Debian 6 debuts its long term support period

June 16th, 2014

The Debian project is pleased to announce that the Long Term Support (LTS) infrastructure to provide security updates for Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 (code name squeeze ) until February 2016 is now in place. Users of this version should follow the instructions from the LTS wiki page to ensure that they get the LTS security updates.

We would like to thank the volunteers who joined the LTS team and the organizations which expressed their interest to contribute to the LTS initiative: AD&D - IntarS Austria, Deezer, Électricité de France, Freeside, Offensive Security, Positive Internet, Seznam.cz, Sipwise, Univention, University of Oxford and all the others who will join them in the coming months.

However, to ensure its success and cover more packages, more help is needed: organizations benefiting from the extended support period are encouraged to contribute manpower to the LTS team.

For organizations that cannot contribute their own workforce to the LTS team, Freexian — a French company owned by Debian Developer Raphaël Hertzog — offered to act as an intermediary between organizations interested in funding LTS work, and individual Debian contributors preparing LTS security updates. For more information, see Freexian's description of their proposal.

The Debian Project welcomes this initiative, and is generally supportive of organizations exploring ways to help sustain the LTS project and Debian in general.

Should Debian 6 LTS be a success, it would be repeated and generalized so that Debian 7 ( wheezy ) and Debian 8 ( jessie ) would also benefit from Long Term Support.

More information can be found in the Debian LTS project's wiki page.

About Debian

The Debian Project is an association of Free Software developers who volunteer their time and effort in order to produce the completely free operating system Debian.

Contact Information

For further information, please visit the Debian web pages at https://www.debian.org/, send mail to <press@debian.org>, or contact the LTS team at <debian-lts@lists.debian.org>.