Debian 5: Lenny

The latest release of Debian 5 comes with an extensive list of software packages and support for 12 different architectures

Wednesday, April 01, 2009

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After Etch, it's time for Lenny to prove what Debian can do. The new release includes lots of updates, security enhancements and better hardware support for you. It comes in 5 DVDs, which is sufficient to prove what an extensive list of software Debian 5 has. Most of the commonly used applications and the base OS are in the first DVD, whereas the rest of the bunch consists of less popular stable and unstable versions of applications. If you want to try out the latest Debian, then the first DVD ISO is packed with this month's magazine. Just burn the ISO, and boot the machine to get a feel of this OS.

Booting the OS
Lenny provides extensive options to install Debian 5 on a system. Apart from the basic installation, unlike most of other Linux distros, you can find 'Advance installation' option also. Under the 'Advance installation', you will find options like 'Express install' or Graphical express install that provide you expert options during its installation. The next option is the automated install and Graphical automated install. These options provide you the option of installing Debian 5 with minimal inputs. It is good for novice users. Next option is alternative desktop environment. By default, Debian 5 gives you GNOME desktop, so in case you are looking for other desktop environment probably KDE or Xfce, then you need to navigate to this menu. We installed it on Core2Duo machine with 1 GB RAM and 80 GB HDD. We started the graphical installation process which went out smooth and in about 20 minutes Debian 5 was up and running.

Apart from GNOME, you also have option for KDE. To install KDE you have to choose Advance option from boot menu.

The OS
Like other OSes of this class, this OS provides sufficient application to fulfil your need, incase you are a novice desktop user. But if you are an advance user, then like other distro you have the option to drill down to custom package selection. Couple of applications that you will find with the OS are OpenOffice 2.4, GIMP 2.4, Firefox 3.01, Iceweasel for Internet browsing, and so on. Apart from the application, you will also get a bunch of accessories and game with the OS, which are also available on most of the linux distros.

Debian has always been considered as stable OS. Hence it does not have all the latest versions of application installed as other latest releases of Linux do. For example, it comes with 2.6.26 Linux kernel which is not only the latest but also stable enough to use it in production environment. Other than that, the latest GNOME desktop available is 2.24 and Debian 5 has bit older version of that, GNOME 2.22.

As said earlier, and unlike most of the Linux distros, Debian supports 12 different architecture, such as x86, PowerPC, MIPS, AMD 64, Sparc, HP PA-RISC, etc. But the latest Debian 5 supports a new architecture which makes it of much more worth that Debian 4. It has new ARM port that is built specially to benefit from ARM processors. The integration of the latest X-server 7.3 enable itself to adjust the screen resolution automatically rather than the troubling you to manually set it.

You can also use Debian 5 in office environment as it offers OpenOffice 2.4.	You can also find applications targetted for developers which helps in developing websites.

What's new?
As discussed earlier, there are quite a number of enhancements in this latest release. The package management 'aptitude' has now advanced conflict resolving mechanism, which means if there is any change in dependencies between packages, then aptitude will automatically find you the best possible solution for that. The SELinux as a feature will not be enabled in the OS, but it will be installed with the default installation. 'rsyslog' replaced the syslogd and klobd which was the default logging daemon in earlier versions of Debian. There are also some changes in the kernel packaging. Debian 5 provides you with a pre-built kernel image for OpenVZ which enables features like live migration. For developers who are looking forward to build package that suit the embedded ARM system, Debian 5 comes with all the necessary tools to build those package and then shrunk it to port to ARM systems.

For Java developer, debain 5 has now includes OpenJDK java runtime environment and development kit. This helps in running Java GUIs or webstart programs within Debian. As the netbook market is growing, and more people are using netbook, Debian now has built-in support for netbooks such as EeePC. Especially for netbook, Debain has alternative desktop called lightweight X11 which is basically meant for low performance PC and well suited for such PC's.

Hardware supports
We tried installing Debian 5 on a couple of systems which include servers, workstations and laptops. In case of workstations, mostly every piece of the hardware was detected, for example the screen resolution was automatically adjusted for the wide screen LCD screen. But if you have external graphics card installed on the system, then you need to install its driver. On Laptop, debian 5 performed well enough. We installed Debian 5 on IBM Thinkpad R51. It very well detected all the hardware and everything was running smooth. The card reader and USB ports were working fine. Similar to latest release of Fedora or OpenSuse, hardware support is also good. We also installed this OS on the Latest Dunnigton server, which has 4 processor and 6 cores each processor, and 16 GB RAM.

The installation was smooth. In the same server when we installed Windows server 2003 it could not detect the RAID driver and hence it didn't detect the HDD as well.

Bottomline: Considering its features and support architecture, it is well suited for work stations and servers.

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