List of Debian releases

Debian releases do not follow a fixed schedule. Recent releases have been made roughly biennially by the Debian Project.

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 the toys.

Debian 1.0 was never released as a vendor accidentally shipped a development release with that version number. The package management system dpkg and its front-end dselect were developed and implemented on Debian in a previous release. A transition from the a.out binary format to the ELF binary format had already begun before the planned 1.0 release. The only supported architecture was Intel 80386 (i386).

Debian 1.1 (Buzz), released 17 June 1996, contained 474 packages. Debian had fully transitioned to the ELF binary format and used Linux kernel 2.0.

Debian 1.2 (Rex), released 12 December 1996, contained 848 packages maintained by 120 developers.

Debian 1.3 (Bo), released 5 June 1997, contained 974 packages maintained by 200 developers.

Debian 2.0 (Hamm), released 24 July 1998, contained over 1,500 packages maintained by over 400 developers. A transition was made to libc6 and Debian was ported to the Motorola 68000 series (m68k) architectures.

Debian 2.1 (Slink), released 9 March 1999, contained about 2,250 packages. The front-end APT was introduced for the package management system and Debian was ported to Alpha and SPARC.

Debian 2.2 (Potato), released 14–15 August 2000, contained 2,600 packages maintained by more than 450 developers. New packages included the display manager GDM, the directory service OpenLDAP, the security software OpenSSH and the mail transfer agent Postfix. Debian was ported to the PowerPC and ARM architectures.

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