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Saturday, August 7, 2010

Debian -- News -- Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" frozen

Debian 6.0 Squeeze frozen

August 6th, 2010

In this very moment, during the ongoing annual Debian Developer Conference "Debconf10" in New York, Debian's release managers have announced a major step in the development cycle of the upcoming stable release Debian 6.0 Squeeze:

Debian Squeeze has now been frozen.

In consequence this means that no more new features will be added and all work will now be concentrated on polishing Debian Squeeze to achieve the quality Debian stable releases are known for.

The upcoming release will use Linux 2.6.32 as its default kernel in the installer and on all Linux architectures.

New features of the upcoming release include:

State of the art desktop environments, based on KDE 4.4.5, Gnome 2.30.0, LXDE 0.5.0, XFCE 4.6.2, X.org 7.5, OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 and many other applications.
Stable and current versions of common server software such as Apache 2.2.16, PHP 5.3.2, MySQL 5.1.48, PostgreSQL 8.4.4 and Samba 3.4.
Modern interpreters and compilers for all common languages such as Python 2.6 and 3.1, Perl 5.10, GHC 6.12 and GCC 4.4.
DKMS, a framework to generate Linux kernel modules whose sources do not reside in the Linux kernel source tree.
Dependency-based ordering of init scripts using insserv, allowing parallel execution to shorten the time needed to boot the system.

Debian 6.0 Squeeze will also be accompanied by variants based on the FreeBSD kernel for amd64 and i386 machines, together with the GNU libc and userland as a "technology preview". Users of these versions however should be warned that the quality of these ports is still catching up with the outstanding high quality of our Linux ports, and that some advanced desktop features are not supported yet. However, the support of common server software is strong and extends the features of Linux-based Debian versions by the unique features known from the BSD world. This is the first time a Linux distribution has been extended to also allow use of a non-Linux kernel.

Further work

A number of bug squashing parties will be organized before the new distribution is released in order to classify and fix the remaining known problems in the new distribution. As the set of features has now been finalized for Squeeze, developers can now begin to create documentation such as release notes and the installation guide. Interested users and developers are invited to join the #debian-bugs IRC channel on irc.debian.org and help with these efforts or test out pre-release versions of Squeeze. To support more users, the Debian project also asks for help with translating the new documentation to as many languages as possible.

About Debian

The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly free, community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of the largest and most influential open source projects. Over three thousand volunteers from all over the world work together to create and maintain Debian software. Translated into over 30 languages, and supporting a huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal operating system.