Debian¶

What is Debian?¶

Debian is a free operating system, developed and maintained by the Debian project. A free Linux distribution with thousands of applications to meet our users' needs.

Thousands of volunteers around the world work together on the Debian operating system, prioritizing Free and Open Source Software. Meet the Debian project.

Debian at CERN?¶

Debian at CERN is only supported on Accelerator Front-End Systems through an ATS-IT agreement.

This means no support is provided for running Debian on end-user machines (desktops, laptops) or on machines in the data centre. Please refer to this page if you're looking to use a supported distribution.

Repositories¶

There are Debian mirrors available on Linuxsoft at /debian and /debian-security.

Furthermore, daily snapshots of Debian 12 bookworm and Debian 13 trixie are available at /internal/yumsnapshot.

Note:

before 31-03-2026 Debian 13 was not snapshotted
before 02-06-2026 debian-security was not snapshotted

For CERN configuration and utilities, we provide two minimal repositories:

/repos/cern12deb-stable for Debian 12
/repos/cern13deb-stable for Debian 13

Packages¶

Only the cern-ca-certs and cern-get-keytab packages are covered by the support agreement. They can be installed from the cern*deb-stable repositories.

Additional resources (unsupported)¶

There is a working build system for Debian packages. For more information on how to use it for automatically building and publishing packages, see the dedicated Koji page.

Monthly rebuilt Docker images used by rpmci for building Debian packages are pre-configured with the Linuxsoft mirrors and are available in the Gitlab registry: