Debian 9 Delay, Linux PTSD, and Shells

The top story of this slightly slow new day was the announcement from Jonathan Wiltshire, Debian release assistant, stating Debian 9 would be delayed two months. Steven Ovadia dug up an interesting blog post from someone claiming to suffer from Linux Desktop PTSD and KDE announced a new community outreach program. Jason Baker posted a round-up and poll of the top five Linux shells and why do distros look so darn insecure?

The Debian release team today announced the decision to delay the release of Debian 9 by two months. All further milestones are delayed accordingly as well. Seems the developers want to wait for the next long term supported release, Linux 4.10. So now the new transition freeze will be November 5, soft freeze January 5, 2017, and full freeze February 5, 2017. Debian is released when ready, but start looking for version 9.0 around Spring 2017.

Jason Baker today asked, "What is your favorite Linux shell?" He ran down five favorites including ksh, tcsh, and zsh. But, of course, he included bash. "Originally released in 1989, bash has grown to easily become the most used shell across the Linux world, and it is commonly found in other unix-like operating systems as well," Baker wrote. He also said it has its shortcomings though, which is why there is plenty of choice with Linux. Accompanying the article is a poll, so go vote for your favorite commandline. Spoiler alert: bash in way ahead with 67%.

My Linux Rig pointed to a blog post from February 14, but it was too good to pass up. Jen Andre said kids today have it way too easy. He said he remembers when "one did not simply ‘install’ Linux." He then proceeded to reminisce about some of the high points, most of which sounded all too familiar. First thing he mentioned was partitioning and showed a screengrab of what looks like Slackware's ncurses installer captioned "Kill me."

Then he said "nothing worked until you recompiled the kernel at least 10 times." Next he recalled having to edit the XF86Config file over and over again - second displays were particularly challenging. His recollections of fsck were just too good to snip:

Your filesystem was a house of cards made of spiderwebs and magic. Journaling filesystems. Two magical, magical words. Back then, when we were all using ext2, we did not have such luxuries. God help you if you powered off with the power button instead of issuing a clean shut down command, or say, hit the power cord with your foot, or the power cut out in the neighborhood, or you just looked at it weirdly when restarting.
Basically, just try not to reboot ever, ok?

Because on the next startup, your boot up process will halt mid-way, and your filesystem will barf screaming about inconsistencies and lost inodes and generally stomp its feet around pissed off. You will now be mounting your filesystem in read only and running fsck on the partition and saying, “there there now” in soothing tones until your filesystem is placated.

Or if you’re bold: start fsck with ‘y’ enabled, and go make a coffee. Come back when the command completes, and cross your fingers that it worked and didn’t just wipe out like, all of that code you wrote for that CS assignment due tomorrow. “FIXED THAT FOR YOU” — thanks Linux!

In other news:

* Why Linux Distros Look Insecure Even Though They’re Not

* Announcing the KDE community's Distribution Outreach Program

* Baby Ubuntus toddle forth into the big scary world of beta (Review)