Debian released 5.0 codenamed "Lenny" last night, after just 1 month shy of two years since 4.0 "Etch" was released. I've been running it on my messaging server for nearly a year now, and it's great. I had one hiccup with the kernel not wanting to communicate with my HappyMeal ethernet cards, but a fix in the latest release of the kernel brought it online. But, that wasn't a Debian specific bug, so I can say that for me, 5.0 has been rocking! Of course, Debian stable is a thoroughly tested platform, so I'm not concerned about its stability.
Some notes about it's release. This is a GNU/Linux release which supports 12 CPU architectures (1 up from 4.0 "Etch"), ships with four desktop environments and strictly adheres to the FSH 2.3 and LSB 3.2 standards. 23,000 binary packages come from 12,000 source packages, making it one of the top distributions shipping the most software. Most software in this release is the latest version or one release old, and thoroughly tested. 5.0 only shipped with only about 120 outstanding RC bugs. The KVM and Xen hypervisors are shipped, as well as improved support for laptop power management and even adding netbook support. The Debian installer now supports installing important security updates before the first reboot of the system. In terms of continued security, many SETUID binary executables have been removed and Debian GNU/Linux is now listening on fewer ports with a default install than previous. Lastly, live images have shipped with 5.0, making it easy to test Debian GNU/Linux without installing it on your system. Kernel version 2.6.26 is the shipped kernel.
As with every Debian stable release, this is a thoroughly tested, highly featured, stable release on par with the most advance "Enterprise" Linux distributions. As with every stable release, you can easily upgrade to 5.0 by changing your /etc/apt/sources.list, and running 'aptitude update' and 'aptitude full-upgrade' as root from the terminal. If your sources.list already is using "stable' as it's repository, then you'll get the upgrade automatically.
This is a well received release. As you can see, a lot has gone into it, and the Debian Developers have done a good job putting it together. The next stable release, codenamed "squeeze" is now the current testing repository, and hopefully will be out sooner than later. Put this on your servers, if you haven't already, because you know you can kick a Debian stable box, and it'll keep humming right along.
Congrats everyone on a solid release!
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