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 https://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 https://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.

Here are a few of the major Debian release milestones: