Debian is a mature Linux operating system that many other distributions are based on.
Few days ago the Debian developer team have announced to the community of users and public in general the availability of releasing the fifth update distribution correction Debian 11, which includes cumulative package updates and fixes bugs in the installer.
It should be noted that this update release includes 58 stability updates and 53 security updates. These updates integrate a series of very important kernel security improvements, dedicated precisely to the Linux kernel builds present in the repositories, which allow to resolve numerous security flaws, even very dangerous ones, discovered in recent months.
It should be noted that this point release does not represent a new version of Debian 11, but only updates some of the included packages. There is no reason to discard the Bullseye media, as its packages can be updated after installation using a recent Debian mirror.
Debian 11.5 Main New Features
Debian 11.5 integrates, eg patches to resolve the known security bug called Retbleed, as well as a number of general maintenance fixes for the Linux 5.10-based kernel.
According to the various analyzes of security researchers, Retbleed is identified as a kind of “speculative execution attack” dedicated to x86-64 and ARM hardware platforms, so it can potentially operate on, and thus hit, all normal computers on the market in addition to the ARM boards used in common mobile phones or tablets .
Besides that, Debian 11.5 includes updated NVIDIA binary driver packages to provide security fixes, a number of double bugs in various packages resolved, updated GRUB boot loader builds, updated time zone data, and a variety of other fixes.
Other changes in Debian 11.5 include update packages clamav, grub2, grub-efi-*-signed, mokutil, nvidia-graphics-drivers*, nvidia-settings to new stable versions.
In addition to this, it is also noted that it was added the cargo-mozilla package to support creating new versions of firefox-esr and thunderbird, while on the other hand it is mentioned that now the krb5 package uses the algorithm SHA256 as Pkinit CMS Digest.
For its part, systemd adds support for defining ARM64 Hyper-V guests and OpenStack environments in KVM on ARM systems.
Removed 22 packages with PHP libraries (including php-embed, php-markdown, php-react-http, ratchetphp, reactphp-*), were left unmaintained and used only in the previously removed movim package (platform for creating decentralized social networks, using the XMPP protocol).
On the other hand, and at the same time, we can also highlight that the new version of the previous stable "Buster" branch of Debian 10.13 was released, which includes 79 stability updates and 79 vulnerability fixes.
This is the final update of the Debian 10 branch, that its maintenance time has expired. The Debian Security Team and the Debian Release Team will not be doing further development of updates for the Debian 10 branch, but rather an independent LTS team made up of enthusiasts and company representatives interested in long-term delivery of updates. from Debian.
As part of the LTS cycle, updates to Debian 10 will be published until June 30, 2024 and will only apply to i386, amd64, armel, armhf and arm64 architectures.
Finally, for those who are interested in learning more about the new releases, you can consult the details at the following link.
Download and get the new Debian 10.13 and 11.5 updates
For those interested, you should know that installation builds have been prepared for downloading and installing from scratch, as well as an iso-hybrid live with Debian 11.5.
Pre-installed and updated systems receive the updates that are present in Debian 11.5 through the native update system. Security fixes included in new versions of Debian are made available to users as updates are released via the security.debian.org service.
In any case, if you want to perform the update on your own, just open a terminal and type the following command in it:
sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade