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The Debian Project http://www.debian.org/
Debian Project News debian-publicity@lists.debian.org
April 30th, 2012 http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2012/09/
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Welcome to this year's ninth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian
community. Topics covered in this issue include:
* Deploy your own "cloud" with Debian "Wheezy"
* Debian Tour in Nicaragua
* Debian at ESRF
* Bits from the DPL
* Interviews
* Other news
* Upcoming events
* New Debian Contributors
* Release-Critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release
* Important Debian Security Advisories
* New and noteworthy packages
* Work-needing packages
* Want to continue reading DPN?
Deploy your own "cloud" with Debian "Wheezy"
--------------------------------------------
The Debian Project has announced the availability, for its testing
distribution, of some packages to create a private cloud [1]: among others,
xcp-xapi [2] and nova-xcp-plugins [3].
"Preserving user freedoms in the cloud is a tricky business and one of the
major challenges ahead for Free Software. By easing the deployment of
Debian-based private clouds we want to help our users in resisting the lure of
giving up their freedoms in exchange of some flexibility," said Stefano
Zacchiroli, Debian Project Leader.
1 : http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120425
2 : http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/xcp-xapi
3 : http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/nova-xcp-plugins
Debian Tour in Nicaragua
------------------------
The Debian Nicaraguan community is organising the Debian Tour [4]: from April
to June, members of the local Debian community will deliver talks in several
universities in Nicaragua, helping students to learn about the Debian Project
and Free Software in general. The tour started in the city of Masaya, and will
touch other cities such as Managua and León. On May 5th, Debian Tour will take
place at UCA (the future DebConf12 venue) and special visitors, the Debian
Developers and DebConf chairs, Gunnar Wolf and Holger Levsen, will attend this
time.
4 : http://linuxtour.org/Debian_tour
Debian at ESRF
--------------
Jérôme Kieffer noticed that the European Synchrotron in Grenoble [5] is
migrating its computing infrastructure to Debian: the computer controlling the
particle accelerator has already been migrated, as well as some data analysis
servers and part of the computer cluster. The European Synchrotron Radiation
Facility [6] ("ESRF") is a joint facility supported and shared by various
European countries which operates the most powerful synchrotron radiation
source in Europe. "For data analysis Debian offers both the richest environment
including the most used software and libraries in our field of research, and a
rock solid distribution with security fixes," added Jérôme in another mail
[7].
5 : https://lists.debian.org/debian-science/2012/04/msg00044.html
6 : http://www.esrf.eu
7 : https://lists.debian.org/debian-www/2012/04/msg00157.html
Bits from the DPL
-----------------
Stefano Zacchiroli sent his monthly report on DPL activities [8]. During the
last month, Stefano informed the project about a proposal for a revenue sharing
agreement from DuckDuckGo [9], marked DEP-5 [10] as accepted, and worked with
Kenshi Muto to transfer the ownership of the Debian trademark in Japan to SPI.
Stefano also gave an interview about Debian and Free Software in general [11]
(in Italian) to one of the major newspapers in Italy, La Repubblica. Thanks to
Matteo Cortese, who translated it, an English version [12] of the interview is
also available.
8 : https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/04/msg00006.html
9 : https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2012/03/msg00092.html
10 : http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep5/
11 : http://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/2012/03/26/news/intervista_debian-30986031/
12 : http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2012/03/intervista_per_la_Repubblica/en/
Interviews
----------
Raphaël Hertzog published a "People behind Debian" interview with Samuel
Thibault [13], member of the accessibility and Hurd teams.
13 : http://raphaelhertzog.com/2012/04/19/people-behind-debian-samuel-thibault-working-on-accessibility-and-the-hurd/
Other news
----------
Vincent Bernat wrote a tutorial on how to install XBMC on Debian [14] "Wheezy".
XBMC [15] is a media centre supporting a wide range of digital media and
remote controls, which — thanks to the hard work of Andres Mejia — has
recently been accepted into Debian [16].
14 : http://vincent.bernat.im/en/blog/2012-xbmc-debian-wheezy.html
15 : http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/xbmc
16 : http://xbmc.org/theuni/2012/04/10/xbmc-accepted-into-debian/
Loïc Dachary sent a report from the OpenStack summit [17] where he represented
the Debian Project.
17 : http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/openstack-devel/2012-April/000748.html
Ben Hutchings, member of the Debian Kernel Team, announced that he will
maintain the Linux kernel version 3.2 as long-term kernel at kernel.org, in
place of Greg Kroah-Hartman [18]. Last January, Ben announced that Debian
"Wheezy" will use Linux 3.2 [19].
18 : http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1284809/focus%3D1285786
19 : https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/01/msg00012.html
Paul Wise noticed that two Debian derivatives shut down [20] in the last two
months. Thanks to the derivatives census [21], some patches [22] are still
available and he provided an analysis of them.
