A few months later than expected, Debian 5 has finally arrived with a bundle of new goodies: Java is finally in the Debian repositories thanks to IcedTea and OpenJDK; Firefox (rebranded as Iceweasel) is now at 3.0; and official live images are ready for our downloading pleasure. TuxRadar has a detailed look at Lenny along with an explanation from Steve McIntyre, the Debian Project Leader, on why it was delayed. Earlier this week, we already detailed the new features in Lenny.
Woohoo! That is all I have to say about that. Stability, here I come.
I’ve been running it for a couple weeks and think it’s great. Fast and stable without any problems at all (in KDE 3 anyways).
What exactly makes this a “page 2” story?
No-one wrote a “read more” section for it?
As linked in the item, we already covered the release pretty well and detailed. No need to make the exact same item again two days later.
I was wondering the same thing; your explanation makes sense.
No sense in posting redundant posts
I was wondering the same thing; your explanation makes sense.
No sense in posting redundant posts
Thom_Holwerda trolled…
Yeah, because Debian is only one of the most recognized and valuable server operating systems in widely in use; no need to have hundreds of stories on it.
[irony]
Ohhhh look!!!111eleventy-one, someone posted on their blog about Windows Seven seems faster than Vista. Quick someone submit it as a front page article!!!!!oneoneone[/sarcasm]
–bornagainpenguin
Edited 2009-02-16 05:10 UTC
So I guess you won’t post a news item on Windows 7’s release day then since you’ve already covered Windows 7 extensively.
Ah, I see the armchair crowd has joined us? Enjoying that bag of chips, girls?
Thom Holwerda trolled again…
I just call it as I see it. I’d apologize if the truth is uncomfortable for you, but having one’s biases exposed is never fun…so should we expect to see a bunch of Windows Seven coverage on release or will OSNews simply rest on its previous coverage? Tell us, is your consistency only skin deep?
–bornagainpenguin
EDIT – speeling
Edited 2009-02-17 18:14 UTC
Congratulations to the whole Debian team.
Congrats on yet another late Debian release chock full of already obsolete software! Rah! Rah! Rah!
software is not obsolete if it works and fulfills its role
Windows 3.x worked and fulfilled its role.
The same truly cannot be said in the present sense …
Obiviously, because Windows 3.1 isn’t in use much anymore.
Vista certainly fulfills in the same way — for me and millions of others.
Back when the ‘486/66 machines were top of the line, I remember reading a PC Magazine review which commented that there was finally a machine, albeit an expensive one, that could run Windows 3.1 at a reasonable speed. So yes, I guess you could say that Vista fulfills in the same way…
Edited 2009-02-17 19:25 UTC
Funny, Vista runs perfectly well on my three-year old P4 system that set me back all of about $700. If you think that’s expensive for a computer, you have issues.
I can’t help but notice that it took you over 2 and a half hours to respond. I’m curious if your disk was churning all that time. :-0
Sorry, but I’m not on standby to respond to posts from you immediately after you create them. I’m busy getting actual work done on my inexpensive PC which runs Vista swimmingly.
Except the point of stable is that it is tried and tested. Obsolete is just another word for it depending on your point of view.
bring on a new round of testing/sid!
can you do it better?
don’t be too fast to criticize the debian’s team!
congrats guys!
When I saw your avatar, I couldn’t help but think that that woman had just found out the version of GLIBC included. :-0
Edited 2009-02-16 07:21 UTC
I’d guess she’s a RedHat fan who was shocked to find out that Debian 5.0 ships with glibc 2.7 while RHEL 5.3 (released in 2009-01-20) only includes glibc 2.5.
By myself? No. Do other distros manage to do it better? Yes.
Not many distros, however, manage to offer over 23,000 packages, 5 DVDs, supporting 12 architectures! (And everything stable and bug-free).
Your avatar is simply unfair. How can I even presume to stand up to Spock in his prime, in “The Undiscovered Country”?
I’ve no choice but to concede, darn it! 😉
LOL!
All of it bug-free? All of it, every single possible usage scenario, with every conceivable combination of hardware and software? I highly doubt it. It may be mostly bug-free, but nothing is ever 100%, completely, utterly bug-free. Never. Never has been, never will be.
Debian releases when the count of release-critical bugs is zero. Thus not your definition of bug-free.
However my experience of comparing Debian to other distros over the years (and mind you, Debian is not the only one I like), is that a Debian release is indeed bug-free for any practical purpose.
It really does depend upon one’s definition of “bug”. Say you are running Debian, you go to YouTube, or whatever, and a Flash video won’t play because your version of Gnash is not new enough. Or you try to open an ODF document and it doesn’t work because your version of Abiword or Gnumeric is too old. Are those bugs? Many would argue that the software was not intended to play that Video, or open those ODF files, so they are not bugs, but simply a lack of particular features. My users would call them a bugs. And I would be hard-pressed to dispute them.
