john.parnefjord.se Reflections & findings

At the 8th of april Debian GNU/Linux 4.0, a.k.a. Etch, was officially released. The Debian project has worked for about 21 months with Etch and it contains some interesting features. Among the highlights for Etch are:

• official support for the AMD64/EM64T architechture.
• Linux Standard Base 3.1-compliance.
• Debian volatile is now officially supported with its own debian.org address: www.debian.org/devel/debian-volatile/.
• UTF-8 is the default encoding.
• SELinux is a standard package during installation, not enabled though.
• Graphical installer which may attract new users who are scared off by text mode.
• PostgreSQL 8.1.8

Unless you haven't already upgraded, then start with reading the release notes so you know what to expect. If you don't bother or care to read, it's recommended to use aptitude instead of apt-get to do upgrade. Thanks to the Debian Project team for good work!