Debian ships new 'Jessie' release with systemd AND sysvinit

The Debian project is touting new ports for ARM and POWER architectures, a bunch of software updates, an upgraded Gnome desktop and better security in its just-unleashed Jessie release.

However, El Reg fully expects that the switch to systemd as the default init system will divert at least some attention from the release.

Promising that systemd provides “advanced monitoring, logging, and service management capabilities”, Jessie – the upgrade to Wheezy – still lets the greaybeards' favourite, sysvinit, co-exist with the new init system.

After a brief affair with Xfce, Jessie sees Debian return to the Gnome fold, using version 3.14 of the venerable desktop as its default. The MATE and Cinnamon desktops are also available, or users can opt for Xcfe (version 4.10) if they prefer.

As well as abandoning SSLv3 in Jessie, Debian's overlords have put hardened compiler flags in more packages, and switched the stack protector flag to stack-protector-strong.

There's a new package, needrestart, also to help security along: “If any services running on the system require a restart to take advantage of changes in the upgraded packages then it offers to perform these restarts”, the release notes explain.

The Gnome desktop has been made workmate-friendly: if someone leaves music playing when they leave the machine, workmates can press pause without knowing the password.

The release announcement points to upgraded versions of everything from Apache and Asterisk to Tomcat and Xen, adding that a full install includes “43,000 other ready-to-use software packages built from nearly 20,100 source packages.”

Naturally, all package versions shipping with Jessie are the latest release.

Supporting services include a browsable view of all source code, and a new code search to make browsing less daunting, Debian Code Search [since there's 130 GB of source code, it's no surprise that f*ck turns up 616 pages of results – El Reg]. ®

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