Debian 6 Expected by February 6

After nearly two years the light at the end of the Debian 6.0 tunnel may finally be in sight. Delay after delay has pushed the release of Debian 6 nearly a year passed its original estimated release date. Many observers had put the elusive release in the same category as Duke Nukem Forever. But those Doubting Thomases are eating their words now as Neil McGovern posted that 6.0 is definitely on its way - well, barring "something really critical" like "a needed machine crashes, RC2 exploding in a giant ball of fire etc."

Ostatic.com thought 6.0 might be on the horizon, and today confirmation was received on the debian-devel-announce list. He wrote in to say that blocker bugs were last recorded as four, although those have actually been fixed by now. So, McGovern thinks the second release candidate will be ready by the weekend and if all goes as planned - Debian 6.0 should be released on February 5 or 6.

This upcoming release should bring GNOME 2.3.0, KDE 4.4.5, the addition of PolicyKit and ConsoleKit, the replacement of HAL with udev and udisks, OpenOffice 3.2, WebKit for Epiphany, and GRUB 2. Space Fun will be the new theme for 6.0.