Debian Weekly News - October 28th, 2003
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2003/43/
Debian Weekly News - October 28th, 2003
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Welcome to this year's 43rd issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. The [1]XPde team [2]discussed the legal
implications of emulating aspects of proprietary desktop environments.
Andreas Steinel [3]announced a set of pictures that he took at
[4]OpenSaar ([5]info) and [6]Linux-Kongress ([7]info, [8]report).
Alongside, the Debian user group in Sao Paulo has been [9]organising
a Debian [10]workshop.
1. http://www.xpde.com/
2. http://www.xpde.com/docs/Windows_Linux_Lookalikes_v02.pdf
3. http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-eu-0310/msg00034.html
4. http://w5.cs.uni-sb.de/~lnxbil/08.10.2003_OpenSaar/
5. http://www.debian.org/events/2003/1007-opensaar
6. http://w5.cs.uni-sb.de/~lnxbil/14.10.2003_LK/
7. http://www.debian.org/events/2003/1014-linuxkongress
8. http://www.debian.org/events/2003/1014-linuxkongress-report
9. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg01277.html
10. http://www.debian-sp.org/oficina2003/
SPI Board Election. Wichert Akkerman [11]announced that Software in
the Public Interest (SPI) is holding an election to fill three
vacancies in its board of directors. [12]SPI is a non-profit
organisation which assists Debian and other Free Software projects in
legal matters such as holding trademarks/copyrights or accepting
donations. November 6th is the deadline to declare candidacy, voting
will run from November 7th to 21st.
11. http://lists.spi-inc.org/pipermail/spi-announce/2003/000058.html
12. http://www.spi-inc.org/
Constitutional Amendment of Section 4.1.5. Manoj Srivastava posted the
second [13]call for votes in the proposed constitutional amendment.
All three [14]proposals passed the quorum requirements within the
first 72 hours of the polls being open. So far, there have been 124
valid votes, which is lower participation than this year's DPL vote
(which in turn trailed last year's DPL vote). Romain Francoise also
tracked down a major bug in the [15]DEbian VOTE Engine (Devotee),
which had caused some votes to be rejected.
13. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote-0310/msg00098.html
14. http://www.debian.org/vote/2003/vote_0003
15. http://arch.debian.org/arch/private/srivasta/archive-2003/devotee/
Linux Brochure Project. Martin Michlmayr forwarded a [16]mail from the
[17]Linux Brochure Project which documents key Linux information in
standard-size brochures whose source is released under the [18]GNU
GPL. Currently there are two versions of the brochure: a "Linus"
version, which features famous quotes from Linus and a VLUG version,
which has been adapted as the Victoria Linux Users Group (VLUG)
official brochure. Frank Lichtenheld [19]adopted it to produce a
[20]Debian brochure that could use some help.
16. http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-eu-0310/msg00031.html
17. http://lbproject.sourceforge.net/
18. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
19. http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-eu-0310/msg00037.html
20. http://www.djpig.de/projekte/debian/debianb/
How to build Debian Packages. Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier [21]explained
how to build Debian packages. His article provides a well-structured
discussion, ranging from what a package is to the final steps of
building. He also includes links to other resources, including the
[22]Debian Policy Manual and the [23]pkgwrite tool, which assists in
making both Debian and RPM packages from a single specification file.
21. http://linuxdevices.com/articles/AT8047723203.html
22. http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/
23. http://www.ffem.org/daveb/pkgwrite/
Installing Debian with Red Hat? Ian Murdock [24]announced that
[25]Progeny has ported Red Hat's Anaconda installer to Debian and
ceased work on PGI (Progeny Graphical Installer). They are also
working with various parties to add RPM support into the mainline APT
tree, to [26]allow Debian- and RPM-based distributions to be managed
using a single APT codebase, and possibly even to allow Debian and RPM
packages to coexist side by side.
24. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg01880.html
25. http://www.progeny.com/
26. http://arstechnica.com/archive/news/1067056799.html
Debian in the World Solar Challenge. During the seventh [27]World
Solar Challenge the Western Australian Solar Team [28]Sungroper is
also competing for the Yahoo most [29]unusual or remote Internet
[30]cafe. Onno Benschop runs his workstation (Debian testing) as the
gateway and teams from around the globe flock to the satellite dish
each night to send emails back home.
27. http://www.wsc.org.au/
28. http://www.sungroper.asn.au/
29. http://www.pcchatshow.com/articles/showarticle.php?ArticleID=142
30. http://www.sungroper.asn.au/cafe/
Bug Reports belong in the Debian BTS. Russell Coker [31]noticed that a
maintainer closed a bug he discovered with a note "submitting upstream
bugs to Debian BTS only slows down the packaging work by requiring the
maintainer to act as go between on the bug". However, Debian users
should submit bugs to the Debian Bug Tracking System (BTS) from where
the maintainer can forward the bugs upstream if it is an upstream bug.
Consequently, Adrian Bunk [32]reopened all such bug reports.
31. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg01641.html
32. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg01685.html
Making zopectl a Pre-Dependency of Zope. As per policy, Luca De Vitis
[33]asked for consensus to add a pre-dependency to [34]zopectl for
[35]zope since zopectl is required to discover file locations when
Zope is purged. Since the location of these files is configurable, it
would be difficult to discover them without zopectl.
33. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg01850.html
34. http://packages.debian.org/zopectl
35. http://packages.debian.org/zope
Supporting different Kernels and Configuration. Mattia Dongili
[36]wondered how he is supposed to provide a default configuration for
[37]cpufreqd which is a speedstep applet that monitors battery level,
power state and running programs to adjust the cpu frequency. The
kernel interface has changed between the 2.4 and 2.6 mainstream line.
Wouter Verhelst [38]suggested to calculate the speed based on the main
processor speed.
36. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg01851.html
37. http://packages.debian.org/cpufreqd
38. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg01853.html
Debian Bug-Squashing Party. Erik Rossen [39]announced a Debian
bug-squashing party on Sunday, November 9th 2003, in Ecublens,
Switzerland. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Debian GNU/Linux
distribution, the Groupe romand des Utilisateurs de Linux et de
Logiciels Libres will lock 10 to 40 volunteers in a large room and
provide them with all of the computers, bandwidth, electricity, pizza,
and beer that they need to work well.
39. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg01911.html
Debian Installer Packages. Joey Hess [40]wondered how the
debian-installer is supposed to create binary packages once it is in a
state where buildds can pick it up -- apart from regular .deb and
.udeb files. The two choices seem to be to include all the boot images
in a .deb file as Alastair's original build/debian does, or to create
a tarball that will have to be processed manually by the FTP people
and unpacked into a proper directory. The latter will be the method to
be [41]implemented.
40. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot-0310/msg01291.html
41. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot-0310/msg01331.html
Debian Installer with low Memory Consumption. Goswin von Brederlow
[42]noticed that the debian-installer currently needs a lot of RAM to
install the udeb files on the CDROM. Large memory requirement would
lock out several machines with only 16 MB or less of RAM. He proposed
to use a huge initrd which is loopback mounted and an lvm snapshot
device set over that with a ramdisk as copy-on-write storage.
42. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot-0310/msg01295.html
New Glibc for Sid. Dan Jacobowitz [43]announced that there's nothing
left in the TODO file of glibc that he considers a showstopper. Hence,
he proposed to freeze CVS on Tuesday, build and test 2.3.2.ds1-8 on as
many architectures as possible, and upload it probably straight into
unstable.
43. http://lists.debian.org/debian-glibc-0310/msg00650.html
New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the
unstable Debian archive recently or contain important updates.
* [44]athcool -- Enable powersaving mode for Athlon/Duron
processors.
* [45]cassbeam -- Program for Cassegrain antenna modelling.
* [46]ftm -- Frogfoot Networks Traffic Monitoring Utility.
* [47]sux -- Wrapper around su which will transfer your X
credentials.
