Debian releases do not follow a fixed schedule. Recent releases have been made roughly biennially by the Debian Project.
Contents
Release history
Debian 1.0 was never released as a vendor accidentally shipped a development release with that version number. The package management system dpkg and its front-end dselect were developed and implemented on Debian in a previous release. A transition from the a.out binary format to the ELF binary format had already begun before the planned 1.0 release. The only supported architecture was Intel 80386 (i386).
Debian 1.1 (Buzz)
Debian 1.1 (Buzz), released 17 June 1996, contained 474 packages. Debian had fully transitioned to the ELF binary format and used Linux kernel 2.0.
Debian 1.2 (Rex)
Debian 1.2 (Rex), released 12 December 1996, contained 848 packages maintained by 120 developers.
Debian 1.3 (Bo)
Debian 1.3 (Bo), released 5 June 1997, contained 974 packages maintained by 200 developers.
Debian 2.0 (Hamm)
Debian 2.0 (Hamm), released 24 July 1998, contained over 1,500 packages maintained by over 400 developers. A transition was made to libc6 and Debian was ported to the Motorola 68000 series (m68k) architectures.
Debian 2.1 (Slink)
Debian 2.1 (Slink), released 9 March 1999, contained about 2,250 packages. The front-end APT was introduced for the package management system and Debian was ported to Alpha and SPARC.
Debian 2.2 (Potato)
Debian 2.2 (Potato), released 14–15 August 2000, contained 2,600 packages maintained by more than 450 developers. New packages included the display manager GDM, the directory service OpenLDAP, the security software OpenSSH and the mail transfer agent Postfix. Debian was ported to the PowerPC and ARM architectures.
Debian 3.0 (Woody)
Debian 3.0 (Woody), released 19 July 2002, contained around 8,500 packages maintained by more than 900 developers. KDE was introduced and Debian was ported to the following architectures: IA-64, PA-RISC (hppa), mips and mipsel and IBM ESA/390 (s390).
Debian 3.1 (Sarge)
Debian 3.1 (Sarge), released 6 June 2005, contained around 15,400 packages. debian-installer and OpenOffice.org were introduced.
Debian 4.0 (Etch)
Debian 4.0 (Etch), released 8 April 2007, contained around 18,000 packages maintained by more than 1,030 developers. Debian was ported to x86-64 (amd64) and support for the Motorola 68000 series (m68k) architectures was dropped.
Debian 5.0 (Lenny)
Debian 5.0 (Lenny), released 14 February 2009, contained more than 23,000 packages. Debian was ported to the ARM EABI (armel) architecture.
Debian 6.0 (Squeeze)
Debian 6.0 (Squeeze), released 6 February 2011, contained more than 29,000 packages. The web browser Chromium was introduced and Debian was ported to the kfreebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64 architectures and support for the Alpha, and PA-RISC (hppa) architectures was dropped.
Debian 7 (Wheezy)
Debian 7 (Wheezy), released 4 May 2013, contained more than 36,000 packages. Support for UEFI was added and Debian was ported to the armhf and IBM ESA/390 (s390x) architectures.
Debian 8 (Jessie)
Debian 8 (Jessie), released 25–26 April 2015, contained more than 43,000 packages, with systemd installed by default instead of init. (sysvinit and upstart packages are provided as alternatives.) Debian was ported to the ARM64 and ppc64le architectures, while support for the IA-64, kfreebsd-amd64 and kfreebsd-i386, IBM ESA/390 (s390) (only the 31-bit variant; the new 64-bit s390x is retained) and SPARC architectures were dropped.