Debian or Debian GNU/Linux is a Distribution Linux very known and influential. It is characterized in particular by its development made by a thousand from volunteers on Internet, by its adherence meticulous person with the principles of the Free software, by its reliability, the great number of Logiciel S distributed and the number of Plateforme S of supported Computer material. It was retained for the deployment of Linux in the town of Munich (: 14000 PC).

Organization of the project

Debian is a noncommercial Distribution Linux, impetus in 1993 by Ian Murdock with the support of the Fondation for the free software   ; the purpose of it is principal to provide a Operating system only made up of Free software. Debian decides “Débiane”. This name finds its origin in the contraction of two first names: Debra, the woman of the creator of the project, and Ian, the creator himself.

The Debian project is organized around three pillars:

1. a social contract signed with the community of the free software defines great principles to which the developers adhere.
2. the principles of the free software according to Debian (or DFSG) precisely defining the direction of the “free” word for the developers of Debian.
3. a Constitution describes the inner working of the project, the methods of decision makings and the roles of the various actors: the chief of the project, the secretary, the developers, etc democracy Internet uses a method of vote by weighting by classification: the Method Schulze (a Method Condorcet).

Juridically, Debian is the project of a named association with nonlucrative goal SPI ( Software in the Public Interest ).

Debian is the name of the organization, often used to indicate the distribution Debian GNU/Linux. However other projects are also under development, in particular based on the Hurd, the core of the operating system GNU. Projects of bearing towards other cores are also in hand: Debian GNU/Hurd, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD and Debian GNU/NetBSD.

Distribution of the software

The GNU/Linux distribution contains approximately: 18000 software packages worked out and maintained by a thousand of developers. Debian is famous for its reliability and its original manager of packages (Apt), with the Format of file .deb, allowing the updates and guaranteeing a homogeneous system. Debian is available for ten platforms of computer material: M68k, SPARC, Alpha, PowerPC, X86, IA-64, PA-RISC, MIPS ( big and little- endian ), ARM, OS/390 and more recently AMD64.

Sections of software packages

For each branch, three sections are available:

• the section hand is the principal section of Debian. It contains the majority of the packages.
• the section non-free gathers all the packages which do not respect DFSG. They officially do not form any more part of the distribution and are not maintained by the Debian developers. The package Vrms indicates if there are packages non-free on the system.
• the section contrib is intended for the packages which respect the DFSG, but which depend on a package of the section non-free .

Management of the packages

DPKG is the main program to handle the files of packages besides (Apt made there call for the installation of the known as programs).

Apt ( Advanced Packaging Tool , “advanced tool of packages”) is an interface advanced for the management system of the Debian packages, which consists of several programs whose names start with “apt-” (apt-get, apt-mask, apt-cdrom…). In addition to its user friendliness and its versatility, its interest lies in its automatic management of the dependences between the various packages. There exists also an graphical interface for this program: Synaptic.

Dselect is the historical user interface, allowing an easier management of the packages. This utility tends to yield the place to Aptitude.

Versions of Debian GNU/Linux

Debian is always available in 3 versions (three branches) which are:

• stable : fixed version where the only updates are corrective measures of safety;
• testing : future stable where only the sufficiently mature packages can return;
• unstable : active version, constantly nourished new packages or updates of already existing packages (called Sid ).

Moreover, there exists an experimental deposit of packages named ; it contains experimental packages of software of which the use could degrade the system. However, the experimental deposit does not contain all the packages available in the branches stable , testing and unstable . For this reason he is not regarded as a branch with whole share.

History of the versions

The various versions of the distribution borrow their names from the characters of cartoon film Toy Story of the studios Pixar:

Note: there no was version 1.0 of the Debian system. In December 1995, a CD retailer (Infomagic) made press CD of the version of development by entitling them Debian 1.0. This version imperfect and being manifestly boguée, the first official version of Debian was thus the 1.1 in order to avoid any confusion.

Moreover, Sid, does not mean development still in contrary to widespread rumor.

Question about which the doubt still reigns if one believes of it paragraph 4.6 of the referred document.

Versions 0.x

Debian was born in August 1993 thanks to Debra Murdock and Ian Murdock, then students with the Université Purdue. Debian was supported by the project GNU of the Free Software Foundation of November 1994 until November 1995. Version 0.01 up to 0.90 of Debian were produced between August and December 1993. Ian Murdock wrote then:

“version 0.91 of Debian left in January 1994. It had a primitive management system of packages which made it possible to the users to handle the packages but large thing of other did not authorize (it did not certainly have similar dependences or options). As from this moment, a few dozen people worked on Debian, although I was to always assemble the versions myself. Version 0.91 was the made last version in this manner. ”

“most of the year 1994 was devoted to organize the Debian project so that the others can more directly contribute, as for the realization of dpkg (Ian Jackson was very largely responsible for the latter). If I remember well, there was no official version in 1994, although we had a certain in-house number of it, with each time we progressed in the advance of the distribution. ”

“Debian 0.93, in version 5, left in March 1995 and was the first version " moderne" of Debian: there had never been as many developers (although I cannot remember how much), each one maintaining its own packages and Dpkg was used to install and maintain all these packages after the installation of the basic system. ”

“Debian 0.93, in version 6, left in November 1995 and was the last version with the format a.out. There were approximately 60 developers to maintain the packages of the version 0.93R6. If I remember well, Dselect made its appearance in this version…” Ian Murdock as pointed out as Debian 0.93R6 “… was my favorite version of Debian” although he admitted the possibility of being of party taken, whereas he stopped working actively on the in March 1996 project during the pre-production of Debian 1.0. The latter was famous 1.1 to avoid any confusion with a manufacturer of cédérom which named 1.0 wrongfully a previous model. This incident led to the concept of images ISO " officielles" , in order to avoid with the salesmen this kind of blunder.

