Debian Celebrates its 17th Birthday

Whew, how time flies! On August 16, Debian, one of the first-ever Linux distributions, turned 17. That’s right… before computers could be found in almost every home, and before there was even the “Internet”, a hopeful operating system based on the Linux kernel was rapidly being developed. If you follow Linux in any extent today, you’re likely aware of Debian’s presence today.

On August 16, 1993, an ambitious Ian Murdock announced the “Debian Linux Release”, a distro that sought to improve upon the wrongs of Softlanding Linux System, one of the absolute first Linux distros. Believe it or not, “Debian” isn’t just some random name. “Deb” comes from “Debra”, Ian’s girlfriend at the time, and “ian” comes from, well, “Ian”. It’s simple, but it works.

Since its original release, Debian has instilled itself as being one of the most important distros available today. If you go and install it now, you will have access to tens of thousands of software packages using the APT package management system, and also the ability to run it on twelve different architectures. Plus, if you are installing to a computer with no network connection, you can even download extra CD’s that include what you need (currently, there are 31 of them… totaling roughly 17GB).

Debian is such a stable and full-featured distro that it has spawned what seems like a billion other distros that use it as a base. Of these, Ubuntu (and its own derivatives) is the most popular, but others include MEPIS, Knoppix, Parsix and Damn Small Linux, among others. Distros like Ubuntu wouldn’t be where they are today if not for Debian, that’s for sure.

Happy 17th birthday, Debian!

The Debian Project is pleased to mark the 17th anniversary of its start. As the official project history states: 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 distribution which would be made openly, in the spirit of Linux and GNU.

Over the last seventeen years Debian has grown significantly. Initiated as a small project with just a handful of developers it now has more than 1000 contributors from many corners of the globe. Documentation has been written in numerous languages, and it now has tens of thousands of software packages, all following the Debian Free Software Guidelines.