A moment of silence, please, for the final release of Debian on x86-32

os platforms

New Debian versions hit FOSSland in the form of 13.6 and 12.15

This week brings two point releases for both Debian 13 - aka “Trixie” - and Debian 12 - “Bookworm,” the latter now shuffling off into long-term support. 

Debian 13.6 and Debian 12.15 are just the latest point releases of Trixie and Bookworm, but Debian 12.15 is also significant in another way: it marks the end of regular support for Debian 12, which is being handed over to the LTS team. That reduced level of support is scheduled to last until mid-2028.

That means Debian 12.15 is the last point release of Debian 12. There won’t be a Debian 12.16. In turn, that means mainstream support for Debian on 32-bit x86 is over. (Debian 13 does still support some 32-bit Arm CPUs via the armhf port.)

As we warned you in 2023, to run Debian 13 on x86, you require a 64-bit CPU. It supports 32-bit packages and libraries, so you can run 32-bit programs fine – but if you want to install Trixie on a 32-bit CPU, then you need to compile your own kernel. That’s not impossible: as we reported in late 2025, WindowMaker Live 13.2 does this, and so does antiX Linux, which we last looked at in March.

The new releases both have two significant changes worth knowing about.

The fwupd firmware-update tool from the Linux Vendor Firmware Service has been updated to version 2.0.20. As the Arch wiki describes, fwupd can only update the system firmware if your machine boots in UEFI mode (that is, not legacy BIOS boot.) However, that’s useful, as it can update UEFI machines’ secure-boot signing certificates and database too – and as Red Hat warned last month, Microsoft’s original 2011 secure-boot certificates just expired.

If you don’t use secure boot, that doesn’t matter, but if you do and your boxes haven’t rebooted in a while, you might have problems. Don’t panic: problems aren’t likely, but if you do have some, disabling secure boot will work around it. Either way, it’s worth updating those certificates. The Debian Wiki has more info, and Linux Weekly News has a full rundown on the problem.

Also, there’s a downgrade: the geoip-database package has been rolled back to an older version from 2019. This is because of changes in the MaxMind EULA on newer versions of GeoLite which conflict with the Debian Free Software Guidelines.

The Debian release notes, somewhat unexpectedly, tell users to go and buy it:

“Consumers of this data are strongly encouraged to obtain a GeoLite license directly and cease reliance on the ‘geoip-database’ package.” ®