Debian GNU/Linux 5.0, codenamed Lenny, was recently released. Here’s a round of of articles about the release and why you might want to consider Debian for your infrastructure.

Techworld sums up what this means for companies and highlights new features and security enhancements:

http://www.techworld.com/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsID=110898

Debian 5.0, known as Lenny, will offer users improved security handling. For example, as an added protection measure, Debian Installer will now apply any security updates before the first boot.
In addition, several security-critical packages have been built with GCC hardening features, and the standard system contains fewer setuid root binaries and fewer open ports. Other new features include support for IPv6, NFS 4, PostgreSQL 8.3.5, MySQL 5.1.30 and 5.0.51a, Samba 3.2.5, PHP 5.2.6, Asterisk 1.4.21.2, Nagios 3.06 and the Xen Hypervisor 3.2.1.

… Debian was proving to be particularly attractive, claiming that Debian was now the Linux distribution with the lowest total cost of ownership.

And Russell Coker mentions that Debian has full Xen support, which will make Xen users happy!

http://etbe.coker.com.au/2009/02/16/xen-and-lenny/

One of the features that is particularly noteworthy is that Xen has been updated and now works fully and correctly on the 2.6.26 kern

Sami Haatinen suggests that administrators utilize the apt-listchanges command:

http://ressukka.net/blog/posts/20090215_apt-listchanges/

It lists changes made to packages since the currently installed version. Sure that information will be overwhelming on major upgrades, but what is useful even on major upgrades is the capability to parse News files in the same way.

Debian 5.0 release notes are available at:

http://debian.org/releases/stable/i386/release-notes/

Me? I’m being running a mixture of Debian Stable, Testing, Sid, and Experimental on my Desktop and it runs stable 99% of time. A configuration like that isn’t recommended, as serious breakage can occur. But, this rarely happens, and I’ve Debian enough to know when not to let the package manager remove important packages! On my laptop, a Lenovo T400, I run Ubuntu Linux, see here for why.

Why use Lenny as a codename? All versions of Debian have been named after characters from the film Toy Story. The unstable version is codenamed Sid, and Sid will never be released as Sid breaks things. For a list of the previous names used see Section 6.2 here:

http://www.debian.org/doc/FAQ/ch-ftparchives

Lenny is named after a pair of wind-up binoculars.