Debian News Archives

As a follow-up to last month's article around the Debian 13 release processes continuing and desktop artwork voting underway for Debian 13 "Trixie", the winning desktop theme/artwork was announced today.

The Debian 13 "Trixie" release is slated for 2025 and with the artwork voting now underway for the default desktop theme is a reminder that the release is quickly approaching.

Debcow is an experimental implementation of deploying Debian packages on copy-on-write file-systems like Btrfs and Bcachefs. Debcow adapts DPKG to use reflinks for installing packages. With reflinking to the file contents from the Debian package archives rather than copying of files, it can lead to a dramatic speed-up of installing Debian packages: as much as 6x faster on CoW file-systems.

While there are more than 74k packages available within Debian's package management system for x86_64 systems, not all of the packages are well maintained and a portion of them haven't seen any maintenance/updates in ages. Debian developers have recently begun discussing how to begin removing more of those long unmaintained packages from the archive.

Debian 12.7 is out today as the latest stable release update for the Debian Bookworm series.

Even before the Bcachefs file-system driver was accepted into the mainline kernel, Debian for the past five years has offered a "bcachefs-tools" package to provide the user-space programs to this copy-on-write file-system. It was simple at first when it was simple C code but since the Bcachefs tools transitioned to Rust, it's become an unmaintainable mess for stable-minded distribution vendors. As such the bcachefs-tools package has now been orphaned by Debian.

A Debian General Resolution was called following a lengthy and contentious period among Debian stakeholders on moving forward tag2upload, a system that lets Debian developers and maintainers more easily carry out source-only uploads by using a signed Git tag.

For those on the Debian stable train, Debian 12.6 is out this weekend as the newest point release to Debian Bookworm.

Debian developer Luca Boccassi has begun working on systemd-boot support for using it as an alternative to the GRUB bootloader.

While the Gentoo Linux project recently established an AI policy to forbid contributions to the project made using any AI tools/assistance and NetBSD also came out with a similar policy against AI-generated code, the Debian project for now has no project-wide policy regarding AI.

Debian's APT packaging tool is working its way toward the big APT 3.0 release. The APT 2.9 development series is underway and debuting last month was APT's new (CLI) user interface with a columnar display, colored text, and other improvements for this widely-used tool on Debian-based environments. APT 2.9.3 is out today as the newest development release and new to this version is a new package solver.

APT as the packaging tool built around Debian Linux is embarking on some big upgrades with the APT 2.9 development series to then roll-out as APT 3.0. There's big improvements to the command-line user interface with the new APT and it's certainly looking nice from my initial Friday night encounter.

A new version of the Debian Policy Manual has been published that outlines the policy requirements for Debian around the package archive and various design matters of the platform.

Debian 12.5 is out this weekend as the newest stable point release for this widely-used Linux distribution in order to ship the latest security fixes and various bug fixes.

Debian Experimental has begun its package rebuilds for its 64-bit time_t transition for ensuring 32-bit architectures running Debian Trixie will be able to operate past the Year 2038.

There was recently a mini DebConf in Cambridge where the Debian GNU/Linux release team held a spring and figured out some items moving forward, including the dim future for i386 moving forward.

Following Debian 12.3 being delayed due to an EXT4 data corruption bug briefly appearing in released Linux 6.1 LTS releases, Debian 12.3 has been replaced by Debian 12.4 and comes with dozens of bug fixes.

Due to a problematic patch back-ported from Linux 6.5 causing interference between EXT4 and iomap code, there's the possibility of a data corruption bug on older kernels -- most notably recent Linux 6.1 LTS point releases that can currently be found in the likes of Debian 12.

Debian's MIPS64EL that is a 64-bit little endian port using the N64 ABI is at risk due to declining access for building the Debian 64-bit MIPS packages. MIPS64EL is now being treated as an "out of sync" architecture due to lacking sufficient build daemon resources for timely building new packages and if the situation doesn't improve, it may not be suitable as a release architecture for Debian 13 "Trixie".

Debian 12 had aimed to have a merged "/usr" file-system layout similar to other Linux distributions, but The Debian Technical Committee earlier this year decided to impose a merged-/usr file movement moratorium. But now with Debian 12 having been out for a few months, that moratorium has been repealed.

Following the release of Debian 12.1 in July, Debian 12.2 was released this weekend to incorporate all of the latest security fixes and other stable back-ports for Debian 12 Bookworm.

