Selection of packages

Debian contains nearly 10000 binary packages, and this number is constantly increasing. There is no single user who needs all these packages. The regular user is interested in a subset of these packages. To specify packages of one's particular interest, several options are provided by Debian:

tasksel
Provision of a reasonable selection of rather general tasks that can be accomplished using a set of packages installed on a Debian GNU/Linux system. However, these are not yet covering scientific applications. The CDD toolkit which is currently developed will also support tasksel to enable selecting for instance Debian-Med right after a fresh installation of a general Debian system.

standard package management
dpkg and apt provide means to search for packages of particular interest by its name or words in the package's description. Every package also indicates, as set by its maintainer, references to other packages of potential interest.

In its current development, an ontology of applications of software, upon which semantical queries could be performed, analogous to Moby-S and BioMoby [17,26] effort, is not available.

A package management system is a very strong tool to manage software packages on your computer. A large amount of the work of a distributor is building these software packages. The Debian package management tools have been ported to MacOS X[22] and other Linux Distributions[14].

Debian officially maintains 11 different architectures with many more not officially supported ports to other operating systems, which includes some that run another flavour of UNIX. Its technology for package management has been adopted for other operating systems, i.e. Fink on MacOSX (fink.sourceforge.net).

A distribution is a collection of software packages around the GNU Linux operating system that satisfies the needs of the target user group. There are general distributions, which try to support all users, and there are several specialised distributions, which each target a special group of users.

Distributors are those companies that are building these collections of software around the GNU Linux operating system. Since the software is Free, the user who buys a distribution pays for the service that the distributor is providing. These services might be:

The best established Distributors of GNU/Linux systems are Mandrake, RedHat, SuSE (now owned by Novell) and Debian. Linspire, Xandros, MEPIS and Ubuntu are well known derivates of Debian.

Andreas Tille 2005-05-13