Debian GNU/Linux has made made it to version 3.0, with the version codenamed woody being designated the current stable release over the weekend. The Debian Project doesn't involve in itself in the numbers wars, so woody succeeds potato/2.2, which succeeded slink/2.1. The current "testing" release is sarge, which has not had a release date set, but woody, Debian Planet tells us, took one year, 11 months and four days, so don't hold your breath.

Debian now supports 11 processor architectures (adding IA64, PA-Risc, MIPS and S/390), and 3.0 is the first version to have cryptographic software integrated into the main distribution. OpenSSH and GNU Privacy Guard are included in the default installation, and strong encryption is now present in web browsers and web servers, and databases, and further integration of cryptographic software is planned for future releases.

Also new is the addition of KDE 2.2. It supports Linux kernels 2.2 and 2.4, and is the first release of Debian that is compatible with version 2.2 of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS). Full release details can be had by starting here, and as the download-related pages seem to be under some pressure at time of writing, we suggest if you're looking for it you start at debian.org or debianplanet.org. ®