Debian Weekly News - March 4th, 2003

Welcome to this year's 9th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Today's issue is a little bit short, so the next one will probably be a little bit longer. Marek Habersack informed us about an article about Linux security - a continuing joke. It made us laugh.

GNOME 2.2 for Debian Woody. Jamie Strandboge announced on DesktopLinux.com that he has backported GNOME packages from Debian unstable, to run on Debian stable. The list of packages also include Gnucash, Mozilla, Galeon and Evolution. To use the packages you only need to add a line to your sources.list file.

New Mailing Lists created. Anand Kumria announced several new lists to support work for non-english languages. Additionally the deity list has been opened to the public and a debian-accessibility list has been created. Earlier he announced that he had installed razor and crossassassin to reduce the number of spam mails distributed through the Debian lists.

Debian Support for RISC Architectures. Andrew Buckeridge pointed out that HP, SGI, Sun and IBM are supporting their own architecture together with their own proprietary operating system. All four, however, also push the x86 architecture together with GNU/Linux. He asks anybody interested in these ports to contact their hardware vendors to clarify support for GNU/Linux, since Debian supports all on them.

New Maintainer Reports. Martin Michlmayr recently announced 18 new maintainers that were accepted by the Debian project. He says that since Debian is growing so much, it's good to have a listing of new members together with a little background of them.

Out of sync Packages in Testing? Jérôme Marant proposed to let a package enter the testing distribution when they compile on some architectures without the need to compile on all. He believes that a package should enter testing as soon as possible so it can be tested by interested users. Anthony Towns said that this would be problematic since there is only one source package per suite. Colin Watson finally wondered why so many people are more concerned with juggling infrastructure details instead of fixing the bugs.

More Release Proposals. Jaldhar Vyas proposed an update for woody with several backported packages, a central source repository and the permission for all maintainers to fix bugs, and to stop releasing at all since this could be done by third parties. Jesus Climent added that HispaLinux started to create personalised Debian releases targeted at concrete groups of users (such as universities, education facilities, government etc.).

Ceasing unmaintained Documentation. Adam Di Carlo proposed removing manuals which are obsoleted or unmaintained. He would like to clean up some unmaintained documents and focus our efforts in a single place. He asked for opinions about merging the tutorial, user manual, Debian guide, system administrator guide and the network administrator guide with the well maintained Debian reference.

Debian used for Security Appliance. LinuxDevices reports that Innominate Security Technologies will unveil what it calls the "world's smallest security appliance" at the Intel Developer Forum. Debian GNU/Linux is the first choice as base operating system for Innominate when developing standard and customized security appliances for a long time. Current products are based on version 2.2 and 3.0. While using Open Source code for product development, Innominate are of course also anxious to contribute their own code.

Report from Hamburger Computer Tage. Jan Palic finished his report about the Debian presence at Hamburger Computer Tage at the end of January. Debian was invited to staff a booth and give two talks in addition to many other talks covering GNU/Linux. The Debian booth was subject of interest by many visitors during the entire exhibition.

Report from FOSDEM. Christoph Siess sent in his report about the Debian presence at the Free and Open Source Software Developers' Meeting (FOSDEM). The Debian project maintained a booth that attracted a lot of developers. Martin Michlmayr gave a talk about Embedded Debian and Russell Coker spoke about SE Linux which attracted quite some visitors.

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.

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This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Martin 'Joey' Schulze.