Debian 6 Squeeze, the universal operating system, finally released

by Sebastian Anthony on February 6, 2011 at 07:55 AM

After exactly two years of development and with over 10,000 new packages, version 6 of the wunderkind jack of all trades, Debian, has been released. This release, along with support for i386, amd64, powerpc, sparc, mips, mipsel, ia64, s390 and armel architectures, also features a technical preview of Debian ported to the FreeBSD kernel, dubbed Debian GNU/kFreeBSD.

Along with the usual slew of updated software packages (no GNOME 3 though!), Debian 6 also reaffirms its role as the One OS to Run Them All with the addition of some 10,000 new packages, bringing the total number of software packages in Debian up to more than 29,000. If you want some idea of just how broad Debian's coverage is, check out the new Debian Pure Blends.

Bearded purists will be interested to hear that the Debian 6 kernel is, for the first time, completely free. The problematic non-free firmware files have been moved into a non-free area of the Debian archive, and will have to be explicitly included if you want to use them.

Finally, alongside GNOME, Debian 6 ships with KDE Plasma Desktop, Xfce and LXDE desktop environments. There's also a KDE Plasma Netbook shell that makes Debian a lot more usable on small form-factor devices.

The best way to download Debian 6 is with BitTorrent, but there are HTTP and FTP sources too. If you're enjoying a particularly slow Sunday morning, read the complete release notes...

Tags: debian, debian 6, debian pure blends, Debian6, DebianPureBlends, freebsd, kde, linux, lxde, open source, OpenSource, squeeze, xfce