Debian's next release frozen

Sam Varghese
Saturday, 07 August 2010 10:14

Opinion and Analysis

The Debian GNU/Linux Project has announced that its next release, Squeeze, has been frozen.

This means that no new features will be added and that work will now commence on ironing out all release-critical bugs so that Squeeze can be officially released.

The release will be based on the 2.6.32 kernel and will have version 4.4.5 of the KDE Desktop and 2.30 of GNOME. Other desktop environments like XFCE (version 4.6.2) and LXDE (0.5.0) are also included.

The release will include DKMS, a framework to generate kernel modules whose source does not reside in the Linux kernel tree.

It will also feature dependency-based ordering of init scripts using innserv - parallel execution will mean shorter boot times.

Apart from all the regular ports which Debian caters to, this time there will be versions based on the FreeBSD kernel for both x86 and AMD64 platforms.

In the case of these latter two, the release team has asked probable users not to expect that they will be of the same standard as other ports as this is the first time they are being released.

"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," a post from the Debian team said.

The Debian project, which is now nearly 16 years old, has three streams of development - stable, testing (which becomes the next release) and unstable, meant for use by experts.

Debian serves as the base for many other distribution, has well in excess of 20,000 packages and caters to more ports than any other distribution.