Posted by Steve on Sun 8 Apr 2007 at 14:14
The Debian Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of their next stable release. Debian 4.0, codenamed Etch, was officially released today, after 21 months of constant development.
Significant Changes
Compared to the Sarge release of Debian GNU/Linux almost every single package has been updated, and many new packages have been introduced which weren't previously available.
There have been several significant upgrades of commonly used packages such as:
- The upgrade of PHP5.x
- The upgrade to MySQL 5.x
- The upgrade to Apache 2.2.x
- GCC v4.1 as the default compiler
- The transition from XFree86 to X.org v7.1
As well as these upgrades there are many notable new features and additions to the release:
- The availability of Xen.
- The availability of VServer.
- Support for the AMD-64 architecture.
- The availability if Tomcat 5.x.
- The availability of official Sun Java packages.
- Signature checking for APT, along with partial downloads.
- Fully integrated support for encrypted partitions from the installer.
- The translation of the installation system into 58 languages.
Upgrading
Before you upgrade to Etch please read the release notes, as they contain important information which will ease your upgrade.
The recommended update tool is aptitude, since this handles dependency updating better than apt-get.
Once you've updated your sources.list in /etc/apt you can upgrade from Sarge to Etch by running:
# apt-get update # apt-get install aptitude # aptitude -f --with-recommends dist-upgradeIn case of problems please consult the release notes before reporting a bug.
A big thank you to all the contributors, developers, bug reporters, testers, translators, and users.
This article can be found online at the Debian Administration website at the following bookmarkable URL (along with associated comments):
This article is copyright 2007 Steve - please ask for permission to republish or translate.