For a non-insider (that is, someone who is not an official Debian Developer), getting a package into the Debian distribution and, by proxy, into the Ubuntu distribution requires getting the attention of someone with sufficient interest and privilege to do the actual upload. It’s called finding a sponsor in Debian parlance, and it’s sometimes a [...]

“For all the grief people have given Debian over time for how ‘outdated’ the packages in Debian stable have been, Debian is certainly my choice for any type of Linux-based server,” said Hyperlogos blogger Martin Espinoza. “I flirted with Ubuntu Server for a while, but Ubuntu suffers from an excess of dependencies.”

I still need CDs and DVDs for some of my older computers that won’t boot from USB. And I’ve done three installations recently on just these kinds of PCs. It was Debian Squeeze for all three, and I used the discs I bought from Debian Developer Raphael Hertzog.

One of the delightful things about Debian is that the project consists of a group of people who are working together to create something that, primarily, we all want to use.

There are so many distributions out there that it’s become quite ridiculous to a handful of users, while others enjoy the massive variety of how Linux is served. In this case, you really can be picky enough to mimic James Bond with “shaken, not stirred.”

The French government has published a call for tender for a 2 million euro contract to support Debian and CentOS systems throughout the French public administration. The news is a month old, but the call for bids is open until 9 January 2012.

From two PhD students trying to get a few neuroimaging research software packages to work smoothly in their own labs, to a broad neuroscience software initiative with thousands of unique users and an even larger group of unwitting beneficiaries. In five years, without almost any external funding. The quick growth of NeuroDebian shows the value [...]

Ben Hutchings is a rather unassuming guy… but hiding behind his hat, there’s a real kernel hacker who backports new drivers for the kernel in Debian stable so that our flagship release supports very recent hardware.

It’s not only the FreeBSD and PC-BSD camps gearing up for the imminent release of FreeBSD 9.0, but Debian developers have already been gearing up for the major update of this leading BSD distribution as they prepare to pull in its new kernel.

Updating the bios on my X200 Tablet was surprisingly simple in Debian. Often, updating bios requires some sort of Windows or Dos boot disk and all kinds of machinations to make that happen.

Continuing on with this project it became necessary to look a little deeper on how apt based software repositories handle version numbers. At first I thought this was the silliest overly complicated mess I could imaging.

But where does this leave those distributions that chose to embrace a pure Debian base instead? In this article, I will explore two very different distributions that decided to look to Debian for the future and did so with immense style.

Best Linux Distribution:Ubuntu…..Runner-up: Debian. apt, apt and more apt this year in the distribution category.

A group of evolutionary biologists, however, has now used the tools of ecosystem analysis to look at the evolution of Debian releases, examining things like package dependencies and software incompatibility.

Being an advocate of Linux Mint, which is a derivative based on Ubuntu, which is a derivative of Debian; I noticed a nasty bug back in July of 2011. Ubuntu 11.04 was released in April of that year and I waited for the bugs to be shaken out of the rug and finally installed it.

I have been struggling with my conscience recently over using Ubuntu as a server. From a technical perspective, it’s an excellent choice. It has regular releases, can be both stable and cutting edge, has thousands upon thousands of packages, … But recently I have been thinking more philosophically.

I probably don’t have to present Mark Shuttleworth… he was already a Debian developer when he became millionaire after having sold Thawte to Verisign in 1999. Then in 2002 he became the first African (and first Debian developer) in space.

I never really considered myself a GNOME user. Though I am. I’ve used Xfce, Fluxbox, Fvwm2, LXDE, even JWM (Joe’s Window Manager) in Puppy and FLTK in TinyCore. But most of the time I stick with the default desktop environment offered by a given distribution.

While watching his thin client boot up [Nav] noticed that it’s using some type of Linux kernel. He wondered if it were possible to run a full-blow desktop distribution on the device. A little poking around he got a Debian desktop distribution running on a thin client.

Raphaël Hertzog recently announced a new dpkg-buildflags interface in dpkg that at long last gives the distribution, the package maintainers, and users the control they want over the build flags used when building packages.

The Debian GNOME team started uploading a mix of GNOME 3.0 and 3.2 packages to Debian unstable because the release team is ready to take care of this transition. This means that as soon as the packages are ready in Debian unstable, the release team will ensure that they also reach wheezy (aka the current [...]

The Debian project has announced the release of the third update to version 6.0, “Squeeze”, of its Debian Linux distribution. The update to the current stable release focuses on addressing security vulnerabilities and bugs found in the previous versions, as well as updating a number of included packages.

I have run Debian on my primary mobile phone for over 2.5 years, although now in the recent months I’ve had dual-SIM in my Nokia N950 as well (Debian not yet running on Nokia N950 or Nokia N9 – but it can and will be done!).

Think it’s all just another glorified ad for Ubuntu? Think again, because Ubuntu didn’t win the No. 1 spot overall — Debian did. The result? More than 100 comments from Linux fans eager to agree with or dispute some or all of TuxRadar’s results.

Three weekends ago, I participated in a Debian bug squashing party. It was more fun than I had guessed! The event worked: we squashed bugs. Geoffrey Thomas (geofft) organized it as an event for MIT’s student computing group, SIPB. In this post, I’ll review the good parts and the bad. I’ll conclude with beaming photos [...]

I switched to the current Debian release, “Squeeze”, quite a few months ago on my Sony Vaio laptop. I’ve found that Squeeze, with its older kernel and good attention to power management (compared to the power management regressions in more recent kernels), gets much better battery life than either Arch Linux or Ubuntu on this [...]

The Debian Project is pleased to mark the 18th anniversary of Ian Murdoch’s founding announcement [1]. Quoting from the official project history [2]: “The Debian Project was officially founded by Ian Murdock on August 16th, 1993. At that time, the whole concept of a ‘distribution’ of Linux was new. Ian intended Debian to be a [...]

Linux on a 386 in about an hour? Madness you might think, it probably takes Linux longer to boot on a 386 (and in some cases you are correct)! Want to know the trick? Simple, cheat!

During Debconf 11, I got access to a fast s390 machine, and I have started to work on a Debian s390x port, the 64-bit version of the s390 port. One of my goal was to help the SPARC64 port, as some of the issues are the same: both are 64-bit big-endian, don’t support unaligned access [...]

Yesterday I begun using Debian GNU/kFreeBSD “squeeze” in thorin, my main workstation. During the last few weeks I had to work through some of the limitations that were holding me back, such automated driver load and FUSE.