Debian Weekly News - 23 Feb to 1 Mar 1999
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/
Debian Weekly News - 23 Feb to 1 Mar 1999
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Debian Weekly News - 23 Feb to 1 Mar 1999
Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer
community. We are reporting this week from LinuxWorld Expo in San
Jose, California. This issue of DWN is a day late, I apologize for the
delay.
The release of Debian 2.1 has been delayed by one week. There was a
release [8]IRC party held on irc.debian.org on Monday, but despite
what you may have heard there, the release was not made on time.
"There are a couple of reaons for this delay, ranging from some
internal struggles to upgrade failures that were discovered at the
last moment." For more details, see [9]Wichert's message and [10]Guy's
message.
Debian's booth at LinuxWorld is up and running. If you're in town for
LinuxWorld, do stop by booth #1445 and get some free CD's. News from
the booth at Linuxworld will appear [11]here. [12]Here is a Wired News
article about the Debian booth and old Mac of some sort we have running
Debian there. By the way, according to a [13]script Lars Wirzenius wrote,
Debian contains about 62,895,190 lines of code. And all those lines of
code are scrolling by on a monitor at LinuxWorld.
Debian is now the distribution used in the Empeg in-car mp3 player.
One of these neat little boxes is actually at the Debian booth at
LinuxWorld. For more on the Empeg, see [14]their home page.
Brian White is [15]stepping down from his position of Release Manager.
Richard Braakman or another volunteer will take his place. The events
leading up to this, occuring in the last few days of the freeze, were
ugly. Mistakes were made, resulting in about a gigabyte of extra
traffic to each mirror. Harsh words were [16]exchanged. Hopefully the
parties involved can put this behind them and continue to work in
other areas of Debian.
The Gimp logo contest is [17]over. "Next week the logo team will
present the best logos, from which all developers can choose a winner
by vote. The current logo will also be a possible option." A
discussion is also [18]underway about what license to use for the
winning logo.
Joel Klecker [19]posted about glibc 2.1, which will be showing up in
unstable soon after slink is released. One important change in glibc
2.1 is that it uses a utmpd, so programs that once needed to be setuid
to write to utmp (like xterm) will no longer need special permissions.
In the realm of security, a temporary file security hole is present in
mutt. A [20]fix is in incoming.
Jonathan Walther has written up a [21]short HOWTO on PGP key signing,
which is a useful reference when you finally meet another developer,
only to discover neither of you has any clue about how to exchange PGP
signatures (a common occurrence, in my experience).
Another Debian convert: Mike of the comic strip User Friendly is
perhaps the first fictional Debian user, as depicted in [22]this
cartoon.
If you prefer your news in a format like slashdot instead of weekly,
check out [23]netgod.net, which now has Debian news in a slashdot-like
format.
New packages added to Debian this week include:
* [24]ldp-ligs, the Linux Installation and Getting Started Guide
* The [25]pike programming language.
* [26]youbin ([27]youbin-client, [28]xyoubin), a mail notification
tool
* The Debian Bug Tracking system's engine is [29]packaged, though
not yet uploaded.
Server news
* non-us.debian.org continues to have troubles; there is now a good
non-us mirror in [30]Canada.
* A new ftp.debian.org is coming: [31]Linux Hardware Solutions
[32]donated a $6100 "Linux Hardware Solution PS350RR-100 RAID
rackmount server with 256 MB RAM attached to a dedicated
colocation connection at Mindspring Enterprises' data center in
Atlanta, Georgia". Now we just need one of those boxes on every
developer's desk...
Followups to previous news items:
* A new mailing list called debian-gtk-gnome has been created, for
the use of maintainers of imlib, gtk and gnome, and any packages
depending on them. Speaking of gnome, a statement on the [33]gnome
web site raised the [34]question: should gnome be the default
Debian desktop in the future? The consensus reached was that that
Debian will support any equivilant DFSG free desktops on an equal
footing.
Off topic email of the week ([35]speaking of the Debian logo, after
some very off topic conversation):
we could compromise: a bumblebee attempting intimate relations with
an orca.
i'm glad that's settled. now the only question remaining is "which
one of them should be in drag?"
References
8. http://netgod.net/~slash/articles/99/03/01/195210_F.shtml
9. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/mail#1
10. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/mail#3
11. http://kitenet.net/~bad/linuxworld.html
12. http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/18222.html
13. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9902/msg02392.html
14. http://www.empeg.com/main.html
15. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9902/msg02745.html
16. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9902/msg02712.html
17. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9902/msg02858.html
18. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9902/msg02710.html
19. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9902/msg02831.html
20. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-changes-9902/msg02659.html
21. http://master.debian.org/~krooger/HOWTO-PGP-Key-Signing
22. http://www.userfriendly.org/cartoons/archives/99mar/19990301.html
23. http://netgod.net/
24. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/doc/ldp-ligs.html
25. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/interpreters/pike.html
26. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/mail/youbin.html
27. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/mail/youbin-client.html
28. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/mail/xyoubin.html
29. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9902/msg02556.html
30. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-user-9902/msg03707.html
31. http://www.linux-hw.com/
32. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/mail#2
33. http://www.gnome.org/
34. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9902/msg02483.html
35. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9902/msg02688.html
--
see shy jo
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