Debian “Squeeze” has now been frozen.
In consequence this means that no more new features will be added and all work will now be concentrated on polishing Debian “Squeeze” to achieve the quality Debian stable releases are known for.
The upcoming release will use Linux 2.6.32 as its default kernel in the installer and on all Linux architectures.
New features of the upcoming release include:
* State of the art desktop environments, based on KDE 4.4.5, Gnome 2.30.0, LXDE 0.5.0, XFCE 4.6.2, X.org 7.5, OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 and many other applications.
* Stable and current versions of common server software such as Apache 2.2.16, PHP 5.3.2, MySQL 5.1.48, PostgreSQL 8.4.4 and Samba 3.4.
* Modern interpreters and compilers for all common languages such as Python 2.6 and 3.1, Perl 5.10, GHC 6.12 and GCC 4.4.
* DKMS, a framework to generate Linux kernel modules whose sources do not reside in the Linux kernel source tree.
* Dependency-based ordering of init scripts using insserv, allowing parallel execution to shorten the time needed to boot the system.
Debian 6.0 “Squeeze” will also be accompanied by variants based on the FreeBSD kernel for amd64 and i386 machines, together with the GNU libc and userland as a “technology preview”. Users of these versions however should be warned that the quality of these ports is still catching up with the outstanding high quality of our Linux ports, and that some advanced desktop features are not supported yet. However, the support of common server software is strong and extends the features of Linux-based Debian versions by the unique features known from the BSD world. This is the first time a Linux distribution has been extended to also allow use of a non-Linux kernel.
