Debian 5 "Lenny" Mini-Review (Installation)

A bit of background info about Debian. Debian is a distribution of Linux which is well known for being incredibly stable. It is community developed rather than being developed by a company (Like Ubuntu, SUSE, or Red Hat for example). Debian has a stable release approximately once every 2 years. It is available for 12 different CPU architectures(!). There are 3 branches of Debian. Stable is... just that, stable. Testing is the development version of their next upcoming stable release. Unstable has no "release" and is always being updated with packages currently under development. Ubuntu is based on Debian Unstable.

All of the codenames of their releases are named after characters from Toy Story. The current release (5.0) is codenamed "Lenny", the next release is codenamed "Squeeze", and Unstable is codenamed "Sid".

I installed Debian 5.0.3 in Virtualbox 3.0.6 . The double point releases only include security and stability updates and don't contain any new features. I decided to try out the xfce version, rather than the standard install CD which includes the GNOME Desktop Environment.

A look at Haiku coming up soon

I was originally planning on looking at/reviewing Debian Linux 5.0 (Lenny) after my Arch Linux review, but I'll be looking at Haiku next. I downloaded the ISO file of Haiku Alpha 1 on Sunday when it was released and have been seeding since then, but I haven't tried it yet. Haiku is an open source operating system compatible with BeOS. It is not Linux or Unix. Apparently it's REALLY fast and lightweight.

After Haiku, I'll be looking at Debian 5(.0.3) .