Last week Canonical announced the official date for Hoary Hedgehog’s retirement: October 31st 2006. Ubuntu 5.04, as Hoary is officially known, was released more than 18 months ago on April 8th 2005 and was the highly successful upgrade to the first ever Ubuntu release Warty Warthog (4.10).
On October 31st, after 18 months of hard work, Hoary will reach its End-Of-Life (EOL) which means it will not receive any new security updates from Ubuntu. Users still using this version are highly encouraged to upgrade to a newer version of Ubuntu to continue enjoying a secure computing environment.
The only supported upgrade path from Hoary to newer Ubuntu releases is first to Breezy (Ubuntu 5.10), then to Dapper (Ubuntu 6.06 LTS).