Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" released
Posted: Sat May 04, 2013 11:46 pmAfter many months of constant development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 7.0 (code name "Wheezy").
This new version of Debian includes various interesting features such as multiarch support, several specific tools to deploy private clouds, an improved installer, and a complete set of multimedia codecs and front-ends which remove the need for third-party repositories.
Multiarch support, one of the main release goals for "Wheezy", will allow Debian users to install packages from multiple architectures on the same machine. This means that you can now, for the first time, install both 32- and 64-bit software on the same machine and have all the relevant dependencies correctly resolved, automatically.
The installation process has been greatly improved: Debian can now be installed using software speech, above all by visually impaired people who do not use a Braille device. Thanks to the combined efforts of a huge number of translators, the installation system is available in 73 languages, and more than a dozen of them are available for speech synthesis too.
In addition, for the first time, Debian supports installation and booting using UEFI for new 64-bit PCs (amd64), although there is no support for "Secure Boot" yet.
This release includes numerous updated software packages, such as:
Apache 2.2.22
Asterisk 1.8.13.1
GIMP 2.8.2
an updated version of the GNOME desktop environment 3.4
GNU Compiler Collection 4.7.2
Icedove 10 (an unbranded version of Mozilla Thunderbird)
Iceweasel 10 (an unbranded version of Mozilla Firefox)
KDE Plasma Workspaces and KDE Applications 4.8.4
kFreeBSD kernel 8.3 and 9.0
LibreOffice 3.5.4
Linux 3.2
MySQL 5.5.30
Nagios 3.4.1
OpenJDK 6b27 and 7u3
Perl 5.14.2
PHP 5.4.4
PostgreSQL 9.1
Python 2.7.3 and 3.2.3
Samba 3.6.6
Tomcat 6.0.35 and 7.0.28
Xen Hypervisor 4.1.4
the Xfce 4.8 desktop environment
X.Org 7.7
more than 36,000 other ready-to-use software packages, built from nearly 17,500 source packages.
With this broad selection of packages, Debian once again stays true to its goal of being the universal operating system. It is suitable for many different use cases: from desktop systems to netbooks; from development servers to cluster systems; and for database, web, or storage servers. At the same time, additional quality assurance efforts like automatic installation and upgrade tests for all packages in Debian's archive ensure that "Wheezy" fulfills the high expectations that users have of a stable Debian release. It is rock solid and rigorously tested.
You can install Debian on computers ranging from handheld systems to supercomputers, and on nearly everything in between. A total of nine architectures are supported: 32-bit PC / Intel IA-32 (i386), 64-bit PC / Intel EM64T / x86-64 (amd64), Motorola/IBM PowerPC (powerpc), Sun/Oracle SPARC (sparc), MIPS (mips (big-endian) and mipsel (little-endian)), Intel Itanium (ia64), IBM S/390 (31-bit s390 and 64-bit s390x), and ARM EABI (armel for older hardware and armhf for newer hardware using hardware floating-point).
This new version of Debian includes various interesting features such as multiarch support, several specific tools to deploy private clouds, an improved installer, and a complete set of multimedia codecs and front-ends which remove the need for third-party repositories.
Multiarch support, one of the main release goals for "Wheezy", will allow Debian users to install packages from multiple architectures on the same machine. This means that you can now, for the first time, install both 32- and 64-bit software on the same machine and have all the relevant dependencies correctly resolved, automatically.
The installation process has been greatly improved: Debian can now be installed using software speech, above all by visually impaired people who do not use a Braille device. Thanks to the combined efforts of a huge number of translators, the installation system is available in 73 languages, and more than a dozen of them are available for speech synthesis too.
In addition, for the first time, Debian supports installation and booting using UEFI for new 64-bit PCs (amd64), although there is no support for "Secure Boot" yet.
This release includes numerous updated software packages, such as:
Apache 2.2.22
Asterisk 1.8.13.1
GIMP 2.8.2
an updated version of the GNOME desktop environment 3.4
GNU Compiler Collection 4.7.2
Icedove 10 (an unbranded version of Mozilla Thunderbird)
Iceweasel 10 (an unbranded version of Mozilla Firefox)
KDE Plasma Workspaces and KDE Applications 4.8.4
kFreeBSD kernel 8.3 and 9.0
LibreOffice 3.5.4
Linux 3.2
MySQL 5.5.30
Nagios 3.4.1
OpenJDK 6b27 and 7u3
Perl 5.14.2
PHP 5.4.4
PostgreSQL 9.1
Python 2.7.3 and 3.2.3
Samba 3.6.6
Tomcat 6.0.35 and 7.0.28
Xen Hypervisor 4.1.4
the Xfce 4.8 desktop environment
X.Org 7.7
more than 36,000 other ready-to-use software packages, built from nearly 17,500 source packages.
With this broad selection of packages, Debian once again stays true to its goal of being the universal operating system. It is suitable for many different use cases: from desktop systems to netbooks; from development servers to cluster systems; and for database, web, or storage servers. At the same time, additional quality assurance efforts like automatic installation and upgrade tests for all packages in Debian's archive ensure that "Wheezy" fulfills the high expectations that users have of a stable Debian release. It is rock solid and rigorously tested.
You can install Debian on computers ranging from handheld systems to supercomputers, and on nearly everything in between. A total of nine architectures are supported: 32-bit PC / Intel IA-32 (i386), 64-bit PC / Intel EM64T / x86-64 (amd64), Motorola/IBM PowerPC (powerpc), Sun/Oracle SPARC (sparc), MIPS (mips (big-endian) and mipsel (little-endian)), Intel Itanium (ia64), IBM S/390 (31-bit s390 and 64-bit s390x), and ARM EABI (armel for older hardware and armhf for newer hardware using hardware floating-point).
