“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.
Great Mother Debian!
Linux wouldn’t be the same today if Debian never existed.
It is only a pity, from my point of view, that you can’t get Firefox.deb or Thunderbird.deb.
What apt-get install iceweasel isn’t easy enough?
Actually I had read somewhat recently that with Firefox 4.0 the whole trademark thing has finally been solved.
Well, it had been before that, but I don’t think ‘Firefox’ will make it into Squeeze.
http://glandium.org/blog/?p=933
Congrats and Happy Birthday to the Debian project. May it go for a thousand more years, or something.
Been using it since 1.3 Bo.
Edited 2010-08-17 01:28 UTC
That is great news, thanks!
I would put Debian on my microwave if I could. I’ve used it on everything from my xbox to my phone mostly just because I could. It’s been on every computer I’ve owned since 2005.
Happy birthday! You’ll always be my favourite.
I got in to Debian around the potato era and put it on my workstation, then on my spare powermac. I was slow to love it, but as I kept trying other distributions (which I did often back then) I would find them to not be as good as Debian and I’d go back. Soon, I stopped seriously replacing Debian on my main boxes and set up a distro-test box for experimentation so I was never without my Debian.
I bought a YellowMachine NAS in ~2002. I found that it had Debian on it. Yes, it as an ARM box with 64M of RAM but it had Debian Woody right there and I was instantly at home: I new how to update, what I could tweak without breaking things. After a couple days it was essentially a custom NAS with slick packaging.
In 2009 I bought the Nokia N900 and it had Debian on it. Sure it’s a maemo variant, but when I saw 20 pending updates and the UI at the time had no “install all” option I knew I could drop to a command prompt and apt-get upgrade my troubles away.
Debian is rational. Things are put in logical places–maybe not where you thought they should go, but always somewhere that was planned out for a reason. Nothing just happens on a whim. Debian pioneered a menu system that was universal for all environments. Debian created the best runlevel management tools I’ve seen. Debian created the first good dependency resolver (for the purpose of Linux software installation) and continues to enforce such standards of package creation that no other system can compete for package stability. Debian repeatedly solves hard problems that other distributions only realize they have years later.
Debian isn’t just Linux: Debian will adopt and adapt to any kernel that proves popular in the future. I’m still waiting on Debian GNU/kMinix3, but I expect it will happen. Debian is the universal base operating system on which you can add just enough to suit your needs.
I started with Debian because I listened to Geeks In Space and CmdrTaco said it was his favorite; I should really by him a bottle of scotch for this fortunate, unintentional recommendation. I love Debian. You love Debian. We all love Debian, here. Debian is god. Debian is Jesus. apt-get jesus.
the rock of the free software community.
The society is facing problems with such laws. This has to go legal and it^aEURTMs needed to be sorted at the earlier.
http://autopartindex.com“ Auto Part Index
Edited 2010-08-17 20:38 UTC
Happy Birthday Debian!
I’ve been using Debian since Potato – or Woody, I am not sure – and couldn’t be happier with a Linux distro. Both my laptop and desktop have been running on Sid for years on the same install and, unlike a certain popular distro out there that happens to be a Debian derivative, updating and keeping it running is a piece of cake.
The day that I found Debian was the day that I stopped shopping for the perfect distro.
Granted, it is not nearly as easy to setup on a laptop as Ubuntu but I think that it is still worth the two or three hours that it takes to shape into perfection (well, for me anyway).
Congrats to everyone involved with Debian. You guys and girls really rock my world!
My all-time favorite. Most of what little I know about Linux, I learned from using Debian, starting with Sarge (when it was testing). I hope to soon move this box to sid.
Glad to see it I love Debian.