Debian GNU/Linux was the first project to be deliberately modelled on the principles of distributed software development, and provides the core software for many of the more successful commercial Linux distributions. Though Debian does not have the high profile of other Linux distributions the commercial success of Linux may owe more to the Debian community than advocates of Linux in the enterprise are ever likely to acknowledge.

Debian is both the most conservative and the most radical of Linux distributions, resolute and true to the ideals of the movement from which it sprang. The Debian project reaches back to a time when Linux was young and easy, when real programmers rode on the metal and coded in the buff, and a couple of floppies was sufficient to carry Linux, GNU and all the tools that were required to get a system up and running on a 386.

Owen le Blanc compiled the first 'MCC interim release' of Linux in February 1992, named after the Manchester Computing Centre in Manchester, England. Later that year Peter McDonald released SLS (Softlanding Linux System), which was the first attempt to pull together all the available software to make a popular Linux distribution as we might recognise it today.

But SLS wasn't to everybody's liking. There was little concept of packaging, and though the system was 'good enough' it left the user with lots of work to do. The shortcomings of SLS led Patrik Volkerding to create Slackware, which became the blueprint for many later commercial distributions, including Red Hat and SuSE. Dissatisfaction with SLS was also the spur for Ian Murdock's decision to initiate the Debian project. "SLS is possibly the most bug-ridden and badly maintained Linux distribution available," he wrote in 1994. "Unfortunately, it is also quite possibly the most popular."

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