Debian Weekly News - March 13th, 2002

Welcome to this year's eleventh issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. It looks like this was a quiet week. However, it was a great week, since the Woody release process continues well and a Debian Developer apparently won two Gold medals.

Woody Release Status. Anthony Towns sent in another report covering the Woody release. The bug count is still going down, but more slowly than we might like. Please keep looking through packages you maintain or use to make sure they are releasable. Again, he removed a bunch of packages from Woody that seemed to be unreleasable.

Project Leader Elections Debate. Randolph Chung sent a Call for Questions for the upcoming Debian Project Leader (DPL) Election debate, as announced by the project secretary last week. As currently envisioned, the debate will be moderated by the panelists, and will be broken down into four parts: General questions, questions directed to the candidates, questions that arise during the above two parts and, finally, closing remarks and rebuttal.

XFS based Boot Floppies. Two people are working towards integration of XFS into Debian's boot-floppies. Eduard Bloch created the first installations CD image for Woody and XFS which can be downloaded from here. Angelo Ovidi started a new project on SourceForge called XFDeb. He already created a rescue disk based on kernel 2.4.14 and XFS 1.0.2 and is going to create the root and drivers floppies, too. His aim is to unify his work with Ionut Georgescu's Debian installer with SGI XFS support to offer the XFS journaling file system as an option at installation time.

Debian Developer wins Paralympic Gold twice. It seems that one of our developers, Bart Bunting, is attending the Paralympics currently being held in Salt Lake City. He won the gold medal in the visually impaired mens Super-G and Downhill. Bart, a two-time world champion at the titles in Switzerland two years ago, is competing at his first Paralympics. Congratulations Bart!

teTeX Documentation Licenses. C.M. Connelly is in the process of vetting the documentation files that are distributed with the tetex packages. Most of them are compliant with the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG), partially using the LaTeX Project Public License (LPPL), GNU General Public License (GPL), their own DFSG-compliant license, or in the public domain. There are about 30 documents whose licensing status is less clear, and those are the ones that are the subject of investigation.

DebianHelp Needs A New Home. The web site DebianHelp was created in 2000 and aims to help out beginners to Debian GNU/Linux. Presently, the maintainer of DebianHelp himself, Randy Edwards, is asking for help, because the site will lose its internet connection in a couple of months. People who want to offer him hosting for the web site or the server should drop Randy a line.

New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the Debian archive recently.

Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure that you update your systems if you have any of these packages installed.

Got News? Please inform us about everything that is happening in the Debian community. We are always looking for any interesting stories to add, especially new items by volunteer writers, and topics we tend to miss. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at dwn@debian.org.


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This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Yooseong Yang and Martin 'Joey' Schulze.