Debian Project News - November 4th, 2011

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

Updated Debian: 6.0.3 and 5.0.9 released

The third update for Debian 6.0 (codename Squeeze) and the ninth update for Debian 5.0 (codename Lenny) have been released. These updates mainly add corrections for security problems to the stable and oldstable releases, along with some adjustments for serious problems.

DebConf12 official dates

The DebConf team announced the final and official dates for DebConf12: DebCamp will be held from July 1 to 7 2012, followed by DebConf from July 8 to 14, in Managua, Nicaragua. DebConf will be preceded by a day during which the doors are opened to the general public, commonly called Debian Day. For further information, please visit the DebConf12 web pages.

Debian Installer localisation

Christian Perrier reported some new progress in Debian Installer localisation. Nineteen languages are now up to date for D-I's core files; eight (Czech, Dutch, French, German, Persian, Portuguese, Russian and Swedish) are 100% complete for the moment, and many more should reach this hall of fame pretty soon, thanks to the translators.

Feedback after DebConf11

After his This week in Debian interview, Adnan Hodzic wrote a summary of DebConf11 and its consequences. He offers an inside view of DebConf organisation, sharing some of the stresses and the amazing experiences he had with other organisers. Among the after-effects: the Government of Republika Srpska may seriously consider free and open source software for their own use, and Adnan has taken a vacation to prepare himself for his next projects.

Uses of Emdebian

Continuing his series on Emdebian, Neil Williams posted an article about the use of Emdebian on special purpose computers. The common features of special purpose computers include: single task only, single-user support, single mode input, restricted connectivity, constrained user data. On this kind of computer Emdebian is very popular for many reasons, such as the multi-tasking kernel and userspace which provide a responsive machine, or the mere fact that in Emdebian (unlike proprietary competitors) the graphical software is trivially separated from the core software. But the most important reason is that Emdebian Grip allows better debugging: in fact, Emdebian Grip is binary compatible with the equivalent Debian suite and when a bug appears in the high level user interface, it is much easier to debug that on the desktop than on the device, said Neil.

Bits from the DPL

Stefano Zacchiroli reminded us that Wheezy is a few months away from its freeze: everyone can help. He reported about some discussions that are worth attention; about maintainers' and porters' responsibilities; reasons not to use private email aliases; etc. Stefano gave updates about sprints (for coordinating which there is a new mailing list) and the trademark policy. He also recently attended the Linux Day in Parma, Italy, and the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, Florida.

New Member process

Enrico Zini announced that the New Maintainer process has changed its name, to become the New Member process: the procedure is still the same, and even its initials are unchanged, but its name is no longer confusing and ambiguous. Thanks to Stefano Zacchiroli for his proposal. Jan Hauke Rahm also joined the New Member Front Desk, which can now be reached at nm@debian.org.

Further interviews

Since the last issue of the Debian Project News, two new issues of the This week in Debian podcast have been published: with Jonathan Nadeau, who talks about the Ohio LinuxFest and his internship at the FSF; and with Adnan Hodzic, who talks about DebConf11.

Other news

Julien Cristau announced that in the current testing Debian distribution, the default Python version pointed at by the /usr/bin/python symlink is now Python 2.7.

Meike Reichle officially announced the Wheezy Bug Squashing Party Marathon, starting in Hildesheim on December 2, 2011.

New Debian Contributors

Twenty-four people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Harish Badrinath, Andrew Harvey, Michael Jumper, Jakub Adam, Tiziano Zito, Zlatan Todoric, Ivo Maintz, Judit Foglszinger, Daniel Hughes, Mark Owen, Rico Rommel, Alex Chiang, Daniel Schaal, Alexander Chernyakhovsky, Jerome Robert, Shell Xu, Sebastian Eichelbaum, Jeroen Nijhof, Michael Milligan, Emmanuel Thomas-Maurin, Arthur Gautier, Kouhei Maeda, Rodolphe Pelloux-Prayer and Ahmed Toulan into our project!

Important Debian Security Advisories

Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): linux-2.6, openjdk-6, iceape, iceweasel, puppet, openoffice.org, quagga, icedove, cyrus-imapd-2.2, policykit-1, dokuwiki, moin, bugzilla, radvd, wireshark, kfreebsd-8, pam, libfcgi-perl, freetype, torque, simplesamlphp, tor, python-django, phpldapadmin, mahara, man2html and xen. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

Debian's Backports Team released advisories for these packages: puppet (updated announce) and iceweasel, Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

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

Debian's Volatile Team released update announcements for the packages: tzdata (last updated announce) and clamav. Please read them 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

Hundreds of packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently. Among many others are:

Work-needing packages

Currently 400 packages are orphaned and 145 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 Francesca Ciceri, David Prévot, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, Alexander Reshetov and Justin B Rye.