After 24 months of constant development, the Debian Project is proud to present its new stable version 6.0 (code name Squeeze). Debian 6.0 is a free operating system, coming for the first time in two flavours. Alongside Debian GNU/Linux, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is introduced with this version as a technology preview.

The website of the Debian project also got a facelift. Please visit it for more information.

As a consequence, you have to take care of the content of your /etc/apt/sources.list file :

• Squeeze is now refered as “stable”
• Lenny is now known as “oldstable”

Therefore, if you want to stick to Lenny, change all the occurrences of “stable” to “oldstable” or “lenny”.

• the packaging process has been improved : dependencies were cleaned up, PHP tests are now displayed, libtool 2.2 is now supported (thanks to the Debian team for their precious work)
• 3 new useful extensions have been packaged : gearman, phpredis and xhprof (without its interface files)

With these new packages, Dotdeb’s support for Squeeze is still experimental, but almost complete. Some more packages could be added in a near future :

• MySQL (or Percona) Server 5.5 will replace MySQL Server 5.1. More info here and here.
• a Nginx backport

The installation instructions did not change : just add Dotdeb’s GnuPG key to your keyring, pick a mirror near you and add squeeze-related lines to your sources.list. For example :

deb http://packages.dotdeb.org squeeze all
deb-src http://packages.dotdeb.org squeeze all

And, of course, feel free to donate if you find Dotdeb useful.

Security Support for Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 to be discontinued on
February 15th

One year after the release of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 alias 'lenny' and
nearly three years after the release of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 alias
'etch' the security support for the old distribution (4.0 alias
'etch') is coming to an end next month.  The Debian project is proud
to be able to support its old distribution for such a long time and
even for one year after a new version has been released.

The Debian project has released Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 alias 'lenny' on
the 14th of February 2009.  Users and Distributors have been given a
one-year timeframe to upgrade their old installations to the current
stable release.  Hence, the security support for the old release of
4.0 is going to end in February 2010 as previously announced.

Previously announced security updates for the old release will continue
to be available on security.debian.org.

Then, Dotdeb will follow the Debian project and all the Etch packages will be moved to http://archives.dotdeb.org/ on Feb. 15th.

It is now time for you to upgrade your last servers from Etch to Lenny…

What’s next?

I’ll have to prepare the Squeeze release (planned on August 2010). The (early) plans ?

• Focus on high quality PHP 5.3 and MySQL 5.1+ packages
• More useful tools for your LAMP platforms : Gearman, Maatkit… MariaDB? Drizzle? Wait & see
• No more mail-realated packages (Qmail, Vpopmail, Courier, Dovecot, Vqadmin)