Debian created by the Debian project, is a widely used distribution of free software developed through the collaboration of volounteers from around the world.

Debian GNU/Linux is a particular distribution of the Linux operating system, and numerous packages that run on it. In principle, users could obtain the Linux kernel via the Internet or from elsewhere, and compile it themselves. They could then obtain source code for many applications in the same way, compile the programs, then install them into their systems. For complicated programs, this process can be not only time-consuming but error-prone.

This is stable and well tested software, it changes if major security or usability fixes are incorporated. This is where packages that will be released as the next 'stable' are placed; they've had some testing in unstable but they may not be completely fit for release yet. This distribution is updated more often than 'stable', but not more often than 'unstable'. This is the version currently under development; it is updated continuously.

You can get the installation disks by downloading the appropriate files from one of the Debian mirrors. The installation system files are separated in subdirectories of dists/stable/main directory, and the names of these subdirectories correspond to your architecture like this: disks-arch (arch is "i386", "sparc", etc, check the site for an exact list).

Linux supports the ISO 9660 (CD-ROM) file system with Rock Ridge extensions (formerly known as "High Sierra". Several vendors provide Debian GNU/Linux in this format. Warning: When installing from CD-ROM, it is usually not a good idea to choose dselect's cdrom access method. This method is usually very slow.

Debian developers communicate with other Linux distribution creators in an effort to maintain binary compatibility across Linux distributions. Most commercial Linux products run as well under Debian as they do on the system upon which they were built. Debian GNU/Linux adheres to the Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. However, there is room for interpretation in some of the rules within this standard, so there may be slight differences between a Debian system and other Linux systems.

Files under the directory /usr/local/ are not under the control of the Debian package management system. Therefore, it is good practice to place the source code for your program in /usr/local/src/. For example, you might extract the files for a package named "foo.tar" into the directory /usr/local/src/foo. After you compile them, place the binaries in /usr/local/bin/, the libraries in /usr/local/lib/, and the configuration files in /usr/local/etc/.

A list of packages which are still needed to be packaged for Debian exists, the Work-Needing and Prospective Packages list. For more details about adding the missing things, see How can I become a Debian software developer?, Section 12.1. Debian Policy requires that such symbolic links (to libfoo.so.x.y.z or similar) are placed in separate, development packages. Those packages are usually named libfoo-dev or libfooX-dev (presuming the library package is named libfooX, and X is a whole number).

In order to make sure that your system has been installed from the real Debian base disks check for the existence of /etc/debian_version file, which contains a single one-line entry giving the version number of the release, as defined by the package base-files.

The software that has been packaged for Debian GNU/Linux is available in one of several directory trees on each Debian mirror site. The dists directory is short for "distributions", and it is the canonical way to access the currently available Debian releases (and pre-releases). DOS utilities for creating boot disks, partitioning your disk drive, compressing/decompressing files, and booting Linux.

There are three distributions, the "stable" distribution, the "testing" distribution, and the "unstable" distribution. The "testing" distribution is sometimes 'frozen' (see What about "testing"? How is it 'frozen'?, Section 5.6.1).

Make sure you do all steps as root. Download and install Tomcat x@y:/$ cd /usr/local x@y:/usr/local/$ wget http://www.apache.org/dist/tomcat/tomcat-5/v5.0.28/bin/jakarta-tomcat-5.0.28.tar.gz x@y:/usr/local/$ tar -zxf jakarta-tomcat-5.0.28.tar.gz x@y:/usr/local/$ mv jakarta-tomcat-5.0.28 tomcat Make script so you can start-stop-restart Tomcat (make sure that java path is correct!). x@y:/$ cd /etc/init.d x@y:/etc/init.

The project name is pronounced Deb'-ee-en, with a short e in Deb, and emphasis on the first syllable. This word is a contraction of the names of Debra and Ian Murdock, who founded the project. (Dictionaries seem to offer some ambiguity in the pronunciation of Ian (!), but Ian prefers ee'-en.)

Yes. You can boot the Debian installation system from a set of files you can download from our FTP site and its mirrors. You can download a small CD image file, create a bootable CD from it, install the basic system from it and the rest over the network. For more information please see http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/. You can also download even smaller floppy disk image files, create bootable diskettes from them, start the installation procedure and get the rest of Debian over the network.

For most applications Linux source code is compatible with other Unix systems. It supports almost everything that is available in System V Unix systems and the free and commercial BSD-derived systems. However in the Unix business such claim has nearly no value because there is no way to prove it. In the software development area complete compatibility is required instead of compatibility in "about most" cases. So years ago the need for standards arose, and nowadays POSIX.

Yes. Just install the required libc5 libraries, from the oldlibs section (containing old packages included for compatibility with older applications).

Yes. Install libc5-altdev and altgcc packages (from the oldlibs section). You can find the appropriate libc5-compiled gcc and g++ in directory /usr/i486-linuxlibc1/bin. Put them in your $PATH variable to get make and other programs to execute these first.

A complete list is available from any of the Debian mirrors, in the file indices/Maintainers. That file includes the package names and the names and e-mails of their respective maintainers. The WWW interface to the Debian packages conveniently summarizes the packages in each of about twenty "sections" of the Debian archive.

Debian GNU/Linux is distributed with keymaps for nearly two dozen keyboards, and with utilities (in the kbd package) to install, view, and modify the tables. Vast majority of the software we packaged supports entering non-US-ASCII characters used in other Latin languages (e.g. ISO-8859-1 or ISO-8859-2), and a number of programs support multi-byte languages such as Japanese or Chinese.

Packages generally contain all of the files necessary to implement a set of related commands or features. There are two types of Debian packages: Binary packages, which contain executables, configuration files, man/info pages, copyright information, and other documentation. These packages are distributed in a Debian-specific archive format; they are usually distinguished by having a '.deb' file extension.

Conffiles are listings of configuration files, usually placed in /etc, that the package management system will not overwrite when a package is upgraded. This ensures that local values for the contents of these files will be preserved, and is a critical feature enabling the in-place upgrade of packages on a running system.

Conffiles are listings of configuration files, usually placed in /etc, that the package management system will not overwrite when a package is upgraded. This ensures that local values for the contents of these files will be preserved, and is a critical feature enabling the in-place upgrade of packages on a running system. To determine exactly which files are preserved during an upgrade, users can inspect the contents of /var/lib/dpkg/info/package_name.conffiles For example, the netbase.

It was as a result of this manifesto that debian's Social Contract was written, a document defining what Debian GNU/Linux is all about. Read the Social contract here. Gentoo is a source distribution. This means the user compiles most everything from source. This is both good and bad. Good because it improves performance, especially on older machines. The bad is because this takes time and on a older machine, a lot of time.

The OpenSSL upgrade path is difficult. wget with USE=ssl (default) links against libssl. When upgraded, that breaks - which means wget breaks - which means if you don't have the wget source in distfiles, you're stuck.

To run Xen and a single OS from a binary release you need install no extra packages. To build Xen, XenLinux and documentation from source you will need: make, libncurses5-dev, libncurses5, gcc, libc6-dev, zlib1g-dev, python, python-dev, python-twisted, openssl, openssl-dev, bridge-utils, iproute, libcurl3, libcurl3-dev, bzip2, module-init-tools, latex, latex2html, transfig, and tgif.

Go to address http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp and download packet that contains java JDK and JRE with extension .bin Download it in directory /usr/java (do all steps as root). x@y:/$ mkdir /usr/java x@y:/$ cd /usr/java x@y:/usr/java/$ chmod 755 jdk-1_5_0_09-linux-i586-rpm.bin x@y:/usr/java/$ ./jdk-1_5_0_09-linux-i586-rpm.bin After installation, make and run this script. x@y:/usr/java$ pico skripta.sh #!/bin/sh for i in 'find /usr/java | grep ^.*\.

Debian GNU/Linux includes complete source-code for all of the included programs, so it should work on all systems which are supported by the Linux kernel; see the Linux FAQ for details. The current Debian GNU/Linux release, 3.