Debian Weekly News - May 23rd, 2006

Welcome to this year's 21st issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Julien Danjou reported that he has successfully installed NetBSD 3 inside the new Xen 3 virtual machine monitor available in Debian unstable. Eric Dorland explained the creation of library packages with debugging capabilities.

Graphical Debian Installer Images. Frans Pop reported that the graphical installer is part of the regular daily built images for the i386 platform with AMD and PowerPC following soon. To use the new installer the boot argument "installgui" or "expertgui" has to be used. Frans Pop explained that the graphical installer could be the default in the release after etch.

Sun Java distributed by Debian. Jeroen van Wolffelaar announced the availability of Sun's Java package in the non-free section of Debian after Sun has reworked their license. Debian still remains committed to supporting free runtime and development environments for Java, such as Kaffe and GCJ. Red Hat, however, complained that this is not free enough and that Sun should free their virtual machine (JVM) at least.

DebConf6 successfully finished. The 6th Debian Conference, which was held last week in Mexico, has ended. Many thanks go to the sponsors and the organisation team, who made this great Debian event possible. A lot of photos were taken and in about four weeks a DVD with all talks will be available.

Splitting Changelog Files. Nico Golde wondered about the proper way to handle large and old debian changelog files when they are edited quite often and grew very large. The predominant opinion is to keep the entire file as it contains information about why and when bugs have been fixed. Since it is compressed in the package, the space consumption is usually acceptable.

Project Leader Report. Anthony Towns encouraged everybody to think about ways the Debian project could help organisations that would like to be partners to cooperate better with Debian. He pondered about a social contract for partners and is seeking input. He also reported about the large number of sponsors for this year's Debian Conference and the participation in Google's Summer of Code.

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. 6 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 298 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, Thomas Bliesener and Martin 'Joey' Schulze.