Happy Birthday Debian!

Fellow Linuxers, prepare your champagne and let’s party, as last night the famous Debian Linux distribution has just turned 14. Debian is well known for its adherence to the Unix and free software philosophies, and for its software packages which satisfy most of the computer architectures on the market. The name Debian has a romantic story, coming from the combination of the names of it creator, Ian (Murdock), and his girlfriend, Debra.

First announced 14 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 I think he managed to do that quite well. Its Debian became today the father and mother of 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. Fourteen years later, we see Debian as being one of the best examples of a good, stable, easy to use and reliable Linux distributions. Sleek and slim, without multiplied binaries and manpages, Debian is also one of the best documented distros.

Providing almost 20,000 precompiled packages, the Debian OS and its packages are very stable. 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 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.

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