The Debian development community has officially released version 5.0 of the venerable open source Linux distribution. The new version, which is codenamed Lenny, includes updated software, security enhancements, and improved hardware support.

Debian is known for its broad architecture support, lengthy development cycles, and strong ideological commitment to software freedom. Debian provides the foundation for many popular derivatives, including Ubuntu and Knoppix. The Debian project has attracted an enormous community of free software enthusiasts and has become one of the largest community-driven distributions in existence. Despite its declining relevance on the desktop, it is an essential part of the Linux software ecosystem and continues to serve an important function for its downstream partners.

Debian 5, which has been under development for almost two years, includes over 23,000 software packages and is supported on 12 architectures including x86, AMD64, Sparc, PowerPC, and MIPS. Version 5 introduces a new ARM port that is designed to take advantage of modern ARM processors.

"The Debian project's key strengths are its volunteer base, its dedication to the Debian Social Contract, and its commitment to provide the best operating system possible," wrote Debian spokesperson Alexander Reichle-Schmehl in an announcement on the Debian mailing list. "Debian 5.0 is another important step in that direction."

The Debian project maintains three separate streams of packages. The official releases consist of the "stable" package set, but users who want the latest software often use the "testing" or "unstable" streams which are maintained through a rolling release model. Official releases, which occur roughly every two or three years, are created by freezing the packages in the testing stream and ironing out the bugs so that they meet the requisite level of robustness.

Reliability is considered a very high priority for official Debian releases, so the most current software is generally not included. Debian 5 ships with version 2.6.26 of the Linux kernel, GNOME 2.22, XOrg 7.3, OpenOffice.org 2.4.1, GIMP 2.4.7, KDE 3.5.10, and Iceweasel (Firefox with alternate branding) 3.0.6. Several of these components posed challenges for the Debian community.

GNOME 2.22, which was released in March 2008, was a transitional release with several technical weaknesses. GNOME's new virtual filesystem layer was still under heavy development and was not fully integrated until GNOME 2.24. To address this issue, the Debian developers have reverted to gnome-vfs, which is the desktop's previous virtual filesystem layer.

The KDE project's transition from version 3 to version 4 also created some thorny issues for Debian. KDE 4.2, which is the first solidly usable release in the KDE 4 series, unfortunately arrived too late for inclusion in Debian 5. Instead, it ships with KDE 3.5.10, which is the last update in the KDE 3.5.x series.

Although Debian's emphasis on stability at the expense of recency often works against it on the desktop, it makes a very good server distro. As companies gain greater internal Linux expertise, they are increasingly turning towards non-commercial Linux distributions in order to cut support costs. This has had a positive impact on Debian adoption in enterprise computing environments. Debian 5 adds some nice security improvements that will be beneficial for sever installs.

I tested Debian 5.0 by installing the desktop package set from the lightweight "netinst" CD image. The graphical installation wizard walks the user through the process of configuring and installing the system. The default desktop installation provides a complete GNOME desktop environment, the OpenOffice.org suite, and several additional applications such as Inkscape, Pidgin, and IceWeasel.

Unlike Ubuntu, Debian doesn't strive to deliver a plug-and-play user experience--many popular proprietary and encumbered components are omitted in conformance with Debian's high standards for software freedom. Proprietary binary drivers are not offered automatically, for example, and it ships with the open source Gnash implementation of Flash instead of Adobe's proprietary version. Some concessions are still made for practicality, however, such as the decision to tolerate the presence of binary blobs in the 5.0 release.

For the average Linux user who wants the latest desktop software, greater ease of use, and a more refined experience, Ubuntu is probably a better choice. For users who want a (mostly) unbreakable server platform, it's a pretty great option.

All things considered, this is a pretty good Debian release. It seems to live up to the distro's long-standing tradition of delivering solid reliability, and it introduces some nice improvements that will be appreciated by Debian aficionados. Check out the official release notes for more details. You can download Debian 5.0 from the project's website.