Chapter 4. Existing Debian Pure Blends

Table of Contents

4.1. Debian Junior: Debian for children from 1 to 99
4.2. Debian Med: Debian in Health Care
4.3. Debian Edu: Debian for Education
4.4. Debian GIS: Geographical Information Systems
4.5. Debian Astro: professional and hobby astronomers
4.6. DebiChem: Debian for Chemistry
4.7. Debian Science: Debian for science
4.8. Debian Accessibility Project

4.1. Debian Junior: Debian for children from 1 to 99

Start

beginning of 2000

URL

http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-jr

Tasks

Tasks of Debian Jr.

Mailing list

debian-jr@lists.debian.org

Initiator

Ben Armstrong

Activity

Activists on Debian Jr. mailing list

Release

Debian 3.0 (Woody)

Goals
  • To make Debian an OS that children of all ages will want to use, preferring it over the alternatives.

  • To care for those applications in Debian suitable for children, and ensure their quality, to the best of our abilities.

  • To make Debian a playground for children's enjoyment and exploration.

The main target is young children. By the time children are teenaged, they should be comfortable with using Debian without any special modifications.

Debian Jr. was the first Blend. In fact, at the time this project was created, the idea behind of Debian Pure Blends was born, although then, we used the term "Debian Internal Project". Over time, this name was changed to "Custom Debian Distributions" first because it was too broad, as it was equally descriptive of a number of quite different projects, such as IPv6 and QA. The next change of names became necessary when it was realised that the term "Custom Debian Distribution" was considered as "something else than Debian" by any newcomer. This was so misleading that it effectively blocked a wide propagation of the principle.

Debian Jr. not only provides games, but is also concerned about their quality from a child's perspective. Thus, games that are regarded as not well suited to young children are omitted. Moreover, choices are made about which packages are best suited for children to use for various other activities and tasks that interest them. This includes, for example, simple text processing, web browsing and drawing.

4.2. Debian Med: Debian in Health Care

Start

beginning of 2002

URL

Debian Med

Tasks

Tasks of Debian Med

Mailing list

debian-med@lists.debian.org

Initiator

Andreas Tille

Activity

Activists on Debian Med mailing list

Activists on Debian Med developer list

Committers to Debian Med VCS

Uploaders of Debian Med team

Team members closing the most bugs in Debian Med packages

Release

Sarge

Goals
  • To build an integrated software environment for all medical tasks.

  • To care especially for the quality of program packages in the field of medicine that are already integrated within Debian.

  • To build and include in Debian packages of medical software that are missing in Debian.

  • To care for a general infrastructure for medical users.

  • To make efforts to increase the quality of third party Free Software in the field of medicine.

4.3. Debian Edu: Debian for Education

Start

Summer of 2002, since 2003 merged with SkoleLinux, which is now synonymous with Debian Edu

URL

Debian Edu Wiki

Tasks

Tasks of Debian Edu

Mailing list

debian-edu@lists.debian.org

Activity

Activists on Debian Edu mailing list

Responsible

Petter Reinholdtsen

Release

Sarge

Goals
  • To make Debian the best distribution available for educational use.

  • Provide a ready to run classroom installation with free educational software. An automatically installed server provides net-boot services for disk-less thin clients and all necessary applications for educational use.

  • To federate many initiatives around education, which are partly based on forks of Debian.

  • To continue the internationalisation efforts of SkoleLinux.

  • To focus on easy installation in schools.

  • To cooperate with other education-related projects (like Schoolforge, Ofset, KdeEdu).

This project started with the intention to bring back into Debian a fork from Debian that was started by some people in France. Because they had some time constraints, the people who initially started this effort handed over responsibility to the Norwegian Skolelinux, which is currently more or less identical to Debian Edu.

4.4. Debian GIS: Geographical Information Systems

Start

October 2004

URL

DebianGIS Wiki

Tasks

Tasks of Debian GIS

Mailing list

user and developer list

Activity

Activists on Debian GIS mailing list

Initiator

Francesco P. Lovergine

Goals

4.5. Debian Astro: professional and hobby astronomers

Start

March 2014

URL

Debian Astro Blends page

Tasks

Tasks of Debian Astro

Mailing list

user and developer list

Activity

Activists on Debian GIS mailing list

Initiator

Ole Streicher

Goals

Debian Astro is a "Debian Pure Blend" with the aim to develop a Debian based operating system that fits the requirements of both professional and hobby astronomers. It integrates a large number of software packages covering telescope control, data reduction, presentation and other fields.

4.6. DebiChem: Debian for Chemistry

4.7. Debian Science: Debian for science

While there are Debian Pure Blends that care for certain sciences (Debian Med deals in a main part with Biology, DebiChem for Chemistry and Debian GIS for geography) not all sciences are covered by a specific Blend. The main reason is that at the moment not enough people support such an effort for every science. The temporary solution was to build a general Debian Science Blend that makes use of the work of other Blends in case it exists.

4.8. Debian Accessibility Project

Debian for blind and visually impaired people

Start

February 2003

Mailing list

debian-accessibility@lists.debian.org

URL

Debian Accessibility

Tasks

Tasks of Debian Accessibility

Activity

Activists on Debian Accessibility mailing list

Initiator

Mario Lang

Goals
  • To make Debian accessible to people with disabilities.

  • To take special care for: Screen readers; Screen magnification programs; Software speech synthesisers; Speech recognition software; Scanner drivers and OCR software; Specialised software like edbrowse (web-browse in the spirit of line-editors)

  • To make text-mode interfaces available.

  • To provide screen reader functionality during installation.