By Sam Varghese
Debian GNU/Linux, a free Linux distribution started by Ian Murdock in 1993, is the fastest growing distribution for web servers, according to figures collated by network services vendor Netcraft.
The British company, which releases a monthly report on the number of active websites, web server software and operating systems in use, said its latest survey had counted 1.2 million active sites hosted on Debian.
The last release of Debian, version 3.1 (codenamed Sarge), was released on July 6, after nearly three years of development.
Netcraft said the anticipation of the release and the release itself had generated new interest in Debian after some years when the distribution had lagged behind others.
Debian's growth was particularly noticeable in European hosting locations, such as Komplex, Lycos Europe, Proxad and Deutsche Telecom, it said.
The data showed that Red Hat is still the most popular Linux distribution. Non-commercial distributions such as Fedora - Red Hat's community distribution - and Gentoo, were growing much faster than their commercial counterparts.