At last week's DebConf 7 Debian Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, nearly 400 attendees had a chance to meet and socialise after years of working together online. They attended more than 100 talks and events, ranging from an update by the current and former Debian Project Leaders to a group trip to the Isle of Bute, off the opposite coast of the country.

«The Debian project announced yesterday that it has renamed the former “Custom Debian Distribution” concept (under which Debian projects such as Debian Edu, Debian Jr, Debian Med, Debian GIS and Debian Science were collectively known) to the catchier name “Debian Pure Blends.” ...»

Today is Debian's Birthday, and for a while I've wanted to do something special on this date. In order to raise the general motivation of the project, have a special day when everyone is invited to thank those that make our lives easier.

After 24 months of constant development, the Debian Project is proud to present its new stable version 6.0 (code name "Squeeze"). Debian 6.0 is a free operating system, coming for the first time in two flavours. Alongside Debian GNU/Linux, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is introduced with this version as a "technology preview".

The Debian project is proud to announce that the transition from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice has now been completed. LibreOffice has already been available for "testing" and "unstable" since March and has now been backported to Debian 6.0 "Squeeze", too.

I've had the pleasure of taking a special Debian 5.0 distribution (Debian 5.0 i386 XFCE LXDE) for a recent test drive as a virtual machine in Citrix XenServer 5.0.

This is not a rant about Debian vs. Ubuntu. I used both, loved both, and I'm currently using Debian Lenny. It's not about Debian versus any other distribution either: in fact, I only tried a few other distros, and most of them were Debian-based. Here are the top 10 reasons for which I enjoy using Debian:

Talking about this particular review with a trusted friend who far out-geeks me (but I’m working on it), he made the following comparison. “Isn’t reviewing Debian kind of like reviewing your mother?” There’s something to be said for that.

"The two things that Debian Developers absolutely agree on are – first, the uncompromising emphasis on free software, and second, the joy of Sid."