Debian Project News - May 13th, 2013

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

Debian 7.0 Wheezy released

27 months after the release of Debian 6.0 Squeeze, a new stable version of the Debian operating system, Debian 7.0 Wheezy, was released on May 4, 2013. Among other improvements, this release brings to its users multiarch support, various tools to deploy private clouds, an improved installer supporting software speech, which makes accessibility one of its strong points, and an expanded set of multimedia codecs.
Adam D. Barratt, Release Team manager, has already announced a first point release planned for next month and given advice to maintainers about further uploads to unstable: the development of Jessie is already starting.
Joerg Jaspert, Debian FTP master, gave some insight into the workflow needed by the FTP team to release a new stable version of Debian, while Raphael Geissert noted that in the first 48 hours after its log files were rotated last Sunday, http.debian.net handled almost 2 million requests, for an average of 11 requests per second.
Meanwhile, Debian users and enthusiasts from all over the world are organising parties to celebrate the release of Wheezy: the Catalan Debian community and some Indian Debian users already seem to have had some fun! If you're going to have a party, share your report and pics with us using the identi.ca hashtag #releaseparty.

What's new in Debian Wheezy?

Michael Prokop launched the #newinwheezy initiative aimed at presenting to users and fellow developers the packages that have been newly introduced in Wheezy. According to the Debian contributors who joined the initiative, among the most interesting new packages are: various forensic tools; vcsh (manage config files in $HOME via fake bare git repositories); Charybdis (a popular and solid IRC server which is the base of the software behind the Freenode network); packages from the Grml system; mosh (a UDP based remote shell terminal which works better than SSH in case of lag); several lightweight browsers (dillo, netsurf, surf and xxxterm); libghc-stm-dev, a tool to help with writing non-buggy threaded programs; scratch (an easy, interactive, collaborative programming environment designed for creation of interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art) and plymouth (a boot-time I/O multiplexer).

DebConf11 and 12 videos

IRILL, sponsor of Debian for DebConf videos, has published all of the videos from DebConf11 and 12. They are available both in MP4 (H.264) and (recommended) Ogg formats, and easily available through their video player (DebConf11: 56 videos; DebConf12: 72 videos).

Debian beyond the cloud

Keith Chuvala, the manager of Space Operations Computing (SpOC) for NASA, announced this week that the agency will switch to Debian on the International Space Station's laptops. Specifically, the ISS astronauts will be using computers running Debian 6. Chuvala mentioned they needed an operating system that was stable and reliable, and that they will rely on the Linux Foundation for training their astronauts and IT specialists.

Debian in Google Compute Engine

Google recently announced the availability of Debian images on its Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Google Compute Engine. At the moment, both 6.x and 7.x versions of Debian are distributed on their infrastructure, in order to provide an easier workload migration. For fast performance and to reduce bandwidth costs, Google is hosting a Debian package mirror for use by Google Compute Engine Debian instances.
As Google announced, Debian will be the default image type for Compute Engine from now on.

Bits from the DPL

Lucas Nussbaum sent his first monthly report of DPL activities. Besides thanking the other candidates, the voters and the previous project leader, Stefano Zacchiroli, the newly elected Project Leader summarised his first thirteen days of activity. Lucas focused particularly on the ongoing discussion about the Debian logo as a registered trademark, planned - with the help of Moray Allan - a survey of the main Debian teams to verify their health status, and started work on improving and documenting paths into the project.

Coding Freedom: a closer look at Debian contributors

Gabriella Coleman announced the recent publication of her book, "Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking", which was mostly inspired by Debian's community and active members. The book strives to identify and explain the key factors that have influenced the development of free software projects, while examining the social impact they have had. A good portion was based on Debian, following two years of ethnographic research. There is one chapter dedicated to the project and many others draw on interviews with Debian developers.
The book is available under a Creative Commons license and freely available for download.

Other news

Guido Günther sent a report from the 6th Debian Groupware Meeting held in Essen, Germany.

Gunnar Wolf announced that the deadline for sponsored registration for DebConf13 in Switzerland has officially been extended to Sunday May 19. For more information about how to register, you can check the original announcement about the opening of registration.

Upcoming events

There is one upcoming Debian-related event:

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.

Important Debian Security Advisories

Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): mysql-5.5, xen, stunnel and strongswan. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

Debian's Stable Release Team released an update announcement for the package: clamav. 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

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

Work-needing packages

Currently 512 packages are orphaned and 139 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 Cédric Boutillier, Francesca Ciceri, Sylvestre Ledru, Victor Nițu and Justin B Rye..