Debian 9 Stretch and Fedora 26 Beta: Major Release Highlights and Upgrade Guide

Debian 9 "Stretch" Released

After 26 months of development, the Debian project announced the stable release of Debian 9 (code name Stretch ) on June 17th, 2017, with five years of support. The release is dedicated to founder Ian Murdock.

Key changes include the default MySQL variant switching to MariaDB, and the return of branded Firefox and Thunderbird, replacing Iceweasel and Icedove.

More than 90% of source packages build bit‑for‑bit identical binaries thanks to the Reproducible Builds project, improving security against tampered builds. Future releases will provide tools for verifying package provenance.

Security‑sensitive environments benefit from the X display system no longer requiring root privileges, and the modern GnuPG branch adds elliptic‑curve cryptography, better defaults, modular architecture, and improved smart‑card support.

UEFI support is enhanced, including 32‑bit UEFI boot with a 64‑bit kernel, and live images now support UEFI booting.

Highlighted software updates:

Apache 2.4.25

Asterisk 13.14.1

Chromium 59.0.3071.86

Firefox 45.9 (firefox‑esr)

GIMP 2.8.18

GNOME 3.22

GCC 6.3

GnuPG 2.1

Go 1.7

KDE Frameworks 5.28, KDE Plasma 5.8

LibreOffice 5.2

Linux kernel 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

Xfce 4.12

and over 51,000 additional packages built from roughly 25,000 source packages

Supported architectures include amd64, i386, ppc64el, s390x, armel, armhf, arm64, mips, mipsel, and mips64el. Support for 32‑bit PowerPC ( powerpc) has been dropped.

Live images for amd64 and i386 allow users to try Stretch without installation; they are available for CD, USB, and netboot. Installation media (DVD, Blu‑ray, USB, network) support multiple desktop environments (GNOME, KDE Plasma, LXDE, Xfce) and multi‑arch discs.

Fedora 26 Beta Released

After five release delays, Fedora 26 Beta is now available, featuring the latest GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) and Go 1.8 with 32‑bit MIPS support and performance improvements.

The installer gains a new partitioning GUI called “blivet‑gui”, offering a building‑block style interface for experienced sysadmins.

Security enhancements have been added throughout the distribution.

Download options include Workstation, Server, and Atomic Host images, as well as Spins (LXQt, Python Classroom, Cinnamon) and Labs. ARM devices (Raspberry Pi 2/3) are supported.

Fedora 26 Beta ships with updated packages such as GNOME 3.24 (including Night Light), the latest LibreOffice, and the newest Docker container platform, cockpit manager, and atomic CLI for improved container management.

Alternative architectures (64‑bit ARM AArch64, PowerPC little/big endian, s390x, and others) are provided, along with minimal network installers and a Cloud Base image for building traditional cloud environments.

The Beta is code‑complete and closely resembles the final release expected in July. Users are encouraged to test, report bugs, and provide feedback to help improve the final product.