Debian Archive

"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 developer Robert Millan talks about recent improvements with Debian GNU/kFreeBSD in the past few weeks.

"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."

Writing about Debian is not a simple thing. You know it's the giant that has spawned pretty much every other distro out there. It's almost like a Roman Empire, almost a taboo. Furthermore, it's not a desktop distro per se. It's more sort of a template you use to build your platform. It's also a SOHO server distro, therefore it more fits into the business category, comparable to CentOS and similar.

"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."

The Debian project will release the new stable version of debian - Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" - with a completely free Linux kernel. Binary-only firmware and other non-free kernel components will only be available via the non-free repositories and the project is actively encouraging vendors that have not done so already to release their firmware in a form compatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines.

"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.

Debian GNU/Hurd can now be installed a little easier. "This month Philip Charles created a new installation CD, the L series, for the Hurd, which brings us a big step towards installing the Hurd from the Hurd (without the need of a Linux-based installer). If you enjoy testing stuff, please give it a try."

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.

Earlier this month, we reported that Debian had announced a new release schedule; a freeze during December, a release some time in the first half of the following year. After outcries from the Debian community, the December freeze aspect of the plan was reversed. Since most of the ire about this situation seemed to be directed towards Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth decided to step in and offer to put several Canonical employees to work on Debian instead of Ubuntu.

A new Linux App Store apperi.com has been launched allowing one-click installation of over 100,000 packages across recent Debian and Ubuntu versions. "Apperi provides a simple way to search and install applications on your Debian or Ubuntu Linux computer. By using the official repository package lists and apt-url it allows for one-click installation of every official package in its supported distributions. Apperi was developed by Ryan Quinn who is also the founder and lead developer of the currently dormant GNU/Linux distro SymphonyOS."

Last week we talked about whether or not the Debian project would include Mono in its default GNOME installation. This incited some heavy debate on OSNews, but sadly, the Mono debate also lead to some very nasty blog posts in the Debian community. Time for damage control, Debian project leader Steve McIntyre must've thought.

Via LWN, we found a blog post of a Debian maintainer which announces a new package: EGLIBC, a compatible reimplementation of the GNU glibc which "which will soon replace the GNU C Library". Apparently the primary reason is the sadly famous bad maintainership aptitude of Ulrich Drepper, the main libc maintainer.

Two new architectures based on the FreeBSD-kernel have been added to the Debian Archive. This makes Debian the first distribution, and probably the first large OS, to support two completely different kernels at the same time. "The two new architectures (well, better named OS i think, as they use a different kernel) are available in unstable and experimental. We do start out empty, importing only what is needed to get a build running. For this reason you will not be able to directly use it immediately. Please wait until they catched up, which I expect to happen soon."