--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Debian Weekly News http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2003/31/ Debian Weekly News - August 5th, 2003 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Welcome to this year's 31st issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Few of you may have noticed this already, but as per the [1]results of last year's security [2]survey the Debian Security Team doesn't support potato (Debian 2.2) anymore. Also, Robin 'Roblimo' Miller [3]explained why governments should be allowed to specify Free Software. 1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0302/msg00010.html 2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0211/msg00001.html 3. http://newsforge.com/newsforge/03/07/19/1713232.shtml Booting Debian with Eye-Candy. Martin Michlmayr [4]wondered about having Debian show nice graphics during boot up, rather than boot messages in text mode. He discussed this with Herbert Xu, who explained that this is no longer a kernel issue. Once the frame buffer driver is loaded, a user space process can do arbitrary graphical operations on the console. Alastair McKinstry [5]pointed out that debian-installer already uses framebuffer support in modules and that work is under way to divert all stderr towards a logging solution. 4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot-0307/msg00471.html 5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot-0307/msg00479.html MPlayer moves closer to being Free. Andrea Mennucc and Dariush Pietrzak [6]worked on mplayer checking copyright information and [7]asked for volunteers to re-check the [8]source code to ensure it satisfies the [9]Debian Free Software Guidelines. Adam Warner was [10]pleased with the work and made some suggestions. After it was [11]pointed out that mplayer contains problematic DVD Content Scrambling System (CSS) code, Andrea [12]repackaged it with the CSS code removed. He would appreciate feedback on its suitability for Debian main. 6. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal-0307/msg00243.html 7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal-0307/msg00241.html 8. http://tonelli.sns.it/pub/mplayer 9. http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines 10. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal-0307/msg00246.html 11. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0307/msg01827.html 12. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal-0307/msg00283.html Linux is a Process, not a Product. In a [13]commentary on ZDNet.com.com Ian Murdock explained that Linux is not a product but a process. "To think of Linux as a product is to freeze an inherently dynamic thing in time and to close something that is inherently open. It cannot be done without losing something -- and something significant at that". 13. http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1107_2-5057755.html Philosophy behind Knoppix. Klaus Knopper was [14]interviewed about Free Software, the roots of and ideas behind [15]Knoppix, his interests and the future of his Knoppix project. In his opinion, the GNU software suite, together with the Linux kernel, have become the most flexible and usable operating system and application software available for a vast variety of hardware platforms. 14. http://www.pctechtalk.com/view.php?id=1239 15. http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/ More automatic BTS Reports. Nikita Youshchenko [16]suggested that the bug tracking system (BTS) generates more automatic mails than just the list of [17]release critical bugs and the [18]work needing packages report. He would like to see a list of bugs that have a "patch" tag for (e.g.) 2 weeks and no "wontfix" tag, a list of bugs that are more than N months old and also don't carry a "wontfix" tag and a list of packages with huge bug lists that probably need community help. 16. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0307/msg02168.html 17. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0307/msg00012.html 18. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0307/msg00011.html DebConf 2005 in Vienna? Gerfried Fuchs [19]proposed to organise the Debian conference for 2005 in Vienna, since he would like to attend a Debian conference as well. A good [20]argument for Vienna is that it is centrally located in Europe and is close to the eastern countries of the continent, which could help our friends from Eastern Europe to attend the conference more conveniently. Finally, Tollef sent in his [21]experiences from the Oslo Debian conference. 19. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0307/msg02189.html 20. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0307/msg02226.html 21. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0307/msg02284.html Synchronising the BTS and Bugzilla. Erich Schubert has [22]written a small Perl [23]script which queries the Debian bug tracking system for bugs forwarded to bugzilla (GNOME in this case) and creates a list of the bugs and their status in bugzilla. This should help tracking which forwarded bugs were closed by upstream. 22. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0307/msg02212.html 23. http://people.debian.org/~erich/debugzilla-html.pl.renamed.txt Debian in Schools. Thomas Lindemans [24]explained at the [25]European Schoolnet, a partnership of 26 Ministries of Education, why educators should try GNU/Linux. Debian is mentioned as being "built for stability" and good for those who enjoy a "fast and secure operating system". The article suggests that using Debian in a school would require somebody with knowledge of Linux because of text configuration files, however no mention is made of [26]Skolelinux or the [27]Debian-Edu subproject. 