Debian Lenny update: so far, much better, and we also have 'Etch and a half'

Now that Debian's current testing release, code name Lenny, has been frozen, we're this much closer to seeing Lenny become a Stable release, a milestone that is projected for September of this year. That would make it a year and four months after the current Stable release, Etch, was so designated in April 2007.

For those using Etch now, keep in mind that once Lenny becomes a Stable release, Etch will receive the designation Old Stable and continue to receive security patches for another year.

While on the subject of Etch, it's interesting to know that the install images have been updated, and along with that update comes a 2.6.24 kernel as an alternative to the 2.6.18 kernel that shipped with the initial release.

This new Etch, dubbed "Etch and a half" by the Debian team. With the new kernel comes additional hardware support. For details on the new packages and bug fixes, go to the release announcement.

I don't think that the decision to add hardware support to Etch at this stage has anything to do with Red Hat's similar move with its Enterprise Linux product, but it's interesting to see both distros going in this direction.

Back to Lenny: I still have 84 updates to do with Lenny, but I'm holding off for the moment because I'm at home, and when I start a big download, I tend to dominate our home DSL connection. My Netgear router tends to dedicate almost all of the bandwidth to the huge download, and my wife, Ilene, who is using the iBook G4 on this same router, can barely use Firefox.

I don't know if there's some kind of setting in the router I can tweak to more equitably share the bandwidth, and if there is, I'd sure like to know about it.

No, really ... back to Lenny: One of today's updates, which I will install later, is a new Abiword, which will go from version 2.4.6 to 2.6.4. I noticed considerable lengthening of the load times for Abiword in Puppy Linux 4, which uses an Abiword from the 2.5 series, over the 2.4.5 version in previous Puppy builds.

The $0 Laptop — a Gateway Solo 1450 with 1.3 GHZ Celeron processor and 1 GB of RAM — loads Abiword almost instantly, and I'll be anxious to see if that changes with this new version.

Since my last Lenny update, Firefox/Iceweasel 3.01 has been performing well. The "work offline" issue has been fixed, and I don't have to uncheck the box every time I start the browser.

One thing about Iceweasel 3 that I like is that the fonts have been cleaned up. Debian has been using what appear to be bitmapped fonts, as opposed to smoother varieties, for quite some time. These look better on LCD displays, but I've grown so used to them that I just leave them on the lone CRT monitor I still use.

But now that the fonts are looking so much better right out of the box, I'm just happy to see the screen looking better in Firefox.

OpenOffice 2.4 has been running very well, and I've been using it quite a bit more in Debian, Ubuntu and Windows, the latter of which needs an update from what I think is version 2.2. Since I don't get prompted for an upgrade on the Windows box, I get very lazy about doing them at all.

Going to Windows for a moment, my main Windows text editor, Notepad++, just pushed an update to me yesterday, and I did download and install it. I really am not good about checking Web sites for updated applications, and I do appreciate when the program itself tells me about a new version. Filezilla also does this in Windows, and of course Firefox and Thunderbird always notify me about updates.

Back to Lenny, again: When I wanted to test the KDE photo editor Krita and camera-interface digiKam, a ton of KDE apps and libraries came along for the ride. Since then I've also added Xfce, and as a result this Debian Lenny installation is quite large. I might want to redo it at some point with just the default GNOME desktop and Xfce added, just to keep it a little more manageable. But to the Debian Project's credit, things are working quite well, and many issues have been resolved on Lenny's road to Stable.

I'm still getting the "ghosting" in the upper panel in GNOME, but it does seem to go away at various times in the computing session. The same thing doesn't happen in Ubuntu, so that makes it a bit of a mystery.

And if I could figure out why and how Ubuntu is able to suspend/resume this Gateway laptop and make Lenny do the same thing, I'd probably use Lenny a whole lot more.

I'm pretty much a "Stable release" kind of person. I would've been content to use Etch all the way through up until Lenny goes Stable, but since Lenny ran so much better on this laptop, most importantly supporting the touchpad better, I decided to follow it through on the road to it becoming a stable Debian 5.0.

Since then, I've also tried Sidux, which takes the unstable Debian Sid and makes it easier to use as a desktop system. My time with Sidux was brief, but it pretty much flew on this system as a live CD loaded entirely into RAM.

I had planned to write a full Sidux review, and I still might, but since I'm more inclined to run a Stable release over Testing, I can't see any reason to run Unstable, even with the Sidux team smoothing the way. I just don't need the latest packages that quickly to get my work done.

Quick Ubuntu note: Being so "Stable," in my own mind at least, I had planned to continue running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS for at least a year if not two, but the upcoming Ubuntu 8.10 release promises something I really want: encrypted folders. Instead of encrypting whole drives or partitions, which Debian (and Ubuntu with the alternate installer) has done since Etch, the ability to only encrypt what is really "sensitive" is something that I could really use. Such an ability would speed up the system, since there will be much less to unencrypt, and it would also make it easier to choose to use or not use encryption.

So will I upgrade when October arrives? I'm not sure yet. 8.04 runs so well on this laptop that I'm loathe to mess with it.

Related:
Debian mailing list announcement of Lenny freeze
Sidux 2008-2 release notes
"Etch and a half" announcement