Debian Archive

At university, I didn't lift weights to keep in shape. I carried my textbooks in one arm and lugged a 12-pound laptop in the other. That heavy beast never lived up to its promise of freedom but my T20 running Debian Linux has. A modern notebook is compact and portable, runs its quiet fan only when necessary, uses less power than a desktop, and offers instant access to running applications by opening the lid.

Ian Murdoch, Debian's founding father, does not believe Ubuntu's popularity bodes well for Debian-based distros. "If anything, Ubuntu's popularity is a net negative for Debian," Murdoch told internetnews.com. "It's diverged so far from Sarge that packages built for Ubuntu often don't work on Sarge. And given the momentum behind Ubuntu, more and more packages are being built like this. The result is a potential compatibility nightmare."

In June 2001, Progeny Linux Systems was in crisis. Looking around, co-founder and CEO Ian Murdock realized that the company needed fundamental changes to survive. Four years later, Progeny is back up to its former staffing levels and showing modest profits. It is also one of the few Free/Open Source Software (FOSS)-based companies from that era to survive.

A Hurd Live CD was released, for everyone that always wanted to give it a try.

The lack of a new stable release of Debian GNU/Linux since July 2002 is fuelling the campaigns of many candidates for the project's leadership position, with many pushing for a shorter and more regular release cycle to arrest user departures.

My basement is like a mortuary with the remains of computers all lying in state, waiting and hoping for a new lease on life. But what is there to do with the K6s, the Celerons, and Pentiums of the past. It seems nothing short of a miracle would bring these ghosts back to life.

"Anyone who dislikes the non-standard desktops of many distributions will feel right at home with Libranet, and the .deb packaging system will keep the Debian nerds happy. Those of you searching for a server-oriented distribution should look elsewhere, but if you're searching for a strong desktop/multimedia distribution, Libranet is one of the best choices available." Read more at NewsForge.

So you want to be a Debian developer? You're not the only one. Preparing software packages for the distribution, writing documentation, and testing a release are all endless, thankless tasks. Yet, at any given time, hundreds have applied to do them. However, before candidates are trusted with such tasks, they have to prove not only their programming skills, but also their understanding of Debian processes and philosophy. The process takes months, and there are few exceptions.

TuxMagazine posted a review of Libranet and here is its follow up article.

Since the arrival of the very first versions of Gentoo, some people have announced that "Debian is good, but that's not optimized for ". And this is wrong, you are free to recompile software you use on Debian, using the apt system. Downloading a tarball, uncompressing it, running configure scripts and make install, is an easy task for every Linux user, but this is not adapted for the Debian package management system. Stow was a way which worked without too much effort, but compiled programs were not really integrated in the apt dependancies. The ultimate solution is to use apt-build to recompile a software already packaged for Debian. Read in English - Read in Portuguese (Brazilian)

This is the fourth update of Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (codename 'woody') which mainly adds security updates to the stable release, along with a few corrections to serious problems.

There are many ways of installing Debian, this is just how I do it. This guide is dedicated to all the newbies out there, and users with old boxes. Update: Screenshots here.

Debian Woody, the current stable release for over 2 years, and Sarge, the new upcoming stable release due out in a month or two, support no fewer than 11 architectures. Perhaps surprisingly, AMD64 is not one of them and it won't be in Sarge either.

If any single program defines the Debian Linux project, that program is apt-get. apt-get is Debian's main tool for installing and removing software. Working with the .deb package format, apt-get offers sophisticated package management that few Red Hat Package Manager RPM-based distributions can match.