Debian Weekly News - August 15th, 2000

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

Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 is officially released! The release went off as scheduled, despite a few last minute problems. The release announcement mentions support for the Powerpc and Arm architectures, a streamlined install process, slews of new and updated packages, full PAM support, and improved internationalization as key changes in this version of Debian. Of course, it is dedicated to developer Joel "Espy" Klecker, who died shortly before release. Debian 2.2 is the culmination of 18 months of development, much of it chronicled here in Debian Weekly News, and everyone in the project deserves a big "thank you" for all their hard work.

Linuxworld Expo is in full swing now, and Debian's booth there is being flooded by many attendees. A webcam is up at the booth's web site. Debian was awarded the IDG/Linus Torvalds Community Award today, and in an unprecedented turn of events, a real live press conference is being held to announce the release of Debian 2.2 to the world. The festivities at LinuxWorld will continue, with a release party scheduled for Wednesday night.

VA Linux Systems has announced on their web site that Debian will be available pre-installed on their systems "in late 2000".

Security fixes: A hole in Zope allowed remote users to gain unauthorised access. An update to the mailx package was released that prevents attackers from tricking mail into running other programs. Since there are no exploits of this problem that are known to work on Debian, this is mainly just a preventive measure, but upgrading to the fixed package is still a smart move.

It wasn't exactly a quiet week on the Debian mailing lists, but the editor of this newsletter is at LinuxWorld and hasn't been able to read and report on discussions there in the usual detail. Next week, things will return to normal, and we'll discover how Debian 2.2 is faring and probably switch focus to the development of woody. For a first taste of that, here is Anthony Towns, thinking about what we did right and wrong, this time around, and some of the major projects planned for woody.


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