Debian

Debian is a Linux distribution and a royalty-free server and desktop operating system. Debian was released in 1993 and renamed Debian GNU/Linux in 1994. The word Debian was created from the first names of the developer Ian Murdoch and his wife Debra.

Behind the Debian project is a democratic organization with a constitution and elections. The Debian guidelines provide that all components of Debian are free and open source. The number of tools and applications suitable for Debian is estimated at over 29,000, the number of recognized developers at over 1,000.

Since version 6.0 (Squeeze) of February 2011, Debian is available in GNU/Linux and GNU/kFreeBSD variants. From the same date, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD was portable to the FreeBSD project's operating system kernel on 32 and 64 bit x86 machines.

Each Debian release goes through several stages. Thus at each time the variants (releases) Experimental, Unstable, Testing, Stable and Oldstable are offered parallel. To update older software and install new ones, Debian has the package management Dpkg and the frontend APT.

A Linux distribution significantly influenced by Debian is Ubuntu.