Debian

Debian 3.1, codenamed Sarge, has been released on Monday after nearly three years of constant development. Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system which supports a total of eleven processor architectures, ranging from palmtops and handheld systems to supercomputers, and on nearly everything in between, and the installation is available in about thirty languages, just to give you an idea about the size of Debian.

This release includes a number of up-to-date large software packages, such as the K Desktop Environment 3.3 (KDE), the GNOME desktop environment 2.8, the GNUstep desktop, XFree86 4.3.0, GIMP 2.2.6, Mozilla 1.7.8, Thunderbird 1.0.2, Firefox 1.0.4, Perl 5.8.4 and much more.

The upgrade of my firewall took over one hour and went reasonably well, though not as smooth as anticipated : the upgrade process wanted to remove some packages, but that was quickly sorted out. Shorewall and Squid had their minor problems as they were not trivially upgradable, but these issues are now solved too. There's only one problem left with pppd and a deprecated configuration setting, but that doesn't interfere with a normal operation.

Debian has been known to be the NetBSD of Linux : it runs on 11 different computer architectures ranging from embedded devices over personal computers to mainframes. But this complex range of archs to be supported makes realeasing a new version of Debian painstakingly slow. The upcoming next release, Debian 3.1 aka Sarge, has been delayed already a few times. But now, release manager Steve Langasek has announced that Debian support will be dropped for all but four computer architectures.
Among the reasons cited for doing this are improving testing
coordination, 'a more limber release process' and ultimately a shorter release cyle. Luckily, this is only a proposal, but it indicates about how some of the leading people in the Debian project feel about the current situation. Personally, I think the proposal is insane, and that one should better investigate about how the number of packages could be
reduced. Dropping Sparc would make me quite unhappy, and frankly, I don't see how this is compatible with the Debian Social Contract. It's all about the user, wasn't it ?

Update : from Steve's original post, I can make out that dropping archs would only be for stable and testing, so there still would be some kind of support. Still, having no stable (server) environment for Sparc could be painfull.

Falko Timme has written a tutorial describing how to create Debian packages with checkinstall. Checkinstall is a nice tool to create simple .deb-packages that you can use in your local network (e.g. if you have to install the same piece of software on multiple computers running Debian). It lets you compile and install software from the sources like before, but with the difference that you end up with a Debian package which also means that you can easily uninstall the software you just compiled by running dpkg -r!

Debian has three available versions : a stable one, which is released about every two years, a testing one, which serves as a playground for testing new stable releases, and a development version, which changes every day.
People who run the "unstable" version receive every day (or every time they choose for it) new software versions. A good place to track new versions is the Debian 'new' queue, which shows packages in the pipe before entering unstable.

There are plenty of Linux live CDs out there, but few carry the utilities a Unix sysadmin wants for his daily job. Like minicom, for example, to connect a laptop with a Unix machine. Enter Debian from scratch, a live distribution, but which now also has entered in the Debian distribution, as it contains the dfsbuild package, which allows you to create your own Debian from Scratch custom live CD easily.

Oh, and by the way, I really like software which prints out messages like :

...
P: Configuring package shellutils
P: Doing something important

The simple mechanism Debian has for performing package upgrades, apt-get, is often touted as a good thing and indeed it is. But sometimes you will have a package installed that you absolutely do not want to be upgraded. If, for example, you don't wish to upgrade the package apache then you should run the following command as root:

echo "apache hold" | dpkg --set-selections

To remove the hold run this:

echo "apache install" | dpkg --set-selections

Debian-administration.org is a site meant for administrators of Debian machines, initially set up by Steve Kemp. It's packed with tips and tricks about the innards of the Debian system.

I don't have the time to apt-get regularly, so I get usually a few hundred packages that have to be upgraded. In some cases, apt wants to remove something you rather like to keep on your system. In that case, you can check out the reason why with the following command line option :


apt-get -o Debug::pkgProblemResolver=1 ...

Debian From Scratch (DFS) is a single CD that is a full rescue CD capable of working with all major filesystems, LVM, software RAID, and even compiling a new kernel.

And, it's a cdebootstrap-based install CD that can install i386 woody, i386 sarge, i386 sid, and amd64 sid directly from CD, and whatever else from the 'net. The installation can best be described as "Gentoo-like".

Definitively need to play with this, though the documentation still is sparse...

Cool : there aren't so many Belgian developers who have their own blog, so it was a pleasant surprise to find out that Wouter Verhelst (fellow Linux geek and Debian developer) maintains his own LiveJournal.

Fabio Massimo Di Nitto reported that he was able to install Debian on a Sun Enterprise 10000 server via NFS-Root at Ericsson Telebit A/S. Such a Starfire machine contains up to 64 CPUs and can run several operating systems at the same time.

At work, I sysadmin a domain on such a StarFire, or E10K as we call it. Speaking of which, we bought a new toy : a Fujitsu PrimePower 450 server, the size of half a refrigerator. Contains only a rack with a 4U machine in it, though.