Linux: Debian 13 comes as Trixie

On Saturday, the Debian developers plan to publish the next release of the Linux distribution. As usual, Debian is catching up with the update to version 13 "Trixie" in terms of the software versions included. There are few surprises to be expected this time when upgrading to the new distribution. The prerequisite is that the latest updates of the predecessor Debian 12 "Bookworm" are installed before switching to Trixie.

Support for i386 as a regular Debian platform has been dropped. There is neither a kernel nor an installer for the 32-bit x86 world. However, a slimmed-down selection of i386 packages is still available for chroot environments and multi-arch installations that can run 32-bit code on a 64-bit installation.

Temporary files in memory

A major change concerns temporary files. In future, the /tmp directory will be connected as a tmpfs file system, meaning that the files will end up in the main memory. If large files are created there, the main memory can run out. By default, Debian cuts a maximum of 50 percent of the main memory. Debian users must first activate the automatic deletion of older, temporary files in Trixie after an upgrade, which is common in other distributions; it is active in new installations: files in /tmp are deleted after 10 days, files in /var/tmp after 30 days.

For some packages, the developers warn of problems that may occur after upgrades: OpenSSH can no longer be tricked into establishing DSA connections, even with configuration options; with openssh-client-ssh1, there is a special package with which this is still possible for accessing old devices, however. MariaDB users should ensure that the databases are in a consistent state before upgrading. Operators of a Dovecot email server must be prepared for a new configuration format due to the change from version 2.3 to 2.4.

Standard programs are no longer available

Some standard programs from the util-linux package, such as "last" for displaying the last logins, have been dropped because the originals are not year-2038-proof – they do not reserve enough memory to process dates beyond this limit. Ping now runs without root rights. There have been changes to the distribution of packages for some programs, such as Samba and libvirt.

If you use dm-crypt and not LUKS to encrypt devices, you may have to complete the configuration because Trixie uses other standard procedures and thus misses the mark. Systemd-cryptsetup is now responsible for the automatic mounting of encrypted disks – The package should be installed with systemd. In any case, it is worth taking a look at the release notes.

(nie)