Aye aye Sarge

Debian’s Sarge release has finally been frozen and there is actually a timeline for it’s release.

For those of you unaware of this distribution of Linux, Debian tends to do extensive multi-year testing before actually releasing anything. Their current stable release is Woody 3.0 and was released on July 19th, 2002. Some 3 years later Sarge “3.1″ is going to be released.

Other distros like Redhat, Slackware, Mandrake, <insert-distro-name-here>, usually come out with releases a lot sooner, but also end up having to provide patches for things that are invariably broken.

Debian runs under the premise the each of their releases is stable enough to be run largely unchanged until the next release comes out. The only caveat with this theory is, of course, the security fixes that you might need for individual packages as issues are found and fixed. This is not a bad theory for people who want a distribution of Linux to run without constant administration.

For those who like the structure of Debian, but don’t want to wait for years between each release, definitely check out Ubuntu. Ubuntu is based on a Debian core but promises (in theory) 6 month release cycles and is far more up-to-date than Debian will ever be at any given time.

I switched over from using Redhat 9.0 Shrike to Ubuntu 5.04 Hoary recently and have to say that I was very impressed with the distribution. I thought about going to Fedora but as I’ve been using Debian at work for sometime, I really liked a bunch of it’s tools and wanted them. So, to me, Ubuntu was the perfect answer.

Cheers

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