This page is a placeholder for New In Wheezy .

This page is licensed under GPL-2. It is meant to be merged in the Release Notes :

General

Review ReleaseGoals?

Debian Archives

wheezy-backports packages will be accessible from the regular pool, see announcement; (701769)

OS Infrastructure

linux based flavours use kernel 3.2

ext4 is now the default filesystem for new Linux installations. It is possible to convert an ext3 Filesystem to ext4, following this Howto.

As an option: systemd: with journald, utilizing new kernel feature cgroups, and exposing other new kernel features like per-process filesystem namespaces.

multiarch support, see announcement

New kFreeBSD versions 9.0 (default) and 8.3 ZFS version 28 adds support for block-level deduplication, triple-parity RAID-Z, improvements to ZIL and snapshotting iSCSI target possible with userland istgt whole-disk encryption with geli



Desktop and Laptop

LibreOffice replaces OpenOffice.org, see announcement; (702039)

GNOME has been updated to version 3.4.

KDE has been updated to version 4.8

Xfce has been updated to version 4.8

PackageKit replaces the previous graphical package management stack on GNOME, Apper is used for package management on KDE

Multimedia support In Debian wheezy, ffmpeg has been replaced by the libav fork, which is considered to feature a more conservative release process and thus fit better to Debian's needs. It provides all libraries and prepares an upgrade path for existing application packages. Debian wheezy comes with full-featured libav (formerly ffmpeg) libraries and frontends, including e.g. mplayer, mencoder, vlc and transcode. Additional codec support is provided e.g. through lame for MP3 audio encoding, xvidcore for MPEG-4 ASP video encoding, x264 for H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video encoding, vo-aacenc for AAC audio encoding and opencore-amr and vo-amrwbenc for Adaptive Multi-Rate Narrowband and Wideband encoding and decoding, respectively. For most use cases, installation of packages from third-party repositories should not be necessary anymore. The times of crippled multimedia support in Debian are finally over! ?FabianGreffrath: I know the paragraph about added codecs is very detailed and technical, but all these codecs are explicitely mentioned on purpose. They are kind of buzz words and Debian was long time infamous for not supporting them, so this should get explicit press coverage. I am not a native speaker so the actual wording is, of course, subject to change.

Real-time kernel featureset (linux-image-rt-amd64, linux-image-rt-686-pae)

New loongson-2f (mipsel) Linux flavor; much improved support overall for Lemote Yeeloong notebooks (except 601119)

kFreeBSD uses Xfce by default (? see http://lists.debian.org/debian-bsd/2011/09/msg00051.html)

exFAT support via fuse driver

Server

MySQL updated to 5.5.30.

GNU/kFreeBSD jails are working

Dovecot is upgraded from v1.2 to v2.1. This involves moving the previous single dovecot.conf to conf.d-style files. Backup your config before upgrading and read README.Debian.gz.

Distributed Computing

Packages for Condor, CCTools, and DMTCP have been added as an integrated solution for distributed high-throughput computing in local-, cluster-, grid-, or cloud-computing scenarios. This includes support for checkpoint and migration of unmodified executables and interpreter sessions (dmtcp). Various interfaces to use these facilities are provided. For example, makefile-like distributed parallelization (Makeflow), or a minimal ?GridEngine compatibility layer (condor_qsub). Other packages (e.g. NiPype) have been modified to work with this solution out-of-the-box.

Cloud

(get in touch with debian-cloud for more info/references about this)

Deploy your own cloud using Debian

Xen Cloud Platform (XCP)

Openstack

Use Debian on public clouds

Amazon EC2

Windows Azure

Google Compute Engine

Communications

Better support for UnifiedCommunications and Federated VoIP: previous releases of Debian had excellent support for VoIP (SIP and Jabber) within a single site Wheezy includes a range of independent components that enable federation and routing between sites reTurn server provides ICE/STUN/TURN to enable NAT traversal for sites using SIP, Jabber or both repro SIP proxy provides mutual TLS for federated SIP calling (packages like ejabberd already provide federation for Jabber users) dlz-ldap-enum uses the phone numbers and email addresses in LDAP directories to support routing of SIP or Jabber over large sites or distributed/loosely-coupled organisations



Security

Apache

Apache remains at version 2.2 in Wheezy due to problems with integration of mod-perl. However various changes of note have taken place.

Addition of libapache2-mod-security

Addition of libapache2-mod-qos

Addition of libapache2-mod-log-slow

Addition of various authentication schemes

Also the file /etc/apache2/conf.d/security suggests some commented out headers which modern browsers may honor to prevent certain types of abuse.

Programming

Perl 5.14 (703561)

PHP 5.4

Python 2.7 as the default Python 2.X interpreter (2.6 remains supported)

Python 3.2 as the default Python 3.X interpreter

Ruby 1.9 as default version, 1.8 still available, but will be dropped in Jessie most of packages for Ruby libraries renamed, with one package ruby-package for all supported Ruby versions instead of libpackage-ruby* many Debian packages for Ruby libraries are recognized by Rubygems, thanks to metadata shipped by those packages and the rubygems-integration package, making those metadata available for Rubygems. Those packages can be used to satisfy dependencies both with plain Rubygems and with Bundler.

Haskell - GHC 7.4.1

Lua - Lua 5.2 joins Lua 5.1.

GNU Guile 2.0, much faster than previous versions (1.6 and 1.8 still available, probably removed after wheezy)

Debian Installer

Support for UEFI installation on x86-64 (amd64) systems

WPA support

Software speech synthesis support!

Support for installing to diskless systems using NBD or iSCSI.

