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Probably we have to link to his QA page: http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=cjwatson

From Debian 7 release notes:

"Therefore, browsers built upon the webkit, qtwebkit and khtml engines are included in Wheezy, but not covered by security support. These browsers should not be used against untrusted websites. For general web browser use we recommend browsers building on the Mozilla xulrunner engine (Iceweasel and Iceape) or Chromium."

-- http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/ch-information.en.html#browser-security

it has been able to play h.264 since firefox 14. just build it with --enable-gstreamer. (this is easy to do if you run gentoo. most major distros have a bug open asking them to enable the gstreamer support. eg https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=843583 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/1051559 http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=682917 )

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my name is ssam and i have been flash free for 5 months

Testing is for accepting into Stable, so, it's the same without major feature changes and some fixes: http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-faq/ch-ftparchives#s-frozen Unstable is more like development version, not the "Debian Fedora". If they're paying attention, if everything is fine, then why do we have aptosid in here? According to distrowatch, Debian has already spawned more than 120 derivatives (c) debian.org (!). RHEL/Fedora have 28, and most of them are very specific, like trixbox, clearos, Yellowdog, centos, scientific. There is a huge diversity in Debian and community is creating general use distros outside the Debian project. Why? Is it so hard to allow maintainers to deliver changes and add-ons via subprojects? At least two mainlines. I guess it's because of Ubuntu, and there we've got LTS. It's separatism and very closed approach, like Oracle is playing with MySQL.

Is it so hard for Debian to have two main distros like "Debian Stable" and "Debian Mainstream"? Everybody will be happy.

That's a good idea, but can I suggest a small change? Make three of them and call them stable, unstable and testing. Then you can have one distribution that is well tested and reliable which people can use as a reliable, long lasting platform, one which is more up to date while still being fairly solid, and another which can have the latest features but which may not have all the issues straightened out. The alternative, having two completely different distributions called "Debian Enterprise Linux" and "Debian Fedora", has already been tried by another group and has somehow failed to bring about an age of universal peace and contentment.

I've heard another post-self-mortification words like "you know we've got 236272927 packages in here". Oh yes, it's scaring, you are using only 5% of these packages and 95% of users - about 15 I think... Who cares about the rest? Why are they so blind?

If they were so blind, it would be because they weren't paying attention to the popularity contest. Yes, 15% of packages are installed on 95% of the systems surveyed. What of it? Not all users have the same needs. 95% of the adult male population of the USA is under 190cm is height. Does it also trouble you that the remaining 5% are able to find pants in their size?

Is it so hard for Debian to have two main distros like "Debian Stable" and "Debian Mainstream"? Everybody will be happy.

That's a good idea, but can I suggest a small change? Make three of them and call them stable, unstable and testing. Then you can have one distribution that is well tested and reliable which people can use as a reliable, long lasting platform, one which is more up to date while still being fairly solid, and another which can have the latest features but which may not have all the issues straightened out. The alternative, having two completely different distributions called "Debian Enterprise Linux" and "Debian Fedora", has already been tried by another group and has somehow failed to bring about an age of universal peace and contentment.

I've heard another post-self-mortification words like "you know we've got 236272927 packages in here". Oh yes, it's scaring, you are using only 5% of these packages and 95% of users - about 15 I think... Who cares about the rest? Why are they so blind?

If they were so blind, it would be because they weren't paying attention to the popularity contest. Yes, 15% of packages are installed on 95% of the systems surveyed. What of it? Not all users have the same needs. 95% of the adult male population of the USA is under 190cm is height. Does it also trouble you that the remaining 5% are able to find pants in their size?

Well, debian does backport all relevant security bugfixes.

No. Wheezy’s QtWebKit is stuck at version 2.2. QtWebKit 2.3.1 is out since a while featuring many important bugfixes of which none were backported: http://patch-tracker.debian.org/package/qtwebkit/2.2.1-5

Debian stable focuses in being a bugfree distribution, not a distribution comprised only of bugfree software.

That's not what masternerdguy wrote.

if you campare it to, say, Fedora 17's or even Kubuntu 12.04's KDE 4.8, you'll realize how marvelously quirkless Debian's KDE is and why it pays to have stabler distributions.

