Debian 5: Lenny

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.