Debian Weekly News - 16 to 22 Feb 1999
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/
Debian Weekly News - 16 to 22 Feb 1999
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Welcome to the eighth edition of Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for
the Debian developer community.
There's now a version of Debian translated into Italian. [8]PROSA
Debian is based on slink, and is sold with a book "[9]Athena Linux".
For more information see the [10]announcement.
Linuxpower [11]interviewed Wichert Akkerman. Definitely worth a read.
Bruce Perens is [12]moving away from supporting the term "Open Source"
and returning to promoting "Free Software". "Open Source has
de-emphasized the importance of the freedoms involved in Free
Software. It's time for us to fix that."
This month's Linux Journal contains three articles related to Debian.
One is about the [13]Linux Router Project, a mini-distribution derived
from Debian. The second describes [14]ARGO, an autonomous car driven
by a computer running Debian. The last is by Andrew Feinberg, a Debian
developer, and is a general article about linux in a high school.
Debian seems to have quite a tradition of having high-school aged
developers..
Someone [15]proposed a Debian distribution based on FreeBSD. There was
considerable debate on this topic. Most of the favorable opinions
expressed were based on the argument that there should be a Debian
distribution for as many open source UNIX variants as possible. This
was countered with the argument that this would drastically increase
the workload of the package maintainers.
The final test build of the X packages is [16]available now, everyone
who is able should test it. Also, X 3.3.3.1 is now [17]packaged though
not yet part of the distribution. On a related note, the [18]request
for a prompt for the default term type during xterm's configuration
has resurfaced. This would be nice for people in a heterogeneous
environment, and who therefore prefer xterm over xterm-debian despite
the disadvantages. For those interested, the reasoning for
xterm-debian as a default term type is at the bottom of Branden's
[19]X Strike Force page.
If you're wondering where all the .deb's for the arm architecture
went, they've [20]all been removed from the archive. The arm port has
broken binary compatability with those .deb's and has deleted them all
and has started building new ones.
Brian May has written a number of perl scripts which which one might
use to configure and maintain NFS images for diskless clients. He has
[21]asked whether these might be included in the Debian distribution.
There are some problems that need to be resolved. For example how to
compare two packages for upgrades and calculating module dependencies
when /lib/modules is mounted as read-only.
Javier Fdz-Sanguino Peña has written an [22]article on Slink for
[23]Open Resources and is asking for comments. Among other things,
this article discusses the problems that needed to be overcome for
this distribution and some of the issues involved with the gcc
compiler upgrade.
It was a busy week for security holes:
* Debian 2.0r5 has been [24]released, the contents are primarily
security fixes, but include some other bug fixes as well.
* A new version of mutt that fixes the mailcap security hole has
been [25]released. This isn't the end of that security hole, pine
and other mailers may still be vulnerable. A more general fix to
mailcap is in the works.
* A buffer overflow problem in lsof is [26]fixed.
* A trivial root exploit was discovered in eterm and quickly
[27]fixed. It only affected potato.
* The version of wget in slink and potato had an exploitable problem
with attempting to chmod symlinks, this has been [28]fixed.
* zgv has a security hole as well, reliable sources tell me the fix
is in Incoming.
It's always a nice change of pace to meet fellow Debian developers
face to face. There were a couple of opportunities for this lately.
* Nine developers, including Wichert Akkerman, Enrique Zanardi, and
almost every single developer in .nl, got together in Amsterdam
last week for dinner.
* There was a Debian gathering in San Fransisco, on February 6th.
Ian Jackson and Dale Scheetz were in town, and several local
Debian developers and many users showed up for an impromptu
meeting -- billed as the "First Ever Debian User's Group Meeting".
About 17 people attended in all. Some summaries of the event can
be found [29]here.
The next big chance to meet fellow developers will be at
[30]LinuxWorld Expo next week at the Debian booth.
New packages added to Debian this week include:
* [31]synaptics, a configuation utility for the Synaptics TouchPad.
* [32]gnome-metatris, a themed gnome tetris.
* [33]gtick, gtk based metronome.
* An icecast [34]server and [35]client.
* [36]midentd, an identd replacement with masquerading support.
* Also, a package of the security scanner [37]satan is in incoming.
Help wanted:
* Havoc Pennington won't be able to work on gnome-apt for a while.
He has a [38]list of small, discrete tasks that others could help
with in the meantime.
Server news
* An [39]archive of all the old versions of Debian is now available.
Only source is available for some of the older versions.
Followups to previous news items:
* Daniel Burrows [40]wrote a script that automatically converts
Windowmaker themes to .deb's. Frozen Rose [41]posted about a
similar script, and a GTK-theme-to-deb converter as well. These
should eventually appear in a package.
Many thanks to this week's contributors: Michael Dahlberg and Brandon
Mitchell.
References
8. http://www.prosa.it/prosa-debian/
9. http://www.mondolinux.com/cdroms/prosa.htm
10. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/mail#1
11. http://linuxpower.org/display_item.phtml?id=104
12. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9902/msg01641.html
13. http://linuxrouter.org/
14. http://millemiglia.ce.unipr.it/
15. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9902/msg01630.html
16. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/mail#3
17. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9902/msg02010.html
18. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-testing-9902/msg00145.html
19. http://master.debian.org/~branden/xsf.html
20. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9902/msg02084.html
21. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9902/msg01983.html
22. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9902/msg01815.html
23. http://www.openresources.com/
24. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/mail#2
25. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-changes-9902/msg01450.html
26. http://www.debian.org/security/1999/19990220a
27. http://www.debian.org/security/1999/19990218
28. http://www.debian.org/security/1999/19990220
29. http://kitenet.net/~bad/
30. http://www.linuxworldexpo.com/
31. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/utils/synaptics.html
32. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/games/gnome-metatris.html
33. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/sound/gtick.html
34. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/sound/icecast-server.html
35. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/sound/icecast-client.html
36. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/net/midentd.html
37. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-changes-9902/msg02047.html
38. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9902/msg01653.html
39. http://archive.debian.org/debian-archive/
40. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-user-9902/msg02340.html
41. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-user-9902/msg02644.html
--
see shy jo
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