Debian 11 “bullseye” released

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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The Debian Project https://www.debian.org/
Debian 11 “bullseye” released press@debian.org
August 14th, 2021 https://www.debian.org/News/2021/20210814
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After 2 years, 1 month, and 9 days of development, the Debian project is
proud to present its new stable version 11 (code name “bullseye”), which
will be supported for the next 5 years thanks to the combined work of
the Debian Security team [1] and the Debian Long Term Support [2] team.

1: https://security-team.debian.org/
2: https://wiki.debian.org/LTS

Debian 11 “bullseye” ships with several desktop applications and
environments. Amongst others it now includes the desktop environments:

* Gnome 3.38,
* KDE Plasma 5.20,
* LXDE 11,
* LXQt 0.16,
* MATE 1.24,
* Xfce 4.16.

This release contains over 11,294 new packages for a total count of
59,551 packages, along with a significant reduction of over 9,519
packages which were marked as “obsolete” and removed. 42,821 packages
were updated and 5,434 packages remained unchanged.

“bullseye” becomes our first release to provide a Linux kernel with
support for the exFAT filesystem and defaults to using it for mount
exFAT filesystems. Consequently it is no longer required to use the
filesystem-in-userspace implementation provided via the exfat-fuse
package. Tools for creating and checking an exFAT filesystem are
provided in the exfatprogs package.

Most modern printers are able to use driverless printing and scanning
without the need for vendor specific (often non-free) drivers.
“bullseye” brings forward a new package, ipp-usb, which uses the vendor
neutral IPP-over-USB protocol supported by many modern printers. This
allows a USB device to be treated as a network device. The official SANE
driverless backend is provided by sane-escl in libsane1, which uses the
eSCL protocol.

Systemd in “bullseye” activates its persistent journal functionality, by
default, with an implicit fallback to volatile storage. This allows
users that are not relying on special features to uninstall traditional
logging daemons and switch over to using only the systemd journal.

The Debian Med team has been taking part in the fight against COVID-19
by packaging software for researching the virus on the sequence level
and for fighting the pandemic with the tools used in epidemiology; this
work will continue with focus on machine learning tools for both fields.
The team’s work with Quality Assurance and Continuous integration is
critical to the consistent reproducible results required in the
sciences. Debian Med Blend has a range of performance critical
applications which now benefit from SIMD Everywhere. To install packages
maintained by the Debian Med team, install the metapackages named med-*,
which are at version 3.6.x.

Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and many other languages now have a new Fcitx
5 input method, which is the successor of the popular Fcitx4 in
“buster” ; this new version has much better Wayland (default display
manager) addon support.

Debian 11 “bullseye” includes numerous updated software packages (over
72% of all packages in the previous release), such as:

* Apache 2.4.48
* BIND DNS Server 9.16
* Calligra 3.2
* Cryptsetup 2.3
* Emacs 27.1
* GIMP 2.10.22
* GNU Compiler Collection 10.2
* GnuPG 2.2.20
* Inkscape 1.0.2
* LibreOffice 7.0
* Linux kernel 5.10 series
* MariaDB 10.5
* OpenSSH 8.4p1
* Perl 5.32
* PHP 7.4
* PostgreSQL 13
* Python 3, 3.9.1
* Rustc 1.48
* Samba 4.13
* Vim 8.2
* more than 59,000 other ready-to-use software packages, built from
more than 30,000 source packages.

With this broad selection of packages and its traditional wide
architecture support, Debian once again stays true to its goal of being
“The Universal Operating System”. It is suitable for many different use
cases: from desktop systems to netbooks; from development servers to
cluster systems; and for database, web, and storage servers. At the same
time, additional quality assurance efforts like automatic installation
and upgrade tests for all packages in Debian’s archive ensure that
“bullseye” fulfills the high expectations that users have of a stable
Debian release.

A total of nine architectures are supported: 64-bit PC / Intel EM64T /
x86-64 (amd64), 32-bit PC / Intel IA-32 (i386), 64-bit little-endian
Motorola/IBM PowerPC (ppc64el), 64-bit IBM S/390 (s390x), for ARM, armel
and armhf for older and more recent 32-bit hardware, plus arm64 for the
64-bit “AArch64” architecture, and for MIPS, mipsel (little-endian)
architectures for 32-bit hardware and mips64el architecture for 64-bit
little-endian hardware.

If you simply want to try Debian 11 “bullseye” without installing it,
you can use one of the available live images [3] which load and run the
complete operating system in a read-only state via your computer’s
memory.

3: https://www.debian.org/CD/live/

These live images are provided for the amd64 and i386 architectures and
are available for DVDs, USB sticks, and netboot setups. The user can
choose among different desktop environments to try: GNOME, KDE Plasma,
LXDE, LXQt, MATE, and Xfce. Debian Live “bullseye” has a standard live
image, so it is also possible to try a base Debian system without any of
the graphical user interfaces.

Should you enjoy the operating system you have the option of installing
from the live image onto your computer’s hard disk. The live image
includes the Calamares independent installer as well as the standard
Debian Installer. More information is available in the release notes [4]
and the live install images [5] sections of the Debian website.

4: https://www.debian.org/releases/bullseye/releasenotes
5: https://www.debian.org/CD/live/

To install Debian 11 “bullseye” directly onto your computer’s hard disk
you can choose from a variety of installation media such as Blu-ray
Disc, DVD, CD, USB stick, or via a network connection. Several desktop
environments — Cinnamon, GNOME, KDE Plasma Desktop and Applications,
LXDE, LXQt, MATE and Xfce — may be installed through those images. In
addition, “multi-architecture” CDs are available which support
installation from a choice of architectures from a single disc. Or you
can always create bootable USB installation media (see the Installation
Guide [6] for more details).

