text:
Debian

Debian, also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software and optionally non-free firmware or software  developed by the community-supported Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. The first version of Debian (0.01) was released on September 15, 1993, and its first stable version (1.1) was released on June 17, 1996. The Debian Stable branch is the most popular edition for personal computers and servers. Debian is also the basis for many other distributions that have different purposes, like Proxmox for servers, Ubuntu or Linux Mint for desktops, Kali for penetration testing, and Pardus and Astra for government use.

Debian is one of the oldest operating systems based on the Linux kernel and, as of September 2023, the second oldest Linux distribution still in active development, only behind Slackware. The project is coordinated over the Internet by a team of volunteers guided by the Debian Project Leader and three foundational documents: the Debian Social Contract, the Debian Constitution, and the Debian Free Software Guidelines. New distributions are updated continually, and the next candidate is released after a time-based freeze.

In general, Debian has been developed openly and distributed freely according to some of the principles of the GNU Project and Free Software. Because of this, the Free Software Foundation sponsored the project from November 1994 to November 1995. However, it is no longer endorsed by GNU and the FSF due to the distribution's long-term practice of hosting non-free software repositories and, since 2022, its inclusion of non-free firmware in its installation media by default. On June 16, 1997, the Debian Project founded the nonprofit organization Software in the Public Interest to continue financially supporting development.

Debian version history
Debian distribution codenames are based on the names of characters from the Toy Story films. Debian's unstable trunk is named after Sid, a character who regularly destroyed his toys.

Founding (1993–1998)
First announced on August 16, 1993, Debian was founded by Ian Murdock, who initially called the system "the Debian Linux Release". The word "Debian" was formed as a portmanteau of the first name of his then-girlfriend (later ex-wife) Debra Lynn and his own first name. Before Debian's release, the Softlanding Linux System (SLS) had been a popular Linux distribution and the basis for Slackware. The perceived poor maintenance and prevalence of bugs in SLS motivated Murdock to launch a new distribution.

Debian 0.01, released on September 15, 1993, was the first of several internal releases. Version 0.90 was the first public release, providing support through mailing lists hosted at Pixar. The release included the Debian Linux Manifesto, outlining Murdock's view for the new operating system. In it he called for the creation of a distribution to be maintained "openly in the spirit of Linux and GNU."

The Debian project released the 0.9x versions in 1994 and 1995. During this time it was sponsored by the Free Software Foundation for one year. Ian Murdock delegated the base system, the core packages of Debian, to Bruce Perens and Murdock focused on the management of the growing project. The first ports to non-IA-32 architectures began in 1995, and Debian 1.1 was released in 1996. By that time and thanks to Ian Jackson, the dpkg package manager was already an essential part of Debian.

In 1996, Bruce Perens assumed the project leadership. Perens was a controversial leader, regarded as authoritarian and strongly attached to Debian. He drafted a social contract and edited suggestions from a month-long discussion into the Debian Social Contract and the Debian Free Software Guidelines. After the FSF withdrew their sponsorship in the midst of the free software vs. open source debate, Perens initiated the creation of the legal umbrella organization Software in the Public Interest instead of seeking renewed involvement with the FSF. He led the conversion of the project from a.out to ELF. He created the BusyBox program to make it possible to run a Debian installer on a single floppy disk, and wrote a new installer. By the time Debian 1.2 was released, the project had grown to nearly two hundred volunteers. Perens left the project in 1998.

Ian Jackson became the leader in 1998. Debian 2.0 introduced the second official port, m68k. During this time the first port to a non-Linux kernel, Debian GNU/Hurd, was started. On December 2, the first Debian Constitution was ratified.

Leader election (1999–2005)
From 1999, the project leader was elected yearly. The Advanced Packaging Tool was deployed with Debian 2.1. The number of applicants was overwhelming and the project established the new member process. The first Debian derivatives, namely Libranet, Corel Linux and Stormix's Storm Linux, were started in 1999. The 2.2 release in 2000 was dedicated to Joel Klecker, a developer who died of Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

In late 2000, the project reorganized the archive with new package "pools" and created the Testing distribution, made up of packages considered stable, to reduce the freeze for the next release. In the same year, developers began holding an annual conference called DebConf with talks and workshops for developers and technical users. In May 2001, Hewlett-Packard announced plans to base its Linux development on Debian.

In July 2002, the project released version 3.0, code-named Woody, the first release to include cryptographic software, a free licensed KDE and internationalization. During these last release cycles, the Debian project drew considerable criticism from the free software community because of the long time between stable releases.

Some events disturbed the project while working on Sarge, as Debian servers were attacked by fire and hackers. One of the most memorable was the Vancouver prospectus. After a meeting held in Vancouver, release manager Steve Langasek announced a plan to reduce the number of supported ports to four in order to shorten future release cycles. There was a large reaction because the proposal looked more like a decision and because such a drop would damage Debian's aim to be "the universal operating system".

The first version of the Debian-based Ubuntu, named "4.10 Warty Warthog", was released on October 20, 2004. Because it was distributed as a free download, it became one of the most popular and successful operating systems with more than "40 million users" according to Canonical Ltd. However, Murdock was critical of the differences between Ubuntu packages and Debian, stating that it leads to incompatibilities.

Sarge and later releases (2005–present)
The 3.1 Sarge release was made in June 2005. This release updated 73% of the software and included over 9,000 new packages. A new installer with a modular design, Debian-Installer, allowed installations with RAID, XFS and LVM support, improved hardware detection, made installations easier for novice users, and was translated into almost forty languages. An installation manual and release notes were in ten and fifteen languages respectively. The efforts of Skolelinux, Debian-Med and Debian-Accessibility raised the number of packages that were educational, had a medical affiliation, and ones made for people with disabilities.

In 2006, as a result of a much-publicized dispute, Mozilla software was rebranded in Debian, with Firefox forked as Iceweasel and Thunderbird as Icedove. The Mozilla Corporation stated that software with unapproved modifications could not be distributed under the Firefox trademark. Two reasons that Debian modified the Firefox software were to change non-free artwork and to provide security patches. In February 2016, it was announced that Mozilla and Debian had reached an agreement and Iceweasel would revert to the name Firefox; similar agreement was anticipated for Icedove/Thunderbird.

A fund-raising experiment, Dunc-Tank, was created to solve the release cycle problem and release managers were paid to work full-time; in response, unpaid developers slowed down their work and the release was delayed. Debian 4.0 (Etch) was released in April 2007, featuring the x86-64 port and a graphical installer. Debian 5.0 (Lenny) was released in February 2009, supporting Marvell's Orion platform and netbooks such as the Asus Eee PC. The release was dedicated to Thiemo Seufer, a developer who died in a car crash.

In July 2009, the policy of time-based development freezes on a two-year cycle was announced. Time-based freezes are intended to blend the predictability of time based releases with Debian's policy of feature based releases, and to reduce overall freeze time. The Squeeze cycle was going to be especially short; however, this initial schedule was abandoned. In September 2010, the backports service became official, providing more recent versions of some software for the stable release.

Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) was released in February 2011, featuring Debian GNU/kFreeBSD as a technology preview, along with adding a dependency-based boot system, and moving problematic firmware to the non-free section. Debian 7.0 (Wheezy) was released in May 2013, featuring multiarch support. Debian 8.0 (Jessie) was released in April 2015, using systemd as the new init system. Debian 9.0 (Stretch) was released in June 2017, with nftables as a replacement for iptables, support for Flatpak apps, and MariaDB as the replacement for MySQL. Debian 10.0 (Buster) was released in July 2019, adding support for Secure Boot and enabling AppArmor by default. Debian 11.0 (Bullseye) was released in August 2021, enabling persistency in the system journal, adding support for driverless scanning, and containing kernel-level support for exFAT filesystems. Debian 12.0 (Bookworm) was released on June 10, 2023, including various improvements and features, increasing the supported Linux Kernel to version 6.1, and leveraging new "Emerald" artwork. Debian is still in development and new packages are uploaded to unstable every day.

Debian used to be released as a very large set of CDs for each architecture, but with the release of Debian 9 (Stretch) in 2017, many of the images have been dropped from the archive but remain buildable via jigdo.

Throughout Debian's lifetime, both the Debian distribution and its website have won various awards from different organizations, including Server Distribution of the Year 2011, The best Linux distro of 2011, and a Best of the Net award for October 1998.

On December 2, 2015, Microsoft announced that they would offer Debian GNU/Linux as an endorsed distribution on the Azure cloud platform. Microsoft has also added a user environment to their Windows 10 desktop operating system called Windows Subsystem for Linux that offers a Debian subset.

