What's New
Debian (OS)
A Brief History of Debian
- 1 Introduction -- What is the Debian Project?
- 2 Leadership
- 3 Debian Releases
- 4 A Detailed History
- A The Debian Manifesto
Debian 0.01 through 0.90 (August-December 1993)
Debian 0.91 (January 1994): This release had a simple package system which could install and uninstall packages. The project had grown to several dozen people at this point.
Debian 0.93R5
(March 1995): Responsibility for each package was clearly assigned to a
developer by this point, and the package manager (dpkg) was
used to install packages after the installation of a base system.
Debian 0.93R6
(November 1995): dselect appears. This was the last Debian
release using the a.out binary format; there were about 60 developers. The
first master.debian.org server was built by Bdale Garbee and hosted by HP
in parallel with the 0.93R6 release. The deployment of an explicit master
server on which Debian developers would construct each release led
directly to the formation of the Debian mirror network, and indirectly to
the development of many of the policies and procedures used to manage the
project today.
Debian 1.0 was never released: Accidently Infomagic, a CD vendor, it's the shipped the development release of Debian and entitled it 1.0. On December 11th 1995, Debian and Infomagic jointly announced that this release was screwed. Bruce Perens explains that the data placed on the "InfoMagic Linux Developer's Resource 5-CD Set November 1995" as "Debian 1.0" is not the Debian 1.0 release, but an early development version which is only partially in the ELF format, will probably not boot or run correctly, and does not represent the quality of a released Debian system. To prevent confusion between the premature CD version and the actual Debian release, the Debian Project has renamed its next release to "Debian 1.1". The premature Debian 1.0 on CD is deprecated and should not be used.
Debian 1.1 Buzz (June 17th, 1996): This was the first Debian release with a code name. It was taken, like all others so far, from a character in the movie Toy Story... in this case, Buzz Lightyear. By this time, Bruce Perens had taken over leadership of the Project from Ian Murdock, and Bruce was working at Pixar, the company that produced the movie. This release was fully ELF, used Linux kernel 2.0, and contained 474 packages.
Debian 1.2 Rex (December 12th, 1996): Named for the plastic dinosaur in the movie. This release consisted of 848 packages maintained by 120 developers
Debian 1.3 Bo (June 5th, 1997): Named for Bo Peep, the shepherdess. This release consisted of 974 packages maintained by 200 developers.
Debian 2.0 Hamm (July 24th, 1998): Named for the piggy-bank in the movie. This was the first multi-architecture release of Debian, adding support for the Motorola 68000 series architectures. With Ian Jackson as Project Leader, this release made the transition to libc6, and consisted of over 1500 packages maintained by over 400 developers.
Debian 2.1 Slink
(March 9th, 1999): Named for the slinky-dog in the movie. Two more
architectures were added, Alpha
and SPARC.
With Wichert Akkerman as Project Leader, this release consisted of about
2250 packages and required 2 CDs in the official set. The key technical
innovation was the introduction of apt, a new package
management interface. Widely emulated, apt addressed issues resulting from
Debian's continuing growth, and established a new paradigm for package
acquisition and installation on Open Source operating systems.
Debian 2.2 Potato
(15 August 2000): Named for "Mr Potato Head" in the movie. This
release added support for the PowerPC
and ARM
architectures. With Wichert still serving as Project Leader, this release
consisted of more than 3900 binary packages derived from over 2600 source
packages maintained by more than 450 Debian developers.
Debian 3.0 woody
(19 July 2002): Named for the main character in the movie:
"woody" the cowboy. Even more architectures were added in this
release: IA-64,
HP PA-RISC, MIPS
(big endian), MIPS
(little endian) and S/390.
This is also the first release to include cryptographic software due to
the restrictions for exportation being lightened in the US, and
also the first one to include KDE, now that the license issues with QT
were resolved. With Bdale Garbee recently appointed Project Leader, and
more than 900 Debian developers, this release contained in excess of 8900
packages and 7 binary CDs in the official set.
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