About Debian

History

1993–1998

Debian was first announced on 16 August 1993 by Ian Murdock.^[19] Murdock initially called the system "the Debian Linux Release".^[20] Prior to Debian's release, the Softlanding Linux System (SLS) had been the first Linux distribution compiled from various software packages, and was a popular basis for other distributions in 1993-1994.^[21] The perceived poor maintenance and prevalence of bugs in SLS^[22] motivated Murdock to launch a new distribution.

In 1993 Murdock also released the Debian Manifesto,^[23] outlining his view for the new operating system. In it he called for the creation of a distribution to be maintained in an open manner, in the spirit of Linux and GNU. He formed the name "Debian" as a combination of the first name of his then girlfriend Debra Lynn and his own first name.^[24]

The Debian Project grew slowly at first and released the first 0.9x versions in 1994 and 1995. The first ports to other, non-i386 architectures began in 1995, and the first 1.x version of Debian was released in 1996.

In 1996, Bruce Perens replaced Ian Murdock as the project leader. In the same year, fellow developer Ean Schuessler suggested that Debian should establish a social contract with its users. He distilled the resulting discussion on Debian mailing lists into the Debian Social Contract and the Debian Free Software Guidelines, defining fundamental commitments for the development of the distribution. He also initiated the creation of the legal umbrella organization, Software in the Public Interest.^[9]

Perens left the project in 1998 before the release of the first glibc-based Debian, 2.0.

1999–2004

The Project elected new leaders and made two more 2.x releases, each including more ports and packages. The Advanced Packaging Tool was deployed during this time and the first port to a non-Linux kernel, Debian GNU/Hurd, was started. The first Linux distributions based on Debian, namely Libranet, Corel Linux and Stormix's Storm Linux, were started in 1999.^[9] The 2.2 release in 2000 was dedicated to Joel Klecker, a developer who died of Duchenne muscular dystrophy.^[25]

In late 2000, the project made major changes to archive and release management, reorganizing software archive processes with new "package pools" and creating a testing distribution as an ongoing, relatively stable staging area for the next release. In the same year, developers began holding an annual conference called DebConf with talks and workshops for developers and technical users.^[9]

In July 2002, the Project released version 3.0, codenamed woody, (after a character in the movie Toy Story, a trend which continues to the present), a stable release which would see relatively few updates until the following release.^[9]

The long release cycle employed by the Debian Project during this time drew considerable criticism from the free software community, and this triggered the creation of Ubuntu in 2004, to date one of the most influential Debian forks.

2005–present

The 3.1 sarge release was made in June 2005. There were many major changes in the sarge release, mostly due to the large time it took to freeze and release the distribution. Not only did this release update over 73% of the software shipped in the previous version, but it also included much more software than previous releases, almost doubling in size with 9,000 new packages. A new installer replaced the aging boot-floppies installer with a modular design. This allowed advanced installations (with RAID, XFS and LVM support) including hardware detection, making installations easier for novice users. The installation system also boasted full internationalization support as the software was translated into almost forty languages. An installation manual and comprehensive release notes were released in ten and fifteen different languages respectively. This release included the efforts of the Debian-Edu/Skolelinux, Debian-Med and Debian-Accessibility sub-projects which boosted the number of educational packages and those with a medical affiliation as well as packages designed especially for people with disabilities.^[9]

In 2006, as a result of a much-publicized dispute, Mozilla software was rebranded in Debian, with Firefox becoming Iceweasel, Thunderbird becoming Icedove, along with other Mozilla programs. The Mozilla Corporation stated that Debian may not use the Firefox trademark if it distributes Firefox with modifications which have not been approved by the Mozilla Corporation. Two prominent reasons that Debian modifies the Firefox software are to change the artwork, and to provide security patches. Debian Free Software Guidelines consider Mozilla's artwork non-free. Debian provides long term support for older versions of Firefox in the stable release, where Mozilla prefers that old versions are not supported. The software programs owned by the Mozilla Corporation were rebranded but the programs' source codes remained the same only with minor differences.^[26]

Debian 4.0 (etch) was released April 8, 2007 for the same number of architectures as in sarge. It included the AMD64 port but dropped support for m68k. The m68k port was, however, still available in the unstable distribution. There were around 18,200 binary packages maintained by more than 1,030 Debian developers.^[9]

Debian 5.0 (lenny) was released February 14, 2009 after 22 months of development. It includes over 25,000 software packages. Support was added for Marvell's Orion platform and for netbooks such as the Asus Eee PC.^[1] The release was dedicated to Thiemo Seufer, an active developer and member of the community who died in a car accident on December 26, 2008.^[27]

www.wikipedia.org

Back