Debian 9 Stretch released

June 17th, 2017

After 26 months of development the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 9 (code name Stretch), which will be supported for the next 5 years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and of the Debian Long Term Support team.

Debian 9 is dedicated to the project's founder Ian Murdock, who passed away on 28 December 2015.

In Stretch, the default MySQL variant is now MariaDB. The replacement of packages for MySQL 5.5 or 5.6 by the MariaDB 10.1 variant will happen automatically upon upgrade.

Firefox and Thunderbird return to Debian with the release of Stretch, and replace their debranded versions Iceweasel and Icedove, which were present in the archive for more than 10 years.

Thanks to the Reproducible Builds project, over 90% of the source packages included in Debian 9 will build bit-for-bit identical binary packages. This is an important verification feature which protects users from malicious attempts to tamper with compilers and build networks. Future Debian releases will include tools and metadata so that end-users can validate the provenance of packages within the archive.

Administrators and those in security-sensitive environments can be comforted in the knowledge that the X display system no longer requires root privileges to run.

The Stretch release is the first version of Debian to feature the modern branch of GnuPG in the gnupg package. This brings with it elliptic curve cryptography, better defaults, a more modular architecture, and improved smartcard support. We will continue to supply the classic branch of GnuPG as gnupg1 for people who need it, but it is now deprecated.

Debug packages are easier to obtain and use in Debian 9 Stretch. A new dbg-sym repository can be added to the APT source list to provide debug symbols automatically for many packages.

The UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) support first introduced in Wheezy continues to be greatly improved in Stretch, and also supports installing on 32-bit UEFI firmware with a 64-bit kernel. The Debian live images now include support for UEFI booting as a new feature, too.

This release includes numerous updated software packages, such as:

• Apache 2.4.25
• Asterisk 13.14.1
• Chromium 59.0.3071.86
• Firefox 45.9 (in the firefox-esr package)
• GIMP 2.8.18
• an updated version of the GNOME desktop environment 3.22
• GNU Compiler Collection 6.3
• GnuPG 2.1
• Golang 1.7
• KDE Frameworks 5.28, KDE Plasma 5.8, and KDE Applications 16.08 and 16.04 for PIM components
• LibreOffice 5.2
• Linux 4.9
• MariaDB 10.1
• MATE 1.16
• OpenJDK 8
• Perl 5.24
• PHP 7.0
• PostgreSQL 9.6
• Python 2.7.13 and 3.5.3
• Ruby 2.3
• Samba 4.5
• systemd 232
• Thunderbird 45.8
• Tomcat 8.5
• Xen Hypervisor
• the Xfce 4.12 desktop environment
• more than 51,000 other ready-to-use software packages, built from a bit more of 25,000 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, or 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 Stretchfulfills the high expectations that users have of a stable Debian release.

A total of ten 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, in addition to the two 32-bit mips (big-endian) and mipsel (little-endian), there is a new mips64el architecture for 64-bit little-endian hardware. Support for 32-bit Motorola/IBM PowerPC (powerpc) has been removed in Stretch.

Want to give it a try?

If you simply want to try Debian 9 Stretch without installing it, you can use one of the available live images which loads and runs the complete operating system in a read-only state via your computer's memory. 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 is available for CDs, USB sticks, and netboot setups. Initially, these images are provided for the amd64 and i386 architectures only. More information is available in the live install images section of the Debian website.

Should you choose to install Debian 9 Stretch 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 internal network. Several desktop environments — GNOME, KDE Plasma Desktop and Applications, LXDE, and Xfce — may be installed through those images with your desired selection chosen from the boot menus of the install media. In addition, multi-architecture CDs and DVDs are available which support installation of multiple architectures from a single disc. Or you can always create bootable USB installation media (see the Installation Guide for more details). For cloud users Debian also offers pre-built OpenStack images for amd64 and arm64 architectures, ready to use.

Debian can now be installed in 75 languages, with most of them available in both text-based and graphical user interfaces.

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

Upgrading Debian

Upgrades to Debian 9 from the previous release, Debian 8 (codenamed Jessie), are automatically handled by the apt-get package management tool for most configurations. As always, Debian systems may be upgraded painlessly, in place, without any forced downtime, but it is strongly recommended to read the release notes as well as the installation guide 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.

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 <[email protected]>.