Debian Weekly News - November 26th, 2003

Welcome to this year's 47th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. We were not able to produce and publish DWN in time this week due to the security breach the Debian project faced. An interesting interview with several developers from freedesktop.org regarding aspects of their project, including interoperability, hardware abstraction, accessibility and more has been published.

Debian Servers compromised. The Debian project had to report that four servers were compromised by an unknown attacker. The admin team, with site admins and service admins are busy checking and resurrecting machines and services. As a first reaction all accounts have been locked as a safety precaution. If the same password was used for Debian machines and others, you are strongly advised to change it as soon as possible.

Testing Propagation Status. Nathanael Nerode looked at several packages and their migration to testing and concluded that things look pretty good actually. Perl and GNOME should be fine after their quarantine time. Mozilla, however, does not build on two architectures. Several packages, though, are waiting for Perl and PostgreSQL which is waiting for Perl as well.

Results for new SPI Board of Directors Member Vote. Wichert Akkerman, SPI board secretary, announced that a total of 52 people did cast their vote, which is 18 % of all eligible voters. The three winners are David Graham, Ian Jackson and Martin 'Joey' Schulze. The lists of voters, votes and results are also published. After a dispute period the three winners will be automatically appointed to the board of directors.

Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 Updated. Nearly one year after the last update to Debian GNU/Linux 3.0, the project finally updated the woody release again. This revision adds 143 security updates to the stable release, that were formerly distributed through security.debian.org, and 18 important bugfixes to various packages. Details of this update are on the preparation page.

Beginners Guide to GNU/Linux. Not exactly Debian related, but Chris Walden released a nine part series that guides beginners to GNU/Linux on IBM developerWorks. This roadmap is designed to help you take the experience and knowledge that you already have in computing and redirect it to working in GNU/Linux.

Review of both new Installers for Debian. Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier reviewed the new Debian Installer and Progeny's anaconda port. Debian-installer is an improvement over the old boot-floppies, especially since hardware is automatically detected, however it will still be intimidating for new users. Anaconda for Debian is not yet ready for primetime, but once finished will be easier to use on x86 than debian-installer.

EU Open Source Migration Guidelines. A strategic initiative (IDA, Interchange of Data between Administrations) of the European Commission has released the IDA Open Source Migration Guidelines which provide practical and detailed recommendations on how to migrate to office applications, calendaring, e-mail and other standard applications based on Free Software. IT experts from several European countries have been involved in creating this document.

Distro Taste: If Debian was a Beer... Indranath Neogy wrote a short article about GNU/Linux distribution taste and beer which was discussed on Slashdot as well. This diversity of GNU/Linux is reflected in the enormous number of flavors (or distributions) it is available in. The author would pair Debian with a something like Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier. The Debian Free Software Guidelines would be a reminiscent of the German Beer Purity laws, which mandate that the beer be made out of malt, hops, yeast and water alone.

New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently or contain important updates.

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This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Andre Lehovich, Dan Hunt and Martin 'Joey' Schulze.