| Debian distro named for little green man |
Sep. 02, 2008
 The Debian project will continue to its tradition of naming releases for characters in Pixar's classic animated movie, Toy Story. With "Lenny" in the final stages of preparation, Project Maintainer Luk Claes has announced that Lenny's successor will be named for "squeeze," a three-eyed space alien.
According to an entry in Wikipedia, squeeze toys were prizes in a game of skill at the "Pizza Planet" restaurant. The entry continues:Squeeze Toy Aliens are a bunch of three-eyed space aliens voiced by Jeff Pidgeon in the motion pictures Toy Story and Toy Story 2. ... Each one believes that "The Claw" will somehow choose one of them to "go on to a better place." Three of these toys are rescued by Mr. Potato Head in Toy Story 2, and become attached to him. Mrs. Potato Head chooses to adopt them. They appear to be promotional toys for Pizza Planet, as they wear uniforms with restaurant's logo. They also appear in Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: The Adventure Begins and the subsequent Buzz Lightyear of Star Command television program. In this series they are an actual alien race and are employed by Star Command as scientists and inventors. They are called "Little Green Men" or "L.G.M." for short. Previous Debian releases have been named for:
- buzz
- rex
- bo
- hamm
- slink
- potato
- woody
- sarge
- etch
- lenny
Additionally, "sid" is the perpetual nickname for the project's "unstable" release, featuring binaries built from typically the newest or at least very new upstream source releases.
Final push?
While announcing the choice of names, Claes also called upon the Debian community to rally together for a final push to get Lenny ready. Claes's plan includes: - Removing a few "exceptions" to the freeze
- Lenny's final 2.6.26 kernel is in place, and users are asked to test both upgrades from etch, and fresh installs
- After a couple of betas, the first release candidate of Lenny's installer is being readied. To help hunt bugs, the Debian Installer page will move to daily instead of weekly snapshot builds
- "Fringe" packages with release-critical (RC) bugs will be removed
- A bug-squashing party (ewww) will take place Sep. 5-6 on #debian-bugs at irc.debian.org
- The considerable work needed on Lenny's release notes will be coordinated on the debian-doc@lists.debian.org mailing list
Additionally, the Debian wiki is now accepting worthy contributions to the NewInLenny page, Claes noted.
By coincidence, your editor happened to try out the second beta release of Lenny's installer last night, on a quirky small form-factor system with an Intel 935 chipset. Despite turning up its nose at an Atheros WiFi radio requiring a binary driver, the installer worked well, especially with regard to achieving perfect ACPI power management, suspend, and resume. The single biggest (no pun intended) change seemed to be enormous default GNOME 2.2 system fonts, at least when using the system with an equally enormous monitor with DVI interface. We also really liked the slightly improved gParted partition editor, which can move partitions around, and support for writing as well as reading NTFS partitions. On the downside, package dependencies left no graceful way to use Xscreensaver instead of gnome-screensaver, for example in order to take advantage of the former's better support for configuring Xplanet screensavers with real-time sun shadows and cloud maps.
The Lenny release was frozen in late July, in preparation to transition it from "testing" to "stable" status. At the time, Claes said the release would ship in September. From the tone of his message, it still seems possible that the Debian project, infamous for delayed releases, may actually hit the mark. His post can be found here.
-- Henry Kingman
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