Debian 2.1, also known as ``slink'', introduces two additional architectures into the officially released set: DEC Alpha (``alpha''), and SPARC (``sparc''). The officially supported architectures from Debian's release, Intel x86 (``i386'') and Motorola 680x0 (``m68k'') are of course still supported. This brings the total number of supported architectures to four, which is greater than the number of architectures supported by any other GNU/Linux distribution.
The sparc port of Debian is based on a pre-release of the shining new glibc2.1. So it's the first major distribution which is glibc2.1 based. Programmers' note: glibc2.1 is binary compatible but not source compatible. Almost everything compiled for glibc2 will run on glibc2.1, but if you recompile with glibc2.1 headers sometimes you've got to fix a couple of constructs which are no longer allowed in glibc2.1.
The number of distributed packages in our main distribution is now around 2000. As always, the distribution is growing around 50% per release; it shows no sign of slackening.
Unlike the transition from 1.3.x (``bo'') to 2.0 (``hamm''), the
changes from 2.0 to 2.1 are incremental. New versions are included,
fixes for bugs, etc. apt is now the officially
blessed package installation tool, which is to be used in conjunction
with dpkg. apt can be used as a
package acquisition (download) method in dselect, or it
can be used from the command-line as apt-get.
apt will internally model the entire state of your
installed packages, and will do its best to ensure that all package
dependencies are met at all times.
Due to the increased number of packages, CD-ROM distributions must ship as two binary package CD-ROMs. This has necessitated an upgrade of the installation tools, in order to deal with multiple CD-ROMs.
The Debian installation system, which is called the
boot-floppies (even though it is for more than just
floppies), has been streamlined and upgraded for users' convenience.
The documentation has been expanded and corrected; documentation for
the new architectures has been added (but still may be sketchy for
non-x86 architectures, help is still needed).
The X Window System packages, now at 3.3.2.3a, have undergone major changes that you might want to be aware of. See The Great X Reorganization, section 3.1 for details.
hilliard@debian.org