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Debian Turns 20

Posted by Soulskill on from the and-many-more dept.

New submitter stderr_dk writes "According to Wikipedia, the initial release of Debian happened 16 August 1993. In other words, it's Debian's birthday and you're all invited. 'During the Debian Birthday, the Debian conference will open its doors to anyone interested in finding out more about Debian and Free Software, inviting enthusiasts, users, and developers to a half day of talks relating to Free Software, the Debian Project, and the Debian operating system.' Over the years, Debian has been forked a number of times. Some of the more well-known forks are Ubuntu and Knoppix. The latest release of Debian pure blend was Debian 7.1 'Wheezy' on June 15th 2013."

18 of 121 comments (clear)

  1. THANKS!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Thanks to Debian devs, community, and everyone else involved.

    1. Re:THANKS!!! by unixisc · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Two things I'd like to really appreciate Debian doing:
      1. 1.)Supporting as many hardware platforms as they could, and not yanking support simply b'cos it's going nowhere. I'm looking at you, Itanic!
      2. 2.)Being platform agnostic as well - coming out with distros of FBSD and HURD

      I really hope that Debian's non-Linux platforms fully develop and mature. Also, I'd toast Debian for being prudent and offering unliberated software separately, in defiance of the FSF jihadis. While on that topic, Debian also should be commended for joining OSI and embracing Open Source as well as their own FSG.

    2. Re:THANKS!!! by lvxferre · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Also, I'd toast Debian for being prudent and offering unliberated software separately, in defiance of the FSF jihadis.

      Agreed. Debian plays as "the last sane man" [okay, distro] regarding that: they realize that open source is freer than closed source, but closed source is still freer than no program; installing by default only free but allowing the users [if they wish to do so] install non-free is the least restrictive thing they could do.

      Happy birthday, Debian!

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  2. Happy Birthday Debian! by monzie · · Score: 5, Informative

    .. and to all the contributors - Thank you for creating this awesome distribution!

  3. Is it really? by geek · · Score: 3, Informative

    I'm not so sure. The Debian group "formed" for lack of a better work on 8/16/93 but they didnt release anything til almost 1995. So the group might be 20 years old but the distro itself maybe not.

    1. Re:Is it really? by some+old+guy · · Score: 4, Funny

      Dude, it's a party...lose the buzzkill. :)

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      Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
    2. Re:Is it really? by KiloByte · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Hmm... sounds like a good reason to party twice, then. And I'm at the DebConf at the moment...

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      The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
    3. Re:Is it really? by rubycodez · · Score: 4, Informative

      wrong, 0.01 was released August 1993 and was usable

      in fact, if you are referring to the 1.0 release in 1995 that had the bad CD with wrong stuff on it

    4. Re:Is it really? by jones_supa · · Score: 4, Informative

      Correct. Here's the full background story of the CD incident for anyone who's interested:

      Debian 1.0 was never released: InfoMagic, a CD vendor, accidentally shipped a development release of Debian and entitled it 1.0. On December 11th 1995, Debian and InfoMagic jointly announced that this release was screwed. Bruce Perens explains that the data placed on the "InfoMagic Linux Developer's Resource 5-CD Set November 1995" as "Debian 1.0" is not the Debian 1.0 release, but an early development version which is only partially in the ELF format, will probably not boot or run correctly, and does not represent the quality of a released Debian system. To prevent confusion between the premature CD version and the actual Debian release, the Debian Project has renamed its next release to "Debian 1.1". The premature Debian 1.0 on CD is deprecated and should not be used. [1]

  4. One of the best by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Debian is probably the most consistent among all Linux distributions. I love the community spirit and non-commercial nature of Debian. Rock solid and stable and of course truly free "as in freedom".

    And with the goal of being the "universal operating system" which recently come true with becoming the official OS on the International Space Station, I look forward to the next 20 years of Debian awesomeness and galactic domination!

    1. Re: One of the best by beefoot · · Score: 5, Informative

      It is called stable for a reason. For server environment, stable works really well. Hell no way I would want to upgrade my server every year. Every 3 years --- maybe. Ideally would be every 5 years. As you pointed out, if you want newer stuffs, go with testing or unstable. They are called testing / unstable for a reason. Ubuntu's release schedule drives me nuts.

    2. Re:One of the best by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 4, Funny

      Yeah, consistently out of date.

      Because God knows, you don't want to miss Ubuntu's next exciting innovation.

  5. most memorable and significant fork by CAIMLAS · · Score: 3, Informative

    One of the most memorable forks of Debian was Stormix (not mentioned on WP): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormix

    For those who don't remember, or weren't there: it was a very nicely cleaned up Debian installer with additional driver support and simplified configuration. It ran very well on a wide range of systems and was way, way ahead of pretty much everything else with respect to software installation and system configuration.

    The Stormix company, when it failed, became Progeny, if I recall correctly. Progeny was a greatly used add-on repository for Debian which eventually had a lot of the functionality added into the core of Debian.

    Without Stormix, later efforts like Knoppix and Ubuntu would not have been possible.

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  6. Re:Have they fixed their "Firefox" problem yet? by sqrt(2) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's too bad Ubuntu went full retard back when they released Unity, and then just threw the oars out of the boat entirely with the Amazon spyware fiasco. Thankfully there's still sane derivative distros like Xubuntu and Mint that can leverage the useful work Canonical is doing.

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  7. Re:Have they fixed their "Firefox" problem yet? by gl4ss · · Score: 5, Insightful

    maybe complain to firefox about their branding/copyright/licensing?

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  8. Re:Have they fixed their "Firefox" problem yet? by rubycodez · · Score: 4, Insightful

    just download the latest tarball from mozilla and unpack it into a directory like /local or /opt, then run firefox/firefox on that path what's the big deal?

    http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/

  9. And in celebration... by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...Debian will be available FREE all day today!

  10. Re:Why so serious? by Hognoxious · · Score: 3, Funny

    Go ahead, lardy-boy. Given your awesome talent for geography you'd probably hit Bahrain, Bhutan or Belgium anyway.

    Hang on, I'm in Be . .. .£$@* &
    no carrier

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