Debian Etch released!

[drag]

A new Debian Stable has been released, called GNU/Linux Debian 4.0 "Etch".

What is Debian?

Debian is one of the oldest continuously active Linux distributions. It is one of the largest and most popular and is the only significant Linux based operating system that is a purely non-commercial project.

It has managed to set itself apart from other distributions by a strong focus on quality control, it's Debian (apt-get) package management system and the massive amount of officially support packages that go along with that. In terms of stability, performance, and flexibility it stands out from your typical Linux distribution.

Unfortunately the project has been marred by a lack of strong release schedule (biggest problem), steep learning curve, and a community with 'elitist' tendencies.

Keeping that in mind Debian is one of the few Linux distributions that is particularly suitable for all common computing tasks. From embedded development, to making new Linux distributions (most famously Ubuntu), and for small/medium businesses and even large scale enterprise. It even has fairly widespread vendor support (although not approaching what Redhat or Suse enjoys).

In my own opinion Debian is very useful for web server deployments, traditional Unix workstation, large numbers of customized Linux desktops with server support, and good desktop for moderate to advanced Linux distributions.

Debian comes in many flavors. OldStable, Stable, Testing, and Unstable.

All of them are usable full fledged operating systems. For desktop use Testing is usually most appropriate, for server use you want Testing, for advanced users you'd probably want Unstable.

Right now, since it's a new release you want to stick with Etch for the time being. After a release Testing can be very volatile. If your currently tracking Testing you want to edit your /etc/apt/sources.list and replace 'testing' with 'etch' for the time being.

If your running the now-old stable it'd probably be worth your time to stick with that before upgrading Etch so you can get the release notes specifying what issues your likely to encounter during a upgrade. So hold off until that is available.


If you a new user to Linux it would probably be better off taking a look at Ubuntu. Debian is definately not a 'out of the box' Linux distribution and requires decent amount of knowledge to customize. However if your adventurous and don't mind reading documentation then by all means try Debian.

If your a Ubuntu user that want something more stable or would like to setup a Linux server then Debian would be a very good thing to take a look at.

For desktop use Debian Etch doesn't support the latest and greatest hardware. Currently using 2.6.18 it won't have support for the very newest stuff. If you want to use Stable that's quite possible on newest hardware but it would require you to jump through hoops.

Debian's most unique features is support of non-PC platforms. It supports mainframes, PowerPC/POWER machines, Sparc machines, ARM machines, MIPS machines, as well as many others. If you have special 'server' hardware or a old Sun machine then Debian more then likely will support it.


KDE or Gnome?

AS far as Gnome vs KDE vs XFCE or whatever you'd like to use. Debian has all of it and officially supports all of it. Full Gnome, KDE, Fluxbox, Blackbox, XFCE or whatever you want is available with one command.



Were to obtain Debian?

Debian has many mirrors. One such one is:
http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/release/4.0_r0/

In there you have various different support architectures.
The ones most people will be interested in are:
i386 -- Regular Intel/AMD 32bit machines.
amd64 -- Regular Intel/AMD 64bit machines.
PowerPC -- Most Apple and IBM hardware.

Don't confuse Intel 64bit desktops and laptops with ia64. Ia64 is for Itanium platform, which is high-end big iron servers and supercomputers. Anybody here will want AMD64 if they are using any sort of PC.

Unless you have 3 or more gigs of RAM you will probably benefit most by staying with the 32bit version. However the 64bit version is just as stable and useful.

Say you pick i386. In that directory you will be presented by a large numbers of smaller directories. If you want to use cdroms pick out bt-cd. If you want to use dvds pick out bt-dvds. These are images that are being distributed via bittorrent and will give you the fastest downloads. Only use regular direct downloads if you can't use bittorrent for some reason. The torrents are well seeded and you can expect to have whatever you want fairly quickly.

When in doubt pick the bt-cd directory.

In there you will find a large number of available files.

The CD-1-21 is if you want the full Debian release. That is 21 cdroms of compressed software and source code. You only really want that if you need to do installations without internet access or you want to setup a local mirror for a college campus or something like that. 99% of the time you do not want to download the full installation. You will only ever use a tiny fraction of available software.

Most people will want to use the debian-40r0-i386-netinst.iso.torrent

What that is a minimal Linux system with the Debian installer. This is generally the quickest way to install Debian. It has the basic packages you need and depending on your configuration it will download the operating system directly from the internet as you go. This is much faster then downloading everything to cdrom first then installing it.

Aside from cdrom installations it's possible to install Debian from other Linux distributions. Using network booting on a LAN. Harddrive based installs and USB key based installs are also possible.


Debian documentation?

Note that Debian Etch is not quite aviable at this time. It's getting released today, this is links to testing manual.

Quick install documentation:
http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/en.i386/apa.html

Full install guide:
http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/

FAQ:
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/FAQ

Wiki:
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller

More Debian documentation:
http://www.debian.org/doc/

Websites?


http://www.debian-administration.org/
http://newbiedoc.berlios.de/wiki/Debian_newbie_documentation
http://www.debianhelp.org/
http://wiki.debian.org/


OS provided documentation?

