Debian 7.0 ("Wheezy") Released 191
First time accepted submitter anarcat writes "After two years since the last Debian release (6.0, nicknamed "squeeze"), the Debian release team has finally published Debian 7.0 (nicknamed "Wheezy"). A newly created blog has details on the release, which features multi-arch support (e.g. you can now install packages for both i386 and amd64 on the same install), improvements to multimedia support (no need for third party repositories!) and improved security through hardening flags. Debian 7.0 also ships with the controversial Gnome 3 release, and the release notes explicitly mention how to revert to the more familiar 'Gnome classic' interface. Finally, we can also mention the improved support for virtualization infrastructure with pre-built images available for Amazon EC2, Windows Azure and Google Compute Engine. Debian 7.0 also ships with the OpenStack suite and the Xen Cloud Platform. More details on the improvements can be found in the release notes and the Debian wiki." An anonymous reader points out (from the announcement) that "[t]he installation process has been greatly improved: Debian can now be installed using software speech, above all by visually impaired people who do not use a Braille device. Thanks to the combined efforts of a huge number of translators, the installation system is available in 73 languages, and more than a dozen of them are available for speech synthesis too.
In addition, for the first time, Debian supports installation and booting using UEFI for new 64-bit PCs (amd64), although there is no support for Secure Boot yet."
Well done guys! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Outdated (Score:5, Insightful)
Heh, kernel 3.2... this OS comes outdated out of the box.
It's not outdated. It is well tested.
Re:Why Debian? (Score:5, Insightful)
Missing Apache 2.4 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Outdated (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Why Debian? (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux has been historically considered a good OS for servers, where uptime and stability are very important. Don't forget the Debian project goes back really far, 1993 or so if I'm not mistaken.
Once you have a server running that many people depend on, you become change-averse to it, because change = risk. So having mature, well-tested, stable software is more important than having the latest and greatest.
Re:Dated, old, irrelevant to many except the dieha (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Outdated (Score:2, Insightful)
As a Debian user, I didn't notice the GNOME 3 switch because not everybody uses Linux as a desktop. It's fairly popular as a headless server.
fire up your torrents! (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's your quick and easy way to give back. I don't code in c/c++, I hate writing documentation, so share some bandwidth and seed the torrents for a few hours or a few gb.
Re:Why Debian? (Score:3, Insightful)
Without Debian there'd be no Ubuntu or Linux Mint since they both pull packages from the unstable (read: under testing / "current" ) Debian repos.
And that is really the strange thing to me, that Debian does so much work but don't want to put it in a product. Debian unstable is a rolling release, meaning at any time you can be hit with a major change. Not fun if you want to run any kind of stable environment. Debian testing is extremely variable over the course of a release cycle, being almost similar to unstable early and stable late in the cycle. It's good for people working on the next stable but doesn't balance freshness and stability for anyone else. And stable is of course for the ultra-conservative server that really needs 99.999%+ uptime. They don't have - and apparently don't want to have - anything that competes in the space of Ubuntu (non-LTS), Linux Mint, Fedora etc. with rapid-cycle releases. It's like Debian should mean Debian stable and absolutely nothing else.
I think there would have been a good market for a Debian Desktop distribution, essentially that's what Ubuntu marketed itself. I'm not really surprised that it must happen outside Debian though, because there's been a lot of outright hostility from Debian developers that don't want to divide limited resources between what they consider "real" Debian and "play" Debian. Instead of getting the act together on devices with a GUI now Gnome, KDE, Unity etc. have been overrun by Android on smart phones and tablets and I suspect hybrids and laptops will be next.
Re:Outdated (Score:2, Insightful)
Heh, kernel 3.2... this OS comes outdated out of the box.
It's not outdated. It is well tested.
Isn't 2.6 even more well tested?
Re:Why Debian? (Score:4, Insightful)
I sort of fit into the group you're talking about.
My intro to Debian was through Suse. I've been a distro hopper all of my Linux life, but I settled on Ubuntu as my "household" distro, because it was easy to use. The wife and kids used Ubuntu for a long time. We broke with Ubuntu when Unity came along. Now, the household distro is Linux Mint Debian. I still use anything and everything, but at home, it's Mint.
Re:Outdated (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Dated, old, irrelevant to many except the dieha (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Missing Apache 2.4 (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only this, but you can use the stable Debian version as a base to install / compile whatever new stuff you want (just work your way up the upgrade path tree), this way you can choose stability in some places and newest features in others. Despite sometimes having dependency hell, I've found it even more difficult to go the opposite direction -- Installing the latest stuff, then going after the more stable things in certain places.