Debian is one of the oldest and most well-known Linux distributions.

It is created and distributed entirely by volunteers, which explains some of its characteristics: the quality is very high, but the flashiness factor is often low.  It is very easy to keep the system up to date, and there are thousands of packages available.  Of particular interest to Tcl'ers, Debian has versions of [Tcl], [Tk], [tcllib], [BLT], [expect], [snack], [Rivet], [AOLserver], [tkcon], [itcl], [tix], [xotcl], [tclvfs], [Img] and a host of other packages.

[David Welton] is a Debian developer.

More information is available at http://www.debian.org

Used and recommended by a number of Tclers - including
   * [Andreas Kupries]
   * [Mike Tuxford]
   * [David Welton]
   * [Colin McCormack]
   * [Salvatore Sanfilippo]
   * [Christophe Muller]

A good way to test Debian is to try the Knoppix CD. If you install Knoppix to the hard-drive, it becomes a nicely configured Debian system. Debian itself can be tricky to make pretty. [PT]

[Luciano ES] survived a Debian installation earlier this year (2003). And shall not forget the experience any time soon.

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Other distributions used and recommended by Tcl'ers: [Suse]