14 DAY TRIAL // More than two years after the release of the Debian GNU/Linux 8 "Jessie" series, which, as of today, is marked as "oldstable," the Debian Project is pleased to announce today the availability of Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch".
As of a few minutes ago, Debian Stretch or Debian 9 has been declared stable and ready for deployment in production environments. It's one of the most anticipated GNU/Linux distributions of 2017, on which numerous upcoming Linux distros will be rebased in the months to come.
Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" is a major release that includes better support for modern hardware components and architectures, up-to-date core components and applications, as well as dozens of other new features, stability and security improvements, and countless bug fixes.
"After 26 months of development the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 9 (code name "Stretch"), which will be supported for the next 5 years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and of the Debian Long Term Support team. Debian 9 is dedicated to the project's founder Ian Murdock, who passed away on 28 December 2015," reads the release announcement.
Highlights of Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch"
Highlights of the Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" release include support for the 64-bit little-endian MIPS (mips64el) hardware architecture, removal of support for the PowerPC (powerpc) architecture, new deb.debian.org mirror, and support for the X.Org Server display server to run as a regular user rather than as root.
Major improvements were implemented to the APT and aptitude command-line package managers, as well as the archive layouts, since the Jessie series, there's now a new archive for debug symbols, called debian-debug, and it looks like a new standard naming scheme is now used for naming network interfaces. Debian Stretch is also shipping with the first release of the Debian Astro Pure Blend.
Updated components include Linux 4.9 LTS kernel, GCC 6.3 as default compiler, Glibc 2.24, GnuPG 2.1, MariaDB 10.1, PHP 7.0, Python 3.5, Samba 4.5, Vim 8, GNOME 3.22, KDE Plasma 5.8, LXQt 0.11, MATE 1.16, and Xfce 4.12 desktops, Evolution 3.22 groupware client, as well as LibreOffice 5.2 and Calligra 2.9 office suites.
Debian Stretch is officially supported on 32-bit (i386), 64-bit (amd64), 64-bit ARM (arm64), ARM EABI (armel), ARMv7 (EABI hard-float ABI, armhf), MIPS (mips (big-endian) and mipsel (little-endian)), 64-bit little-endian MIPS (mips64el), 64-bit little-endian PowerPC (ppc64el), and IBM System z (s390x) hardware architectures.
Those running the Debian GNU/Linux 8 "Jessie" release on their personal computers will be able to upgrade to Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" right now, and those wanting to reinstall or deploy the new OS on other computers can download the installation mediums right now from the debian.org website.
Live CD ISO images of Debian GNU/Linux 8 "Jessie" with the GNOME, KDE, Xfce, LXDE, Cinnamon and MATE desktop environments are also available for download (click on each link to get the ISOs), via our website or the official mirrors, for 64- and 32-bit computer architectures. Debian 9 has 25,357 source packages with 9,808,465 source files and can be installed in 75 languages.