Debian sets course for summer

White smoke from the most cherished of all Linux distros Debian today. Project maintainer Anthony Towns has posted a progress update with a roadmap into next year.

Renowned for its silly names and the glacial pace of its development, Debian is nonetheless highly regarded for its flexibility and openness. If you can't do it with Debian, you can't do it with Linux. Or GNU/Linux.

And being the sole major distro not at the mercy of capital - private or public - Debian continues to support more platforms than any of its rivals. ARM, Motorola 68000, SPARC and PowerPC ports are maintained, alongside x86 of course. The first two names really ought to clock amber as clues to this distro's strategic import: Debian is the most attractive platform to embedded hardware partners who don't need a real-time OS. And that's a lot of potential adopters, with Transmeta among them.

"Woody's been in existance for eleven months, and that we probably want to think about freezing and releasing it in a few more months," announces Towns.

Don't you wish all press releases had this give-a-fuck insouciance?

OK, maybe it's just us. So following on from the 'Potato' release at LinuxWorld last year, 'Woody' is targeted for a freeze around June next year. KDE 2.0 and Gnome are in the main list, and the chief goal is to have glibc 2.2 ship shape on all platforms. Look, we didn't promise this was cutting edge stuff, but that's not the point... ®

Related Link

Read the full update at LinuxToday here, or at the Debian Web site