Etch: January 2010 Archives

Image above of the Debian Etch GNOME desktop from Wikimedia Commons. I always liked this version of the Debian swirl on the wallpaper.

I just saw the news that Debian Etch will no longer receive updates from the Debian Security Team as of Feb. 15, 2010.

As you may or may not know, the current Stable version of Debian is Lenny, which received that "Stable" designation on Feb. 15, 2009.

See the pattern? In the world of Debian, once a release is declared Stable, the previous release moves from Stable to what the project calls Old Stable, at which time it receives security patches for an additional year. That gives users a full year during which to upgrade to the current Stable distribution, which in case you haven't been reading closely is Lenny.

Truth time: I still have an Etch installation — an Apple PowerPC box, in fact. I'm not running the Etch drive, but it's still in the box waiting to be hooked up (I have the OS X drive connected and running). So if and when I hook the Debian drive up, I'd have to update the Etch installation, which hasn't seen an update in about a year, then dist-upgrade to Lenny (which I'm running on my main laptop as well as two other machines).

I remember Debian Etch fondly. It was released in April 2007, mere months after I started mucking around with Linux, and its 2.6.18 kernel played very well with the machines I ran for the next two years. I did run other things between then and now (Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Slackware, CentOS, OpenBSD, Wolvix, Puppy), but for reasons that one can deduce from the past 100 entries in this blog, I'm back in the Debian camp with Lenny (and not feeling all that good about my Intel video-running laptop and the future of Linux and Xorg, meaning I'll be sticking with Lenny for quite some time).

Just as one can have a very good experience running the Debian Testing branch, Squeeze, right now, with no date certain for going Stable, one could have run Etch that same way before April 2007. But if you're the conservative type (and I usually am when it comes to my old machines and the software they run) and you began running Debian Etch in April 2007, the release's life from Stable through Old Stable to the end of its patched life will be roughly 2 years, 10 months (unless I miscounted my fingers). Not bad for a "long-term release," which in the world of Debian is EVERY release.

I've been approaching the point over the past year where I'm becoming much less a free, open-source software-using hobbyist, trying out the various Linux distributions and BSD projects to see how they run, and am now pretty much a regular user of one open-source operating environment, with productivity and stability being the only thing that matters.

And if you've read the past 20 or so entries, you know that means I'm running one of the driest distributions around, Debian Lenny. (You can pretty much follow my whole OS progression from 2007 to the present in the blog archives.)

In the last week I've gone from the Los Angeles Daily News' Web developer to online editor, which means the ramp up in my work that I've experienced over the past many months is getting that much more intense.

I don't have time to fix broken networking, video, hot-plugging, screen-saving, kernel mode setting, or any of the other things that have gone wrong since my use of OpenBSD 4.4 led into the Xorg disaster that was 4.5 in May 2009, leading me to Ubuntu 8.04 soon thereafter.

My mistake was upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10, where things really started to go badly. After the hardware on which I was running Ubuntu Karmic took an unrelated turn for the worse (LCD cracking onto death), I took that as a sign to return to the OS I've used on more machines and probably for more time than any other: Debian GNU/Linux (Debian uses the GNU, so I will too, for the moment anyway).

I started running Debian Etch soon after it went stable in April 2007, and in December 2009, I again returned to the Stable branch of Debian, now Lenny (yes, every Debian release is named after a "Toy Story" character)

Sure the temptation is there to upgrade to the current Debian Testing branch (code-name Squeeze), but mindful of all the trouble I've had with my 2001/02-era Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop, especially with its Intel video chip, the need to stay productive with a minimum of tinkering is keeping me in the Debian Lenny camp.

You see, I expected to have some configuration work to do when I ran OpenBSD 4.4 as my primary desktop from May through November 2009. But when I made the move to Ubuntu, with its "Linux for Human Beings" mantra, I figured a whole lot would be done for me by the system itself (and, by extension, the developers who put it together).

But whether it was my relatively aged hardware, the lack of luck in having Intel video (which is very, very common, by the way), or just the way it is, I ended up doing just as much configuration in Ubuntu as I did in the past for Debian Lenny when I used it during its Testing phase.

Except with Ubuntu I had to fix broken things not just with every six-month-release upgrade but often in between as package updates started to break things large and small.

With Debian Lenny, I figured everything out, got the laptop running as well as I could, and over the last month all I've been doing is using my computer. Sure I'd like the newer packages in Ubuntu (or Debian Squeeze, for that matter), but right now I just need to get work done, and between the large number of packages in the repository and the stable, staid and secure base system, Debian Lenny is doing the job.

Most of the time I'm not all that broken up about the older packages in Lenny. When it comes to my day-to-day, there's very little I can't do, and I appreciate not having to drop into uber-geek mode every time there's a kernel or Xorg update.

I'm not saying I won't use Ubuntu again. I still maintain one machine running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (and doing very well with it). I have three running Lenny exclusively, with my Mac G4/466 booting into Debian Etch on one drive, OS X 10.4 on the other.

And that doesn't mean I won't be back in OpenBSD on the desktop at some future time. Or FreeBSD.

But for now, it's Debian Lenny on my desktop.