Debian 6 debuts its long term support period
June 16th, 2014
The Debian project is pleased to announce that the "Long Term Support (LTS)" infrastructure to provide security updates for Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 (code name "squeeze") until February 2016 is now in place. Users of this version should follow the instructions from the LTS wiki page to ensure that they get the LTS security updates.
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We've had the door open for a while now, and we've put up a number of articles about Operating systems but the discussion has been rather light.
Have we just gotten mellow about the options? Are you waiting for a review of Windows 8 to plaster the pages with your disgust?
Are we at a point where all of the options are no better than the others?
Where has all the passion gone?
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/04/01/1514223
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/04/28/1457224
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/06/18/0221230
(Score: 4, Informative) by Urlax on Wednesday June 18 2014, @01:26PM
2 years ago, I bought a motherboard (AMD E350 'APU') and build a system with 3x2TB and a small laptop drive to boot.
because the processor was onboard, the board + ram was just under €100,- slapped it inside a case and installed squeeze.
We use it as our server. The uptime was around 120 days, when the first reboot was due to power failure.Later, I went on vacation and shut the system down. It would run until the next holiday, and it still runs terrific. runs rtorrent inside an tmux session, so now it handles all our torrents,files,DBs, printers, scanner and home automation.
I still need to upgrade to Debian 7 (wheezy), but because it runs so super stable, barely needs maintenance (last week i decided to dust off the fans, but thats it), I never got around to it.
also because it's so superstable, most packages are a little outdated. it's not much of a problem, but i had to compile rTorrent from source, because the debian package did not include xmlRpc.
(Score: 2, Informative) by present_arms on Wednesday June 18 2014, @02:44PM
Pretty much the same as me, the way I see it, unless there is a real problem with hardware I can't see the problem with it just updating in the background. It's never let me down as of yet. It even hosts my /home partition via nfs for the other machines i use. Debian really is just rock solid.
http://trinity.mypclinuxos.com/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 18 2014, @02:53PM
Glad to see Unicode support is working strongly; assume that is EUR based on the German formatting.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 18 2014, @04:01PM
This summary is a confusing... something announced to be "Long Term"
that last to 1.5 year from now... 1.5 year is not a long time/term...
I would say 10 years is a normal time and 20 years is a long time, personally I prefer things that last a long time.
What should have been mentioned in the summary is that Debian 6.0 was released 2011, so its support is (not very long but I guess usable) 5 years.
(Score: 1) by oostertoaster on Wednesday June 18 2014, @08:39PM
I agree the terminology is confusing, but it's not the summary's fault, it's the terminology that Debian used. Probably more accurate to think of it as Debian 6 shifting to "Extended Support" or something.
(Score: 1) by khedoros on Thursday June 19 2014, @09:51PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 18 2014, @10:10PM
I'm confused as to why you need to add new repositories to apt-sources in order to get the updates. Why not put the updates in the regular squeeze repositories?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Marand on Thursday June 19 2014, @04:33AM
Most likely to avoid hitting the user with unexpected behaviour. If you want the LTS squeeze, you opt in by adding the repo. Otherwise, you either stick with what you've got or move to the next stable. Everything they do with regard to distribution upgrades tends to be cautious like that.
Consider how they handle dist upgrades, for example:
In addition to having their code names (wheezy, squeeze, jessie, sid, etc.) they maintain aliases that don't change: oldstable, stable, testing, unstable. You can get automatic updates from one stable release to another by setting your repo to "stable" instead of "squeeze", and some will want that, but they don't default to that, because it can introduce larger changes to the system than you'd expect.
Within a release they're separated, too: distname, distname-updates, distname-backports. You choose if you want updates or not, and what sort (just security fixes, or new versions of software).
It's all about control, rather than forcing updates on you.
(Score: 1) by pranith on Friday June 20 2014, @02:04AM
Ubuntu provides the lts release with updated kernels regularly. I wish debian would do the same for hardware enablement.