Debian Weekly News - January 23rd, 2002
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2002/4/
Debian Weekly News - January 23rd, 2002
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Welcome to DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. After
the last issue was released, several news services, such as
[1]Pro-Linux, [2]BSD Today, [3]Linux Today and [4]Slashdot featured
a story about the Debian (GNU/)NetBSD system. Hopefully it gets enough
attention to help its development.
New Powermac Flavour for Boot-Floppies. Colin Walters recently
completed work on a new-powermac flavour for woody boot-floppies, and
the installer needs more testing. The old powermac flavour did not
support newer hardware, so G4 Powerbook, iBook2, and iBook Dual USB
were not supported properly by older 2.2 kernels, and a 2.4 kernel was
needed. This will be released with 3.0.19, please give it a try and
report problems to [5]debian-boot@lists.debian.org.
Debian Mini Conference. There's going to be a [6]Debian Mini
Conference before the next [7]Linux.conf.au in Brisbane, Australia,
which takes place from February 6th to 9th. James Bromberger and
others are organizing it, and speakers will include Anthony Towns,
Russell Coker, Bdale Garbee, Brendan O'Dea, Jason Andrade and others.
Anyone who is in the region, is invited to come on down and share a
beer etc.
New 2.4 Installation Flavour? Eduard Bloch [8]discussed how the
Debian boot-floppies could support a Linux kernel 2.4.x. His proposed
solution includes a special kernel-image package for boot-floppies and
a new flavour (in addition to plain, safe, idepci and compact). This
will add more recent hardware to the list of supported hardware, while
the existing flavours will continue to work.
Sponsoring non-free Packages? Jérôme Marant [9]proposed that we don't
sponsor people who want to upload non-free packages. His main concern
is that people who are only trying to upload non-free packages into
the Debian archive, probably don't understand the Debian philosophy
and dedication to Free Software. However, our [10]social contract
talks about support for our users who develop and run non-free
software on Debian. Additionally, sponsors are free to decide who they
sponsor and what they sponsor.
No Freeze Progress? Adrian Bunk is [11]frustrated because he feels
that there is no progress being made in the freeze of woody. Woody
won't enter the next stage of the freeze until [12]base and
[13]standard packages are in a releasable state. The current situation
prohibits this: the number of [14]release critical (RC) bugs in these
packages is increasing.
The Release Manager, Anthony Towns, [15]explains: The goal that was
meant to have passed was "no outstanding RC bugs in base". However
with things like outstanding glibc security bugs for about one month,
along with some other RC issues that have been around, partially even
with a patch sitting in the Bug Tracking System (BTS), he doesn't see
much point worrying about all the other things that need to be done.
Anthony adds the following request: Fix RC bugs promptly, and other
bugs as soon as you can.
Internationalizing APT. Michael Piefel [16]announced that he is
working on an internationalized version of APT and related tools from
the same package. Currently Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, German,
Italian, Polish and Spanish are supported. If you want to help, please
check out the [17]status page. Michael has uploaded a [18]preliminary
package.
A New Release Scheme? Adrian Bunk [19]proposed a different release
scheme to the release manager, which he thinks will result in a
release by June this year. Anthony Towns [20]proposed to fix an RC bug
with every post to the thread instead of eating up time and beating
each other's arguments into the ground. Adam Heath [21]added that the
proposal doesn't solve the problems with base packages having unfixed
RC bugs.
VAX Port of Debian? Greg Ingram has an old VAX machine running
GNU/Linux and [22]would like to start porting Debian to this
architecture. The only answer to his request for instructions came
from Marcus Brinkmann, who replied with a [23]detailed list that
starts with "Get rid of your job, your hobbies and all your friends".
Coming from the person who started our Hurd port, this pessimistic
opinion is definitely not encouraging. One thing is certain, Greg has
a long way to go before he eventually succeeds.
Mixing Debian Releases the Easy Way. Robert McQueen sent us a [24]note
about mixing several different releases of Debian with the same
configuration. You'll still be able to use the testing distribution
for updates, but you are also able to install packages (and their
dependencies) from the unstable distribution if you like to.
CD Image Mirrors. Josip Rodin posted the [25]list of currently 66
sites that mirror Debian CD images, that are recorded in the central
Debian mirror database. These sites distribute CD images through FTP,
HTTP or rsync. Some more have been added since then. Several people
are asking for images of 2.2r5, which were not yet added to the
[26]main CD page but are now.
Mobile Debian? Josh Hansen [27]wondered if there is any current plan
for a mobile edition of the Debian distribution, for use on handhelds
like the iPAQ. Shaleh [28]explained that Debian has been used as a
basis for the iPaq's linux distribution. However, it is not designed
for handhelds so they changed a lot. Even use a different (but very
very similar) packaging format. Additionally, there is the
[29]Intimate Project which is a fully blown Debian-based GNU/Linux
distribution for the Compaq iPAQ, and the [30]Familiar Project that
works on creating the next generation of PDA OS, and that has just
recently published the [31]release candidate for v0.5.1.
Help with Packaging GRASS. A [32]question came up asking about the
status of packaging GRASS. Federico Di Gregorio replied that he has
[33]preliminary packages ready which are full of packaging errors and
generate a single 25MB package. He asked for help with this effort. So
if somebody wants to help, please contact Federico.
SPAM Causes Trouble on Debian Mailing Lists. The Debian project runs a
lot of [34]mailing lists. Many good disscussions about installation
problems, development related items, policy, documentation, and so on,
are made there. These lists are distressed with a lot of [35]SPAM
mails (such as [36]this one). While some people eventually unsubscribe
from these lists, others suggest solutions for preventing these mails
from being delivered: [37]procmail rules, [38]spamassassin,
[39]spamfilter etc. However, such rules need to be updated regularly
and filtering out particular charsets could discourage developers in
those countries from contributing to the project. Note from our
listmasters: The lists are already using spamfilter, but unfortunately
it doesn't prevent all spam mails.
New or Noteworthy Packages. The following new or updated packages were
added to the Debian archive recently.
* [40]aranym -- Atari ST/TT/Falcon software virtual machine.
* [41]ctie -- Merge multiple CWEB change files into one file.
* [42]evms -- Enterprise Volume Management System.
* [43]fake -- IP address takeover tool.
* [44]gkrellm-newsticker -- Scrolling News plugin for gkrellm.
* [45]gkrellm-reminder -- Reminder plugin for gkrellm.
* [46]gnumail -- Clone of NeXT/Apple's Mail.app application.
* [47]gtkwave -- VCD (Value Change Dump) file waveform viewer.
* [48]hpijs -- HP Inkjet Server - Ghostscript driver for HP inkjets.
* [49]libdime -- DXF Import, Manipulation, and Export library.
* [50]log-analysis -- Analyse system's logs to find out problems.
* [51]pantomime1 -- An Objective-C library for handling mail.
* [52]phpsysinfo -- PHP Based Host Information.
* [53]pop3browser -- Allows to check a pop3 mailbox before
downloading any mail.
* [54]preview-latex -- Render LaTeX equations etc. in an emacs
buffer.
* [55]whisker -- CGI scanner to audit web servers.
* [56]xmms-alarm -- Xmms General plugin for using xmms as an alarm
clock.
Security Updates. You know the drill, please make sure that you update
your systems if you have this package installed.
* [57]enscript -- Insecure temporary files.
Orphaned Packages. 13 packages were orphaned this week. This makes it
total 108 orphaned packages. Please see the [58]WNPP pages for the
full list.
* [59]doc-linux-zh-text ([60]Bug#130150) -- Linux HOWTOs in Chinese
* [61]fttools ([62]Bug#130427) -- FreeType font utilities.
* [63]liboo2cx11 ([64]Bug#129592) -- X11 specific modules for the
oo2c compiler
* [65]libooc-vo ([66]Bug#129589) -- VisualOberon GUI class library
for Oberon-2
* [67]libooc-x11 ([68]Bug#129587) -- X11 specific modules for the
oo2c compiler
* [69]libooc-xml ([70]Bug#129588) -- XML parser for the oo2c
Oberon-2 compiler
* [71]mmix-src ([72]Bug#129591) -- Assembler and Simulator for
Knuth's MMIX
* [73]oo2c ([74]Bug#129590) -- Optimizing Oberon-2 to ANSI-C
Compiler
* [75]pm3 ([76]Bug#129594) -- Polytechnique Montreal Modula-3
* [77]viewml ([78]Bug#129868) -- A Web Browser
* [79]wordplay ([80]Bug#130151) -- anagram generator
* [81]xcoral ([82]Bug#129585) -- Extensible mouse-based text editor
for X
Got news? Please inform us about everything that's going on in the
Debian community. We are always looking for more interesting stories
to add, especially new items by voluntary writers. We're looking
forward to receiving your mail at [83]dwn@debian.org.
