Posted by Steve on Mon 6 Jun 2005 at 05:12
The new Debian stable release, codenamed Sarge, has officially been released today.
Several years of development since the last stable release, Woody, was released on the 9th of July, 2002 over a thousand developers around the world have helped make this release possible.
As this release has been in the making for such a long time there are many major software upgrades included in this release - as well as a large number of new packages. The combination of the two should make backports a thing of the past for at least the next few months.
Highlights of the release include the following, and more can be read within the Sarge Release Announcement :
If you are aiming to upgrade your system you should make sure you read the Debian Sarge Release Notes - these contain important instructions regarding the upgrade from Woody.
If you do not wish to have your system upgraded you should make sure that you change your sources.list file in /etc/apt - rather than reading:
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free ... ...
You should change each occurance of "stable" to "woody". If you do not do this you will find your system upgraded to Sarge the next time you run "apt-get update; apt-get upgrade".
Once you've upgraded your system to Sarge you can start to take advantage of many of the newer pieces of software available. For example:
If you're feeling cautious it might be worthwhile postponing the upgrade for a few days to track newly reported bugs.
Whilst every effort has been made to test upgrading to the release by a large number of users there may still be corner-cases out there which could cause you problems. Reading the available upgrade-reports might be prudent if you suspect your setup, or hardware, might cause problems.
This article can be found online at the Debian Administration website at the following bookmarkable URL (along with associated comments):
This article is copyright 2005 Steve - please ask for permission to republish or translate.