Debian Archive

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The Debian fork website, put together by the Veteran Unix Admins (VUA) group, has annouced the VUA has decided to fork the popular Debian GNU/Linux distribution. The VUA is critical of Debian's decision to adopt systemd as the distribution's default init software and to allow software packaged for Debian to depend directly on systemd. The VUA plans to create a fork of Debian using SysV Init as the default init software and is asking for donations to support the endevor.

There has been a lot of debate over systemd in the Debian community in the past few months and it will be interesting to see if this non-systemd fork of Debian gains support.

Debian is one of the largest and longest lived GNU/Linux distributions. The project forms the foundation of many other popular Linux-based operating systems, including Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and Raspbian. The Debian project announced this week that the distribution's Testing repository, called "Jessie", has entered a feature freeze. This means Debian's Jessie branch will not receive any new features nor any significant software upgrades. From now until Debian's upcoming stable release is launched, the Jessie repository will accept only important bug fixes and updated translations. Based on the time-line presented by Debian's freeze policy it seems as though Debian 8.0 will be released in late February.

That rare event where tried and true Debian releases a new version. "This new version of Debian includes various interesting features such as multiarch support, several specific tools to deploy private clouds, an improved installer, and a complete set of multimedia codecs and front-ends which remove the need for third-party repositories. Multiarch support, one of the main release goals for 'Wheezy', will allow Debian users to install packages from multiple architectures on the same machine. This means that you can now, for the first time, install both 32- and 64-bit software on the same machine and have all the relevant dependencies correctly resolved, automatically."

"When you buy a Raspberry Pi, the $35 computer doesn't come with an operating system. Loading your operating system of choice onto an SD card and then booting the Pi turns out to be pretty easy. But where do Pi-compatible operating systems come from? With the Raspberry Pi having just turned one year old, we decided to find out how Raspbian - the officially recommended Pi operating system - came into being. The project required 60-hour work weeks, a home-built cluster of ARM computers, and the rebuilding of 19,000 Linux software packages. And it was all accomplished by two volunteers."

Debian announced that they are going to introduce multiarch support for Wheezy (7.0) in 2013. Well, nice, but aren't they a little bit late now that problems are mostly sorted out and systems moved to 64-bit? This would have been great news at the time when Lenny (5.0) was released, but does it even matter in 2013? Are they just going to make things more complicated for no reason?

"Debian is the 'mother' distro to many 'children' derivative distros, including Ubuntu. Sometimes those derivatives give back to the upstream, but it's not always easy. A new effort called DEX is aiming to improve how derivative bits are merged upstream."

Oh glorious day! After two years of development, one of the prime Linux distributions has pushed out a new release - Debian 6.0 'Squeeze' has been released. The most fascinating aspect fo this new release is that it includes Debian/kFreeBSD s a technology preview, which fascinates me to no end. Of course, there's a whole lot more, including a brand new website for the project - the first major redesign in 13 years.

"The Debian project has now announced that from the release of Squeeze (Debian 6.0) their GNU/Linux kernels will be available without the non-free blobs."

"ZFS will be supported in Debian Squeeze using the official installer. This means that Debian Squeeze will be one of the first GNU distributions to support ZFS. In fact, even though ZFS support didn't make it to Debian-Installer beta1 by the time it was released, it is now available in the netboot images (this happens because netboot images fetch newer installer components from the internet)."

"Debian turns 17 today. Yes it has really come a long way from being Ian Murdock's pet project back in 1993 to being the distribution on which the most popular Linux distribution, Ubuntu, is based on now." Let's go through some interesting history of Debian.

It's hard to turn a news item like this into a front page item, but I'm going to try anyway, because I think it's pretty cool news. As we all know, Debian supports a number of architectures as 'release architectures', but what some of you may not be aware of is that Debian also supports a number of kernels other than Linux. One of those, the FreeBSD kernel, has been promoted to release status, putting it on equal footing with the Linux variant.

Developer Frans Pop, author of debtree, posted an article showing the evolution in size of the GNOME desktop environment in recent Debian releases. The picture he paints isn't particularly pretty: the default GNOME install has increased drastically in size over the years.