Debian 6.0 Squeeze supercedes Lenny

LINUX DISTRIBUTION Debian has released Debian 6.0, codenamed 'Squeeze', after two years of development.

Debian 6.0 maintains support for nine processor architectures, including X86, X86-64, ARM, PowerPC and Sparc, but perhaps the most interesting development is the "technology preview" of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, which has the GNU userland ported on top of the FreeBSD kernel. The main release of Debian 6.0 remains GNU/Linux.

Debian is known for its conservative release philosophy, with Squeeze being no different. Debian 6.0 offers KDE 4.4.5 and GNOME 2.3, which is the default desktop environment. It also includes Open Office 3.2.1, and the project claims to have over 10,000 new packages including Google's Chromium web browser. Package management software now includes the Ubuntu-esque Software Centre, though dselect remains an option.

One of the big plus points of the Debian 6.0 GNU/kFreeBSD release is its support for the fabled Zettabyte filesystem (ZFS). ZFS support in FreeBSD has been maturing steadily for many years now, and while it's not feature complete, it could be the feature that kickstarts adoption of this new fork.

The latest version of Debian also promises an improved installation procedure including distribution of LiveCDs, meaning users can try out Debian without having to install it.

The relatively slow release cycle of Debian has meant that other Linux distributions based on it such as Canonical's Ubuntu have taken the limelight in recent years. However Debian remains popular with old school Linux users and is commonly installed on servers.

Existing Debian users can update using apt-get, while new users can download the relevant files over Bittorrent, HTTP or FTP or jigdo. µ