Debian Project News - August 5th, 2023

Welcome to the inaugural issue of Debian Project Bits!

Welcome to this year's first issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community.

Those remembering the Debian Weekly News (DwN) will recognize some of the sections here which served as our inspiration.

Debian Project Bits posts will allow for a faster turnaround of some project news on a monthly basis. The Debian Micronews service will continue to share shorter news items, the Debian Project News remains as our official newsletter which may move to a biannual archive format.

News

Debian Day

The Debian Project was officially founded by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. Since then we have celebrated our Anniversary of that date each year with events around the world. We would love it if you could join our revels this very special year as we have the honor of turning 30!

Attend or organize a local Debian Day celebration. You are invited to plan your own event: from Bug Squashing parties to Key Signing parties, Meet-Ups, or any type of social event whether large or small. And be sure to check our Debian reimbursement How To if you need such resources.

You can share your days, events, thoughts, or notes with us and the rest of the community with the #debianday tag that will be used across most social media platforms. See you then!

Events: Upcoming and Reports

Upcoming

Debian 30 anos

The Debian Brasil Community is organizing the event Debian 30 anos to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Debian Project.

From August 14 to 18, between 7pm and 22pm (UTC-3) contributors will talk online in Portuguese and we will live stream on Debian Brasil YouTube channel.

DebConf23: Debian Developers Camp and Conference

The 2023 Debian Developers Camp \(DebCamp) and Conference (DebConf23) will be hosted this year in Infopark, Kochi, India. DebCamp is slated to run from September 3 through 9, immediately followed by the larger DebConf, September 10 through 17.

If you are planning on attending the conference this year, now is the time to ensure your travel documentation, visa information, bursary submissions, papers and relevant equipment are prepared. For more information contact: <debconf@debconf.org>.

MiniDebConf Cambridge 2023

There will be a MiniDebConf held in Cambridge, UK, hosted by ARM for 4 days in November: 2 days for a mini-DebCamp (Thu 23 - Fri 24), with space for dedicated development / sprint / team meetings, then two days for a more regular MiniDebConf (Sat 25 - Sun 26) with space for more general talks, up to 80 people.

Reports

During the last months, the Debian Community has organized some Bug Squashing Parties:

In January, Debian India hosted the MiniDebConf Tamil Nadu in Viluppuram, Tamil Nadu, India (Sat 28 - Sun 26). The following month, the MiniDebConf Portugal 2023 was held in Lisbon (12 - 16 February 2023).

These events, seen as a stunning success by some of their attendees, demonstrate the vitality of our community.

Debian Brasil Community at Campus Party Brazil 2023

Another edition of Campus Party Brazil took place in the city of São Paulo between July 25th and 30th. And one more time the Debian Brazil Community was present. During the days in the available space, we carry out some activities such as:

For more info and a few photos, check out the organizers report.

MiniDebConf Brasília 2023

From May 25 to 27, Brasília hosted the MiniDebConf Brasília 2023. This gathering was composed of various activities such as talks, workshops, sprints, BSPs (Bug Squashing Party), key signings, social events, and hacking, aimed to bring the community together and celebrate the world's largest Free Software project: Debian.

For more information please see the full report written by the organizers.

Debian Reunion Hamburg 2023

This year the annual Debian Reunion Hamburg was held from Tuesday 23 to 30 May starting with four days of hacking followed by two days of talks, and then two more days of hacking. As usual, people - more than forty-five attendees from Germany, Czechia, France, Slovakia, and Switzerland - were happy to meet in person, to hack and chat together, and much more. If you missed the live streams, the video recordings are available.

Translation workshops from the pt_BR team

The Brazilian translation team, debian-l10n-portuguese, had their first workshop of 2023 in February with great results. The workshop was aimed at beginners, working in DDTP/DDTSS.

For more information please see the full report written by the organizers.

And on June 13 another workshop took place to translate The Debian Administrator's Handbook. The main goal was to show beginners how to collaborate in the translation of this important material, which has existed since 2004. The manual's translations are hosted on Weblate.

Releases

Stable Release

Debian 12 bookworm was released on June 10, 2023. This new version becomes the stable release of Debian and moves the prior Debian 11 bullseye release to oldstable status. The Debian community celebrated the release with 23 Release Parties all around the world.

Bookworm's first point release 12.1 address miscellaneous bug fixes affecting 88 packages, documentation, and installer updates was made available on July 22, 2023.

RISC-V support

riscv64 has recently been added to the official Debian architectures for support of 64-bit little-endian RISC-V hardware running the Linux kernel. We expect to have full riscv64 support in Debian 13 trixie. Updates on bootstrap, build daemon, porterbox, and development progress were recently shared by the team in a Bits from the Debian riscv64 porters post.

non-free-firmware

The Debian 12 bookworm archive now includes non-free-firmware; please be sure to update your apt sources.list if your systems requires such components for operation. If your previous sources.list included non-free for this purpose it may safely be removed.

apt sources.list

The Debian archive holds several components:

Example of the sources.list file

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm main
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm main
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/ bookworm-security main
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/ bookworm-security main
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates main
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates main

Example using the components:

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm main non-free-firmware
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm main non-free-firmware
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/ bookworm-security main non-free-firmware
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/ bookworm-security main non-free-firmware
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates main non-free-firmware
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates main non-free-firmware

For more information and guidelines on proper configuration of the apt source.list file please see the Configuring Apt Sources - Wiki page.

Inside Debian

New Debian Members

Please welcome the following newest Debian Project Members:

To find out more about our newest members or any Debian Developer, look for them on the Debian People list.

Security Advisories

Debian's Security Team releases current advisories on a daily basis. Some recently released advisories concern these packages:

Other

Popular packages

New and noteworthy packages in unstable

Once upon a time in Debian:

Calls for help

The Publicity team calls for volunteers and help!

Your Publicity team is asking for help from you our readers, developers, and interested parties to contribute to the Debian news effort. We implore you to submit items that may be of interest to our community and also ask for your assistance with translations of the news into (your!) other languages along with the needed second or third set of eyes to assist in editing our work before publishing. If you can share a small amount of your time to aid our team which strives to keep all of us informed, we need you. Please see the contributing page to find out how to help and reach out to us via IRC on #debian-publicity on OFTC.net, or our public mailing list, or via email at press@debian.org for sensitive or private inquiries.

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This issue of Debian Project News was edited by The Publicity Team with contributions from Jean-Pierre Giraud, Joost van Baal-Ilić, Carlos Henrique Lima Melara, Donald Norwood and Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana.