Debian 4.0 (“Etch”) reaches stable status

News Posted 11/04/07
Author: PV5150
Source: ars technica


Debian logo

Fans of ‘alternative’ operating systems may or may not know that Debian has officially released Debian 4.0, the latest version of the popular non-commercial Linux distribution.

Codenamed Etch, the Debian 4.0 release comes almost two years after the release of the previous version, Debian 3.1. Debian 4.0 is available for 11 different architectures, including SPARC, PowerPC, Alpha, ARM, MIPS, AMD64, and x86. Debian is the basis for a variety of widely used derivative distributions, including Ubuntu, Xandros, MEPIS, and Knoppix.

Debian 4.0 includes updated versions of many popular applications and features a number of significant enhancements. Debian 4.0 is the first official release to include Debian’s new lightweight graphical installer, which runs in 58 languages and has built-in support for encrypted partitions. The 4.0 release also includes a new version of Debian’s package manager, which can now download package list diffs instead of entire package lists in order to improve performance.

Debian 4.0 is available through BitTorrent, Jigdo, and the Debian web site .

Discuss in our forum