After nearly two years of development, Debian GNU/Linux 12.0 (Bookworm) is now 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, which can be downloaded via HTTP, jigdo or BitTorrent. For the amd64 and i386 architectures, LiveUSB has been developed, available in GNOME, KDE, LXDE, Xfce, Cinnamon and MATE variants, as well as a multi-architecture DVD that combines packages for the amd64 platform with additional packages for the i386 architecture. Please read the following document before migrating from Debian 11 Bullseye.
The repository contains 64419 binary packages, which is 4868 packages more than what was offered in Debian 11. Compared to Debian 11, 11089 new binary packages have been added, 6296 (10%) obsolete or abandoned packages have been removed, and 43254 (67%) packages have been updated. The total total size of all source texts offered in the distribution is 1 lines of code. The total size of all packages is 341 GB. For 564% (204% in the previous branch), support for repeatable builds is provided, which allows you to confirm that the executable file is built exactly from the declared sources and does not contain extraneous changes, the substitution of which, for example, can be done by attacking the build infrastructure or bookmarks in compiler.
Key changes in Debian 12.0:
- In addition to the free firmware from the main repository, the official installation images also include proprietary firmware previously available through the non-free repository. If you have hardware that requires external firmware, the required proprietary firmware is loaded by default. For users who prefer only free software, at the download stage, an option is provided to disable the use of non-free firmware.
- A new non-free-firmware repository has been added, to which packages with firmware have been transferred from the non-free repository. The installer provides the ability to dynamically request firmware packages from the non-free-firmware repository. The presence of a separate repository with firmware made it possible to provide access to firmware without including a common non-free repository in the installation media.
- The Linux kernel has been updated to version 6.1 (Debian 11 shipped a 5.10 kernel). Updated systemd 252, Apt 2.6 and Glibc 2.36.
- Updated graphics stack and user environments: 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. GNOME environments use the Pipewire media server and the WirePlumber audio session manager by default.
- Updated user applications such as LibreOffice 7.4, GNUcash 4.13, Emacs 28.2, GIMP 2.10.34, Inkscape 1.2.2, VLC 3.0.18, Vim 9.0.
- Updated server applications, e.g. 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.
- Added support for working with the APFS (Apple File System) file system in read-write mode using the apfsprogs and apfs-dkms packages. The ntfs2btrfs utility is included to convert NTFS partitions to Btrfs.
- Added support for the mimalloc memory allocation library, which can act as a transparent replacement for the malloc function. A feature of mimalloc is its compact implementation and very high performance (in tests, mimalloc is ahead of jemalloc, tcmalloc, snmalloc, rpmalloc, and Hoard).
- The ksmbd-tools package has been added and support for the file server implementation built into the Linux kernel based on the SMB protocol has been implemented.
- A set of new fonts has been added and previously offered fonts have been updated. A font manager fnt (analogous to apt for fonts) is proposed, which solves the problem of installing additional fonts and keeping existing fonts up to date. Using fnt, you can install more recent fonts from 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 menus for booting them. Among other things, when booting, the detection of an already installed Windows 11 OS is provided.
- Due to the termination of development, the libpam-ldap and libnss-ldap packages have been removed, instead of which it is recommended to use the equivalent libpam-ldapd and libnss-ldapd packages for user authentication through LDAP.
- Removed the default setting of a background logging process such as rsyslog. To view the logs, instead of parsing log files, it is recommended to call the "systemd journalctl" utility. If necessary, the old behavior can be restored by installing the system-log-daemon package.
- Separated from systemd are systemd-resolved and systemd-boot. The systemd package moved the systemd-timesyncd time synchronization client from a required to a recommended dependency, allowing for minimal installations without an NTP client.
- Support for booting in UEFI Secure Boot mode has returned for systems based on the ARM64 architecture.
- Removed package fdflush, instead use "blockdev --flushbufs" from util-linux.
- The tempfile and rename.ul programs have been removed, instead of which it is recommended to use the mktemp and file-rename utilities in scripts.
- The which utility has been deprecated and will be removed in a future release. As a replacement in bash scripts, it is recommended to use the "type" or "type -a" commands to determine the path to executable files.
- The libnss-gw-name, dmraid and request-tracker13 packages have been deprecated and will be removed in Debian 4.
- The assignment of permanent network interface names ("enX0") for Xen virtual network devices is provided.
- Added support for new devices based on ARM and RISC-V processors.
- Updated system manuals (man) in Russian and Ukrainian.
- Added collections of thematic packages related to medicine, biology and astronomy prepared by the Debian Med and Debian Astro teams. For example, the package includes shiny-server (platform for hosting R web applications), openvlbi (correlator for telescopes), astap (astronomical image processor), planetary-system-stacker (forms images of planets from fragments), new drivers and libraries with INDI protocol support associated with Astropy Python packages (python3-extinction, python3-sncosmo, python3-specreduce, python3-synphot), Java libraries for working with ECSV and TFCAT formats.
- The packages developed by the UBports project with the Lomiri user environment (former Unity 8) and the Mir 2 display server, which acts as a composite server based on Wayland, have been added to the repository.
- At the final stage of preparation of the release, the transition of the distribution kit, which was originally expected in Debian 12, from using a separate /usr partition to a new representation, in which the /bin, /sbin and /lib* directories are decorated as symbolic links to the corresponding directories inside /usr, is postponed.
Source: opennet.ru