20 : http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2012/04/26/when-a-distro-dies/
21 : http://wiki.debian.org/Derivatives/Census
22 : http://dex.alioth.debian.org/census/Vanillux/patches/
Ana Guerrero announced that fifteen Debian projects have been selected for the
Google Summer of Code 2012 [23], which is six more projects than last year.
23 : http://ekaia.org/blog/2012/04/27/debian-in-the-google-summer-of-code-2012/
Upcoming events
---------------
There are several upcoming Debian-related events:
* April 29-30, Shanghai, China —Debian Bug Squashing Party [24]
* May 11-13, York, UK —Debian Bug Squashing Party [25]
You can find more information about Debian-related events and talks on the
events section [26] of the Debian web site, or subscribe to one of our events
mailing lists for different regions: Europe [27], Netherlands [28], Hispanic
America [29], North America [30].
24 : http://www.debian.org/events/2012/0429-shangai-bsp
25 : http://www.debian.org/events/2012/0511-york-bsp
26 : http://www.debian.org/events
27 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-eu
28 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-nl
29 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-ha
30 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-na
Do you want to organise a Debian booth or a Debian install party? Are you aware
of other upcoming Debian-related events? Have you delivered a Debian talk that
you want to link on our talks page [31]? Send an email to the Debian Events
Team [32].
31 : http://www.debian.org/events/talks
32 : mailto:events@debian.org
New Debian Contributors
-----------------------
One applicant has been accepted [33] as Debian Developers and nine people have
started to maintain packages [34] since the previous issue of the Debian
Project News. Please welcome Eduardo Trápani, Norman Messtorff, Frank
Neuber, Daniel Pocock, Artur Rona, Yongzhi Pan, Nuno Carvalho, Daniel Martí,
Jussi Hakala, and Eric Beuque into our project!
33 : https://nm.debian.org/nmlist.php#newmaint
34 : http://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/new-maintainers.cgi
Release-Critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release
---------------------------------------------------------
According to the Bugs Search interface of the Ultimate Debian Database [35],
the upcoming release, Debian "Wheezy", is currently affected by 781
Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to
being solved, roughly speaking, about 543 Release-Critical bugs remain to be
solved for the release to happen.
35 : http://udd.debian.org/bugs.cgi
There are also some hints on how to interpret [36] these numbers.
36 : http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/RC-Stats
Important Debian Security Advisories
------------------------------------
Debian's Security Team recently released
advisories for these packages (among others): apache2 [37], gajim [38],
openssl [39], typo3-src [40], dropbear [41], iceweasel [42], iceape [43],
quagga [44], asterisk [45], spip [46] and imagemagick [47].
Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.
37 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2452
38 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2453
39 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2454
40 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2455
41 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2456
42 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2457
43 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2458
44 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2459
45 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2460
46 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2461
47 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2462
Debian's Backports Team released an advisory for the package: samba
[48].
Please read it carefully and take the proper measures.
48 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-backports-announce/2012/04/msg00000.html
Please note that these are a selection of the more important security
advisories of the last weeks. If you need to be kept up to date about security
advisories released by the Debian Security Team, please subscribe to the
security mailing list [49] (and the separate backports list [50], and stable
updates list [51]) for announcements.
49 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/
50 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-backports-announce/
51 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-stable-announce/
New and noteworthy packages
---------------------------
180 packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently. Among many
others [52] are:
52 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/newpkg
* devede — simple application to create video DVDs [53]
* dfc — display file system usage using graph and colors [54]
* freetuxtv — Internet television and radio player [55]
* gif2apng — tool for converting animated GIF images to APNG format [56]
* git-ftp — Git powered FTP client written as shell script [57]
* gnac — audio converter for GNOME [58]
* nqp — Not Quite Perl compiler [59]
* packagekit-tools — PackageKit command-line tools [60]
* parallel — build and execute command lines from standard input in
parallel [61]
* postfixadmin — virtual mail hosting interface for Postfix [62]
53 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/devede
54 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/dfc
55 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/freetuxtv
56 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/gif2apng
57 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/git-ftp
58 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/gnac
59 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/nqp
60 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/packagekit-tools
61 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/parallel
62 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/postfixadmin
Work-needing packages
---------------------
Currently [63] 408 packages are orphaned [64] and 166 packages are up for
adoption [65]: please visit the complete list of packages which need your help
[66].
63 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/04/msg00634.html
64 : http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/orphaned
65 : http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/rfa
66 : http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/help_requested
Want to continue reading DPN?
-----------------------------
Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers to
watch the Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see the
contributing page [67] to find out how to help. We're looking forward to
receiving your mail at debian-publicity@lists.debian.org [68].
67 : http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/HowToContribute
68 : mailto:debian-publicity@lists.debian.org
This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Moray Allan, Cédric
Boutillier, Francesca Ciceri, Norman García, David Prévot and Justin B Rye
[69].
69 : mailto:debian-publicity@lists.debian.org
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