YGingras^.net

There I was, overlooking the Kilauea, one km above sea level, 3700 km from the closest continent, in the middle of a vast treeless lava field. There was a pleasant yet strong breeze making the tropical Sun easier to stand. It was lunch time and I was looking forward for a hot meal after all the rough hiking.

I was well prepared with my, mostly homemade, ultra-light backpacking gears: Cobra Stove, aluminum foil wind screen, mesh pot stand and camping saucepan. Everything was perfectly calculated: with 175ml of alcohol I was good for six meals, all what was needed for an overnight back-country trip with a generous margin for errors. I had a watertight matchbox with a capacity of 20, that was more than enough. Right?

Compared to other Zen Stove designs, the Cobra is more fuel efficient. Construction is as simple but you need a primer pan (video by Don Johnston) in order to reach the inner pressure that makes the jets burning by themselves. The principle of the primer pan is simple: you let your stove sit in a (really small) bath of alcohol that you set ablaze. If the bath is too small, the stove won't get hot enough and you have to repeat the procedure, no big deal here. If the bath is too big, the stove gets too hot and you might have noticed that design don't include a relief valve. If you are lucky, you waste all your fuel in a few seconds of 50 cm flames, otherwise the stove blow up. Obviously, I tend to make small primer baths.

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Etch have been frozen for about a month now and will soon become the new stable Debian. I used to run Sarge (the current stable) on my desktop while it was still in testing and since I liked the experience I decided to give Etch a try during the winter break.

Among the major improvement there is now a graphical installer and AMD64 became an official architecture. Aside from that all the packages are upgraded to bleeding edge versions and there are quite a few new comers. A full binary download is now 21 CDs, double that if you want the sources. All of those packages have now passed the freeze so we can expect Etch to be the most complete distribution ever released thought Gentoo must not be too far.

The install went smoothly. The console install is pretty much the same with the "normal" mode asking even less questions than before. No doubt, anyone can install this distribution. The graphical install is cute but the transitions are sometimes strange and the "next" button don't alway do what one would expect. Hopefully this will be fixed before the release. I had no problem to setup a software RAID over SATA at install time with / and /boot on LVM on top of the RAID. I heard people have had problems with that setup with other distros, so far didn't notice any glitches. Of course I didn't burn the 21 CDs, the usual way to install Debian is to burn only the "netinst" CD and to use the excellent apt tool to install the packages from the network when you need them. Apt performs all dependency calculations and compared to yum and urpmi, it is blindingly fast (diclaimer: the last time I used urpmi was a few years ago, it might be better now).

Some packages still present a few minor bugs but the overall experience so far is great. The new KDE 3.5.5 now feature text-to-speech integration. KDE must have been tuned lately because it feels really snappy and responsive, even over XDMCP. I was able to keep /home unchanged and everything just worked. It's good to know that systems with many more users are likely to upgrade smoothly because no one likes to nuke his .kde when he arrives on Monday morning. By the way, rm -rf .* is never a good idea (someone knows what I'm talking about).

For a system that isn't mission critical, I think that Etch is ready now and I encourage everyone to try it. Debian Etch is a flexible meta distribution that can be shaped into either a desktop or a server with loss of usability or stability.

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