Debian GNU/Linux is my favorite distribution of the GNU/Linux operating system. Ported to eleven architectures, with over 8710 packages in the stable branch and over 13000 in the unstable branch, Debian is the largest Free Software distribution on the planet!
I first started using Debian in 1998 while working for a small Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) company in central Minnesota. We had purchased a WindowsNT firewall package, a bundled packet filter and multi-protocol proxy server that had a bad memory leak. When the memory consumed by the application was large enough, the SMTP proxy refused to forward email in either direction. A few times each day, we had to stop and restart the service in order to "unstick" the email queue. It was clear to me that it had to go.
I called up a friend of mine, Ben Kochie, and asked if we would be able to install Linux to do network address translation (NAT) and packet filtering (ipchains). His reply was simply, "Yes." I grabbed an old Compaq 486DX66 with a 3.5" floppy drive and two ISA network cards and headed down to his house. A few hours later, with a notebook full URL's to HOWTO's and tutorials, I left his house with a fully working Debian GNU/Linux firewall.
Then next day, I simply swapped ethernet cables with the commercial firewall. No one knew the difference, and I was able to get a multi-thousand dollar refund for the errant commercial software. That is why I love Debian and Linux.
That year, I wiped the dual-boot setup on my home workstation and ran Debian, without the Windows "crutch" in reserve. It was the best decision I could have made then, and one I believe still applies today.
Initially, I applied [1] to be a Debian Developer [2] (DD) because one of the packages I depended upon heavily -- pnm2ppa, a printer driver for HP DeskJet 72x, 82x, 1000 printers -- had been orphaned. Rather than see it wallow in an unmaintained state, I applied to be a developer. I now maintain five source packages: clamsmtp, cheetah, gnats, gnatsweb, and pnm2ppa.
In the last couple years, there have been a few very nice sites and web applications designed to help track and summarize the work of DD's:
Supplementary to the package information above, you can access my GNU Arch repository at http://arch.debian.org/. I use the package John Goerzen's tla-buildpackage to manage the tree, so if you wish to build binary packages from the working directory, definitely install that package.
Currently, I'm sponsoring some of Bob Tanner's packages, and that's probably all I can handle for now.
| [1] | See "How to Join" at http://www.debian.org/devel/join/ |
| [2] | From the Constitution: "Developers are volunteers who agree to further the aims of the Project insofar as they participate in it, and who maintain package(s) for the Project or do other work which the Project Leader's Delegate(s) consider worthwhile. |