For Debian Etch, the end (of security patches) is near

Image above of the Debian Etch GNOME desktop from Wikimedia Commons. I always liked this version of the Debian swirl on the wallpaper.

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? In the world of Debian, once a release is declared Stable, the previous release moves from Stable to what the project calls Old Stable, at which time it receives security patches for an additional year. That gives users a full year during which to upgrade to the current Stable distribution, which in case you haven't been reading closely is Lenny.

Truth time: I still have an Etch installation — an Apple PowerPC box, in fact. I'm not running the Etch drive, but it's still in the box waiting to be hooked up (I have the OS X drive connected and running). So if and when I hook the Debian drive up, I'd have to update the Etch installation, which hasn't seen an update in about a year, then dist-upgrade to Lenny (which I'm running on my main laptop as well as two other machines).

I remember Debian Etch fondly. It was released in April 2007, mere months after I started mucking around with Linux, and its 2.6.18 kernel played very well with the machines I ran for the next two years. I did run other things between then and now (Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Slackware, CentOS, OpenBSD, Wolvix, Puppy), but for reasons that one can deduce from the past 100 entries in this blog, I'm back in the Debian camp with Lenny (and not feeling all that good about my Intel video-running laptop and the future of Linux and Xorg, meaning I'll be sticking with Lenny for quite some time).

Just as one can have a very good experience running the Debian Testing branch, Squeeze, right now, with no date certain for going Stable, one could have run Etch that same way before April 2007. But if you're the conservative type (and I usually am when it comes to my old machines and the software they run) and you began running Debian Etch in April 2007, the release's life from Stable through Old Stable to the end of its patched life will be roughly 2 years, 10 months (unless I miscounted my fingers). Not bad for a "long-term release," which in the world of Debian is EVERY release.