Debian News Archives

Devuan 3.0 "Beowulf" has finally reached beta as a spin of Debian 10 "Buster" created without a dependence on systemd.

While the Debian 11 "Bullseye" code freeze isn't for another year, the second alpha release of the Debian Installer to ultimately provide the installation process is now available.

The Debian release team has published their tentative freeze dates for the next major version of their Linux operating system, Debian 11 Bullseye.

While the Debian archive continues to be built with the GCC compiler by default and will likely remain that way for the foreseeable future, Debian developers do continue experimenting with building the Debian archive under LLVM's Clang.

Over the past year Debian developers have been working towards APT 2.0 while now it is officially released for the advanced package tool on Debian, Ubuntu, and other DEB-based platforms.

Out this weekend are the stable updates Debian 10.3 and Debian 9.12.

Debian developer Mike Gabriel in cooperation with the UBports developers continuing to maintain Ubuntu Touch and Unity 8 are working to offer Unity 8 (and in turn, Mir) packages within Debian.

Following last month's Debian init system diversity vote where the Debian developers decided on a general resolution of focusing on systemd but support exploring alternatives, the official Debian Policy has been updated to reflect that.

For a decade now snapshot.debian.org has been around for accessing old Debian packages and to find packages by dates and version numbers. Only now though is a guide materializing for leveraging this Debian "wayback machine" in order to help in bisecting regressions for the distribution that span multiple/unknown packages.

For those wanting to run Debian from the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) as the root file-system, that support is emerging.

The Debian developer voting over init system diversity options has wrapped up and a decision has been made.

It's been five years already since the vote to transition to systemd in Debian over Upstart while now there is the new vote that has just commenced for judging the interest in "init system diversity" and just how much Debian developers care (or not) in supporting alternatives to systemd.

Debian 11 "Bullseye" isn't expected to be released until well into 2021 but out today is the first alpha release of the Debian Installer that will ultimately power that next major Debian GNU/Linux release.

Devuan 2.1 is available as the latest release of this spin of Debian GNU/Linux that works without a dependence on systemd. Devuan 2.1 remains focused on "init freedom" though this new release is still tracking the older Debian 9 "Stretch" branch.

A few days ago Debian Project Leader Sam Hartman laid out the proposals for the upcoming Debian General Resolution vote concerning "init system diversity" and just how much Debian developers still care in 2019 about supporting non-systemd init systems within the Linux distribution.

Following the decision by Debian Project Leader Sam Hartman to seek a general resolution over init system diversity and just how much Debian developers care about supporting systemd alternatives, the general resolution vote is moving closer.

Debian 10.2 is out this morning as the latest point release to the "Buster" series.

Debian Project Leader Sam Hartman has determined it's necessary to pursue a general resolution among Debian developers over their init system policy and whether to still care about init system diversity outside of systemd.

Debian 10 "Buster" already is making use of IPTables' Netfilter back-end by default in their path to deprecate IPTables while for Debian 11 the deprecation will continue further.

Debian Project Leader Sam Hartman has shared his August 2019 notes where he outlines the frustrations and issues that have come up as a result of init system diversity with some developers still aiming to viably support systemd alternatives within Debian.

For fans of the lightweight Slax Linux distribution, version 9.11 is now available and is re-based against upstream Debian 9.11 for this operating system that was resurrected two years ago.

Debian 10.1 was released today as the first collection of security and bug fixes to this summer's release of Debian 10 "Buster" GNU/Linux.

With Debian 10 "Buster" out the door and Python 2 hitting end-of-life at the end of the year, Debian is working on their process of removing Python 2 packages that don't get ported to Python 3 and Ubuntu is working on similar action for their Python 2 packages not found in upstream Debian.

As a change that will affect Debian 11 "Bullseye" but not the current Debian 10 "Buster" or older is the distribution's decision to remove the old MIPS architecture.

Debian 10.1 along with Debian 9.10 are expected to be released on 7 September.

