Table of Contents
beginning of 2000
Ben Armstrong <synrg@debian.org>
Debian 3.0 (Woody)
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.
Andreas Tille <tille@debian.org>
Activists on Debian Med mailing list
Sarge
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.
Summer of 2002, since 2003 merged with SkoleLinux, which is now synonymous with Debian Edu
Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>
Sarge
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.
Francesco P. Lovergine <frankie@debian.org>
Geographical Information Systems
OpenStreetMap and GPS devices
Ole Streicher <olebole@debian.org>
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.
October 2004
Michael Banck <mbanck@debian.org>
Chemical applications in Debian
Activists on Debian Science mailing list
Activists on Debian Science maintainers list
Committers to Debian Science VCS
Uploaders of Debian Science team
Team members closing the most bugs in Debian Science packages
Sylvestre Ledru <sylvestre@debian.org>
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.
Debian for blind and visually impaired people
February 2003
Mario Lang <mlang@debian.org>
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.
Latest posts on discussion forum
FreedomBox Team <admin@freedombox.org>
FreedomBox is designed to be your own inexpensive server at home. It runs free software and offers an increasing number of services ranging from a calendar or jabber server to a wiki or VPN. A web interface allows you to easily install and configure your apps.