Debian Weekly News - December 23rd, 2003
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2003/51/
Debian Weekly News - December 23rd, 2003
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Welcome to this year's 51st issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. Finally, the Debian website is [1]functional
again, but not all mirrors are already updating. The [2]FSF Europe is
[3]seeking [4]donations to secure their work in the future. Some
political factions make clear statements with regards to the use of
Free Software. So did the new Queensland Greens party and
[5]announced that their website is running Free Software on top of
the Debian operating system. Merry Christmas to all of you who
celebrate the birth of Jesus.
1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-www-0312/msg00161.html
2. http://www.fsfeurope.org/
3. http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/press-release-de/2003q4/000021.html
4. http://www.fsfeurope.org/help/donate
5. http://qld.greens.org.au/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=78
Mass pbuilder Installation Testing. Junichi Uekawa [6]reported about
his efforts to test the installation of packages in a pbuilder
environment. About 300 packages failed to install, 20 of them were
kernel packages and about 50 were Emacs 20 packages since Emacs
doesn't install when stdin is directed to /dev/null.
6. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0312/msg01744.html
Debian-Installer Translation Howto. Christian Perrier [7]presented
the [8]debian-installer translation micro-HOWTO. People, who offer
help with translating [9]debian-installer should read it first. It
suggests a list of priorities so that commonly used phrases are
translated first. Christian also sent in a translation [10]status
report.
7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot-0312/msg01066.html
8. http://cvs.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/debian-installer/doc/translations.txt?cvsroot=d-i
9. http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
10. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot-0312/msg01037.html
Debian-Installer Source moved to Alioth. Joey Hess [11]announced that
he has moved [12]source code for the new [13]debian-installer into
[14]Alioth's CVS repository. This should make it easier for
translators and developers without accounts on the main Debian systems
to contribute.
11. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot-0312/msg00748.html
12. http://alioth.debian.org/projects/d-i/
13. http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
14. http://alioth.debian.org/
Support Free Software by purchasing Books. Thorsten Ehlers [15]told us
about the [16]Bookzilla project which sells books online for a German
distributor. The entire commission which is 5 % of the price is
donated to the [17]Free Software Foundation Europe. The FSF Europe was
[18]chosen as it works on general and political issues from which all
Free Software projects benefit. He added that if you are planning to
buy some books, CDs or DVDs, you may want to consider doing this at
Bookzilla to support Free Software.
15. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project-0312/msg00062.html
16. http://www.bookzilla.de/
17. http://www.fsfeurope.org/
18. http://www.bookzilla.de/shop/action/magazine?mpid=2187
Two Years debianforum.de. The German speaking web forum
[19]debianforum.de for Debian Users celebrated its second anniversary.
With discussions starting like "How to install a program"
debianforum.de has turned into an important site for both the Debian
beginners and the professional users in German speaking countries. The
forum is also awaiting its 100,000th posting soon.
19. http://debianforum.de/
Extracting SSH Keys from LDAP. Matt Zimmerman was interested in a way
to extract SSH keys from Debian's [20]LDAP database to ensure that the
client connects to the proper machine. He sent in a [21]Python program
to accomplish this. Clint Adams added the same in [22]Z Shell and
Andrew Suffield finally provided the same functionality in [23]Perl.
20. http://db.debian.org/
21. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0312/msg01192.html
22. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0312/msg01373.html
23. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0312/msg01443.html
Alternative Linux Kernel Packages. Robert Millan [24]put his
alternative packages of the Linux kernel in an APT [25]repository on
gluck, so that interested people can use it until the ftp-masters
enable the overrides. He [26]believed that Debian doesn't provide a
solution for newbie users to "install & forget" for kernel packages
just like for all other packages, so he tried to accomplish this.
24. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0312/msg01460.html
25. http://people.debian.org/~rmh/debian/
26. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0311/msg00204.html
Support for the Lustre Cluster Filesystem? Nick Pavlica [27]wondered
if Debian was interested in adding support for the [28]Lustre Cluster
Filesystem. Jörg Wendland [29]thought that this is something to
include in the new Enterprise Subproject and Andres Salomon even
[30]planned to package the required tools and patches.
27. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0312/msg01543.html
28. http://www.lustre.org/
29. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0312/msg01561.html
30. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0312/msg01572.html
Defining Build Dependencies. Roland Stigge [31]noticed that several
packages (about 1871) declare an architecture independent build
dependency against debhelper but use parts of it in the clean target.
Andreas Metzler [32]countered that such [33]bugs will be found as soon
as the package is processed by a build daemon. This is fine for
architecture independent packages (binary-all), though.
31. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0312/msg01743.html
32. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0312/msg01804.html
33. http://bugs.debian.org/216747
Report from Linux World Expo Frankfurt. Alexander Schmehl wrote a
[34]report about the Debian presence at this year's [35]Linux World
Expo in Frankfurt. Debian, KDE and PostgreSQL joined booths so it
looked larger and more inviting. An interested visitor wondered if
there was a company supporting about 10,000 installations of Debian
and another one was [36]unhappy with the state of Java in the stable
release and hence offered money to help fix it.
34. http://www.debian.org/events/2003/1027-lwe-report
35. http://www.debian.org/events/2003/1027-lwe
36. http://lists.debian.org/debian-java-0312/msg00072.html
HP expanding Debian Support. John Ribeiro [37]reported that Bdale
Garbee (HP's Linux chief technology officer and Debian developer)
announced HP's plans to expand support for Debian GNU/Linux at the
recent [38]Linux Bangalore conference in India. HP has sponsored
Debian in various ways over the years but has lacked Debian support
offerings. Michael Schulz from HP Germany later [39]confirmed this.
37. http://www.techworld.com/news/index.cfm?fuseaction=displaynews&NewsID=739
38. http://www.debian.org/events/2003/1202-bangalore
39. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project-0312/msg00067.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 [40]contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your
mail at [41]dwn@debian.org.
40. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
41. mailto:dwn@debian.org
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