Debian Weekly News - April 11th, 2006

Welcome to this year's 15th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Martin Zobel-Helas sent out an update of the preparations for an updated stable distribution. When this newsletter is released, the Debian project has elected a new project leader. Congratulations.

Internationalisation Collaboration Server. Jaldhar H. Vyas asked if it would be possible to set up a central website for coordinating translation efforts within Debian. He suggested several tools which were working like Ubuntu's proprietary Rosetta tool. Margarita Manterola added that such a website would encourage a lot of people to contribute to Debian who were unable to do so with the existing translation tools.

Proposed General Resolution. Josselin Mouette proposed a new general solution to alter the Debian Free Software Guidelines in response to the resolution that allows some documents licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License to go into the main archive. Jacobo Tarrio pointed out that the wording would allow documents with strong restrictions to go into main as well.

Debian-Installer for Linksys NSLU2. Martin Michlmayr reported that basic support for Linksys NSLU2 machines has been included in the debian-installer. This is a sub $100 ARM device with 32 MB RAM, Ethernet and two USB ports on which one can attach a USB disk and run a full Debian system. One reason why only few people are working on the ARM port is probably the lack of a cheap platform, which has been fixed now.

Changes to su and sudo. Christian Perrier announced changes in the new su program. Arguments to executed scripts have to be quoted together with the program name. Joey Schulze announced that new sudo packages will still correct recently reported security vulnerabilities but be less strict in which environment variables are passed to executed scripts.

Xen in Debian. Julien Danjou reported that he has started a Xen packaging project on Alioth to foster inclusion in Debian. Functional and split packages of Xen 3 are also available from the Subversion repository.

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. 21 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 293 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 Sebastian Feltel and Martin 'Joey' Schulze.