24. http://news.eun.org/eun.org2/eun/en/_News_search_news/content.cfm?ov=28498&lang=en&id_area=109 25. http://www.eun.org/eun.org2/eun/en/index_eun_corporate.cfm 26. http://www.skolelinux.no/ 27. http://wiki.debian.net/DebianEdu Status of Debian/AMD64. Access to an Opteron machine was [28]granted to the Debian project after a discussion with AMD at this year's [29]LinuxTag. Bart Trojanowski also [30]announced a [31]birds of a feather session targeting the Debian port to AMD64 at this year's [32]Ottawa Linux Symposium. Bart [33]explained that a few libraries are [34]ported to the AMD64 architecture but they are not yet sufficient to run applications. 28. http://lists.debian.org/debian-x86-64-0307/msg00029.html 29. http://www.linuxtag.org/ 30. http://lists.debian.org/debian-x86-64-0307/msg00007.html 31. http://www.linuxsymposium.org/2003/view_abstract.php?talk=192 32. http://www.linuxsymposium.org/2003/ 33. http://lists.debian.org/debian-x86-64-0307/msg00041.html 34. http://jukie.net/~bart/debian/amd64/ Benchmarking Debian's Performance. Indranath Neogy tried to [35]discover what kind of gains the source based nature of Gentoo might give it over Debian and Mandrake. The tests included timing how long it took to open a large sheet in Gnumeric, how long to compile the Linux kernel and how long to perform various operations in GIMP. Gentoo was expected to lead in the tests, but the results showed no significant variation between the distributions. Simple recompiling doesn't seem to speed things up, fine grained tuning may. 35. http://articles.linmagau.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=227&page=1 CUPS as the default Print Service. Petter Reinholdtsen [36]suggested that the default print system in the next release of Debian (sarge) be changed to [37]CUPS, because it is a more complete, more user friendly and RFC compliant printing system. Daniel Jacobowitz [38]found that CUPS lacked functionality, but Cyrille Chepelov [39]thought CUPS has improved over the last 18 months. 36. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0307/msg02384.html 37. http://www.cups.org/ 38. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0307/msg02385.html 39. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0307/msg02387.html LinuxTag Show Report. Nicholas Blachford [40]reported on his experience at this year's [41]LinuxTag. He said that "the Debian stand seemed to be one of the most popular stands, constantly getting a crowd of people, many of whom picked up the Debian CDs they were giving away. At the back of the booth they ran an ASCII art animation via a beamer which got some very bewildered looks at times". 40. http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=4185 41. http://www.linuxtag.org/ LSB Presentations at LinuxWorld. The [42]Linux Standard Base (LSB) project will be delivering a tutorial, two presentations, and a "Taste of Linux" discussion at [43]LinuxWorld in San Francisco. These [44]presentations will take place on August 5 and 6 and will include "Designing and Implementing Great Shared Libraries", presented by Ted Ts'o. Amongst other things, Ted is a Debian Developer and Linux kernel contributor. 42. http://www.linuxbase.org/ 43. http://www.linuxworldexpo.com/linuxworldny03/V40/index.cvn 44. http://www.linuxbase.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=21 Inconsistencies in our Handling of Licenses. John Goerzen is [45]getting an increasingly uneasy feeling about the consensus that appears to be starting to coalesce around our handling of the [46]FDL, RFC issues and related matter. He mentions that the [47]DFSG are guidelines, not a definition, that we allow information to be distributed with software under even more stricter terms than the FDL, that standards have to be handled different to software, and that we need to think about whether the actions we take are advancing our goals or not. 45. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal-0307/msg00338.html 46. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html 47. http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines DeCSS for Debian? There has been an [48]Intent to Package for DeCSS, a utility for stripping CSS tags from an HTML page. Sam Hocevar [49]objected to this cluttering of the package namespace with a useless program. Brian Nelson [50]quoted the project's [51]website which admits that it is pretty much useless. 48. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0307/msg02296.html 49. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0307/msg02301.html 50. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0307/msg02304.html 51. http://www.pigdog.org/decss/ Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure that you update your systems if you have any of these packages installed. * [52]xconq -- Buffer overflows. * [53]gallery -- Cross-site scripting. * [54]xtokkaetama -- Buffer overflows. * [55]wu-ftpd -- Buffer overflow. * [56]Linux 2.4.18 -- Several vulnerabilities. * [57]atari800 -- Buffer overflows. * [58]xfstt -- Several vulnerabilities. * [59]kdelibs -- Several vulnerabilities. * [60]mindi -- Insecure temporary file creation. * [61]postfix -- Remote denial of service, bounce scanning. * [62]man-db -- Buffer overflows, arbitrary command execution. 