
Many
Linux fans know that
Debian Stable usually already lost the “b”
when it’s being released. ;-) What seems not so well known (especially
not by some DesktopBSD Marketing guy at last year’s
LinuxDay.at :-) is that
there is really a lot of people who really like this “stale” software
collection — because it’s rock solid — especially compared
to the ports in
FreeBSD or
DesktopBSD *evilgrin* which
unnecessarily follow every new feature upstream introduces. This is
really annoying in a server environment where you want as less changes
as possible when updates are necessary due to security issues. My
personal favourites here are Samba and CUPS.
*grmpf*
Although I belong to those people who run Debian Stable even on
brand-new hardware, I sometimes have to use the newest beta or alpha
versions of some software to get it even only running. And doing so is
fun but feels strange somehow, though. Currently I follow the
pre-releases of three software makers quite close, due to a new
laptop:
At the beginning of last semester I bought a brand-new Lenovo ThinkPad
T61 (2,2
GHz Intel Core2 Duo T7500, 4
GB RAM, 160
GB HD, 1440x900 14”
Widescreen)
without preinstalled operating system (possible
thanks to the
ETHZ
Neptun Project) and installed — of course — 64-bit
Debian Stable on it.
While the Debian Installer from
Etch worked fine even on such new
hardware, not all features worked out of the box because some
components were just too new.
So the first thing I did was installing 2.6.22 from
Backports.org, quickly moving
farther to vanilla 2.6.23. Nearly everything I needed worked except
the wireless network card. It needs the
iwlwifi driver
which is officially in the Linux kernel starting at the upcoming
2.6.24 (
said to be released during the next few days). So I
run 2.6.24 pre-releases on the laptop since the first release
candidate, always eagerly waiting for either the next RC or the final
release. (And 2.6.24 looks impressively stable to me — even
since the early release candidates. :-)
I even got the fingerprint reader working for login and sudo (but not
xscreensaver) using
libthinkfinger backported to Etch
from
Debian Experimental. I’m just not sure if this is a good idea
since the back of the screen already has enough of my fingerprints on
it. ;-)
The next software of which I’m currently running an alpha version is
64-bit
Opera 9.50 (
aka Kestrel, available at
snapshot.opera.com) because
no earlier Opera version is available for 64-bit Linuxes. Here I had
different experiences: The builds from October and November were
already quite stable, but since December it crashes usually several
times a day.
At work I also run the 64-bit Opera on my workstation, but stalled
updating it when I noticed that it became so unstable. So my Opera at
work has currently an uptime of nearly four weeks — and would
have probably more if I hadn’t rebooted my workstation in
Mid-December.
Somehow this hunting for new versions and eagerly waiting for every
new (pre-)release makes me really fidgety sometimes. And my
understanding for people doing this for there whole userland or even
operating system has grown, but I still prefer to have
stale but stable
software on all my productive machines, even on my laptop —
just with some few and handpicked
excpetions.
The third but less thrilling thing I’m following are nVidia drivers
for X. Since the free nv driver of X.org doesn’t support (and not only
just doesn’t know) my graphics card yet and
nouveau isn’t ready yet, I
run the
binary only and closed source driver from nVidia, waiting for
that one release which supports
Xen since I really would like to run a Xen guest with
Debian Unstable for testing purposes and package building on my
laptop. Until then I have to content myself with the much more
unwieldy
QEMU respectively
KVM.
Anyway, I’m very happy with the T61 and Debian Stable and can easily
connive at the few not (yet) perfect issues like missing Xen support
by nVidia, broken ad-hoc mode in the wireless card, no internal
card-reader (as announced in the Neptun specifications) and no native
serial port.
Some useful links regarding the subject of this post:
Now playing: Jean Michel Jarre — Rendez-vous à Paris