And when you look at openSUSE, your whole argument falls apart: openSUSE is also relatively conservative but still manages to bring recent GNOME, KDE SC, and Xfce releases to its users. That's because the openSUSE maintainers decide on a case by case basis (eg. they waited a while to adopt systemd or Plymouth) instead of blindly picking only old software.

Well, it's just now moving on: Debian's testing has been frozen since June 2012 for the wheezy release cycle. Now with the release having happened, it's unfrozen so new packages can start migrating from unstable again.

re: for many people it's not the main OS but more like a solid reference implementation.
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That others use Debian as their "backroom workshop" does not define Debian's true role, no more than one person using another person as a slave manifests that slavery as being the defining characteristic of that other person.
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I disagree with your statement that debain's role has changed "more towards being a professional backroom workshop for other distributions". Debian has stayed being what it has always been. It's just being used more as the foundation that supports the work of the facade builders and marketers that put a pretty face (or not-so-pretty Tammy Faye Baker clown-makeup face, if you want Gnome 3, imho) on top of all that and market it as if they made the whole thing.
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I agree that Debian is a solid implementation. But I disagree with your contention that it's more like a solid reference implementation. A "reference implementation" would imply that it is a demo of some of the capabilities of what can be done and that others are to build upon it. (whoops, the second half of that sentence is actually true! That's exactly what GNU's GPL licensing allows!) A "reference implementation" implies that it's built specifically just to be a partial implementation, which debian definitely is not. While others may build atop Debian, that is not Debian's sole purpose.
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For details on Debian's purpose, see Debian's own documentation about their "social contract", or read about it on articles about it.
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For info about how it started and about Debian's manifesto, read about the Ian who makes up the "-ian" half of "debian" or read the original Debian Manifesto .

Has anyone checked how correctly OpenSMTPd implements the SMTP protocol? The OpenBSD project has an unfortunate history of caring more about simplicity of implementation than correctness (see also this discussion).

Some satire I wrote five years ago when Google created Knol, reposted here: http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2011-February/000401.html

Gold Leader: Pardon me for asking, sir, but what good are semantic wikis and desktops going to be against [that]?
General Dodonna: Well, the Empire doesn't consider a small cgi script on a shared server or desktop to be any threat, or they'd have a tighter defense. ...

Commander #1: We've analyzed their attack on Knol, sir, and there is a danger. Should I have your Golden Parachute standing by?
Governor Schmidt: Evacuate? In our moment of triumph? I think you overestimate their chances.

----

Maybe the same goes fro private drones in the balance between meshworks and hierarchies?
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."

Interesting ammendent suggestion. Also related by me: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc./76207-8319

All that said, I think Eric Schmidt has done a lot of great things, and we could have much worse at the heart of Google. Anyone in that position would face a lot of constraints about what he could say or do; it's amazing anyone could do as well as he has. As Langdon Winner wrote about, the systems (including bureaucracies) we create shape the nature of what components are allowed to exists in them. If the components (including people) act too far out of expectations, they are replaced.

A long time.

We don't even have true 64-bit x86-64 processors yet. While programmers are told to* treat pointers as 64-bit in the current implementation (reffered to as a "48-bit implementation" there are only 47 usable bits for user-mode pointers**. That is enough to map 128 terabytes to one process, afaict the most ram you can currently get in a PC architecture machine is 2 terabytes.

If we assume the largest available memory size doubles every 1.5 years and we want to be able to map all the memory to one process then we have 9 years until the current implementation is used up and another 24 years after that before a "full 64-bit" (with one bit used to distinguish between kernel and user mode) implementation is used up.

* Of course just because programmers are told to do something doesn't mean they will http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=642750
** A 48th bit is used to differentiate kernel and user addresses. The number is then sign-extended to produce a 64-bit number.

kernel and compiler support is there, not sure about all the userspace stuff.

Just debootstrap it from Daniel Schepler's repository. Most of the work has since moved to official second-class repositories (AKA debian-ports), but because of the freeze, you want both, So after debootstrapping, echo "deb http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian unstable main" >>/etc/apt/sources.list and you're set.

