The Debian Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of their next stable release. Debian 4.0, codenamed Etch, was officially released today.
What’s new in Debian Etch
This new release of Debian again comes with a lot more software than its predecessor sarge; the distribution includes over 6500 new packages, for a total of over 18200 packages. Most of the software in the distribution has been updated: over 10700 software packages (this is 68% of all packages in sarge). Also, a significant number of packages (over 3500, 23% of the packages in sarge) have for various reasons been removed from the distribution. You will not see any updates for these packages and they will be marked as ‘obsolete’ in package management front-ends.
With this release, Debian GNU/Linux switches from XFree86 to the 7.1 release of X.Org, which includes support for a greater range of hardware and better autodetection. This allows the use of Compiz, which is one of the first compositing window managers for the X Window System, taking full advantage of hardware OpenGL acceleration for supported devices.
Debian GNU/Linux again ships with several desktop applications and environments. Among others it now includes the desktop environments GNOME 2.14[2], KDE 3.5.5a, and Xfce 4.4. Productivity applications have also been upgraded, including the office suites OpenOffice.org 2.0.4a and KOffice 1.6 as well as GNUcash 2.0.5, GNUmeric 1.6.3 and Abiword 2.4.6.
Updates of other desktop applications include the upgrade to Evolution 2.6.3 and Gaim 2.0. The Mozilla suite has also been updated, with a rename of the main programs: iceweasel (version 2.0.0.2) is the unbranded Firefox web browser and icedove (version 1.5) is the unbranded Thunderbird mail client.
Among many others, this release also includes the following software updates:
the GNU C library, version 2.3.6
the GNU Compiler Collection 4.1 as default compiler
language interpreters: PHP 5.2, Python 2.4
server software:
e-mail servers: Exim 4.63 (default email server for new installations), Postfix 2.3, Courier 0.53, Cyrus 2.2
web servers: Apache 2.2, fnord 1.10
database servers: MySQL 5.0.32, PostgreSQL 8.1
the OpenSSH server, version 4.3
name servers: Bind 9.3, maradns 1.2
directory server: OpenLDAP 2.3
The official Debian GNU/Linux distribution now ships on 19 to 23 binary CDs (depending on the architecture) and a similar number of source CDs. A DVD version of the distribution is also available.
Download Debian Etch
If you want to try debian etch you can download from here
If you want to read release notes you can check from here