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Protest against software patents

Due to the directive validating Software Patents that will be voted on at the European Parliament, we have decided to protest.

Citizens whose nations are part of the European Parliament -- please sign the Petition for a Software Patent Free Europe.

What is Debian?

Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer. An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run. Debian uses the Linux kernel (the core of an operating system), but most of the basic OS tools come from the GNU project; hence the name GNU/Linux.

Debian GNU/Linux provides more than a pure OS: it comes with more than 8710 packages, precompiled software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine.

Read more...

Getting Started

The latest stable release of Debian is 3.0r1. The last update to this release was made on December 16th, 2002. Read more about available versions of Debian.

If you'd like to start using Debian, you can easily obtain a copy, and then follow the installation instructions to install it.

To get help in using or setting up Debian, see our documentation and support pages.

Users that speak languages other than English should check the international section.

People who use systems other than Intel x86 should check the ports section.

News

For older news items see the News Page. If you would like to receive mail whenever new Debian news comes out, subscribe to the debian-announce mailing list. Debian Weekly News is an in-depth summary of what's happened in the world of Debian.

Security Alerts

For older security alerts see the Security Page. If you would like to receive security alerts as soon as they're announced, subscribe to the debian-security-announce mailing list.

This page is also available in the following languages:

How to set the default document language.

See the Debian contact page for information on contacting us.
Last Modified: Sun, Sep 14 13:33:33 UTC 2003
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