Debian Weekly News - December 20th, 2005

Welcome to this year's 51st issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Mohammed Adnène Trojette summarised the events from last year and created the timeline 2004. Thomas Lange announced version 2.9 of FAI, the fully automatic installation for Debian.

Debian on one DVD? Jaldhar Vyas reported that one of the problems GNU/Linux users in countries like India face is low bandwidth. Therefore a distribution on CD or DVD is preferred over large network installations or updates. He has found a sponsor and is looking for a 1-DVD version of the Debian system. Jörg Jaspert confirmed that the production is easy since he's done it before.

Four Years debianforum.de. The web forum debianforum.de, aimed at German speaking Debian Users, has had its fourth anniversary on December 20th. With discussions like "How to install a program" this forum has turned into an important site for both the Debian beginner and the professional in German speaking countries. With booths on several GNU/Linux Events the forum was also active outside the world wide web.

Ballot: Declassification of private Mails. Manoj Srivastava called for vote on the declassification of debian-private list archives from December 18th to December 31th. When passed a committee will be created that will seek to declassify and publish mails of historical or ongoing significance made to the internal private Debian mailing list.

Simon Bienlein receives BIENE Award. Simon Bienlein (German), a German Debian contributor has received the BIENE award (German). Simon contributes to the Debian installer and helped to make it fit for use with a braille terminal. He received the award for his website (German) on GNU/Linux for blind people. The BIENE award is given annually to websites whose accessibility is exemplary. Simon even received a special award.

New apt-get and dpkg Guide. All about Linux a GNU/Linux focused blog at blogspot.com published a nice guide on apt-get and dpkg. The article is catered for new users and explains the most common applications of both programs. For more detailed information on these programs you can also refer to Debian's own apt howto.

Using LSB conforming Init Scripts. Thomas Hood wondered how he is supposed to use the LSB compliant functions for init scripts properly. He noted that arbitrary output would spoil the formatting. Petter Reinholdtsen reported about ideas to send the output of scripts to the syslog server. Henrique Holschuh added that the functions will even work when parallel init scripts execution is implemented.

Individually signed Packages. Marc Brockschmidt reported about a change in the archive suite that caused individually signed packages to be rejected. Several people stated that they would like dpkg-sig to continue to work. Marc added that Jörg Jaspert planned to provide a better version of the problematic check that will accept such packages again.

TeX Live in Debian? Norbert Preining reported about the genesis of TeX live for Debian after the packages have been rejected from the incoming directory. Frank Küster added that several TeX live developers and users wanted a simple way to install TeX live in Debian, replacing teTeX and keeping dependencies in order.

Automatic Bug Closing. Roberto Sanchez wondered if automatic closing of bugs could be adjusted to only work for bugs in the same source package since a typo in the bug number will cause the wrong bug to be closed. Matthew Palmer added that the close message does actually state the source package which closes the bug.

Debian Sarge updated. The Debian project announced the first update for the current stable release. Preparations for this update lasted six months and ended shortly after the first round of kernel updates for this release. This update accumulates 172 security updates and 16 important corrections.

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 Sebastian Feltel, Meike Reichle and Martin 'Joey' Schulze.