Sunday, February 6, 2011

Debian GNU/Linux squeeze, aka V6 released

The entire world celebrated the release of Debian GNU/Linux 6 aka squeeze. All over the world, people await and rejoice the release of a new "stable" version of Debian GNU/Linux. This is true particularly for people running servers, apps who want a stable interface to all other interconnected software. The stability issue relates to the interfaces the apps provide to the external world. This stability is important in keeping mission critical servers/computers uptime to the maximum.

When apps are upgraded in a fanatic manner, the interfaces they offer to the external world too change. This results in lot of effort being put to manage these changes. Security updates are provided for stable versions such that they dont disturb these interfaces. For "normal" users the stable might seem outdated compared to the downstream projects like ubuntu. Ubuntu uses the packages from the "unstable" branch to provide bleeding edge software to "normal" users. I would recommend the stable branch to all kinds of users owing to the highest quality of packages resulting from being cooked in the testing stage for approximately two years.

If users want to use the bleeding edge software, I recommend people to download the weekly builds. With this they have an advantage, they run bleeding edge packages. The Debian project also gets an advantage, since, users can test these packages over time and provide feed back to the project which in turn will help in fine tuning the packages for the next stable version.

Thanks RMS, Ian, Linus and all the Freedom software developers for liberating and continuing to do so my computing experience. I am very confident that the Debian GNU/Linux and Debian GNU/KfreeBSD will grow and include many more freedom kernels in the future. I for one would like to see GNU/Minix in the next release. With multi-cores we are now ready for micro-kernels.

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Nobody can deter me away from "free as in freedom" concept seeded by Sri RMS. See to it that u dont make fun of my belief. If u think otherwise, no need to comment.