What is Debian?

Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer. An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run. Debian uses the Linux kernel (the core of an operating system), but most of the basic OS tools come from the GNU project; hence the name GNU/Linux.

Debian GNU/Linux provides more than a pure OS: it comes with more than 8710 packages, precompiled software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine.

Read more...

Getting Started

The latest stable release of Debian is 3.0r0. The last update to this release was made on July 19th, 2002. Read more about available versions of Debian.

If you'd like to start using Debian, you can easily obtain a copy, and then follow the installation instructions to install it.

To get help in using or setting up Debian, see our documentation and support pages.

Users that speak languages other than English should check the international section.

People who use systems other than Intel x86 should check the ports section.

News

[19 Jul 2002] Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 released
[13 Jul 2002] Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 updated (r7)
[13 Jun 2002] Gibraltar Firewall based on Debian
[22 May 2002] Debian Woody in less than two minutes
[01 May 2002] Debian at upcoming events in May
[03 Apr 2002] Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 updated (r6)

For older news items see the News Page. If you would like to receive mail whenever new Debian news comes out, subscribe to the debian-announce mailing list. Debian Weekly News is an in-depth summary of what's happened in the world of Debian.

Security Alerts

[25 Sep 2002] DSA-169 htcheck - cross site scripting
[18 Sep 2002] DSA-168 php - bypassing safe_mode, CRLF injection
[16 Sep 2002] DSA-167 kdelibs - cross site scripting
[13 Sep 2002] DSA-166 purity - buffer overflows
[12 Sep 2002] DSA-165 postgresql - buffer overflows
[10 Sep 2002] DSA-164 cacti - arbitrary code execution
[09 Sep 2002] DSA-163 mhonarc - cross site scripting
[06 Sep 2002] DSA-162 ethereal - buffer overflow
[04 Sep 2002] DSA-161 mantis - privilege escalation
[03 Sep 2002] DSA-160 scrollkeeper - insecure temporary file creation

For older security alerts see the Security Page. If you would like to receive security alerts as soon as they're announced, subscribe to the debian-security-announce mailing list.

Last Modified: Sat, Jul 20 05:25:05 UTC 2002
Copyright © 1997-2002 SPI; See license terms