A few months late, Debian 4.0, aka Etch, has been released, but how many people actually will be running it?
Thats not a trite question. It wasnt that long ago that a new release of Debian would have the Linux world excited and downloading it. Now… well, Debian Etch isnt exactly being greeted with yawns—but, excitement?… Thats not a word Id use to describe the reactions Im hearing.
What Im hearing about instead is problems.
/zimages/3/28571.gifClick hereto read more about the recent release of Debian 4.0.
Now, some of these are minor. I, for example, find it more than almost stupid beyond my powers of description that Debians free-software political correctness has them renaming Firefox to Iceweasel, Thunderbird to Icedove and Seamonkey to Iceape. But, OK, while this will mean that Debians Mozilla programs will forevermore be not as up-to-date as all other distributions versions, this is petty anti-stuff.
Some of the other problems, however, are downright serious. For example, if you use two or more network interfaces on your Debian server or a Debian system acting as a router, Etch is going to flat-out break at least one of your interfaces.
Etch comes with CONFIG_IP_ROUTE_MULTIPATH_CACHED (experimental) enabled in its kernel. This setting has long been known to break IProutes multipath behavior. IProute is a collection of TCP/IP network utilities. These utilities form the foundation for almost all Linux traffic control and multi-routing.
/zimages/3/28571.gifRead the full story on Linux-Watch: Debian 4.0 Finally Arrives… Does Anyone Care?
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