Debian Project News - April 30th, 2012

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

Deploy your own cloud with Debian Wheezy

The Debian Project has announced the availability, for its testing distribution, of some packages to create a private cloud: among others, xcp-xapi and nova-xcp-plugins. Preserving user freedoms in the cloud is a tricky business and one of the major challenges ahead for Free Software. By easing the deployment of Debian-based private clouds we want to help our users in resisting the lure of giving up their freedoms in exchange of some flexibility, said Stefano Zacchiroli, Debian Project Leader.

Debian Tour in Nicaragua

The Debian Nicaraguan community is organising the Debian Tour: from April to June, members of the local Debian community will deliver talks in several universities in Nicaragua, helping students to learn about the Debian Project and Free Software in general. The tour started in the city of Masaya, and will touch other cities such as Managua and León. On May 5th, Debian Tour will take place at UCA (the future DebConf12 venue) and special visitors, the Debian Developers and DebConf chairs, Gunnar Wolf and Holger Levsen, will attend this time.

Debian at ESRF

Jérôme Kieffer noticed that the European Synchrotron in Grenoble is migrating its computing infrastructure to Debian: the computer controlling the particle accelerator has already been migrated, as well as some data analysis servers and part of the computer cluster. The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) is a joint facility supported and shared by various European countries which operates the most powerful synchrotron radiation source in Europe. For data analysis Debian offers both the richest environment including the most used software and libraries in our field of research, and a rock solid distribution with security fixes, added Jérôme in another mail.

Bits from the DPL

Stefano Zacchiroli sent his monthly report on DPL activities. During the last month, Stefano informed the project about a proposal for a revenue sharing agreement from DuckDuckGo, marked DEP-5 as accepted, and worked with Kenshi Muto to transfer the ownership of the Debian trademark in Japan to SPI. Stefano also gave an interview about Debian and Free Software in general (in Italian) to one of the major newspapers in Italy, La Repubblica. Thanks to Matteo Cortese, who translated it, an English version of the interview is also available.

Interviews

Raphaël Hertzog published a People behind Debian interview with Samuel Thibault, member of the accessibility and Hurd teams.

Other news

Vincent Bernat wrote a tutorial on how to install XBMC on Debian Wheezy. XBMC is a media centre supporting a wide range of digital media and remote controls, which — thanks to the hard work of Andres Mejia — has recently been accepted into Debian.

Loïc Dachary sent a report from the OpenStack summit where he represented the Debian Project.

Ben Hutchings, member of the Debian Kernel Team, announced that he will maintain the Linux kernel version 3.2 as long-term kernel at kernel.org, in place of Greg Kroah-Hartman. Last January, Ben announced that Debian Wheezy will use Linux 3.2.

Paul Wise noticed that two Debian derivatives shut down in the last two months. Thanks to the derivatives census, some patches are still available and he provided an analysis of them.

Ana Guerrero announced that fifteen Debian projects have been selected for the Google Summer of Code 2012, which is six more projects than last year.

Upcoming events

There are several upcoming Debian-related events:

You can find more information about Debian-related events and talks on the events section of the Debian web site, or subscribe to one of our events mailing lists for different regions: Europe, Netherlands, Hispanic America, North America.

Do you want to organise a Debian booth or a Debian install party? Are you aware of other upcoming Debian-related events? Have you delivered a Debian talk that you want to link on our talks page? Send an email to the Debian Events Team.

New Debian Contributors

One applicant has been accepted as Debian Developer and nine people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Eduardo Trápani, Norman Messtorff, Frank Neuber, Daniel Pocock, Artur Rona, Yongzhi Pan, Nuno Carvalho, Daniel Martí, Jussi Hakala, and Eric Beuque into our project!

Release-Critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release

According to the Bugs Search interface of the Ultimate Debian Database, the upcoming release, Debian Wheezy, is currently affected by 781 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 543 Release-Critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen.

There are also some hints on how to interpret these numbers.

Important Debian Security Advisories

Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): apache2, gajim, openssl, typo3-src, dropbear, iceweasel, iceape, quagga, asterisk, spip and imagemagick. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

Debian's Backports Team released an advisory for the package: samba. 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) for announcements.

New and noteworthy packages

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

Work-needing packages

Currently 408 packages are orphaned and 166 packages are up for adoption: please visit the complete list of packages which need your help.

Want to continue reading DPN?

Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers to watch the Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see the contributing page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at debian-publicity@lists.debian.org.

To receive this newsletter in your mailbox, subscribe to the debian-news mailing list.

Back issues of this newsletter are available.

This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Moray Allan, Cédric Boutillier, Francesca Ciceri, Norman García, David Prévot and Justin B Rye.