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.

Fedora, Mint, Arch, Ubuntu, Debian and OpenSUSE go head-to-head – we’ve dropped the six most popular Linux distributions of the day into a cage fight for your affections. Read on to discover which distro comes up top for installation ease, customisation, performance, security and more.

Unlike paid software (such as (Microsoft), which now serves our administration and local councils, Linux Debian’s free use and development, along with the exceptional security of the software, everyone can look inside it, makes this software one of the largest IT and educational achievements, realizing the full extent of the human right to maximum development, [...]

Debian GNU/kFreeBSD was first released with Squeeze in last february. The “technology preview” label indicated, among other things, that it had a number of limitations when compared with what users would expect: missing features, incomplete functionality, etc.

There was a bit of a controversy back in February as Debian decided to replace libreadline with libedit, which affected a number of apps, the most important of which for Postgres people is the psql utility. They did this because psql links to both OpenSSL and readline, and although psql is compatible with both, they [...]

GNU Hurd on the other hand is an alternative kernel that the GNU software was originally written for. GNU Hurd provides the services that implement file systems, network protocols etc. over the GNU Mack microkernel. It is still a work in progress despite being in development for over 20 years.

As a nice byproduct of the huge “rolling” discussion we had back in April/May, various people have brainstormed about applying Test-Driven Development (TDD) techniques to Debian development.

More recently, upgrading any GNU/Linux distribution without a DVD and from a live system is the norm and I wouldn’t expect less. After all, isn’t Apple’s App Store an imitation of Debian’s APT repository or Fedora’s RPM package archives?

AVG’s AMI consists of a hardened Debian Linux operating system with AVG’s pre-configured anti-virus technology which can be launched, ready for use, as rapidly as any other instance on Amazon EC2.

Turmoil in the free-office-suite world has led to the formation of the Document Foundation and its forking of OpenOffice.org into LibreOffice, and much if not most of the Linux world has declared its support for the more-community-oriented LibreOffice.

Joining the ever-growing list of Linux distributions jumping the sinking OpenOffice.org ship for the safety of LibreOffice is the irreplaceable Debian. LibreOffice has been in testing since March, but as of today it’s available for stable 6.0 as well.

The Debian project is proud to announce that the transition from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice has now been completed. LibreOffice has already been available for “testing” and “unstable” since March and has now been backported to Debian 6.0 “Squeeze”, too.

Philipp is a Debian developer since 2005 and a member of the release team since 2008. Since he took the responsibility of Stable Release Manager, the process has evolved for the best. I asked him to explain how the release team decides what’s fit for stable or not.

Swapnil: Can you tell us a bit about yourself? How you got associated with computers?……Stefano: With computers … wow, that’s quite some time ago! I discovered programming when I was 9 year old – I’m 31 now – finding an illustrated book about BASIC programming at the local library (!). Pair that with a C64 [...]

The goal of our first project, nicknamed ancient-patches, was to clear out an old batch of a few hundred Ubuntu patches whose status was unclear. We couldn’t tell which ones had been merged into Debian, which were waiting in the BTS, and which had yet to be submitted to Debian. All of them were several [...]

With Linux 3.0 on its way, the Debian developers have decided to move the Debian Wheezy development from Linux 2.6 to Linux 3.0.

Now, we can’t be entirely sure which netbook North Korea is using, but it looks a lot like a MenQ EasyPC, the Sylvania 7″ netbook, or an unbranded netbook from Deal Extreme.

A few days ago I mentioned Conky, the desktop system resource monitor. I’d been meaning to install this for some time, and did so after my upgrade to Debian 6.0 “Squeeze”. And I was immediately alarmed to see that with only my web browser and email client open, I was using over 450 MB of [...]

I’ve always been an advocate for using the packages supplied by the distribution/project you happen to be running as an OS. Rarely do I go outside the “official” repositories for something shinier and newer. That’s changing, and swapping the Chromium browser in Debian Squeeze for the Google Chrome browser directly from Google is my latest [...]

Executive summary: Don’t use btrfs on Debian Squeeze. Longer summary: Don’t use btrfs RAID with the kernel Debian Squeeze comes with.