Content

 

Introductory

In this article, we'll look at what innovations and changes the Debian 9 (Stretch) operating system brings to its users. Although the topic is not new at all, this information may be needed in several other descriptions, so I will make a little summary of it, which I can refer to in related tutorials.

A official Debian source there are a lot of changes to Debian's 9 version, which you should not forget if we plan to upgrade to a newer Debian release. Without being exhaustive, I have highlighted what I consider most important.

 

 

architectures

Support for New Architecture Added: 64-bit little-endian MIPS (mips64el)

And the following architecture has been removed from the distribution: PowerPC (powerpc)

 

Asztalkörnyezetek

The following desktop environments and versions are available on the Debian 9 distribution:

• GNOME 3.22
• KDE Plasma 5.8
• LXDE 9
• LXQt 0.11
• MATE 1.16
• Xfce 4.12

 

software Packages

The distribution includes more than 15 new packages, bringing Debian 346 to a total of 51 packages. Most of the previous software has been updated: more than 687 packages (This is 9% of the Debian 29 Jessie packages). In addition, a significant number of packages were removed (more than 859 pieces, 8% of Jessie’s stock) from the new distribution. There are no longer updates for this software in Debian 57, and in frontend packages they are referred to as "obsolete".

Some example

Here are some examples of updates to Debian packages:

Package	Version of Debian 8 (Jessie)	Version of Debian 9 (Stretch)
BIND (DNS Server)	9.9	9.10
Emacs	24.4	24.5 and 25.1
Exim default email server	4.84	4.88
GNU compiler	4.9	6.3
GnuPG	1.4	2.1
Inkscape	0.48	0.91
The GNU C function library	2.19	2.24
Linux kernel image	3.16 Series	4.9 Series
MariaDB	10.0	10.1
Nginx	1.6	1.10
OpenJDK	7	8
OpenSSH	6.7p1	7.4p1
Perl	5.20	5.24
PHP	5.6	7.0
Postfix	2.11	3.1
PostgreSQL	9.4	9.6
Python 3	3.4	3.5
Samba	4.1	4.5
Vim	7	8
GNU Nano	2.2.6-3	2.7.4-1

 

CD, DVD, Blu-ray installation kits

The official Debian distribution is now distributed on DVDs containing 12-14 binary packages (depending on the architecture) and on DVDs containing 12 source codes. Also, there is another DVD that is amd64 and that i386 part of architectural editions and their source code. Debian has also been released on Blu-ray and dual-layer Blu-ray discs, which include the amd64 and i386 architectures, including source code. Debian had previously released all architectures on large volumes of CDs, but this was no longer the case with Stretch.

 

Apache web server

Az Apache it may be important for web server users to replace the 8 version of Debian 2.4.10 with the 9 in Debian 2.4.25, which they have since many new features have been added, including the HTTP / 2 protocol, which offers a significant increase in speed on the web service front.

 

PHP

The default PHP server also changed: the 8 branch in Debian 5.6 was replaced by 7.0.x line took over.

Nevertheless you can still install PHP version 5.6.x on Debian 9 (Stretch) also if necessary.

 

MySQL

A mySQLwill be replaced by MariaDB version 10.1, which has been the default database engine for the distribution since Debian 9. 

The Stretch release introduced a new mechanism to switch the default database engine to mysql-defaults using virtual packages created from source packages. For example, default-mysql-server when you install a virtual package, you already have the MariaDB-server-10.1 will be installed. For users with mysql-server-5.5 or the mysql-server-5.6 running, these components will be removed during the upgrade and the corresponding MariaDB packages will be added instead. Similarly, a default-mysql-client When installing the MariaDB-client-10.1 package will be uploaded to the system.

Important!
Keep in mind that the binary data file formats in the database are not backward compatible, so once you have switched to MariaDB 10.1, it is no longer possible to convert the data files back to MySQL or earlier versions of MariaDB unless a proper backup has been made. Therefore, it is very important to make a full database backup before upgrading / converting, for example mysqldump command.

A MySQL virtual-* and default, MySQL * packages will still be retained. MySQL will continue to be a part of Debian, but it will instable releases. THE Debian on the MySQL / MariaDB team wiki to get current information about MySQL-related software available on Debian.

 

Networking

Installer and newly installed systems use a new standard naming scheme for network interfaces in the previously used eth0, eth1, etc. instead of names. The old naming methods bound the system to constraints that caused unexpected changes to interface names. The new names use the numbers provided by the BIOS and the serial numbers of the PCI slots, from which the system generates interface names such as ens0 vagy enp1s1 (ethernet interfaces) or for example wlp3s0 (WLAN). For USB devices, which can be added to the system on the fly, the interface names are compiled based on the MAC address of that device.

This change does not apply to upgrading Debian 8 (Jessie) systems to Debian 9 (Stretch); the names remain a /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules file. More detailed information can be found here.