Debian Project News - June 24th, 2011

Welcome to this year's tenth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:

Upcoming Debian GNU/Linux update

Philip Kern announced the upcoming release of Debian GNU/Linux 6.0.2. This update, scheduled for Saturday, June 25th, will mainly add corrections for security problems to stable release, along with some adjustments for serious problems.

Spreading the world

Christian Perrier published his annual report about the number of developers per country. Among these numbers, we can noticed that Debian developers are present in fifty-seven countries. Twenty-three more active Debian developers have been counted this year, along with two more countries.

New IRC Training Sessions

The Debian Project started a new round of IRC Training Sessions, which will be held on IRC by experienced community members. This time, there will be two different series: non-technical, called Ask the ... and more technical One day with .... Additional information and scheduled sessions are always available on the related wiki page.

The first session, held on June 22th and featuring Stefano Zacchiroli, current Debian Project Leader, was followed by more than 70 attendees who asked Stefano various interesting questions; it is also available the log of the session. In the next one, scheduled for July 1st at 19:00 UTC, Gregor Herrmann will tell us about the day-to-day work of the Debian Perl Team and how join it. Don't miss it!

Report from the Debian Edu developer meeting

Holger Levsen sent a report from the Debian Edu developer gathering in Hamburg, Germany. The main goal of the sprint was preparing the release of Debian Edu Squeeze. Debian Edu developers discussed and worked on various things like documentation, Samba integration, and testing of Squeeze installation images. More than 200 commits were pushed to the Debian Edu's Subversion repository and 18 bugs fixed (and a bunch of bugs filed against bugs.skolelinux.org). Participants also had a long discussion with two persons from Chaos macht Schule, which is a CCC subproject. In the end of his mail Holger thanks CCC Hamburg, Opensides.be, the OLPC.de association and the Debian sprints program for their financially supporting the event.

Meet Planet Debian Derivatives!

Paul Wise blogged about creation of Planet Debian Derivatives which aggregates the blogs and planets of all the distributions represented in the derivatives census. As say Paul it's first concrete outcome from the Debian derivatives census. He also shared his plans about integration of information about derivatives with Debian infrastructure and thanks Jörg Jaspert for doing the necessary setup procedures.

Squeeze debian-installer with Linux 2.6.38

Kenshi Muto announced the release of backported amd64 debian-installer for Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 Squeeze, which is available on his images archive page. This image is based on Debian 6.0.1 and contain firmwares. Also Kenshi added in the image a new DHCP client which fixes an interacting problem with some DHCP servers. Please note that this is an unofficial image and you should use it only if you really need this.

DebConf11: Call for keys for keysigning

Aníbal Monsalve Salazar sent an announcement about organization of keysigning at DebConf11 which will be held at Banja Luka, Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina. All who intend to participate in the keysigning should send their ASCII armored public key no later than 23:59 UTC on Sunday 10 July 2011. All needed information can be found on corresponding page.

Graphical installer for Debian GNU/kFreeBSD

Robert Millan announced that a graphical installer is now available for Debian GNU/kFreeBSD: with it is now possible to install Wheezy in a more comfortable way. You can find it on the daily images page.

Iceweasel 5.0 in experimental

Mike Hommey blogged about adding Iceweasel 5.0 to experimental. Mike also noticed that he discontinued the Iceweasel 4.0 backport for Squeeze, but he will still backports patches to 3.5 in Squeeze and 3.0 in Lenny. At the end of the post he added: In the coming weeks, there will also be some additional changes to the mozilla.debian.net repository, but I’ll give more details when that happens.

Further interviews

There has been two further People behind Debian interview: with Philipp Kern, Stable Release Manager and member of the wanna-build team; and with Sam Hartman, Kerberos package maintainer explains how he uses Debian despite his blindness.

Other news

Christian Perrier noticed that the bug #630000 has been reported Friday, 10 Jun 2011.

Daniel Barlow blogged about how to clone a Debian system installing on it identical packages and versions.

Martin Zobel-Helas wrote an interesting article on how start contributing to Debian. He listed various ways to help Debian: from reporting bugs and try to reproduce them, to write documentation or translate the existing one, to organize events or deliver talk on Debian-related topics. And, if you haven't time to actively work with Debian, you could always help it donating money or hardware. As Martin said: Find your own area to work on within Debian, and don't think you can't help. Even graphic designers, lawyers or clerks can help Debian!.

New Debian Contributors

14 people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome John T. Nogatch, Matthias Kümmerer, Jonathan Riddell, Alexey S Kravchenko, Cleto Martín, Petr Hlozek, Nikolaus Rath, Maxime Chatelle, Gergely Nagy, Leonid Borisenko, Julien Dutheil, Manish Sinha, Bastian Blywis, and Wences Arana into our project!

Important Debian Security Advisories

Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): tiff, vlc, kolab-cyrus-imapd, fex, rails, redmine, moodle, movabletype-opensource, linux-2.6, perl. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

Please note that these are a selection of the more important security advisories of the last weeks. If you need to be kept up to date about security advisories released by the Debian Security Team, please subscribe to the security mailing list (and the separate backports list, and stable updates list or volatile list, for Lenny, the oldstable distribution) for announcements.

New and noteworthy packages

263 packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently. Among many others are:

Work-needing packages

Currently 306 packages are orphaned and 142 packages are up for adoption: please visit the complete list of packages which need your help.

Want to continue reading DPN?

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This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Francesca Ciceri, Jeremiah C. Foster, David Prévot, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, Alexander Reshetov and Justin B Rye.