Debian Archive

That rare event where tried and true Debian releases a new version. "This new version of Debian includes various interesting features such as multiarch support, several specific tools to deploy private clouds, an improved installer, and a complete set of multimedia codecs and front-ends which remove the need for third-party repositories. Multiarch support, one of the main release goals for 'Wheezy', will allow Debian users to install packages from multiple architectures on the same machine. This means that you can now, for the first time, install both 32- and 64-bit software on the same machine and have all the relevant dependencies correctly resolved, automatically."

Debian announced that they are going to introduce multiarch support for Wheezy (7.0) in 2013. Well, nice, but aren't they a little bit late now that problems are mostly sorted out and systems moved to 64-bit? This would have been great news at the time when Lenny (5.0) was released, but does it even matter in 2013? Are they just going to make things more complicated for no reason?

Oh glorious day! After two years of development, one of the prime Linux distributions has pushed out a new release - Debian 6.0 'Squeeze' has been released. The most fascinating aspect fo this new release is that it includes Debian/kFreeBSD s a technology preview, which fascinates me to no end. Of course, there's a whole lot more, including a brand new website for the project - the first major redesign in 13 years.

"ZFS will be supported in Debian Squeeze using the official installer. This means that Debian Squeeze will be one of the first GNU distributions to support ZFS. In fact, even though ZFS support didn't make it to Debian-Installer beta1 by the time it was released, it is now available in the netboot images (this happens because netboot images fetch newer installer components from the internet)."

It's hard to turn a news item like this into a front page item, but I'm going to try anyway, because I think it's pretty cool news. As we all know, Debian supports a number of architectures as 'release architectures', but what some of you may not be aware of is that Debian also supports a number of kernels other than Linux. One of those, the FreeBSD kernel, has been promoted to release status, putting it on equal footing with the Linux variant.

Most mainstream distributions, like Ubuntu, Fedora, and Mandriva, have already adopted a time-based release schedule, meaning that releases are not done on a feature basis, but according to a pre-determined time schedule. The Debian project has announced that it has adopted a time-based release schedule too.