At the top of the tower is Debian — carefully organizing and fitting everything so it all works together. It's all free? You may be wondering: why would people spend hours of their own time to write software, carefully package it, and then give it all away?
The answers are as varied as the people who contribute. Some people like to help others. Many write programs to learn more about computers. More and more people are looking for ways to avoid the inflated price of software. A growing crowd contribute as a thank you for all the great free software they've received from others. Many in academia create free software to help get the results of their research into wider use. Businesses help maintain free software so they can have a say in how it develops -- there's no quicker way to get a new feature than to implement it yourself!
Of course, a lot of us just find it great fun. Debian is so committed to free software that we thought it would be useful if that commitment was formalized in a written document.
Thus, our Social Contract was born. Although Debian believes in free software, there are cases where people want or need to put non-free software on their machine. Whenever possible Debian will support this. There are even a growing number of packages whose sole job is to install non-free software into a Debian system. When buying a CD, you are paying for someone's time, capital outlay to make the disks, and risk in case they don't sell them all.
In other words, you are paying for a physical medium used to deliver the software, not for the software itself. When we use the word "free", we are referring to software freedom , not that it's without cost. You can read more on what we mean by "free software" and what the Free Software Foundation says on that subject. Most software costs over US dollars.
How can you give it away? A better question is how do software companies get away with charging so much? Software is not like making a car. Once you've made one copy of your software, the production costs to make a million more are tiny there's a reason Microsoft has so many billions in the bank.
Look at it another way: if you had an endless supply of sand in your backyard, you might be willing to give sand away. It would be foolish, though, to pay for a truck to take it to others. You would make them come and get it themselves equivalent to downloading off the net or they can pay someone else to deliver it to their door equivalent to buying a CD. Debian does not make any money from the sale of CDs.
At the same time, money is needed to pay for expenses such as domain registration and hardware. Thus, we ask that you buy from one of the CD vendors that donates a portion of your purchase to Debian.
What hardware is supported? Debian will run on almost all personal computers, including most older models. Each new release of Debian generally supports a larger number of computer architectures. For a complete list of currently supported ones, see the documentation for the stable release.
Only experienced users should consider using this distribution. See the unstable distribution pages for more information. This search engine allows you to search the contents of Debian distributions for any files or just parts of file names that are part of packages.
You can also get a full list of files in a given package. To report a problem with the web site, please e-mail our publicly archived mailing list debian-www lists. For other contact information, see the Debian contact page. Web site source code is available. Skip Quicknav Blog Micronews Planet. Packages Introductory notes View package lists Search package directories Search the contents of packages Introductory notes All packages that are included in the official Debian distribution are free according to the Debian Free Software Guidelines.
They include: Contrib Packages in this area are freely licensed by the copyright holder but depend on other software that is not free. Each Debian "release" contains well defined and unchanging contents. Updates are separately available. For a one-line description of the installation status of package foo , use the command dpkg --list foo. For a more verbose description, use:. Note that the existence of the program dpkg shows that you should be able to install Debian packages on your system.
Nearly all of the software in Debian supports UTF-8 as character set. Dan J. Bernstein used to distribute all software he has written with a restrictive license which does not allow modified binaries to be distributed. In november however, Bernstein said "[ See FAQ from distributors for his distribution terms. As of this writing , ezmlm-idx is available in experimental only mlmmj is similar, and shipped with Debian jessie ; djbdns is available in sid unstable only, see Bug and Bug for details and see dbndns for a similar alternative; the publicfile software is still not free software, a publicfile-installer package is available from Debian's contrib section.
Other software of Dan J. Bernstein qmail , daemontools , ucspi-tcp is shipped with Debian. Debian ships both gnash and swfdec : two free SWF movie players.
However, googleearth-package in the contrib-section might be helpful in using this software. Both are implemented by a wide variety of software in Debian main. Alternatively, use ndiswrapper to use a driver for Windows if you have one on your Linux system. See the Debian Wiki ndiswrapper page for more information. Chapter 5. Software available in the Debian system. Table of Contents 5.
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