Re: Sarge Release
David Krider wrote:
Don't get me wrong here. I've spent the past couple days installing and
configuring Woody on 2 servers and a workstation, knowing full well what
the package set looked like. However, I got to wondering if it's going
to be another two years before Sarge releases (like Woody took). I
understand that Debian doesn't make any predictions, but does anyone
have a realistic idea?
I want Debian to work for me. I'm fully behind the idea. I actually
think that (part) of the terrible frustration I've had getting things to
work is a good thing. I want to configure the various packages the way
the developers of those packages thought they'd be configured, not
necessarily the way that SuSE or Red Hat (for instance) build an
(incomplete) wrapper around that process. Getting a desktop up and
running on Woody wouldn't work for me. (I have a GeForce4 card, and
XFree86 4.1 won't use that.) So I went to Sid on my workstation, which I
did once before, but only for a few days. (When I tried Sid before, the
bitmapped fonts in KDE were borked.)
Compile a 2.4 kernel, then install Xfree86 server and client (4.2) from testing,
then: XFree86 -configure will generate a base XF86Config.new file for your
video card which you can use to update XF86Config-4. Do these small steps
first without a GUI, and you'll be much better off for solving X problems.
That's the debian way. Post the error logs and you'll get help. Then install
the window-manager/desktop. I use icewm because it's small, fast, and easy
to use and configure (it has vaguely win95 usage).
I've been running Linux full-time for about 5 years now, but I'm new to
Debian. It seems to me that I can have really stable stuff that's a year
or two old, or I can have spanky new stuff that might flake out. On the
other hand, I'm amazed by the plethora of software in Debian. I say all
of this to ask the following...
I started with old woody then learnt to compile and install the 2.4.20
kernel. Then i installed packages from testing whenever i needed something
more up-to-date. I've also been installing a few things from unstable, and
other packages direct from tarballs. It's all easy, and you can make debian
as modern as you like.
Is there any sort of thought in the Debian developer community about
cutting back on the number of packages and/or supported platforms in
order to get the distro more on-par with others in terms of package
currency? I was both excited and frightened when I read that Debian is
looking to add various BSD kernels to their supported platforms list.
It's a two-edged sword, but the bottom line is that it will surely drag
out the release schedule to even longer timeframes.
There is no penalty for supporting the other platforms. You just have to
get used to using apt-get install <package>/testing|unstable and using
dpkg for the occaisonal hiccup.
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