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A Brief History of Debian - Chapter 3
Debian Releases


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 a.out Debian release; there were about 60 developers. The first master.debian.org server was built in parallel with the 0.93R6 release.

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 move. 848 packages, 120 developers.

Debian 1.3 Bo (July 1997): Named for Bo Peep. 974 packages, 200 developers.

Debian 2.0 Hamm (July 1998): Named for the piggy-bank in the movie. First Debian release to support the Motorola 68000 series architecture. This release (made with Ian Jackson as Project Leader) made the transition to libc6, and had 1500+ packages and 400 developers.

Debian 2.1 Slink (09 March 1999): First Debian release to support the Alpha and Sparc architectures. This release (made with Wichert Akkerman as Project Leader) contained about 2250 packages on 2 Official CDs, and included apt, the new package management interface.

Debian 2.2 Potato (Feb 2000?):


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A Brief History of Debian
0.1 (last revised 29 December 1999)
Bdale Garbee bdale@debian.org