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 [1] 3.1-compliance.
• Debian volatile is now officially supported with its own debian.org address: www.debian.org/devel/debian-volatile/ [2].
• 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 [3] 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!