Debian Weekly News - June 25th, 2001
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2001/15/
Debian Weekly News - June 25th, 2001
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MOSIX Correction: Last week we mentioned the [1]MOSIX tool, and there
may have been some confusion when we described it as a
"multi-platform" tool. MOSIX works on several OSes, but only on the
x86 architechture. However, ports for SPARC and Alpha are under way as
well.
KDE 2.2 Alpha Packages: If you want to live on the bleeding edge, Ivan
E. Moore II, the Debian KDE maintainer has made preliminary [2]KDE 2.2
packages available on people.debian.org. Thanks, Ivan!
Inexpensive Linux Laptops: Chris Ivanovich is looking for an
inexpensive laptop that is Linux-friendly. He's gotten quite a few
suggestions on the debian-laptop list. If you have any suggestions, or
are looking for one yourself, check out [3]the discussion.
When it rains...: Auric, Debian's FTP master server, [4]crashed
during last Thursday's 'dinstall' run, which corrupted the database.
Consequently, testing disappeared for a day, but returned on Friday.
Watch where you put that...: On debian-devel, the location of the
traceroute program is the subject of (another) [5]heated discussion.
Should it go into /usr/sbin or /usr/bin? Currently, it makes its home
in /usr/sbin -- where the package maintainer believes it should be. As
always, there are some strong opinions and interesting points made, as
well as a few silly ones -- almost as much fun as watching two geeks
argue over the relative merits of Emacs and vi.
Improving Qmail Performance: It's always good to get advice on how to
improve system performance. Jason Lim [6]has a recommendation on the
debian-isp list that might be of interest to Qmail users.
Exim and outgoing SMTP AUTH: Andrew J. Perrin is a Telocity user who
is [7]looking for help to make Exim work with his ISP's mail servers,
which now use SMTP AUTH. SMTP is the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol,
which is used to transmit mail from one mail server to another. It
typically does not require a username/password pair to transmit mail,
but to prevent spammers abusing their mail servers to relay mail
across the Internet, ISPs usually use the IP address of the sender and
the destination of the mail to decide if they will accept it. Some
ISPs are supplementing this with the SMTP AUTH system, where in order
to relay mail to another machine, senders must provide a username and
password. Unfortunately, Telocity's idea of how this works doesn't
quite match Exim's... If you have any ideas, join in the thread on the
debian-user mailing list.
NewbieDoc News: We need more proto-newbies! If you've got a hurdle
that you figured out how to overcome -- maybe a configuration setting
for Exim, or a trick with Apache, or a command in vim -- we'd love to
hear about it. You'll be able to help someone tomorrow by documenting
what you learned today. Please help out -- see the [8]web site or
[9]mailing list for more details!
School finals have just about drained our talent pool dry recently, so
the NewbieDoc effort has been a bit quiet lately. Even so, Will
Trillich has been applying some PHP tricks to automate the NewbieDoc
listings, so our document listings are now generated on-the-fly, and
Romain Lerallut has re-wrapped the whole NewbieDoc set in tarball
form, and it's available for download now.
Newbie Tip: If you haven't tried using Mutt to read your mail, you
should give it a whirl. First, "apt-get install mutt" and then run
"mutt" to read your messages. To see how powerful the customization
features are, you can visit a web site and [10]download some example
configurations there.
Security Advisories: Several have been issued this week for various
Debian packages. Take a look and see if you need to update your
system:
* [11]fetchmail -- buffer overflow
* [12]gnupg -- printf format attack
* [13]rxvt -- buffer overflow
* [14]xinetd -- change default umask
As always, many thanks to the security team for their hard work.
New packages this week:
* [15]3dwm -- a 3D user environment
* [16]kino -- a non-linear video editing tool
* [17]jfs -- tools for managing (IBM's) JFS filesystem
* [18]bugzilla -- Mozilla's bug tracking system
* [19]DBS -- a debian build system with seperated patchfiles
Also of special note, after a [20]heated thread on debian-devel, last
week Mozilla 0.9.1, the first new version since November 2000, was
installed to non-US/main.
As always, feel free to write to us with your Debian-related news at
[21]dwn@debian.org.
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References
1. http://www.mosix.org/
2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-kde-0106/msg00042.html
3. http://lists.debian.org/debian-laptop-0106/msg00147.html
4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0106/msg00760.html
5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0106/msg00790.html
6. http://lists.debian.org/debian-isp-0106/msg00221.html
7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-user-0106/msg02983.html
8. http://newbiedoc.sourceforge.net/
9. mailto:newbiedoc-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net
10. http://linuxbrit.co.uk/mutt/
11. http://www.debian.org/security/2001/dsa-060
12. http://www.debian.org/security/2001/dsa-061
13. http://www.debian.org/security/2001/dsa-062
14. http://www.debian.org/security/2001/dsa-063
15. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/graphics/3dwm-geoclient.html
16. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/graphics/kino.html
17. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/jfs.html
18. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/bugzilla.html
19. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/dbs.html
20. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0106/msg00245.html
21. mailto:dwn@debian.org
--
Debian Weekly News is edited by
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier, Jean-Christophe Helary and Tollef Fog Heen
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