 Great, so I have my presentation now. What I'm going to tell you about is, well, you can read it also, but custom Debian distributions and derivatives from Debian. And I'm Igaris Makhinoz. First, as always, we can start by definitions. And for the purposes of this talk, I would define what a distribution basically is. And it's basically kernel, and some software to accompany the kernel. And it is made in some format with some defaults and something made by adjusting the configuration. As it was mentioned previously, some services or some community is also part of the package of the distribution. What is a derived distribution? Well, it's another distribution that's made out of the base distribution. It's probably changed a bit because someone didn't like something in the base distribution. And what is a custom distribution? That's kind of a new thing. It's a toolkit that allows someone to create a derived distribution without actually deriving from the base distribution just defining what changes does he want to make. We'll see that a bit later in the detail how it works. Many distributions have been the mothers of other distributions. And here we have the basic family tree of Linux distributions. We have the Red Hat branch with the Mandrake, SUSE, Fedora, based off the Red Hat. There are around 50 distributions that are based off the Red Hat. We have the Debian branch with around the base of that. We have Slackware with 30 distributions of it. And some other smaller mother distributions with 5 to 10 derived distributions from like 10 to Linux from scratch. And also there are distributions that are made from scratch like Linux from scratch, but the other way. And they are independent. So the question basically is why so many distributions have been derived from Debian? Why is it so good to derive from Debian? Well, one thing is we have strict policy. We have very high packaging standards. We basically have a definition of what we think is a good package. What we think is a nicely packaged software and we see that this definition is upheld. If some package does not fit... Sleeper. I'll be pressing this rapidly now. If we... It doesn't help, right? So I must press it more than once per second, right? I think the video team is working on something. But okay, I'll continue that. If a package does not confirm to our policy, a serious bug is filed against it by someone who cares about it, of course. Many do. We have a gigantic number of packaged programs. It was like over 15,000 when I was last looking at it, but it grows every day. We have very small and very simple base system that every custom distribution can build upon. And as you know, the simpler is the thing you are building upon, the more simple it is to build upon. Sometime ago, a couple of releases back, the base of Debian was just an archive that you simply unpacked and you got your basic system. It's done. Now it's a bit more complicated, but it's still the same easiest of views as before, but more flexible. And that is the next point. We have very flexible installation infrastructure. The Debian installer, the key point of this current woody release of Debian that happened just, sorry. Whatever. The stable. It has a Debian installer, which is an extremely flexible tool for installing an operating system. You can make modules for it that could do anything to the system you want to create in the end. You can create a custom CD to run your modified installer off, and that will be a derived distribution there. One other point that some people consider disadvantage of Debian, and I think that could be an advantage here. We have a very long release cycles. That means we have a very stable base to build upon. Some people don't want to remake their derived distribution every four to five months as a new Fedora version comes out. I don't know why. They just don't want to. You don't have to with Debian. You can wait for two or three years without doing anything major, but of course you can do more. Always you can do more. One very, very important point is that Debian is non-commercial. That brings some more aspects to it. First of all, users of your derived distribution can usually get some support of Debian channels. Debian RC, Debian mailing lists. If you're not deriving too broadly, of course. Debian is not a contestant for you. It's not a concurrent for you. You don't need to compete with Debian. There's no Debian sales task force that will be mad at you for selling too much of your derived distribution. We don't care. We'll be happy for you, actually. There's a lot of freelance experts that are Debian developers. You can hire them. You can get the best expertise you want on the Debian and you can hire it into your company. Get the best experts. That's why there are lots of them. I think one of the first and one of the loudest Debian derivatives is Knoppix, made by Klaus Knopper from Germany. The innovative thing was that that was a live CD. That was the thing that has never been seen before an operating system running directly off the compact disc without touching any hard drive and living in the memory. Very strange. That's why it has spawned basically hundreds and hundreds of derivatives, including some derivatives that are not based on Debian. There are now SUSE live CDs. There are now Slackware live CDs and there are now even live CDs based on other operating systems. I've actually seen one based on Windows. It's crappy but it works sometimes. What Knoppix can be told of? It's the best way to try Linux and free software environment without actually installing anything, without changing anything on your computer. As it doesn't depend on anything that is on your computer, it's the best system recovery tool. You can always boot Knoppix regardless of if you just reformatted your hard drive accidentally. And it is a stable environment wherever you go. I've seen some people that cannot afford a notebook but they have made a version of Knoppix for them and they have a $15 USB key. So they put the USB key in, put the CD with Knoppix in, they boot from the CD and they have all their programs, they have all their settings loaded from the USB key and they can start working on any computer in a matter of a couple of minutes. Ubuntu is one of the very, very, very prominent now Debian derivative. You can actually, as you've been told before, get some of it there. It has been founded by Mark Shuttleworth. I think multi-billionaire who can count that? With the idea of giving the humanity to others, that's basically what the word Ubuntu means in some African language. I don't know which one, but whatever. And he gives work, he employs more than 40 Debian