Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (ETCH) will be released in December 2006
This week the Debian project has announced that the next stable release will be available in December 2006 and will be named Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 alias ‘etch’. This is great news for the Debian fans that are using the stable release, meaning they will not have to wait 3 years as they did for Sarge to see a new Debian stable release. As Sarge is now one year old (released on 6th of June, 2005) this means that after one year and 6 months we will have a new stable Debian release… This is possible probably because there will not be major changes as in Sarge (where we had the migration from kernel 2.4 to 2.6), and you can see the major changes as presented in the official announce:
“July 24th, 2006 The Debian project confirms December 2006 as the date for the next release of its distribution which will be named Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 alias ’etch’. This will be the first official release to include the AMD64 architecture. The distribution will be released synchronously for 11 architectures in total.
At this stage, the upcoming release will ship with Linux 2.6.17 as its default kernel. This kernel will be used across all architectures and on the installer. A later version may be selected during a review in October.
New features of this release include the GNU Compiler Collection 4.1 as default compiler. X.Org will replace XFree86 as implementation of the X Window System X11. Secure APT will add extra security by easily supporting strong cryptography and digital signatures to validate downloaded packages.”