Technocrat

15 years of Debian

lars
Sat Aug 16 09:55:00 -0700 2008
Open+Source+Software.
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The Debian project was officially founded 15 years ago today.  Debian is a key Linux distro composed entirely of software which is both Free and Open Source (FOSS).  It's known for, among other things, supporting a wide range of architectures, its when-it's-ready release cycle, and the Debian Social Contract.

APT, Debian's package management system, has revolutionized the industry allowing installation and  maintenance of software over the network in a seamlessly integrated fashion.

ed: Bruce Perens was project leader for a while. About the same time I started using Debian at work, he drafted the first Social Contract, a document which generated tremendous discussion and continues to have great positive impact on the industry.

very lively now

rubycodez
Sat Aug 16 11:22:12 -0700 2008
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great to see that for over three years the Debian project has been very lively with full and point releases (called "updates" but have a "R" number, like the recent 4.0R4 upgrate  that came out last month). Been using it since November 2006 for servers and currently have Debian-derived distros on laptop and desktop (I did run the straight stuff for awhile but always took some tweaking)

 

http://technocrat.net/reply/2006/11/5/10155

 

before that, four and five years ago, some of us were concerned Debian was going to go comatose.

another game changer courtesy of debian

zogger
Sat Aug 16 12:40:17 -0700 2008
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Knoppix. Best idea since burgers in a bag and better than Ubuntu, IMO, just doesn't have a millionaire behind it. And I still think it should be expanded on by some hardware company and have them offer a robust and secure internet appliance that doesn't suck, as in, adequate CPU/Vid card and tons 0 RAM.

BTW that link doesn't go anyplace, "not in service".

another game changer courtesy of debian
rubycodez
Sat Aug 16 17:24:14 -0700 2008
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how strange, a link to a past technocrat reply gets mangled into something else (with a "no-cache") that doesn't work.  that was my post trying out Debian again in recent history.

 

having a millionaire behind something isn't a show-stopper in itself for me.  or even a hundred-thousand-daire, that would still be a person with many times the money I have.   A lot of the lead open source people probably fall into one of those categories

15 years of Debian
Michael Smith
Sat Aug 16 18:04:53 -0700 2008
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Their logo is very popular too.

Debian started young

tqft
Sun Aug 17 17:02:16 -0700 2008
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15 years old and already has a number of children and grand children.

Does anyone have any idea how many distros hang off debian (and their apt-repositories)?

Still have not decided whether to give ubuntu the flick and go debian.  I am going to have to decide soon as I broke stuff bad last night and a re-install is a week away at most I think.

Debian started young
rubycodez
Sun Aug 17 18:35:29 -0700 2008
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here's the search results on distrowatch.com, on bottom part of page, includes direct children, grandchildren, etc of Debian.  Of course, it counts things like ubuntu and kubuntu and gobuntu seperately, but even de-duping a lot yields dozens, or you can just take the 124 as an answer.

 

p.s. yowzah!  332 Linux distros total out there

 

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