Debian Weekly News - April 11th, 2006
Welcome to this year's 15th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Martin Zobel-Helas sent out an update of the preparations for an updated stable distribution. When this newsletter is released, the Debian project has elected a new project leader. Congratulations.
Internationalisation Collaboration Server. Jaldhar H. Vyas asked if it would be possible to set up a central website for coordinating translation efforts within Debian. He suggested several tools which were working like Ubuntu's proprietary Rosetta tool. Margarita Manterola added that such a website would encourage a lot of people to contribute to Debian who were unable to do so with the existing translation tools.
Proposed General Resolution. Josselin Mouette proposed a new general solution to alter the Debian Free Software Guidelines in response to the resolution that allows some documents licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License to go into the main archive. Jacobo Tarrio pointed out that the wording would allow documents with strong restrictions to go into main as well.
Debian-Installer for Linksys NSLU2. Martin Michlmayr reported that basic support for Linksys NSLU2 machines has been included in the debian-installer. This is a sub $100 ARM device with 32 MB RAM, Ethernet and two USB ports on which one can attach a USB disk and run a full Debian system. One reason why only few people are working on the ARM port is probably the lack of a cheap platform, which has been fixed now.
Changes to su and sudo. Christian Perrier announced changes in the new su
program. Arguments to
executed scripts have to be quoted together with the program name. Joey
Schulze announced that new sudo
packages will still correct recently reported security vulnerabilities but be less strict in
which environment variables are passed to executed scripts.
Xen in Debian. Julien Danjou reported that he has started a Xen packaging project on Alioth to foster inclusion in Debian. Functional and split packages of Xen 3 are also available from the Subversion repository.
Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure that you update your systems if you have any of these packages installed.
- DSA 1022: storebackup -- Several vulnerabilities.
- DSA 1023: kaffeine -- Arbitrary code execution.
- DSA 1024: clamav -- Several vulnerabilities.
- DSA 1025: dia -- Arbitrary code execution.
- DSA 1026: sash -- Potential arbitrary code execution.
- DSA 1027: mailman -- Denial of service.
- DSA 1028: libimager-perl -- Denial of service.
- DSA 1029: libphp-adodb -- Several vulnerabilities.
- DSA 1030: moodle -- Several vulnerabilities.
- DSA 1031: cacti -- Several vulnerabilities.
New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently or contain important updates.
- arno-iptables-firewall -- Single- and multi-homed firewall script with DSL/ADSL support.
- aspell-cs -- Czech dictionary for GNU Aspell.
- ecl -- Embeddable Common-Lisp: has an interpreter and can compile to C.
- enemylines7 -- First person 3D-shooter game.
- gammu -- Mobile phone management utility.
- gnome-commander -- Nice and fast file manager for the GNOME desktop.
- gnome-power-manager -- Frontend for gnome-powermanager.
- kasablanca -- Fast and free FTP client for KDE.
- kftpgrabber -- FTP client for KDE.
- kmflcomp -- KMFL Compiler.
- qpxtool -- CD/DVD quality checker.
- torrentflux -- Web based, feature-rich BitTorrent download manager.
- ttf-dzongkha -- TrueType fonts for Dzongkha language.
- xarchive -- GTK frontend for most used compression tools.
- xarchiver -- GTK frontend for most used compression formats.
Orphaned Packages. 21 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 293 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.
- achilles -- Artificial life and evolution simulator. (Bug#361167)
- apple2 -- Apple ][ Emulator. (Bug#361344)
- astrolog -- Customisable astrology chart calculation program. (Bug#361346)
- bfr -- Nonblocking 8-bit-clean pipe buffer. (Bug#360672)
- cfi -- Copyright finns inte, book about hacker culture. (Bug#361294)
- cl-ftp -- Common Lisp FTP library. (Bug#361169)
- cl-sdl -- Support for the SDL_ttf library in Common Lisp. (Bug#361166)
- drawmap -- Draws customised maps, using raw USGS data files. (Bug#361015)
- ipw2100 -- Source for the ipw2100 driver. (Bug#360632)
- libapache-mod-lisp -- Apache module that interfaces with Lisp environments. (Bug#361168)
- njbtools -- Tools for interfacing with libnjb. (Bug#361002)
- ogle -- DVD player with support for DVD menus. (Bug#361297)
- ogle-gui -- User interface to ogle (Gtk). (Bug#361298)
- ploticus -- Script driven business graphics package. (Bug#361016)
- ploticus-doc -- Documentation and gallery of examples for ploticus. (Bug#361017)
- plotmtv -- Multipurpose X11 plotting program. (Bug#361293)
- pmidi -- Command line MIDI player for ALSA. (Bug#361299)
- sppc -- Simple Panel Plot Composer. (Bug#361296)
- tela -- Interactive tensor language. (Bug#361292)
- xml-resume-library -- Set of tools for writing a resume in XML. (Bug#361013)
- zope-zshell -- Command line interface to Zope. (Bug#361018)
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This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Sebastian Feltel and Martin 'Joey' Schulze.