During the month of August 1995 (between the version 0.93R5 and 0.93R6 of Debian), Hartmnut Koptein began the first bearing from Debian for the family of Motorola M68k. He said that “the many ones and many packages were built around architecture I386 (" small bout" , - m486, - O6 and all this kind of options of the library libc4) and that it was an enormous work to have a base of starting packages on my machine (Atari Medusa 68040,32 MHz). After three months (in November 1995), I placed at the disposal 200 packages, out of the 250 available ones, all for the library libc5! ” Since then, the Debian project developed by including many bearing towards other architectures, as well as a bearing towards a new core (different from Linux), the micronucleus GNU/Hurd.

One of the very first members of the project, Bill Mitchell, remembers about the Linux core:

“… one was to be between the version 0.99r8 and 0.99r15 when one began. During very a long time, I was able to build a core in less than 30 minutes on a machine equipped with one 386 to 20 MHz, and I was thus able to install Debian in same time with less than 10 Mo of disk space. ”

“… I remember that the initial team included/understood Ian Murdock, myself, Ian Jackson, another Ian which I do not remember family name, daN Quinlan, and some other people of which I do not remember the names. Matt Welsh formed also part of the initial group, or joined it at its all beginnings (it since left the project…). Somebody created a list of discussions and we put ourselves at work. ”

“If I remember well, we did not leave a defined plan, and we did not leave on the fact of creating together a plan with a very organized approach. As of the beginning, if I am not mistaken, we gathered by chance the sources of a certain number of packages. With time, we ended up finalizing a collection of articles which would be necessary in the middle of the distribution: the core, Shell, update, getty, many other programs and files of necessary configuration to initialize the system like a whole set of utilities. ”

Versions 2.x

Ian Jackson became the person in charge of the Debian project to the beginning of the year 1998 and became immediately after vice-president of the Software in the Public Interest. After the resignation of the treasurer (Tim Sailer), of president (Bruce Perens) and the secretary (Ian Murdock), he became president and three novel members were selected: Martin Schulze (vice-president), Flagstone Scheetz (secretary) and the Nile Lohner (treasurer). Version 2.0 of Debian (Hamm) left in July 1998 for architectures processors Intel X86 and Motorola M68k. This version is characterized by the introduction of a new version of the libraries C (libc6 resting on the glibc2). At the time of its exit, there was more than 1500 packages maintained by more 400 Debian developers. Wichert Akkerman succeeded Ian Jackson as Debian project manager in January 1999.

Version 2.1 of Debian left on March 9th, 1999, after being delayed during one week by requests for corrections of last minute. Debian 2.1 (Slink) supports officially two new architectures: the Alpha and the Sparc. The packages containing the system X-Window were deeply reorganized compared to the preceding versions. It includes also apt, the interface of management of packages of the following generation. Thus, this version of Debian was the first to require two cédéroms for the play of cédéroms official; it contains approximately 2250 packages.

April 21st, 1999, Corel Corporation and project KDE formed indeed an alliance with Debian when Corel affirmed its intention to manufacture a Linux distribution based on Debian and the environment of office of the project KDE. During spring and the next summer, another distribution based on Debian made its appearance, Storm Linux. The Debian project chooses a new logo then, by creating at the same time an official version to be used on the material using Debian, like the cédéroms or the official Web sites of the project, and an not-official version for a use derived from Debian or mentioning its name. A new bearing, single in its kind, began at this time with the Hurd. It is the first attempt to use a core non-linux, with GNU/Hurd, which itself is based on the micronucleus GNU/Mach.

Debian 2.2 (Potato) left on August 15th, 2000, this version adds the support of architectures PowerPC and ARM, Wichert Akkerman as a project manager, this version of the distribution takes into account 3.900 packages maintained by nearly 450 developers.

Versions 3.x

Debian 3.0 was named “Woody” and supported always more architectures, with the addition of IA-64, HP PA-RISC, MIPS and S/390. The project then counts 900 developers and 8.000 packages, of which for the first time KDE, after the conflict of license of the library Qt had been solved.

Debian “Sarge”, is version 3.1, was finalized on June 6th, 2005 and does not count less than 15.000 packages and 11 architectures.

Versions 4.x

Version 4.0, “Etch” left on April 8th, 2007 and include the following elements:

• Core Linux 2.6.18;
• official Support of architecture AMD64, is a total of 11 different architectures;
• Replacement of XFree86 by X.Org (version 7.1)
• New fitter (including a graphic version)
• Presence of Secure improved APT for remote loadings made safe with cryptography and signatures

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