11 ms·

Brand-new Linux release, which I'm calling the Debian Linux Release (1993)

381 points by ecliptik 3y ago

woleium 3y ago
Named after Deborah and Ian (Deborah was his girlfriend at the time)
- Midnight1938 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - snvzz 3y ago
    Perhaps respect. e.g. I very much prefer to remember him for Debian.
  - random467 3y ago
    [dead]
  - themerone 3y ago
    Because most people aren't into conspiracy theories.
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    The guy was sexually assaulted and then accused himself of sexual assault which got him “cancelled.” I followed him on Twitter back then, it’s hard to imagine it not being suicide after all of that.
  - kergonath 3y ago
    How would that be relevant to what he did 20 years before? Also, because these conspiracy theories are bullshit? His death was a tragedy and a symptom of our times, but there’s no point banging on about it here.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- echelon_musk 3y ago
  I embarrassingly used to pronounce it as "deebian" before being schooled by a graybeard.
  - fortyseven 3y ago
    Shit, I say it like that! OH GOD, MY WORLD IS IN SHAMBLES. :D
  - joemi 3y ago
    I don't think I've ever said it aloud, but that's how I always read it in my head.
  - nicoburns 3y ago
    I always assumed it was pronounced "day-bian" until I heard the above story of how the name came to be.
- midoridensha 3y ago
  Yes, and this was a terrible idea. Deb and Ian ended up divorcing. Not a good omen for the future. Ian should have picked a better name. Edit: corrected history of their relationship
  - steppi 3y ago
    While a college student, Murdock founded the Debian project in August 1993, and wrote the Debian Manifesto in January 1994. Murdock conceived Debian as a Linux distribution that embraced open design, contributions, and support from the free software community. He named Debian after his then-girlfriend (later wife) Debra Lynn, and himself.[3] They later married, had three children, and divorced in January 2008.[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Murdock https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Murdock
raxxorraxor 3y ago
> 1) someone who will eventually be willing to allow me to upload the release to their anonymous ftp-site. Please contact me. Back then data sharing was so good. Despite the now present security threats in a more weaponized net, this even beats the most convenient drag&drop sharing site. > Debian will contain the most up-to-date of everything. Ironic that today it is the dependable system. Still flexible enough for development, but I guess priorities have changed. Debian is my favorite distro, it just always works for me. The author seemed to have a tragic life and made many stops at different companies, would have been interesting to hear his reaction to the development of Debian. I don't know if he was still an active developer, Debian had many, many project leaders as far as I know.
- macintux 3y ago
  I worked closely with Ian at Progeny Linux. He wasn’t an active developer on Debian at that point in time, although he was very technically savvy.
- TacticalCoder 3y ago
  > I don't know if he was still an active developer According to Wikipedia he died in 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Murdock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Murdock
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - jrockway 3y ago
      Are you sure Twitter is to blame? It seems like he was abused by the police.
      - throw81749202 3y ago
        I worked with him at the time of his death shortly after Christmas of 2015. There was definitely a toxic twitter mob, and it's also true that he had been in police custody the day before, but whether either of these things was the reason for his suicide was never clear.
snvzz 3y ago
It took a very long time to load. Perfectly illustrates how even serving tiny static files really is hard these days. >?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=Debian-announcement-1993.txt Perhaps that's why. There's some dynamic script duplicating the functionality of HTTP GET.
- neilv 3y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20230816143054/https://wiki.debian.org/DebianHistory?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=Debian-announcement-1993.txt https://web.archive.org/web/20230816143054/https://wiki.debi...
- whalesalad 3y ago
  who would have imagined a post from 30 years ago might be in cold storage and take a lil while to load.
  - AlecSchueler 3y ago
    The first time, sure, but I'd expect it to be cached after that.
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    If it was cold, it's not anymore.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
darkwater 3y ago
Happy 30th birthday, Debian!
- HankB99 3y ago
  Happy birthday Debian and thank you Mr. Murdock and all of the many devs and maintainers who have kept it going.
  - stOneskull 3y ago
    Hear, Hear!
abhijeetpbodas 3y ago
> 2) Debian will contain the most up-to-date of everything. Hasn't aged too well, I suppose.
- rollcat 3y ago
  Quite the contrary, it aged extremely well. Debian testing/sid is very usable on a desktop/laptop; I've used it successfully in such fashion for something like a decade. Nowadays I do prefer a distro/OS with a 6-month release cycle (like NixOS or OpenBSD), but as far as rolling releases go, Debian has always been great.