Features

Debian has access to online repositories that contain over 51,000 packages. Debian officially contains only free software, but non-free software can be downloaded and installed from the Debian repositories. Debian includes popular free programs such as LibreOffice, Firefox web browser, Evolution mail, K3b disc burner, VLC media player, GIMP image editor, and Evince document viewer. Debian is a popular choice for servers, for example as the operating system component of a LAMP stack.

Kernels
Several flavors of the Linux kernel exist for each port. For example, the i386 port has flavors for IA-32 PCs supporting Physical Address Extension and real-time computing, for older PCs, and for x86-64 PCs. The Linux kernel does not officially contain firmware lacking source code, although such firmware is available in non-free packages and alternative installation media.

Desktop environments

Debian offers CD and DVD images specifically built for Xfce, GNOME, KDE, MATE, Cinnamon, LXDE, and LXQt. MATE support was added in 2014, and Cinnamon support was added with Debian 8.0 Jessie. Less common window managers such as Enlightenment, Openbox, Fluxbox, IceWM, Window Maker and others are available.

The default desktop environment of version 7.0 Wheezy was temporarily switched to Xfce, because GNOME 3 did not fit on the first CD of the set. The default for the version 8.0 Jessie was changed again to Xfce in November 2013, and back to GNOME in September 2014.

Localization
Several parts of Debian are translated into languages other than American English, including package descriptions, configuration messages, documentation and the website. The level of software localization depends on the language, ranging from the highly supported German and French to the barely translated Creek and Samoan. The Debian 10 installer is available in 76 languages.

Multimedia support
Multimedia support has been problematic in Debian regarding codecs threatened by possible patent infringements, lacking source code, or under too restrictive licenses. Even though packages with problems related to their distribution could go into the non-free area, software such as libdvdcss is not hosted at Debian.

A notable third party repository exists, formerly named Debian-multimedia.org,  providing software not present in Debian such as Windows codecs, libdvdcss and the Adobe Flash Player. Even though this repository is maintained by Christian Marillat, a Debian developer, it is not part of the project and is not hosted on a Debian server. The repository provides packages already included in Debian, interfering with the official maintenance. Eventually, project leader Stefano Zacchiroli asked Marillat to either settle an agreement about the packaging or to stop using the "Debian" name. Marillat chose the latter and renamed the repository to deb-multimedia.org. The repository was so popular that the switchover was announced by the official blog of the Debian project.

Distribution
Debian offers DVD and CD images for installation that can be downloaded using BitTorrent or jigdo. Physical discs can also be bought from retailers. The full sets are made up of several discs (the amd64 port consists of 13 DVDs or 84 CDs), but only the first disc is required for installation, as the installer can retrieve software not contained in the first disc image from online repositories.

Debian offers different network installation methods. A minimal install of Debian is available via the netinst CD, whereby Debian is installed with just a base and later added software can be downloaded from the Internet. Another option is to boot the installer from the network.

The default bootstrap loader is GNU GRUB version 2, though the package name is simply grub, while version 1 was renamed to grub-legacy. This conflicts with distros (e.g., Fedora Linux), where grub version 2 is named grub2.

The default desktop may be chosen from the DVD boot menu among GNOME, KDE Plasma, Xfce and LXDE, and from special disc 1 CDs.

Debian releases live install images for CDs, DVDs and USB thumb drives, for IA-32 and x86-64 architectures, and with a choice of desktop environments. These Debian Live images allow users to boot from removable media and run Debian without affecting the contents of their computer. A full install of Debian to the computer's hard drive can be initiated from the live image environment. Personalized images can be built with the live-build tool for discs, USB drives and for network booting purposes. Installation images are hybrid on some architectures and can be used to create a bootable USB drive (Live USB).

Packages
Package management operations can be performed with different tools available on Debian, from the lowest level command dpkg to graphical front-ends like Synaptic. The recommended standard for administering packages on a Debian system is the apt toolset.

dpkg provides the low-level infrastructure for package management. The dpkg database contains the list of installed software on the current system. The dpkg command tool does not know about repositories. The command can work with local .deb package files, and information from the dpkg database.

APT tools
An Advanced Packaging Tool (APT) allows a Debian system to retrieve and resolve package dependencies from repositories. APT tools share dependency information and cached packages.
 * The apt command itself is intended as an end user interface and enables some options better suited for interactive usage by default compared to more specialized APT like apt-get and apt-cache explained below.
 * apt-get and apt-cache are command tools of the standard apt package. apt-get installs and removes packages, and apt-cache is used for searching packages and displaying package information.
 * Aptitude is a command line tool that also offers a text-based user interface. The program comes with enhancements such as better search on package metadata.

GDebi and other front-ends
GDebi is an APT tool which can be used in command-line and on the GUI. GDebi can install a local .deb file via the command line like the dpkg command, but with access to repositories to resolve dependencies. Other graphical front-ends for APT include Software Center, Synaptic and Apper.

GNOME Software is a graphical front-end for PackageKit, which itself can work on top of various software packaging systems.

Repositories
The Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) define the distinctive meaning of the word "free" as in "free and open-source software". Packages that comply with these guidelines, usually under the GNU General Public License, Modified BSD License or Artistic License, are included inside the main area; otherwise, they are included inside the non-free and contrib areas. These last two areas are not distributed within the official installation media, but they can be adopted manually.

Non-free includes packages that do not comply with the DFSG, such as documentation with invariant sections and proprietary software, and legally questionable packages. Contrib includes packages which do comply with the DFSG but fail other requirements. For example, they may depend on packages which are in non-free or requires such for building them.

Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation have criticized the Debian project for hosting the non-free repository and because the contrib and non-free areas are easily accessible, an opinion echoed by some in Debian including the former project leader Wichert Akkerman. The internal dissent in the Debian project regarding the non-free section has persisted, but the last time it came to a vote in 2004, the majority decided to keep it.

Cross-distribution package manager
The most popular optional Linux cross-distribution package manager are graphical (front-ends) package managers. They are available within the official Debian Repository but are not installed by default. They are widely popular with both Debian users and Debian software developers who are interested in installing the most recent versions of application or using the cross-distribution package manager built-in sandbox environment. While at the same time remaining in control of the security.

Four most popular cross-distribution package managers, sorted in alphabetical order:
 * AppImage Linux distribution-agnostic binary software deployment
 * Flatpak software code is owned and maintained by the not for profit Flatpak Team, with an open source LGPL-2.1-or-later license.
 * Homebrew software code is owned and maintained by its original author Max Howell, with an open source BSD 2-Clause License.
 * Snap software code is owned and maintained by the for profit Canonical Group Limited, with an open source GNU General Public License, version 3.0.

Branches

Three branches of Debian (also called releases, distributions or suites) are regularly maintained:
 * Stable is the current release and targets stable and well-tested software needs. Stable is made by freezing Testing for a few months where bugs are fixed and packages with too many bugs are removed; then the resulting system is released as stable. It is updated only if major security or usability fixes are incorporated. This branch has an optional backports service that provides more recent versions of some software. Stable's CDs and DVDs can be found in the Debian website. The current version of Stable is codenamed bookworm.
 * Testing is the preview branch that will eventually become the next major release. The packages included in this branch have had some testing in unstable but they may not be fit for release yet. It contains newer packages than stable but older than unstable. This branch is updated continually until it is frozen. Testing's CDs and DVDs can be found on the Debian website. The current version of Testing is codenamed trixie.
 * Unstable, always codenamed sid, is the trunk. Packages are accepted without checking the distribution as a whole. This branch is usually run by software developers who participate in a project and need the latest libraries available, and by those who prefer bleeding-edge software. Debian does not provide full Sid installation discs, but rather a minimal ISO that can be used to install over a network connection. Additionally, this branch can be installed through a system upgrade from stable or testing.

Other branches in Debian:
 * Oldstable is the prior stable release. It is supported by the Debian Security Team until one year after a new stable is released, and since the release of Debian 6, for another two years through the Long Term Support project. Eventually, oldstable is moved to a repository for archived releases. Debian 11 is the current Oldstable release (since 2023-06-10).
 * Oldoldstable is the prior oldstable release. It is supported by the Long Term Support community. Eventually, oldoldstable is moved to a repository for archived releases. Debian 10 is the current Oldoldstable release (since 2023-06-10).
 * Experimental is a temporary staging area of highly experimental software that is likely to break the system. It is not a full distribution and missing dependencies are commonly found in unstable, where new software without the damage chance is normally uploaded.

The snapshot archive provides older versions of the branches. They may be used to install a specific older version of some software.

Numbering scheme
Stable and oldstable get minor updates, called point releases;, the stable release is version 11.7, released on April 29, 2023, and the oldstable release is version 10.10.

The numbering scheme for the point releases up to Debian 4.0 was to include the letter r (for revision) after the main version number and then the number of the point release; for example, the latest point release of version 4.0 is 4.0r9. This scheme was chosen because a new dotted version would make the old one look obsolete and vendors would have trouble selling their CDs.

