--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Debian Weekly News - November 26th, 2003 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Welcome to this year's 47th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. We were not able to produce and publish DWN in time this week due to the security [1]breach the Debian project faced. An interesting [2]interview with several developers from [3]freedesktop.org regarding aspects of their project, including interoperability, hardware abstraction, accessibility and more has been published. 1. http://www.debian.org/News/2003/20031121 2. http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5215 3. http://www.freedesktop.org/ Debian Servers compromised. The Debian project had to [4]report that four servers were [5]compromised by an unknown attacker. The admin team, with site admins and service admins are busy checking and resurrecting machines and services. As a first [6]reaction all accounts have been locked as a safety precaution. If the same password was used for Debian machines and others, you are strongly advised to change it as soon as possible. 4. http://www.debian.org/News/2003/20031121 5. http://cert.uni-stuttgart.de/files/fw/debian-security-20031121.txt 6. http://lists.infodrom.org/misc/2003/0013.html Testing Propagation Status. Nathanael Nerode [7]looked at several packages and their migration to testing and concluded that things look pretty good actually. Perl and GNOME should be fine after their quarantine time. Mozilla, however, does not build on two architectures. Several packages, though, are waiting for Perl and PostgreSQL which is waiting for Perl as well. 7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-release-0311/msg00092.html Results for new SPI Board of Directors Member Vote. Wichert Akkerman, [8]SPI board secretary, [9]announced that a total of 52 people did cast their vote, which is 18 % of all eligible voters. The three winners are David Graham, Ian Jackson and Martin 'Joey' Schulze. The lists of voters, votes and results are also [10]published. After a dispute period the three winners will be automatically appointed to the board of directors. 8. http://www.spi-inc.org/ 9. http://lists.spi-inc.org/pipermail/spi-announce/2003/000064.html 10. http://www.spi-inc.org/secretary/votes/vote2/ Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 Updated. Nearly one year after the last update to Debian GNU/Linux 3.0, the project finally [11]updated the woody release again. This revision adds 143 security updates to the stable release, that were formerly distributed through [12]security.debian.org, and 18 important bugfixes to various packages. Details of this update are on the [13]preparation page. 11. http://www.debian.org/News/2003/20031121a 12. http://www.debian.org/security/ 13. http://people.debian.org/~joey/3.0r2/ Beginners Guide to GNU/Linux. Not exactly Debian related, but Chris Walden released a nine part [14]series that guides beginners to GNU/Linux on IBM developerWorks. This roadmap is designed to help you take the experience and knowledge that you already have in computing and redirect it to working in GNU/Linux. 14. http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-roadmap.html Review of both new Installers for Debian. Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier [15]reviewed the new Debian Installer and Progeny's anaconda port. Debian-installer is an improvement over the old boot-floppies, especially since hardware is automatically detected, however it will still be intimidating for new users. Anaconda for Debian is not yet ready for primetime, but once finished will be easier to use on x86 than [16]debian-installer. 15. http://lwn.net/Articles/58074/ 16. http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/ EU Open Source Migration Guidelines. A strategic [17]initiative (IDA, Interchange of Data between Administrations) of the European Commission has released the [18]IDA Open Source Migration Guidelines which provide practical and detailed recommendations on how to migrate to office applications, calendaring, e-mail and other standard applications based on Free Software. IT experts from several European countries have been involved in creating this document. 17. http://europa.eu.int/ISPO/ida/ 18. http://europa.eu.int/ISPO/ida/export/files/en/1603.pdf Distro Taste: If Debian was a Beer... Indranath Neogy wrote a short [19]article about GNU/Linux distribution taste and beer which was discussed on [20]Slashdot as well. This diversity of GNU/Linux is reflected in the enormous number of flavors (or distributions) it is available in. The author would pair Debian with a something like Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier. The Debian Free Software Guidelines would be a reminiscent of the German Beer Purity laws, which mandate that the beer be made out of malt, hops, yeast and water alone. 19. http://articles.linmagau.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=324 20. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/31/0334237 New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently or contain important updates. * [21]arkrpg -- Roleplaying kernel. * [22]diveintopython -- Free Python book for experienced programmers. * [23]gwget2 -- GNOME 2 wget front-end. * [24]openuniverse -- 3D Universe Simulator. * [25]prokyon3 -- Mp3 and Ogg/vorbis manager and tag editor. * [26]pyxmms-remote -- Command-line interface to XMMS. * [27]racoon -- Racoon IKE server. * [28]tclparser -- Tcl extension to access Tcl's internal parser. 21. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/arkrpg.html 22. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/doc/diveintopython.html 23. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/gnome/gwget2.html 24. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/science/openuniverse.html 25. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/prokyon3.html 26. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/pyxmms-remote.html 27. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/racoon.html 28. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/interpreters/tclparser.html Want to continue reading DWN? Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers who watch the Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see the [29]contributing page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at [EMAIL PROTECTED] 29. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing 30. mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
