Debian Weekly News - March 9th, 2004
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2004/10/
Debian Weekly News - March 9th, 2004
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Welcome to this year's tenth issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. Christoph Berg [1]reported about a Knoppix based
[2]live CD including lots of the hamradio software Debian ships.
Wichert Akkerman [3]announced that the [4]alioth service has been
moved to a new server. Additionally, Ethan Sommer has set up a
[5]collection of Open Source advocacy papers.
1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-hams-0402/msg00019.html
2. http://hubert.fink.bei.t-online.de/knoppix.html
3. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0403/msg00002.html
4. http://alioth.debian.org/
5. http://ossadvocacy.org/
Questions for the Candidates. Anthony Towns formulated a set of
[6]questions for the project leader candidates. In his platform only
Gergely Nagy mentioned changes to the distribution, replace perl
scripts in base by [7]shoop scripts. The questions include the
new-maintainer process, announcements, installer development, release
process/progress and more. Andreas Tille also submitted a set of
[8]questions.
6. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote-0403/msg00010.html
7. http://packages.debian.org/shoop
8. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote-0403/msg00018.html
DPL Bits. Martin Michlmayr sent in another [9]report and said that
over the last two weeks he attended three conferences: [10]Open Source
World Conference in Spain, [11]FOSDEM in Belgium, and a conference in
Italy organized by Firenze Tecnologia. He added reports for these
conferences as well. Also, a London based company is interested in
having a 64 bit port of Debian to PowerPC and are willing to invest
resources in this.
9. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0403/msg00000.html
10. http://www.debian.org/events/2004/0218-oswc
11. http://www.debian.org/events/2004/0221-fosdem
11 Keystrokes away from Debian. Joey Hess [12]counted the keystrokes
in a Debian installation with DHCP and partman's spiffy streamlined
autopartitoning. 11 keystrokes from the boot prompt to the "Welcome to
Debian" screen. 10 of them even were "Enter". The one extra was
selecting the "Yes, please nuke my drive" button. He believes that
perhaps two more keystrokes could be removed.
12. http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/11_keystrokes_to_debian-2004-03-04-01-58.html
Video Cluster running Debian. The [13]Visualization Group at Penn
State University has been [14]building a graphics cluster and tiled
video display wall using it for Architecture and Engineering
applications. They utilise [15]Distributed Multiheaded X and
[16]Chromium for an interactive, parallelized application environment.
Applications are developed with [17]VTK and [18]OpenSG. [19]VideoLAN
is also used to stream a video source to multiple displays via
multicast for tiled video.
13. http://viz.aset.psu.edu/
14. http://viz.aset.psu.edu/ga5in/ImmersiveEnvironmentsLab.html
15. http://dmx.sourceforge.net/
16. http://chromium.sourceforge.net/
17. http://www.vtk.org/
18. http://www.opensg.org/
19. http://www.videolan.org/
Does Debian scare away Women? Amaya Rodrigo Sastre [20]asked the
project leader candidates about their ideas to encourage more women to
be involved and what the benefits would be. Helen Faulkner
[21]explained that women face subtle problems and that on average,
women are likely to be not so confident that their skills will allow
them to survive in an environment like debian, compared to their male
counterparts. The following discussion seems to have very well
[22]proven this.
20. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote-0403/msg00040.html
21. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote-0403/msg00067.html
22. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote-0403/msg00132.html
Call for Votes on a General Resolution. Manoj Srivastava [23]called
for votes on a [24]General Resolution to decide on future handling of
the non-free section. Votes must be received by Sunday, March 21st.
The vote is being conducted in accordance with the policy delineated
in section Standard Resolution Procedure of the [25]Debian
Constitution.
23. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote-0403/msg00377.html
24. http://www.debian.org/vote/2004/vote_002
25. http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution
Supporting Hurd with ext2. Roland McGrath has [26]written a patch for
Linux 2.6 which makes it possible to get and set [27]passive
translators for Hurd via extended attributes for the ext2 filesystem
on Linux 2.6. This makes it possible to archive passive translators
using [28]star. Using experimental [29]kernel packages, Michael Banck
was able to extract a Debian GNU/Hurd base tarball and
[30]successfully boot into a working Debian GNU/Hurd installation
without having to setup translators natively. This could considerable
ease the installation of Debian GNU/Hurd if this patch gets accepted
upstream.
26. http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2004-02/msg00108.html
27. http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-doc-translator#actpas
28. http://packages.debian.org/star
29. http://people.debian.org/~mbanck/xattr-hurd/
30. http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2004-03/msg00029.html
Debian Conference: Call for Papers. Andreas Schuldei sent out the
[31]call for papers for this years' [32]Debian Conference which will
take place from May 26th to June 2nd in Porto Alegre, Brazil. On day
one there will be an introductory talk for all speakers covering
public speaking. The deadline for submissions is April 1st and
interested people should only submit a short description of the
presentation and provide technical details.
31. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0403/msg00004.html
32. http://www.debian.org/events/2004/0526-debconf
Debian Source Archive. Joachim Breitner [33]wondered whether it is
possible and useful, to have a website with all source packages from
the Debian archive extracted and available, including older versions.
Shaun ONeil [34]mentioned the peek of mirror.ac.uk to look into
archives and Roland Bauerschmidt [35]suggested to use Subversion and
ViewCVS.
33. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0403/msg00008.html
34. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0403/msg00023.html
35. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0403/msg00034.html
Transition Plan for non-free. Michael Banck [36]proposed a transition
plan to move the non-free archive off of debian.org and on
nonfree.org. In particular he talks about replicating the FTP archive,
the [37]bug tracking system, the [38]package tracking system and some
mailing lists. He also called for help since the services would have
to be set up at the beginning. At the end, only a few people would be
required to maintain the service.
36. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project-0403/msg00202.html
37. http://bugs.debian.org/
38. http://packages.qa.debian.org/
Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure that you update
your systems if you have any of these packages installed.
* [39]libxml -- Arbitrary code execution.
* [40]Linux 2.2.19 (arm) -- Local root exploit.
* [41]wu-ftpd -- Multiple vulnerabilities.
39. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-455
40. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-456
41. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-457
New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the
unstable Debian archive [42]recently or contain important updates.
42. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/newpkg_main
* [43]adabrowse -- HTML generator for Ada 95 library unit
specifications.
* [44]apollon -- KDE-based interface to the giFT file-sharing
system.
* [45]apwal -- Icon-based floating application launcher with
transparency.
* [46]bacula -- Network backup, recovery and verification.
* [47]blogtk -- GTK Weblogging client.
* [48]camera -- GNUstep application for digital still cameras.
* [49]clipbook -- GNUstep Pasteboard Viewer.
* [50]cscvs -- System for integrating CVS repositories into Arch
archives.
* [51]darcs -- David's advanced revision control system.
* [52]dcoprss -- KDE RSS utilities.
* [53]dvbackup -- Backup tool using MiniDV camcorders.
* [54]emms -- The Emacs MultiMedia System.
* [55]gwremote -- GNUstep Remote Workspace Manager.
* [56]highlight -- Universal source code converter.
* [57]kbruch -- Fraction calculation teaching tool for KDE.
* [58]kdewebdev -- Web development applications from the official
KDE release.
* [59]kfilereplace -- Batch search-and-replace component for KDE.
* [60]kgamma -- Gamma correction KControl module.
* [61]kig -- Interactive geometry program for KDE.
* [62]kmilo -- KDE kded hardware support module.
* [63]kpdf -- PDF viewer for KDE.
* [64]ksvg -- SVG viewer for KDE.
* [65]kwalletmanager -- KDE Wallet Manager.
* [66]kwifimanager -- KDE Wireless LAN Manager.
* [67]kxsldbg -- Graphical XSLT debugger for KDE.
* [68]latex-xcolor -- Easy driver-independent TeX class for color.
* [69]muine -- Simple music player.
* [70]netselect-apt -- Choose the fastest Debian mirror with
netselect.
* [71]nyquist -- Language for music composition and sound synthesis.
* [72]okle -- DVD player for KDE.
* [73]openload -- Tool for load testing of web applications.
* [74]pgf -- TeX Portable Graphic Format.
* [75]phpbb2 -- Fully featured and skinneable flat (non-threaded)
webforum.
* [76]popfile -- E-Mail classification tool.
* [77]pscan -- Format string security checker for C files.
* [78]pycaml -- OCaml bindings to embed Python interpreter and
objects.
* [79]readpst -- Converts Outlook PST files to mbox and others.
* [80]udev -- /dev/ management daemon.
* [81]vrel -- Virtual Reality Engine Language parser.
* [82]wordpress -- Semantic personal publishing platform.
43. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/adabrowse
44. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/apollon
45. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/gnome/apwal
46. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/bacula
47. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/blogtk
48. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/graphics/camera
49. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/clipbook
50. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/cscvs
51. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/darcs
52. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/dcoprss
53. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/dvbackup
54. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/emms
55. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/gwremote
56. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/highlight
57. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/math/kbruch
58. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/kde/kdewebdev
59. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/kde/kfilereplace
60. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/graphics/kgamma
61. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/math/kig
62. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/kmilo
63. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/graphics/kpdf
64. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/graphics/ksvg
65. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/kwalletmanager
66. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/kwifimanager
67. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/text/kxsldbg
68. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/tex/latex-xcolor
69. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/gnome/muine
70. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/netselect-apt
71. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/nyquist
72. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/kde/okle
73. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/openload
74. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/tex/pgf
75. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/phpbb2
76. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/mail/popfile
77. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/misc/pscan
78. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libdevel/pycaml
79. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/readpst
80. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/udev
81. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/vrel
82. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/wordpress
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83. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
84. mailto:dwn@debian.org
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