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Debian 7.3 is out

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159 pointsduggieawesome66 comments

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

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/in...

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

There's nothing special about upgrading Debian between point releases.

There's nothing special...except for the actual commands. Empathize with the newbie.

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.

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.)

Isn't it:

  apt-get dist-upgrade

???

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.

Not between point releases.

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)).

Well, sometimes you need to dist-upgrade, even when not switching distros.

How would you know when?

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".

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.

dist-upgrade does not mean distribution upgrade, it just handles additional dependencies after an upgrade and it may remove some packages if necessary.

This is not Ubuntu.

Better use 'aptitude':

  sudo aptitude update && aptitude full-upgrade

Huh? I've been using apt-get on Debian since it was first released (in 1998).

Why is it better to use aptitude on debian?

I've been using debian for years and always just used apt-get.

For a start, aptitudes command line options are less confusing and more powerful.

Furthermore:

http://superuser.com/questions/93437/aptitude-vs-apt-get-whi...

There doesn't seem to be anything that jumps out as a reason to use aptitude over apt-get there. It mentions that the defaults for upgrading the distro are better for aptitude but doesn't say why or what differences there are.

I can see the search being useful though.

Seeing as my muscle memory is set at apt-get, i'll stick with it for the moment.

There was a brief time when aptitude was smarter than apt-get (it was smart enough to remove auto-installed dependencies when you removed a package, for example). During that time, the advice was to use aptitude instead of apt-get.

Those smarts were later moved to apt itself, but it's still a part of the folklore.

There isn't any specific reason, really. It's a matter of preference, and they can be used interchangeably (which wasn't always the case) nowadays.

If you're already on a 7.x install (codename 'wheezy') then per 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.

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.

Upgrading from any Debian 7 upgrade should just be:

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get dist-upgrade

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.

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.

Any time this happens it is a bug. I hope that you reported them. I've never had this kind of issue with Debian stable (other Debian derivatives may be less reliable, and if you're running sid you're expected to fix it yourself).

Is all of this relevant to Debian based systems like Ubuntu as well?

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.

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.

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.

You don't actually have to do anything if you are already on Wheezy. Just update normally.

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.

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.

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

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.

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".

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.

Honestly, I find Aptitude hard to use. Maybe Pacman has spoiled me.

Yes, Pacman is actually quite easy to use and lacks a lot of historical inconstancies that make tools like apt hard(er).

When I first started using Arch (coming from 'buntu and Debian) I was surprised just how straightforward most of the flags were.

I don't understand what is surprising or funny about that. It's pure Unix philosophy, different commands within a coherent management system.

The opposite would be the surprising thing, this is not Windows. There are managers that do the whole thing in one single executable that calls others, even with GUIs etc, for dumb people.

No it's not, it's just how things turned out. The different commands have a whole bunch of separate options, and the fact that they turned out to be split upon certain lines isn't a reflection of some "philosophy". (Also, I'm glad you find it so easy to find ways to convince yourself you're not a dumb person.)

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/36920/why-do-most-di...

Debian is pretty much the only "major" distro that does sensible package management and history shows it just beats the rest at what it does. Other than Debian, I value Slackware because its approach works for what it does. These two make Gentoo and Arch pointless. Ubuntu and Mint work differently and with different goals. I can also rescue Puppy, SLAX, and Stalix. Rest I've tried are basically a waste of time and a result of not knowing what's out there combined with "Not Invented Here" syndrome.

It's helpful to note that "aptitude" could fulfill 99% of the tasks in that "Rosetta" as well (so you could mostly use only a single tool to perform all the required tasks), though I appreciate the fact that they usually provided the lowest-level command to perform the single action.

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.

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").

Try it on a VM like VirtualBox (free, OS X supported). Among the advantages, you get vastly superior hardware support, particularly with the trackpad.

Source: Running Debian Wheezy on a 2011 Air.

edit to add: Here's a quick list what running Debian on a VM gives you:

* Seamless full-screen linux with full hardware access (e.g. GPU)

* Advantage of native OS X drivers (particularly the amazing trackpad -- linux drivers crippled it in my experience)

* Instant, lag-free transition between linux/OS X -- e.g. four-finger "swipe" gesture between desktops.

* Shared linux/OS X filesystem ("shared folders")

* Zero hassle with linux wifi, custom bootloader hacks (rEFIt), etc. VirtualBox has first-class support in Debian -- everything's just an apt-get away: https://wiki.debian.org/VirtualBox

However, performance is shite. I ended up going for a native install and you can appreciate the difference. That is, if you run Gnome 3 (which is a pile of shite as well). When on other DMs, if you can call xmonad a dm, virtual box was just awesome, for exactly the reasons you mentioned.

Why would you use gnome if you've used xmonad :)I run crunchbang (debian w/ openbox) and it's awesome.

So, you're not running "awesome"? So is crunchbang now awesome? Or awesome has been renamed to crunchbang?

The naming of these is confusing :-)

Wouldn't performance be better with VMWare Fusion? I think it includes even 3D acceleration.

I'd recommend using Debian testing instead of stable for that. (testing is preferred in most personal use cases if you don't run in a corporate environment/server or similar)

http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/

I am not sure, but you may need the additional firmware files listed on that page.

I thought unstable was more geared toward personal use cases. Testing doesn't even get supported by the security team, that seems like a huge mistake to run as your personal workstation.

Where are you getting stuck?

Can't boot from a USB nor from the Debian installer cd (using USB CDROM drive)

I remember when I was messing around a few years ago I had to use a bootloader called refit, which is now forked to refind at http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

It's been too long since I used a Mac, but if someone wants to donate a recent Macbook to me I'm happy to get Debian set up and blog about it ;)

Make sure you're using the amd64 image, not the i386 one. Either the netinst or regular CD1 should work fine from a USB stick, if it's amd64.

I tried both i386 and amd64 about a week ago on my 2011 Macbook Air, and only the amd64 image booted successfully.

You shouldn't need rEFIt.

UEFI Fuck-Up. Or, try waiting 30-60 seconds until the Legacy-BIOS-Mode kicks in..

you have to use 64 bit and know a bit about uefi. (or give up and do lubuntu)

Are Macs different enough that the amd64 Debian installer won't boot on it?

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)

Anybody knows if the kernel version was bumped?

Looks like it's still 3.2 based: http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/linux-image-3.2.0-4-amd64

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.

3.11 is in Wheezy backports if wanted.

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