“Good news for those readers who wait impatiently for the new
stable release of Debian GNU/Linux – we now have a target date for
a release, set for the 6th of February. This was announced by Neil
McGovern from the Debian release team: “Now that a release
candidate of the installer has been uploaded and tested, a few
issues have been identified today. This should turn into RC2 by the
end of the week. This means we are able to begin the final
preparations for a release of Debian 6.0 ‘Squeeze’. Following on
from above, we now have a target date of the weekend of 5th and 6th
February for the release. We have checked with core teams, and this
seems to be acceptable for everyone. The intention is only to lift
that date if something really critical pops up that is not possible
to handle as errata, or if we end up technically unable to release
that weekend. Every other fix that doesn’t make it in time will be
r1 material.” As promised in the above update, the second release
candidate of the Debian Installer was also released last week.“One of the hot topics accompanying the new release of Debian
GNU/Linux is the issue of non-free firmware. As this is an issue
that, judging by various blog and forum posts around the web, is
far from clear, Debian developer Alexander Reichle-Schmehl has
written an excellent summary of the situation entitled “Myths and
facts about firmware and their non-removal from Debian: “Debian’s
announcement to release ‘Squeeze’ with a completely free Linux
kernel caused quite some attention, which is actually a good thing.
However, it also seems to have caused quite some uncertainty and
was often partially misunderstood and miss-quoted”