9 ms·

Debian 7.3 is out

159 points by duggieawesome 13y ago

jlgaddis 13y ago
Better link with more info: http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20131214 http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20131214
- rhizome 13y ago
  It truly confuses me that the upgrade instructions are so obfuscated, bordering on unfindable. Can someone point me to the chapter where an upgrade from 7.1 to this version is covered? http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/index.en.html http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/in...
  - bpeebles 13y ago
    Upgrading from any Debian 7 upgrade should just be: apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get dist-upgrade
    - asuffield 13y ago
      You don't need that upgrade. The only difference between upgrade and dist-upgrade is that dist-upgrade can add and remove packages, while upgrade will decline to make any upgrades that would require this. As such, dist-upgrade is almost always the one you meant.
      - ksdkkdddd 13y ago
        In my experience, there's value in doing a standard upgrade before a dist-upgrade. It seems to help to fully update the system doing "upgrade" before "doing the upgrade" (dist-upgrade) that will uninstall things... That said, it can obviously be a bit of a waste to upgrade everything like gnome just to uninstall it immediately... As such, I typically manually uninstall large tasks then upgrade then dist-upgrade and manually add the tasks back. In "theory" it should just be as you say - one big dist-upgrade - but I've yet to encounter an upgrade that didn't need special attention and I have learned that minimizing the installed base being upgraded is a good first step to a smooth transition.
        hrjet 13y ago
        Is all of this relevant to Debian based systems like Ubuntu as well?
        drill_sarge 13y ago
        Yes. To clarify: dist-upgrade upgrades everything, including installing or removing new dependencies. Upgrade upgrades the installed packages, but doesn't add or remove new packages. In theory only using "upgrade" is supposed to be safer (eg more unlikely to break something) but I have not encountered any problems when using dist-upgrade (disclaimer: when you rely on the standard distro repositories; if you use unstable programs/repos or 3rd party repos/PPAs in Ubuntu, it is more likely that dist-upgrade breaks something). But I do not agree with what ksdkkdddd said. There is not really a use to do upgrade and then dist-upgrade right after it, because upgrade doesn't magically fix something in case dist-upgrade breaks something. It works or it does not. Also if you use apt from the terminal (as you should) and not rely on graphical updaters you always get output on what may prevent upgrading and how to resolve it.
        ksdkkdddd 13y ago
        In my experience a package's ability to cope with a complex uninstall scenario generally improves with the initial upgrade - or any upgrade for that matter - (for example, sometimes dist-upgrade-specific issues are only discovered by the maintainer as part of the coordination for a release) and so (in my experience) the reliability of the "dist-upgrade" is usually increased by doing an "upgrade" first. Dist-upgrade is one of those things that "should work" of it's own accord, but there are ways of increasing the odds; I have found a pre-"dist-upgrade" upgrade is one. (Sometimes I'm impatient and only upgrade apt/aptitude before a dist-upgrade though.) I would say it makes more of a difference on systems that are infrequently upgraded in general since a few points away from the current versions aren't going to contain many differences anyways, but I'd certainly be more hesitant to dist-upgrade from a .0 release (6.0 to 7.x, for example). I'd almost rather clean-install in that scenario since it amounts to a similarly-sized download.
        asuffield 13y ago
  - juliocc 13y ago
    Just doing apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get dist-upgrade should be enough. You have to be careful, do backups and all that, but that's basically all you need to do.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - null_ptr 13y ago
    apt-get update && apt-get upgrade There's nothing special about upgrading Debian between point releases.
    - rhizome 13y ago
      There's nothing special...except for the actual commands. Empathize with the newbie.
      - null_ptr 13y ago
        You're right. What I meant was that doing your regular system updates is enough to upgrade from 7.1 to 7.3, there's nothing special you need to do on top of that.
      - ars 13y ago
        You are supposed to run those commands every day, not just with a point release. When the newbie installed debian in the first place they were (should have been) told to do that. (And yes there is a tool that will do it automatically and email you if there are updates - apticron.)
        chris_wot 13y ago
        Isn't it: apt-get dist-upgrade ???
        scurry 13y ago
        Not between point releases.
        perlgeek 13y ago
        The difference between 'dist-upgrade' and 'upgrade' is that 'dist-upgrade' will install new dependencies (additional methods) if necessary, while 'upgrade' holds back new versions of packages that add new dependencies. Between point releases, there really shouldn't be new dependencies. Maybe if some library is found to be totally broken from a security point of view it is replaced by another, but that happens very rarely. So usually, the two commands do exactly the same thing for point release upgrades.
  - jlgaddis 13y ago
    As others have mentioned: $ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade In this particular case, from 7.1 to 7.3, "dist-upgrade" is not needed (you aren't upgrading from one distribution to another (e.g. from 6 to 7)).
    - guipsp 13y ago
      Well, sometimes you need to dist-upgrade, even when not switching distros.
      - RexRollman 13y ago
        How would you know when?