  - Corsome 3y ago
    What are the advantages of using Debian testing/sid rolling release instead of a regular rolling release distro (say, Arch)?
    - brnt 3y ago
      What's irregular about Debian, and why would I use Arch instead of it?
      - Corsome 3y ago
        I rather meant irregular with regards to Debian Sid not Debian in general. Arch only has rolling release mode so everyone is using the latest (thus any potential issue in Arch will affect bigger % of Arch users) while Debian has stable and testing and I was wondering if that'd make Sid less stable for practical use (since "it's not stable"). I don't want to start a distro war here, just wondering about some anecdata of actual distro users.
        type0 3y ago
        Anecdata, if you aren't advanced user with new hw, Sid might be more robust, otherwise Arch is superior in almost any way. I wish it wasn't, I like Debian community more, it is less elitist.
kragen 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Murdock#Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Murdock#Death police reported finding him dead of suicide the day after he pledged to spend his life opposing police brutality like what he'd just experienced (after, it must be said, threatening suicide that day as well)
- tuukkah 3y ago
  Getting targetted (mistakenly or not) by the law enforcement for certain minor offences seems to be one of the most dangerous things that can happen to you: they won't investigate carefully and they won't presume you're innocent.
  - dpkirchner 3y ago
    Something worth keeping in mind when people blame the victim with the classic "they should have complied!" retort.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - sdfghswe 3y ago
      > Something worth keeping in mind when people blame the victim with the classic "they should have complied!" retort. I noticed it's more common to get that retort if the victim is black and/or poor. If the victim is a middle class white American, you don't hear that.
    - imtringued 3y ago
      Compliance does nothing against American police violence. You're merely reducing the chance that they pull out a gun and execute you on the spot.
    - phone8675309 3y ago
      A summary execution by cop, regardless of how much you resist, should not be the punishment for any crime, yet we have enough bootlickers and sycophants that want to give the police carte blanche (yet also claim to be skeptical of government power somehow).
glonq 3y ago
My first awareness of Debian was in a surplus electronics store in Rohnert Park California. A kid who bore a striking resemblance to Martin Short's Ed Grimley character from SCTV brought a fat stack of floppy disks to the check-out and then proudly proclaimed that he was using them for installing Debian linux. Bless him.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
HeckFeck 3y ago
Interesting that they were called "releases" back then. I wonder when it became a "distribution"? Was that word only used by BSD back then?
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
Did it already have the .deb package format and the amazing apt repositories at this point? To me that is what blew my mind; the transitive dependency management and automatic upgrades made me not touch an RPM based distro again. I don't recall using this first release, I was probably still on SLS or something then, and I believe I briefly played with RedHat... But I did use it maybe a year or two later, and haven't stopped (okay, sometimes I use Ubuntu, shh).
- mr_sturd 3y ago
  Looks like the .deb format was introduced in 0.93[0]. Can't really tell if that was the time `dpkg` was introduced, in 1994. [0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deb_(file_format) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deb_(file_format)
- lproven 3y ago
  `.deb` was there basically from the start -- it was already in v1.0, AFAIK. APT didn't appear until Debian 2.1 "Slink" in 1999.
dehrmann 3y ago
I went to Purdue. Its LUG had 10 year birthday party of Debian, and alumnus Ian Murdock was there. Sadly, it was a week before the semester started, so I wasn't in-town, yet. https://www.cs.purdue.edu/news/articles/2003/debian-birthday-celebration.html https://www.cs.purdue.edu/news/articles/2003/debian-birthday...
- aidenn0 3y ago
  Hey, we were at Purdue at the same time (I graduated December '04)! That means the chances of me having met you in person are very slightly elevated compared to just a random person on HN...
hdjjhhvvhga 3y ago
> This library will contain packages like the S3 X-server It took me a moment to realize he meant a version of X for S3 cards. In the meantime, my brain was trying to imagine an X server running from an AWS bucket...
- jeffbee 3y ago
  Lost to history is the fact that XFree86 version 3 provided a different binary for some families of graphics card. If you owned an S3 911 (a very common "Windows accelerator" at that time) you needed XF86_S3 but if you owned one of S3's execrable ViRGE 3D cards you needed XF86_S3V. Having a single server that contained or could load every driver did not come until version 4.
  - h2odragon 3y ago
    > S3's execrable ViRGE 3D cards twitch clocks so bad the screen would swim at 1024x768.
  - sharts 3y ago
