Debian Weekly News - November 30th, 2004

Welcome to this year's 47th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Debian flyers have been moved to Alioth for easier maintenance and contribution. Despite the upcoming release of sarge, another update to the current stable release is being prepared.

Debian News RSS Feed. Greg Stark wondered if Debian Weekly News is available via RSS. Romain Francoise pointed out that GMANE provides RSS feeds for many Free Software lists, including Debian News RSS and in blog format. There is currently no official RSS feed provided by the Debian project, though volunteers are welcome to write the necessary code.

Saving Download Bandwidth. Goswin von Brederlow proposed to provide sorted Packages files in order to reduce the amount of data that needs to be retrieved for each update since the Packages file for sid is already 13 MB (3.5 MB compressed) large. Adam Heath added that the package name alone would not be sufficient and Eduard Bloch mentioned apt-dupdate as another means to speed up the download. Several developers have contributed ideas and code about this to Bug#128818.

The Workstation OS: Debian. Hindistan Kivilcim explained the reasons to make Debian GNU/Linux the operating system (OS) on his workstation which are crystal clear: "Installing new applications and configuring old ones in Debian GNU/Linux is a breeze. You do not have to worry about dependencies, library problems, or even former configuration files." He also emphasised package dependencies versus file dependencies.

OpenOffice.org 1.9 for Debian. Chris Halls announced very rough packages for OpenOffice.org 1.9.62 as a preview for the upcoming version 2.0. He warns that these packages are not of the same quality or caliber as Debian users would normally expect to see. They mostly lack proper Debian integration as well and the packages will be placed in /opt/openoffice1.9.62/.

Remote Collaboration. Don Marti wrote about fostering the conversations that make a group a team. He mentions that mail can quickly turn into personal accusations and misunderstandings so that a short phone call may avoid real trouble. He also emphasised on the value of online meetings (IRC, IM) and cooperative online resources (bug tracking system, wikis) and mentioned when they should not be used.

Installing Linux 2.6 on Debian. Falko Timme wrote a tutorial on running Linux 2.6 together with Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (woody). In order to have module support some backports need to be installed. One of the final steps is creating a ramdisk so that the kernel will boot properly.

Bug Squashing Parties last Weekend. During the bug squashing parties last weekend, several release-critical bugs have been closed. Additionally, a solution for the KDE removal problem has been discussed and improvements to the testing scripts prepared. There are some pictures from the party in Frankfurt, Germany. Corrections for the remaining problems are still appreciated.

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.

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