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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This post will show how to deal with the issue I had on a newly installed debian lenny xen virtual machine. I used xen-tools to create the vm using the deboostrap method, and all was fine. I installed the bash-completion package, as probably most of you, I can’t live without bash completion, but quickly found out that it was broken. Any attempt to perform a filelist completion was failing with this error:
vm11:~# tail -f /va<TAB>-bash: /dev/fd/62: No such file or directory
-bash: /dev/fd/60: No such file or directory
and this basically makes the bash completion useless. On a quick look I could easily see that the /dev/fd link was not there and that was the main cause of the problem. Still on one older lenny vm I had for a couple of months this was not happening (from what I can tell because it had an older version of the /etc/bash_completion file). There are several ways to fix this starting with the obvious one to downgrade /etc/bash_completion but I didn’t like that, so I looked for some other ways. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, 14 February 2009, the Debian Project announced the official release of Debian GNU/Linux version 5.0 (codenamed “Lenny“). This comes after almost 2 years (22 months) from the previous stable release, “Etch” that was launched on 8 April 2007.

“This release includes numerous updated software packages, such as the K Desktop Environment 3.5.10 (KDE), an updated version of the GNOME desktop environment 2.22.2, the Xfce 4.4.2 desktop environment, LXDE 0.3.2.1, the GNUstep desktop 7.3, X.Org 7.3, OpenOffice.org 2.4.1, GIMP 2.4.7, Iceweasel 3.0.6 (an unbranded version of Mozilla Firefox), Icedove 2.0.0.19 (an unbranded version of Mozilla Thunderbird), PostgreSQL 8.3.6, MySQL 5.0.51a, GNU Compiler Collection 4.3.2, Linux kernel version 2.6.26, Apache 2.2.9, Samba 3.2.5, Python 2.5.2 and 2.4.6, Perl 5.10.0, PHP 5.2.6, Asterisk 1.4.21.2, Emacs 22, Inkscape 0.46, Nagios 3.06, Xen Hypervisor 3.2.1 (dom0 as well as domU support), OpenJDK 6b11, and more than 23,000 other ready-to-use software packages (built from over 12,000 source packages).”

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Debian Lenny’s release is getting closer and closer and many people will want to upgrade their Etch servers to Lenny, maybe even before Lenny is declared stable (at RC1 at this time). Even people that don’t want to upgrade to lenny might find some useful information in this post .
One of the greatest advantages of debian over other linux distributions is that we can upgrade our systems live from one version to another (hopefully with minimal damage or impact to the running system), while other distros like rhel will not recommend their users to ever do this but to do a full new installation and migrate over their user data afterwards. Obviously it is a great advantage to be able to perform a live upgrade from one version to the other, and from my experience this has not caused problems, but even so, if this is a production server or just a system you care for and it is not for testing, I would start by making a backup of the system and be prepared in case it will no longer work after this. Just in case… Also you should start by reading the release notes of the new version and look for any incompatibilities (hardware or software) or changed things that could affect your particular setup. Read the rest of this entry »

The Debian Art team is seeking a slogan for the next stable release, Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 “Lenny”.
The poll, can be found at: http://www.debianart.org/contest/lenny-slogan.html so go there and vote for your favorite one.

The choices are:

• The Spiral Strikes Back!
• The Universal Operating System <- my favorite one
• When code matters more than commercials
• Free never looked so good
• The universal operating system never looked so good!
• We build it the right way
• Wanna see new horizons?
• See Freedom Work
• One operating system. Infinite Freedom

The latest MySQL Community Edition release, 5.0.67 will not be included in Debian Lenny as the distribution is frozen meaning no upstream new releases are going to be included into testing before lenny is released. Lenny will ship with MySQL 5.0.51a, while 5.0.67 (or a newer version if that will be the case) will be added to debian testing right after the release.

In the meantime, if you want to use 5.0.67 you can either download the source packages from MySQL or use the packages Norbert Tretkowski (one of the mysql package maintainers) has made available. The deb sources allow you to recompile the package on any architecture you might need it (only amd64 binary packages are provided).

Source: http://tretkowski.de/blog/archives/418-MySQL-5.0.67-not-uploaded-to-Debian.html