After two years of development, Debian 6.0 codenamed Squeeze has been finally released. The release is not just limited to Debian GNU/Linux. A technology preview of Debian GNU/kFreeBDS has also been released. Debian GNU/Linux is available for a total of nine platforms and the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is available on two platforms.

As revealed earlier, the Debian 6.0 kernel is completely free and does not include any proprietary firmware. The proprietary firmwares have been moved to the non-free part of the Debian archive.

A new very interesting feature in Debian 6.0 is the dependency based booting. It allows for a parallel execution of boot scripts and tracking of dependencies, which makes the boot faster. Debian 6.0 also comes with support for new filesystems - ext4 and Btrfs. In the kFreeBSD version, ZFS is also supported.

Debian 6.0 also comes with a lot of updated packages. It comes with KDE SC 4.4.5, GNOME 2.3, Apache 2.2.16, PHP 5.3.3 just to name a few. Unlike Ubuntu though, Debian 6.0 still comes with OpenOffice.org. In addition to the updated packages, Debian 6.0 also has more than 10,000 new packages - the most notable addition being the Chromium browser.

You can download Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" from here. Users of Debian 5.0 "Lenny" can, however, upgrade using the apt-get tool.

You may also want to read the release note for more information.

[image of Squeeze Toy Aliens credit]