Support for installing GNU/kFreeBSD to ZFS

Debian Pure Blends

The Debian subsets targeting at specific user groups which were formerly known as Custom Debian Distributions are now called Debian Pure Blends (in short Blends). New Blends featuring metapackages in Wheezy are : none yet

Debian Med

YaroslavHalchenko: In my opinion it is better to group and describe not by a team/blend per se but by field of endeavor. Individual package names would not make it into release notes anyways, but listing them here might help to quantify on how much coverage of any specific field got improved

New packages of specific importance

ginkgocadx: industrial strength,field-tested medical image (DICOM) viewer fit for use in the busy daily practice of Medicine.

hhsuite: sensitive protein sequence search tool based on the pairwise alignment of hidden Markov models. hhsuite compares favorably to the NCBI PSI-BLAST according to the authors.

reprof: protein secondary structure and accessibility predictor that improves on the popular PROF (packaged as profphd) tool.

biosig4c++: supports over 40 formats for biomedical signal data (EEG, ECG, etc.

freediams: pharmaceutical drug prescription and interaction manager

freemedforms-emr: electronic medical record manager

gbrowse: the generic genome browser

more and more packages related to next-generation sequencing: bedtools, bowtie, fastx-toolkit, tabix, tophat, vcftools, etc.

other packages to mention here

Debian Science

and the other sciences oriented Blends DebianMed and DebiChem started maintaining citation information that is displayed in the web sentinel and can be used in a BibTeX file.

FOSS solutions for various fields of science got vastly improved coverage

Neuroscience Modeling: brian, pynn Electrophysiology: aghermann, eegdev, klustakwik, sigviewer, stimfit Brain imaging: cmtk, connectomeviewer, dipy, mricron, nitime, openwalnut, pysurfer Psychophysics: psychtoolbox-3, psignifit3 Data I/O: biosig4c++, nibabel, libgdf, neo, xdffileio Hardware interfaces: libfreenect, pyoptical, pyxid

Simulations: contains the packages that are used to do simulations in different fields of science: discrete element method, molecular dynamics, traffic simulation.

High energy physics: packages related to development of High Energy Physics applications, which is a branch of physics that studies the elementary subatomic constituents of matter and radiation, and their interactions.

Physics-dev: packages are helpful for development of applications for Physics and Mathematics.

Dataacquisition: build you own SCADA application using the TANGO Control System, its python binding and its Qt based graphical toolkit taurus.

ADD YOUR FIELD

with new software addressing miscelaneous computing demands

Distributed computing cctools, condor, dmtcp, mpi4py

Remote access: guacamole

General numeric computing numexpr, pandas, skimage, statsmodels, xppaut (maintained again)

IPython 0.13 with notebook support

Other helpful tools: CDE (cdepack), numdiff

although not an explicit release goal -- many of the above packages enabled exercising of upstream's unittest batteries at build-time -- that greatly improved reliability and guaranteed performance of the scientific software in Debian.

Debichem

New packages since squeeze:

No longer supported in Wheezy

Upgrade issues

Linux : linux-image-686-bigmem kernel flavor renamed to linux-image-686-pae, 686 flavor dropped. 686-class systems not supporting Physical Address Extension - all 400 MHz-bus versions of the Intel Pentium M and Celeron M (i.e. all "Banias" and pre-Sonoma "Dothan"), VIA C3 "Nehemiah" and AMD Geode LX - should migrate to the 486 flavour (also more efficient due to optimisation for uniprocessor systems).

drupal7 : no automated upgrade path from drupal6. See Drupal/Upgrade/From6To7 for more information.

sudoers : The /etc/sudoers file in sudo has been changed to be a conffile (605130) and must be upgraded to the package version which contains new features. New features include addition of secure_path and #includedir /etc/sudoers.d (639841).

bootlogd : The bootlogd functionality has been split out into a separate package. If you had boot logging previously and want to continue it then install the bootlogd package.

ischroot : The ischroot command is new in debianutils version 4 (627205) introduced during Wheezy Testing. Unfortunately it is buggy and does not detect that it is running in a chroot (685034). Upgrades from Squeeze will not be affected. Upgrades of chroots from Testing will fail. A workaround is to copy /bin/true on top of /usr/bin/ischroot before the upgrade to enable a successful upgrade of a chroot. And copy it again afterward and after every upgrade of debianutils.

mysqldump : Now requires --events option since 5.5.30 or a warning is printed. See the MySQL 5.5.30 release notes. See http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=55587 for details.

php5 : Upgrades from squeeze will remove the php5-suhosin package, but leave configuration files in place. This will cause a "PHP Warning" email to be sent to root every half hour. Purge the php5-suhosin package to stop these.

rsyslog: Upgrades from systems that did not already have rsyslog installed may not have any syslog daemon running after the upgrade. After your upgrade, check whether rsyslog is installed, and install it if necessary.

Notes

DSO Linking Changed

Previously the linker used indirect dependent shared libraries to resolve symbols. That would hide various encapsulation violations. Now the linker does not use indirect shared libraries. See ToolChain/DSOLinking for details.

Debian Installer Preseed Changed

The preseed keymap options for the Debian Installer have changed. Previously console-keymaps-at/keymap=us set the keymap for an automated preseed. Now the option is keymap=us and the previous option is ignored.

getty now clears the vt tty screen

In the util-linux package getty has changed and it now clears the screen. This seems like a good thing on the surface. Then you discover that it destroys the boot time messages on vt1 including any errors that are on the screen at the time. To prevent this a new option --noclear has appeared. To restore the previous behavior change the getty line in /etc/inittab to include the --noclear option.

See Also