As Dwarf, the author began traveling the Information Super-highway in the early 1990's. Several years later he discovered Linux, when someone gave him a copy of the first edition of The Linux Journal. He purchased a CD from one of the adds in that magazine, and after only 3 or 4 tries, was successful installing Slackware on a PC that had previously only run DOS. He was almost immediately disappointed because many of the source packages that he was able to download off the net would not build because some library, or utility, appeared to be missing from the system. Being barely able to manage make provided none of the skills needed to resolve the problem. As Dwarf later discovered, the reason for these failures came from the nonstandard locations for libraries and utilities in a Slackware system. With that knowledge it is a pretty simple matter to edit the make file so the libraries can be successfully found. Lack of this knowledge forced Dwarf to try another distribution. Software Landing Systems (SLS) was installed next, and it did a much better job of supplying everything necessary to build packages directly off the net. In fact, Dwarf used this system for all his network activities until he lost his computer to lightning two years later.
Once a new machine arrived a decision had to be made. Although the SLS system had been more successful than Slackware, the success rate was still down around 3 successes for every 4 attempts. Searching the various CDs in his growing collection, Dwarf discovered Debian. Although the release available on that CD had no PPP support, what was provided was much more successful at building the collected source files than either of the previous distributions! Finding the debian-devel mailing list and upgrading his system to a version of Debian with PPP support got Dwarf working as a developer, and he has been working with Debian ever since.
After that short history of the author, a short history of Debian seems to be in order. The following was provided by Ian Murdock, the creator of Debian: