14 DAY TRIAL // The Debian Project has just celebrated its 17th birthday. That would make it a teenager in human years, but in IT, it makes it more of a grandfather. Given the number of Linux distros it has spawned over the years and how many still rely on it, the title is fitting.
“The Debian Project was officially founded by Ian Murdock on August 16th, 1993. At that time, the whole concept of a distribution of Linux was new. Ian intended Debian to be a distribution which would be made openly, in the spirit of Linux and GNU,” an announcement in the project’s newsletter read.
“Over the last seventeen years Debian has grown significantly. Initiated as a small project with just a handful of developers it now has more than 1000 contributors from many corners of the globe,” it continued.
“The project will release Debian 6.0, code named Squeeze, at some point this year once the hard work of fixing release critical bugs is finished,” the announcement added.
The Debian project is one of the oldest and most respected in the Linux community. It adheres to a strict open-source code and contributes as much to the community in terms of philosophy and principles as it does technologically.
Debian has a reputation for rock solid stability. This, along with a big number of contributors and active community as well as a huge number of binary packages built for Debian and readily available through APT has helped it become one of the most popular choices for derivative distros.
Many popular Linux distros are based on Debian and still heavily rely on ‘upstream’ development including the very popular Ubuntu, but also Knoppix, MEPIS, Xandros and many others. In turn, these distros have each been used as the basis for many other Linux flavors.
Debian GNU/Linux 5.0.5 is available for download here.