* [48]translucency-source -- Filesystem translucency module.
* [49]ttt -- Standalone program for local traffic-monitoring.
* [50]tttprobe -- Probe to collect traffic-data and send it to a
viewer.
* [51]tttview -- Graphical viewer for remote captured traffic-data.
* [52]nut-usb -- USB Driver subsystem for the nut - Network UPS
Tools.
* [53]umbrello -- UML modelling tool.
* [54]wesnoth -- Battle for Wesnoth is a fantasy turn-based strategy
game.
* [55]xautomation -- Control X from the command line, and find
things on the screen.
44. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/misc/athcool.html
45. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/cassbeam.html
46. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/ftm.html
47. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/sux.html
48. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/misc/translucency-source.html
49. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/ttt.html
50. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/tttprobe.html
51. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/tttview.html
52. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/nut-usb.html
53. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/umbrello.html
54. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/wesnoth.html
55. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/xautomation.html
Orphaned Packages. 15 packages were orphaned this week and require a
new maintainer. This makes a total of 195 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free
Software community. Please see the [56]WNPP pages for the full list,
and please add a note to the bug report and retitle it to ITA: if you
plan to take over a package.
56. http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/
* [57]arts -- Analog Realtime Synthesizer (aRts) metapackage.
([58]Bug#217097)
* [59]kdeadmin -- KDE Administration tools metapackage.
([60]Bug#217102)
* [61]kdebase -- KDE Base metapackage. ([62]Bug#217103)
* [63]kdegraphics -- KDE Graphics metapackage. ([64]Bug#217104)
* [65]kdelibs -- KDE core libraries metapackage. ([66]Bug#217105)
* [67]kdenetwork -- KDE Network metapackage. ([68]Bug#217106)
* [69]kdepim -- KDE Personal Information Management metapackage.
([70]Bug#217107)
* [71]kdeutils -- KDE Utilities metapackage. ([72]Bug#217108)
* [73]libboulder-perl -- Perl module for hierarchical tag/value
structures. ([74]Bug#217111)
* [75]libcflow-perl -- Perl module for analysing raw flow files
written by cflowd. ([76]Bug#217112)
* [77]libconfigreader-perl -- Perl module for reading config files.
([78]Bug#217113)
* [79]libnet-patricia-perl -- Perl module for fast IP address
lookups. ([80]Bug#217115)
* [81]meta-kde -- The K Desktop Environment. ([82]Bug#217118)
* [83]pyne -- Python-GTK powered GUI mail- and newsreader.
([84]Bug#216890)
* [85]roleplaying -- Database system for role players.
([86]Bug#216879)
57. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/arts.html
58. http://bugs.debian.org/217097
59. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/kde/kdeadmin.html
60. http://bugs.debian.org/217102
61. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/kde/kdebase.html
62. http://bugs.debian.org/217103
63. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/kde/kdegraphics.html
64. http://bugs.debian.org/217104
65. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/kde/kdelibs.html
66. http://bugs.debian.org/217105
67. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/kde/kdenetwork.html
68. http://bugs.debian.org/217106
69. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/kde/kdepim.html
70. http://bugs.debian.org/217107
71. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/kde/kdeutils.html
72. http://bugs.debian.org/217108
73. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/perl/libboulder-perl.html
74. http://bugs.debian.org/217111
75. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/perl/libcflow-perl.html
76. http://bugs.debian.org/217112
77. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/perl/libconfigreader-perl.html
78. http://bugs.debian.org/217113
79. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/perl/libnet-patricia-perl.html
80. http://bugs.debian.org/217115
81. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/kde/kde.html
82. http://bugs.debian.org/217118
83. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/mail/pyne.html
84. http://bugs.debian.org/216890
85. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/roleplaying.html
86. http://bugs.debian.org/216879
Want to continue reading DWN? Please help us create this newsletter.
We still need more volunteer writers who watch the Debian community
and report about what is going on. Please see the [87]contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your
mail at [88]dwn@debian.org.
87. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
88. mailto:dwn@debian.org
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