Debian Lenny is out and ....
 

It took the usual little-bit-less-than two years for the next Debian version to be released, but if you look at the release notes, an impressive milestone has been passed. I wonder if there are any other distro's which support not less than 12 processor architectures. The long release time was not really a problem for me, on desktop and laptop machines I ususally follow testing anyway. Now that Lenny has become stable I can think about moving my servers to Lenny as well. In short, I am proud that I may consider myself as member of the Debian users community.

Huge achievments have been made in support of various hardware items which 2 years ago were not invented yet, or where the drivers were not working well. Also in applications like Office 2.4 improvements have been made which makes the Linux desktop more useful and less difficult to use and configure.

With these two paragraphs above I haven't stated anything new, did I? It is also about 2 years ago that Windows Vista was released. Correct me if I am wrong, I don't follow the Windows release cycles that closely. The opposite has been achieved on that platform, Vista can be looked at as a decrease in performace as compared to XP in many aspects like speed, hardware support, driver problems, user interface, stupidity, configuration and no 64-bits version while doesn't run on anything less than 2 GB RAM

If Debian could release such a beautiful version after 2 years of hard work, I am seriously wondering what the next Windows release will be this time. As it is advertised, Windows 7 should be less resource intensive, and should solve a lot of problems experienced with Vista. So where is the progress in the Seattle camp? If Windows 7 behaves more like a usable OS, and Debian went up in the above mentioned issues, the two platforms must have grown closer, isn't it?

jlinkels

I read an article last week that Microsoft plans to offer free upgrades to windows 7 for people that purchase machines with Vista on them from OEMs. I'm wondering what the start and end dates for the free upgrade program will be, probably no more than 3 months prior to the release of Windows 7 and it will be a line item option you have to select when purchsing the system. Much like the free upgrades to Vista were handled.

Also amazing is 2 years after the release of Vista you can still purchase a PC with Windows XP Pro becuase of the huge backlash against Vista from corporate users.. Dell currently charges you extra for the priviledge of Upgrading from Vista to XP on your purchases.. heh Money well spent if you ask me. :)

I too am happy Lenny was finally released, the increased hardware support alone between Etch and Lenny is impressive. I haven't run into any show stoppers with the upgrade either. I do wish a few packages were newer such as OpenOffice was version 3.x instead of 2.4 a few items like that.. nothing that would make me swith to another distro though..

Why not just install OO 3.x? Or is there some issue with Debian that prevents that?

Yes That would be easy enough to do. I have a couple systems I leave as stable so they can easily get security updates.. we'll call it just being lazy.

I see 3 is in unstable at the moment, so I imagine it will be pushed into squeeze in the near future. it will probably also end up in backports for lenny. so there should be several options soon enough.

I also don't feel the obsessive need to have the 'latest and greatest' of every package or distro out there.. otherwise I would be running Ubuntu or Fedora I'm sure. :)

Not to take away any credit of the Debian dev's of their accomplishment, but for me, I'll stick to Etch for a little longer. I've seen enough issues raised here and elsewhere when users upgrade their machines to Lenny to be comfortable. It looks like a bumpy transition which really is a shame. Next to that, Lenny has some issues that prevented me from adopting it earlier (when it was near Stable a few months ago), mostly related to Gnome and bloated dependencies. I doubt those have been addressed as Lenny was practically frozen by then (and I didn't contact the Debian dev's about it, in the knowledge that a single complaint isn't going to change anything...).

Just this: I have the experience that upgrading from Stable to Testing can be (extremely) bumpy, especially if Testing is nearing Freeze, because at that moment the differences are most relevant. It might be worth trying again on a non-production machine.

I don't have experience with the bloatedness of Gnome, but it is not the first time I hear this. That's not good.

jlinkels

I had exactly one problem with the etch->lenny upgrade: my propietary UPS monitor daemon started segfaulting.

I was quite lucky with my transition from Etch------>Lenny. I did a dist-upgrade on 5 boxes and only one upgrade failed ( I ended up doing a clean install with the Lenny RC1 netinstall iso). All in all a smooth transition.
I have 3 older Etch boxes that I will leave alone for awhile, they're Pll units. I think Etch will be supported for quite some time.

The problem (it was like this before, not sure now anymore) with testing is that some packages verson might be allowed to go from unstable to testing but then when a big bug is found, it would go back to unstable.

Hehe - tried that with a ooold netinstall CD the other day.OMFG.

On the other hand stable to unstable with a up-to-date CD worked fine.
There are people insisting that unstable is more stable that testing anyway.

Now I am using debian etch
Broadband connections is there ( with download limit of 2500MB)

I wish to upgrade to lenny

can I do it by net within my download limit

approximate size of package?

Maybe some magazines in your area will have a cd attached in the next weeks?

Update you /etc/apt/sources.list so the Lenny repositories will be used instead of Etch.

On the command line do
Apt will calculate the amount of downloads for you.

If download limit is a problem, do:
This will only download the packages without installing. Interrupt the process as often as you like and restart it again when it suits you. Once all packages have been downloaded, do the dist-upgrade without the -d option. Then the upgrade willbe performed without downloading.

jlinkels

I've done a few dist upgrades from Etch to Lenny. It depends on how much you have installed on Etch. If memory serves my last upgrade ended up downloading 800 MB. So that would be under your 2500 MB limit.

also you can make a simulation:
aptitude -s full-upgrade

no action will be taken and you can even run this as normal user

He must install the Lenny versions of dpkg/apt-get/aptitude/debian-archive-keyring first. Then he can do the dist-upgrade, though it's recommended to do upgrade then dist-upgrade.