developers to create a distribution that would be usable by common man, basically by him for starts and then by everybody else too. They have a fixed release cycle. Sometimes it's good but sometimes it could be bad but they've decided to release every six months and they have developed a lot of interesting features that are basing on the Debian infrastructure but they have built upon it and now they are starting to contribute it back to Debian and we're seeing that this collaboration between the derivative distribution is going on quite well. And what I see about Ubuntu it is very frequently now advertised as the first distribution for a newbie to try. It's something that you can just give to a new Linux user, here, take it, try it, whatever, go away. When you have problems, they usually don't come back because they don't have problems. Well, that's the beauty of it. There are a lot of distributions that are specialized for a certain area, for a certain country or even for a certain city, like Viennese for the city Viennese administration or Linux for the Spanish I'll not try to... Extremadura region Arabics for the Arabian languages Catics for Czechs and Lease Linux from Latvian school distribution. Basically, there are hundreds of them but nobody knows about most of them because they are only known in the city, in the region where they are specialized in. If there is such a distribution in your area, then probably it's one of the best to try because, well, it will be adjusted to your language it will be adjusted to your time zone and it will have quite a lot of users and developers locally that you can contact and try to get support from. One other thing that's very interesting, it's a lot of special purpose distributions have been popping up. For example, the big example actually, the Skoll Linux, the distribution for schools that has now actually become a custom Debian distribution has been integrated back into Debian in some sort and has provided a lot of help in developing the Debian installer. I think that's the most prominent, the best example of contributing back to the base distribution that I've seen at this point. There's also some other educational distributions like free CD, Seoul and basically lots of them because schools like Linux. Scientists like Linux and that's why there are scientific distributions like Bionics for biology research Geoliver for research on cartography, mapping. Of course hobbies like Linux and that's why there are distributions for their specific needs like Agnula for people that are working with sound. They have some very special needs and that's why they make a special distribution that is fitted to their needs. Hammocks for the amateur radio operators. Some people see that general distributions are not fit for them in a security sense like for example they have network cards enabled or like they have some other services enabled actually that they actually let people to get access to the system at all and that's why they make a special distributions with higher security levels that are to be used in extremely secure environments like military environments and super secret servers or whatever and Adamantix is one of the examples there. If you want a server but you don't want to read manuals for all the services you want to have installed or oriented distributions that you can pop in a CD and have a server with several dozens of services configured coming out of it. You can actually do similar things with some other special purpose distributions. For example Skor Linux has a mode for installing server and you get a lot of services configured that way that server could be used not only in school but in some other environments but that's what all special purpose distributions are all about making the defaults differently adapted to a special purpose. So if there is a special purpose any special purpose there can be a distribution made for that purpose. Some distributions are made to serve as a commercial base to serve as a stable base, a controlled base that you can provide services of or that you can further modify to adjust to needs of your client and while we see Ubuntu here we see Progeny that making custom distributions for the clients we see the project that I was leading back in Latvia, Amber Linux and the aim of such a distribution is actually not to make a best distribution as one of the aims is to make a distribution that your people that are working here for you know all about they know all the quirks of this distribution and the second aim is to train your people to know all the quirks and when you have this commercial base distribution completed you have not only a base to provide your services of you have also the people that are actually able to change anything in your distribution to fit your needs and as we see many reasons to make custom Debian distributions we see a reason to make that simpler and that's where a custom Debian distribution framework comes in. The basic idea is to make a software and a set of format definitions that allow you to well defined maybe simple files create a custom Debian distribution version. Make something that will adjust itself to your needs afterwards when you're installing it. As this custom Debian distribution is not actually a derivative in the sense that it can exist inside Debian. It is actually Debian but with some adjustments it means it has a lot less work to make it and less work to maintain it than a distribution on its own. So basically this framework provides you with all the features that usually derivative distributions use you can make a selection of packages you want to install for example you want the Apache server to be installed by default and you don't want any graphical interface installed well that's one of the selection possibilities. You adjust configuration of packages you make some other defaults that do not make sense in your specific purpose you overwrite some files maybe some packages you recompile maybe with some patches apply to them and some other packages you add which are not in Debian which is quite rare but sometimes you need that and after that you can get a lot of derivatives with very little effort. What I see the future of this derivatives and custom Debian distributions basically is I see that there will be less and less actual derivation from Debian because it's less work to maintain something that is basically a small description of a change than to maintain a couple hundred packages and CDs and servers to do it in backtracking systems and whatever the less you have to work to maintain it and we are lazy people as you know you have more comfortability gains because for