Debian "Lenny" 5.0 Released

Nearly two years after the introduction of Debian 4.0 "Etch", Debian has reached the version 5.0 milestone. Debian 5.0 "Lenny" was released yesterday on Valentine's Day after it previously had faced a few delays. Debian 5.0 is based upon the Linux 2.6.26 kernel, X.Org 7.3, GNOME 2.22, KDE 3.5.10, and OpenOffice.org 2.4 are among the key packages.

New in Debian 5.0 is a new architecture/binary ABI (armel) for current and future ARM processors. Though when it comes to architectures, Debian 5.0 drops support for 32-bit SPARC. With Debian 5.0 "Lenny" there is an enhanced "out of the box" experience as OpenJDK has been integrated for Java support, Gnash / swfdec is available for Flash files, and there is also full support for NTFS file-systems.

The news announcement for the release of Debian 5.0 can be found at Debian.org. The next major release of Debian with an unknown release time-frame has been codenamed Squeeze.