Conversely, one of the reasons GNU+Linux on the desktop has not been a hit is because of the abhorrent support for commonly used multimedia file formats. The common user may not understand the technical names of software codecs and the multimedia formats they encode to and decode from, but they sure feel it when they are shipped a default installation that can read or create any possible format out there.

It's an immense achievement that an operating system with a Social Contract dedicated to only including Libre Software in its main repositories can be automagically more versatile at handing more media formats than proprietary OSes like Windows or Mac OS X. "Casual users" want their audio players, video players and editors, etc. to read and write anything, and the news here is that the complex libraries and codecs are included to be used by any software that needs to call them.

Conversely, one of the reasons GNU+Linux on the desktop has not been a hit is because of the abhorrent support for commonly used multimedia file formats. The common user may not understand the technical names of software codecs and the multimedia formats they encode to and decode from, but they sure feel it when they are shipped a default installation that can read or create any possible format out there.

It's an immense achievement that an operating system with a Social Contract dedicated to only including Libre Software in its main repositories can be automagically more versatile at handing more media formats than proprietary OSes like Windows or Mac OS X. "Casual users" want their audio players, video players and editors, etc. to read and write anything, and the news here is that the complex libraries and codecs are included to be used by any software that needs to call them.

I just tried to find some more info about it and found this page (http://wiki.debian.org/MultimediaCodecs) which doesn't really answer my question, but it amused me how much they're at pains to point out that you might have problems if you use unofficial codecs (3 times in a few cms of text).

At the bottom of that document is http://www.debian.org/legal/patent, which says "Debian will not knowingly distribute software encumbered by patents". But debian apparently distribute mp3 and h264 codecs and I'm completely certain that these are encumbered by patents, which is in direct contradiction to that statement.

So who knows what they're up to?

They do? Because when I walk over to http://debian.org/ and then click on either "Getting Debian" or "CD ISO Images" it says absolutely fuck all about "Wheezy", "Squeeze", "Etch", "Sarge" or anything. And when you download it, the iso is labeled with the version number 6.0.7.

Likewise, when I head over to Ubuntu.com, click "Download" in the upper right corner, and then Ubuntu Desktop, it says 12.10, no code name here either. Now, there are few places where the codename will appear, but it's not in extensive use. And it's not any worse than OS X recycled names(Mountain Lion is the same as Puma, which is the same as Cougar. Puma has already been used on 10.1).

I take back what I said. Apparently, even unstable is still on 4.8. Sheesh!

http://packages.debian.org/unstable/xfce/

Nevertheless, it's not that nontrivial to pull 4.10 from experimental.

These bugs, along with all the links they contain, is a good starting point:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=522373
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=592457

My guess...Debian got legal advice which gave them enough courage to go ahead...and it included the instruction not to publish the details of said advice. See also:
http://www.debian.org/legal/patent
http://www.debian.org/reports/patent-faq

These bugs, along with all the links they contain, is a good starting point:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=522373
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=592457

My guess...Debian got legal advice which gave them enough courage to go ahead...and it included the instruction not to publish the details of said advice. See also:
http://www.debian.org/legal/patent
http://www.debian.org/reports/patent-faq

These bugs, along with all the links they contain, is a good starting point:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=522373
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=592457

My guess...Debian got legal advice which gave them enough courage to go ahead...and it included the instruction not to publish the details of said advice. See also:
http://www.debian.org/legal/patent
http://www.debian.org/reports/patent-faq

These bugs, along with all the links they contain, is a good starting point:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=522373
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=592457

My guess...Debian got legal advice which gave them enough courage to go ahead...and it included the instruction not to publish the details of said advice. See also:
http://www.debian.org/legal/patent
http://www.debian.org/reports/patent-faq

Debian will run Linux kernel 3.2.39

Debian can also run on the FreeBSD kernel. It looks like Wheezy will support both 8.3 and 9.0 kernels.

Debian will run Linux kernel 3.2.39

Debian can also run on the FreeBSD kernel. It looks like Wheezy will support both 8.3 and 9.0 kernels.

Debian will run Linux kernel 3.2.39

Debian can also run on the FreeBSD kernel. It looks like Wheezy will support both 8.3 and 9.0 kernels.

I hope they can fix http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=368297 before they ship.
It seems horrible in this day and age that a Linux would exist that couldn't get basic functionality with ldap working.

