Debian Project News - March 28th, 2011

Welcome to this year's fifth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:

Updated Debian: 6.0.1 released

The first update for Debian 6.0 (codename Squeeze) has been released. This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with some adjustments for serious problems.

Nicaragua to host DebConf12

The DebConf committee has announced that DebConf12, the Debian developer conference for 2012, will be held in Managua, Nicaragua. The Managua bid beat a bid from Belo Horizonte, Brazil. More details can be found on the organizers' wiki.

Debian Derivatives Exchange project launched

Stefano Zacchiroli and Matt Zimmerman launched a new project called the Debian dErivatives eXchange project (DEX). The main goal of this project is to reduce the technical differences between Debian and its derivatives. The first such group is the Ubuntu DEX Team, which aims to start integrating packages and changes available in Ubuntu back into Debian. A gNewSense DEX Team is also expected soon.

The Debian Project invites all Debian based distributions and other projects to join the DEX project and work together on a common base.

Bits from the Debian Installer Team

Otavio Salvador sent some bits from the Debian Installer Team, which summarizes changes that have happened in the team since the release of Squeeze (such as the switch from Subversion to Git), and the team's goals for Wheezy (among others, more features for netcfg: wireless support for WPA networks, IPv6, VLAN network infrastructure support, and link detection). An important part of the mail is dedicated to a call for help: the right moment to join the team and start contributing is exactly now, as it's starting a new development cycle.

Insider summary of recent developments in DebConf11 organization

Vedran Omeragic has blogged about some recent developments in DebConf11 organization. The official DebConf11 website has been completed and contains a lot of information for those wanting to attend this year's Debian developer conference. Another important step was made (during a meeting held on 22 February) in establishing sponsorship levels, slightly changed from last year, and completing sponsorship brochures, available in three different qualities. There are also some clarifications about the Bosnian visa regime: all the information can be found on the related wiki page. At the end, Vedran lists the next steps: opening registration, working on finding the best routes for attendees, looking for sponsors, and preparing promotional material. You can contact the DebConf11 organizational team on their mailing list at debconf11-localteam@lists.debconf.org.

Debian -offtopic mailing list

Have you ever wanted to discuss things completely unrelated to Debian or even computers with fellow users or developers? On debian-user the custom is to put [OT] in the subject and fire away.

Unfortunately, this can be disruptive for uninterested subscribers, especially on a high volume mailing list like debian-user. Because of this, with the kind support of Holger Levsen and the Debian Community project, the d-community-offtopic list has been created.

The list is open to anyone, just like most other Debian lists, so all you have to do is to CC and set Reply-To to the list, so that whoever is interested will know discussion is moving to that list. Have fun and be excellent to each other!

Further This week in Debian interviews

Since the last issue of the Debian Project News, two new issues of the This week in Debian podcast have been published: with Joe Shields of the Debian Mono team; and with Jonathan Nadeau, about Debian and the Northeast GNU/Linux Fest.

Other news

Michael Gilbert announced the first unofficial Debian monthly testing snapshot release. The release is currently available as mini ISO images for i386 and amd64 architectures.

Alexander Reichle-Schmehl noticed that the video of the Linux New Media Award ceremony, in which we can see Alexander himself and Meike Reichle receive two awards on behalf of the Debian Project, is finally available online.

As reported by Ana Guerrero in her mail, the deadline for proposing Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects is close. As you may know Debian has again this year been accepted as a mentor organization for the GSoC. The submission of student proposals opened today, but we are still missing project proposals and mentors: you can visit last year's projects page to find some inspiration, or simply think of an project in your team and propose it.

New Debian Contributors

Nine people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Vincent Cheng, Rodolfo García Peñas, Guillaume Mazoyer, Fernando Mercês, Daniel Thomas, Christo Buschek, Jean Schurger, Manu Garg, and Vasudev Kamath into our project!

Important Debian Security Advisories

Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): proftpd-dfsg, chromium-browser, libcgroup, libvirt, php5, maradns, quagga, tex-common, iceape, iceweasel, wireshark, apache2, nss, and imp4. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

Debian's Backports Team released advisories for these packages: subversion and iceweasel. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

Debian's Stable Release Team released update announcements for these packages: clamav and tzdata. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

Debian's Volatile Team released an update announcement for the package tzdata. Please read it 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

The following packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently (among many others):

Work-needing packages

Currently 330 packages are orphaned and 149 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 Alexander Reshetov, Andrei Popescu, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, Francesca Ciceri and Jeremiah C. Foster.