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Debian Weekly News - November 26th, 2003



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Debian Weekly News - November 26th, 2003
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Welcome to this year's 47th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. We were not able to produce and publish DWN in
time this week due to the security [1]breach the Debian project faced.
An interesting [2]interview with several developers from
[3]freedesktop.org regarding aspects of their project, including
interoperability, hardware abstraction, accessibility and more has
been published.

 1. http://www.debian.org/News/2003/20031121
 2. http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5215
 3. http://www.freedesktop.org/

Debian Servers compromised. The Debian project had to [4]report that
four servers were [5]compromised by an unknown attacker. The admin
team, with site admins and service admins are busy checking and
resurrecting machines and services. As a first [6]reaction all
accounts have been locked as a safety precaution. If the same password
was used for Debian machines and others, you are strongly advised to
change it as soon as possible.

 4. http://www.debian.org/News/2003/20031121
 5. http://cert.uni-stuttgart.de/files/fw/debian-security-20031121.txt
 6. http://lists.infodrom.org/misc/2003/0013.html

Testing Propagation Status. Nathanael Nerode [7]looked at several
packages and their migration to testing and concluded that things look
pretty good actually. Perl and GNOME should be fine after their
quarantine time. Mozilla, however, does not build on two
architectures. Several packages, though, are waiting for Perl and
PostgreSQL which is waiting for Perl as well.

 7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-release-0311/msg00092.html

Results for new SPI Board of Directors Member Vote. Wichert Akkerman,
[8]SPI board secretary, [9]announced that a total of 52 people did
cast their vote, which is 18 % of all eligible voters. The three
winners are David Graham, Ian Jackson and Martin 'Joey' Schulze. The
lists of voters, votes and results are also [10]published. After a
dispute period the three winners will be automatically appointed to
the board of directors.

 8. http://www.spi-inc.org/
 9. http://lists.spi-inc.org/pipermail/spi-announce/2003/000064.html
 10. http://www.spi-inc.org/secretary/votes/vote2/

Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 Updated. Nearly one year after the last update to
Debian GNU/Linux 3.0, the project finally [11]updated the woody
release again. This revision adds 143 security updates to the stable
release, that were formerly distributed through
[12]security.debian.org, and 18 important bugfixes to various
packages. Details of this update are on the [13]preparation page.

 11. http://www.debian.org/News/2003/20031121a
 12. http://www.debian.org/security/
 13. http://people.debian.org/~joey/3.0r2/

Beginners Guide to GNU/Linux. Not exactly Debian related, but Chris
Walden released a nine part [14]series that guides beginners to
GNU/Linux on IBM developerWorks. This roadmap is designed to help you
take the experience and knowledge that you already have in computing
and redirect it to working in GNU/Linux.

 14. http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-roadmap.html

Review of both new Installers for Debian. Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier
[15]reviewed the new Debian Installer and Progeny's anaconda port.
Debian-installer is an improvement over the old boot-floppies,
especially since hardware is automatically detected, however it will
still be intimidating for new users. Anaconda for Debian is not yet
ready for primetime, but once finished will be easier to use on x86
than [16]debian-installer.

 15. http://lwn.net/Articles/58074/
 16. http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/

EU Open Source Migration Guidelines. A strategic [17]initiative (IDA,
Interchange of Data between Administrations) of the European
Commission has released the [18]IDA Open Source Migration Guidelines
which provide practical and detailed recommendations on how to migrate
to office applications, calendaring, e-mail and other standard
applications based on Free Software. IT experts from several European
countries have been involved in creating this document.

 17. http://europa.eu.int/ISPO/ida/
 18. http://europa.eu.int/ISPO/ida/export/files/en/1603.pdf

Distro Taste: If Debian was a Beer... Indranath Neogy wrote a short
[19]article about GNU/Linux distribution taste and beer which was
discussed on [20]Slashdot as well. This diversity of GNU/Linux is
reflected in the enormous number of flavors (or distributions) it is
available in. The author would pair Debian with a something like
Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier. The Debian Free Software Guidelines
would be a reminiscent of the German Beer Purity laws, which mandate
that the beer be made out of malt, hops, yeast and water alone.

 19. http://articles.linmagau.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=324
 20. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/31/0334237

New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the
unstable Debian archive recently or contain important updates.

 * [21]arkrpg -- Roleplaying kernel.
 * [22]diveintopython -- Free Python book for experienced
   programmers.
 * [23]gwget2 -- GNOME 2 wget front-end.
 * [24]openuniverse -- 3D Universe Simulator.
 * [25]prokyon3 -- Mp3 and Ogg/vorbis manager and tag editor.
 * [26]pyxmms-remote -- Command-line interface to XMMS.
 * [27]racoon -- Racoon IKE server.
 * [28]tclparser -- Tcl extension to access Tcl's internal parser.

 21. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/arkrpg.html
 22. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/doc/diveintopython.html
 23. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/gnome/gwget2.html
 24. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/science/openuniverse.html
 25. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/prokyon3.html
 26. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/pyxmms-remote.html
 27. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/racoon.html
 28. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/interpreters/tclparser.html

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 [29]contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your
mail at [30]dwn@debian.org.

 29. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
 30. mailto:dwn@debian.org



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