6: https://www.debian.org/releases/bullseye/installmanual

There has been a lot of development on the Debian Installer, resulting
in improved hardware support and other new features.

In some cases, a successful installation can still have display issues
when rebooting into the installed system; for those cases there are a
few workarounds [7] that might help log in anyway. There is also an
isenkram-based procedure [7] which lets users detect and fix missing
firmware on their systems, in an automated fashion. Of course, one has
to weigh the pros and cons of using that tool since it’s very likely
that it will need to install non-free packages.

7:
https://www.debian.org/releases/bullseye/amd64/ch06s04#completing-installed-system

In addition to this, the non-free installer images that include firmware
packages [8] have been improved so that they can anticipate the need for
firmware in the installed system (e.g. firmware for AMD or Nvidia
graphics cards, or newer generations of Intel audio hardware).

8:
https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/

For cloud users, Debian offers direct support for many of the best-known
cloud platforms. Official Debian images are easily selected through each
image marketplace. Debian also publishes pre-built OpenStack images [9]
for the amd64 and arm64 architectures, ready to download and use in
local cloud setups.

9: https://cloud.debian.org/images/openstack/current/

Debian can now be installed in 76 languages, with most of them available
in both text-based and graphical user interfaces.

The installation images may be downloaded right now via bittorrent [10]
(the recommended method), jigdo [11], or HTTP [12]; see Debian on
CDs [13] for further information. “bullseye” will soon be available on
physical DVD, CD-ROM, and Blu-ray Discs from numerous vendors [14] too.

10: https://www.debian.org/CD/torrent-cd/
11: https://www.debian.org/CD/jigdo-cd/#which
12: https://www.debian.org/CD/http-ftp/
13: https://www.debian.org/CD/
14: https://www.debian.org/CD/vendors

Upgrades to Debian 11 from the previous release, Debian 10 (code name
“buster”) are automatically handled by the APT package management tool
for most configurations.

For bullseye, the security suite is now named bullseye-security and
users should adapt their APT source-list files accordingly when
upgrading. If your APT configuration also involves pinning or
APT::Default-Release, it is likely to require adjustments too. See the
Changed security archive layout [15] section of the release notes for
more details.

15:
https://www.debian.org/releases/bullseye/amd64/release-notes/ch-information#security-archive

If you are upgrading remotely, be aware of the section No new SSH
connections possible during upgrade [16].

16:
https://www.debian.org/releases/bullseye/amd64/release-notes/ch-information#ssh-not-available

As always, Debian systems may be upgraded painlessly, in place, without
any forced downtime, but it is strongly recommended to read the release
notes [17] as well as the installation guide [18] for possible issues,
and for detailed instructions on installing and upgrading. The release
notes will be further improved and translated to additional languages in
the weeks after the release.

17: https://www.debian.org/releases/bullseye/releasenotes
18: https://www.debian.org/releases/bullseye/installmanual

About Debian
————

Debian is a free operating system, developed by thousands of volunteers
from all over the world who collaborate via the Internet. The Debian
project’s key strengths are its volunteer base, its dedication to the
Debian Social Contract and Free Software, and its commitment to provide
the best operating system possible. This new release is another
important step in that direction.

Contact Information
——————-

For further information, please visit the Debian web pages at
https://www.debian.org/ or send mail to <press@debian.org>.

--
Brian Masinick

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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I downloaded the Debian Bullseye 11 Xfce 4.16 live instance and installed it on a recently purchased SanDisk Ultra 64 GB USB3 .0 Flash Drive. I got a couple of these drives in anticipation of some new Bullseye releases, and I have more drives that I can “repurpose” as needed.

I haven’t physically installed this release to anything other than the Flash Drive so far, but it’s pretty much what I’ve already experienced: Debian Bullseye, for the most part, has been solid for a long time.

I know that we still have a few things to resolve in order to finish antiX 21, but I can tell you with confidence that Bullseye is a solid platform on which we can build our release. I suspect that we could put together a very solid sysvinit version of antiX 21 even now, based on what I’m seeing with this, but I’m quite willing to be patient so that we release the usual lean, mean, solid software with a very low incidence of problems and defects.

As far as our runit version, I know we’ve made some improvements. If we want to take our time and come up with a terrific new version, I’m happy with that. I’ll try to be helpful as much as possible.
As far as the core underpinnings of our system, though we put our own systemD stuff in place, the other stuff that is common with Debian is rock solid. I like this stuff; it’ll be a good foundation for our projects!

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Brian Masinick

[Member calciumsodium]

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Brian Masinick wrote:

I suspect that we could put together a very solid sysvinit version of antiX 21 even now

Hi All,

I think that the antiX21 b1-sysvinit version is already a very solid operating system. I have been using antiX21 b1-sysvinit for over a month and a half. I am really impressed with its stability and performance. I have been using kodi 19, chromium, palemoon, seamonkey, mpv, youtube-dl, smtube, ytfzf, vlc, netsurf, and wine very extensively. I don’t see any crashes where I have to reboot. My wife and daughter uses one of our family computers to watch movies and stream videos almost everyday. That computer is well used, and no problem. I have not seen any of the recent network issues because I have been just updating the kernels and the relevant application softwares that I only use. I don’t update anything else. It works very well for me.

Thank you for all who have helped to develop this version.

I will also help with testing the runit version once another antiX 21 version is available.

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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+1; agree with you.

Thanks for your clear, complete comments ☑️👍

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Brian Masinick

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