Today, the Debian Project has overwhelmingly decided in a General Resolution to formally acknowlege the contribution made by many people who help Debian in ways other than maintaining packages -- by opening up the process of becoming an officially recognised Debian Developer.

Several months ago I created an article with 5 APT (Advanced Packaging Tool) tips for both Debian and Ubuntu available here. APT is the package manager in Debian and Debian-based distributions, like Ubuntu. Here's part two of that article, with 5 more tips and tricks for APT.

"I am very happy that 19 contributors who were waiting for their accounts, sometimes for a very long time, became Debian Developers today. This is great news for them, and for the project as a whole. Many thanks to all people involved for making this possible, including Joerg Jaspert, Steve McIntyre and James Troup. And congratulations to (using their account names)..."

Finally announced during the annual Debian Developer Conference "Debconf10" in New York that Debian "Squeeze" has now been frozen. In consequence this means that no more new features will be added and all work will now be concentrated on polishing Debian "Squeeze" to achieve the quality Debian stable releases are known for.

Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, a Debian developer who stated Debian's position on Mono in the default Debian install last week, has clarified his statement on the issue in a new posting.

«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.” ...»

It has been 22 months since developers started on the new version of Debian, code name Lenny. With most distros releasing every 6 months this is a distro with a different course. One of the things that separates Debian 5 Lenny from other distros is that it supports over 23,000 applications. That is 5 DVDs full of applications.

Debian is one of the oldest and most popular distributions among the Linux users. There are probably hundreds of distributions which are based on Debian, or others which are based on distributions which in turn are based on Debian. Although I'm not a Debian developer, I use it for over two years or so, and slowly got to love this OS.

Steve McIntyre is the recently elected Debian Prioject Leader. He is a software engineer and a long-time Debian developer. His best known contributions have been in the field of creating Debian CD/DVD images; he is the Debian-cd team leader and is responsible for generating the official images.