        prg318 13y ago
        Some packages will be held back by apt-get until you "dist-upgrade" them and apt-get will notify you of the held back packages when you apt get "upgrade".
        ars 13y ago
        If you get a lot of packages that it tries to uninstall. That's basically what dist-upgrade does: tries to uninstall the least number of packages to allow the update through. It never happens with a point release though - they are careful about that.
    - thesigil 13y ago
      dist-upgrade does not mean distribution upgrade, it just handles additional dependencies after an upgrade and it may remove some packages if necessary.
    - gernotk 13y ago
      This is not Ubuntu. Better use 'aptitude': sudo aptitude update && aptitude full-upgrade
      - 13y ago
  - andrewaylett 13y ago
    If you're already on a 7.x install (codename 'wheezy') then per http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20131214 http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20131214 it suffices to enable the updates repository (which I believe is the default) and run `apt-get upgrade`. The release notes you linked to are for the original 7.0 release. I think that most people will pretty much ignore that there's a point release and continue to update their systems regularly -- unless you're installing a large number of systems or have particular requirements there seems little point in paying it specific attention.
    - rhizome 13y ago
      The release notes you linked to are for the original 7.0 release. The notes I linked are the ones linked from the post page on where the upgrade instructions can be found.
  - 2jgi7 13y ago
    You don't actually have to do anything if you are already on Wheezy. Just update normally.
- swetland 13y ago
  Thanks. I was puzzled that there seemed to be no 7.2 to 7.3 release notes or change lists linked from the original URL... just stuff about 7.0.
nkuttler 13y ago
It has already been said, but this is just a point release. If you keep your Debian system up to date (which you should) you'll only get a few new packages. See also https://wiki.debian.org/DebianReleases/PointReleases https://wiki.debian.org/DebianReleases/PointReleases
plg 13y ago
Can anyone point me to a step by step for how to get debian running on a macbook air? I've googled it and tried at least 4 different approaches, to no avail. I'm talking about a macbookair3,1 (late 2010 11").
- voltagex_ 13y ago
  Where are you getting stuck?
  - plg 13y ago
    Can't boot from a USB nor from the Debian installer cd (using USB CDROM drive)
    - puppetmaster3 13y ago
      you have to use 64 bit and know a bit about uefi. (or give up and do lubuntu)
      - voltagex_ 13y ago
        Are Macs different enough that the amd64 Debian installer won't boot on it?
        deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
        toast0 13y ago
        Not sure about the airs, but on the 2011 macbook pro, you could boot a lot of things from cd, but not from USB. Apple doesn't have a very good pre-boot environment if you're not running Apple software. (No PXE, either, just their proprietary netboot)
    - sydney6 13y ago
      UEFI Fuck-Up. Or, try waiting 30-60 seconds until the Legacy-BIOS-Mode kicks in..
alecco 13y ago
Anybody knows if the kernel version was bumped?
- swetland 13y ago
  Looks like it's still 3.2 based: http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/linux-image-3.2.0-4-amd64 http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/linux-image-3.2.0-4-amd64
  - vacri 13y ago
    The kernel version isn't going to change in the 'stable' flavour. You can backport it if you need newer features, or use one of the other flavours.
- sherr 13y ago
  3.11 is in Wheezy backports if wanted.
RexRollman 13y ago
I recently gave Debian a try and one thing that surprised me, coming from Arch, is that the tool to install software, apt-get, can't list what software has already been installed. You have to use dkpg to get that information. Even funnier, I found the answer for that on the Arch Wiki page on Pacmac Rosetta: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman_Rosetta https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman_Rosetta
- massysett 13y ago
  Sort of makes sense if you consider the history behind it: dpkg installs software, not apt-get. apt-get, aptitude, etc. are higher-level dependency resolution tools that simply loop in dpkg to actually install packages. dselect is an older tool that did dependencies before apt-get came around. RPM distros are similar, as they use higher-level tools to do dependencies (yum, zypper, etc.; there was even apt for RPM) and then RPM to actually install the packages and track them. Admittedly though Debian's command line tools are stuck in the past in this regard, as the user shouldn't need to care about all this. Arch gets this right by putting it all into pacman.
  - rcthompson 13y ago
    Debian (and Ubuntu etc.) has a tool available that unifies all the many different commands required for administrating and querying the package system. It's called "wajig". I don't believe it's installed by default, though. I rarely see it suggested, probably because whenever people complain about the complexity of the command-line tools, the answer they get is "use the GUI tools".
- squeezingswirls 13y ago
  Better use aptitude instead of apt-get. If you want to know which packages are installed: aptitude search '~i' That command will list all your installed packages and the automagically installed ones will be marked with A.
  - RexRollman 13y ago
    Honestly, I find Aptitude hard to use. Maybe Pacman has spoiled me.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
arc_of_descent 13y ago
Since I do apt-get update && apt-get upgrade almost regularly, I found out that my system was already running 7.3 (cat /etc/debian_version). So yes, this is not a major upgrade release just that the Debian team thought that there were enough changes and bug fixes to label this as a new release.

