Debian Weekly News - February 14th, 2006

Welcome to this year's 7th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Lars Wirzenius nominated himself as a candidate for the upcoming Debian project leader election. Manoj Srivastava called for nominations for this election until February 25th again.

Delivering Free Software at 2 Gbit/s. Mattias Wadenstein published details on how the Academic Computer Club at Umeå University, Sweden, managed to saturate the 2 Gbit/s of available Internet bandwidth with a cluster of machines and http redirects. New releases made by large Free Software projects usually means that a lot of people want the new release immediately, and the Debian Sarge release followed by an Ubuntu release were no exceptions.

Message-ID Lookup for List Mails. Jeroen van Wolffelaar announced that he has re-implemented the lookup by Message-ID for list mails on lists.debian.org. This service is based on an idea by Andrew Suffield who has terminated it recently. It also supports multiple hits for a single ID.

Trademark Policy for Packages? Simon Josefsson wondered about Debian's policy on trademarks for terms used in documentation and package descriptions and wanted to know if there are particular permissions that would be useful to request as far as Debian is concerned. Florian Weimer explained that as long as trademark issues do not prevent creation and distribution of derivative works, or prevent an interoperable re-implementation, trademarks are outside Debian's scope.

Wireless with iBook G4. Jorge Ortiz reported that the wireless system in the iBook G4 is now fully supported in Debian for the PowerPC architecture. He pointed out that kernel versions newer than 2.6.15-rc5 in conjunction with bcm43xxx drivers are needed. This airport extreme card was not expected to be supported so soon.

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. 31 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 221 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.

Removed Packages. 8 packages have been removed from the Debian archive during the past week:

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This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Mattias Wadenstein, Juanjavier Martínez and Martin 'Joey' Schulze.