The latest version of Debian, the Universal Operating System, Debian 5.0 (code named "Lenny") has been released as a valentine's day gift on 14th February 2009. For those unfamiliar with the naming scheme of the Debian releases, they are named after characters in the animated film Toy Story and go through four phases - experimental, unstable, testing and stable. So the earlier version - Etch - has been superseded by Lenny (the binoculars in Tory Story) and Squeeze (the three-eyed green alien) will become the current "testing" version.
It had been in freeze for a long time and has come up well within the planned window (two months before maximum deadline). This release supports the 12 architectures and has as many as 23000 packages (almost 6000 more than the previous release Debian etch). The supported architectures this time are : Sun SPARC (sparc), HP Alpha (alpha), Motorola/IBM PowerPC (powerpc), Intel IA-32 (i386), IA-64 (ia64), HP PA-RISC (hppa), MIPS (mips, mipsel), ARM (arm, armel), IBM S/390 (s390), and AMD64 and Intel EM64T (amd64).
There are some indications that there maybe a Lenny-and-a-half release later in the year with support for newer hardware. The release comes at a time when people have successfully installed it on Google's Android Mobile platform (See details here and here). One person here claims that its possible to do so within 10 minutes!
I have been using it for few months and am very happy with it. The GUI installer is much improved over the previous ones and it runs very fast. The shutdown time is also quite reduced compared to the previous version. There are of course many more packages this time. Due to this reason it has as many as 31 CDs (or 5 DVDs) which contain the free packages.
For those interested in upgrading to it from Debian etch please add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:-
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free
Don't forget to read the release notes and the installation manual before you do the install.
You can easily obtain a copy and install it.
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