Earlier this week, at DebConf 9, the Debian team proposed a new approach for the Debian’s release cycle, which was later on announced publicly on the Debian site:

“The Debian project has decided to adopt a new policy of time-based development freezes for future releases, on a two-year cycle. Freezes will from now on happen in the December of every odd year, which means that releases will from now on happen sometime in the first half of every even year. To that effect the next freeze will happen in December 2009, with a release expected in spring 2010. The project chose December as a suitable freeze date since spring releases proved successful for the releases of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (codenamed “Etch”) and Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (“Lenny”).”

This doesn’t mean that we will have a time-based release as for example Ubuntu does on a specific date, but it means that we will have a time-based freeze for each new release (in December of every odd year); the release will still become stable “when it is ready”, but after this, we can expect the new releases in general sometimes in the spring of the every even year.

“Time-based freezes will allow the Debian Project to blend the predictability of time based releases with its well established policy of feature based releases. The new freeze policy will provide better predictability of releases for users of the Debian distribution, and also allow Debian developers to do better long-term planning. A two-year release cycle will give more time for disruptive changes, reducing inconveniences caused for users. Having predictable freezes should also reduce overall freeze time.”

This new approach will leave a very short time for the next release Debian 6.0 (“Squeeze”), that will be freezed later on this year (lenny was released earlier this year in February). Here are the major release goals for squeeze: multi-arch support, which will improve the installation of 32 bit packages on 64 bit machines, and an optimised boot process for better boot performance and reliability.

The moment I heard about the Open Source Bridge Configuration Management panel session on FLOSS Weekly a while ago, I was hoping that I will be able to see the recording of this session (as for obvious reasons I was not able to attend and see this live in Portland, Oregon). They managed to bring together (for the first time to my knowledge) the creators (or maintainers) of *all* the major configuration management tools to date was very impressive; and obviously someone as myself that has been working with many of these tools (I haven’t tried/used automateit yet) would definitely see this as a great session.

Here are the members of the configuration management panel (from left to right):

• Igal Koshevoy of AutomateIt
• Brendan Strejcek of Cfengine
• Luke Kanies from Reductive Labs for Puppet
• Narayan Desai of bcfg2
• Adam Jacob from Opscode for Chef

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The Debian project just announced the second update for its stable distribution “lenny” 5.0.2. Those installing regular updates from security.debian.org might not even notice this update, except for the version change to 5.0.2. As an interesting change, the debian-installer has been updated to allow the installation of the oldstable release (Debian 4.0 “etch”).

“The Debian project is pleased to announce the second update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (codename “lenny”). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems.
Please note that this update does not constitute a new version of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away 5.0 CDs or DVDs but only to update via an up-to- date Debian mirror after an installation, to cause any out of date packages to be updated.
…
New version of the debian-installer
The debian-installer has been updated to allow the installation of the previous stable release (Debian 4.0 “etch”) and to include an updated cdebconf package which resolves several issues with installation menu rendering using the newt frontend, including:
* explanatory text overlapping with the input box due to a height miscalculation
* overlapping of the “Go Back” button and the select list on certain screens
* suboptimal screen usage, particularly affecting debian-edu installations
The installer has been rebuilt to use the updated kernel packages included in this point release, resolving issues with installation on s390 G5 systems and IBM summit-based i386 systems.”

Release Announcement: http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090627

Ubuntu released official images for Amazon EC2 for Intrepid (8.10) and Hardy (8.04) releases (not Jaunty image yet). These are server edition images. I’ve always used the great alestic ec2 images created by Eric Hammond for any Ubuntu or Debian release I needed in the past and was very happy with the quality of the images Eric maintained. This was also seen by the Ubuntu team and they worked with Eric to create their official images with the same quality and most of the features of what most people were used for Ubuntu images so far in EC2 world.

In my opinion here are the advantages of the newly released official Ubuntu images:

• officially support by Canonical (Eric has done a great job in patching and updating his images, but I am sure he has better things to do and let the Ubuntu team do this).
• custom kernels: for Intrepid 2.6.27 and Hardy 2.6.24 by having Amazon support in doing this (while alestic images were using the default Amazon Fedora kernel 2.6.21 image).
• apt mirrors in the ec2 cloud provided by Ubuntu: us.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com and eu.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com
• RightScale support for advanced integration with the RightScale platform for RightScale users.

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Just a few days after the eighth update of etch (4.0r8), the Debian project announced the first update of lenny. Opposed to the etch updates, this receives a minor numbering in the version 5.0.1 and also updates the /etc/debian_version file with this information; even if this is a simple change, I like it a lot as it will make it much easier to identify what update level a machine is running (just like redhat world had forever in /etc/redhat-release ). Besides this cosmetic change, most of the updates were already on security.debian.org; still there is a kernel update (minor version update of course) that fixes some openvz, nfs bugs (see debian kernel changelog for full details) and because of this also an updated debian-installer.

“The Debian project is pleased to announce the first update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (codename lenny). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems.

Please note that this update does not constitute a new version of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away 5.0 CDs or DVDs but only to update via an up-to-date Debian mirror after an installation, to cause any out of date packages to be updated.

Those who frequently install updates from security.debian.org won’t have to update many packages and most updates from security.debian.org are included in this update.”

Release Announcement: http://debian.org/News/2009/20090411

Amazon just announced “reserved instances”, guaranteeing uptime and a price reduction if customers commit to Amazon’s cloud solution for a year or more.

“We’ve learned that some of our customers have needs which aren’t addressed by the spot pricing model. For example, some of them were looking for even lower prices, and were willing to make a commitment ahead of time in order to achieve this. Also, quite a few customers actually told us something even more interesting: they were interested in using EC2 but needed to make sure that we would have a substantial number of instances available to them at any time in order for them to use EC2 in a DR (Disaster Recovery) scenario. In a scenario like this, you can’t simply hope that your facility has sufficient capacity to accommodate your spot needs; you need to secure a firm resource commitment ahead of time.”

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“Benjamin Franklin: scientist, scholar, statesman, and . . . systems administrator? Yes, 200 years or so before the birth of UNIX®, Franklin scribed sage advice to keep systems humming. Here are 10 of Franklin’s more notable tips. “

Check out the full article: “10 tips for sensible systems administration“

Here is an interesting interview with Steve McIntyre, the current leader @ debian.org where he talks about his work as the DPL and Debian future in general. By the way, Steve is standing for re-election this year… we will see how this turns out after this year vote…

http://www.h-online.com/open/Interview-Steve-McIntyre-of-Debian–/features/112783

Alexander Wirt announced that the lenny-backports suite is ready for uploads:
“I’m proud to announce the start of the lenny-backports distribution. All  contributors are now asked to provide new backports also for lenny-backports. But that does not mean etch-backports is dead, we will continue support for etch-backports as long as there is security support for oldstable (aka etch).”

etch-backports will still be supported for as long as there is security support for debian etch (now oldstable). People using etch-backports should probably upgrade to lenny anyway, and stop using the backports as this can now bring their system into an unstable state and break a clean upgrade path to lenny, if using potential newer packages than then one in lenny at this time.

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Citrix announced today that they will offer free licenses for their full XenServer virtualization solution. While Xen, the hypervisor itself was always open source, XenServer will not be released as open source, as it contains proprietary code, but will be free for anyone to download and use. I am sure that current XenServer5 clients that have paid more than $900 per server will be very ‘happy’ to hear this news . They will probably receive some special deals for Citrix Essentials, but still…

For full details: http://www.citrix.com/English/NE/news/news.asp?newsID=1687130