I’m not a big advocate for one Linux distribution over another. Or maybe I’m fooling myself. I pretty much run Debian GNU/Linux (as it’s officially known) on just about anything. But what I run day to day on my main machine is Debian. Right now that means Wheezy, currently the Testing distribution, which I upgraded [...]

Given the rise of collaboration, through collab-maint and packaging teams, it is more important than ever that workflows and tools are easily understood and documented. This lets new contributors (including people new to Debian) jump in more quickly and with less risk of disruption.

I’ve watched the progress of Linux over quite some time and can’t help but conclude that development in the Debian community has become dogmatic, stodgy, and held back for no other reason than pure politics and control issues.

The Debian GNU/Linux project released version 7.0 of its well-known Linux distribution on May 4, two years and three months after the last version came out.

Those of us that run Linux on a modern or nearly-modern PC know that it’s a capable operating system. It’s also (at least in my case with Ubuntu) extremely easy to install on a semi-modern computer. On a mid-90s era PowerMac 7200, things aren’t quite so simple.

The Debian Project, which oversees the development and distribution of free and open source operating system Debian, recently released a new trademark policy (which can be viewed here) which enables third parties to use its marks freely for commercial purposes. While such a laissez-faire approach could be seen as risky, it also presents an opportunity [...]

Debian developers are still working on making the operating system compiler agnostic so that its packages can be built with LLVM/Clang and other compilers rather than continuing in a monogamist relationship with GCC.

When Bdale Garbee talks about the future of the Linux desktop, it is not so much a visionary view as a view of how he would like computing to evolve.

I’ve been using Ubuntu as my primary operating system since 2005. Back then it was truly amazing. Before I started using Ubuntu I tried out Red Hat, Mandrake (and later Mandriva), Slackware, Gentoo, and even Debian. In all of them, something didn’t work. Usually it was wifi, but sometimes it was audio or video, or [...]

I picked a bad time to rebuild my laptop this week. I’ve been tracking Debian 7.0 (Wheezy) since it was frozen and using Enlightenment 0.17 (E17) for yonks. When I rebuilt my laptop, E17 was no longer available. The reason for the removal is essentially a result of the good news that a stable version [...]

The Debian Security Team recently issued Debian Security Announcement 2593-1 [1] regarding the ‘moin’ package [2] and a remote arbitrary code execution vulnerability in the twikidraw / anywikidraw components. Debian’s wiki [3] is implemented using ‘moin’ and includes support for the twikidraw component.

It is possible to put Debian on smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S: Find a friendly Android distro that supports your device, install it with fastboot or heimdall and play around.

But Debian gets better as it inches toward release. And if you’re running the Stable distribution (Squeeze instead of Wheezy, still in Testing) you can enjoy the goodness for the next two years — or three if you wish, as Stable gets an extra year of security patches as Old Stable after a new Stable [...]

The Debian GNU/Linux project has yet to decide on the method whereby it will ensure that the Linux distribution it produces can boot on computers that are certified for Windows 8. Read more here

Across multiple desktops, applications and windows, I’m pretty much smashing GNOME 3 in Debian Wheezy against the wall to see if it breaks. So far it’s all holding up very, very well.

I claim that the way we conduct discussions on debian-devel has gone quickly downhill this year. The discussions around the default init implementation are particularly sad examples of how Debian debates technical topics.

For me, Bruce Byfield, Debian and free software are hopelessly intertwined. While I had played about with Linux before, I only went hardcore when I started work on 5 July, 1999 at Stormix Technologies, an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to commercialize Debian. From there, I jumped ship to work at Progeny Linux System, which was founded [...]

Debian, one of the oldest actively maintained GNU/Linux distributions, turns 19 today. Project founder Ian Murdock originally announced the project on 16 August 1993 when he released the first version of the distribution. Looking back at that email, a surprising number of Murdock’s initial goals for the project are still reflected in Debian today, despite [...]

Debian developers are planning to switch the default desktop environment of Debian 7 codenamed Wheezy from Gnome to XFCE. The move comes mainly to make the distro lightweight and also reduce the size of the installation image.

I’ve installed numerous Debian forks and had few if any issues with them, distributions like SolusOS, Linux Mint debian, SalineOS, and Mepis. All were very solid Linux distributions and relatively easy to install. Not so with vanilla Debian. My goal was to install Debian to a 16 gig usb stick, essentially installing Debian to an [...]

As much as I hate nonfree software, and I think relying on as part of our infrastructure sucks, there is a degree of sense to keeping stuff on GitHub. If upstream is on GitHub, it may make it easier to coordinate and work with them. However! These are repos sitting in people’s personal accounts — [...]

While the room was full of Debian developers in Managua, Nicaragua, nothing really new came out of the discussion. If you’ve been keeping track of Matthew Garrett’s blog posts, talks, and other information concerning SecureBoot on Linux, you didn’t miss out on much from this Debian talk.

Newcomers of the Linux way of doing things are usually surprised to see Debian not on the FSF’s list of free distros, particularly since Debian has always made a strong public stance to adhere to free software principles. Not to mention that it is one of the few Linux distributions that actually uses “GNU/Linux” in [...]

With Debian Wheezy now frozen for its release sometime next year, here are some early benchmarks comparing the performance of Debian 6.0.5 “Squeeze” to the latest packages for the Debian 7.0 “Wheezy” release. For this Squeeze vs. Wheezy comparison, both Debian GNU/Linux and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD were benchmarked from an Intel 64-bit system.

Here are some benchmarks of the MIPS-based ICT Loongson-3A quad-core processor out of China. Unfortunately I have yet to get my hands on any Loongson hardware, but on OpenBenchmarking.org it was discovered that Linux benchmark results are beginning to appear for the ICT Loongson-3A V0.5 FPU.

Though my track record with in-place upgrades of Linux/Unix systems is far from positive, I decided to do just that with my long-running (since late 2010) Debian Squeeze laptop today. It went surprisingly well — and by that I mean I’m using a fully upgraded Debian Wheezy laptop to create this post in Nautilus via [...]

However, after Debian GNU/kFreeBSD Wheezy/sid installation with the kFreeBSD 9.0-1-amd64 kernel was complete, it never successfully booted. It was a no go. Trying different UEFI/BIOS settings and other FreeBSD kernel options were tried, but the Ivy Bridge system with Debian GNU/kFreeBSD never successfully booted.

The more interesting bits this month include a controversy over duplication between the Debian Multimedia archive and Debian proper. Stefano suggests that what package belongs where be worked out, or that Debian Multimedia shed its Debian name and move on.

So, I (an RPM packager) have taken it on – APT packages. A Linux distribution I’m not all too familiar with, a packaging mechanism I’m not all too familiar with, and guidelines and processes and rules I’m completely unaware of.

In the Czech municipality of Grygov open source is used almost everywhere. It covers most of the applications used by the administration, offers public Internet access across the entire village and it is the basis for an SMS gateway linking the regional fire department with the volunteers in the village. The software even keeps parents [...]