16 Years of Debian
It was about 16 years ago that Ian Murdock came upon the idea to design a new Linux distro. He named it Debian after Debra and Ian.
Only Murdock himself knows about the moment of conception and naming of the distro, but its birth is recorded in a mailing to the comp.os.linux.development newsgroup on August 16, 1993, almost exactly 16 years ago:
"This is a release that I have put together basically from scratch; in other words, I didn't simply make some changes to SLS and call it a new release."
The SLS he's referring to is Softlanding Linux System, a distro put together by Peter McDonald in 1992 that was the first to go beyond just the Linux kernel and some basic utilities. SLS introduced the graphical X Window System, but it was buggy and led to some frustration in the Linux commmunity. Among those frustrated was Ian Murdock.
Debian is one of the oldest Linux distros, although Slackware predates it by just a bit. Just a month before Murdock announced Debian, Patrick Volkerding released Slackware 1.00. Unlike Debian's total rewrite, Slackware was a modified version of SLS.
Issue 32: Getting Started with Linux 2nd Ed./Special Editions
Buy this issue as a PDF
News
-
NextCloud 14 Arrives
The new version adds two new security features for users.
-
Linus Torvalds Takes a Break, Apologizes
The creator of Linux is admitting his abusive behavior on LKML and plans to change.
-
A New Business Model for Open Source Projects
Storj offers a new program that enables open source projects to monetize from storage.
-
Linux Mint Debian Edition 3 Released
It’s Linux Mint without any Ubuntu base packages.
-
Zorin OS 12.4 Released
It’s an extremely popular distribution among Windows and macOS users.
-
Debian Celebrates Its Birthday
The great community Linux distro turns 25 years old.
-
Chromebooks Support Debian Applications
Containerized Debian environment is now available through the Chrome OS dev channel.
-
Opera Embraces Snap for Linux
Announcement may open doors for more mainstream applications to adopt Ubuntu's Snap package system.
-
Canonical Fixes Boot Failure Issues in Ubuntu
The regression that led to boot failures was introduced by a previous patch.
-
Weird Unofficial LibreOffice Version Shows Up in the Microsoft Store
Unknown developer wants you to pay $2.99 for a free tool.