Installing Debian 8 Jessie

Conclusions

Even though the update worked in our lab without any major problems, users or administrators should proceed carefully and not put their systems on autopilot. Systemd can cause problems on computers with encrypted partitions, and PHP 5.6 requires changes to scripts.

That said, however, the developers have tried to remove, or at least document, most of the pitfalls with the update. Nevertheless, an automated upgrade version (as offered by Ubuntu for the server version) would be a good thing to have – at least as an alternative to the manual operation. The installer is fine as it is (Figure 3), but the module for partitioning could be a little less complicated.

Figure 3: The Debian developers have hardly changed anything with the graphical installer.

The current software selection makes Debian Jessie pretty interesting. We did our testing on Debian 8.0, but version 8.1, which debuted on June 26, is now available and might address some of the issues that appeared in the 8.0 edition. If Jessie has undiscovered bugs, they are typically exposed soon after the release. However, experience shows that serious bugs are extremely rare in this famously stable Linux distribution.

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