Hello Debian lovers, Good news for you. Yesterday, 19th March, 2014, the Debian development team has announced the first alpha release of the installer for Debian 8, code named “Jessie”. Hence, it is very first release in the Debian 8 series, the full list of changes is not included in the official announcement. Debian 8 “Jessie” ships with XFCE as the default desktop environment, but it will be re-evaluated and may change again before it is released. Also, the Debian 8 gives us the option to select different desktop environments, such as GNOME or KDE, during installation.
Changes in Debian 8
– The ia64 architecture has been removed from the archive, and is no longer supported.
– The s390 architecture has been replaced with the s390x architecture.
– It wasn’t possible to build the installer for sparc , so no installation images are available for this architecture. Its future as an official port is being evaluated by the release team.
– The Linux kernel has been updated from 3.2 to 3.13.
– The FreeBSD kernel has been updated from 9.0 to 9.2.
– armel: The iop32x flavour has been dropped.
– armhf: The armmp flavour has been added; it covers both mx5 and vexpress.
– mipsel: The cobalt flavour has been dropped.
– s390x: The tape flavour has been dropped.
All users are requested to try Debian 8, and submit bugs to the developer team. Be mindful that, since it is alpha release, don’t try it on production systems.
Installing or upgrading to Debian 8
You can get the Debian 8 testing images here. Alternatively, you install it by adding the debian 8 testing repositories.
To do that, edit file /etc/apt/sources.list,
vi /etc/apt/sources.list
Add the following line:
deb http://security.debian.org <"testing" or codename>/updates main
Replace code name with “jessie” without quotes.
Save and close the file.
Update the sources list and upgrade to Debian 8 using the following commands:
apt-get update apt-get upgrade apt-get dist-upgrade
Source: Debian News
Image credits: Softpedia & Debianart