...Oh, and the screenlock refused to work. After having spent over a day trying to get my workstation back into a state where I could actually _work_, I said "stuff it" and installed WindowMaker, grabbed a few dock-apps by source, hacked my xsession to configure my dual-screen setup, set up the ssh-agent, xlock, etc etc. I really haven't missed having to do all of that manually, but by golly, right now there doesn't seem to be an easily usable alternative!

I've installed my last Ubuntu system, that's for sure.

Just a wild ass guess here, but it sounds like you were hacking on a Debian-based system as if it was Slackware. This may be helpful if you decide to give it another chance.

P.S. Switching to a different theme is a good and fast way to wipe all the flashiness off KDE (and especially Plasma) in short order. I must admit though, it's the first time I've heard of Oxygen described as flashy.

What you are asking for is the default in Openstack. I have just finished writing a howto about Openstack networking in here:
https://wiki.debian.org/OpenStackHowto/Quantum

So, basically, you first add a virtual router with a NIC on a public IP address, and the other NIC on your virtual LAN. Then if you need a public IP address for a VM, you just add a "floating IP address", which basically means that you will have NAT port redirections going to that IP in the LAN.

All this is completely standard in Openstack, if your provider is using Nova and Quantum in a normal setup. The problem is that Rackspace is half in the past (with their own previous implementation which they want to stay compatible with), and half in the future (with implementations of things which aren't in the mainstream project yet because this takes time, cells is a very good example that turned out very well since it is now integrated). As for HP, it is a very different story. They decided to stick with the Diablo release for a long time, and basically forked it, also working on features away from the project (eg: healthmon).

Finally, I strongly believe that both Rackspace and HP are committed to have these problems solved, as this is very problematic for them also (eg: maintaining their own branch means a big loss in terms of human hours of development). So I am convinced that in the long run, these problems will go away.

Why not try debian testing? Or even unstable.

http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-faq/ch-choosing.en.html

No, ubuntu sucks because it is nothing more than a six month snapshot of debian, ubuntized to make it binary non-compatible with debian goes against debian's DFSG (Debian Free Software Guidelines) http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines

ubuntu is the aol of linux

But, choice is a good thing, I don't use, nor will ever use a watered down debian distro.

Just because ubuntu comes with codec's and *such* don't mean you can't install it in debian proper using apt-get update && apt-get install "whatever", notice no sudo bullshit

I haven't ever experienced problems with data not being available on MySQL either. Running several Drupal 6 & 7 sites on MySQL. Also, the company I work for hosts their main customer interface against on MySQL and they haven't had any problems in the several years it has been running either.

Is that an issue from 'ye olde' days? I love your posts, but from what I am reading here, it seems like some have problems with bugs in MySQL that aren't actually there anymore. Either that, or I have just been insanely lucky to not have experienced any of them? I'm running Debian stable with apt sources from (http://packages.dotdeb.org stable). So my MySQL version is 5.5.30-1~dotdeb.0.

I couldn't blame you in that regard though, once something leaves a sour taste in your mouth, it's hard to find reason to go back and try it again, I've done the same thing. Though this article is definitely inspiring me to have a look at both PostgreSQL and MariaDB. One gripe I had before (in drupal v6 about 2 years ago) was that PostgreSQL was purported to not support a 'distinct' select by the maintainer of the 'views' module (or possibly a random committer?). It made some of the configuration that I tried to do with views not work out correctly, so I ended up hacking the module code to add distinct support.

Drupal v7 now has a database abstraction layer though, so it now supports specialized queries based on whatever DB you choose to run it on. Drupal 8.. haven't tried it yet, but I looked at some of their DB code using PHP 5.4 traits, and it looks pretty slick. I'm was planning on putting together a new VM soon for testing out Drupal v8 on PHP 5.4, I'll definitely give PostgreSQL and MariaDB a shot.. though http://packages.debian.org/testing/database/ doesn't seem to have a package for MariaDB, looks like mariadb.org has its own repos: https://downloads.mariadb.org/mariadb/repositories/.

Should be fun!

Ouya is Android

Agreed.

not Linux.

Android is not GNU/Linux, but it does use the Linux kernel, and some people have reported success running a userspace based on GNU in a chroot alongside Android.