After you install Debian there are a variety of available documentation on your harddrive and available using Debian's package management system, *-doc packages.

All packages have documentation aviable for them in one form or another.

If you go and look at /usr/share/doc/<packagename> you can find information provided with a program's source tarball as well as any Debian-specific changelogs, modifications, and additional documentation as well as configuration examples. Not all packages are like that, but most popular ones are.

Then there is extensive 'man' files as well as 'info' files.

 

[xSauronx]

:thumbsup:

noticed this on /. this morning

i just did a reinstall of etch friday

didnt expect id be updating so soon

 

[LuckyTaxi]

thank god ... hopefully my VPS will have etch images

 

[MedicBob]

Time to start the D/L Thanks.

 

[Brazen]

time to do a dist-upgrade!

 

[Seeruk]

Never had my bandwidth maxed out downloading a distro from ftp on it's release day before... good point before it's even installed

A good point you didnt mention is that it has always been (for me anyway) the most stable base for an e17 desktop... my favourite for a year or so.

 

[drag]

Here is the official announcement to the Debian mailing list. It has some interesting things.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-announce/debian-announce-2007/msg00002.html

They mention that it supports encrypted partitions out of the box. That it has new graphical installers.

It's also been translated to 58 different languages. So that's nice if your not a native english speaker.

Also they don't mention it, but now packages are signed, which is nice.

Here is the release notes:
http://www.debian.org/releases/etch/releasenotes

They have guides for preparing your system to upgrade from the older stable releases. What to do, how to recover, how to upgrade from a 2.4 to a 2.6 kernel and such things. And some known problems, like the watching out for udev issues.

So if you have a currently 'Sarge' server or desktop you want to upgrade you'd probably want to check that out first.

 

[Nothinman]

Nice, now sid can start progressing again. =)

Also they don't mention it, but now packages are signed, which is nice.

Technically that's not true. Secured apt is enabled by default now but the packages aren't signed, just the Packages file itself, which contains the list of packages and their checksums among other things, is signed so if a package is altered it's checksum shouldn't match the one in that file and since that file's signed it can be trusted as correct. There are a few downsides to that such as if the Packages file signature is messed up then that whole repo won't be trusted but that would most likely be a mirror issue and would be taken care of rather quickly, especially now that etch is stable.

So if you have a currently 'Sarge' server or desktop you want to upgrade you'd probably want to check that out first.

You should also at least check out the Potential Problems section for fresh installs too, for example if you have an AMD64 box with 4G or more memory you could have data corruption because of IOMMU problems on some hardware which hasn't been fixed upstream yet.

 

[Netopia]

Hmmm.... I was halfway through the setup of a Debian Etch (testing) AntiSpam/AntiVirus filter ... guess I'll scrap it and start fresh.

Thanks for the great post and info.

Joe

 

[Nothinman]

Hmmm.... I was halfway through the setup of a Debian Etch (testing) AntiSpam/AntiVirus filter ... guess I'll scrap it and start fresh.

It's no reason to stop unless there's a bug in the installer that you're hitting, just finish the installation and then update it.

 

[Netopia]

Well... I prefer KDE to gnome, and the net installer for the testing didn't have an option for it, just for "Desktop Environment" or something akin to that. I also wanted to install FreeNX, but when I tried to install, different dependencies weren't met, so I figured that it was because this was testing. This is my first foray into Debian.

So.... is installing KDE or XFCE really that simple, and will it show up in the login screen options? Also, do you think that FreeNX will work with the stable version?

One other thing is that I ran into problems with hwclock timing out unless run with the --directisa argument... I was hoping that perhaps this might be fixed in the stable release.

If I merely do the update, will it update everything?

Joe
the Debian noob

 

[Nothinman]

Well... I prefer KDE to gnome, and the net installer for the testing didn't have an option for it, just for "Desktop Environment" or something akin to that.

So don't use that option and then just 'aptitude install kde' after the initial installation, AFAIK the final disc will be the same.

So.... is installing KDE or XFCE really that simple, and will it show up in the login screen options?

Once installed, yes they both should be in the session options of the display manager.

Also, do you think that FreeNX will work with the stable version?

AFAICT there is no FreeNX package in Debian so it really depends on wherever you get the software from.

One other thing is that I ran into problems with hwclock timing out unless run with the --directisa argument... I was hoping that perhaps this might be fixed in the stable release.

No clue on that one, I've never had problems with my clock.

If I merely do the update, will it update everything?

Everything that you've installed from Debian repos, yes.

 

[Netopia]

The problem with hwclock appears to be related to newer machines. This is a brand new Dell server and it's one of the ones with the problem. The symptoms tend to be very slow boot and shutdown times because the system is trying to sync hctosys and systohc, respectively.