Debian 7.3 is out

159 points by duggieawesome 13y ago

jlgaddis 13y ago

Better link with more info: http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20131214 http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20131214

rhizome 13y ago
It truly confuses me that the upgrade instructions are so obfuscated, bordering on unfindable. Can someone point me to the chapter where an upgrade from 7.1 to this version is covered? http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/index.en.html http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/in...
- bpeebles 13y ago
  Upgrading from any Debian 7 upgrade should just be: apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get dist-upgrade
  - asuffield 13y ago
    You don't need that upgrade. The only difference between upgrade and dist-upgrade is that dist-upgrade can add and remove packages, while upgrade will decline to make any upgrades that would require this. As such, dist-upgrade is almost always the one you meant.
    - ksdkkdddd 13y ago
      In my experience, there's value in doing a standard upgrade before a dist-upgrade. It seems to help to fully update the system doing "upgrade" before "doing the upgrade" (dist-upgrade) that will uninstall things... That said, it can obviously be a bit of a waste to upgrade everything like gnome just to uninstall it immediately... As such, I typically manually uninstall large tasks then upgrade then dist-upgrade and manually add the tasks back. In "theory" it should just be as you say - one big dist-upgrade - but I've yet to encounter an upgrade that didn't need special attention and I have learned that minimizing the installed base being upgraded is a good first step to a smooth transition.
      - hrjet 13y ago
        Is all of this relevant to Debian based systems like Ubuntu as well?
        drill_sarge 13y ago
        Yes. To clarify: dist-upgrade upgrades everything, including installing or removing new dependencies. Upgrade upgrades the installed packages, but doesn't add or remove new packages. In theory only using "upgrade" is supposed to be safer (eg more unlikely to break something) but I have not encountered any problems when using dist-upgrade (disclaimer: when you rely on the standard distro repositories; if you use unstable programs/repos or 3rd party repos/PPAs in Ubuntu, it is more likely that dist-upgrade breaks something). But I do not agree with what ksdkkdddd said. There is not really a use to do upgrade and then dist-upgrade right after it, because upgrade doesn't magically fix something in case dist-upgrade breaks something. It works or it does not. Also if you use apt from the terminal (as you should) and not rely on graphical updaters you always get output on what may prevent upgrading and how to resolve it.
        ksdkkdddd 13y ago
        In my experience a package's ability to cope with a complex uninstall scenario generally improves with the initial upgrade - or any upgrade for that matter - (for example, sometimes dist-upgrade-specific issues are only discovered by the maintainer as part of the coordination for a release) and so (in my experience) the reliability of the "dist-upgrade" is usually increased by doing an "upgrade" first. Dist-upgrade is one of those things that "should work" of it's own accord, but there are ways of increasing the odds; I have found a pre-"dist-upgrade" upgrade is one. (Sometimes I'm impatient and only upgrade apt/aptitude before a dist-upgrade though.) I would say it makes more of a difference on systems that are infrequently upgraded in general since a few points away from the current versions aren't going to contain many differences anyways, but I'd certainly be more hesitant to dist-upgrade from a .0 release (6.0 to 7.x, for example). I'd almost rather clean-install in that scenario since it amounts to a similarly-sized download.
      - asuffield 13y ago
- juliocc 13y ago
