Debian Weekly News - March 1st, 2005

Welcome to this year's 9th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Harald Welte reported a 2.1 M pps (packets per second) UDP packet forwarding rate over four gigabit ethernet ports, which is a new record for Linux. After OASIS, of which Debian is a member, has accepted a patent policy that has bad consequences on implementation of the standards, John Goerzen called for support for an open letter.

Debian Release Update. Andreas Barth sent in a new update for the release progress in which he outlines the timeline for the third release candidate of the debian-installer. The buildd infrastructure is also getting some improvements, and will soon be in shape for the release. A lot of bugs were fixed and several out-dated libraries will be removed from sarge.

Debian Cluster Components. The Rudjer Boskovic Institute in Croatia has released their Debian Cluster Components, which is a fairly complete toolbox for building Debian based high-performance computing clusters. It consists of a set of Debian packages which simplify the creation and deployment of Debian based clusters.

Report from LinuxWorld. Jaldhar Vyas and others ran a Debian booth at the LinuxWorld Expo in Boston and reported about the event. They believed that the show was quite a success, as they handed out a lot of Debian CDs, and collected a number of donations. More people have now heard of Debian and its derivatives, which were heavily represented in the .org pavilion. They were disappointed, though, that the Free Software community had been separated by a wall from the rest of the expo.

GNU/Hurd Progress with L4. After Marcus Brinkmann finished the process initialisation code in Hurd/L4, an ambitious effort to port the Hurd to the high-performance L4 microkernel, the first program was executed on top of it. Porting Hurd to L4 has slowed down the development a lot, but the execution of the first user program on Hurd/L4 is a very important first step.

Common Release Questions. Drew Daniels has set up a wiki document that is intended to cover most questions that users may have with the upcoming Debian release, especially its availability and temporary problems. It also answers questions about new or critical uploads and the inclusion of packages in sarge.

Close Relationship between Maintainer and Upstream. Andrew Pollock asked Debian developers to maintain a close relationship with the upstream authors of the software they package for Debian. He mentioned some examples where he was more or less taking over packages and discussed bugs with their respective upstream developers who hadn't known about the Debian bug tracking system yet. This should be done when the bug is not a result of the Debian packaging.

AMD64 Port Status Update. Goswin von Brederlow sent a progress report for the AMD64 port of Debian. Both GNOME and KDE now have their dependencies fulfilled in the sarge tree. With the recent reports of successful debian-installer tests on AMD64, this port has finally caught up with the official release.

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

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This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Pascal Hakim and Martin 'Joey' Schulze.