Debian Weekly News - July 18th, 2001
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Debian Weekly News
2001/17/index.html
Debian Weekly News - July 18th, 2001
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Correction. In the last issue, we said that ia64 had been using
GCC-3.0 for some time. This isn't true, it's hppa which has been using
GCC-3.0 and only GCC-3.0. Thanks to Bdale Garbee for the correction.
lcap support? Christian Thäter is [1]proposing to add lcap
(capabilities) support by default. This might increase security, since
daemons will only be able to exercise the capabilities which are given
to them.
Bugs, bugs and more bugs. Adrian Bunk [2]reports that we have an
all-time high in the [3]number of RC bugs, just as the freeze
started. This is mainly due to recent build failures on ia64 and hppa.
Also, gcc-3.0 seems to have some issues, at least on hppa. The most
important bugs are the [4]RC bugs against base and we have
approximately one more week for fixing them
ASCII art Joey Hess forwarded [5]a nice piece of ASCII art, the
Debian Logo, from met. In the true spirit of debian-devel, people went
about creating colorful versions of it. [6]One of them were made by
John H. Robinson, IV.
BugSquash! A variant of the "common" bugsquashing parties was held
this weekend -- a Debian Architecture BSP. Have a look at the
[7]announce and the [8]bug graph
LinuxTag's over! At [9]LinuxTag 2001 about thirty Debian developers
and as many users have met at the Debian booth and participated in the
first [10]Debian Day. This was a one-day conference organized by
Debian developers who gave talks about various issues for other
developers and users. The Debian Day was a great success and shall be
repeated next year. At the end of the schedule we've had a keysigning
session organized in order to improve everybody's web of trust.
Although the Debian booth was even larger than last years booth, it
was still overcrowded most of the time. Through sponsors we have had
the opportunity to produce [11]special Debian CD-ROMs to give away to
visitors who wanted to try out Debian GNU/Linux. In addition to that
the LinuxTag-Crew has produced a [12]conference CD with a Linux
system, which is running directly from CD-ROM without any installation
to the hard disk, based on Debian GNU/Linux. About 17,000 people have
visited this years LinuxTag, some 6,000 ended up with a Debian CD in
their bag.
During the Debian Day Richard Higson gave a [13]talk about Debian
GNU/Linux on [14]IBM S/390 machines. The porting on S/390 is going on
well, a lot of packages (some 3000) have been compiled for this
architecture, a brute force build daemon is running on a Multiprise
3000 hosted at [15]Millenux. This suddenly lead into a notice of
intention by some developers, some people working for IBM and the
Stuttgart based company [16]trustsec IT solutions GmbH, who plan to
work on getting Debian GNU/Linux officially supported by IBM on the
S/390 architecture, alongside with other distributions.
Release of the new unifont announced by [17]David Sterner on
debian-i18n: the Unifont is a biwidth (8x16/16x16) bitmap font,
designed to provide coverage for all of Unicode. It currently covers a
large part of Unicode 3.0. Note that this version of the Unifont only
provides a single glyph for each character, making it impossible to
handle any language that needs context-dependent character shaping
well. It is supplied in the form of a hex file, with a converter to
convert it to bdf. See [18]http://czyborra.com/unifont/.
The first official [19]Debian conference was held during the [20]Libre
Software Meeting (LSM) in Bordeaux, France. 40 to 50 Debian developers
and about 20 Debian users attended the conference in order to discuss
various issues and to socialize. Talks during the day stimulated many
discussions which were continued during the evening either while going
to the city for food or while hacking in the university computer
rooms.
[21]Roland Bauerschmidt and [22]James Bromberger have taken pictures
during the conference and Thierry Laronde has organized to take a
picture of the [23]whole group. For those who want to read more about
the conference and see slides of the talks, Arto Teräs has written an
[24]extended travel report with many links to other sites. Although
the conference is over, the discussions continue via the Internet and
one of the hot topics is currently where Debian Conference 2 is going
to be held.
Newbie Tip-of-the-week Are you security-conscious? Good! Here's how
you can use apt-get to keep your potato system up-to-date with the
latest security patches: in /etc/apt/sources.list include those lines
deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security potato/updates main contrib non-
free
deb http://security.debian.org/debian-non-US potato/non-US main contrib non-fre
e
deb http://security.debian.org potato/updates main contrib non-free
Thereafter, a quick apt-get update && apt-get upgrade is all you need
to keep the gremlins at bay.
New packages this week
* [25]anjuta, a GNOME development IDE, for C/C++
* [26]dbishell an interactive SQL shell with readline support
* [27]hp-ppd, Postscript Printer Definition (PPD) files for HP
printers
* [28]moon-lander a fun and entertaining game based on the classic
moon lander
* [29]pconf-detect autodetects printers
* [30]tcptraceroute, a traceroute implementation using TCP packets.
Nifty for finding ECN-blocking routers
As always, feel free to write to us with your Debian-related news at
[31]dwn@debian.org.
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References
1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-0107/msg00024.html
2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0107/msg01007.html
3. http://master.debian.org/~wakkerma/bugs/
4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0107/msg00004.html
5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0107/msg00686.html
6. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0107/msg00861.html
7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0107/msg00001.html
8. http://master.debian.org/~wakkerma/bugs/
9. http://www.debian.org/events/2001/0705-linuxtag
10. http://www.infodrom.ffis.de/Debian/events/LinuxTag2001/day.php3
11. http://www.infodrom.ffis.de/Debian/events/LinuxTag2001/cd.html
12. http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/
13. http://pax.gt.owl.de/~higson/LinuxTag2001/Deb390-talk.html
14. http://www.debian.org/ports/s390/
15. http://www.millenux.de/company
16. http://www.trustsec.de/
17. http://lists.debian.org/debian-i18n-0107/msg00021.html
18. http://czyborra.com/unifont/
19. http://www.debian.org/events/2001/0704-debcon
20. http://lsm.abul.org/
21. http://people.debian.org/~rb/lsm/
22. http://www.james.rcpt.to/2001/conf-1.deb/
23. http://www.ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au/~james/2001/conf-1.deb/5th-day/preview-114-1435_IMG.JPG.html
24. http://www.niksula.cs.hut.fi/~ateras/travel/debian_conference/
25. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/anjuta.html
26. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/admin/dbishell.html
27. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/utils/hp-ppd.html
28. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/games/moon-lander.html
29. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/utils/pconf-detect.html
30. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/net/tcptraceroute.html
31. mailto:dwn@debian.org
--
Debian Weekly News is edited by
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier, Jean-Christophe Helary and Tollef Fog Heen
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