Debian developers will be discontinuing their 32-bit MIPS little-endian "mipsel" CPU architecture port moving forward.

In addition to Debian promoting RISC-V to an official CPU architecture for the newly in development Debian 13 cycle, another CPU architecture/port change is adding LoongArch "Loong64" as a new Debian Port.

Devuan is still alive and well for those wanting to run Debian GNU/Linux but without systemd. Devuan 5.0 is out today as the newest distro release that is now rebased atop Debian 12 Bookworm.

RISC-V is now an official Debian architecture for the Debian 13 "Trixie" release to happen in about two years time. Over the weekend a brief status update was issued surrounding this newest CPU architecture to be supported by the Debian GNU/Linux team. Arguably most interesting is how they are currently building out the Debian RISC-V packages.

Debian 13 "Trixie" has been aiming for official RISC-V support and indeed it will happen: RISC-V has now been promoted to an official Debian CPU architecture.

Building off last month's release of Debian 12.0, Debian 12.1 is out today to ship dozens of bug fixes.

Following this weekend's release of Debian 12.0, the Debian GNU Hurd port has been released that rather than utilizing the Linux kernel is making use of GNU Hurd.

With today's release of Debian 12 the official ports are for AMD64, AArch64, ARMEL, ARMHF, i386, MIPS, 64-bit MIPS, POWER, and IBM System Z. There isn't RISC-V 64-bit as an official port but that is likely to change for Debian 13.

Following more than one and a half years in development, Debian 12 is officially shipping today as the latest major release for this long-maintained Linux distribution.

Debian 12 remains on track for releasing next week even with around 100 known RC bugs that likely won't be resolved pre-release. The Debian release team says overall things are on-track.

Armbian 23.05 is out today as this Arm-focused Debian-based Linux distribution effort is approaching its tenth anniversary.

The Debian 12 "Bookworm" release is quickly approaching with an early June release date while for helping facilitate more last minute testing is a fourth release candidate of the updated Debian Installer.

The Debian Technical Committee has voted to reinstate the merged-/usr file movement moratorium.

Ahead of Debian 12.0 releasing in June, a third release candidate of the Debian 12 "Bookworm" installer has been released.

Debian's APT packaging tool that is also used by downstreams like Ubuntu has begun seeing initial support for "snapshots" introduced.

In preparing for releasing Debian 12.0 "Bookworm" in June, out this weekend is the second release candidate of the Debian Installer for this next major Debian Linux release.

The Debian release team has just announced a tentative ship date for Debian 12.0 "Bookworm".

While Debian and its derivatives are quite popular with ARM single board computers, the ARM64 Secure Boot support has been broken for at least two years. But a fix is on the way and it should appear for this year's Debian 12 "Bookworm" release.

CoreCtrl as the open-source utility for managing your system's performance/vitals and supporting various application profiles has landed in Debian as well as being picked up for easy installation on the upcoming Ubuntu 23.04.

The Debian Installer for the upcoming Debian 12 "Bookworm" release has reached its release candidate phase.

Following last month's soft freeze for Debian 12 "Bookworm", this popular Linux distribution is now in its hard freeze until its release time.

Debian developers today released APT 2.6 as the newest version of this package manager that will ship as part of the upcoming Debian 12 "Bookworm" release.

Debian 12 "Bookworm" is now under its soft freeze while out this weekend is the second alpha release for the Debian Installer.

After last month's initial Debian 12 freeze, this week the "Bookworm" Linux distribution release entered its soft freeze.

Debian 12 (codenamed "Bookworm") is expected to be released later this year and as such the first of several code/package freezes has begun.

Being introduced to the Debian package archive this week is accel-config as Intel's new user-space component for configuring the DSA accelerators found with the new 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors.

While Debian 12.0 "Bookworm" will hopefully be out around mid-2023, Debian 11.6 is out this weekend as the newest point release to the current Debian 11 "Bullseye" stable series.

The upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 12 release is codenamed "Bookworm" and is expected to be released in 2023. Meanwhile Debian 13 will be out around 2025 and it was already announced under the Trixie codename. Now today it's been announced that Debian 14 come 2027 will also be known as the "Forky" release.

There's been a lot happening in Debian recently from improving their handling of non-free firmware to switching to PipeWire and WirePlumber with Debian 12. Another change on the way is picking up Ubuntu's work on dynamic triple buffering for the GNOME desktop.