Debian Weekly News - May 14th, 2001

You like us, you really like us! We got a slew of letters (well, emails...) saying that it was good to see DWN back. Thanks for the show of support, we'll do our best to keep you informed! A big Kudos to Joey Hess for providing helpful guidance.

Boot floppy success. Santiago Garcia Mantinan reports that he has had success with a complete install of Woody using the new boot floppies, and a few modifications of his own. And there was much rejoicing... A little later, an updated progress report, was posted. According to this, the freeze will start in June.

Why care about boot floppies? A few inquisitive minds wanted to know what all the fuss about boot floppies was, when they just wanted to install from CD-ROM. The software used for installation are all designed to fit on floppy disks, though they may actually reside on CD-ROM, hard disk or on a network. For instance, you can download a bootable image sized for 1.2MB, 1.44MB or 2.88MB floppies - but that image can actually reside on just about any bootable media that your system can handle. Floppy disks were a much more common install method several years ago, though many folks install from CD-ROM or do a network install rather than fussing with floppies.

Tasks policy proposal. Anthony Towns raised the topic of creating a proper tasks policy for Woody. Anthony proposes a set of guidelines for task-* packages that would make a task-* package more flexible, and allow for selection of packages rather than all packages mentioned in the task header.

Separate phases. Glenn McGrath proposed separating the preparation and installation phases of the Debian installer to make the installer more versatile. Debian-installer is the installer project for the version of Debian after woody. It has a whole new design, while boot-floppies are going to be used for the last time for woody.

Security notices. Several packages have been the subject of Debian Security Advisories this week. If you're using Zope, mandb, gftp or Samba, be sure to visit the Debian Security Page for information on upgrading to newer versions.

JBuilder4 on Debian/PPC. In case you want to run JBuilder4 on PPC, Franck Routier was kind enough to contribute his success story and instructions on getting it running. Thanks for the report, Franck!

Package list for 2.2r4. A list of proposed updated packages for 2.2r4 was announced by Martin Schulze.

New packages this week. New to Debian this week are the IDS filesystem checker fcheck, the Java VM japhar, XFS filesystem support kernel-patch-xfs, the serpento dict server and vcr, a video capture program.

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This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier, Jean-Christophe Helary and Tollef Fog Heen.