Note that I am not criticizing ODF, here. It’s not that ODF is a moving target, but that ODF support in Abiword and Gnunmeric are incomplete “works in progress” at this time. And we all know what a “work in progress” Gnash is.
Edited 2009-02-17 08:03 UTC
A couple of examples of what can be done:
1)Replace Gnash with Flash. Debian is not the only distro which comes by default with free software only.
2)Dowload and install the latest OpenOffice.
Workarounds for those particular examples, yes. But it doesn’t really address the general issue. What if the shortcoming is in the version of Gnome or KDE?
My viewpoint is somewhat colored by the fact that I have about 75 desktop users who have the annoying habit of expecting things to work. In my work, I have used both CentOS, which is a lot like Debian in its “creakiness with stability”, and the perpetually broken Fedora, which always has its own problems right out of the box. I’m beginning to think that Ubuntu is the solution. Predictable LTS releases every two years, with the option to upgrade every six months should the need arise, with support for that non-LTS release being good through the next LTS. And there is no denying that it inherits a healthy dose of Debian goodness; It combines some of the best things of all worlds, while somewhat minimizing the down sides of each. It’s what I’ve been using on my own desktop for some time now, and I’m a big believer in eating my own dog food. The problem is that switching distros is a challenging proposition when you have 75 users and just only you to handle it. I can do it, of course. But Fedora has not been so annoying as to get me to do it yet. But I’m considering it for the XDMCP server upgrades planned for this Spring.
Edited 2009-02-17 08:56 UTC
To me this solution doesn’t look much different than using Debian Stable and six months later using testing, should the need arise. With the difference that Debian fully supports each of its 23,000 packages.
And with the difference that every single Ubuntu release has had show-stopper bugs for me.
Upgrading to a distro called “Testing” is just not appealing. I’ve been told by some that “Testing” is more stable than other distro’s gold releases. I’ve been told by others that “Testing” is sometimes quite broken. No one, including Debian itself, is prepared to actually stand behind claims of Testing’s stability.
I’ve not observed bugs that I would consider to be “show stopping” for my use case as XDMCP desktop server in my own use of Ubuntu. But I’ve also found that one can never judge a distro by personal testing. Once you have it on the server, and other people are using it in their business… that’s when you find out about stuff you didn’t know about before.
For example, for its entire life-cycle, Fedora 8 did not support more than 16 concurrent GDM sessions. That problem never actually got fixed. I think that the distro maintainers might have thought it was fixed. Or maybe they just forgot about it. I finally gave up and put my own ugly solution into place. Individual Fedora users no doubt had no idea that the problem ever existed.
Edited 2009-02-17 10:45 UTC
That is exactly my experience as well. I am also a great fan of openSUSE, but it can have quite a few bugs when it is released, bugs which sometimes don’t get fixed for years (not to mention their bad habit of removing useful features and apps).
Mandriva is even worse.
The main issue with Debian testing can be that sometimes a package you need is still in Sid, Thus it is only a matter of fetching it from there.
This can be automated by using apt-pinning:
http://jaqque.sbih.org/kplug/apt-pinning.html
Would AdamW please pick up the blue house phone? AdamW, please pick up the blue house phone… 😉
Does that mean my Canon LBP-1120 printer will work out of the box?
Will I be able to browse my windows shares with ease?
It might be good if stable, but I think these releases should at least make sure basic networking and printing works.
Edited 2009-02-16 02:40 UTC
All these things work fine for me and I have five computers in my house running lenny for over a year now!
And you know what? It cost me nothing and does everything I and my kids want for school.
Sure some school stuff was windows only, but I just wrote the principle and told him to change his Luddite attitude and move his kids into the 20th century and now there’s no problem. Take control of your life, freedoms, destiny and stop expecting everyone to do everything for you!
A big and sincere Thankyou to all involved with Debian and linux in general, we know the battle is hard and you keep coming through for us year after year. Great jobs guys and gals!
The computer is my slave, I am not a slave to the computer, I expect the printer to work.
Over the years I have tried to get it to work.(Me being a slave to the computer).
You know what it was painless. I googled found relevant links telling capt this compatible driver that. I did it, it didn’t work. I clicked print. Nothing happened. I turned off or reboot the PC, a blank page got fed through the printer.
Why? My programming skills at best is creating a calculator program with complex numbers.
Ahh stuff it, I am not going to type anymore about it.
Edited 2009-02-16 11:43 UTC
http://www.openprinting.org
Everything you need to know to get printing working in CUPS … and whether or not it’s even worth attempting, based on the printer model.
Thanks. I will have a look.
🙂