After 1 year, 9 months, and 28 days of development, the Debian
project
is proud to present its new stable version 12 (code name
"bookworm").
"bookworm" will be supported for the next 5 years thanks to the
combined
work of the Debian Security team [1] and the Debian Long Term
Support [2] team.
Following the 2022 General Resolution about non-free
firmware [3], we
have introduced a new archive area making it possible to
separate non-
free firmware from the other non-free packages:
non-free-firmware Most
non-free firmware packages have been moved from non-free to
non-free-
firmware. This separation makes it possible to build a variety
of
official installation images.
This release contains over 11,089 new packages for a total count
of
64,419 packages, while over 6,296 packages have been removed as
"obsolete". 43,254 packages were updated in this release. The
overall
disk usage for "bookworm" is 365,016,420 kB (365 GB), and is
made up of
1,341,564,204 lines of code.
"bookworm" has more translated man pages than ever thanks to our
translators who have made man-pages available in multiple
languages such
as: Czech, Danish, Greek, Finnish, Indonesian, Macedonian,
Norwegian
(Bokmål), Russian, Serbian, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.
All of
the systemd man pages are now completely available in German.
The Debian Med Blend introduces a new package: shiny-server
which
simplifies scientific web applications using R. We have kept to
our
efforts of providing Continuous Integration support for Debian
Med team
packages. Install the metapackages at version 3.8.x for Debian
bookworm.
The Debian Astro Blend continues to provide a one-stop solution
for
professional astronomers, enthusiasts, and hobbyists with
updates to
almost all versions of the software packages in the blend. astap
and
planetary-system-stacker help with image stacking and astrometry
resolution. openvlbi, the open source correlator, is now
included.
Support for Secure Boot on ARM64 has been reintroduced: users of
UEFI-
capable ARM64 hardware can boot with Secure Boot mode enabled to
take
full advantage of the security feature.
Debian 12 "bookworm" includes numerous updated software packages
(over
67% of all packages from the previous release), such as: Apache
2.4.57
BIND DNS Server 9.18 Cryptsetup 2.6 Dovecot MTA 2.3.19 Emacs
28.2 Exim
(default email server) 4.96 GIMP 2.10.34 GNU Compiler Collection
12.2
GnuPG 2.2.40 Inkscape 1.2.2 The GNU C Library 2.36 lighthttpd
1.4.69
LibreOffice 7.4 Linux kernel 6.1 series LLVM/Clang toolchain
13.0.1,
14.0 (default), and 15.0.6 MariaDB 10.11 Nginx 1.22 OpenJDK 17
OpenLDAP
2.5.13 OpenSSH 9.2p1 Perl 5.36 PHP 8.2 Postfix MTA 3.7
PostgreSQL 15
Python 3, 3.11.2 Rustc 1.63 Samba 4.17 systemd 252 Vim 9.0
With this broad selection of packages and its traditional wide
architecture support, Debian once again stays true to its goal
of being
"The Universal Operating System". It is suitable for many
different use
cases: from desktop systems to netbooks; from development
servers to
cluster systems; and for database, web, and storage servers. At
the same
time, additional quality assurance efforts like automatic
installation
and upgrade tests for all packages in Debian's archive ensure
that
"bookworm" fulfills the high expectations that users have of a
stable
Debian release.
A total of nine architectures are officially supported for
"bookworm" :
32-bit PC (i386) and 64-bit PC (amd64), 64-bit ARM (arm64), ARM
EABI
(armel), ARMv7 (EABI hard-float ABI, armhf), little-endian MIPS
(mipsel), 64-bit little-endian MIPS (mips64el), 64-bit
little-endian
PowerPC (ppc64el), IBM System z (s390x) 32-bit PC (i386) no
longer
covers any i586 processor; the new minimum processor requirement
is
i686. If your machine is not compatible with this requirement,
it is
recommended that you stay with bullseye for the remainder of its
support
cycle.
The Debian Cloud team publishes "bookworm" for several cloud
computing
services: Amazon EC2 (amd64 and arm64), Microsoft Azure (amd64),
OpenStack (generic) (amd64, arm64, ppc64el), GenericCloud
(arm64,
amd64), NoCloud (amd64, arm64, ppc64el) The genericcloud image
should be
able to run in any virtualised environment, and there is also a
nocloud
image which is useful for testing the build process.
GRUB packages will by default no longer run os-prober for other
operating systems. [4]
Between releases, the Technical Committee resolved that Debian
"bookworm" should support only the merged-usr root filesystem
layout [5], dropping support for the non-merged-usr layout. For
systems
installed as buster or bullseye there will be no changes to the
filesystem; however, systems using the older layout will be
converted
during the upgrade.
If you simply want to try Debian 12 "bookworm" without
installing it,
you can use one of the available live images [6] which load and
run the
complete operating system in a read-only state via your
computer's
memory.
