When you run Debian Stable, you get used to updates to the system being few and far between.

While there is certainly some truth to the open-source OS adage that bugs related to functionality (and not security) at release tend to stay unpatched, the emphasis in Debian on releasing when ready means there are theoretically (and practically) fewer broken pieces in the system and not as much need to push updates for non-security-related issues.

So a Stable installation of Debian doesn’t have the Update Manager (or apt or Aptitude) working all that hard.

While it might be boring (and make many geeks itchy for the kind of constant updates that many systems push to users), it’s also efficient. If you’ve set up the system the way you want it, then tested everything and are satisfied that things work the way you expect, a stable, boring Stable release can really boost your productivity.

Chances are, what’s not broken won’t break — and certainly won’t be broken with an update from Debian.

It’s not the cutting edge, the bleeding edge, the leading edge, but a comfortable, conservative build with nothing broken — for the most part.

Key to choosing any distro/project release of an operating system is whether or not it runs well on your hardware and performs your tasks the way you like and expect. If you have a favorite OS/environment in a general sense, I’d say be flexible — a different hunk of hardware might not respond so well, and the version of a particular software package in a given release might not work as well as a newer (or even an older) version.

Many, if not most application developers tend to fix bugs and then release a new version. They don’t backport those fixes to the versions in a given Debian or Ubuntu release. That’s where things like Backports (in Debian) PPAs (in Ubuntu) and what I remember being called “development” builds in Fedora can come in handy. If you really rely on a particular application, finding a newer (or older) version in a different repository, or with a .deb or .rpm package, or even building it yourself from source (or a port in BSD) can make a given OS installation work better for you.

In my case, that “holy grail” app is gThumb, the image organizer/editor. Fedora was a great place to run gThumb because the newest versions were always being pushed via the package manager if the “development” version was installed.

In my case, the gThumb version in vanilla Debian Squeeze does everything I need it to do. Same for OpenOffice and the dozen or so other applications that I rely on day to day.

But I’m not above using Debian Backports, pulling from Sid, or grabbing a .deb or the source to keep my workflow, uh, flowing.

As I’ve written way too many times, while I do have the stock 2.6.32 Linux kernel installed on my Squeeze laptop, I’ve been running the Liquorix 2.6.37 kernel for about a month, and I expect I’ll soon be seeing the 2.6.38 kernel (with the much-heralded 200-line patch that’s supposed to make everything faster and better).

I also plan to follow the newer kernels in Debian Backports; while Liquorix has been great, I feel better running as much out of the Debian repositories as possible (and I consider Debian Multimedia, which I use heavily, to be “official” enough).

I remember writing about the novelty of the Debian Live Project’s inclusion of PowerPC among the architectures for which it was producing Squeeze alpha images.

If you look at the Debian Live releases page and click through the links. You’ll see that live images for the PowerPC architecture were made for 6.0 Alpha 1 and Alpha 2. But the betas, the release candidates and the final release are i386 and amd64 only.

What happened? I praised Debian Live for taking care of PowerPC users in a way that most other distributions do not. These days you can’t even get an “official” Ubuntu ISO for PowerPC. Fedora dropped PowerPC, too. In my tests, Debian was always the best distribution for older PowerPC machines anyway, and the project still supports the architecture with installers.

But the live images were something else. It’s great to be able to “audition” a live image before committing to a full installation.

At this point, it looks like PowerPC users can’t do that anymore.

Comments from the original FlatPress post

Jeroen Diederen Wednesday, February 9, 2011 - 16:35:16

I have tried several times to get support for powerpc Debian live. I always got the answer that he (Daniel Baumann) was on holidays. Never heard of it ever since. I guess you cannot stay in your holidays forever… This project is as dead as dead can be. In Debian Squeeze you cannot even get the easiest live cd made for PPC using the scripts. That’s the reason you don’t see those images. It’s sad, but there is no active support anymore.

steven Wednesday, February 9, 2011 - 19:07:01

The fact that they had PowerPC support for the live images was so novel, I hardly could believe that they did it in the first place. At least with the Alpha images you can see how your PowerPC system responds to Debian Squeeze before deciding whether or not to install from the non-live (but up-to-date) PowerPC ISOs. I’ve written many times - I ran a G4 on Debian Etch for awhile, and it was a very nice OS for the hardware.

Kyle Reynolds Conway Thursday, February 10, 2011 - 19:06:23

So is Etch the thing to run on an ailing PPC Mac Mini? Live images really do ease the nerves though.

klhrevolution Thursday, February 10, 2011 - 19:32:25

While it would be nice I’m grateful for what we’ve got as this release is going well on the old eMac. Hopefully powerpc can be supported for years to come and if a live-image is spit out every now and again then even better.

steven Thursday, February 10, 2011 - 20:05:56

Don’t worry so much about the live image. I would just do an installation of Squeeze. Debian itself still supports PowerPC - and very well, too. It’s just the live images that aren’t available for the final release. The reason I’ve been keeping an eye on the Debian Live project is that I thought it novel that they were introducing a PowerPC live image just as everybody else was dropping PowerPC entirely (Ubuntu, Fedora).

I definitely encourage all PowerPC users to try the Alpha 2 image for Squeeze, or just jump right in and do an installation from the regular ISO.

Etch was great on my G4, and I think Squeeze should be just as good. I let the G4 go months ago, so I don’t have anything at the moment on which I’d run a Linux distro. I’m pretty much sticking to i386/amd64 these days.

zoobab Tuesday, February 15, 2011 - 13:50:11

Debian developers still do not understand that users wants livecds, not debian-installer where you have to click 200 times to get your installation done. Kyle Reynolds Conway

Thursday, March 10, 2011 - 14:01:36

Sort of an update — I installed squeeze onto my ppc macmini to great success. The only two problems I’ve noticed is that wireless doesn’t work out of the box (any suggestions there?) and that bluetooth acts very strange indeed (recognizing devices and even setting them up… but then they don’t work at all). Can’t say I’m displeased though. Much happier than I was with the sluggish, no longer upgradable and increasingly obsolete mac os on that machine. Thanks for the help!

steven Thursday, March 10, 2011 - 20:45:05

Here’s my suggestion for wireless: Add the non-free repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list.

Try to figure out what kind of wireless card the computer is using. Add the firmware for that. It could be Broadcom http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/broadcom-sta-common …

You could also add the firmware-linux-nonfree package http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/firmware-linux-nonfree, which enabled my ATI video chip to use DRI and hence make suspend/resume work.

If you do a little bit of searching, I’m pretty sure you can get the proper firmware or driver to make wireless work.