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?

Debian Stable has a bad reputation of being little obsolete. It's never able to catch up with time. But I don't buy to the view that Debian Stable is outdated.

After 24 months of constant development, the Debian Project is proud to present its new stable version 6.0 (code name "Squeeze"). Debian 6.0 is a free operating system, coming for the first time in two flavours. Alongside Debian GNU/Linux, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is introduced with this version as a "technology preview".

"The Debian project is pleased to announce the fourth update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (codename etch). In addition to correcting several security problems and a few serious defects in the stable release, for the first time in Debian's history an update for a stable distrubtion also adds support for newer hardware by giving users the option to install newer drivers..."

"The Debian project is pleased to announce the seventh update of its old stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 (codename `sarge'). This is the first time we update the old stable distribution during the lifetime of the stable distribution. This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the oldstable release, along with a few adjustments to serious problems..."

Debian Lenny comes with Wine 1.0.1 included in the repositories, which is the stable release of Wine, but it is also a little outdated. Here are a few easy steps for compiling and installing the latest Wine release from source in Debian Lenny. This tutorial should work for the latest Wine release (at the time of writing, the last release is 1.1.17).

This time around I tried the daddy of many desktops, Debian Lenny, and compared it with Mepis 8.0 on my notebook. I am pleased Debian has made itself easy to install and use. However, Warren has spelled magic onto Debain through his much tested Mepis.

When I write these lines, the latest version of Imule is 1.4.6. But ... It relies on packages version (libgcj10, libstdc++6) that are released with the unstable (sid) version of Debian. So either you upgrade Debian to unstable version or you choose a lower version of Imule. I chose the latter: to install an old version of Imule.

"The Debian project is pleased to announce the fifth update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (codename etch). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems.

Please note that this update does not constitute a new version of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 but only updates some of the packages included..."