I just saw the news that Debian Etch will no longer receive updates from the Debian Security Team as of Feb. 15, 2010. As you may or may not know, the current Stable version of Debian is Lenny, which received that "Stable" designation on Feb. 15, 2009. See the pattern?

"It seems that the Debian team doesn't like to release minor versions anymore. After Debian 4.0 (code name 'Etch') released last year, the next Debian release (code name 'Lenny') will be numbered as Debian 5.0 as announced yesterday by Marc Brockschmidt: 'For reading this far, you receive the small reward of the knowledge that Lenny will be shipped as Debian 5.0.'

"Also interesting enough he mentioned that Lenny might be released with KDE4..."

"Debian Lenny’s release is getting closer and closer and many people will want to upgrade their Etch servers to Lenny, maybe even before Lenny is declared stable (at RC1 at this time). Even people that don’t want to upgrade to lenny might find some useful information in this post ;-) ..."

The Debian development community has officially released version 5.0 of the venerable open source Linux distribution. The new version, which is codenamed Lenny, includes updated software, security enhancements, and improved hardware support.

Debian Etch is soon to be unsupported by the Debian team, therefore all Debian Linux Servers need to be upgraded to Debian Lenny. I have upgraded many Linux servers to Debian Lenny over the past months, so I am providing this guide on how to upgrade Debian Etch to Debian Lenny.

When Debian issues a point release, as it just did with the current Stable distribution Lenny going from 5.0.3 to 5.0.4, it's no big deal. They happen. But you don't need to throw out your Lenny install CDs or do any kind of reinstallation.

«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 Live team is pleased to announce the first beta of Debian Lenny's Live images. Although we missed releasing images for Etch along with the installer images, we are now prepared to release live images within the regular Lenny release process.

"We are approaching the Debian 5.0 (Lenny) release and the Debian Installer team is working to fix the remaining issues for it. The Debian Installer Release Candidate 1 is being prepared and we are short in time to make fixes.