Debian News Archives

While Debian 7.8 was released this weekend, for those living on the bleeding edge the release candidate of the installer for the upcoming Debian 8.0 "Jessie" release is now available.

While Debian 8.0 might stand chances to be released in the weeks ahead, Debian 7.8 was released this weekend as the latest stable update to Debian Wheezy.

WAPT is an open-source package manager for Windows that's based on apt-get functionality and can ease the installation/updating/configuration/removal/management of Windows programs and drivers.

With the upcoming release of Debian 8.0 "Jessie", AArch64/ARM64 will become an official release architecture.

In looking back at Debian in 2014, it was the year of heated systemd discussions and debates with ultimately switching over to it as the default init manager, which led to resignations among the Debian technical committee and other responsibilities.

The Devuan fork of Debian is progressing as Debian GNU/Linux without systemd present on the system.

Here's our latest benchmark results comparing the performance of Debian Jessie GNU/Linux vs. GNU/kFreeBSD -- the Debian port that uses the FreeBSD kernel rather than Linux.

Users of Debian and its derivatives can soon expect to find systemd 217.

Last month we wrote about a group of administrations planning to fork Debian GNU/Linux over not liking its direction due to adopting systemd over Upstart or SysVInit. The Debian administrators have made good on their word and announced the Devuan fork of Debian.

There's yet another resignation this morning in the Debian camp.

The Debian voting surrounding a general resolution around init system coupling has ended.

There's yet another resignation from the Debian camp. This time, Russ Allbery of the Debian Technical Committee has stepped away from those duties.

Just over one week ago Joey Hess resigned as a Debian developer with unhappy how the Linux distribution has evolved. This Sunday there's another resignation in the Debian camp, but it's just over maintainership of the systemd package.

Lucas Nussbaum, the Debian Project Leader, is pushing to try to have Debian 8.0 "Jessie" ready for release within the next twelve weeks.

Joey Hess is now distancing himself from the Debian project as he resigns from his roles after being involved with Debian since 1996. In his parting remarks, Joey says his biggest regret over the past eighteen years is not speaking out against the Debian constitution.

Jonathan Wiltshire on the behalf of the Debian release team announced this week that Debian 8.0 "Jessie" is frozen.

While init system discussions have dominated the discussions about Debian 8.0 Jessie, on a brighter note, there's many multimedia improvements found in this next release.

Back in September Debian switched back to the GNOME desktop by default in place of Xfce for the upcoming Debian 8.0 "Jessie" release. However, as of today, the non-x86 versions of Debian have flip-flopped once again back to Xfce.

While some are busy debating whether Debian should be forked, the upstream Debian release team is moving forward and has announced the stable release of Debian 7.7.

In light of Debian's outlook for using systemd by default, a group of users/developers/administrators are talking about forking Debian GNU/Linux.

The init system discussion is back on in the Debian camp... A vote will be taking place in two weeks to look at preserving the "freedom of choice of init systems."

Debian's installer is up to its second beta for the 8.0 Jessie release cycle.

For years there's been the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port that ships the same Debian GNU user-land as Debian GNU/Linux but replaces the Linux kernel with that of the FreeBSD kernel.

While Debian defaulted to the Xfce desktop in the past after switching from GNOME, the default Debian desktop is back to being with GNOME.

OpenMediaVault 1.0 was released today as a Debian-based network attached storage (NAS) solution that uses Nginx, its own dashboard with widgets support, and other original features.

Earlier this year was the announcement of Debian to be handled with Long Term Support for the Squeeze, Wheezy, and Jessie releases. That LTS support is working but their initial funding is coming up less than desirable and there's still open issues.

With Debian now being more than two decades old, it has a long history, but a Phoronix reader has tried to make sense of the situation.

The first beta of the installation images for Debian 8.0 "Jessie" are now available.

It looks like the next major Debian GNU/Linux release will be shipping with the soon to be released Linux 3.16 kernel.

While Spotify was a major Debian user with running their thousands of back-end servers on the major Linux distribution, including being vocal about systemd on Debian, they have decided to switch over to Ubuntu.

Debian 7.6 was released this weekend as the latest "Wheezy" release to mainly address security problems and other important bug fixes.

A half-decade ago the Debian project switched from GLIBC to EGLIBC as their standard C library. Debian is now reverting course and switching back to GLIBC.

As some good news for Debian users running a Radeon HD 7000 series or newer graphics card where the GLAMOR 2D acceleration support is required, GLAMOR support has been enabled within the Debian experimental repository.

Debian developers have announced today that Debian 6 will be maintained as a long-term support (LTS) state until February of 2016.

GCC 4.9, which was officially released in late April, brings many improvements to the de facto standard Linux compiler stack. Debian and Ubuntu developers are now working on landing this annually-updated compiler stack for their Linux distributions.

For five years the wattOS Linux distribution has been around as being an energy-efficient distribution powered at its core by Ubuntu, but with their new release they have shifted to being powered by Debian.

Based upon the timing of kernel releases and requirements for hardware support, it looks like Debian 8.0 "Jessie" will ship with the Linux 3.16 kernel but it might end up being Linux 3.17.

Debian has removed their SPARC CPU architecture support from Debian 8.0 "Jessie" testing and it might also be removed from Debian unstable as well.

The fifth update to Debian 7 "Wheezy" is now available.

Regular security support for Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" was set to end after next month, but now the Debian developers have decided to provide security support for this 2011 Debian Linux release until February 2016 -- marking five years since the original Debian 6.0 release.

The Debian Project Leader elections are over for the year.

Debian developers announced this week version 1.0 of APT, their Advanced Packaging Tool, on the day that the packaging project turned sixteen years old.

With the first alpha release yesterday of the Debian 8.0 installer back when I was briefly in the office, I decided to try out the updated installer and packages for this next Debian release that's under the Jessie codename.

Today's been a very exciting open-source Linux news day and there's still a lot more to share. The latest surprising news today is the availability of the first alpha installer release for Debian 8.0 Jessie.

Since the Debian technical committee decided they will use systemd over Upstart, the latest vote on their agenda was over init system coupling and how Debian developers maintaining packages should deal with different init systems or what guidance the technical committee should send to these package maintainers.

A Debian port is now available for OpenRISC.

When FFmpeg was forked into Libav, Debian ended up taking the route of packaging and shipping Libav in place of FFmpeg. However, there's many people that prefer FFmpeg to Libav with FFmpeg's continued progress, and now this multimedia project may be on its way to finding itself in the Debian archive once again.

The Mempo Project is still aiming to provide the "most secure and yet comfortable out-of-the-box Desktop and Server" operating system powered by Debian.

Debian's technical committee have moved onto voting over the operating system's default init system to now voting whether they should issue any guidance concerning the coupling of packages for specific init systems(s).

The next Debian release, 8.0, is codenamed Jessie, but succeeding that will be Debian 9.0 "Zurg" in a few years time.