Debian's annual developer conference, DebConf, wrapped up last week in Curitiba, Brasil. The slide decks and video recordings for many of those presentations are now available.

With more tier-one Linux distributions working on plans for doing away with 32-bit x86 support, if you are looking for a new distribution to play nicely with older hardware, Q4OS 3.8 may be it.

Now that Debian 10 "Buster" shipped, Debian developers are preparing already to kickoff the Debian 11 "Bullseye" development and begin with uploading new packages for this next major release of Debian GNU/Linux.

In addition to the release of Debian 10.0 "Buster" this weekend, the team maintaining the Debian port to the GNU Hurd micro-kernel did their unofficial "2019" release.

After a long day of preparations, Debian 10.0 "Buster" is now available as planned with the CD/DVD images having just hit the mirrors.

While Debian 10.0 "Buster" is due to be released this weekend, a seemingly last release candidate of the Debian Installer is now available.

With Debian 10.0 aiming to release next weekend, the near-final release images have been uploaded with enthusiasts encouraged to test out these builds for spotting any lingering bugs.

With Debian 10 "Buster" aiming to be released in early July, a second release candidate of the Debian Installer has been made available.

With Debian 10 "Buster" due to be releasing in early July, I've begun testing the near-final Buster images on various systems. Here is a look at a common Intel Core i7 system comparing the current performance of Debian 10.0 to the current stable 9.9 release.

Debian's RISC-V support has been coming together but how's the state of affairs for the imminent Debian 10.0 "Buster" release?

We now have a tentative release date for the big Debian 10 "Buster" release.

After ending out 2019 by seeking the successful removal of a package over its name and logo, the Debian Anti-Harassment Team saw initially a busy 2019 but work has leveled out while they are working on making it easier to bring them aware of situations via a web-based form.

Not only does this appear to be the first time Lenovo has decided to sponsor Debian's annual conference, but they have done so at the flagship "platinum" sponsorship tier.

As it stands now the upcoming release of Debian 10 "Buster" will provide a default desktop of the GNOME Shell running atop Wayland, but that still could change with a Debian developer suggesting the experience might not be good enough for this next release that they would be better off still using the X.Org Server.

Sam Hartman, Debian's new Project Leader, has issued his first (partial) monthly report with his initial activities serving in the "DPL" role.

While we are eager for the release of Debian 10 this summer, Debian 9.9 is out this weekend as the latest stable release update to "Stretch" and primarily delivering security fixes.

While initially no qualified candidates stepped forward for the 2019 Debian Project Leader elections, following the extended nomination period and voting, Sam Hartman has been elected the newest leader of Debian.

While there are around 150 release critical bugs to be addressed before Debian 10.0 "Buster" can make its debut, the Debian Installer continues getting in great shape and is out today with its release candidate.

Debian developer Jonathan Wiltshire who is part of the project's release team issued a Buster freeze status update on Sunday concerning the readiness of Debian 10.

For years Debian developers have been planning for a merged /usr concept where the /{bin,sbin,lib}/ directories becoming symbolic links to /usr/{bin,sbin,lib}/. With the upcoming Debian 10 Buster is the initial step of their plan after it was postponed from Debian Stretch.

For those that have been wanting to try out the near-final Sway 1.0, this Wayland compositor has made its way into the Debian archive albeit only in the "experimental" section for now.

Debian 9.8 is available this weekend as the latest bug-fix / security fix update to Debian GNU/Linux "Stretch".

The open-source projects that regularly participate in Google's annual Summer of Code initiative for helping student developers start out their career in free software development are already thinking about GSoC 2019. Debian is among the projects working out their Google Summer of Code 2019 plans and have some interesting project possibilities should they find enough interested students.

The fifth alpha of the Debian Installer for the upcoming Debian 10.0 "Buster" release is now available for testing. What makes this new release particularly important to test is that it features the initial UEFI Secure Boot support.

Now included in the Debian 10.0 Buster release and pending as part of the upstream MATE desktop environment is support for making it remote desktop aware.