From Debian 5.0, the numbering scheme of point releases was changed, conforming to the GNU version numbering standard; the first point release of Debian 5.0 was 5.0.1 instead of 5.0r1. The numbering scheme was once again changed for the first Debian 7 update, which was version 7.1. The r scheme is no longer in use, but point release announcements include a note about not throwing away old CDs.

Branding

Debian has two logos. The official logo (also known as open use logo ) contains the well-known Debian swirl and best represents the visual identity of the Debian Project. A separate, restricted-use logo, also exists for use by the Debian Project and its members only.

The Debian "swirl" logo was designed by Raul Silva in 1999 as part of a contest to replace the semi-official logo that had been used. The winner of the contest received an @Debian.org email address, and a set of Debian 2.1 install CDs for the architecture of their choice. Initially, the swirl was magic smoke arising from an also included bottle of an Arabian-style genie presented in black profile, but shortly after was reduced to the red smoke swirl for situations where space or multiple colours were not an option, and before long the bottle version effectively was superseded. There has been no official statement from the Debian project on the logo's meaning, but at the time of the logo's selection, it was suggested that the logo represented the magic smoke ( or the genie ) that made computers work.

One theory about the origin of the Debian logo is that Buzz Lightyear, the chosen character for the first named Debian release, has a swirl in his chin. Stefano Zacchiroli also suggested that this swirl is the Debian one. Buzz Lightyear's swirl is a more likely candidate as the codenames for Debian are names of Toy Story characters. The former Debian project leader Bruce Perens used to work for Pixar and is credited as a studio tools engineer on Toy Story 2 (1999).

Hardware
Hardware requirements are at least those of the kernel and the GNU toolsets. Debian's recommended system requirements depend on the level of installation, which corresponds to increased numbers of installed components:

The real minimum memory requirements depend on the architecture and may be much less than the numbers listed in this table. It is possible to install Debian with 170 MB of RAM for x86-64; the installer will run in low memory mode and it is recommended to create a swap partition. The installer for z/Architecture requires about 20 MB of RAM, but relies on network hardware. Similarly, disk space requirements, which depend on the packages to be installed, can be reduced by manually selecting the packages needed. , no Pure Blend exists that would lower the hardware requirements easily.

It is possible to run graphical user interfaces on older or low-end systems, but the installation of window managers instead of desktop environments is recommended, as desktop environments are more resource intensive. Requirements for individual software vary widely and must be considered, with those of the base operating environment.

Architectures

, the official ports are:
 * amd64: x86-64 architecture with 64-bit userland and supporting 32-bit software
 * arm64: ARMv8-A architecture
 * armel: Little-endian ARM architecture (ARMv4T instruction set) on various embedded systems (embedded application binary interface (EABI)), although support has ended after Buster
 * armhf: ARM hard-float architecture (ARMv7 instruction set) requiring hardware with a floating-point unit
 * i386: IA-32 architecture with 32-bit userland, compatible with x86-64 machines
 * mips64el: Little-endian 64-bit MIPS
 * mipsel: Little-endian 32-bit MIPS
 * ppc64el: Little-endian PowerPC architecture supporting POWER7+ and POWER8 CPUs
 * riscv64: 64-bit RISC-V
 * s390x: z/Architecture with 64-bit userland, intended to replace s390

Unofficial ports are available as part of the unstable distribution:
 * alpha: DEC Alpha architecture
 * hppa: HP PA-RISC architecture
 * hurd-i386: GNU Hurd kernel on IA-32 architecture
 * ia64: Intel Itanium
 * loong64: LoongArch
 * m68k: Motorola 68k architecture on Amiga, Atari, Macintosh and various embedded VME systems
 * powerpc: 32-bit PowerPC
 * ppc64: PowerPC64 architecture supporting 64-bit PowerPC CPUs with VMX
 * sh4: Hitachi SuperH architecture
 * sparc64: Sun SPARC architecture with 64-bit userland
 * x32: x32 ABI userland for x86-64

Debian supports a variety of ARM-based NAS devices. The NSLU2 was supported by the installer in Debian 4.0 and 5.0, and Martin Michlmayr is providing installation tarballs since version 6.0. Other supported NAS devices are the Buffalo Kurobox Pro, GLAN Tank, Thecus N2100 and QNAP Turbo Stations.

Devices based on the Kirkwood system on a chip (SoC) are supported too, such as the SheevaPlug plug computer and OpenRD products. There are efforts to run Debian on mobile devices, but this is not a project goal yet since the Debian Linux kernel maintainers would not apply the needed patches. Nevertheless, there are packages for resource-limited systems.

There are efforts to support Debian on wireless access points. Debian is known to run on set-top boxes. Work is ongoing to support the AM335x processor, which is used in electronic point of service solutions. Debian may be customized to run on cash machines.

BeagleBoard, a low-power open-source hardware single-board computer (made by Texas Instruments) has switched to Debian Linux preloaded on its Beaglebone Black board's flash.

Roqos Core, manufactured by Roqos, is a x86-64 based IPS firewall router running Debian Linux.

Organization
Debian's policies and team efforts focus on collaborative software development and testing processes. As a result, a new major release tends to occur every two years with revision releases that fix security issues and important problems. The Debian project is a volunteer organization with three foundational documents:
 * The Debian Social Contract defines a set of basic principles by which the project and its developers conduct affairs.
 * The Debian Free Software Guidelines define the criteria for "free software" and thus what software is permissible in the distribution. These guidelines have been adopted as the basis of the Open Source Definition. Although this document can be considered separate, it formally is part of the Social Contract.
 * The Debian Constitution describes the organizational structure for formal decision-making within the project, and enumerates the powers and responsibilities of the Project Leader, the Secretary and other roles.

Debian developers are organized in a web of trust. There are about one thousand active Debian developers,  but it is possible to contribute to the project without being an official developer.

The project maintains official mailing lists and conferences for communication and coordination between developers. For issues with single packages and other tasks, a public bug tracking system is used by developers and end users. Internet Relay Chat is also used for communication among developers and to provide real time help.

Debian is supported by donations made to organizations authorized by the leader. The largest supporter is Software in the Public Interest, the owner of the Debian trademark, manager of the monetary donations and umbrella organization for various other community free software projects.

A Project Leader is elected once per year by the developers. The leader has special powers, but they are not absolute, and appoints delegates to perform specialized tasks. Delegates make decisions as they think is best, taking into account technical criteria and consensus. By way of a General Resolution, the developers may recall the leader, reverse a decision made by the leader or a delegate, amend foundational documents and make other binding decisions. The voting method is based on the Schulze method (Cloneproof Schwartz Sequential Dropping).

Project leadership is distributed occasionally. Branden Robinson was helped by the Project Scud, a team of developers that assisted the leader, but there were concerns that such leadership would split Debian into two developer classes. Anthony Towns created a supplemental position, Second In Charge (2IC), that shared some powers of the leader. Steve McIntyre was 2IC and had a 2IC himself.

One important role in Debian's leadership is that of a release manager. The release team sets goals for the next release, supervises the processes and decides when to release. The team is led by the next release managers and stable release managers. Release assistants were introduced in 2003.

Developers
The Debian Project has an influx of applicants wishing to become developers. These applicants must undergo a vetting process which establishes their identity, motivation, understanding of the project's principles, and technical competence. This process has become much harder throughout the years.

Debian developers join the project for many reasons. Some that have been cited include:
 * Debian is their main operating system and they want to promote Debian
 * To improve the support for their favorite technology
 * They are involved with a Debian derivative
 * A desire to contribute back to the free-software community
 * To make their Debian maintenance work easier

Debian developers may resign their positions at any time or, when deemed necessary, they can be expelled. Those who follow the retiring protocol are granted the "emeritus" status and they may regain their membership through a shortened new member process.

Development
Flowchart of the life cycle of a Debian package

Each software package has a maintainer that may be either one person or a team of Debian developers and non-developer maintainers. The maintainer keeps track of upstream releases, and ensures that the package coheres with the rest of the distribution and meets the standards of quality of Debian. Packages may include modifications introduced by Debian to achieve compliance with Debian Policy, even to fix non-Debian specific bugs, although coordination with upstream developers is advised.

The maintainer releases a new version by uploading the package to the "incoming" system, which verifies the integrity of the packages and their digital signatures. If the package is found to be valid, it is installed in the package archive into an area called the "pool" and distributed every day to hundreds of mirrors worldwide. The upload must be signed using OpenPGP-compatible software. All Debian developers have individual cryptographic key pairs. Developers are responsible for any package they upload even if the packaging was prepared by another contributor.

