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Like most Linux distributions, Debian GNU/Linux provides:
the major GNU applications for software development, file manipulation, and text processing, including gcc, g++, make, texinfo, Emacs, the Bash shell and numerous upgraded Unix utilities,
Perl, Python, Tcl/Tk and various related programs, modules and libraries for each of them,
TeX (LaTeX) and Lyx, dvips, Ghostscript,
the Xorg windowing system, which provides a networked graphical user interface for Linux, and countless X applications including the GNOME, KDE and Xfce desktop environments.
a full suite of networking applications, including servers for Internet protocols such as HTTP (WWW), FTP, NNTP (news), SMTP and POP (mail) and DNS (name servers); relational databases like PostgreSQL, MySQL; also provided are web browsers including the various Mozilla products [1],
a complete set of office applications, including the OpenOffice.org productivity suite, Gnumeric and other spreadsheets, WYSIWYG editors, calendars.
More than 18040 packages, ranging from news servers and readers to sound support, FAX programs, database and spreadsheet programs, image processing programs, communications, net, and mail utilities, Web servers, and even ham-radio programs are included in the distribution. Another 560 software suites are available as Debian packages, but are not formally part of Debian due to license restrictions.
For each package the authors of the program(s) are credited in the file /usr/share/doc/PACKAGE/copyright, where PACKAGE is to be substituted with the package's name.
Maintainers who package this software for the Debian GNU/Linux system are listed in the Debian control file (see What is a Debian control file?, Section 7.4) that comes with each package. The Debian changelog, in /usr/share/doc/PACKAGE/changelog.Debian.gz, mentions the people who've worked on the Debian packaging too.
A complete list is available from any of the Debian mirrors, in the
file indices/Maintainers. That file includes the package names
and the names and e-mails of their respective maintainers.
The WWW interface to the Debian
packages conveniently summarizes the packages in each of about
thirty "sections" of the Debian archive.
If you want to build packages in your Debian system you will need to have a
basic development environment, including a C/C++ compiler and some other
essential packages. In order to install this environment you just need to
install the build-essential. This package is a meta-package or
place-holder package which depends on the standard development tools one needs
to build a Debian package.
Some software can, however, need additional software to be rebuilt, including
library headers or additional tools such as autoconf or
gettext. Debian provides many of the tools needed to build other
software as Debian packages.
Finding which software is precisely required can be tricky, however, unless you
are planning on rebuilding Debian packages. This last task is rather easy to
do, as official packages have to include a list of the additional software
(besides the packages in build-essential) needed to build the
pacakge, this is known as Build-Dependencies. To install all the
packages needed to build a given source package and then build said source
package you can just run:
# apt-get build-dep foo
# apt-get source --build foo
Notice that if you want to build the Linux kernels distributed by Debian you
will want to install also the kernel-package package. For more
information see What tools does
Debian provide to build custom kernels?, Section 10.2.
A list of packages which are still needed to be packaged for Debian exists, the
Work-Needing and Prospective
Packages list.
For more details about adding the missing things, see How can I become a Debian software developer?, Section 13.1.
Debian Policy requires that such symbolic links (to libfoo.so.x.y.z or similar) are placed in separate, development packages. Those packages are usually named libfoo-dev or libfooX-dev (presuming the library package is named libfooX, and X is a whole number).
Several free implementations of Java technology are available as Debian packages, providing both Java Development Kits as well as Runtime Environments. You can write, debug and run Java programs using Debian.
Running a Java applet requires a web browser with the capability to recognize and execute them. Several web browsers available in Debian, such as Mozilla or Konqueror, support Java plug-ins that enable running Java applets within them.
Please refer to the Debian Java
FAQ for more information.
In order to make sure that your system has been installed from the real Debian base disks check for the existence of /etc/debian_version file, which contains a single one-line entry giving the version number of the release, as defined by the package base-files.
The existence of the program dpkg shows that you should be able to install Debian packages on your system, but as the program has been ported to many other operating systems and architectures, this is no longer a reliable method of determining is a system Debian GNU/Linux.
Users should be aware, however, that the Debian system consists of many parts, each of which can be updated (almost) independently. Each Debian "release" contains well defined and unchanging contents. Updates are separately available. For a one-line description of the installation status of package foo, use the command dpkg --list foo. To view versions of all installed packages, run:
dpkg -l
For a more verbose description, use:
dpkg --status foo
Debian GNU/Linux is distributed with keymaps for nearly two dozen keyboards, and with utilities (in the kbd package) to install, view, and modify the tables.
The installation prompts the user to specify the keyboard he will use.
Vast majority of the software we packaged supports entering non-US-ASCII characters used in other Latin languages (e.g. ISO-8859-1 or ISO-8859-2), and a number of programs support multi-byte languages such as Japanese or Chinese.
Currently, support for German-, Spanish-, Finnish-, French-, Hungarian-, Italian-, Japanese-, Korean-, Dutch-, Polish-, Portuguese-, Russian-, Turkish-, and Chinese-language manual pages is provided through the manpages-LANG packages (where LANG is the two-letter ISO country code). To access an NLS manual page, the user must set the shell LC_MESSAGES variable to the appropriate string.
For example, in the case of the Italian-language manual pages, LC_MESSAGES
needs to be set to 'italian'. The man program will then search
for Italian manual pages under /usr/share/man/it/.
US laws placed restrictions on the export of defense articles, which includes some types of cryptographic software. PGP and ssh, among others, fall into this category. For the sarge release packages in this archive were moved to the main archive (or to non-free, if applicable) due to the US relaxing its regulations on the export of cryptography.
To prevent anyone from taking unnecessary legal risks, certain Debian GNU/Linux
packages were only available from a non-US site ftp://non-US.debian.org/debian-non-US/,
with numerous mirror sites all of which are also outside of the US, see
ftp://non-US.debian.org/debian-non-US/README.non-US
for a full list. These sites still exist (for the benefit of users of
woody) but its contents are no longer supported and are considered
obsolete. Please remove any mentions to non-US from your sources in your
/etc/apt/sources.list configuration file.
Due to its restrictive license, it's in the non-free area. Moreover, since license does not even allow modified binaries to be distributed, you have to compile it yourself from the source and the Debian patches.
The source package name is pine. You can use the
pine-tracker package to be notified about when you need to
upgrade.
Note that there are many replacements for both pine and pico, such as
mutt and nano, that are located in the main section.
Dan J. Bernstein distributes all
software he has written with a restrictive license, consequently,
it's in the non-free area. Since the license he uses does not allow modified
binaries to be distributed, you have to compile it yourself from the source and
the Debian patches to obtain a binary package you can install in your Debian
GNU/Linux system.
The source package names are qmail-src, ezmlm-src and
djbdns-installer, respectively.
For qmail you need to install qmail-src first and
then run build-qmail to build the Debian package. You also need
to do install the ucspi-tcp-src package to get ucspi-tcp, which
qmail depends on.
Dan J. Bernstein maintains a FAQ from distributors page
if you are interested in reading his reasons (one of which is Cross-platform
compatibility)
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The Debian GNU/Linux FAQ