What is it?
Debian GNU/Linux — or simply “Debian” — is an operating system. An operating system is the “central” software in a computer, on top of which all the other applications will run. Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X are two well known proprietary operating systems.
Debian GNU/Linux has two fundamental differences with the proprietary operating systems:
Debian GNU/Linux is a free software (think of free as in freedom, not as in free beer). This means that the software included in Debian can be freely used, modified and redistributed by anyone. Incidentally, this means that Debian can be downloaded for free. Debian is developed by a community of thousands of developers and users which work cooperatively, mainly through the Internet. Some are volunteers, some are academics, others work for companies which have understood the technical and strategic interest of free software. The free software community resembles the scientific community in many ways: both share the goal of contributing to the common good, and both routinely pratice sharing of ideas and products to reach that goal.
- Debian GNU/Linux is an operating system, but it is also much more than that: it is a collection of several dozens of thousands of softwares. No need to go through several websites to get an office suite from there, a web browser from there, a numerical computing environment at another place, and to familiarize yourself with various installation procedures. With Debian, all these softwares, and many more, are freely accessible with a few clicks from a uniformized dowload interface (the package manager, see below).
Among all these softwares, many are directly useful for the researcher in economics. Actually, all the sofware that an economist would need for its daily job are in Debian, whether for producing theoretical or quantitative results or for communicating these results through article or presentation typesetting.
The objective of the present endeavour is to provide a easy way for researchers and students to try free software with a very simple installation procedure, using a virtual machine.