Welcome to this year's second issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
This week in Debianinterviews
Squeezeto be released this weekend
Release Manager Neil McGovern announced the release date of Debian 6.0
Squeeze
: On the very next weekend, the weekend of the 5th and
6th February Debian 6.0 Squeeze
will finally be realed as a stable
release! Final work towards has began, inlcuding preparation for release parties all
over the world!
For those of the community waiting impatiently for the release, news.debian.net provides a countdown banner. As the release process takes quite some time, members of the Debian Project while provide live comments and interesting facts via Debian's official identica account.
One interesting number has already been noted
down: In the two years of development of Debian 6.0 Squeeze
the Debian Project has closed 149,862 bugs. Thank you everyone for this
fantastic work!
DebConf is a yearly conference for the Debian community. Like everything else in Debian, DebConf is run completely by volunteers. Organizing a conference is a lot of work as you might imagine, so it is no surprise that the DebConf team is eager to have people help out. As Richard Darst writes:
DebConf is a huge process, and there are many things we could use help on. People come and go, and are usually overworked after a year or two — so we would love new people to get involved. If you have new ideas, we'd love to hear about them and we can discuss if they'd work and how to make them happen. And by the way, if you are looking for a good way to get involved with Debian and don't know where to start, this might be among the best options!
Thijs Kinkhorst sent some bits from
the Debian Security Team reporting about the group's meeting at the Linux
Hotel in Essen, Germany. Among the things they discussed was various
improvements to the team workflow, particularly regarding therelease
process of Debian Security Advisories - redesigned from the ground up; a longer security support for Debian
stable - still a proposal - and backports security support. The report also
mentions various other interesting topics as Beta testing
of security
updates, a README.test file to include into packages to explain how its
functionality can be tested, and the problem of some specific packages which
are difficult to handled because of they include a lot of source packages.
The mail ends with a call for volunteers. More details can be read on the
full minutes of
the meeting.
In related news, Simon Paillard from our mirrors team, gave some news for sponsors of Debian mirrors. An interesting part of it was his request for help to provide more official mirrors of the security archive. He's especially interested in new official mirrors in South America, Asia and Africa.
After noticing, that Debian's recent announcement to release Debian 6.0
Squeeze
with a completly free Linux kernel seems to have been
often missunderstood, Debian Developer Alexander Reichle-Schmehl debunked
some myth about the non-Removal of Firmwares, including Debian
removed all firmware files from its kernels
(short answer: No);
Debian will be uninstallable for many users
(short answer: There
are netinstall
images and tarballs
for other installation media available): Ah, those Debian freedom
zealots again...
(short answer: It's not only Debian).
He also explained some of the reasons for the fuss about non-free firmware files, and recommended all people, who find it difficult to find the non-free images, to just remember two things: wiki and Firmware, as everything one would need can be found on the Firmware page of Debian's wiki.
A new update for Debian
GNU/Linux 5.0 Lenny
has been released. This update mainly adds
corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few
adjustment to serious problems.
The second release candidate of the installer for Debian Squeeze was released
on January 22nd. Some fixes, e.g. keyboard configuration for the
graphical installer fixed for several languages, have been included in this
releases of the installer.
The errata
collects some details and a full list of known issues. You are encouraged to
test the installer and report bugs; media and further information are
available on the Debian Installer
page.
In related news, Matthew Palmer announced test images of the debian-installer supporting IPv6 (suitable for IPv6-only networks) and test images supporting Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA). He calls for testers for both images.
Enrico Zini has published on his blog a reportof his partecipation at the Cross-distro Meeting on Application Installer. The meeting, organised by Vincent Untz, was focused on metadata (both from packages and users) and how to share them between distributions or, at least, how to define some standards for these metadata. Enrico has presented Debtags and apt-xapian-index, two of the most powerful tools for handle package metadata in Debian. As a result of the meeting, there's now the intent of match package names across distributions.
It's also nice to see, how Debian's services and projectes like screenshot.debian.net (providing screenshots of applications to users and package management frontends), Debian Description Translation Project (DDTP for shot; translating Debian package description into other languages), or debtags (tagging debian packages for easier search) where a very welcome help and much marveled by other representatives.
The mailing list for general discussion of GIS issues in Debian was moved from Alioth to lists.debian.org. As usual at lists.debian.org is open also for non-subscribers, has a more generic name and hopefully can attract more GIS users and developers in Debian to discuss relevant issues.
The Debian GIS Blend has defined a new task SAR and earth
observation
at their tasks page
which contains a list of not yet official packages which are potential
targets for inclusion into Debian. Feel free to discuss this task or
other ideas you might have about the GIS relevant packages on the
mailing list mentioned above.
Please note that Debian GIS also maintains OpenStreetMap-related packages, together with the Debian OpenStreetMap Team (pkg-osm on Alioth). Feel free to join us!
The Debian project announced, that it will be present on several upcoming events and trade fairs, including Cloud Expo Europe 2011 in London, United Kingdom, FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium, SCaLE on Los Angeles, USA, CeBIT in Hanover, Germany, and the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage in Chemnitz, Germany.
This week in Debianinterviews
Since the last issue of the Debian Project News, two new issues of the
This week in
Debian
podcast have been published: with
XXX, xxx; and with
XXX, xxx.
The xxth issue of the miscellaneous news for developers has been released and covers the following topics:
Aurelien Jarno announced the new debian-ports archive signing key, which will be used signing the archive with unofficial ports.
The Debian
Administration blog published a howto about installing
an encrypted openvpn on Lenny
and one about creating
dynamic volumes with loop devices.
Mike Hommey bloged about Changes to the Debian Mozilla team APT archive, where test versions of several Mozilla products (like Firefox 3.6 and 4.0) are made available.
Raphaël Herzog noticed, that unlike other
distributions,
Debian
is doing very well eating his own dog food
, meaning that its
infrastructure is running on its own distribution. He gave big kudos to
Debians System Adminstration Team for
keeping more than 140
servers running Debian.
Cyril Brulebois published Debian XSF News summarize many recent events around package X.org in Debian.
XXX applicants have been accepted as Debian Developers and XXX applicants has been accepted as Debian Maintainer and XXX people started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome X, Y, and Z into our project!
According to the Bugs Search
interface of the Ultimate Debian Database, the upcoming release,
Debian 6.0 Squeeze
, is currently affected by
XXX release-critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved
or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about
XXX release-critical bugs remain to be solved for the
release to happen.
There are also more detailed statistics as well as some hints on how to interpret these numbers.
Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): wireshark, libsmi, mydms, pimd, tor, dbus, request-tracker3.6, openoffice.org, Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.
Debian's Backports Team releases advisories for these packages: egroupware (removal), kvm (removal), request-tracker3.8, Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.
Debian's Volatile Team released an update announcement for the package: . Please read it carefully and take the proper measures.
Please note that these are a selection of the more important security advisories of the last weeks. If you need to be kept up to date about security advisories released by the Debian Security Team, please subscribe to the security mailing list (and the separate backports list and volatile list) for announcements.
The following packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently (among others):
Please note that due to the freeze of the upcoming
Debian 6.0 Squeeze
acceptance of new packages has almost ceased.
Currently XXX packages are orphaned and XXX packages are up for adoption. Please take a look at the recent reports to see if there are packages you are interested in or view the complete list of packages which need your help.
Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers to watch the Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see the contributing page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at debian-publicity@lists.debian.org.
#use wml::debian::projectnews::footer editor="XXX, XXX, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl" # Translators may also add a translator="foo, bar, baz" to the previous line