News About Debian and Its Derivatives
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-04-08 09:36:17 UTC
- Modified: 2014-04-08 09:36:17 UTC
Package Managers
Synaptic is a graphical package management program for apt. It provides the same features as the apt-get command-line utility with a GUI front-end based on GTK+. Most importantly, users can install, remove, upgrade and downgrade single and multiple packages.
16 years old and still ever changing: Not even the name remains stable. What used to be called "deity" was announced as "Apt", first released as "APT" [1], shipped as "apt-get" and "apt-cache", interpreted as "A Package Tool" and "Advanced Package Tool" and is now also available as "apt" … But the initial wisdom holds: "it's still a good word in its own right". And this word has surely influenced the way we manage our software on phones, servers and space stations.
“We need ensure that we cater to our users, and there's millions of them. From those running the latest software in unstable, to people who simply want a rock solid core release. The size of Debian is increasing, and will reach a point where we're unable to guarantee basic compatibility with other packages, or the length of time it takes to do so becomes exponentially longer, unless something changes,” said Neil McGovern.
Software
Mutter can replace Openbox in LXDE, and bring a modern, elegant look to your desktop. To experiment with it, install the software package and start it...
Comparison
Threehosts.com compares Mint, Ubuntu and Debian to show which is the best Linux Distribution.
All benchmarking for this article was done from the same Intel Core i7 4770K "Haswell" system with HD Graphics 4600, 16GB of RAM, and 120GB Samsung SSD 840. No hardware or settings changed between the clean installs of the different Linux distributions. The operating systems tested from this Intel Core i7 desktop were:
- Debian 7.4 "Wheezy" stable with the Linux 3.2 kernel, GNOME Shell 3.4.2.1, Mesa 8.0.5, and GCC 4.7.
- Debian 8.0 "Jessie" testing with the Linux 3.12 kernel, GNOME Shell 3.8.4, Mesa 9.2.2, and GCC 4.8.2.
- Debian "Sid" unstable with the Linux 3.13 kernel on top of the Jessie changes.
- Ubuntu 14.04 with the Linux 3.13 kernel, Unity 7.1.2 desktop, and Mesa 10.1-rc3.
Init Systems
Branches Debate
So there you have it. There is a simple summary for all of this:
Debian Stable if your first priority is a rock-solid system, and you don't necessarily need to support the very latest hardware. This is often the case if you are setting up a server of some sort, but it may also be true if you are going to use a bit older .system as a desktop workstation,
Debian Testing if you want or need to have the latest hardware support, kernel dvelopments and advanced filesystems
Derivative distributions if you want a lot of additional packages included in the base distribution, thus saving you the time and effort of installing and configuring them.
Installer
The Debian Installer team has just announced that the first Alpha build of the Debian 8 "Jessie" version is now available for download and testing.
Wheezy
The Debian project has just released the Live CD version of the recently launched Debian 7.4 in several separate images with various flavors.
“At the moment it seems likely that an extended security support timespan for squeeze is possible. The plan is to go ahead, sort out the details as as it happens, and see how this works out and whether it is going to be continued with wheezy. The rough draft is that updates will be delivered via a separate suite (e.g. squeeze-lts), where everyone in the Debian keyring can upload in order to minimise bottlenecks and allow contributions by all interested parties," said Moritz Muehlenhoff in the official mailing list.
Derivatives
Parsix GNU/Linux, a live and installation DVD based on Debian, aiming to provide a ready-to-use, easy-to-install desktop and laptop-optimized operating system, is now at version 6.0 Test 3 and is ready for testing.
Tails, The Amnesic Incognito Live System, version 0.23, is out.
Clonezilla Live is a Linux distribution that is designed to do bare metal backup and recovery on a wide variety of file systems and operating systems. It's very similar to other older cloning software, such as True Image or Norton Ghost.
The distribution is based on Debian and, as usual, the developers have upgraded the underlying GNU/Linux operating system and the release is now based on the Debian Sid repository, as of March 31, 2014.
Grml is not a regular Linux distribution for regular users. It’s packed with a sysadmin's favorite tools and allows admins with packages for installation, deployment and system rescue. This latest version has been dubbed Ponywagon and it comes with a couple of interesting features.
LMDE
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Only the Cinnamon and MATE editions of Linux Mint Debian Edition 201403 were released. If there’s going to be a KDE edition, it probably will be released in about a month. Prominent features of this release are support (in the installer) for computers with UEFI firmware and for GPT partitions. But the installer, as you will read in the next section, is the weakest part of this distribution, a problem it shares with most distributions that are based on Debian. And the cause of that weakness is that it does not use the Debian Installer. Rather, the installer is a custom application that does not belong on a modern desktop operating system.
When I wrote about the Linux Mint Debian Edition Release Candidate last week, I promised to look at it in more detail when the final release was made.
Knoppix
Version 7.3.0 of Knoppix is based on the usual picks from Debian stable (wheezy) and newer Desktop packages from Debian/testing and Debian/unstable (jessie). It uses kernel 3.13.0 and xorg 7.7 (core 1.15.0) for supporting current computer hardware.
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