Latest News: The Tunney Act. Jeremy White from the [84]WINE project
released a confession of shame, and a call to [85]action. People who
care about WINE, Free Software and Microsoft should read it and
consider sending an email if they are a U.S. citizen.
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References
1. http://www.pro-linux.de/news/2002/3888.html
2. http://www.bsdtoday.com/2002/January/News625.html
3. http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2002-01-18-018-20-NW-DB-BD
4. http://slashdot.org/bsd/02/01/19/1915256.shtml
5. mailto:debian-boot@lists.debian.org
6. http://www.linux.conf.au/debiancon.html.
7. http://www.debian.org/events/2002/0204-linuxconf
8. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot-0201/msg00437.html
9. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0201/msg00951.html
10. http://www.debian.org/social_contract
11. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0201/msg00961.html
12. http://base.debian.net/
13. http://standard.debian.net/
14. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0201/msg00010.html
15. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0201/msg01020.html
16. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0201/msg01170.html
17. http://people.debian.org/~piefel/apt/
18. http://incoming.debian.org/apt-i18n_0.5.4-1_i386.changes
19. http://www.fs.tum.de/~bunk/Debian/freeze
20. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0201/msg01466.html
21. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0201/msg01326.html
22. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0201/msg01512.html
23. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0201/msg01524.html
24. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2002/4/mail#1
25. http://lists.debian.org/debian-cd-0201/msg00156.html
26. http://www.debian.org/CD/
27. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0201/msg01626.html
28. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0201/msg01630.html
29. http://intimate.handhelds.org/
30. http://familiar.handhelds.org/
31. http://familiar.handhelds.org/releases/v0.5.1/
32. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0201/msg01702.html
33. http://people.debian.org/~fog/
34. http://www.debian.org/MailingLists/
35. http://www.foldoc.org/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?query=spam
36. http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-0201/msg00430.html
37. http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-0201/msg00229.html
38. http://spamassassin.taint.org/
39. http://spamfilter.nl.linux.org/
40. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/otherosfs/aranym.html
41. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/ctie.html
42. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/evms.html
43. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/fake.html
44. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/gkrellm-newsticker.html
45. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/gkrellm-reminder.html
46. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/mail/gnumail.html
47. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/electronics/gtkwave.html
48. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/text/hpijs.html
49. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/libdime.html
50. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/log-analysis.html
51. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/pantomime1.html
52. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/phpsysinfo.html
53. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/mail/pop3browser.html
54. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/tex/preview-latex.html
55. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/whisker.html
56. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/xmms-alarm.html
57. http://www.debian.org/security/2002/dsa-105
58. http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/
59. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/doc/doc-linux-zh-text.html
60. http://bugs.debian.org/130150
61. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/fttools.html
62. http://bugs.debian.org/130427
63. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/liboo2cx11.html
64. http://bugs.debian.org/129592
65. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/libooc-vo.html
66. http://bugs.debian.org/129589
67. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/libooc-x11.html
68. http://bugs.debian.org/129587
69. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/libooc-xml.html
70. http://bugs.debian.org/129588
71. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/mmix-src.html
72. http://bugs.debian.org/129591
73. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/oo2c.html
74. http://bugs.debian.org/129590
75. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/pm3.html
76. http://bugs.debian.org/129594
77. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/viewml.html
78. http://bugs.debian.org/129868
79. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/wordplay.html
80. http://bugs.debian.org/130151
81. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/editors/xcoral.html
82. http://bugs.debian.org/129585
83. mailto:dwn@debian.org
84. http://www.winehq.com/
85. http://www.codeweavers.com/~jwhite/tunney.html
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