Debian's 5th Birthday!

August 13th, 1998

On Sunday, August 16, 1998, Debian will turn a proud 5 years old. There will be an IRC party on irc.debian.org (also irc.openprojects.net) channel #debian on Sunday August 16 at 20:00 UTC. Please join us for the festivities!

From its beginnings in 1993 with about a dozen developers, Debian has grown into a strong organization that develops one of the world's leading Linux distributions. The recently released the 2.0 Hamm distribution (see http://www.debian.org/News/1998/19980724) was developed by over 400 developers and contains over 1500 entirely free packages.

Work on several ports is currently in progress. PowerPC, Alpha, Sparc, UltraSparc, ARM, m68k, i386-hurd and more are currently under active development. For more information regarding these ports, please visit our web page at http://www.debian.org/.

Plans for the future include moving towards FHS compliance, as well as introducing apt, our next generation package manager. Apt enables system administrators to keep their systems in sync with the latest available software using just a few simple commands to automatically retrieve the latest versions of packages from the Internet, and install and configure them.

Debian is working together with Red Hat and other organizations and individuals from the Linux community in developing the Linux Compatibility Standard (LCS). To subscribe to the lcs-eng mailing list send an e-mail to lcs-eng-REQUEST@lists.debian.org with the single word subscribe in the subject line.

Debian would like to thank all the people who have made this distribution grow and prosper. These include the founder Ian Murdock, leaders Bruce Perens and Ian Jackson, and all of the developers that have put in countless hours of volunteer work. Debian would not be possible without you. Thank you!

Some History

Debian has had several leaders since its beginnings in 1993.

Ian Murdock founded Debian in August 1993 and led it until March 1996. This effort was sponsored by the FSF's GNU project for one year (November 1994 to November 1995).
Bruce Perens led Debian from April 1996 until December 1997
Ian Jackson led Debian from January 1998 until the present

Here are a few of the major Debian release milestones:

0.01-0.90 were released between August 1993 and December 1993
0.91 released January 1994 (~30 developers, primitive packager)
0.93R5 released in March 1995 (dpkg makes its first appearance)
0.93R6 released in November 1995 (~60 developers, a.out, first dselect)
1.0 was never released. It later became version 1.1
1.1 Buzz released June 1996 (474 packages, 2.0 kernel, fully ELF, dpkg)
1.2 Rex released December 1996 (848 packages, 120 developers)
1.3 Bo released July 1997 (974 packages, 200 developers)
2.0 Hamm released July 1998 (1500+ packages, 400+ developers, glibc2)
2.1 Slink is scheduled to be frozen in October or November 1998.