Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 released

February 14th, 2009

The Debian Project is pleased to announce the official release of Debian GNU/Linux version 5.0 (codenamed Lenny) after 22 months of constant development. Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system which supports a total of twelve processor architectures and includes the KDE, GNOME, Xfce, and LXDE desktop environments. It also features compatibility with the FHS v2.3 and software developed for version 3.2 of the LSB.

Debian GNU/Linux runs on computers ranging from palmtops and handheld systems to supercomputers, and on nearly everything in between. A total of twelve architectures are supported: Sun SPARC (sparc), HP Alpha (alpha), Motorola/IBM PowerPC (powerpc), Intel IA-32 (i386), IA-64 (ia64), HP PA-RISC (hppa), MIPS (mips, mipsel), ARM (arm, armel), IBM S/390 (s390), and AMD64 and Intel EM64T (amd64).

Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 Lenny adds support for Marvell's Orion platform which is used in many storage devices. Supported storage devices include the QNAP Turbo Station series, HP Media Vault mv2120, and Buffalo Kurobox Pro. Additionally, Lenny now supports several Netbooks, in particular the Eee PC by Asus. Lenny also contains the build tools for Emdebian which allow Debian source packages to be cross-built and shrunk to suit embedded ARM systems.

Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 Lenny includes the new ARM EABI port, armel. This new port provides a more efficient use of both modern and future ARM processors. As a result, the old ARM port (arm) has now been deprecated.

This release includes numerous updated software packages, such as the K Desktop Environment 3.5.10 (KDE), an updated version of the GNOME desktop environment 2.22.2, the Xfce 4.4.2 desktop environment, LXDE 0.3.2.1, the GNUstep desktop 7.3, X.Org 7.3, OpenOffice.org 2.4.1, GIMP 2.4.7, Iceweasel 3.0.6 (an unbranded version of Mozilla Firefox), Icedove 2.0.0.19 (an unbranded version of Mozilla Thunderbird), PostgreSQL 8.3.6, MySQL 5.0.51a, GNU Compiler Collection 4.3.2, Linux kernel version 2.6.26, Apache 2.2.9, Samba 3.2.5, Python 2.5.2 and 2.4.6, Perl 5.10.0, PHP 5.2.6, Asterisk 1.4.21.2, Emacs 22, Inkscape 0.46, Nagios 3.06, Xen Hypervisor 3.2.1 (dom0 as well as domU support), OpenJDK 6b11, and more than 23,000 other ready-to-use software packages (built from over 12,000 source packages).

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