It's a time of joy and happiness for Linux fans, as two days ago the famous Debian Linux distribution turned 15 years old. Debian is well known for its adherence to the Unix and free software philosophies, and for its software packages that satisfy most of the computer architectures on the market. The story behind the Debian name is a romantic one, it coming from the combination of the names of its creator, Ian (Murdock), and his girlfriend, Debra.

First announced 15 years ago, on August 16, 1993 by Ian, Debian was created basically from scratch. Ian Murdock, back then a student, claimed that he wasn't quite satisfied with the Softlanding Linux System he was using and decided to create a better distro by himself. And what a tremendous impact that decision had, as today Debian is the forefather of many other famous Linux releases such as Knoppix, Xandros, Linspire, MEPIS and, last but not least, the Ubuntu family.

When it was first announced, Debian was quite limited and didn't have too many exquisite features. Fifteen years later, we see Debian as one of the best examples of a good, stable, easy to use and reliable Linux distribution. Sleek and slim, without multiplied binaries and manpages, Debian is also one of the best-documented distributions.

The fact that the Debian OS provides almost 20,000 precompiled packages is just one of the many proofs to its stability. There is also another release of Debian, called Sid, which doesn't address the common users, but rather the programmers interested in software development. The Sid version is known as an experimental unstable version, where different ideas are implemented and tested before they should be included in the final stable version. However, this branch is much more stable than it seems at a first glance and it also receives highly frequent software updates.

The Softpedia team wishes a Happy Birthday!!! to Debian, and we are looking forward for the forthcoming TBA release, codenamed Lenny, estimated for October 2008. Keep up the good work, Mr. Murdock.