Debian 6.0 ‘Squeeze’ is Out with Some Big Changes

Finally the much-anticipated Debian Squeeze has been released (or better to say it’s stable); which kinda makes us to say a happy goodbye to our dear Lenny installations and also welcome the new unstable release; namely Wheezy. Along with the release, we can see the new layout of Debian website and it’s planet (the previous layout belonged to 13 years ago! you judge: Oct 2009, Dec 1998). The community is just bursting with energy and we are all happy that Debian is still the same OS as we knew it: stable and easy-to-use without eye-candies or weird changes.

Debian is not your typical everyday GNU/Linux distro. It takes two years of carefully crafting, testing thousands of packages to make a stable release. It’s a mega release for an unmatched number of various hardware architectures from handhelds to enterprise servers (I can safely say no other distro provide such a vast architecture support; if you ignore Gentoo). In addition, It’s going to be the base system for more than 20 debian derivatives; providing necessary platform for FreeBSD and HURD fans; and oh I almost forgot the sacred repository which now contains more than 29,000 packages.

There are some radical changes in the 6th release; most notably the completely free Linux kernel. Now I think maybe it’s time for Free Software Foundation to recognize Debian as a fully-free operating system, just like old days in 90‘s when FSF was an official sponsor of Debian project. Maybe RMS himself should consider migrating to Debian although I know he is not happy with some of these non-free repositories.

Just a note of advice, If you are new to Debian, please don’t download/install the default graphical variety and compare it with your fancy-looking distros. That’s not the way we do Debian. Download the Network Install and build your Debian system from scratch and please do check out the release information. Anyway, as soon as I get some free time( from my python crash course) I will upgrade my own installation and blog about it. Stay tuned.