52. http://www.debian.org/security/2003/dsa-354 53. http://www.debian.org/security/2003/dsa-355 54. http://www.debian.org/security/2003/dsa-356 55. http://www.debian.org/security/2003/dsa-357 56. http://www.debian.org/security/2003/dsa-358 57. http://www.debian.org/security/2003/dsa-359 58. http://www.debian.org/security/2003/dsa-360 59. http://www.debian.org/security/2003/dsa-361 60. http://www.debian.org/security/2003/dsa-362 61. http://www.debian.org/security/2003/dsa-363 62. http://www.debian.org/security/2003/dsa-364 New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently or contain important updates. * [63]acheck -- Check common localisation mistakes. * [64]aget -- Multi-threaded HTTP Download Accelerator. * [65]ardour-gtk -- Digital Audio Workstation. * [66]backup2l -- Low-maintenance backup/restore tool for mountable media. * [67]baken -- Visualisation of European VHF/UHF and microwave beacons. * [68]cinepaint -- Motion picture editing and retouching tool. * [69]cpufreqd -- Speedstep applet clone. * [70]dvdbackup -- Tool to rip DVD's from the command line. * [71]etherboot -- Bootstrapping for various network adapters. * [72]fakechroot -- Gives a fake chroot environment. * [73]fortunes-it-off -- Data files containing Italian fortune cookies, offensive section. * [74]gift -- Meta-package for the giFT file-sharing system. * [75]giftcurs -- Text-based interface to the giFT file-sharing system. * [76]icecast2 -- Streaming Ogg Vorbis/MP3 media server. * [77]jetty -- Java servlet engine and webserver. * [78]kflog -- Flight planner and logger for glider pilots. * [79]klog -- KDE ham radio logging program. * [80]lightning -- Library for assembly code compilation at runtime. * [81]linux32 -- Wrapper to set the execution domain. * [82]litmus -- WebDAV server protocol compliance test suite. * [83]lspowertweak -- Simple front end to powertweak. * [84]pathological -- Puzzle game involving paths and marbles. * [85]pdsh -- Efficient rsh-like utility, for using hosts in parallel. * [86]puredata -- Realtime computer music and graphics system. * [87]sins -- Snake game playable with only one key. * [88]slimp3 -- MPEG Layer III Streaming Server. * [89]spamass-milter -- Sendmail milter for filtering mail through spamassassin. * [90]superkaramba -- Program based on karamba improving the eyecandy of KDE. * [91]vimoutliner -- Script for building an outline editor on top of Vim. * [92]wmclockmon -- Displays a clock in 12/24h mode with alarm mode and 3 different LCD styles. * [93]xa65 -- cross-assembler and utility suite for 65xx/65816 processors. * [94]zynaddsubfx -- Realtime software synthesizer for Linux. 63. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/text/acheck.html 64. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/aget.html 65. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/ardour-gtk.html 66. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/backup2l.html 67. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/hamradio/baken.html 68. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/graphics/cinepaint.html 69. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/cpufreqd.html 70. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/dvdbackup.html 71. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/etherboot.html 72. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/fakechroot.html 73. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/fortunes-it-off.html 74. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/gift.html 75. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/giftcurs.html 76. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/icecast2.html 77. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/jetty.html 78. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/kde/kflog.html 79. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/hamradio/klog.html 80. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/lightning.html 81. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/linux32.html 82. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/litmus.html 83. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/lspowertweak.html 84. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/pathological.html 85. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/pdsh.html 86. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/puredata.html 87. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/sins.html 88. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/slimp3.html 89. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/mail/spamass-milter.html 90. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/kde/superkaramba.html 91. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/editors/vimoutliner.html 92. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/wmclockmon.html 93. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/xa65.html 94. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/zynaddsubfx.html Orphaned Packages. 3 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 183 orphaned packages. Many thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free Software community. Please see the [95]WNPP pages for the full list, and please add a note to the bug report and retitle it to ITA: if you plan to take over a package. 95. http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/ * [96]smm++ -- Graphical MUD client with mapping functionality. ([97]Bug#203933) * [98]tnt -- AIM client for Emacs. ([99]Bug#203894) * [100]yydecode -- Decode yEnc archives. ([101]Bug#203896) 96. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/smm++.html 97. http://bugs.debian.org/203933 98. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/tnt.html 99. http://bugs.debian.org/203894 100. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/yydecode.html 101. http://bugs.debian.org/203896 Want to continue reading DWN? Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers who investigate the Debian community and report about events in the community. Please see the [102]contributing page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at [EMAIL PROTECTED] 102. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing 103. mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
