Debian Weekly News - February 22nd, 2006

Welcome to this year's 8th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Frederick Noronha reported about the Martus project that pits the best of the open source software world against abusers to create a safe and secure environment in which human rights activists can record and store data on abuses without fear.

Requirements for hosted Applications. David Besonen wondered if the GNU GPL address hosted application and requirements to provide its source code. Glenn Maynard answered that the GPLv3 draft attempts to address this issue but not in a satisfactory way, causing various practical problems.

Etch Beta1 broken installation media. Frans Pop announced that as a consequence to changes to the Debian archive, most of the installation media from Etch Beta1 are known to break. The only images that should still be usable are the full installation CDs. These changes are necessary for the Etch Beta2 release of Debian Installer. If you need to use one of the other installation methods, use the daily built images.

Device Driver Test Page. Lars Wirzenius reminded developers to remember the GNU/Linux device driver check page. Basically, the output of lspci -n is pasted into it, and the system describes which hardware on the PCI bus is supported, and by which driver.

Debian Live Initiative. Daniel Baumann reported about the new Debian Live Initiative which is an official sub-project of Debian and produces a live CD. Debian Live reflects the current state Debian, runs on as much architectures as possible, consists of unchanged Debian packages only and does not contain any unofficial package.

Team Maintenance for Debian Packages. Frans Jessop asked the Debian project to emphasise more on teams for package maintenance than single developers. Petter Reinholdtsen added that Debian needs people working on translations, documentation, testing, web pages, system administration, press relations and probably more tasks.

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

Orphaned Packages. 1 package was orphaned last week and requires a new maintainer. This makes a total of 219 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 Mohammed Adnène Trojette and Martin 'Joey' Schulze.