"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 ;-) ..."

After nearly two years of work the the Debian development team have published Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (Lenny). Our trials show what you can expect from Lenny.

With the Debian Linux project officially designating “Lenny” as its new “stable” distribution, I decided to install it on an old Thinkpad to see how well it performs on a low-end machine.

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.

The venerable Debian Linux distribution has experienced a significant new release with its latest update, dubbed Lenny. While Debian is still not the easiest Linux distro to install and use, Lenny makes significant leaps forward and remains one of the most powerful Linux options.

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.

How do I upgrade from Debian Etch to Lenny? The other day, one of our subscribers had asked us just that.

"...Debian Lenny might be called the 'testing' version but I find it stable enough to be used every day as your main OS. The rough edges make it an excellent distribution for the real geek, the computer user that finds that other distributions are either to polished (Ubuntu, SuSe) or too rough (Gentoo, Slackware)..."

I’m not sure why, but after testing Lenny several different ways, Etch is still better. In fact, Lenny is downright inferior.