A new version of Debian 9 was recently announced. Stretch is a new code name for the system. This version dedicated to the memory of the Debian project founder, Ian Murdoch, who died in late 2015.
The release of a new version of one of the most popular Linux distributions & ndash; it is always a momentous event that we can't miss.
Debian 9 image is already available to our users who's using VPS hosting.
In addition to updating many packages and removing the obsolete ones, these are the interesting innovations that we can highlight:
MySQL was replaced with MariaDB
The new Debian version now uses MariaDB instead of MySQL by default. Upon installing default-mysql-server and default-mysql-client, mariadb-server-10.1 and mariadb-client-10.1, respectively, will be installed. This should be considered when updating, because binary database formats are not backward compatible.
New way of naming network interfaces
Stretch uses a new standard for naming network interfaces. In the old scheme format, there was a serial search race issue, which could result in the renaming of the interface, and there were issues with mounting compatibility in read only root filesystem mode. Previously, there were names like eth0, eth1, etc., now the new method first uses the BIOS provided number pointer and then tries to use the slot numbers of PCI cards, which leads to the creation of network interfaces such as enp5s0f0, eno1 for ethernet, or wlp3s0 for wlan. USB devices are added to the system based on their MAC addresses.
APT Package Improvements
Work was done to improve the security and convenience of the package manager apt, many changes were made to aptitude. For example, weak checksums such as SHA-1 are rejected by default, the batch manager tries to download packages on behalf of an unprivileged user, usage of DNS records (SRV) for HTTP engine detection.
Net-tools were replaced with iproute2
Stretch now uses the iproute2 package by default, which provides some more advanced features, shows more information, and works directly with the core of the system.
We have listed the most interesting changes, but this is only a small part. For example, now the standard repository has PHP7.0. For more information on all changes, as well as instructions on how to upgrade to Debian 9 “Stretch”, please visit the official website.