# Existing Debian Pure Blends

## Debian Junior: Debian for children from 1 to 99

Start

- beginning of 2000

URL

Tasks

- Tasks of Debian Jr.

Mailing list

- debian-jr@lists.debian.org

Initiator

- Ben Armstrong synrg@debian.org

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.

## 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 tille@debian.org

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.

## 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 pere@hungry.com

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.

## 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 frankie@debian.org

Goals

- - Geographical Information Systems

  - OpenStreetMap and GPS devices

## 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 olebole@debian.org

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.

## DebiChem: Debian for Chemistry

Start

- October 2004

URL

- Debichem Alioth page

Tasks

- Tasks of DebiChem

Mailing list

- debichem-users@lists.alioth.debian.org

Activity

- Activists on DebiChem mailing list

  Committers to DebiChem VCS

  Uploaders of DebiChem team

  Team members closing the most bugs in DebiChem packages

Initiator

- Michael Banck mbanck@debian.org

Goals

- - Chemical applications in Debian

## Debian Science: Debian for science

Start

- July 2005

URL

- Debian Science Wiki

Tasks

- Tasks of Debian Science

Mailing list

- debian-science@lists.debian.org

Activity

- 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

Responsible

- 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 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 mlang@debian.org

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.