Image via WikipediaStability
The Debian devs spent an extra five months past the planned launch date making sure that the system is as bug free as possible. Lenny will be supported for two more releases, translating into about four years of support.A Butt-load of Packages
There are somewhere in the range of 14,000 packages (miksuh corrects my number to 22,000), supposedly more than any other distribution. If you're used to Ubuntu, you'll find just about every package in Ubuntu's repositories are in Debian's, plus some.Because of the long freeze during bug fixing, though, many of these packages are behind the six-month distributions. They are actually mostly on par with Ubuntu 8.04. The highlights are:
- Kernel 2.6.26
- Gnome 2.22 (mostly -- Nautilus and the panels are from 2.20 because of gvfs problems).
- KDE 3.5.9 and 4.1
- XFCE 4.2
- LXDE 0.3.2.1
- Hildon 2.0.7 (a desktop for embedded systems)
- Xorg 7.3
- OO.o 2.4
- Firefox 3
- Apache 2.9
- MySQL 5.0.51
- PHP 5.2.6
- Ruby 1.8 and 1.9
- Python 2.5.2
- eGroupware 1.4
- Horde 3.2 (groupware platform)
- Xen and KVM
- Adobe Flash
- Some hardware firmware, especially for wireless devices.
- Non-free programs like Parallels in the Canonical Partner repository.
Many Platforms
Debian supports a huge number of architectures. In addition to the normal x86 and AMD64 arches, there is support for armel, mips, sparc, and others. Debian will run on just about anything, which is why Debian already runs on the G1 Android phone.An Easy (But Textual) Installer
Debian's installer doesn't look nearly as pretty as Ubiquity (Ubuntu's installer), but it is actually the same one present in the Ubuntu alternate install. Very few questions require any thought, and the default answers are acceptable for most normal installs.
What the textual installer gives Debian is cross-platform installability. The same installer works on all supported platforms.
As miksuh pointed out in the comments, and I completely forgot, there are other options:
- A GTK installer which has exactly the same dialogs as the text editor, and
- You can install from the Debian LiveCD project.
Desktop Choice
As mentioned in the first section, Lenny offers a number of great desktops to choose from. In addition to Gnome, KDE, XFCE, and LXDE, there are truly minimal choices included EvilWM, DWM, FVWM(-Crystal), IceWM, TinyWM and Window Maker. Debian is anything you want it to be.Security
Debian is secure. Neede patches are now applied before the first boot. Packages use GCC hardening in some cases. Other hardening has occured, setuid inaries have been reduced, and the number of open ports has been furhter limited.![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=71993939-efa5-43c8-8671-3bcfa99f8a4a)
"There are somewhere in the range of 14,000 packages,"
ReplyDeleteNo that's not true. In the official main Debian lenny repository there is ~ 22300 packages. Unofficial contrib repository has ~ 300 packages and non-free repository has ~ 400 packages.
Even Debian Etch has more than 18000 packages in the main repository.
I have to make some other corrections too:
ReplyDelete"Because of the long freeze during bug fixing, though, many of these packages are behind the six-month distributions. They are actually mostly on par with Ubuntu 8."
Actually Debian was frozen in the end of July, several months after the ubuntu 8.04 was released. So lots of packages are newer than those in the ubuntu 8.04, Due to delays in the Lenny development some packages are are even newer than those in the ubuntu 8.10.
"What's missing from the line-up?
* Adobe Flash"
Adobe Flash is not in the Debian main repository, but opensource implementation of Flash called swfdec is installed by default.
Adobe Flash for the Lenny is available from the debian-multimedia.org repository. It will be available from the backports.org repository too soon after the lenny is released.
" * Non-free programs in the Canonical Partner repository."
Remember that Debian has it's own unofficial non-free and contrib repositories. There is also debian-multimedia.org repository which could be called as the "unofficially official Debian multimedia repository". it's not part of the Debian distribution, but most of the Debian desktop users use it anyway.
"An Easy (But Textual) Installer
Debian's installer doesn't look nearly as pretty as Ubiquity (Ubuntu's installer), but it is actually the same one present in the Ubuntu alternate install."
Debian has had graphical installer since Debian Etch was released in 2007. If you want to use graphical mode when installing Etch, you have to use special installer boot option which tells the installer to use graphical mode.
Debian lenny has new installer menu which lets you easily select graphical installer whitout typing any boot options. Debian still has the text based installer too. it's up to user if he/she wants to use text based or graphical installer.
Debian installer is now also integrated to official Debian liveCD and Debian installation can also be started from the Windows.
In the unofficial debian.multimedia.org repository there currently is ~ 300 packages for the Debian Lenny.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the corrections and clarifications.
ReplyDeleteI saw the number of packages referenced in the Debian-Publicity list as 14,000 the other day and took it as fact without checking. FAIL.
I had completely forgotten about the graphical install, despite having used it before. I missed it this time because I normally do a network install. To be fair, though, it appears to be exactly the same as the text installer using GTK2.
When I talked about "Partner" I meant that Opera, Parallels, and VMWare are available through the Canonical partner repo with a tick on Software Sources. Debian will never have these packages because they're not Free.
Flash and other non-free codecs are, of course, available from third-party repos, but they are not available in vanilla Lenny. Lenny uses Gnash instead.
I have never used the Debian LiveCD, but you're right that it is an official Debian project. ISOs for Gnome, KDE, XFCE, and LXDE are available here:
http://live.debian.net/cdimage/lenny-builds/current/i386/iso-cd/
There are also no-gui and rescue CDs.
You can download those pre-built live images, or you can create your own Live cd.
ReplyDelete# aptitude install live-magic
Live-magic is wery easy to use graphical frontend for the live-helper. You can eg. select the desktop (gnome/kde/xfce), locale, live image type: eg. CD and if to integrated debian installer or not.
This is getting a bit offtopic :-) But...
ReplyDelete"When I talked about "Partner" I meant that Opera, Parallels, and VMWare are available through the Canonical partner repo with a tick on Software Sources. Debian will never have these packages because they're not Free."
Well Xen, KVM and VirtualBox-OSE are in the official Debian repository, so i don't see that as a big problem. It could be problem only if you really need Parallels or Vmware and really can't use free alternatives.
Opera does maintain their own Debian repository, also for the Lenny. Ofcourse it's 3rd party repository, and not part of the Debian. But I don't think it makes any big difference. i don't think ubuntu has much control over stuff in their partner repository either.
deb http://deb.opera.com/opera/ lenny non-free
I'm downloading the Gnome live CD right now. Thanks for the recommendation.
ReplyDeleteI wasn't trying to make any statements about Ubuntu vs. Lenny when mentioning what's available in the standard repos. I'm using Lenny on the desktop and Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04 in VirtualBoxOSE. My Pentium D doesn't support KVM, sadly, or I'd probably be using that.
Debian has a huge number of third-party repos, Hardy may have more (or not), but the number of available packages for both releases is absolutely huge. Because of the timing of the Lenny freeze, there are probably even a lot of packages which are intended for one that will work on the other (definitely not recommended unless you want to take a big chance on hosing stuff up, though).
Lenny is going to be great, but there's no doubt that it takes just a little more work to geta Gnome desktop up and running 100% than Ubuntu does. Once it's up, though, I don't have random weirdness I get on Ubuntu updates. I like stable.
The use of the tried-and-true ESD is a big plus for me so that my audio works consistently.
"I wasn't trying to make any statements about Ubuntu vs. Lenny"
ReplyDeleteYep, that was not my intention either. :-)
I've updated the post with your corrections and comments, giving you credit, of course. ;)
ReplyDelete