The wait is over. After months of wrangling and various delays, Debian’s
new GNU/Linux distribution, code-named Sarge, has been officially
released.
Members of the Debian community, including Ian Murdock and Bruce Perens, praised the release and vowed that the
wait won’t be as long next time.
Sarge has been in development for nearly three years since its
predecessor Woody was first released. It supports 11 different chip
architectures ranging from the common x86 to IBM’s
S390, Sun SPARC and HP Alpha.
Among the long list of new features in
Sarge, and likely the first that most users will notice, is the new Debian
installer.
The installer provides an easy-use mechanism to properly install
Debian, which some had previously argued was somewhat less than friendly,
especially in comparison to installers like Red Hat’s Anaconda or SUSE’s
YAST.
Sarge is also notable in that it is the first Debian release to
officially include OpenOffice.org (in this case version 1.1.3). The usual
Linux/open source suspects of KDE (version 3.3), GNOME (version 2.8),
Firefox (1.04), MySQL (4.0.24 and 4.1.11a), GCC (3.3.5), Python (2.3.5 and
2.4.1), Perl (5.8.4), Samba (3.0.14) and Apache (1.3.33 and 2.0.54) are
among the hundreds of updated applications this release includes.
The Debian Sarge release was originally expected
in September but was delayed because of a wide range of issues.
In April, the Debian community elected a new Debian Project Leader (DPL) who pledged to do whatever he could to get
Sarge out the door.
Sarge’s delay helped partially fuel the success of
other Debian-based distributions, in particular Ubuntuas users wanted the latest Debian but didn’t want to wait for the
official Sarge release.
Ubuntu’s CTO Matt Zimmerman does not think that Sarge’s release will
affect Ubuntu very much in terms of the development for the next Ubuntu
release (5.10, due in October). However he did note the significance of
Sarge’s release for the whole Debian community.
“It is, of course, a great moral victory for the Debian community, and when
Debian is strengthened, this benefits Ubuntu as well,” Zimmerman told
internetnews.com. “It is also possible that the release will create new
opportunities for collaboration between Debian and Ubuntu, because at least
for a time we will be in a similar phase of our release cycle.”
The delay and long release cycle for Debian Sarge was a cause of much
anxiety in the Debian world. Though according to open source luminary and
former DPL Bruce Perens, Sarge was worth the wait.
“Sure, it’s worth the wait, but we don’t plan on having that sort of wait
again,” Perens told internetnews.com. “It’s annual releases for Debian from now on.”
Debian founding father, Ian Murdock also felt the pain of waiting for
Sarge’s official release.
“What Sarge is, is less important than the fact that it finally is,
Murdock told internetnews.com. “The lack of an official release for so long has been a problem. No question.”
Like Perens, Murdock sees the next big step as instituting a predictable
release cycle for the next version of Debian.
“The duration isn’t as important as the fact that it’s predictable,”
Murdock said. “I firmly believe the Debian project needs to put this at the
top of its agenda for the next release.”
Though Debian itself is a community-based project, there are a number of
efforts, including Perens’ UserLinux and Murdock’s Componentized Linux
(Progeny Debian), which will take Sarge for a commercial spin.
Perens said that UserLinux will now be able to go ahead with the project
as planned.
“The original premise of UserLinux — a broadly supported version of
Debian with all of the development going on within the Debian project, is
still sound,” Perens explained. “Now that there is a solid distribution to
support, I’m able to build the support organization.”
For Murdock and his company Progeny, Sarge is the center of the
universe.
“We’ll be updating our own Debian derivative [Componentized Linux] to use
it over the next few weeks, and all of the custom distros we build from
Debian here on out using Componentized Linux will be based on Sarge,”
Murdock said.
“We’ve been tracking Sarge for a long time already, but now
we’re based on the official version, and that’s going to make the Debian
compatibility story a whole lot easier to tell.”
