Debian Weekly News - 23 to 29 Mar 1999
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/
Debian Weekly News - 23 to 29 Mar 1999
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Debian Weekly News - 23 to 29 Mar 1999
Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer
community. The next edition of this newsletter may be a few days late;
I will be away from the computer next weekend.
Packages of the current Mozilla snapshot are now [8]available. Be
warned that it's got lots of debugging information in it and is quite
slow. But in other respects it's a very good preview of the new
Mozilla/Gecko. And it uses gtk!
It turns out that when Debian 2.1 was released, a proper press release
wasn't sent out along with it, because no-one had written one up.
Perhaps part of the problem is that though we all know that 2.1 is a
great new release of Debian representing some 7 months of work, we
find it difficult to articulate what's new and good in 2.1 (except of
course for apt). This week a [9]press release, in German, was sent out
[10]rather precipitously by Martin "Joey" Schulze. An English
translation [11]is now available. Another interesting development is a
[12]press release written by Adam Di Carlo and focusing on Debian's
"integrated sgml environment". This and the English translation of
Joey's press release have yet to be distributed.
Martin Schulze is also "trying to revive Debian QA", and has posted a
[13]call for volunteers. He also posted a [14]proposal to
debian-policy to let the QA group work on packages that have not been
formally orphaned.
Some [15]discussion of anacron's usefulness and its problems segued
into talk about Debian's support for laptops in general when Adam Di
Carlo [16]proposed a laptop meta-package.
"1. Stupid Users are Bad. 2. Stupid Users are Bad for Debian.
therefore: 3. Stupid Users should be ignored.". This is a beginning of
an [17]essay posted to the list this week and it sounds like a prime
candidate for sparking a flame war. Instead, it started a reasoned
discussion about user friendliness and Debian.
Strictly speaking, this isn't news, since it has been around for a
while, but it deserves wider exposure. A [18]mini-HOWTO on converting
a Red Hat system to Debian, in-place, without a reboot!
New packages added to Debian this week include:
* [19]abiword: A WYSIWYG word processor based on GTK
* [20]cccd: A small GTK CD player program
* [21]fbtv: A Video4linux viewer using the kernel framebuffer
* [22]gq: A GTK-enabled LDAP client
* [23]hatman: A customizable high resolution Pacman clone
* [24]radio: Listen to the radio available on certain v4l cards.
* [25]streamer: A video capture program for bt848 and video4linux
Server news:
* Kachina Technologies has [26]put up 2 UltraSPARC systems running
Debian and will provide any interested Debian developers with
accounts on them.
* Adam Heath would like to change the time master sends out its
"mirror pulse", to reduce traffic through Novare's ISP at peak
times of day. Adam's initial email about this was high-handed in
tone and drew some criticizm. It's worth reading his [27]annotated
clarification of what he's asking for, if only for all the
interesting details about Debian's mirror system discussed
therein. Any actual rescheduling of the mirror pulse will only
happen after talk with the server admins.
* You can see the effect of the timing of the mirror pulse - mrtg
graphs of bandwidth, cpu usage, and web page hits are available
for [28]master and [29]va.
Thanks to Randolph Chung who has been contributing the new packages
section for a while. I need more help. If you would like to contribute
to this newsletter, please read [30]this page.
_________________________________________________________________
[31]Back issues of this newsletter are available.
Debian weekly news is edited by [32]Joey Hess.
_________________________________________________________________
References
8. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9903/msg02321.html
9. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-publicity-9903/msg00007.html
10. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-publicity-9903/msg00012.html
11. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-publicity-9903/msg00013.html
12. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-publicity-9903/msg00016.html
13. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/1999/13/mail#1
14. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/1999/13/mail#2
15. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9903/msg02269.html
16. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9903/msg02351.html
17. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9903/msg02288.html
18. http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/3328/rh5todeb-howto.txt
19. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/editors/abiword.html
20. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/sound/cccd.html
21. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/graphics/fbtv.html
22. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/net/gq.html
23. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/games/hatman.html
24. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/sound/radio.html
25. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/graphics/streamer.html
26. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/1999/13/mail#3
27. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/1999/13/mail#4
28. http://master.debian.org/mrtg/
29. http://va.debian.org/mrtg/
30. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing.html
31. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/
32. mailto:joeyh@debian.org
--
see shy jo
Reply to: