Long term support for Debian 6.0 Announced

April 24th, 2014

The Debian project is pleased to announce that although regular security support for Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 (code name squeeze ) will be terminated on 31 May, long term support for the distribution is going to be extended until February 2016, i.e. five years after the initial release. This effort is driven by various interested parties / companies which require longer security support.

Squeeze-LTS will only support i386 and amd64, rather than the full range of architectures. Users of other architectures are encouraged to upgrade to Debian 7 ( wheezy ). Additionally, a few packages will not be supported in the LTS version of the release, primarily some web-based applications which cannot be supported for the additional timeframe. A tool will be provided to detect such unsupported packages.

The release will not be handled by the Debian security team, but by a separate group of volunteers and companies interested in making it a success (with some overlap in people involved). Companies using Debian who are interested in aiding this effort should contact team@security.debian.org. Importantly, the success of Squeeze-LTS will be used to judge the viability of LTS support for Debian 7 ( wheezy ) and Debian 8 ( jessie ).

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 stable release team at <debian-release@lists.debian.org>.