Initially, an accepted package is only available in the unstable branch. For a package to become a candidate for the next release, it must migrate to the Testing branch by meeting the following:
 * It has been in unstable for a certain length of time that depends on the urgency of the changes.
 * It does not have "release-critical" bugs, except for the ones already present in Testing. Release-critical bugs are those considered serious enough that they make the package unsuitable for release.
 * There are no outdated versions in unstable for any release ports.
 * The migration does not break any packages in Testing.
 * Its dependencies can be satisfied by packages already in Testing or by packages being migrated at the same time.
 * The migration is not blocked by a freeze.

Thus, a release-critical bug in a new version of a shared library on which many packages depend may prevent those packages from entering Testing, because the updated library must meet the requirements too. From the branch viewpoint, the migration process happens twice per day, rendering Testing in perpetual beta.

Periodically, the release team publishes guidelines to the developers in order to ready the release. A new release occurs after a freeze, when all important software is reasonably up-to-date in the Testing branch and any other significant issues are solved. At that time, all packages in the testing branch become the new stable branch. Although freeze dates are time-based, release dates are not, which are announced by the release managers a couple of weeks beforehand.

A version of a package can belong to more than one branch, usually testing and unstable. It is possible for a package to keep the same version between stable releases and be part of oldstable, stable, testing and unstable at the same time. Each branch can be seen as a collection of pointers into the package "pool" mentioned above.

One way to resolve the challenge of a release-critical bug in a new application version is the use of optional package managers. They allow software developers to use sandbox environments, while at the same time remaining in control of security. Another benefit of a cross-distribution package manager is that they allow application developers to directly provide updates to users without going through distributions, and without having to package and test the application separately for each distribution.

Release cycle
A new stable branch of Debian gets released approximately every 2 years. It will receive official support for about 3 years with update for major security or usability fixes. Point releases will be available every several months as determined by Stable Release Managers (SRM).

Debian also launched its Long Term Support (LTS) project since Debian 6 (Debian Squeeze). For each Debian release, it will receive two years of extra security updates provided by LTS Team after its End Of Life (EOL). However, no point releases will be made. Now each Debian release can receive 5 years of security support in total.

Security
The Debian project handles security through public disclosure. Debian security advisories are compatible with the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures dictionary, are usually coordinated with other free software vendors and are published the same day a vulnerability is made public. There used to be a security audit project that focused on packages in the stable release looking for security bugs; Steve Kemp, who started the project, retired in 2011 but resumed his activities and applied to rejoin in 2014.

The stable branch is supported by the Debian security team; oldstable is supported for one year. Although Squeeze is not officially supported, Debian is coordinating an effort to provide long-term support (LTS) until February 2016, five years after the initial release, but only for the IA-32 and x86-64 platforms. Testing is supported by the testing security team, but does not receive updates in as timely a manner as stable. Unstable's security is left for the package maintainers.

The Debian project offers documentation and tools to harden a Debian installation both manually and automatically. AppArmor support is available and enabled by default since Buster. Debian provides an optional hardening wrapper, and does not harden all of its software by default using gcc features such as PIE and buffer overflow protection, unlike operating systems such as OpenBSD, but tries to build as many packages as possible with hardening flags.

In May 2008, a Debian developer discovered that the OpenSSL package distributed with Debian and derivatives such as Ubuntu made a variety of security keys vulnerable to a random number generator attack, since only 32,767 different keys were generated. The security weakness was caused by changes made in 2006 by another Debian developer in response to memory debugger warnings. The complete resolution procedure was cumbersome because patching the security hole was not enough; it involved regenerating all affected keys and certificates.

Value
The cost of developing all of the packages included in Debian 5.0 Lenny (323 million lines of code) has been estimated to be about US$8 billion, using one method based on the COCOMO model. , Black Duck Open Hub estimated that the current codebase (74 million lines of code) would cost about US$1.6 billion to develop, using a different method based on the same model.

Forks and derivatives
A large number of forks and derivatives have been built upon Debian over the years. Among the more notable are Ubuntu, developed by Canonical Ltd. and first released in 2004, which has surpassed Debian in popularity with desktop users; Knoppix, first released in the year 2000 and one of the first distributions optimized to boot from external storage; and Devuan, which gained attention in 2014 when it forked in disagreement over Debian's adoption of the systemd software suite, and has been mirroring Debian releases since 2017. The Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) uses Debian Stable as the software source base since 2014.

Derivatives and flavors
Debian is one of the most popular Linux distributions, and many other distributions have been created from the Debian codebase. , DistroWatch lists 121 active Debian derivatives. The Debian project provides its derivatives with guidelines for best practices and encourages derivatives to merge their work back into Debian.

Debian Pure Blends are subsets of a Debian release configured out-of-the-box for users with particular skills and interests. For example, Debian Jr. is made for children, while Debian Science is for researchers and scientists. The complete Debian distribution includes all available Debian Pure Blends. "Debian Blend" (without "Pure") is a term for a Debian-based distribution that strives to become part of mainstream Debian, and have its extra features included in future releases.

Debian GNU/Hurd

Debian GNU/Hurd is a flavor based on the Hurd kernel (which, in turn, runs on the GNU Mach microkernel), instead of the Linux kernel. Debian GNU/Hurd has been in development since 1998, and made a formal release in May 2013, with 78% of the software packaged for Debian GNU/Linux ported to the GNU Hurd. Hurd is not yet an official Debian release, and is maintained and developed as an unofficial port. Debian GNU/Hurd is distributed as an installer CD (running the official Debian installer) or ready-to-run virtual disk image (Live CD, Live USB). The CD uses the IA-32 architecture, making it compatible with IA-32 and x86-64 PCs. The current version of Debian GNU/Hurd is 2023, published in June 2023.

Debian GNU/kFreeBSD
Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is a discontinued Debian flavor. It used the FreeBSD kernel and GNU userland. The majority of software in Debian GNU/kFreeBSD was built from the same sources as Debian, with some kernel packages from FreeBSD. The k in kFreeBSD is an abbreviation for kernel, which refers to the FreeBSD kernel. Before discontinuing the project, Debian maintained i386 and amd64 ports. The last version of Debian kFreeBSD was Debian 8 (Jessie) RC3. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD was created in 2002. It was included in Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) as a technology preview, and in Debian 7.0 (Wheezy) as an official port. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD was discontinued as an officially supported platform as of Debian 8.0. Debian developers cited OSS, pf, jails, NDIS, and ZFS as reasons for being interested in the FreeBSD kernel. It has not been updated since Debian 8. From July 2019, the operating system continues to be maintained unofficially. As of July 2023, the development of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD has officially terminated due to the lack of interest and developers.

title: Debian


text:
Doonesbury

Doonesbury is a comic strip by American cartoonist Garry Trudeau that chronicles the adventures and lives of an array of characters of various ages, professions, and backgrounds, from the President of the United States to the title character, Michael Doonesbury, who has progressed from a college student to a youthful senior citizen over the decades.

Created in "the throes of '60s and '70s counterculture", and frequently political in nature, Doonesbury features characters representing a range of affiliations, but the cartoon is noted for a liberal viewpoint. The name "Doonesbury" is a combination of the word doone (American prep school slang for someone who is clueless, inattentive, or careless) and the surname of Charles Pillsbury, Trudeau's roommate at Yale University.

Doonesbury is written and penciled by Garry Trudeau, then inked and lettered by an assistant, Don Carlton, then Todd Pound. Sunday strips are colored by George Corsillo. Doonesbury was a daily strip through most of its existence, but since February 2014 it has run repeat strips Monday through Saturday, and new strips on Sunday.

History

Doonesbury began as a continuation of Bull Tales, which appeared in the Yale University student newspaper, the Yale Daily News, from 1968 to 1970. It focused on local campus events at Yale.

Doonesbury proper debuted as a daily strip in twenty-eight newspapers on October 26, 1970 (it being the first strip from Universal Press Syndicate). A Sunday strip began on March 21, 1971. Many of the early strips were reprints of the Bull Tales cartoons, with some changes to the drawings and plots. B. D.'s helmet changed from having a "Y" (for Yale) to a star (for the fictional Walden College). Mike and B. D. started Doonesbury as roommates; they were not roommates in Bull Tales.

Doonesbury became known for its social and political commentary. By the 2010s, it was syndicated in approximately 1,400 newspapers worldwide.

In May 1975, Doonesbury became the first daily comic strip to win a Pulitzer Prize, taking the award for Editorial Cartooning. That year, U.S. President Gerald Ford told the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association at their annual dinner, "There are only three major vehicles to keep us informed as to what is going on in Washington: the electronic media, the print media, and Doonesbury, not necessarily in that order."

