Debian Weekly News - December 27th, 2001
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2001/35/
Debian Weekly News - December 27th, 2001
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Merry Christmas everybody. We hope that those of you who are
celebrating Christmas are enjoying some nice days. Take a rest from
your regular life, think about the past year and think about what you
can do to improve Free Software and Debian in particular. We're back
being your servant, though only providing a small issue this time.
An Interactive Christmas Tree? Those of you who are slightly bored by
a regular christmas tree may be interested in this. You may have read
about it on other e-zines already, though. At the Worcester
Polytechnic Institute some students have crossed a christmas tree with
a GNU/Linux box. The result is [1]christmastree.wpi.edu, an
interactive christmas tree.
Timeline for 2001. Even though this is not directly related to Debian,
it may be of interest for many of our readers. The team from Linux
Weekly News (LWN) prepared an alpha version of the [2]2001 Linux
Timeline which is the fourth in the series. Therein you'll find a
month-by-month recap of the major Linux and free software events from
this year.
Localizing Debian. Michael Bramer [3]reported about another attempt
he made, to make public use of translated packages descriptions, that
he maintains. He copied the interface of [4]packages.debian.org to
the [5]DDTP server in order to provide a multilingual package search
facility. Currently only German and Brazilian Portuguese are
supported, but more languages will follow as soon as more descriptions
are translated to these languages. Michael would like the official
packages.debian.org server to support this. Help is appreciated.
Debian GNU/Linux 2.2r5 Ante Portas? Joey is [6]working on a new
revision of Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 also known as ``stable''. His plan is
to get this revision out within the first week of January 2002. There
are still some recompiles required, though, in order to get new
versions in the stable release synced with all architectures.
Debian Losing Quality. Brian Wolfe posted a lengthy [7]rant about
Debian. What he says is valid and describes a somewhat critical
problem in Debian. While the number of packages and maintainer are
increasing steadily there are a lot of packages that weren't touched
for a while, or whose upstream has abandoned them apparently. Old and
buggy packages shed a bad light on the Debian distribution. Brian asks
the Debian project to find a way to warn the user if a package is
abandoned upstream and that its bugs aren't likely to get fixed if the
maintainer is unwilling/able to fix it.
Boot-Floppies 3.0.18 are Available. Adam Di Carlo [8]reported that
new boot floppies were uploaded for five architectures and ten
languages through the language chooser, though not all languages are
available for all flavours. It's been said that modconf lacks certain
translations, so help is appreciated. If you have comments,
suggestions, etc, please send them to debian-boot@lists.debian.org.
New or Noteworthy Packages. The following new or updated packages were
added to the Debian archive during the last seven days.
* [9]galrey -- Command line image gallery generator. It also makes
thumbnails.
* [10]mayavi -- A scientific data visualization system.
* [11]openmcl -- OpenMCL Common Lisp compiler.
* [12]pdm -- Small GTK-based login program.
* [13]pencam -- Download images from STV0680B-001 chip based digital
cameras.
* [14]sapphire -- A minimal but configurable X11R6 window manager.
* [15]slpim -- Personal Information Manager for the console.
Got News? Keep us informed! We don't want to miss it. Be sure to send
us feedback and tips about new or old packages. We wish you a happy
new year.
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References
1. http://christmastree.wpi.edu/
2. http://www.lwn.net/2001/features/Timeline/
3. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0112/msg01488.html
4. http://packages.debian.org/
5. http://ddtp.debian.org/packages.debian.org/
6. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0112/msg00007.html
7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0112/msg01977.html
8. http://lists.debian.org/debian-release-0112/msg00015.html
9. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/graphics/galrey.html
10. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/science/mayavi.html
11. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/openmcl.html
12. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/pdm.html
13. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/graphics/pencam.html
14. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/sapphire.html
15. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/mail/slpim.html
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