Wednesday, 18 Feb, 2009

Thanks to the community effort, debian 5 was finally born.

This is a stable release, code name "lenny", continuing the debian toy story naming tradition.

With this release, there are a lot of changes, well, I guess not the kind of changes you would expect from a modern ".6" Ubuntu desktop refresh.

That is because one of the debian's developers aim is stability, so debian's developers deliberately pick packages one by one and test them a lot before releasing them to the public.

Before debian 5, "lenny" was referred to as "testing" (within the debian repos).

  • Now "debian-testing" has become "debian-stable".

debian is useful for System integrators, System Administrators and others Organisations interested on building something "on top of it" (generally servers).

debian logo

debian logo

debian is very prone to customization, so it is normal to see (old) packages like kernel 2.6.26, X.Org 7.3, K (KDE) 3.5.10, GNOME 2.22.2 etc.

Despite them being old packages, they are thorougly tested and debugged.

If you want a fully featured desktop distribution, get Ubuntu instead.

Ubuntu is built around debian and Ubuntu's next minor update is going to offer some intersting new features and improvements.

If you are a debugger or a developer, you may also wish to try "debian-squeeze" or "debian-sid".

In order to get "debian-squeeze" or "debian-sid", all you have to do is edit "/etc/apt/sources.list" and change all the "stable" keyword instances to "testing" (for squeeze) or "unstable" (for sid).

Of course, "debian-sid" is the edge of the edge, 'though dependencies might tend to break.

My recommendation is to try debian64 for server-like production services or experiments.

You may download debian from torrent sites to relieve some traffic from the official servers and always remember that if you spare some bucks, to support the debian community by donating money (especially true if you make money on top of it).

Welcome debian stable!

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