1983–1984 hiatus
Trudeau took a 22-month hiatus, from January 2, 1983, to September 30, 1984. Before the break in the strip, the characters were eternal college students, living in a commune together near Walden College, which was modeled after Trudeau's alma mater, Yale. During the break, Trudeau helped create a Broadway musical of the strip, showing the graduation of the main characters. The Broadway adaptation opened at the Biltmore Theatre on November 21, 1983, and played 104 performances. Elizabeth Swados composed the music for Trudeau's book and lyrics.

After the hiatus
The strip resumed some time after the events in the musical, with further changes having taken place after the end of the musical's plot. Mike, Mark, Zonker, B.D., and Boopsie were all now graduates; B.D. and Boopsie were living in Malibu, California, where B.D. was a third-string quarterback for the Los Angeles Rams, and Boopsie was making a living from walk-on and cameo roles. Mark was living in Washington, D.C., working for National Public Radio. Michael and J.J. had gotten married, and Mike had dropped out of business school to start work in an advertising agency in New York City. Zonker, still not ready for the "real world", was living with Mike and J.J. until he was accepted as a medical student at his Uncle Duke's "Baby Doc College" in Haiti.

Prior to the hiatus, the strip's characters had aged only slightly. But when Trudeau returned to Doonesbury, the characters began to age in something close to real time, as in Gasoline Alley and For Better or for Worse, Since then, the main characters' ages and career developments have tracked that of standard media portrayals of baby boomers, with jobs in advertising, law enforcement, and the dot-com boom. Current events are mirrored through the original characters, their offspring (the "second generation"), and occasional new characters.

Garry Trudeau received the National Cartoonist Society Newspaper Comic Strip Award for 1994, and their Reuben Award for 1995 for his work on the strip.

Alpha House and hiatuses: 2013
Doonesbury syndicate, Universal Uclick, announced on May 29, 2013, that the comic strip would go on hiatus from June 10 to Labor Day of that year while Garry Trudeau worked on his streaming video comedy Alpha House, which was picked up by Amazon Studios. "Doonesbury Flashbacks" were offered during those weeks, but due to the unusually long hiatus, some newspapers opted to run different comic strips instead. Sunday strips returned as scheduled, but the daily strip's hiatus was extended until November 2013.

After Alpha House was renewed for a second season in February 2014, Trudeau announced that he would now produce only Sunday strips for the foreseeable future. Since March 3, 2014, the strip has offered reruns starting from the very beginning of its history as opposed to the recent ones that re-run when Trudeau is on vacation. Alpha House was cancelled in 2016, but Trudeau did not return to drawing Monday-to-Saturday strips, and continued his Sunday-only schedule.

In a 2018 interview with Rolling Stone, Trudeau said that while Donald Trump appears in only a limited number of strips, "for the last two years, he's been subtext in almost all of them."

TV special
In 1977, Trudeau wrote a script for a 26-minute animated special, A Doonesbury Special, which was produced and directed by Trudeau along with John Hubley (who died during the storyboarding stage) and Faith Hubley. The special was first broadcast by NBC on November 27, 1977. It won a Special Jury Award at the Cannes International Film Festival for best short film, and received an Oscar nomination (for best animated short film), both in 1978. Voice actors for the special included Barbara Harris, William Sloane Coffin, Jr., Jack Gilford and Will Jordan. Also included were "Stop in the Middle" and "I Do Believe", two songs "sung" by the character Jimmy Thudpucker (actually actor/singer/songwriter/producer James Allen "Jimmy" Brewer), also part of the "Special". While the compositions and performances were credited to "Jimmy Thudpucker", they were in fact co-written and sung by Brewer, who also co-wrote and provided the vocals for "Ginny's Song", a 1976 single on the Warner Bros. label, and Jimmy Thudpucker's Greatest Hits, an LP released by Windsong Records, John Denver's subsidiary of RCA Records.

Style
With the exception of Walden College, Trudeau has frequently used real-life settings, based on real scenarios, but with fictional results. Because of lead times, real-world events have rendered some of Trudeau's comics unusable, such as a 1973 series featuring John Ehrlichman, a 1989 series set in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, a 1993 series involving Zoë Baird, and a 2005 series involving Harriet Miers. Trudeau has also displayed fluency in various forms of jargon, including those of real estate agents, flight attendants, computer scientists, journalists, presidential aides, and soldiers in Iraq.

Walden College
The unnamed college attended by the main characters was later given the name "Walden College", revealed to be in Connecticut (the same state as Yale), and depicted as devolving into a third-rate institution under the weight of grade inflation, slipping academic standards, and the end of tenure, issues that Trudeau has consistently revisited since the original characters graduated. Some of the second generation of Doonesbury characters have attended Walden, a venue Trudeau uses to advance his concerns about academic standards in the United States.

President King, the leader of Walden College, was originally intended as a parody of Kingman Brewster, President of Yale, but all that remains of that is a certain physical resemblance.

Use of real-life politicians as characters
Even though Doonesbury frequently features real-life U.S. politicians, they are rarely depicted with their real faces. Originally, strips featuring the President of the United States would show an external view of the White House, with dialogue emerging from inside. During the Gerald Ford administration, characters would be shown speaking to Ford at press conferences, and fictional dialogue supposedly spoken by Ford would be written as coming "off-panel". Similarly, while having several characters as students in a class taught by Henry Kissinger, the dialogue made up for Kissinger would also come from "off-panel" (although Kissinger had earlier appeared as a character with his face shown in a 1972 series of strips in which he met Mark Slackmeyer while the latter was on a trip to Washington). Sometimes hands, or in rare cases, the back of heads would also be seen.

Later, personal symbols reflecting some aspect of their character came into use. These included:

 * Ronald Reagan as "Ron Headrest," a computer-generated video character in imitation of Max Headroom
 * George H. W. Bush as a disembodied voice, indicating a lack of personality
 * Dan Quayle as a talking feather, both as a pun on his name and representing him as a political lightweight
 * Bill Clinton as a talking waffle in reference to his triangulation strategy
 * Newt Gingrich as a talking fragmentation bomb, referring to his reputation as a political bomb-thrower
 * White nationalist David Duke as a talking swastika
 * George W. Bush initially as a disembodied voice wearing a Stetson hat, since he had been Governor of Texas. After his controversial election the voice became an asterisk, and during the War on Terror the hat was replaced with a Roman military helmet that grew increasingly worn.
 * Arnold Schwarzenegger as a large hand due to accusations that he had groped women

The long career of the series and continual use of real-life political figures, analysts note, have led to some uncanny cases of the cartoon foreshadowing a national shift in the politicians' political fortunes. Tina Gianoulis in St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture observes that "In 1971, well before the conservative Reagan years, a forward-looking B.D. called Ronald Reagan his 'hero'. In 1984, almost ten years before Congressman Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House, another character worried that he would 'wake up someday in a country run by Newt Gingrich. In its 2003 series "John Kerry: A Candidate in the Making" on the 2004 presidential race, The Boston Globe reprinted and discussed 1971 Doonesbury cartoons of the young Kerry's Vietnam War protest speeches.

Characters
Doonesbury has a large group of recurring characters, with 24 currently listed at the strip's website. There, it notes that "readers new to Doonesbury sometimes experience a temporary bout of character shock", as the sheer number of characters (and the historical connections among them) can be overwhelming.

The main characters are a group who attended the fictional Walden College during the strip's first 12 years, and moved into a commune together in April 1972. Most of the other characters first appeared as family members, friends, or other acquaintances. The original Walden Commune residents were Mike Doonesbury, Zonker Harris, Mark Slackmeyer, Nichole, Bernie, and DiDi. In September 1972, Joanie Caucus joined the comic, meeting Mike and Mark in Colorado and eventually moving into the commune. They were later joined by B.D. and his girlfriend (later wife) Boopsie, upon B.D.'s return from Vietnam. Nichole, DiDi, and Bernie were mostly phased out in subsequent years, and Zonker's Uncle Duke was introduced as the most prominent character outside the Walden group, and the main link to many secondary characters.

The Walden students graduated in 1983, after which the strip began to progress in something closer to real time. Their spouses and developing families became more important after this: Joanie's daughter J.J. Caucus married Mike and they had a daughter, Alex Doonesbury. They divorced, Mike married Kim Rosenthal, a Vietnamese refugee (who had appeared in the strip as a baby adopted by a Jewish family just after the fall of Saigon; see Operation Babylift), and J.J. married Zeke Brenner, her former boyfriend and Uncle Duke's former groundskeeper. Joanie married Rick Redfern, and they had a son, Jeff. Uncle Duke and Roland Hedley have also appeared often, frequently in more topical settings unconnected to the main characters. In more recent years the second generation has taken prominence as they have grown to college age: Jeff Redfern, Alex Doonesbury, Zonker's nephew Zipper Harris, and Uncle Duke's son Earl.

