Debian

Hi everyone.

Hey, I am all the more excited about this blog entry because in this one I am gonna talk about the Debian distribution , though I think that it is quite difficult to try and explain this wonderfully versatile and lively project in a single blog post, such is the beauty and the ambitions of the Debian project.

So, I have decided to narrow it down to a few aspects, namely in three time-lines i.e. Past, Present and the Future of Debian. But first let us talk about why is it that this project sets so many hearts throbbing.BTW, I am gonna build upon my previous posts so now and again there would be references to what I have previously touched upon or written about in-depth. And another thing, this blog is by a beginner ( perhaps, a would-be geek! ) and for the beginner, so I am gonna take the liberty to give full forms and all other such nitty gritty details which are generally taken to be “understood”, so never mind me explaining things away.

So, Debian was born as a result of the open-source philosophy i.e. the idea that software should be free, free as in you-are-free-to-do-what-so-ever-with-it. Be it modify it, change it or even use it as an engine to build upon for your own implementation or a software. So, the need was felt for a free OS (Operating System) in accord with this philosophy. There came, Ian Murdock, still an undergraduate with his romantically named distribution. Debian actually stands for Debra+Ian, Debra was the name of his girlfriend at that point of time.

I wonder how come so many successfull projects, especially in IT, are started by students. Perhaps it’s the restlessness and the idealism of the age. Another example being Linux kernel, which again was initiated by a student, Linus Torvalds. We will talk more Linux in coming posts.

So, this Debian project caught attention of the legendary Richard M. Stallman ( rms) , who started the entire Free Software Foundation (FSF)  and Debian ended up being sponsored by the FSF’s GNU project. From then onwards the entire thing took off.

Today Debian is the foundation for many mainstream (well known) distributions of the Linux like Ubuntu (with it’s own derivatives ), Mint and one of my favourites Kali-Linux. The latter one is used for penetration (hacking) testing and proofing. So, this is one of the reasons that I believe, Debian really really rocks, as in übercool.

You know what amazes me the most about this entire culture, it’s the idea of collaboration. An open-source and as-honest-as-you-can-be collaboration. Of course, there are always some people with malevolent intentions but the overwhelming majority of people are learning to rely upon and trust these open-source systems after all the only thing more dangerous than a hard-core professional is an idealism-obsessed hobbyist.

Well, you might be thinking that giving everyone an opportunity to do anything with the data might be a bad idea. Of course, it would be, but the real power and the well-founded faith in open-source comes from the fact that the standard version is always peer-reviewed, so putting in a bit of code which could potentially compromise your privacy or security is next to impossible.

Think about it for a minute does Wikipedia not work, or let’s take Mozilla Firefox for example or even Google’s Android. You can actually swear by them, that’s how well they work. This peer-reviewing strategy is the master-stroke of the entire philosophy of Free Open Source Software ( FOSS) .

Oh boy, I have so much to say. Well, wait for it ! We will explore this realm together.

So, till next time,

This is Himanshu Sharma

Over and Out =)