Debian will do this too if you manually create a "CAL" symlink and call that instead of `cal`, so I delved into the source for its Debian packge.

The code responsible is here. It prints in the horizontal format if you call the program as "cal" (case-sensitive), and in the vertical format otherwise. I have no idea why it does this (the git repository only goes back to 2009, and I bet this code has been around for a lot longer than that), but there it is. On my Debian system, the program is installed as `ncal`, with `cal` being a symlink to `ncal`, so perhaps the vertical mode is the intended format and the horizontal mode is for backwards compatibility with a previous `cal` tool?

OS X systems are case-insensitive by default, so your attempt at using `CAL` ended up running ncal via the `cal` symlink, but the check for calling name is case-sensitive, so the horizontal mode isn't triggered.

http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/6.0.6/i386/iso-cd/debian-6.0.6-i386-netinst.iso

Slackware and Debian are both excellent recommendations, but one has to understand that Slackware, precisely because it's so KISS, can only be maintained by a seasoned OS administrator. Coincidentally, Slackware is widely regarded as one of the best distributions to learn OS administration from, so if that's your goal, then by all means check it out.

Debian stable would be a safe bet, but keep in mind that they are about to ding.

In general, I would stay away from distributions that peddle non-free software: they are made by people who think that harming you is OK, because that's how they get paid. Ubuntu is one of the worst offenders. Debian is OK because it is free by default, and will stay that way unless you manually add evil repositories. Slackware is OK because it's trivial to purge. But also take a look at the list of fully free, FSF-approved distributions. I have no experience with any of them, but I hear that Trisquel is probably the most user-friendly, and I know that RMS is actively looking people to improve it, so it's likely to be their flagship for a while.

http://packages.debian.org/search?suite=experimental&searchon=names&keywords=GCC Its already in experimental....which is where it belongs. Debian is all about stable, which is kind of the point, but if its not hitting it fast enough, there are a whole host of linux options available to you...like Ubuntu.

Most likely, you will update Debian in the next two years and will be upgraded to MaraDNS 2.0 when that happens: http://packages.debian.org/source/experimental/maradns

Debian unstable (sid) - up-to-date, but unstable

Sid isn't as up-to-date as the name suggests.
My biggest issue with Debian is that it's only a cyclical rolling release, not a true one. When the feature freeze comes 'round, it affects sid as well as testing. Keep in mind that the freeze lasts for 6+ months (the current one has been 8 so far - http://wiki.debian.org/DebianWheezy), and happens once every 2 years; at least 25% of the life cycle is spent in freeze. This is equivalent to being stuck on the previous release of Ubuntu. e.g. I'm still using KDE 4.8, despite 4.10 coming out last month.

Freezing makes sense for testing, since it becomes the next stable, but there's no reason that sid/unstable should be frozen as well.

Self-hosting solutions are available, will never get canned in this manner, and are highly customizable. But, of course, require a place to host it.

I've tried both Tiny Tiny RSS and RSSLounge before in an attempt to rid myself of the Google Reader addiction, but found them both lacking in some respects every time. Since Google Reader is disappearing though, I made a new attempt this morning.

RSSLounge seems to have been abandoned a year or two ago, but perhaps it was stable enough (RSS aggregation is not nuclear science).

Tiny Tiny RSS have some in my eyes quite horrible default settings, especially coming from Google Reader. The good news, however, is that it is configurable to mimic Google Reader quite closely. With some work with custom CSS rules it is quite close at a first glance.

My Tiny Tiny RSS configuration:

• Enable "Automatically expand articles in combined mode"
• Enable "Combined feed display"
• Long date format: "Y-m-d H:i"
• Short date format: "Y-m-d H:i"
• My custom RSS

Last time I installed it on Debian I ran into enough caveats that it led me to write a guide for others to install it, but since then it has been included in the unstable repository. To install it, some manual work was still needed, though:

• sudo aptitude install tt-rss libphp-simplepie #the second package is a correct dependency now, bug fixed very recently, so that should no longer be needed.
• sudo vi /usr/share/tt-rss/www/config.php #Enter server URL. I also set SINGLE_USER_MODE=true per preference.
• ln -s ../conf-available/50-tt-rss.conf /etc/apache2/conf.d #A bit weird by the Debian package to not put it directly in conf.d/
• sudo vi tt-rss.local #This was for my local configuration. Needed a entry for Apache to give access to a directory outside of DocumentRoot. I also locked it to localhost access per preference.
• sudo service apache2 reload
• sudo vi /etc/default/tt-rss #Set DISABLED=0 to be able to start the service.
• sudo service tt-rss start #Hopefully the aggregator will start fetching feeds.

Then go to http://localhost/tt-rss and start configuring. All subscriptions can be exported from Google Reader and imported in Tiny Tiny RSS, keeping dirctory structure intact.

I'll try to migrate fully to this solution now that Google apparently no longer wants my traffic :-) . I'd say I probably use Reader the most of all Google's services, including Search, Gmail, Youtube, etc., so the decision to can it is quite strange from my personal view.

There is no reason that Android couldn't be built on top of any other kernel like FreeBSD, XNU etc...

Other than that nobody has yet bothered to do it. Show me a working ROM of Android/kFreeBSD working on a Nexus device, and I'll agree that Android is kernel-independent in the same way Debian is becoming.

http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=dwm

0.64% of Debian users have this package installed, according to popcon.

Hardly a crowd.

Since this is such a non-newsworthy troll, let's talk about something important. The Debian Wheezy release has just been set back by a newly discovered "grave functionality bug". When extremetuxracer starts, tux turns left.

Debian wiki on the subject http://wiki.debian.org/systemd

Also some extract from discussion http://lwn.net/Articles/452865/

Debian needs to stop being Ubuntu's and Gnome's bitch.

Come on. Seriously?? Debian is nobody's bitch; certainly not Gnome's. You have a completely free choice of desktops in Debian, just as in practically all other distros. It's dead simple to select Xfce, and it's dead simple to select KDE, and it's dead simple to select LXDE, just for example.

Why would you have them completely drop support for ANY major desktop? Open source is about choice. Choice is good.

As for "Ubuntu's bitch", color me completely mystified. I can't even begin to imagine how anyone can connect that to reality.

Debian needs to stop being Ubuntu's and Gnome's bitch.

Come on. Seriously?? Debian is nobody's bitch; certainly not Gnome's. You have a completely free choice of desktops in Debian, just as in practically all other distros. It's dead simple to select Xfce, and it's dead simple to select KDE, and it's dead simple to select LXDE, just for example.

Why would you have them completely drop support for ANY major desktop? Open source is about choice. Choice is good.

As for "Ubuntu's bitch", color me completely mystified. I can't even begin to imagine how anyone can connect that to reality.

Debian needs to stop being Ubuntu's and Gnome's bitch.

Come on. Seriously?? Debian is nobody's bitch; certainly not Gnome's. You have a completely free choice of desktops in Debian, just as in practically all other distros. It's dead simple to select Xfce, and it's dead simple to select KDE, and it's dead simple to select LXDE, just for example.

Why would you have them completely drop support for ANY major desktop? Open source is about choice. Choice is good.

As for "Ubuntu's bitch", color me completely mystified. I can't even begin to imagine how anyone can connect that to reality.

Seeing as Ubuntu is debian for those scared of terms.

Even less of a big deal when you check out NEW.

The stylized bottle below the Debian swirl in the restricted logo practically explains the Debian philosophy. It's a gift from the free software genie.

According to Bruce it's the magic smoke:

    http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/01/msg01782.html

Yet another reason that Debian is awesome.

Zero percent of the profits go towards the project. Is that acceptable? Yes, and I don't even have to tell you that.
"You can also make merchandise with Debian trademarks for commercial usage. In case of commercial usage, we recommend that you truthfully advertise to customers which part of the selling price, if any, will be donated to the Debian project. See our donations page for more information on how to donate to the Debian project."

Also, I'm going to go and register a domain name with debian in it. And then I'm going to have a page with something about cats or cars. Screw: "You cannot use Debian trademarks in a domain name, with or without commercial intent." I'm going to sell cats or cars and Debian can't do jack.

http://www.debian.org/trademark#policy

Also that blog post was not needed at all. The link to the press release, and to the page linked just above, would have been enough.