Debian Weekly News - August 2nd, 2000

Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian community.

There is no news to report about the pending release of Debian 2.2. No show-stopper problems have been found, and nothing else has come up that could change the release schedule. Most of the news items this week are related to development of the unstable tree.

Of course, security fixes continue, as always. A bug in userv that allowed local users to take over other accounts was quickly fixed. A remote root exploit in the dhcp-client and dhcp-client-beta packages is also fixed. (An earlier fix seems to have been incomplete.)

Porting Debian to the ia64. Several developers would like to begin a port of Debian to the Intel ia64 architecture. The problem is that ia64 hardware is not for sale yet, and they're having difficulty getting the root access to some that doing a Debian port would require. Randolph Chung mentioned that "I have some of the basic tools ported already (dpkg, apt)", but cautioned, "I doubt we can do an effective port unless we get machines." A new mailing list was created for the port.

Ian Jackson posted plans for a package signing infrastructure that he, Wichert Akkerman, and Ben Collins developed at a recent meeting in Atlanta. It is based on the SPKI/SDSI infrastructure (AKA "spooky-sudsy"), and it covers not just adding signatures to .deb's, but also verifying that a signature is from a member of Debian, or whatever other organisation a user chooses to trust.

Slashdot interviews Ian Murdock. As the founder of Debian, Ian has an interesting perspective on the distribution. Some quotes from the interview:

Slashdot also ran a story on the dedication of Debian 2.2 to Joel 'Espy' Klecker.

Debian derivatives: The Gibraltar project aims to make a Debian-based firewall/router that runs entirely off of a bootable CD-ROM. The first pre-release is now available. A new version of Libranet Linux has also been released.

Now some changes that should make life easier for Debian developers:

New packages in unstable this week include the following, and 21 more:

And finally, very beta "phase 1" X 4.0.1 packages are available for testing. Be sure to read the README first ...


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This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Joey Hess.