Debian 9.13 - Live DVDs

Version 9.13 Release Date: July 17, 2020

NOTE: This distro comes on DVD. Please ensure that your system will read from a DVD before ordering.

About Debian 9

After 26 months of development the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 9 (code name Stretch), which will be supported for the next 5 years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and of the Debian Long Term Support team.

Debian 9 is dedicated to the project's founder Ian Murdock, who passed away on 28 December 2015.

In Stretch, the default MySQL variant is now MariaDB. The replacement of packages for MySQL 5.5 or 5.6 by the MariaDB 10.1 variant will happen automatically upon upgrade.

Firefox and Thunderbird return to Debian with the release of Stretch, and replace their debranded versions Iceweasel and Icedove, which were present in the archive for more than 10 years.

Thanks to the Reproducible Builds project, over 90% of the source packages included in Debian 9 will build bit-for-bit identical binary packages. This is an important verification feature which protects users from malicious attempts to tamper with compilers and build networks. Future Debian releases will include tools and metadata so that end-users can validate the provenance of packages within the archive.

Administrators and those in security-sensitive environments can be comforted in the knowledge that the X display system no longer requires root privileges to run.

The Stretch release is the first version of Debian to feature the modern branch of GnuPG in the gnupg package. This brings with it elliptic curve cryptography, better defaults, a more modular architecture, and improved smartcard support. We will continue to supply the classic branch of GnuPG as gnupg1 for people who need it, but it is now deprecated.

Debug packages are easier to obtain and use in Debian 9 Stretch. A new dbg-sym repository can be added to the APT source list to provide debug symbols automatically for many packages.

The UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) support first introduced in Wheezy continues to be greatly improved in Stretch, and also supports installing on 32-bit UEFI firmware with a 64-bit kernel. The Debian live images now include support for UEFI booting as a new feature, too.

This release includes numerous updated software packages, such as:

• Apache 2.4.25
• Asterisk 13.14.1
• Chromium 59.0.3071.86
• Firefox 45.9 (in the firefox-esr package)
• GIMP 2.8.18
• an updated version of the GNOME desktop environment 3.22
• GNU Compiler Collection 6.3
• GnuPG 2.1
• Golang 1.7
• KDE Frameworks 5.28, KDE Plasma 5.8, and KDE Applications 16.08 and 16.04 for PIM components
• LibreOffice 5.2
• Linux 4.9
• MariaDB 10.1
• MATE 1.16
• OpenJDK 8
• Perl 5.24
• PHP 7.0
• PostgreSQL 9.6
• Python 2.7.13 and 3.5.3
• Ruby 2.3
• Samba 4.5
• systemd 232
• Thunderbird 45.8
• Tomcat 8.5
• Xen Hypervisor
• the Xfce 4.12 desktop environment
• more than 51,000 other ready-to-use software packages, built from a bit more of 25,000 source packages.

With this broad selection of packages and its traditional wide architecture support, Debian once again stays true to its goal of being the universal operating system. It is suitable for many different use cases: from desktop systems to netbooks; from development servers to cluster systems; and for database, web, or storage servers. At the same time, additional quality assurance efforts like automatic installation and upgrade tests for all packages in Debian's archive ensure that Stretch fulfills the high expectations that users have of a stable Debian release.

WHAT is Debian?

The Debian Project is an association of individuals who have made common cause to create a free operating system. This operating system that we have created is called Debian.

An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run. At the core of an operating system is the kernel. The kernel is the most fundamental program on the computer and does all the basic housekeeping and lets you start other programs.

Debian systems currently use the Linux kernel or the FreeBSD kernel. Linux is a piece of software started by Linus Torvalds and supported by thousands of programmers worldwide. FreeBSD is an operating system including a kernel and other software.

However, work is in progress to provide Debian for other kernels, primarily for the Hurd. The Hurd is a collection of servers that run on top of a microkernel (such as Mach) to implement different features. The Hurd is free software produced by the GNU project.

A large part of the basic tools that fill out the operating system come from the GNU project; hence the names: GNU/Linux, GNU/kFreeBSD, and GNU/Hurd. These tools are also free.