    Dang, I haven't heard S3 ViRGE in so long. That thing was terrible. But that's all I could have at the time and seemed to work well enough. As for those old "Win modems" back in the day...that's a different story.
davidw 3y ago
I have been happily using Debian, and its derivative Ubuntu since 1997. They do great work, and getting involved as a Debian packager was a great way to get involved in the world of open source for someone like me who had no college CS or professional background at that point. Indeed, it was a stepping stone to getting a job as a software developer.
myle 3y ago
The email looks like it describes Arch with the exception of the installer perhaps
- OJFord 3y ago
  Arch has an official/built-in installer now (as of last year iirc) - 'archinstall'.
mr_sturd 3y ago
Early Linux is before my time in computing. Had to look up SLS - Softlanding Linux System[0] - thought it might have been something to do with Slackware. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softlanding_Linux_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softlanding_Linux_System
- jzb 3y ago
  Other way around, really - Slackware was based on SLS.
gorgoiler 3y ago
Debian changed my life. My first look at an OS produced by a collective of disparate developers was RedHat 5.0 in the late 90s. Linux HOWTOs were basically all the docs I had. I got a pppd to answer the phone and dialed home from my friends house. I was logged in as root all the time. fvwm was the pinnacle of cool. Debian changed all that. Local, top quality documentation. A community. Packages that had been hand crafted to work like the rest of the system. The friction disappeared and let me move freely around the OS discovering things. Imagine walking around LA and then someone gives you a car and a map — that was the kind of difference in quality of experience it gave me. potato worked. woody felt like the future. I ran it for years on my iBook G3 (which one of the DDs helped me set up.) To this day, “sarge” still feels like the ultimate next gen, so it’s funny to see it is actually pretty old. To me, sarge means “futuristic out of touch thing” because I waited for it for so long. Thank you all so much.
- TacticalCoder 3y ago
  I did my little part to help Debian: I ordered 100 CDs of Debian 1.1 (in 1996? 1997?) from the US to Europe, which I then shipped to 100 people in Europe (and even some in north Africa). I ran out of the 100 CD and ordered 30 more and by then it was already Debian 1.2! (my old memory may be failing: it may have been 1.2 then 1.3 and not 1.1 then 1.2) It was hard to get Linux distro for some of us back then: dial-up at best and otherwise we'd buy magazines or books that'd come with a Linux CD. I've basically been using Debian and derivatives since forever. Did a short stint with Red Hat and Fedora back in the days but came back to Debian. Before Debian I was using Slackware. And as you said: thanks so much to everyone who worked on Debian!
- antod 3y ago
  That mirrors my first Linux/Unix experiences in the late 90s. Except for a short go at OpenBSD for firewalling between trying Redhat 5.0 and ending up on Debian. Debian just felt so much more "right" to me than Redhat did back then, and I never really went back to the Redhat side of the fence. This was despite Debian having way less third party support for anything back then - it wasn't really until Ubuntu took off that Debian (by extension) felt secure. Up until then, I always had a nagging feeling that the Redhat ecosystem would completely take over, and I would yet again have picked/preferred the wrong horse in the technology world. A big thank you to all the Debian devs/maintainers over the years.
NelsonMinar 3y ago
Nice to see the key innovation described so well: "The system will be easy to keep up-to-date with a 'upgrading' script in the base system" I don't know that dpkg was the first such upgrade system but it definitely still is one of the best. And continues to be, many later imitators are not nearly as effective. A key part of that is all the work done in packaging so that the packages are maintainable and upgradeable, of course.
- tuukkah 3y ago
  dpkg handles individual packages, while APT is used to handle dependencies and version upgrades. I recall using dselect as a predecessor of APT in the beginning, but I don't know if it was part of the first release. EDIT: dselect was developed at the same time as dpkg and was initially considered a part of it, so in that sense it was possible to upgrade a system by using just dpkg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dselect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dselect
  - agumonkey 3y ago
    IIRC deselect was ultra ambitious, but out of the missed target, apt emerged (sic) as a solid cornerstone.
- seabass-labrax 3y ago
  I gave an online talk[1] about the history and future of package management last year that you might find interesting. It was very difficult to determine exactly what was the 'first'; as is often the case with big ideas, the Linux community seemed to spontaneously decide that it was needed and came up with multiple solutions in the space of just a few years. Even the question itself is complicated, because software did not typically come with a clear 'release date', which it usually has now. Ultimately, the conclusion I drew from my research was that Bogus Linux[2] (which is still available, but no longer maintained) was the first distribution with a fully functional, system-wide binary package manager, but that Perl might have a had a functional package manager limited to Perl libraries in development or even in use by some in 1993 too. [1]: https://framatube.org/w/uubjKne6swPQpJWiQLfqxd https://framatube.org/w/uubjKne6swPQpJWiQLfqxd [2]: https://bogus.org/ https://bogus.org/