These live images are provided for the amd64 and i386
architectures and
are available for DVDs, USB sticks, and netboot setups. The user
can
choose among different desktop environments to try: GNOME, KDE
Plasma,
LXDE, LXQt, MATE, and Xfce. Debian Live "bookworm" has a
standard live
image, so it is also possible to try a base Debian system
without any of
the graphical user interfaces.
Should you enjoy the operating system you have the option of
installing
from the live image onto your computer's hard disk. The live
image
includes the Calamares independent installer as well as the
standard
Debian Installer. More information is available in the release
notes [7]
and the live install images [8] sections of the Debian website.
To install Debian 12 "bookworm" directly onto your computer's
storage
device you can choose from a variety of installation media types
to
Download [9] such as: Blu-ray Disc, DVD, CD, USB stick, or via a
network
connection. See the Installation Guide [10] for more details.
Debian can now be installed in 78 languages, with most of them
available
in both text-based and graphical user interfaces.
The installation images may be downloaded right now via
bittorrent [11]
(the recommended method), jigdo [12], or HTTP [13]; see Debian
on
CDs [14] for further information. "bookworm" will soon be
available on
physical DVD, CD-ROM, and Blu-ray Discs from numerous
vendors [15] too.
Upgrades to Debian 12 "bookworm" from the previous release,
Debian 11
"bullseye", are automatically handled by the APT package
management tool
for most configurations.
Before upgrading your system, it is strongly recommended that
you make a
full backup, or at least back up any data or configuration
information
you can't afford to lose. The upgrade tools and process are
quite
reliable, but a hardware failure in the middle of an upgrade
could
result in a severely damaged system. The main things you'll want
to back
up are the contents of /etc, /var/lib/dpkg,
/var/lib/apt/extended_states
and the output of: $ dpkg --get-selections '*' # (the quotes are
important) We welcome any information from users related to the
upgrade
from "bullseye" to "bookworm". Please share information by
filing a bug
in the Debian bug tracking system [16] using the upgrade-reports
package
with your results.
There has been a lot of development to the Debian Installer
resulting in
improved hardware support and other features such as fixes to
graphical
support on UTM, fixes to the GRUB font loader, removing the long
wait at
the end of the installation process, and fixes to the detection
of BIOS-
bootable systems. This version of the Debian Installer may
enable non-
free-firmware where needed.
The ntp package has been replaced with the ntpsec package, with
the
default system clock service now being systemd-timesyncd; there
is also
support for chrony and openntpd.
As non-free firmware has been moved to its own component in the
archive [17], if you have non-free firmware installed it is
recommended
to add non-free-firmware to your APT sources-list.
It is advisable to remove bullseye-backports entries from APT
source-
list files before the upgrade; after the upgrade consider adding
bookworm-backports. For "bookworm", the security suite is named
bookworm-security; users should adapt their APT source-list
files
accordingly when upgrading. If your APT configuration also
involves
pinning or APT::Default-Release,
it is likely to require adjustments to
allow the upgrade of packages to the new stable release. Please
consider
disabling APT pinning [18].
The OpenLDAP 2.5 upgrade includes some incompatible changes
which may
require manual intervention [19]. Depending on configuration the
slapd
service may remain stopped after the upgrade until new
configuration
updates are completed.
The new systemd-resolved package will not be installed
automatically on
upgrades as it has been split into a separate package [20]. If
using the
systemd-resolved system service, please install the new package
manually
after the upgrade, and note that until it has been installed,
DNS
resolution may no longer work as the service will not be present
on the
system.
There are some changes to system logging [21]; the rsyslog
package is no
longer needed on most systems, and is not installed by default.
Users
may change to journalctl or use the new "high precision
timestamps" that
rsyslog now uses.
Possible issues during the upgrade [22] include Conflicts or
Pre-Depends
loops which can be solved by removing and eliminating some
packages or
forcing the re-installation of other packages. Additional
concerns are
"Could not perform immediate configuration..." errors for which
one will
need to keep both "bullseye" (that was just removed) and
"bookworm" (that was just added) in the APT source-list file,
and File
Conflicts which may require one to forcibly remove packages. As
mentioned, backing the system up is the key to a smooth upgrade
should
any untoward errors occur.
There are some packages where Debian cannot promise to provide
minimal
backports for security issues. Please see the Limitations in
security
support [23].
As always, Debian systems may be upgraded painlessly, in place,
without
any forced downtime, but it is strongly recommended to read the
release
notes [24] as well as the installation guide [25] for possible
issues,
and for detailed instructions on installing and upgrading. The
release
notes will be further improved and translated to additional
languages in
the weeks after the release.
Debian is a free operating system, developed by thousands of
volunteers
from all over the world who collaborate via the Internet. The
Debian
project's key strengths are its volunteer base, its dedication
to the
Debian Social Contract and Free Software, and its commitment to
provide
the best operating system possible. This new release is another
important step in that direction.