After nearly two years of development, the release of Debian GNU/Linux 12.0 (Bookworm) has taken place, available for nine officially supported architectures: Intel IA-32/x86 (i686), AMD64/x86-64, ARM EABI (armel), ARM64, ARMv7 (armhf), mipsel, mips64el, PowerPC 64 (ppc64el), and IBM System z (s390x). Updates for Debian 12 will be released for 5 years.
Installation images are available for download via HTTP, jigdo, or BitTorrent. LiveUSBs have been developed for amd64 and i386 architectures, available in versions with GNOME, KDE, LXDE, Xfce, Cinnamon, and MATE, as well as a multi-architecture DVD that combines packages for the amd64 platform with additional packages for the i386 architecture. Before migrating from Debian 11 'Bullseye', please review the following document.
The repository features 64,419 binary packages, which is 4,868 packages more than was offered in Debian 11. Compared to Debian 11, 11,089 new binary packages have been added, 6,296 (10%) outdated or abandoned packages have been removed, and 43,254 (67%) packages have been updated. The total cumulative size of all source texts offered in the distribution amounts to 1,341,564,204 lines of code. The total size of all packages is 365 GB. Support for reproducible builds is provided for 96.3% (compared to 95.7% in the previous branch) of packages, allowing confirmation that the executable file has been built from the declared source texts and contains no foreign modifications, which could be introduced, for example, through an attack on the build infrastructure or a backdoor in the compiler.
Key changes in Debian 12.0:
- In addition to free firmware from the main repository, the official installation images include proprietary firmware that was previously available through the non-free repository. When hardware requiring external firmware is detected, the necessary proprietary firmware is downloaded by default. For users preferring only free software, an option to disable the use of non-free firmware is provided during the boot process.
- A new non-free-firmware repository has been added, which transfers firmware packages from the non-free repository. The installer now provides the option to dynamically request firmware packages from the non-free-firmware repository. Having a separate repository for firmware allows access to firmware without including it in the installation media of the general non-free repository.
- The Linux kernel has been updated to version 6.1 (Debian 11 shipped with kernel 5.10). The systemd 252, Apt 2.6, and Glibc 2.36 have been updated.
- The graphical stack and user environments have been updated: GNOME 43, KDE Plasma 5.27, LXDE 11, LXQt 1.2.0, MATE 1.2, Xfce 4.18, Mesa 22.3.6, X.Org Server 21.1, Wayland 1.21. In GNOME environments, the multimedia server Pipewire and the sound session manager WirePlumber are now used by default.
- User applications have been updated, including LibreOffice 7.4, GNUcash 4.13, Emacs 28.2, GIMP 2.10.34, Inkscape 1.2.2, VLC 3.0.18, Vim 9.0.
- Server applications have been updated, including Apache httpd 2.4.57, BIND 9.18, Dovecot 2.3.19, Exim 4.96, lighttpd 1.4.69, Postfix 3.7, MariaDB 10.11, nginx 1.22, PostgreSQL 15, Redis 7.0, SQLite 3.40, Samba 4.17, OpenSSH 9.2p1.
- Development tools have been updated, including GCC 12.2, LLVM/Clang 14 (15.0.6 is also available for installation), OpenJDK 17, Perl 5.36, PHP 8.2, Python 3.11.2, Rust 1.63, Ruby 3.1.
- Support for working with the APFS (Apple File System) has been added in read and write mode, using the packages apfsprogs and apfs-dkms. The ntfs2btrfs utility is included for converting NTFS partitions to Btrfs.
- Support for the mimalloc memory distribution library has been added, which can serve as a transparent replacement for the malloc function. Notably, mimalloc is compactly implemented and offers very high performance (in tests, mimalloc outperforms jemalloc, tcmalloc, snmalloc, rpmalloc, and Hoard).
- The ksmbd-tools package has been added, and support for the built-in Linux kernel implementation of file systems has been implemented server based on the SMB protocol.
- A set of new fonts has been added and previously offered fonts have been updated. A font manager, fnt (similar to apt for fonts), has been proposed to address the installation of additional fonts and maintain existing fonts up to date. Using fnt, you can install newer fonts available in the Debian Sid repository, as well as external fonts from the Google Web Fonts collection.
- The GRUB bootloader uses the os-prober package to detect other installed operating systems and generate a menu for booting them. Notably, during boot, it is capable of identifying the already installed Windows 11 OS.
- Due to the discontinuation of development, the libpam-ldap and libnss-ldap packages have been removed. Instead, it is recommended to use the functionally equivalent packages libpam-ldapd and libnss-ldapd for user authentication via LDAP.
- The default installation of background logging processes, such as rsyslog, has been discontinued. To view logs, it is recommended to use the 'systemd journalctl' utility instead of parsing log files. If necessary, the old behavior can be restored by installing the system-log-daemon package.
- The systemd-resolved and systemd-boot components have been separated into individual packages. In the systemd package, the system time synchronization client systemd-timesyncd has been changed from a required to a recommended dependency, which allows the creation of minimal installations without an NTP client.
- Support for booting in UEFI Secure Boot mode has been restored for ARM64 architecture-based systems.
- The fdflush package has been removed, and the 'blockdev —flushbufs' command from util-linux should be used instead.
- The tempfile and rename.ul programs have been removed. Instead, it is recommended to use the mktemp and file-rename utilities in scripts.
- The 'which' utility has been deprecated and will be removed in future releases. As a replacement, it is recommended to use the 'type' or 'type -a' commands in bash scripts for determining the path to executable files.
- The libnss-gw-name, dmraid, and request-tracker4 packages have been declared deprecated and will be removed in Debian 13.
- Permanent names for network interfaces ('enX0') have been assigned for virtual network devices in Xen.
- Support for new devices based on ARM and RISC-V processors has been added.
- System manuals (man) have been updated in Russian and Ukrainian.
- Collections of themed packages related to medicine, biology, and astronomy have been added, prepared by the Debian Med and Debian Astro teams. For instance, it includes packages such as shiny-server (a platform for hosting web applications in R), openvlbi (a correlator for telescopes), astap (an astronomical image processor), planetary-system-stacker (which creates planet images from fragments), new drivers and libraries supporting the INDI protocol, and related Astropy Python packages (python3-extinction, python3-sncosmo, python3-specreduce, python3-synphot), along with Java libraries for working with ECSV and TFCAT formats.
- Packages with the user environment Lomiri (formerly Unity 8) and display server proxy server Mir 2, which acts as a compositing server based on Wayland, have been added to the repository by the UBports project.
- The final stage of the release preparation has postponed the originally expected transition in Debian 12 from using a separate /usr partition to a new layout where the /bin, /sbin, and /lib* directories are symlinks to the corresponding directories inside /usr.
Source: opennet.ru
