Tim O’Brien posted his frustration about the state of Java packaging in Debian. While I’m not affiliated with Debian nor Ubuntu, I wanted to post something in defense.

I’m always wondering about people who forget to spring forward or fall back when daylight saving time begins or ends. Now I’m one of them.

Hi, I’ll be uploading dpkg 1.16.2 targeting unstable, by the end of this weekend or beginning of next week the latest (after some final polishing). Some pretty important points follow, the first section in particular.

I have just realized I have been using Debian as my main operating system for 4 years now. I was using Pardus 2008 before. I moved to Debian after getting frustrated with some packaging issues and I never looked back.

A Debian developer’s side project has been to see how well it would work to re-build the Debian archive (the entire distribution) using LLVM’s Clang C/C++ compiler rather than GCC.

Welcome to this year’s fifth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include…

A recent study by a free software advocate has found that the use of the GNU General Public Licence family in the Debian GNU/Linux Project has been growing over the last seven years.

Many things are afoot in the Debian world: ideas to reduce distro complexity and developer feedback cycle time; the embrace of the rise of ARM; and more TLC between Debian and its derivatives.

It’s no surprise that when it comes to languages used within a Linux distribution that C and C++ lead the way, but would you have expected 429 lines of COBOL and 1933 lines of Modula3 to have made their way into the code?

As many would know, Debian GNU/Linux is one of the oldest, and the largest Linux distributions that is available for free. Since it was first released in 1993, several people have analysed the size and produced cost estimates for the project.

Today I will tell you about Debian LXDE Live, thus completing the Debian cycle. If you want to read about other versions of Debian Squeeze, please follow the links to reviews of GNOME, XFCE and KDE versions.

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.