14 DAY TRIAL // Today, June 2, 2016, Debian Project's Markus Koschany has had the great pleasure of announcing that Debian is adding support for two new ARM architectures to the Debian GNU/Linux 7 "Wheezy" operating system.
As many of you, Debian users out there, might be aware of, Debian GNU/Linux 7 "Wheezy" became an LTS (Long Term Support) release sometimes at the end of April 2016, as the Debian LTS took over its maintenance for the next couple of years, releasing security fixes and software updates to the main repos until May 31, 2018.
And today, the Debian FTP team, in collaboration with the Debian's build maintainers, is happy to announce that the Debian GNU/Linux 7 "Wheezy" distribution will be supported on the Armel (ARM EABI) and ARMhf (ARM hard-float) ARM instruction set architectures.
"Debian's build maintainers and the Debian FTP Team are excited to announce that two new architectures, armel and armhf, are going to be supported in Debian 7 Wheezy LTS. These architectures along with i386 and amd64 will receive two additional years of extended security support," says Markus Koschany.
You do not need to change anything on your Debian system
To give you a little background about these two ARM architectures that will receive two years of support from the Debian LTS team for the Debian 7 Wheezy LTS operating system, the ARM EABI (armel) port is designed for older 32-bit ARM devices, such as NAS (Network-attached storage) solutions.
On the other hand, the ARM hard-float (armhf) is a much recent port. Thus, it offers support for newer and more powerful 32-bit ARM devices, in particular those using the ARMv7 architecture specification. To receive support for these two new ARM ports, you do not need to change anything on your Debian system.