Debian 6.0 RC2 should be released by the end of this week, and so, providing there are no major problems with that release, final preparations are being made for 5 and 6 February 2011, the agreed target date for the release of Debian 6.0 (aka Squeeze). This is according to an announcement by Neil McGovern on the developer mailing list. This deadline will only change if critical errors occur, such as those found recently in the Installer release candidate, or there is a failure of critical servers. Debian developers should submit patches before this deadline otherwise their patches are likely automatically to end up in version 6.0r1.

As well as final code submissions, McGovern calls for completion of the list of innovations and for the rest of the documentation and translations to be brought up to date. He says that all this work is necessary for Debian Squeeze to be "the best release ever".

Debian 5.0 is the current stable release of this Linux distribution, with 5.0.7 being the latest update issued on 27 November 2010.

The Debian developers have been working towards releasing a distribution with a kernel that is composed only of free code, and Debian 6.0 will be the first release with a 'free' kernel.

(trk)