Controversial strips and groundbreaking moments
Doonesbury has covered numerous political and social issues, some of which were pioneering and others that drew criticism:

1970s

 * A November 1972 Sunday strip depicting Zonker telling a little boy in a sandbox a fairy tale ending in the protagonist being awarded "his weight in fine, uncut Turkish hashish" raised an uproar.
 * During the Watergate scandal, a strip showed Mark on the radio with a "Watergate profile" of John Mitchell, declaring him "Guilty! Guilty, guilty, guilty!!" A number of newspapers removed the strip and one, The Washington Post, ran an editorial criticizing the cartoon. Following Richard Nixon's death in 1994, the strip was rerun with all the instances of the word "guilty" crossed out and replaced with "flawed".
 * In June 1973, the military newspaper Stars and Stripes dropped Doonesbury for being too political. The strip was quickly reinstated after hundreds of protests by military readers.
 * September 1973: The Lincoln Journal became the first newspaper to move Doonesbury to its editorial page.
 * In February 1976, a storyline included the character Andy Lippincott saying that he was gay. Dozens of papers opted not to publish the storyline, with Miami Herald editor Larry Jinks saying, "We just decided we weren't ready for homosexuality in a comic strip."
 * In November 1976, when the storyline included the blossoming romance of Rick Redfern and Joanie Caucus, four days of strips were devoted to a transition from one apartment to another, ending with a view of the two together in bed, marking the first time any nationally run comic strip portrayed premarital sex in this fashion. The strip was removed from the comics pages of a number of newspapers, although some newspapers opted to simply repeat the opening frame of that day's strip.
 * In June 1978, a strip included a coupon listing various politicians and dollar amounts allegedly taken from Korean lobbyists, to be clipped and glued to a postcard to be sent to the Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, resulting in an overflow of mail to the Speaker's office.

1980s

 * In 1985, a series of Doonesbury strips helped to repeal a 60-year-old discriminatory law in Palm Springs, in Orange County in Florida.
 * In June 1985, a strip featuring Aniello Dellacroce and Frank Sinatra together, which referred to Dellacroce as an "alleged human" who has been charged with murder led to several papers dropping the strip and a statement from Sinatra.
 * In December 1988, the Winston-Salem Journal dropped a Sunday strip featuring the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company (in which a prospective executive cannot deny the link between smoking and cancer without bursting out laughing) because "it would be personally offensive to its employees." It was the first time the strip had been pulled in deference to a corporation.
 * In June 1989, several days' comics (which had already been drawn and written) had to be replaced with repeats, because the humor of the strips was considered in bad taste in light of the violent crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Trudeau himself asked for the recall, despite an interview published with Universal Press Syndicate Editorial Director Lee Salem in the May 28, 1989, San Jose Mercury News, in which Salem stated his hopes the strips could still be used.

1990s

 * In November 1991, a series of strips appeared to give credibility to a real-life prison inmate who falsely stated that former Vice President Dan Quayle had connections with drug dealers. The strip sequence was dropped by some two dozen newspapers, in part because the allegations had been investigated and dispelled previously. Six years later, the reporter who broke the Quayle story, some weeks after the Doonesbury cartoons, later published a book saying he no longer believed the story had been true.
 * In November 1993, a storyline dealing with California wildfires was dropped from several California newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, The Orange County Register, and The San Diego Union-Tribune.
 * In June 1994, the Roman Catholic Church took issue with a series of strips dealing with the book Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe by John Boswell. A few newspapers dropped single strips from the series, and the Bloomington, Illinois, Pantagraph refused to run the entire series.
 * In March 1995, John McCain denounced Trudeau on the floor of the Senate: "Suffice it to say that I hold Trudeau in utter contempt." This was in response to a strip about Bob Dole's strategy of exploiting his war record during his presidential campaign. The quotation was used on the cover of Trudeau's book Doonesbury Nation. McCain and Trudeau later made peace: McCain wrote the foreword to The Long Road Home, Trudeau's collection of comic strips dealing with character B.D.'s leg amputation during the second Iraq war.
 * In February 1998, a strip dealing with Bill Clinton's sex scandal was removed from the comics pages of a number of newspapers because it included the phrases "oral sex" and "semen-streaked dress".

2000s

 * In November 2000, a strip was not run in some newspapers when Duke said of presidential candidate George W. Bush: "He's got a history of alcohol abuse and cocaine."
 * In September 2001, a strip perpetuated the Internet hoax that claimed George W. Bush had the lowest IQ of any president in the last 50 years, half that of Bill Clinton. When caught repeating the hoax, Trudeau apologized "with a trademark barb – he said he deeply apologized for unsettling anyone who thought the president quite intelligent."
 * In 2003, a cartoon that publicized the recent medical research suggesting a connection between masturbation and a reduced risk of prostate cancer, with one character alluding to the practice as "self-dating", was not run in many papers; pre-publication sources indicated that as many as half of the 700 papers to which it was syndicated were planning not to run the strip.
 * In February 2004, Trudeau used his strip to make the apparently genuine offer of $10,000 (to the USO in the winner's name ) for anyone who could personally confirm that George W. Bush was actually present during any part of his service in the National Guard. Reuters and CNN reported by the end of that week that despite 1,300 responses, no credible evidence had been offered. An FAQ posted on the Doonesbury site in September of that year noted that the submissions, while "surreally entertaining", had failed to provide a single definitive corroborator, adding that Trudeau had donated the $10,000 to the USO anyway.
 * April 2004: On April 21, after nearly 34 years, readers finally saw B.D.'s head without some sort of helmet. In the same strip, it was revealed that he had lost a leg in the Iraq War. Two days later, on April 23, after awakening and discovering his situation, B.D. exclaims "SON OF A BITCH!!!" The single strip was removed from many papers—including The Boston Globe —although in others, such as Newsday, the offending word was replaced by a line. The Dallas Morning News ran the cartoon uncensored, with a footnote that the editor believed profanity was appropriate, given the subject matter. An image of B.D. with an amputated leg also appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone that summer (issue 954).
 * In June 2005, Trudeau published The Long Road Home, a book devoted to B.D.'s recovery from his loss of a leg in Iraq. Although Trudeau opposed the Iraq War, the foreword was written by Senator John McCain, a supporter of the war. McCain was impressed by Trudeau's desire to highlight the struggle of seriously wounded veterans, and his desire to assist them. Proceeds from the book, and its sequel The War Within benefited Fisher House.
 * July 2005: Several newspapers declined to run two strips in which George W. Bush refers to his adviser Karl Rove as "Turd Blossom", a nickname Bush has been reported to use for Rove.
 * In September 2005 when The Guardian relaunched in a smaller format, Doonesbury was dropped for reasons of space. After a flood of protests, the strip was reinstated with an omnibus covering the issues missed and a full apology.
 * The strips scheduled to run from October 31 to November 5, 2005, and a Sunday strip scheduled for November 13 about the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court were withdrawn after her nomination was withdrawn. The strips have been posted on the official website, and were replaced by re-runs by the syndicate.
 * Trudeau sought input from readers as to where Alex Doonesbury should attend college in a May 15, 2006, straw poll at Doonesbury.com. Voters chose among MIT, Rensselaer, and Cornell. Students from Rensselaer and then MIT hacked the system, which was designed to limit each computer to one vote. In the end, voters logged 175,000 votes, with MIT grabbing 48% of the total. The Doonesbury Town Hall FAQ stated that given that the rules of the poll had not ruled out such methods, "the will, chutzpah, and bodacious craft of the voting public will be respected", declaring that Alex will be attending MIT.
 * Before the 2008 presidential election, Trudeau sent out strips to run in the days after the election in which Barack Obama was portrayed as the winner. Newspapers were also provided with old strips as an alternative. When asked whether he created the original strip with complete confidence in an Obama victory, Trudeau replied: "Nope, more like rational risk assessment. Nate Silver at Fivethirtyeight.com is now giving McCain a 3.7% chance of winning – pretty comfortable odds. Here's the way I look at it: If Obama wins, I'm in the flow and commenting on a phenomenon. If he loses, it'll be a massive upset, and the goofy misprediction of a comic strip will be pretty much lost in the uproar. I figure I can survive a little egg on my face." In response, McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said, "We hope the strip proves to be as predictive as it is consistently lame."

2010s

 * The sequence for the week of March 12–17, 2012, lampooning the changes in abortion law in several states was pulled or moved to the editorial page by a number of newspapers.
 * In 2014, the site at doonesbury.com moved under washingtonpost.com, and now it redirects to the latter.

