Debian 0.01 through 0.90 (August-December 1993)
Debian 0.91 (January 1994): This release had a simple package system which could install and uninstall packages. The project had grown to several dozen people at this point.
Debian 0.93R5 (March 1995): Responsibility for each package was clearly
assigned to a developer by this point, and the package manager
(dpkg
) was used to install packages after the installation of a
base system.
Debian 0.93R6 (November 1995): dselect
appears. This was the last
Debian release using the a.out binary format; there were about 60 developers.
The first master.debian.org server was built by Bdale Garbee and hosted by HP
in parallel with the 0.93R6 release. The deployment of an explicit master
server on which Debian developers would construct each release led directly to
the formation of the Debian mirror network, and indirectly to the development
of many of the policies and procedures used to manage the project today.
Debian 1.1 Buzz (June 1996): This was the first Debian release with a code name. It was taken, like all others so far, from a character in the movie Toy Story... in this case, Buzz Lightyear. By this time, Bruce Perens had taken over leadership of the Project from Ian Murdock, and Bruce was working at Pixar, the company that produced the movie. This release was fully ELF, used Linux kernel 2.0, and contained 474 packages.
Debian 1.2 Rex (December 1996): Named for the plastic dinosaur in the movie. This release consisted of 848 packages maintained by 120 developers
Debian 1.3 Bo (July 1997): Named for Bo Peep, the shepherdess. This release consisted of 974 packages maintained by 200 developers.
Debian 2.0 Hamm (July 1998): Named for the piggy-bank in the movie. This was the first multi-architecture release of Debian, adding support for the Motorola 68000 series architectures. With Ian Jackson as Project Leader, this release made the transition to libc6, and consisted of over 1500 packages maintained by over 400 developers.
Debian 2.1 Slink (09 March 1999): Named for the slinky-dog in the
movie. Two more architectures were added, Alpha
and Sparc
. With Wichert
Akkerman as Project Leader, this release consisted of about 2250 packages and
required 2 CDs in the official set. The key technical innovation was the
introduction of apt
, a new package management interface. Widely
emulated, apt addressed issues resulting from Debian's continuing growth, and
established a new paradigm for package acquisition and installation on Open
Source operating systems.
Debian 2.2 Potato (15 August 2000): Named for "Mr Potato
Head" in the movie. This release added support for the PowerPC
and ARM
architectures. With
Wichert still serving as Project Leader, this release consisted of more than
3900 binary packages derived from over 2600 source packages maintained by more
than 450 Debian developers.
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