example use your derivative audio distribution and at one moment you need to install a web server you most probably will be able to just install a prepackaged web server from Debian directly and you will not have to do anything to do that you have just compatibility with Debian you will not have to retrain your system administrator so users because it's basically Debian you can describe the changes on a couple of sheets of paper and that's all retraining they'll need and you will be able to yourself as a Debian derivative be able to be a base for other derivatives that will somehow make your derivation more precise for their needs and they will contribute back to you making your custom Debian distribution better and you will contribute back to Debian making Debian better more contribution back to base is what I see a future for all derivatives and custom Debian distributions because the more improvements you have a lot of improvements in your derivatives and the more of these improvements you get back into the base Debian the less improvements you have to support yourself again laziness driver for innovation and of course I see that as future custom Debian distributions will be easier to create, maintain and easier to use, install and upgrade and whatever if there is a purpose there will probably be a custom Debian distribution realizing that purpose, a tool fitted for that so to summarize all that stuff there are hundreds, hundreds of Debian derivatives they're customized for purpose usually they're the best tools for that purpose they base on Debian and add their own benefits when time goes the more they'll be integrated back into Debian and will concentrate on the strength becoming better and better and easier and soon even you and even I will be able to make a custom Debian distribution with little effort thank you are there any questions people might be interested in knowing is it a good idea if you're new to Debian should you start with the basic Debian or you should start with one of the supposedly more easy to use derivatives I think the question is whether if you're new to Debian if you should try to use Debian or one of the derivative distributions I think that if you have a special purpose in mind for example working on a desktop only for example if you're a secretary and absolutely not for any kind of a software development then probably you should use one of the custom Debian distributions that are optimized for desktop use maybe afterwards you would be interested in contributing back to Debian and then you would be also interesting to see more flexible base Debian system but for a very simple beginner it could be more preferable to use a custom version so the question was basically from the Ubuntu point of view is there anything that Ubuntu can do to help Debian make it easier to have custom distributions I think that would be very preferable if Ubuntu would somehow join the effort of creating the custom Debian distribution framework so that in the end the Ubuntu can actually become a custom Debian distribution and not invent the basic tools for themselves My question has to do with an issue that has been brought to my attention from a few perspectives recently and that as some of us know we've had some issues that we've been coping with trying to come up with a better trademark license for the Debian logo for the Debian mark itself One of the concerns that has been expressed to me is that there are many Debian derivatives that don't wear their Debian identity on their sleeve more or less and it might be advantageous if we had ways to encourage derivatives of Debian to promote the Debian brand if you will more know this comes from Debian, that Debian is ultimately the base and that the community that they can contribute to is not limited to their custom distribution but they can also contribute directly to the Debian project My question is an open-ended one in that I'm wondering what you think and what other people here think about ways that we can encourage derivative distributions to push the Debian brand, the Debian label, the Debian name and help people understand that one reason that their derivative distribution is so great is because it is based on Debian Yeah, that's a very hard question to... I wanted to emphasize though you'll notice that having that is a little bit in tension with having a strict trademark license on the Debian mark logo because the more you tighten that down the harder it is for people to legally comply with our requirements and the more we actually discourage people from playing up their Debian identity. I don't know how many people here are familiar with what's going on recently with the Linux Mark Institute but I think there's probably something we can learn from that as the Linux Mark Institute feels its way through the waters of telling people how they can use the Linux Mark, we're going to want to watch that and keep an eye on it because there's a balance to be struck between protecting your mark and basically having people route around your name and not mention you and erase you from the history books because your name is too hard to use. Sorry. Actually as my opinion is that as with any other intellectual property in the case of free software the less protection you have the better and I think that all the free software related trademarks should be put for open use and only be restricted in special cases like if there comes up a porno site calling itself Debian chicks maybe that would be a case maybe but I think that should be decided on an individual basis. My name is Andreas Tiller I'm the author of this CDD Toolkit in Debian and I just want to tell a small story. Last week I've got a male CDD Toolkit is not able to upload to FTP master and shortly after this I've got a male sorry from the man who had set up external set of Debian packages and he is just using it and back porting it to Sarge and I just ask him why are you using it and so he said well I have a little laboratory for teachers and we are just using it what you did and so what I learned is people are using the techniques we invented even if they are crappy I can say I'm the author it is crap and it is rewritten Sarge is rewriting the CDD Toolkit and so my answer to the people from Ubuntu is just joins this effort which is currently done to rewrite what was just a very little and small tool and make it better so that it works for all people and not only for the small purpose we have currently because people are using it and they are using it without our knowledge so I think it is good and we have to learn it that our users are wanting these tools Thank you Andreas and thank you Agars