What is Debian?

Debian is a GNU/Linux distribution. This article at The Age and this one, at Debian Universe provide some more details about Debian "the operating system" and Debian "the project".

The Cedar Solutions APT Data Source

Cedar Solutions currently provides two different APT data sources, one for Debian's the stable distribution ("etch") and one for the unstable distribution ("sid", a.k.a. "lenny").

Users of Debian and other derived distributions (like Ubuntu) can use the Cedar Solutions APT data source to install software directly from cedar-solutions.com rather than waiting for it to hit an official repository.

Cedar Solutions currently only provides binary packages for the i386 architecture. Source packages are available, however, so it should be possible for you to build your own binary packages for any of Debian's many supported architectures. If for some reason you need binary packages for an architecture other than i386, and it is not practical to build the binary package yourself, please contact Ken.

Choose one of the sets of URLs below, and use it as described in the APT HOWTO. Essentially, you'll have to add the URLs to your /etc/apt.sources.list file before running apt-get, aptitude, or synaptic.

Source APT URLs
stable
HTTP 		deb http://cedar-solutions.com/ftp/debian/ stable main
deb-src http://cedar-solutions.com/ftp/debian/ stable main
unstable
HTTP 		deb http://cedar-solutions.com/ftp/debian/ unstable main
deb-src http://cedar-solutions.com/ftp/debian/ unstable main

Available Packages

Prereleases end up on the Cedar Backup website mostly as a convenience to Ken, who is the official Debian maintainer for a number of packages. In Ken's working model, official Debian package updates are uploaded first to cedar-solutions.com and then from there to the official Debian mirrors. This way, it's possible to test installation via APT from some source other than the official mirrors.

The following packages are available in the Cedar Solutions repository.

Prereleases
Package Distribution
cedar-backup2 unstable (lenny)
stable (etch)
cproto unstable (lenny)
epydoc unstable (lenny)
ncompress unstable (lenny)
pychecker unstable (lenny)