seabass-labrax 3y ago
If you're using Debian, you can apt-install the debian-history package, which will put some nice HTML files in your /usr/share/doc/debian-history directory outlining the history of the project!
emersion 3y ago
Printed version here: https://web.archive.org/web/20151229025053/http://ianmurdock.com/post/new-release-under-development-suggestions-requested/ https://web.archive.org/web/20151229025053/http://ianmurdock... > Yes, that’s an actual scanned printout of the Debian announcement. I received such an overwhelming number of responses I had to print them out to avoid filling my 500 kilobyte (!) disk quota on the student Sequent Symmetry.
gowld 3y ago
It's amazing that when I discovered debian in 1997, it was just the thing that was the normal way to do Linux (OK, there were other competing options that were nice too), but actually it was a pretty new idea. And now it's 25 years later.
agumonkey 3y ago
For the french crowd, https://pdfbib.com/pdf/0325-formation-debian-gnu-linux.pdf https://pdfbib.com/pdf/0325-formation-debian-gnu-linux.pdf was a famous tutorial that many suggested to others before we had search engines. Alexis Delattre.
twic 3y ago
> 2) Debian will contain the most up-to-date of everything. No plan survives contact with the enemy.
ilyt 3y ago
I now have 2 machines that are older than 13 years (one 2007, other 2010 install) and just dist-upgrade every 2 years. Ships of Theseus, both of them, everything replaced at some point. Started with Mandrake (now Mandriva), Red Hat 6 (NOT RHEL) that I got with some book, then Storm Linux that eventually got me into Debian. The thing worth nothing back then is that if you wanted to say, install a package with dependencies, you could do that in installer of Red Hat or Mandrake, but tools in the OS didn't allow for that, yum only happened in 2002. So the first shock with Debian derivative was that I could just tell it to install package and it will find the deps. And it could uninstall those deps too! And UPGRADE WORKED! After Mandrake/Red Hat it was like a miracle. I also liked the fact Debian kept it "as vanilla as possible while still playing nice with rest of the packages, instead of... whatever the fuck RHEL was doing (without exaggeration we thousands lines of code of fixes for stuff in RHEL5/6... that just went away when we moved to Debian as there it worked). Wonderful distro, can't recommend it enough, especially on servers, slap unattended-upgrades on it and can basically forget it's there.
stavros 3y ago
Speaking of which, I installed Ubuntu today on my new home server, and, after having to remove snap and disable ads in the MOTD, I'm wondering whether a better choice exists. I just need something that will run Docker and will support my NUC's hardware well. Does anyone have any recommendations?
- NegativeK 3y ago
  I mean... Since you're here... Debian won't have snaps unless you install them, and they're including firmware blobs in the default release now. If you really need a recenter Docker, you can install it from the Docker website instead of apt. Debian stable will just keep on ticking and refuse to surprise you.
  - stavros 3y ago
    Yeah, that's basically why I'm asking. That's great, thank you. Which Debian version is the default one?
    - NegativeK 3y ago
      Here you go: https://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst https://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst . That image will give you a quicker small download; the rest of the packages will download during installation. Debian is currently on version 12, named Bookworm. If you install the stable version (the default option, which is similar to an Ubuntu LTS; I highly recommend it unless you know you need otherwise, and it's easy to change to testing or unstable in an existing install) it'll EOL in June 2026.
      - stavros 3y ago
        Fantastic, thank you! EDIT: One last question, does this include something like Ubuntu's fwmgr? After my Samsung SSD shipping with a critical bug that fwupd silently upgraded me away from, that's something I'm really looking for in an OS.
thsksbd 3y ago
I hated red hat, but its what I used in grad school until the post-doc told me to use Debian. I haven't looked back since; Debian's been my desktop since 2011 :)
GoofballJones 3y ago
1993 was around the time I first installed Linux. I can't remember much of it though, but I think the first distro I installed was Slackware? Maybe? I just remember being kind of jazzed about configuring it to look much like IRIX, which I was using on SGI machines at the shop I was working at the time. I remember Debian coming out then too, but forever reason I went with Slackware (I think) as my very first install. My brain is all fuzzy now.
pabs3 3y ago
Debian's celebratory blog post: https://bits.debian.org/2023/08/debian-turns-30.html https://bits.debian.org/2023/08/debian-turns-30.html
catboybotnet 3y ago
Wow, excited to see where this project will go!

