http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2005/07/msg00165.html

The start up manager worked great in controlling how Mepis 11 is preconfigured.

Hi everyone,

I invite everyone interested to join the Utnubu Team. Utnubu stands for
doing what Ubuntu does, just the other way around: We want to take the
things Ubuntu does and that are missing in Debian, and - where
appliciable - put them in Debian.

This should be achieved using (at least) the following methods:
* Having a look at the patches that Ubuntu publishes, see if they are
suitable for Debian and then contact the Debian Maintainer to see if and
how these can be integrated.
* Contacting Ubuntu developers that upload directly to universe, if
they don't want to upload to Debian, too; this includes sponsoring. Note
that I do not plan to pull developers from Ubuntu, they should instead
form their package for both distributions.
* If this is not possible or feasable, take Ubuntu-only packages,
adjust them to Debian and upload them ourselves.

(Personally, I'd like to concentrate on point 2 and 3, so another reason
for you to join)

I have set up the alioth project utnubu, as well as the mailing lists
utnubu-discuss@lists.alioth.debian.org for general in-group discussion,
as well as utnubu-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org for the maintainer
field of our possible packages.

A list of binary package in universe, but not in Debian, is assembled on
http://people.debian.org/~nomeata/utnubu/