Debian support is offered by a group of volunteers. If this community-driven support doesn't fulfil your needs and you can't find the answer in ourdocumentation, you may hire aconsultant to answer your questions or to maintain or add additional functionality to your Debian system.
IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a great way to chat with people from all over the world in real time. It's a text-based chat system for instant messaging. On IRC you can enter chat rooms (so-called channels) or you can directly chat with individual persons via private messages.
IRC channels dedicated to Debian can be found onOFTC. For a full list of Debian channels, please refer to ourWiki. You can also use asearch engine to check for Debian-related channels.
To connect to the IRC network, you can either use OFTC'sWebChat in your preferred web browser or install a client on your computer. There are lots of different clients out there, some with a graphical interface, some for the console. Some popular IRC clients have been packaged for Debian, for example:
The Debian Wiki offers a more comprehensivelist of IRC clients which are available as Debian packages.
Once you have the client installed, you need to tell it to connectto the server. In most clients, you can do that by typing:
/server irc.debian.org
The hostname irc.debian.org is an alias for irc.oftc.net. In some clients (such as irssi) you will need to type this instead:
/connect irc.debian.org
Once you are connected, join channel#debian by typing this command:
/join #debian
Note: graphical clients like HexChat or Konversation often have a buttonor a menu entry for connecting to servers and joining channels.
More than thousand activedevelopers spread around the world work on Debian in their spare time—and in their own timezones. Therefore we communicate primarily through e-mail. Similarly, most of the conversation between Debian developers and users happens on differentmailing lists:
You can browse ourmailing list archive orsearch the archives without the need to be subscribed.
Of course, there are plenty of other mailing lists, dedicated to some aspect of the Linux ecosystem and not Debian-specific. Please use your favorite search engine to find the most suitable list for your purpose.
A lot of ourmailing lists can be browsed as newsgroups, in thelinux.debian.* hierarchy.
Debian User Forums is a web portalwhere thousands of other users discuss Debian-related topics, ask questions,and help each other by answering them. You can read all boards withouthaving to register. If you want to participate in the discussion and publishyour own postings, please register and log in.
Basically, there are two common ways to get in touch with a maintainer of a Debian package:
The Debian distribution has its ownbug tracker with bugs reported by users and developers. Every bug has a unique number and is kept on file until it is marked as resolved. There are two different ways to report a bug:
Limitations and severe problems of the current stable distribution(if any) are described onthe release page.
Please pay particular attention to thereleasenotes and theerrata.
Back to theDebian Project homepage.
See ourcontact page to get in touch. Web site source code isavailable.
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