381 points by ecliptik 3y ago

woleium 3y ago

Named after Deborah and Ian (Deborah was his girlfriend at the time)

Midnight1938 3y ago
[flagged]
- snvzz 3y ago
  Perhaps respect. e.g. I very much prefer to remember him for Debian.
- random467 3y ago
  [dead]
- themerone 3y ago
  Because most people aren't into conspiracy theories.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  The guy was sexually assaulted and then accused himself of sexual assault which got him “cancelled.” I followed him on Twitter back then, it’s hard to imagine it not being suicide after all of that.
- kergonath 3y ago
  How would that be relevant to what he did 20 years before? Also, because these conspiracy theories are bullshit? His death was a tragedy and a symptom of our times, but there’s no point banging on about it here.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
echelon_musk 3y ago
I embarrassingly used to pronounce it as "deebian" before being schooled by a graybeard.
- fortyseven 3y ago
  Shit, I say it like that! OH GOD, MY WORLD IS IN SHAMBLES. :D
- joemi 3y ago
  I don't think I've ever said it aloud, but that's how I always read it in my head.
- nicoburns 3y ago
  I always assumed it was pronounced "day-bian" until I heard the above story of how the name came to be.
midoridensha 3y ago
Yes, and this was a terrible idea. Deb and Ian ended up divorcing. Not a good omen for the future. Ian should have picked a better name. Edit: corrected history of their relationship
- steppi 3y ago
  While a college student, Murdock founded the Debian project in August 1993, and wrote the Debian Manifesto in January 1994. Murdock conceived Debian as a Linux distribution that embraced open design, contributions, and support from the free software community. He named Debian after his then-girlfriend (later wife) Debra Lynn, and himself.[3] They later married, had three children, and divorced in January 2008.[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Murdock https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Murdock

raxxorraxor 3y ago

> 1) someone who will eventually be willing to allow me to upload the release to their anonymous ftp-site. Please contact me. Back then data sharing was so good. Despite the now present security threats in a more weaponized net, this even beats the most convenient drag&drop sharing site. > Debian will contain the most up-to-date of everything. Ironic that today it is the dependable system. Still flexible enough for development, but I guess priorities have changed. Debian is my favorite distro, it just always works for me. The author seemed to have a tragic life and made many stops at different companies, would have been interesting to hear his reaction to the development of Debian. I don't know if he was still an active developer, Debian had many, many project leaders as far as I know.

macintux 3y ago
I worked closely with Ian at Progeny Linux. He wasn’t an active developer on Debian at that point in time, although he was very technically savvy.
TacticalCoder 3y ago
> I don't know if he was still an active developer According to Wikipedia he died in 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Murdock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Murdock
- edgyquant 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - jrockway 3y ago
    Are you sure Twitter is to blame? It seems like he was abused by the police.
    - throw81749202 3y ago
      I worked with him at the time of his death shortly after Christmas of 2015. There was definitely a toxic twitter mob, and it's also true that he had been in police custody the day before, but whether either of these things was the reason for his suicide was never clear.

snvzz 3y ago

It took a very long time to load. Perfectly illustrates how even serving tiny static files really is hard these days. >?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=Debian-announcement-1993.txt Perhaps that's why. There's some dynamic script duplicating the functionality of HTTP GET.

neilv 3y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20230816143054/https://wiki.debian.org/DebianHistory?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=Debian-announcement-1993.txt https://web.archive.org/web/20230816143054/https://wiki.debi...
whalesalad 3y ago
who would have imagined a post from 30 years ago might be in cold storage and take a lil while to load.
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  The first time, sure, but I'd expect it to be cached after that.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  If it was cold, it's not anymore.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

darkwater 3y ago

Happy 30th birthday, Debian!

HankB99 3y ago
Happy birthday Debian and thank you Mr. Murdock and all of the many devs and maintainers who have kept it going.
- stOneskull 3y ago
  Hear, Hear!

abhijeetpbodas 3y ago

> 2) Debian will contain the most up-to-date of everything. Hasn't aged too well, I suppose.

rollcat 3y ago
Quite the contrary, it aged extremely well. Debian testing/sid is very usable on a desktop/laptop; I've used it successfully in such fashion for something like a decade. Nowadays I do prefer a distro/OS with a 6-month release cycle (like NixOS or OpenBSD), but as far as rolling releases go, Debian has always been great.
- Corsome 3y ago
  What are the advantages of using Debian testing/sid rolling release instead of a regular rolling release distro (say, Arch)?
  - brnt 3y ago
    What's irregular about Debian, and why would I use Arch instead of it?
    - Corsome 3y ago
      I rather meant irregular with regards to Debian Sid not Debian in general. Arch only has rolling release mode so everyone is using the latest (thus any potential issue in Arch will affect bigger % of Arch users) while Debian has stable and testing and I was wondering if that'd make Sid less stable for practical use (since "it's not stable"). I don't want to start a distro war here, just wondering about some anecdata of actual distro users.
      - type0 3y ago
        Anecdata, if you aren't advanced user with new hw, Sid might be more robust, otherwise Arch is superior in almost any way. I wish it wasn't, I like Debian community more, it is less elitist.

kragen 3y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Murdock#Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Murdock#Death police reported finding him dead of suicide the day after he pledged to spend his life opposing police brutality like what he'd just experienced (after, it must be said, threatening suicide that day as well)

tuukkah 3y ago
Getting targetted (mistakenly or not) by the law enforcement for certain minor offences seems to be one of the most dangerous things that can happen to you: they won't investigate carefully and they won't presume you're innocent.
- dpkirchner 3y ago
  Something worth keeping in mind when people blame the victim with the classic "they should have complied!" retort.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - sdfghswe 3y ago
    > Something worth keeping in mind when people blame the victim with the classic "they should have complied!" retort. I noticed it's more common to get that retort if the victim is black and/or poor. If the victim is a middle class white American, you don't hear that.
  - imtringued 3y ago
    Compliance does nothing against American police violence. You're merely reducing the chance that they pull out a gun and execute you on the spot.
  - phone8675309 3y ago
    A summary execution by cop, regardless of how much you resist, should not be the punishment for any crime, yet we have enough bootlickers and sycophants that want to give the police carte blanche (yet also claim to be skeptical of government power somehow).

glonq 3y ago

My first awareness of Debian was in a surplus electronics store in Rohnert Park California. A kid who bore a striking resemblance to Martin Short's Ed Grimley character from SCTV brought a fat stack of floppy disks to the check-out and then proudly proclaimed that he was using them for installing Debian linux. Bless him.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

HeckFeck 3y ago

Interesting that they were called "releases" back then. I wonder when it became a "distribution"? Was that word only used by BSD back then?

cmrdporcupine 3y ago

Did it already have the .deb package format and the amazing apt repositories at this point? To me that is what blew my mind; the transitive dependency management and automatic upgrades made me not touch an RPM based distro again. I don't recall using this first release, I was probably still on SLS or something then, and I believe I briefly played with RedHat... But I did use it maybe a year or two later, and haven't stopped (okay, sometimes I use Ubuntu, shh).

mr_sturd 3y ago
Looks like the .deb format was introduced in 0.93[0]. Can't really tell if that was the time `dpkg` was introduced, in 1994. [0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deb_(file_format) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deb_(file_format)
lproven 3y ago
`.deb` was there basically from the start -- it was already in v1.0, AFAIK. APT didn't appear until Debian 2.1 "Slink" in 1999.

dehrmann 3y ago

I went to Purdue. Its LUG had 10 year birthday party of Debian, and alumnus Ian Murdock was there. Sadly, it was a week before the semester started, so I wasn't in-town, yet. https://www.cs.purdue.edu/news/articles/2003/debian-birthday-celebration.html https://www.cs.purdue.edu/news/articles/2003/debian-birthday...

aidenn0 3y ago
Hey, we were at Purdue at the same time (I graduated December '04)! That means the chances of me having met you in person are very slightly elevated compared to just a random person on HN...

hdjjhhvvhga 3y ago

> This library will contain packages like the S3 X-server It took me a moment to realize he meant a version of X for S3 cards. In the meantime, my brain was trying to imagine an X server running from an AWS bucket...

jeffbee 3y ago
Lost to history is the fact that XFree86 version 3 provided a different binary for some families of graphics card. If you owned an S3 911 (a very common "Windows accelerator" at that time) you needed XF86_S3 but if you owned one of S3's execrable ViRGE 3D cards you needed XF86_S3V. Having a single server that contained or could load every driver did not come until version 4.
- h2odragon 3y ago
  > S3's execrable ViRGE 3D cards twitch clocks so bad the screen would swim at 1024x768.
- sharts 3y ago
  Dang, I haven't heard S3 ViRGE in so long. That thing was terrible. But that's all I could have at the time and seemed to work well enough. As for those old "Win modems" back in the day...that's a different story.

