Debian Weekly News - August 2nd, 2000
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/
Debian Weekly News - August 2nd, 2000
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian community.
There is no news to report about the pending release of Debian 2.2. No
show-stopper problems have been found, and nothing else has come up
that could change the release schedule. Most of the news items this
week are related to development of the unstable tree.
Of course, security fixes continue, as always. A bug in userv that
allowed local users to take over other accounts was [1]quickly fixed.
A remote root exploit in the dhcp-client and dhcp-client-beta packages
is also [2]fixed. (An earlier fix seems to have been incomplete.)
Porting Debian to the ia64. Several developers would like to [3]begin
a port of Debian to the Intel ia64 architecture. The problem is that
ia64 hardware is not for sale yet, and they're having difficulty
getting the root access to some that doing a Debian port would
require. Randolph Chung [4]mentioned that "I have some of the basic
tools ported already (dpkg, apt)", but cautioned, "I doubt we can do
an effective port unless we get machines." A [5]new mailing list was
created for the port.
Ian Jackson [6]posted plans for a package signing infrastructure that
he, Wichert Akkerman, and Ben Collins developed at a recent meeting in
Atlanta. It is based on the [7]SPKI/[8]SDSI infrastructure (AKA
"spooky-sudsy"), and it covers not just adding signatures to .deb's,
but also verifying that a signature is from a member of Debian, or
whatever other organisation a user chooses to trust.
Slashdot interviews Ian Murdock. As the founder of Debian, Ian has an
interesting perspective on the distribution. Some quotes from [9]the
interview:
* "Debian has become so much more than I ever dreamed it would
become, so I'm nothing but thrilled with how well it's all come
together."
* "Debian was the best Linux distribution you'd never heard of, and
that's started to change this past year. "
Slashdot also [10]ran a story on the dedication of Debian 2.2 to Joel
'Espy' Klecker.
Debian derivatives: The Gibraltar project aims to make a Debian-based
firewall/router that runs entirely off of a bootable CD-ROM. The
[11]first pre-release is now available. A [12]new version of Libranet
Linux has also been released.
Now some changes that should make life easier for Debian developers:
* A [13]keyserver for the Debian keyring is available now, just
point gpg at keyring.debian.org.
* The Work-Needing and Prospective Packages list (WNPP) has itself
had a rather spotty maintainence history. It is now [14]integrated
into the bug tracking system, so bugs can be filed against the
[15]wnpp pseudo-package when a package is orphaned or a new
package is requested. This should decentralize the maintenance of
WNPP and help keep it current.
New packages in unstable this week include the following, and [16]21
more:
* [17]gtkhtml: HTML rendering/editing library - bonobo component
binary ([18]dev, [19]runtime)
* [20]heroes: Collect powerups and avoids your opponents' trails
* [21]tcpflow: TCP flow recorder
And finally, very beta "phase 1" X 4.0.1 packages are [22]available
for testing. Be sure to read the README first ...
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
References
1. http://www.debian.org/security/2000/20000727
2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce-00/msg00021.html
3. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0007/msg01674.html
4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0007/msg01675.html
5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0007/msg01684.html
6. http://lists.debian.org/debian-dpkg-0007/msg00044.html
7. http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/spki-charter.html
8. http://www.toc.lcs.mit.edu/~cis/sdsi.html
9. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/07/27/1526236&mode=nested
10. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/07/27/0131226&mode=nested
11. http://gibraltar.vianova.at/
12. http://lists.debian.org/debian-commercial-00/msg00000.html
13. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0007/msg00013.html
14. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/mail#1
15. http://bugs.debian.org/wnpp/
16. http://auric.debian.org/~tausq/newpkgs-20000801.html
17. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/misc/gtkhtml.html
18. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/libgtkhtml-dev.html
19. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/libs/libgtkhtml3.html
20. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/games/heroes.html
21. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/net/tcpflow.html
22. http://lists.debian.org/debian-x-0007/msg00083.html
--
see shy jo
Reply to: