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
- Spreading the world
- New IRC Training Sessions
- Report from the Debian Edu developer meeting
- Meet Planet Debian Derivatives!
Squeeze
debian-installer with Linux 2.6.38- DebConf11: Call for keys for keysigning
- Graphical installer for Debian GNU/kFreeBSD
- Iceweasel 5.0 in
experimental
- Further interviews
- Other news
- New Debian Contributors
- Important Debian Security Advisories
- New and noteworthy packages
- Work-needing packages
- Want to continue reading DPN?
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:
- apt-clone — Script to create state bundles
- brltty-espeak — Access software for a blind person - espeak driver
- c2esp — Driver for Kodak ESP 5xxx AiO color inkjet printers
- cardstories — multiplayer online card guessing game
- clementine — modern music player and library organizer
- espeakup-udeb — Configure the speech synthesizer voice
- extundelete — utility to recover deleted files from ext3/ext4 partition
- hunspell-ml — Malayalam dictionary for hunspell
- jack-stdio — program to pipe audio-data from and to JACK
- letodms — open source document management system based on PHP and MySQL
- linux-headers-2.6.39-2-486 — Header files for Linux 2.6.39-2-486
- linux-image-2.6.39-2-686-pae — Linux 2.6.39 for modern PCs
- m2300w — Driver for the Minolta magicolor 2300W/24000W color laser printers
- preprocess — portable multi-language file preprocessor
- rhash — utility for computing hash sums and magnet links
- xul-ext-linky — iceweasel extension to handle web and image links
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.
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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.