davidw 3y ago

I have been happily using Debian, and its derivative Ubuntu since 1997. They do great work, and getting involved as a Debian packager was a great way to get involved in the world of open source for someone like me who had no college CS or professional background at that point. Indeed, it was a stepping stone to getting a job as a software developer.

myle 3y ago

The email looks like it describes Arch with the exception of the installer perhaps

OJFord 3y ago
Arch has an official/built-in installer now (as of last year iirc) - 'archinstall'.

mr_sturd 3y ago

Early Linux is before my time in computing. Had to look up SLS - Softlanding Linux System[0] - thought it might have been something to do with Slackware. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softlanding_Linux_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softlanding_Linux_System

jzb 3y ago
Other way around, really - Slackware was based on SLS.

gorgoiler 3y ago

Debian changed my life. My first look at an OS produced by a collective of disparate developers was RedHat 5.0 in the late 90s. Linux HOWTOs were basically all the docs I had. I got a pppd to answer the phone and dialed home from my friends house. I was logged in as root all the time. fvwm was the pinnacle of cool. Debian changed all that. Local, top quality documentation. A community. Packages that had been hand crafted to work like the rest of the system. The friction disappeared and let me move freely around the OS discovering things. Imagine walking around LA and then someone gives you a car and a map — that was the kind of difference in quality of experience it gave me. potato worked. woody felt like the future. I ran it for years on my iBook G3 (which one of the DDs helped me set up.) To this day, “sarge” still feels like the ultimate next gen, so it’s funny to see it is actually pretty old. To me, sarge means “futuristic out of touch thing” because I waited for it for so long. Thank you all so much.

TacticalCoder 3y ago
I did my little part to help Debian: I ordered 100 CDs of Debian 1.1 (in 1996? 1997?) from the US to Europe, which I then shipped to 100 people in Europe (and even some in north Africa). I ran out of the 100 CD and ordered 30 more and by then it was already Debian 1.2! (my old memory may be failing: it may have been 1.2 then 1.3 and not 1.1 then 1.2) It was hard to get Linux distro for some of us back then: dial-up at best and otherwise we'd buy magazines or books that'd come with a Linux CD. I've basically been using Debian and derivatives since forever. Did a short stint with Red Hat and Fedora back in the days but came back to Debian. Before Debian I was using Slackware. And as you said: thanks so much to everyone who worked on Debian!
antod 3y ago
That mirrors my first Linux/Unix experiences in the late 90s. Except for a short go at OpenBSD for firewalling between trying Redhat 5.0 and ending up on Debian. Debian just felt so much more "right" to me than Redhat did back then, and I never really went back to the Redhat side of the fence. This was despite Debian having way less third party support for anything back then - it wasn't really until Ubuntu took off that Debian (by extension) felt secure. Up until then, I always had a nagging feeling that the Redhat ecosystem would completely take over, and I would yet again have picked/preferred the wrong horse in the technology world. A big thank you to all the Debian devs/maintainers over the years.

NelsonMinar 3y ago

Nice to see the key innovation described so well: "The system will be easy to keep up-to-date with a 'upgrading' script in the base system" I don't know that dpkg was the first such upgrade system but it definitely still is one of the best. And continues to be, many later imitators are not nearly as effective. A key part of that is all the work done in packaging so that the packages are maintainable and upgradeable, of course.

tuukkah 3y ago
dpkg handles individual packages, while APT is used to handle dependencies and version upgrades. I recall using dselect as a predecessor of APT in the beginning, but I don't know if it was part of the first release. EDIT: dselect was developed at the same time as dpkg and was initially considered a part of it, so in that sense it was possible to upgrade a system by using just dpkg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dselect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dselect
- agumonkey 3y ago
  IIRC deselect was ultra ambitious, but out of the missed target, apt emerged (sic) as a solid cornerstone.
seabass-labrax 3y ago
I gave an online talk[1] about the history and future of package management last year that you might find interesting. It was very difficult to determine exactly what was the 'first'; as is often the case with big ideas, the Linux community seemed to spontaneously decide that it was needed and came up with multiple solutions in the space of just a few years. Even the question itself is complicated, because software did not typically come with a clear 'release date', which it usually has now. Ultimately, the conclusion I drew from my research was that Bogus Linux[2] (which is still available, but no longer maintained) was the first distribution with a fully functional, system-wide binary package manager, but that Perl might have a had a functional package manager limited to Perl libraries in development or even in use by some in 1993 too. [1]: https://framatube.org/w/uubjKne6swPQpJWiQLfqxd https://framatube.org/w/uubjKne6swPQpJWiQLfqxd [2]: https://bogus.org/ https://bogus.org/

seabass-labrax 3y ago

If you're using Debian, you can apt-install the debian-history package, which will put some nice HTML files in your /usr/share/doc/debian-history directory outlining the history of the project!