Criticism
Charles M. Schulz of Peanuts called Trudeau "unprofessional" for taking a long sabbatical. (See also, similar comments by Schulz about sabbaticals taken by Bill Watterson. ) Nor was the return of the strip itself greeted with universal acclaim; in 1985, Saturday Review listed Trudeau as one of the country's "Most Overrated People in American Arts and Letters", commenting that the "most publicized return since MacArthur's has produced a strip that is predictable, mean-spirited, and not as funny as before."

Doonesbury has angered, irritated, or been rebuked by many of the political figures that have appeared or been referred to in the strip over the years. A 1984 series of strips showing Vice President George H. W. Bush placing his manhood in a blind trust—in parody of Bush's use of that financial instrument to fend off concerns that his governmental decisions would be influenced by his investment holdings—brought the politician to complain, "Doonesbury carrying water for the opposition. Trudeau is coming out of deep left field."

Some conservatives have intensely criticized Doonesbury. Several examples are cited in the Milestones section of the strip's website. The strip has also met criticism from its readers almost since it began syndicated publication. For example, when Lacey Davenport's husband Dick, in the last moments before his death, calls on God, several conservative pundits called the strip blasphemous. The sequence of Dick Davenport's final bird-watching and fatal heart attack was run in November 1986.

Liberal politicians skewered by Trudeau in the strip have also complained, including Democrats such as former U.S. House Speaker Tip O'Neill and California Governor Jerry Brown.

Strips about post-World War II American wars have also generated controversy, including Vietnam, Grenada, Panama and both Gulf Wars.

After many letter-writing campaigns demanding the removal of the strip were unsuccessful, conservatives changed their tactics, and instead of writing to newspaper editors, they began writing to one of the printers who prints the color Sunday comics. In 2005, Continental Features refused to continue printing the Sunday Doonesbury, causing it to disappear from the 38 Sunday papers that Continental Features printed. Of the 38, only one newspaper, The Anniston Star in Anniston, Alabama, continued to carry the Sunday Doonesbury, though of necessity in black and white.

Some newspapers have dealt with the criticism by moving the strip from the comics page to the editorial page, because many people believe that a politically based comic strip like Doonesbury does not belong in a traditionally child-friendly comics section. The Lincoln Journal started the trend in 1973. In some papers (such as the Tulsa World and Orlando Sentinel) Doonesbury appears on the opinions page alongside Mallard Fillmore, a politically conservative comic strip.

Awards and honors

 * In 1975, the strip won Trudeau a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning, the first strip cartoon to be so honored. The Editorial Cartoonists' Society subsequently passed a resolution condemning the Pulitzer Committee. (After being assured that the award was irrevocable, Trudeau supported the resolution.) Doonesbury was also a Nominated Pulitzer Finalist in 1990, 2004, and 2005.
 * In 1977, the short film A Doonesbury Special won the Grand Jury Prize from the Cannes Film Festival. It was nominated for the Palme d'Or for "Best Short Film". It was also nominated for an Academy Award.
 * Trudeau received Certificates of Achievement from the US Army 4th Battalion 67th Armor Regiment and the Ready First Brigade in 1991 for his comic strips dealing with the first Gulf War. The texts of these citations are quoted on the back of the comic strip collection Welcome to Club Scud!
 * Trudeau won the Reuben Award from the National Cartoonists Society in 1995.
 * Trudeau was awarded the US Army's Commander's Award for Public Service in 2006 for his series of strips about B.D.'s recovery following the loss of his leg in Iraq.
 * In 2008, Trudeau received the Mental Health Research Advocacy Award from the Yale School of Medicine for his depiction of the mental-health issues facing soldiers upon returning home from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
 * In 2020, Trudeau was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Doonesbury


text:
Dice

Dice (: die or dice) are small, throwable objects with marked sides that can rest in multiple positions. They are used for generating random values, commonly as part of tabletop games, including dice games, board games, role-playing games, and games of chance.

A traditional die is a cube with each of its six faces marked with a different number of dots (pips) from one to six. When thrown or rolled, the die comes to rest showing a random integer from one to six on its upper surface, with each value being equally likely. Dice may also have polyhedral or irregular shapes, may have faces marked with numerals or symbols instead of pips and may have their numbers carved out from the material of the dice instead of marked on it. Loaded dice are specifically designed or modified to favor some results over others for cheating or entertainment.

History
Dice have been used since before recorded history, and it is uncertain where they originated. It is theorized that dice developed from the practice of fortune-telling with the talus of hoofed animals, colloquially known as knucklebones. The Egyptian game of senet (played before 3000 BCE and up to the 2nd century CE) was played with flat two-sided throwsticks which indicated the number of squares a player could move, and thus functioned as a form of dice. Perhaps the oldest known dice were excavated as part of a backgammon-like game set at the Burnt City, an archeological site in south-eastern Iran, estimated to be from between 2800 and 2500 BCE. Bone dice from Skara Brae, Scotland have been dated to 3100–2400 BCE. Excavations from graves at Mohenjo-daro, an Indus Valley civilization settlement, unearthed terracotta dice dating to 2500–1900 BCE, including at least one die whose opposite sides all add up to seven, as in modern dice.

Games involving dice are mentioned in the ancient Indian Rigveda, Atharvaveda, Mahabharata and Buddhist games list. There are several biblical references to "casting lots" (יפילו גורל yappîlū ḡōrāl), as in Psalm 22, indicating that dicing (or a related activity) was commonplace when the psalm was composed. Knucklebones was a game of skill played in ancient Greece; a derivative form had the four sides of bones receive different values like modern dice.

Although gambling was illegal, many Romans were passionate gamblers who enjoyed dicing, which was known as aleam ludere ("to play at dice"). There were two sizes of Roman dice. Tali were large dice inscribed with one, three, four, and six on four sides. Tesserae were smaller dice with sides numbered from one to six. Twenty-sided dice date back to the 2nd century CE and from Ptolemaic Egypt as early as the 2nd century BCE.

Dominoes and playing cards originated in China as developments from dice. The transition from dice to playing cards occurred in China around the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE), and coincides with the technological transition from rolls of manuscripts to block printed books. In Japan, dice were used to play a popular game called sugoroku. There are two types of sugoroku. Ban-sugoroku is similar to backgammon and dates to the Heian period (794–1185 CE), while e-sugoroku is a racing game.

Use
Dice are thrown onto a surface either from the hand or from a container designed for this (such as a cup, tray, or tower). The face (or corner, in cases such as tetrahedral dice, or edge, for odd-numbered long dice) of the die that is uppermost when it comes to rest provides the value of the throw.

The result of a die roll is determined by the way it is thrown, according to the laws of classical mechanics (although luck is often credited for the results of a roll). A die roll is made random by uncertainty in minor factors such as tiny movements in the thrower's hand; they are thus a crude form of hardware random number generator.

One typical contemporary dice game is craps, where two dice are thrown simultaneously and wagers are made on the total value of the two dice. Dice are frequently used to introduce randomness into board games, where they are often used to decide the distance through which a piece will move along the board (as in backgammon and Monopoly).

Arrangement

Common dice are small cubes, most often 1.6 cm across, whose faces are numbered from one to six, usually by patterns of round dots called pips. (While the use of Arabic numerals is occasionally seen, such dice are less common.)

Opposite sides of a modern die traditionally add up to seven, requiring the 1, 2, and 3 faces to share a vertex. The faces of a die may be placed clockwise or counterclockwise about this vertex. If the 1, 2, and 3 faces run counterclockwise, the die is called "right-handed". If those faces run clockwise, the die is called "left-handed". Western dice are normally right-handed, and Chinese dice are normally left-handed.

The pips on standard six-sided dice are arranged in specific patterns as shown. Asian style dice bear similar patterns to Western ones, but the pips are closer to the center of the face; in addition, the pips are differently sized on Asian style dice, and the pips are colored red on the 1 and 4 sides. Red fours may be of Indian origin.

Manufacturing
Non-precision dice are manufactured via the plastic injection molding process, often made of polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA). The pips or numbers on the die are a part of the mold. Different pigments can be added to the dice to make them opaque or transparent, or multiple pigments may be added to make the dice speckled or marbled.

The coloring for numbering is achieved by submerging the die entirely in paint, which is allowed to dry. The die is then polished via a tumble finishing process similar to rock polishing. The abrasive agent scrapes off all of the paint except for the indents of the numbering. A finer abrasive is then used to polish the die. This process also produces the smoother, rounded edges on the dice.

Precision casino dice may have a polished or sand finish, making them transparent or translucent respectively. Casino dice have their pips drilled, then filled flush with a paint of the same density as the material used for the dice, such that the center of gravity of the dice is as close to the geometric center as possible. This mitigates concerns that the pips will cause a small bias. All such dice are stamped with a serial number to prevent potential cheaters from substituting a die. Precision backgammon dice are made the same way; they tend to be slightly smaller and have rounded corners and edges, to allow better movement inside the dice cup and stop forceful rolls from damaging the playing surface.

