would be interesting to hear how crossover goes.
“What the hell is woody & potato”
They are names from Toy Story. The previous releases were Slink, Bo, Rex, and Ham (and maybe some others I don’t recall offhand).
The current unstable is permanently called Sid after the evil kid next door who like to mutilate toys.
I kind of like the Toy Story names, but pretty soon
Debian will run out of characters. I suspect “Andy” will be the ultimate release in this series, after which Debian will have to find something else after which to name the releases.
now if I can just become familiar with it enough to set it up for him, I could eliminate the ritual of cleaning up the Windows mess every 6 months
I know exactly what you mean. That is exactly why I stopped using Windows. Every 6 months or so you would have to blow everything away and start again from scratch. Well, either that or suffer with a degredated system.
“I know exactly what you mean. That is exactly why I stopped using Windows. Every 6 months or so you would have to blow everything away and start again from scratch”
As for me, I personally don’t have that problem. I’ve been working with Windows for long enough that I know how to work around the spyware and keep it updated & optimized so that my Win2k box runs flawlessly without having a need to wipe it hardly ever. However, I still do wipe it every few months just to keep things running as smooth as a baby’s butt. Using Ghost and various techniques that I’ve developed over the years, I can wipe my entire system and be back up and running with fully clean setup (including about 40+ apps freshly installed) in about 2-3 hours.
I do all of this because I personally think that the apps are much better in the Windows world. Sure, Galeon and Evolution are good, the Office suites are passable, the desktop enviroments are flexible, but where’s my Reason, FM7, Gigastudio, Absynth, etc?
As for my parents, I don’t live anywhere near them so I can’t watch over them 24/7 and instruct them to do things like install Kazaa Lite instead of Kazaa. In their case, I sometimes think they’d be better off making the switch.
And of course with Linux you’ll be free of the six-monthly defrag, but will have to do the six-monthly “get a new distro abd install it” (actually not too hard and you get some nice new apps with it too).
Hi there, I’m using Redhat 7.0 (two years old)
Just talking from my own point of view – whenever Mandrake release a new one, I can’t wait to get some ISO’s burned
Of course, if you use Debian and are waiting for potato, this won’t be such an issue 
Most package-based distributions offer a sensible upgrade policy which can let you get all/most of the new applications and bugfixes from a newer version without the headache of an actual reinstall.
My upgrade path on one PC since 1998 looks like:
Pentium II 300 installed RH 5.2
Upgrade to RH 6.1
Add RAM, SCSI
Upgrade to RH 6.2
Add more RAM
Upgrade to RH 7.0
Upgrade to RH 7.2
Swap G100 for GeForce
Swapped back (GeForce picture quality awful)
Upgrade to RH 7.3
Swap G100 for G400. Much better.
The OS upgrades generally take about 1-2 hours actual install time, unsupervised + 1-2 hours over the next week checking out new software, examining recommended config changes etc.
My guess would be that Debian’s release-train makes this even easier, just set something in a config file or type a phrase into the command line?