Re: question

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

[I hope you don't mind the private copy of this mail; I'm guessing
you're not subscribed to the debian-project mailing list.]

On Wed, Aug 27, 2003 at 04:16:13PM -0400, Thompson-Laurin, Harriet wrote:
> I am a systems analyst taking a course at the University of Phoenix on
> Unix.  My teacher has assigned a project in which I need to obtain
> specific information about Debian.  Although I searched your website,
> I wasn't able to find out if Debian runs on Pentium 4's.

It does, yes. Within a general hardware architecture such as i386,
support for variants such as Pentium 4 is up to the Linux kernel, which
in its latest versions claims specific support for the Pentium 4.

At any rate, though, the Pentium 4 is basically backwards-compatible
with earlier i386-class processors, so there should be no problem even
with older versions of the Linux kernel.

> Of course, any other information would be helpful.  It does appear
> that there are quite a number of available application packages for
> Debian, from the website.

Our current stable distribution has approximately 5700 source packages.
These are split down into more binary packages than that, and binary
packages are what users generally see and can install with 'apt-get
install such-and-such; source packages are a fairer measure of the
number of items of software in the distribution, though. I'm not sure
how many of these will qualify as "application packages", since many are
libraries.

The next stable distribution is currently slated to have about 7300
source packages.

> I gather than the Unix/Linux/Debian
> marketshare in total is estimated at 5%, but I also need to obtain
> marketshare for just Debian by itself. 

Unfortunately, I think that will be difficult. Since, as you probably
know, anybody can download Debian from their local mirror for nothing
more than the cost of their own network connection, nobody has anything
like accurate figures for Debian's market share. You may be able to
construct a guess based on the occasional poll on various popular web
sites about the relative popularity of different GNU/Linux
distributions.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                  [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]