  Just doing apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get dist-upgrade should be enough. You have to be careful, do backups and all that, but that's basically all you need to do.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- null_ptr 13y ago
  apt-get update && apt-get upgrade There's nothing special about upgrading Debian between point releases.
  - rhizome 13y ago
    There's nothing special...except for the actual commands. Empathize with the newbie.
    - null_ptr 13y ago
      You're right. What I meant was that doing your regular system updates is enough to upgrade from 7.1 to 7.3, there's nothing special you need to do on top of that.
    - ars 13y ago
      You are supposed to run those commands every day, not just with a point release. When the newbie installed debian in the first place they were (should have been) told to do that. (And yes there is a tool that will do it automatically and email you if there are updates - apticron.)
      - chris_wot 13y ago
        Isn't it: apt-get dist-upgrade ???
        scurry 13y ago
        Not between point releases.
        perlgeek 13y ago
        The difference between 'dist-upgrade' and 'upgrade' is that 'dist-upgrade' will install new dependencies (additional methods) if necessary, while 'upgrade' holds back new versions of packages that add new dependencies. Between point releases, there really shouldn't be new dependencies. Maybe if some library is found to be totally broken from a security point of view it is replaced by another, but that happens very rarely. So usually, the two commands do exactly the same thing for point release upgrades.
- jlgaddis 13y ago
  As others have mentioned: $ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade In this particular case, from 7.1 to 7.3, "dist-upgrade" is not needed (you aren't upgrading from one distribution to another (e.g. from 6 to 7)).
  - guipsp 13y ago
    Well, sometimes you need to dist-upgrade, even when not switching distros.
    - RexRollman 13y ago
      How would you know when?
      - prg318 13y ago
        Some packages will be held back by apt-get until you "dist-upgrade" them and apt-get will notify you of the held back packages when you apt get "upgrade".
      - ars 13y ago
        If you get a lot of packages that it tries to uninstall. That's basically what dist-upgrade does: tries to uninstall the least number of packages to allow the update through. It never happens with a point release though - they are careful about that.
  - thesigil 13y ago
    dist-upgrade does not mean distribution upgrade, it just handles additional dependencies after an upgrade and it may remove some packages if necessary.
  - gernotk 13y ago
    This is not Ubuntu. Better use 'aptitude': sudo aptitude update && aptitude full-upgrade
    - 13y ago
- andrewaylett 13y ago
  If you're already on a 7.x install (codename 'wheezy') then per http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20131214 http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20131214 it suffices to enable the updates repository (which I believe is the default) and run `apt-get upgrade`. The release notes you linked to are for the original 7.0 release. I think that most people will pretty much ignore that there's a point release and continue to update their systems regularly -- unless you're installing a large number of systems or have particular requirements there seems little point in paying it specific attention.
  - rhizome 13y ago
    The release notes you linked to are for the original 7.0 release. The notes I linked are the ones linked from the post page on where the upgrade instructions can be found.
- 2jgi7 13y ago
  You don't actually have to do anything if you are already on Wheezy. Just update normally.
swetland 13y ago
Thanks. I was puzzled that there seemed to be no 7.2 to 7.3 release notes or change lists linked from the original URL... just stuff about 7.0.