emersion 3y ago

Printed version here: https://web.archive.org/web/20151229025053/http://ianmurdock.com/post/new-release-under-development-suggestions-requested/ https://web.archive.org/web/20151229025053/http://ianmurdock... > Yes, that’s an actual scanned printout of the Debian announcement. I received such an overwhelming number of responses I had to print them out to avoid filling my 500 kilobyte (!) disk quota on the student Sequent Symmetry.

gowld 3y ago

It's amazing that when I discovered debian in 1997, it was just the thing that was the normal way to do Linux (OK, there were other competing options that were nice too), but actually it was a pretty new idea. And now it's 25 years later.

agumonkey 3y ago

For the french crowd, https://pdfbib.com/pdf/0325-formation-debian-gnu-linux.pdf https://pdfbib.com/pdf/0325-formation-debian-gnu-linux.pdf was a famous tutorial that many suggested to others before we had search engines. Alexis Delattre.

twic 3y ago

> 2) Debian will contain the most up-to-date of everything. No plan survives contact with the enemy.

ilyt 3y ago

I now have 2 machines that are older than 13 years (one 2007, other 2010 install) and just dist-upgrade every 2 years. Ships of Theseus, both of them, everything replaced at some point. Started with Mandrake (now Mandriva), Red Hat 6 (NOT RHEL) that I got with some book, then Storm Linux that eventually got me into Debian. The thing worth nothing back then is that if you wanted to say, install a package with dependencies, you could do that in installer of Red Hat or Mandrake, but tools in the OS didn't allow for that, yum only happened in 2002. So the first shock with Debian derivative was that I could just tell it to install package and it will find the deps. And it could uninstall those deps too! And UPGRADE WORKED! After Mandrake/Red Hat it was like a miracle. I also liked the fact Debian kept it "as vanilla as possible while still playing nice with rest of the packages, instead of... whatever the fuck RHEL was doing (without exaggeration we thousands lines of code of fixes for stuff in RHEL5/6... that just went away when we moved to Debian as there it worked). Wonderful distro, can't recommend it enough, especially on servers, slap unattended-upgrades on it and can basically forget it's there.

stavros 3y ago

Speaking of which, I installed Ubuntu today on my new home server, and, after having to remove snap and disable ads in the MOTD, I'm wondering whether a better choice exists. I just need something that will run Docker and will support my NUC's hardware well. Does anyone have any recommendations?

NegativeK 3y ago
I mean... Since you're here... Debian won't have snaps unless you install them, and they're including firmware blobs in the default release now. If you really need a recenter Docker, you can install it from the Docker website instead of apt. Debian stable will just keep on ticking and refuse to surprise you.
- stavros 3y ago
  Yeah, that's basically why I'm asking. That's great, thank you. Which Debian version is the default one?
  - NegativeK 3y ago
    Here you go: https://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst https://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst . That image will give you a quicker small download; the rest of the packages will download during installation. Debian is currently on version 12, named Bookworm. If you install the stable version (the default option, which is similar to an Ubuntu LTS; I highly recommend it unless you know you need otherwise, and it's easy to change to testing or unstable in an existing install) it'll EOL in June 2026.
    - stavros 3y ago
      Fantastic, thank you! EDIT: One last question, does this include something like Ubuntu's fwmgr? After my Samsung SSD shipping with a critical bug that fwupd silently upgraded me away from, that's something I'm really looking for in an OS.

thsksbd 3y ago

I hated red hat, but its what I used in grad school until the post-doc told me to use Debian. I haven't looked back since; Debian's been my desktop since 2011 :)

GoofballJones 3y ago

1993 was around the time I first installed Linux. I can't remember much of it though, but I think the first distro I installed was Slackware? Maybe? I just remember being kind of jazzed about configuring it to look much like IRIX, which I was using on SGI machines at the shop I was working at the time. I remember Debian coming out then too, but forever reason I went with Slackware (I think) as my very first install. My brain is all fuzzy now.

pabs3 3y ago

Debian's celebratory blog post: https://bits.debian.org/2023/08/debian-turns-30.html https://bits.debian.org/2023/08/debian-turns-30.html

catboybotnet 3y ago

Wow, excited to see where this project will go!