Debian 6.0 (codenamed Squeeze) has been unleashed after a 24-month development period. Debian spokesman Alexander Reichle-Schmehl said the release came a week short of two years of development. The latest stable release, Lenny, was held on February 14, 2009.
Debian GNU / kFreeBSD port both 32 – and 64-bit PC version of the FreeBSD kernel in Debian user space, becoming the first release of Debian Linux without a kernel. The Debian Project is serious about the sample label technology, however, these versions of FreeBSD based have limited advanced desktop.
The Debian 6.0 installer is better and easier to use than ever before and is now available in 70 languages. You can select language and keyboard settings, partition your logical volumes, RAID and encrypted systems without trouble. Btrfs and ext4 filesystems are finally supported in this release.
To speed up and improve stability during system start-up, Debian 6.0 introduces a dependency based boot system. The parallel execution of boot scripts and the precise dependency tracking between them made it possible.
Within either Linux or FreeBSD, Debian 6.0 includes the usual range of desktop environments: KDE Plasma, GNOME, Xfce and LXDE desktop environment will all be on board. Tighten introduces a dependency-based startup, so the system boot faster and more robust due to parallel execution of startup scripts and correct dependency tracking including Reichle-Schmehl said. “Several other changes make Debian more appropriate for small portable form factor, as the introduction of the KDE Plasma Netbook shell.” The new packages available with Sueeze include the browser chrome, Icing monitoring solution, the software package management interface of the Centre, wicd network manager, tools LXC Linux container and corosync cluster framework. In total, over 10,000 new packages are included.
Here is a list of some of the updated software packages in this latest version:
* Linux 2.6.32
* KDE 4.4.5
* GNOME 2.30
* X.Org 7.5
* OpenOffice.org 3.2.1
* GIMP 2.6.11
* MySQL 5.1.49
* GNU Compiler Collection 4.4.5
* Apache 2.2.16
* Samba 3.5.6
* Python 2.6.6, 2.5.5 and 3.1.3
* Perl 5.10.1
* PHP 5.3.3
* Nagios 3.2.3
* Tomcat 6.0.18
There are many goodies in 6.0 Debian GNU / Linux, not least of which is again completely free as in freedom kernel of Linux, which no longer contains firmware modules that Debian developers are upset. According to the statement of Debian, the installation images can be downloaded right now via bittorrent (the recommended way), jigdo or HTTP, see Debian on CD for more information. Soon be available in physical DVD, CD-ROM and Blu-ray of numerous vendors, too.
Another important aspect is the removal of stains from firmware problems – which were non-free code. All have been removed, restoring the purity of the Debian distribution. You can re-enable non-free repository – belonging to a distribution like Debian.
Debian runs on anything (Intel IA-32 (i386), Intel EM64T/x86-64 (amd64), Motorola/IBM PowerPC (powerpc), Sun/Oracle SPARC (sparc), MIPS (mips (big-endian) and mipsel (little-endian)), Intel Itanium (ia64), IBM S/390 (s390), and ARM EABI (armel)), and you can obviously upgrade your existing installation painlessly.