Etymology and terms
The word die comes from Old French dé; from Latin datum "something which is given or played".

While the terms ace, deuce, trey, cater, cinque and sice are generally obsolete, with the names of the numbers preferred, they are still used by some professional gamblers to designate different sides of the dice. Ace is from the Latin as, meaning "a unit"; the others are 2 to 6 in Old French.

When rolling two dice, certain combinations have slang names. The term snake eyes is a roll of one pip on each die. The Online Etymology Dictionary traces use of the term as far back as 1919. The US term boxcars, also known as midnight, is a roll of six pips on each die. The pair of six pips resembles a pair of boxcars on a freight train. Many rolls have names in the game of craps.

Unicode representation
Using Unicode characters, the faces can be shown in text using the range U+2680 to U+2685 or using decimal  to , and the emoji using U+1F3B2 or   from the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block.

Loaded dice
A loaded, weighted, cheat, or crooked die is one that has been tampered with so that it will land with a specific side facing upwards more often or less often than a fair die would. There are several methods for making loaded dice, including rounded faces, off-square faces, and weights. Casinos and gambling halls frequently use transparent cellulose acetate dice as tampering is easier to detect than with opaque dice.

Polyhedral dice
Various shapes such as two-sided or four-sided dice are documented in archaeological findings; for example, from Ancient Egypt and the Middle East. While the cubical six-sided die became the most common type in many parts of the world, other shapes were always known, like 20-sided dice in Ptolemaic and Roman times.

The modern tradition of using sets of polyhedral dice started around the end of the 1960s when non-cubical dice became popular among players of wargames, and since have been employed extensively in role-playing games and trading card games. Dice using both the numerals 6 and 9, which are reciprocally symmetric through rotation, typically distinguish them with a dot or underline.

Common variations
Dice are often sold in sets, matching in color, of six different shapes. Five of the dice are shaped like the Platonic solids, whose faces are regular polygons. Aside from the cube, the other four Platonic solids have 4, 8, 12, and 20 faces, allowing for those number ranges to be generated. The only other common non-cubical die is the 10-sided die, a pentagonal trapezohedron die, whose faces are ten kites, each with two different edge lengths, three different angles, and two different kinds of vertices. Such sets frequently include a second 10-sided die either of contrasting color or numbered by tens, allowing the pair of 10-sided dice to be combined to generate numbers between 1 and 100.

Using these dice in various ways, games can closely approximate a variety of probability distributions. For instance, 10-sided dice can be rolled in pairs to produce a uniform distribution of random percentages, and summing the values of multiple dice will produce approximations to normal distributions.

Unlike other common dice, a four-sided (tetrahedral) die does not have a side that faces upward when it is at rest on a surface, so it must be read in a different way. On some four-sided dice, each face features multiple numbers, with the same number printed near each vertex on all sides. In this case, the number around the vertex pointing up is used. Alternatively, the numbers on a tetrahedral die can be placed at the middle of the edges, in which case the numbers around the base are used.

Normally, the faces on a die will be placed so opposite faces will add up to one more than the number of faces. (This is not possible with 4-sided dice and dice with an odd number of faces.) Some dice, such as those with 10 sides, are usually numbered sequentially beginning with 0, in which case the opposite faces will add to one less than the number of faces.

Some twenty-sided dice have a different arrangement used for the purpose of keeping track of an integer that counts down, such as health points. These spindown dice are arranged such that adjacent integers appear on adjacent faces, allowing the user to easily find the next lower number. They are commonly used with collectible card games.

Rarer variations

"Uniform fair dice" are dice where all faces have an equal probability of outcome due to the symmetry of the die as it is face-transitive. In addition to the Platonic solids, these theoretically include:

 * Catalan solids, the duals of the 13 Archimedean solids: 12, 24, 30, 48, 60, 120 sides
 * Trapezohedra, the duals of the infinite set of antiprisms, with kite faces: any even number not divisible by 4 (so that a face will face up), starting from 6
 * Bipyramids, the duals of the infinite set of prisms, with triangle faces: any multiple of 4 (so that a face will face up), starting from 8
 * Disphenoids, an infinite set of tetrahedra made from congruent non-regular triangles: 4 sides. This is a less symmetric tetrahedron than the Platonic tetrahedron but still sufficiently symmetrical to be face-transitive. Similarly, pyritohedra and tetartoids are less symmetrical but still face-transitive dodecahedra: 12 sides.

Two other types of polyhedra are technically not face-transitive but are still fair dice due to symmetry:

 * antiprisms: the basis of barrel dice
 * prisms: the basis of long dice and teetotums

Long dice and teetotums can, in principle, be made with any number of faces, including odd numbers. Long dice are based on the infinite set of prisms. All the rectangular faces are mutually face-transitive, so they are equally probable. The two ends of the prism may be rounded or capped with a pyramid, designed so that the die cannot rest on those faces. 4-sided long dice are easier to roll than tetrahedra and are used in the traditional board games dayakattai and daldøs.

Non-numeric dice
The faces of most dice are labelled using sequences of whole numbers, usually starting at one, expressed with either pips or digits. However, there are some applications that require results other than numbers. Examples include letters for Boggle, directions for Warhammer Fantasy Battle, Fudge dice, playing card symbols for poker dice, and instructions for sexual acts using sex dice.

Alternatively-numbered dice
Dice may have numbers that do not form a counting sequence starting at one. One variation on the standard die is known as the "average" die. These are six-sided dice with sides numbered, which have the same arithmetic mean as a standard die (3.5 for a single die, 7 for a pair of dice), but have a narrower range of possible values (2 through 5 for one, 4 through 10 for a pair). They are used in some table-top wargames, where a narrower range of numbers is required. Other numbered variations include Sicherman dice and intransitive dice.

Spherical dice
A die can be constructed in the shape of a sphere, with the addition of an internal cavity in the shape of the dual polyhedron of the desired die shape and an internal weight. The weight will settle in one of the points of the internal cavity, causing it to settle with one of the numbers uppermost. For instance, a sphere with an octahedral cavity and a small internal weight will settle with one of the 6 points of the cavity held downwards by the weight.

Applications

Many board games use dice to randomize how far pieces move or to settle conflicts. Typically, this has meant that rolling higher numbers is better. Some games, such as Axis & Allies, have inverted this system by making the lower values more potent. In the modern age, a few games and game designers have approached dice in a different way by making each side of the die similarly valuable. In Castles of Burgundy, players spend their dice to take actions based on the die's value. In this game, a six is not better than a one, or vice versa. In Quarriors (and its descendant, Dicemasters), different sides of the dice can offer completely different abilities. Several sides often give resources while others grant the player useful actions.

Dice can be used for divination and using dice for such a purpose is called cleromancy. A pair of common dice is usual, though other forms of polyhedra can be used. Tibetan Buddhists sometimes use this method of divination. It is highly likely that the Pythagoreans used the Platonic solids as dice. They referred to such dice as "the dice of the gods" and they sought to understand the universe through an understanding of geometry in polyhedra.

Polyhedral dice are commonly used in role-playing games. The fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is largely credited with popularizing dice in such games. Some games use only one type, like Exalted which uses only ten-sided dice. Others use numerous types for different game purposes, such as D&D, which makes use of all common polyhedral dice. Dice are usually used to determine the outcome of events. Games typically determine results either as a total on one or more dice above or below a fixed number, or a certain number of rolls above a certain number on one or more dice. Due to circumstances or character skill, the initial roll may have a number added to or subtracted from the final result, or have the player roll extra or fewer dice. To keep track of rolls easily, dice notation is frequently used.

Astrological dice are a specialized set of three 12-sided dice for divination; the first die represents the planets, the Sun, the Moon, and the nodes of the Moon, the second die represents the 12 zodiac signs, and the third represents the 12 houses. A specialized icosahedron die provides the answers of the Magic 8 Ball, conventionally used to provide answers to yes-or-no questions.

Dice can be used to generate random numbers for use in passwords and cryptography applications. The Electronic Frontier Foundation describes a method by which dice can be used to generate passphrases. Diceware is a method recommended for generating secure but memorable passphrases, by repeatedly rolling five dice and picking the corresponding word from a pre-generated list.

Notation
In many gaming contexts, especially tabletop role-playing games, shorthand notations representing different dice rolls are used. A "d" or "D" is used to indicate a die with a specific number of sides; for example,  denotes a four-sided die. If several dice of the same type are to be rolled, this is indicated by a leading number specifying the number of dice. Hence,  means the player should roll six eight-sided dice and add the results. Modifiers to a die roll can also be indicated as desired. For example,  instructs the player to roll three six-sided dice, calculate the total, and add four to it.

title: Dice