Of course, the thing that people want is application software: programs to help them get what they want to do done, from editing documents to running a business to playing games to writing more software. Debian comes with over 43000 packages (precompiled software that is bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine), a package manager (APT), and other utilities that make it possible to manage thousands of packages on thousands of computers as easily as installing a single application. All of it free.

It's a bit like a tower. At the base is the kernel. On top of that are all the basic tools. Next is all the software that you run on the computer. At the top of the tower is Debian — carefully organizing and fitting everything so it all works together.

It's all free?

You may be wondering: why would people spend hours of their own time to write software, carefully package it, and then give it all away? The answers are as varied as the people who contribute. Some people like to help others. Many write programs to learn more about computers. More and more people are looking for ways to avoid the inflated price of software. A growing crowd contribute as a thank you for all the great free software they've received from others. Many in academia create free software to help get the results of their research into wider use. Businesses help maintain free software so they can have a say in how it develops -- there's no quicker way to get a new feature than to implement it yourself! Of course, a lot of us just find it great fun.

Debian is so committed to free software that we thought it would be useful if that commitment was formalized in a written document. Thus, our Social Contract was born.

Although Debian believes in free software, there are cases where people want or need to put non-free software on their machine. Whenever possible Debian will support this. There are even a growing number of packages whose sole job is to install non-free software into a Debian system.

You say free, but the CDs/bandwidth cost money!

You might be asking: If the software is free, then why do I have to pay a vendor for a CD, or pay an ISP for downloading?

When buying a CD, you are paying for someone's time, capital outlay to make the disks, and risk (in case they don't sell them all). In other words, you are paying for a physical medium used to deliver the software, not for the software itself.

When we use the word "free", we are referring to software freedom, not that it's without cost. You can read more on what we mean by "free software" and what the Free Software Foundation says on that subject.

Most software costs over 100 US dollars. How can you give it away?

A better question is how do software companies get away with charging so much? Software is not like making a car. Once you've made one copy of your software, the production costs to make a million more are tiny (there's a reason Microsoft has so many billions in the bank).

Look at it another way: if you had an endless supply of sand in your backyard, you might be willing to give sand away. It would be foolish, though, to pay for a truck to take it to others. You would make them come and get it themselves (equivalent to downloading off the net) or they can pay someone else to deliver it to their door (equivalent to buying a CD). This is exactly how Debian operates and why most of the CDs/DVDs are so cheap (only about 12 USD for 4 DVDs).

Debian does not make any money from the sale of CDs. At the same time, money is needed to pay for expenses such as domain registration and hardware. Thus, we ask that you buy from one of the CD vendors that donates a portion of your purchase to Debian.

What hardware is supported?

Debian will run on almost all personal computers, including most older models. Each new release of Debian generally supports a larger number of computer architectures. For a complete list of currently supported ones, see the documentation for the stable release.

Almost all common hardware is supported. If you would like to be sure that all the devices connected to your machine are supported, check out the Linux Hardware Compatibility HOWTO.

There are a few companies that make support difficult by not releasing specifications for their hardware. This means you might not be able to use their hardware with GNU/Linux. Some companies provide non-free drivers, but that is a problem because the company could later go out of business or stop support for the hardware you have. We recommend that you only purchase hardware from manufacturers that provide free drivers for their products.

I'm looking for more information.

You may want to check out our FAQ.

I'm still not convinced.

Don't take our word for it - try Debian yourself. Since hard disk space has become less expensive, you can probably spare about 2GB. If you don't want or need a graphical desktop, 600MB are sufficient. Debian can be easily installed on this extra space and can coexist with your existing OS. If you eventually need more space, you can simply delete one of your OSes (and after you see the power of a Debian system, we are confident you won't delete Debian).

As trying a new operating system will take some of your valuable time, it is understandable that you may have reservations. For this reason we compiled a list of pros and cons of Debian. This should help you decide whether you think it's worth it. We hope you'll appreciate our honesty and frankness.