Joe

 

[Nothinman]

I guess that's good reason to stick with slightly older hardware and non-Dell crap. =)

 

[Netopia]

Well... to be honest, being able to put a machine into a remote customer's location that is new and has a vendor's 4 yr warranty makes my job a little easier. I don't mind building stuff, but at this point, especially if one qualifies for Enterprise pricing, it's hard to put together a system for the price that you can get one from Dell.

BUT... to each his own.

Joe

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: Netopia
Well... to be honest, being able to put a machine into a remote customer's location that is new and has a vendor's 4 yr warranty makes my job a little easier. I don't mind building stuff, but at this point, especially if one qualifies for Enterprise pricing, it's hard to put together a system for the price that you can get one from Dell.

BUT... to each his own.

Joe

I'm with you. I used to build my own servers, but anymore I just don't have the time and Dell's support is incredible. Personally, I've never had a problem with their hardware. Plus we're using blade servers now and it's kinda hard to build your own blades Although I am fine with Dell, though, for our blade server I would have rather gone with HP (for those who don't know, yes HP consumer products are mostly crap, but their servers are awesome), but such is life when you have RFP rules to abide by

 

[corinthos]

I'm downloading now and thinking about switching over from another distro, for various reasons. I was wondering if anyone could tell me how cleanly Debian packages uninstall.
One of the things that bothered me about Windows is that some programs you install and then try to uninstall end up leaving some things installed and don't cleanly and completely remove the program files. Does Debian have this same problem? I can understand and even appreciate leaving alone the data files you generate during the use of the program when uninstalling the program, but that's about all I'd want to remain when I do an uninstall.

Thanks in advance.

 

[n0cmonkey]

I think that Debian will leave data files and modified configuration files after an uninstall. Some or all of this can be taken care of with one of the apt commands though.

 

[nweaver]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
I think that Debian will leave data files and modified configuration files after an uninstall. Some or all of this can be taken care of with one of the apt commands though.

I think apt-get remove --purge packagename will do it. There is also options in aptitude and synaptic for a "complete" removal.

 

[Nothinman]

Well... to be honest, being able to put a machine into a remote customer's location that is new and has a vendor's 4 yr warranty makes my job a little easier. I don't mind building stuff, but at this point, especially if one qualifies for Enterprise pricing, it's hard to put together a system for the price that you can get one from Dell.

I'm not advocating building your own servers but I've had enough problems with Dell equipment that I would go for HP, IBM, etc over them any day.

 

[toekramp]

time to get on it!

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
I think that Debian will leave data files and modified configuration files after an uninstall. Some or all of this can be taken care of with one of the apt commands though.

Ya. By default it's going to leave configuration files and it won't overwrite them if you reinstall the software.

To get rid of configuration files you have to use the --purge option using apt-get or use the _ button in aptitude. Then that will get rid of files more aggressively.

I'm not advocating building your own servers but I've had enough problems with Dell equipment that I would go for HP, IBM, etc over them any day.

I figure if your setting up a server with a OS that is not officially supported by a vendor then that is pretty close to building your own system.

Stuff like that clock business. I am sure that Dell's attitude is that if it works fine in Windows then it's not their problem if it doesn't work in Debian. Which is fine by me; if your not paying them to support Debian, then why should they?

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Well... to be honest, being able to put a machine into a remote customer's location that is new and has a vendor's 4 yr warranty makes my job a little easier. I don't mind building stuff, but at this point, especially if one qualifies for Enterprise pricing, it's hard to put together a system for the price that you can get one from Dell.

I'm not advocating building your own servers but I've had enough problems with Dell equipment that I would go for HP, IBM, etc over them any day.

I'm sure IBMs are good, but man they are mad expensive!

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: drag

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
I think that Debian will leave data files and modified configuration files after an uninstall. Some or all of this can be taken care of with one of the apt commands though.

Ya. By default it's going to leave configuration files and it won't overwrite them if you reinstall the software.

To get rid of configuration files you have to use the --purge option using apt-get or use the _ button in aptitude. Then that will get rid of files more aggressively.

I'm not advocating building your own servers but I've had enough problems with Dell equipment that I would go for HP, IBM, etc over them any day.

I figure if your setting up a server with a OS that is not officially supported by a vendor then that is pretty close to building your own system.

Stuff like that clock business. I am sure that Dell's attitude is that if it works fine in Windows then it's not their problem if it doesn't work in Debian. Which is fine by me; if your not paying them to support Debian, then why should they?

Dell has always had great, official support for Redhat and SuSe. I wonder if this is a Debian-only problem, or if it is a kernel issue that has not been addressed yet. Maybe by the time Redhat 5 is out, this will be taken care of.

 

[Nothinman]

I'm sure IBMs are good, but man they are mad expensive!

No doubt, but I'm not the one paying for it. =)

Dell has always had great, official support for Redhat and SuSe. I wonder if this is a Debian-only problem, or if it is a kernel issue that has not been addressed yet. Maybe by the time Redhat 5 is out, this will be taken care of.

Dell support was terrible everytime we used it and the onboard Broadcomm cards were oh so unreliable.