I'm sorry that I haven't posted anything in a while. As I mentioned in my message in June, I spent a great deal of time in the last two months at various conferences. I attended 7 conferences and gave talks about Debian at six of them (in Europe and Australia). I had a good time at the conferences, and it was great and productive to talk to many Debian developers and users in person. I especially enjoyed the Debian Conference and the preceding Debian camp. I think the camp was a great success since we got a lot of work done. I look forward to the next camp and conference which is tentatively planned to be held in Brazil. At two conferences and trade shows, some developers and I approached some hardware companies in order to get a dedicated Opteron machine for Debian. This was very fruitful and I'm happy to announce that Digital Networks United Kingdom (DNUK) has donated an Opteron box to the project which will act as a developer accessible .debian.org box. This machine has recently been shipped to Positive Internet in the UK and is currently being set up. Watch [0] to see when it becomes available. Furthermore, FMS Computer has agreed to donate an Opteron machine which will be used for various porting work, especially for debian-installer. I'm very thankful for their kind donations. Finally, freenet.de AG has recently offered an Opteron machine which is now available at pergolesi.debian.org and a PowerPC with chroots (bruckner.debian.org). Thanks! I have not only talked to hardware companies, but also to some software companies, notably to those who have products based on Debian. In particular, I talked to Lindows and Xandros. Although those companies use Debian, there is unfortunately no strong relationship with them at the moment. I discussed possible ways we can work together closer and I hope something fruitful springs from that. As a start, Xandros has agreed to work with us to make sure that sarge will be LSB compliant. Regarding LSB, I also talked to Scott McNeil of the Free Standards Group and he was very helpful detailing the steps Debian has to take in order to get an LSB certification. As it turns out, there is quite a bit of paperwork to do and some SPI members and our lawyers are looking at that at the moment. Also, in preparation for LSB v2.0 there is a review of LSB v1.9 out and comments are solicited until the end of this month. If you're interested in LSB compliance for Debian, please download v1.9 and review it. See my message at [1] on this for more information. Of course there are not only commercial products based on Debian. Many of you might heard that 80,000 GNOME desktops have been deployed in Extremadura, Spain [2]. This is a great success for the GNOME project, but in fact it's also one for Debian -- those 80,000 desktops run GNU/LinEx [3] which is based on Debian! There is also Skolelinux [4,5] which is a Debian based distribution for schools. I'm very pleased with Skolelinux since they're closely working together with us and everything they do gets integrated into Debian. In particular, they are a great driving force behind debian-installer. I think we will see more efforts like LinEx and Skolelinux in the future. There is a great demand for Debian from governments and educational institutions. They like the fact that Debian is vendor-neutral and a solid foundation on which further work can be based. The open nature of our development process also makes it much easier to get involved and drive Debian in specific directions. I think that this interest in Debian is a great opportunity for us. If every government interested in using a Debian based system funds a small number of people to work on it, then there is a great amount of work done from which Debian and all other Debian based systems benefit. Clearly, this is something we would benefit from and something we should encourage. At the same time, it might create problems. Foremost, we have to figure out how we can effectively work together with such projects and to make sure that their work is being integrated in Debian so everyone profits. Secondly, there are some questions about how those projects should be related to Debian (e.g. should they be allowed to carry the "Debian" name). This question recently came up in the case of Skolelinux, but I'm sure we will see this more often in the future. I've discussed the Skolelinux case on the SPI mailing lists in the last few weeks. I have now sent a summary[6] to the debian-project mailing list to encourage input from other people. (I'm aware I'm very vague here; my -project posting has a complete summary.) In any case, I think that there is a great opportunity for Debian now to work with government or other (possibly funded) projects, and I look forward to the benefits of that work. Let's all make Debian stronger by working together! P. S. If you're not subscribed to the debian-project mailing list yet, now would be a good time to subscribe. Summaries of recently approved New Maintainers will be posted there soon as well. [0] http://db.debian.org/machines.cgi [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003/debian-devel-200308/msg02765.html [2] http://www.gnome.org/press/releases/extremadura.html [3] http://www.linex.org/ [4] http://www.skolelinux.no/index.php.en [5] http://lwn.net/Articles/47510/ [6] http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2003/debian-project-200309/msg00020.html -- Martin Michlmayr leader@debian.org
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