Debian Releases a new Stable Distribution: Sarge
Posted by Steve on Mon 6 Jun 2005 at 05:12
The new Debian stable release, codenamed Sarge, has officially been released today.
Several years of development since the last stable release, Woody, was released on the 9th of July, 2002 over a thousand developers around the world have helped make this release possible.
As this release has been in the making for such a long time there are many major software upgrades included in this release - as well as a large number of new packages. The combination of the two should make backports a thing of the past for at least the next few months.
Highlights of the release include the following, and more can be read within the Sarge Release Announcement :
- K Desktop Environment 3.3 (KDE)
- The GNOME desktop environment 2.8
- XFree86 4.3.0
- Mozilla 1.7.8
- Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.2
- Firefox 1.0.4
- PostgreSQL 7.4.7
- MySQL 4.0.24 and 4.1.11a
- GNU Compiler Collection 3.3.5 (GCC)
- Linux kernels version 2.4.27 and 2.6.8
- Apache 1.3.33 and 2.0.54
If you are aiming to upgrade your system you should make sure you read the Debian Sarge Release Notes - these contain important instructions regarding the upgrade from Woody.
If you do not wish to have your system upgraded you should make sure that you change your sources.list file in /etc/apt - rather than reading:
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free ... ...
You should change each occurance of "stable" to "woody". If you do not do this you will find your system upgraded to Sarge the next time you run "apt-get update; apt-get upgrade".
Once you've upgraded your system to Sarge you can start to take advantage of many of the newer pieces of software available. For example:
If you're feeling cautious it might be worthwhile postponing the upgrade for a few days to track newly reported bugs.
Whilst every effort has been made to test upgrading to the release by a large number of users there may still be corner-cases out there which could cause you problems. Reading the available upgrade-reports might be prudent if you suspect your setup, or hardware, might cause problems.
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go debian!
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OK it looks like /. linked here - I wonder if the site will hold up ..?
I've setup other sites in the past which specifically needed to take a good slashdotting, but for this one I didn't do anything specific to counter it - apart from install mod-dosevasive.
I wonder if now is a good time to offer my services for remote administration, or setup? I code in perl, c, c++, know Apache intimately and am experienced in all the things you'd expect a systems administrator to know - with a good background of Debian specific knowlege too...
Steve
-- Steve.org.uk
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$ apt-cache search dosevasive $
Shame :( But a good tip - I'll certainly be looking into it.
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It will be part of Debian's unstable branch shortly I believe - there's been an ITP filed.
In the meantime you can build it from source in an identical fashion to the mod-security module with apxs fairly easily.
Steve
-- Steve.org.uk
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should be exciting.
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Anyway, great job debian team! Keep up the good work and maybe the next release won't take 2 years ;)
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Testing was previously the Sarge pre-release, not Sarge itself. Testing will now be the Etch pre-release / staging area.
If you stay with testing you'll soon diverge away from Sarge, although nothing drastic is likely to happen immediately...
Steve
-- Steve.org.uk
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# SARGE
deb http://the.earth.li/debian/ sarge main contrib non-free
# SID
deb http://the.earth.li/debian/ sid main contrib non-free
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
I agree that it's advisable to do it this way, so that one can decide when exactly to upgrade from one release to the next, if at all.
The more I learn about Debian, the more it impresses me how things are so well thought out.
Anton
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Hummmm...
Ubuntu and Fedora are able to do that do that in 6 months....
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But the distribution is about stability not a mass of barely working new features.
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Also Debian is a highly stable distribution because it fixes many problems before releases instead of fixing them after the release.
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Is it advisable to downgrade from unstable to sarge?
tks.
seth
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Package downgrades are not really supported by dpkg, so I'd hesitate in suggesting its' a good thing to do.
Steve
-- Steve.org.uk
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Hmm I guess I'm stuck with unstable. Unless I backup my data and reinstall stable.
Great resource for debian community! It's about time, there was a resource in a non-militant form! :)
I'd like to get around to posting my tips on here..
again excellent friendly resource.
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