Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (Codenamed Etch) released

[eddie]

Source: Debian Official Release Announcement

The Debian Project is pleased to announce the official release of Debian GNU/Linux version 4.0, codenamed etch, after 21 months of constant development. Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system which supports a total of eleven processor architectures and includes the KDE, GNOME and Xfce desktop environments. It also features cryptographic software and compatibility with the FHS v2.3 and software developed for version 3.1 of the LSB.

Using a now fully integrated installation process, Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 comes with out-of-the-box support for encrypted partitions. This release introduces a newly developed graphical frontend to the installation system supporting scripts using composed characters and complex languages; the installation system for Debian GNU/Linux has now been translated to 58 languages.

[mehulved]

Atlast. And quite a lot faster than I expected it to.

[praka123]

great news!this time they are comparatively faster in their release.during sarge it took ~3 yrs to release-mainly bcoz of the development of the new installer(curses based that we now uses).before sarge,Debian install is a little hard with floppy used!.

[desertwind]

Cool news. After a very short honeymoon with FC6 (two weeks), i'm switching back to debian.

[eddie]

Here are two interesting articles related to Debian 4.0 release.
Debian 4.0 finally arrives... does anyone care?
Reactions to Debian's v4.0 release

I would recommend everyone to at least read the first one. It talks about a few wrinkled parts of Debian that people might face after a fresh install.