Debian Weekly News - October 18th, 2005

Welcome to this year's 42nd issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Flavio Villanustre reviewed Elive 0.3, a live CD based on Debian and Morphix that features Enlightenment 0.17. Steve Langasek announced that the m68k port is being ignored for the propagation of packages from unstable into testing.

Debian Installer Beta Preparation. Joey Hess reported about his trial building the debian-installer with the build daemon network. A few of the issues include building on HPPA, reducing the size of boot images on sparc and mipsel, and creating CD image builds.

GNOME 1 Transition. Thomas Bushnell reported on the state of GNOME 1 since libpng10 has been removed and thus a number of GNOME packages don't build anymore. New core libraries that depend on a newer library have been uploaded already. Packages that link against those core libraries need to be rebuilt as well. He asked maintainers of related packages to upload new versions that will be linked against the newer libraries.

Installing Debian Sarge. Edd Dumbill wrote an introduction for the new Debian installer and walks through the Debian installation process. Partitioning the hard disk is described in detail and some selectable targets are shown. In case of hardware problems Edd proposes to use Knoppix for hardware detection.

Message ID Lookup. Andrew Suffield announced a web page that provides a special search feature over the Debian lists archive. Using a specially composed URL it is now possible to search the lists archives for a particular message ID. The index is updated roughly every five minutes and covers the entire public archive.

Debian OpenSolaris. Alex Ross announced that he has compiled large chunks of Debian packages for a system based on the open Solaris kernel from Sun Microsystems. These packages already run on the GNU/Solaris server that will provide ISO images and packages for download soon.

Debian Security Update. Branden Robinson reported about the modified security infrastructure that was implemented faster than anticipated after discussions at the Oldenburg developers meeting and now consists of three public machines combined in a DNS rotation. He also mentioned the ongoing process of updating the kernel in the Debian's releases that will probably lead to new packages soon.

Licensing Pictures inside of Applications. Christian Jodar wondered if it is possible to distribute a package that contains software released under the GNU GPL and pictures or movies released under the Creative Commons BY-SA license. MJ Ray asserted that the result cannot be distributed under the GPL alone and proposed to use the MIT/X11 license instead.

Dependency on GNU Binary Utilities. Camm Maguire wondered if there will be a stable binary interface to the GNU binary utilities that can be used by other packages. Daniel Jacobowitz asserted that the included libraries are subject to change and that other packages would have to link to them statically instead.

License for Debian Wiki Content. John Dowland requested a clear license statement to be added to the new Debian Wiki. Francesco Poli proposed to use the Expat, MIT/X11, BSD license or the GNU GPL for the Wiki content.

Firewall Support at Startup. Samuel Jean wrote a script to load and activate firewall rules during the system boot process. Matthew Palmer suggested looking at the existing shorewall package instead. Steve Langasek pointed out the current proposal. Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña added a note about the Adding firewall capabilities section of the Securing Debian Manual.

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. 5 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 205 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.

Removed Packages. 37 packages have been removed from the Debian archive during the past week:

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