YGingras^.net

There is a Debian Meetup tomorrow at pub Ste-Elizabeth. I'll be there and I hope to meet other GNU/Linuxers.

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Emacs is quite a text editor. When a major version of Emacs is released, it's major news for many developers.

There are many good reasons to upgrade to 22 before your distribution has fully integrated packages available. Mine is nxhtml-mode. Building Emacs 22 from source is not too painful, but it's still nice to have it integrated in the packaging system. Among other thing, it makes it easier to add Emacs modes with apt. Emacs 22 is already in Debian Sid but it didn't make it to Etch backports yet. For people running i386, there is an alternate backports repository with Emacs 22. Those running some other architecture, like me, will need to rebuild the source deb. Fortunately this is a painless procedure.

To install a .deb of Emacs 22 on Debian Etch, amd64, for example, add the alternate backports source to /etc/apt/sources.list:

    deb-src http://hype.sourceforge.jp/f etch backports
  

As root, run:

    apt-get update
    apt-get install build-essential fakeroot
    apt-get build-dep emacs22
  

This will give you all the dev environment that you need to rebuild the .debs from source. As a normal user, run:

    mkdir /tmp/build
    cd /tmp/build
    fakeroot apt-get source -b emacs22-common
  

You should now have all the .debs for Emacs 22. Install them as root like this:

    dpkg -i "emacs22-gtk_22.1+1-1~edh.0_amd64.deb" \ 
            "emacs22-bin-common_22.1+1-1~edh.0_amd64.deb" \ 
            "emacs22-common_22.1+1-1~edh.0_all.deb"
  

That's it, you now have Emacs 22. No need to install Sid or to mess with tarballs.

update: I simplified the dependencies installation instructions. Thanks to Richard.

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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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