Debian unstable on the move

Following the recent stable release of Debian sarge, the distribution's cutting edge “unstable” (“sid”) branch has been getting many interesting updates. Among the first ones were those to GCC 4.0 and apt 0.6. Especially the update to the new version of apt has been much anticipated as it introduces many security features that will help to lower the risk from updating one's system from an FTP/HTTP mirror site. Those of you who are interested in the internals of the new “secure apt” will find good information in these two documents: APT Signature checking and Migration to APT 0.6.

In line with most Linux distributions, Debian has now also replaced the XFree86 packages with those maintained by the X.Org project. It wasn't a completely trouble-free process, but that's to be expected in a development distribution, at least until everybody tests things out and reports bugs to the maintainers.

And while on the subject of Debian, here is an interesting link for those who would like to extend their sarge installation to include proprietary and non-free packages: Debian-Unofficial.org. The site provides a long list of tested packages for Debian sarge, including a multitude of multimedia codecs, wireless networking drivers, Java and various Java-based applications, Opera, Skype and many other packages. Certainly worth checking out – as long as you don't tell Richard Stallman about it!