So this weekend's big news (for me, at least), is the release of Debian Wheezy.
Squeeze (Debian 6.0) was absolutely amazing and will be missed, but the new distro looks like it's bringing a lot of interesting improvements.
What's new?
It'd be inconceivable to describe everything new in this release. After all it's the result of over 2 years of work by developers on over 35,000 packages. It's huge. If you want something more exhaustive you should read more in the official release announcement.
Here are some highlights I found most interesting:
The funny thing about "Wheezy" is that it's absolutely not a new distro. It's actually over 2 years old, and several distributions (like the last 4 versions of Ubuntu) have been based off this version. See Debian has a very particular way of releasing their software. Debian comes in 3 versions:
Today's announcement is that the old "Testing" is becoming "Stable". A new "Testing" is going to get started soon, nicknamed "Jessie (Debian 8.0)".
How to upgrade from Squeeze
One last thing before I leave. If you have an existing Squeeze installation and you want to upgrade to Wheezy, you may want to follow this guide.
Squeeze (Debian 6.0) was absolutely amazing and will be missed, but the new distro looks like it's bringing a lot of interesting improvements.
What's new?
It'd be inconceivable to describe everything new in this release. After all it's the result of over 2 years of work by developers on over 35,000 packages. It's huge. If you want something more exhaustive you should read more in the official release announcement.
Here are some highlights I found most interesting:
- Optional support for systemd
- Support for AppArmor
- Backports are now included in the official mirrors
- Multiarch support (it means you can mix architectures, for instance mixing 64bits and 32bits packages)
- Inclusion of OpenStack packages
- Python2.7 is the default Python2.x interpreter
- Debian/kFreeBSD is getting more attention than before (yay for ZFS goodness).
- ffmpeg is replaced by libav
- For people interested in virtualization, OpenVZ is dropped in favor of more modern solutions (LXC ftw!)
- Java6 is dropped
The funny thing about "Wheezy" is that it's absolutely not a new distro. It's actually over 2 years old, and several distributions (like the last 4 versions of Ubuntu) have been based off this version. See Debian has a very particular way of releasing their software. Debian comes in 3 versions:
- Stable: The "current" version. By default it will get very little updates.
- Testing: The "next" version. It's actively worked on by the developers. It will be the following Stable "when it's ready".
- Unstable: Traditionally called "Sid", this is a staging area where packages are immediately uploaded.
Today's announcement is that the old "Testing" is becoming "Stable". A new "Testing" is going to get started soon, nicknamed "Jessie (Debian 8.0)".
How to upgrade from Squeeze
One last thing before I leave. If you have an existing Squeeze installation and you want to upgrade to Wheezy, you may want to follow this guide.