nkuttler 13y ago

It has already been said, but this is just a point release. If you keep your Debian system up to date (which you should) you'll only get a few new packages. See also https://wiki.debian.org/DebianReleases/PointReleases https://wiki.debian.org/DebianReleases/PointReleases

plg 13y ago

Can anyone point me to a step by step for how to get debian running on a macbook air? I've googled it and tried at least 4 different approaches, to no avail. I'm talking about a macbookair3,1 (late 2010 11").

voltagex_ 13y ago
Where are you getting stuck?
- plg 13y ago
  Can't boot from a USB nor from the Debian installer cd (using USB CDROM drive)
  - puppetmaster3 13y ago
    you have to use 64 bit and know a bit about uefi. (or give up and do lubuntu)
    - voltagex_ 13y ago
      Are Macs different enough that the amd64 Debian installer won't boot on it?
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
      - toast0 13y ago
        Not sure about the airs, but on the 2011 macbook pro, you could boot a lot of things from cd, but not from USB. Apple doesn't have a very good pre-boot environment if you're not running Apple software. (No PXE, either, just their proprietary netboot)
  - sydney6 13y ago
    UEFI Fuck-Up. Or, try waiting 30-60 seconds until the Legacy-BIOS-Mode kicks in..

alecco 13y ago

Anybody knows if the kernel version was bumped?

swetland 13y ago
Looks like it's still 3.2 based: http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/linux-image-3.2.0-4-amd64 http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/linux-image-3.2.0-4-amd64
- vacri 13y ago
  The kernel version isn't going to change in the 'stable' flavour. You can backport it if you need newer features, or use one of the other flavours.
sherr 13y ago
3.11 is in Wheezy backports if wanted.

RexRollman 13y ago

I recently gave Debian a try and one thing that surprised me, coming from Arch, is that the tool to install software, apt-get, can't list what software has already been installed. You have to use dkpg to get that information. Even funnier, I found the answer for that on the Arch Wiki page on Pacmac Rosetta: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman_Rosetta https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman_Rosetta

massysett 13y ago
Sort of makes sense if you consider the history behind it: dpkg installs software, not apt-get. apt-get, aptitude, etc. are higher-level dependency resolution tools that simply loop in dpkg to actually install packages. dselect is an older tool that did dependencies before apt-get came around. RPM distros are similar, as they use higher-level tools to do dependencies (yum, zypper, etc.; there was even apt for RPM) and then RPM to actually install the packages and track them. Admittedly though Debian's command line tools are stuck in the past in this regard, as the user shouldn't need to care about all this. Arch gets this right by putting it all into pacman.
- rcthompson 13y ago
  Debian (and Ubuntu etc.) has a tool available that unifies all the many different commands required for administrating and querying the package system. It's called "wajig". I don't believe it's installed by default, though. I rarely see it suggested, probably because whenever people complain about the complexity of the command-line tools, the answer they get is "use the GUI tools".
squeezingswirls 13y ago
Better use aptitude instead of apt-get. If you want to know which packages are installed: aptitude search '~i' That command will list all your installed packages and the automagically installed ones will be marked with A.
- RexRollman 13y ago
  Honestly, I find Aptitude hard to use. Maybe Pacman has spoiled me.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

arc_of_descent 13y ago

Since I do apt-get update && apt-get upgrade almost regularly, I found out that my system was already running 7.3 (cat /etc/debian_version). So yes, this is not a major upgrade release just that the Debian team thought that there were enough changes and bug fixes to label this as a new release.