Debian Weekly News - November 23rd, 2004

Welcome to this year's 46th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. In an interview Richard Stallman explained why it is important in terms of freedom and cooperation to have schools use Free Software. VA Linux Systems Japan recently announced the release of VA Balance, a load balancing system, based on UltraMonkey and Debian GNU/Linux.

Bug Squashing Parties. Several bug squashing parties (BSP) will take place during the last weekend of this month, on November 27th and 28th. Alexander Schmehl announced the BSP in Frankfurt/Main (Germany). Anand Kumria announced the BSP in Sydney (Australia). David Moreno Garza announced the virtual BSP in Latin America. Finally Steve McIntyre announced the BSP in Cambridge (UK). The overall planning is done through the Debian wiki. As usual, #debian-bugs on irc.debian.org will be the virtual counterpart to the real-life parties.

Mass Filing of Documentation Bugs? Brian M. Carlson proposed to file serious bugs against packages that contain documentation licensed under the GNU FDL since it is not free according to the Debian Free Software Guidelines. Colin Watson, however, recommended not to file bugs on documentation until after sarge since the project agreed by vote that it was not to be considered release-critical for the sarge release.

Debian and LCC? Laszlo Boszormenyi wondered if the Debian project would join to the Linux Core Consortium (LCC, FAQ) or implement it. Implementation would refer to LSB 2.0 compatibility. Ian Murdock tried to explain that it may require to provide a different set of core packages than Debian provides, even for a Debian-based distribution.

Speeding up the Boot Process. Jochen Voss was inspired by Ziga Mahkovec and inspected boot process of some Debian systems. The result is not as beautiful as Ziga's, though. Adrian von Bidder added that he has moved everything needed by interactive users early in the boot process, while moving things like postfix, Apache, PostgreSQL etc. to the end. With this, he could already log in while the system was still booting.

Alioth Update in Progress. Wichert Akkerman reported that he has been working on a new machine that is planned to replace haydn in the future as Alioth host. The new machine and software are now approaching a more or less stable state where user experience is sought. Wichert has copied an all Subversion repositories from Alioth so the new WebSVN gateway can be tested.

First Debian Women IRC Meeting. Erinn Clark has invited interested people to participate in the first meeting of the Debian women sub-project. Helen Faulkner took minutes of the meeting which was attended by people who are involved with and use Debian in a variety of ways. Attendants discussed the success of the Debian women sub-project so far, and plans for future activities that will further the goal of increasing the participation of women in Debian.

Debian Installer Release Candidate 2. Joey Hess announced the second Debian-Installer release candidate which is also expected to be the final release of the installer for the upcoming Debian 3.1 (sarge). Only a few changes have been made to the installer since the pre-rc2 release last month. Support for LVM volumes on software RAID has been added among many improvements, though.

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

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

Orphaned Packages. 16 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 231 orphaned packages. Many thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free Software community. Please see the WNPP pages for the full list, and please add a note to the bug report and retitle it to ITA: if you plan to take over a package.

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This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Christoph Berg and Martin 'Joey' Schulze.