<p> <a href="http://debian.org/">Debian GNU/Linux</a> turns 19 today.</p> <p> I estimate that I did my first install some time in late 1995, perhaps early 1996. I haven&#39;t really used anything else as my day-in-day-out OS since. I&#39;ve never had a Mac of any stripe, and haven&#39;t used Windows with any frequency other than for World of Warcraft since &#39;99.</p> <p> I can pin my first contribution to Debian with far more accuracy: September 3, 1996. That&#39;s the date on the first Debian changelog entry in the <code class="verbatim">libwww-perl</code> package, which was, I believe, the first package I ever made. It still exists in Debian and Ubuntu (and other derivatives) and if you have it installed, you can look at <code class="verbatim">/usr/share/doc/libwww-perl/changelog.Debian.gz</code>, and right down there at the very end, you&#39;ll find my grubby little fingerprints.</p>

<p> Runs through how to set things up so that you can easily put together a number of packages for different distributions, architectures, etc.</p> <p> <a href="http://www.davromaniak.eu/index.php?post/2011/03/03/The-ultimate-package-building-system">Go read it</a>.</p>