The Linux community had two birthdays to celebrate recently. Debian GNU/Linux turned 17 on August 16 and openSUSE has been providing an excellent desktop Linux for five years.

In an outpouring of appreciation bloggers Webwide wished Debian developers a Happy Birthday and offered thanks for a job well done. Valessio Brito constructed a lovely birthday card highlighting some of Debian's major achievements over its lifetime. On it he lists 14 Releases, 11 Conferences, 117 Maintainers, 873 Developers, and dozens of derivatives. Debian.net set up a Webpage that lets users send a thank you message to their favorite (or random) developer or maintainer. So far, there are over 1500 messages. Debian developer Margarita Manterola declared August 16 Debian Appreciation Day and Jono Bacon, Ubuntu Community Manager, offered his thanks and compliments with links to Debian relevant Websites. Even Ubuntu.com got in on the party.

Poor openSUSE was nearly forgotten. Their fifth birthday fell on August 9 and only one Website remembered. OMG! SUSE! offered their birthday wishes and gave a few milestones. Mentioned was the initial release of openSUSE, 10.0, in October 2005 and there have been seven major releases since. The most recent was 11.3.

Happy Birthday to both wonderful Linux distributions and many many more.