------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Debian Project http://www.debian.org/ Debian Project News debian-public...@lists.debian.org January 9th, 2012 http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2012/01/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------
Welcome to this year's first issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include: * Debian Edu/Skolelinux 6.0.3 beta2 released * Bits from the DPL * Forthcoming new release of the X server * Scientific article on Debian in PNAS * New Debian Infographic * New interface for Debtags website * apt-get purge defoma * Further interviews * Other news * Upcoming events * New Debian Contributors * Release-critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release * Status of Debian Installer localisation * Important Debian Security Advisories * New and noteworthy packages * Work-needing packages * Want to continue reading DPN? Debian Edu/Skolelinux 6.0.3 beta2 released ------------------------------------------ Petter Reinholdtsen announced the release of Debian Edu Squeeze 6.0.3 beta2 [1]: download and installation instructions [2] are available on the wiki, and in particular a useful [3] "Getting Started" chapter in which you can find explanations of how to log in for the first time. Feedback and installation reports can be sent to the Debian Edu mailing list [4]. 1 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2012/01/msg00129.html 2 : http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/Installation 3 : http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/GettingStarted 4 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/ Debian Edu is a project aiming to make a Debian Pure Blend for educational purposes, which can be used in schools and other educational institutions. The Debian Edu project develops and maintains Skolelinux [5], a complete and free "out of the box" software solution for schools. For more information about Debian Edu, please visit therelated wiki page [6]. 5 : http://www.skolelinux.org/ 6 : http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu Bits from the DPL ----------------- Stefano Zacchiroli sent some bits from the DPL [7] in which he reported about the work done by Martin Michlmayr as Auditor, in order to reconstruct Debian's expenses and budgets. Stefano also sent a call for help for Wheezy artwork organisation, and announced that Gunnar Wolf has volunteered to monitor the discussion regarding the Creative Commons process for revision 4.0 on behalf of Debian. 7 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/01/msg00001.html Forthcoming new release of the X server --------------------------------------- Cyril Brulebois blogged about the forthcoming X server release 1.12 [8]: one major change is the addition of XI2.2 patches, which are related to multitouch support. Another significant change is the addition of support for Intel's Sandy Bridge New Acceleration in the Debian packages. 8 : http://blog.mraw.org/2012/01/01/XServer_1.12RC1/ Scientific article on Debian in PNAS ------------------------------------ Michael Hanke noted [9] that the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science ("PNAS") of the United States of America has apaper on the evolution of software in Debian [10]. 9 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2011/12/msg00000.html 10 : http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/11/14/1115960108.abstract If you know other studies about Debian and its software, you can add it to our related wiki page [11]. 11 : http://wiki.debian.org/CategoryPublication New Debian Infographic ---------------------- Claudio Filho has published a beautiful infographic about Debian [12]. The main motivation was, as Claudio said [13], "to "draw" for final users how Debian can be good for them". Similar efforts have been made by Stéphane Blondon [14] and Chris Lamb [15], who created the Debian Timeline website [16] and the related Debian package [17]. 12 : http://claudiocomputing.wordpress.com/infographic-of-debian/ 13 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-publicity/2011/12/msg00066.html 14 : http://ascendances.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/timeline_debian_1993_20111.png 15 : http://chris-lamb.co.uk/2008/03/09/timeline-of-the-debian-project/ 16 : http://timeline.debian.net/ 17 : http://packages.debian.org/sid/debian-timeline New interface for Debtags website --------------------------------- Enrico Zini announced a new interface for the Debtags website [18]. Debtags is a project to classify Debian packages by adding tags to them: "Debtags attaches categories (we call them tags) to packages, creating a new set of useful structured metadata that can be used to implement more advanced ways of presenting, searching, maintaining and navigating the package archive", Enrico saidwhile presenting the project in 2005 [19]. Using the new interface, it is possible to search packages [20], take a look at statistics about Debtags [21] and, obviously, help with the tagging effort [22]. For more information about Debtags, you can visit the related wiki page [23]. 18 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/01/msg00000.html 19 : http://debtags.alioth.debian.org/paper-debtags.html 20 : http://debtags.debian.net/search/ 21 : http://debtags.debian.net/statistics/ 22 : http://debtags.debian.net/getting-started/ 23 : http://wiki.debian.org/Debtags apt-get purge defoma -------------------- Paul Wise reported that the transition from defoma to fontconfig is finally complete [24]. Defoma is the Debian-specific font manager, long unmaintained, while the replacement (fontconfig) is cross-distribution and also has wide support from upstreams. In the past three years the Debian Fonts Task Force [25] has worked a lot in order to gain this result, thanks especially to the work of Christian Perrier and Paul Wise. Please note that the transition is not completely smooth: "Xorg does not yet support fontconfig so for now programs relying on server-side fonts will only be able to use thexfonts- packages shipping their fonts in the directories known by the X server" and in addition "there are some issues [26] with Ghostscript and CJK", Paul said. 24 : http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2012/01/07/apt-get-purge-defoma/ 25 : http://pkg-fonts.alioth.debian.org/ 26 : http://wiki.debian.org/gs-undefoma Further interviews ------------------ Since the last issue of the Debian Project News, two new issues of the [27] "This week in Debian" podcast have been published: with Jonathan Nadeau [28], about the Northeast GNU/Linux Fest; and with Raphael Hertzog [29], about the Debian handbook. 27 : http://wiki.debian.org/ThisWeekInDebian 28 : http://frostbitemedia.org/node/35 29 : http://frostbitemedia.org/node/31 There has also been a "People behind Debian" interview withi Ben Hutchings [30], member of the kernel team. 30 : http://raphaelhertzog.com/2011/12/13/people-behind-debian-ben-hutchings-member-of-the-kernel-team/ In addition the NeuroDebian team [31] was interviewed [32] by the INCF. 31 : http://neuro.debian.net/ 32 : http://incf.org/newsroom/stories/neurodebian-the-value-of-an-integrated-tool-suite Other news ---------- The 27th issue of the miscellaneous news for developers [33] has been released and covers the following topics: 33 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2011/12/msg00001.html * Planet Debian Derivatives * win32-loader.exe now eases access to the GNU/Hurd Debian-Installer * Wiki bugstatus extended to Launchpad bugs * dh-exec entering unstable * derivatives patch generation prototype Uwe Hermann published a useful quick howto on using OpenVPN on Debian GNU/Linux [34]. 34 : http://www.hermann-uwe.de/blog/howto-using-openvpn-on-debian-gnu-linux Jonas Smedegaard reported that the Indonesian newspaper [35] "Serambi" dedicated an article to his Debian involvement after his presence at a radio talkshow in Aceh, Indonesia. Jonas was travelling Asia in order to deliver a series of talks dedicated to Debian Pure Blends [36]. More information about his trip are available on a related wiki page [37]. 35 : http://aceh.tribunnews.com/2011/12/11/ayo-jadi-hacker 36 : http://wiki.debian.org/DebianPureBlends 37 : http://wiki.jones.dk/DebianAsia2011 The web team is pleased to announce that all languages have finished their migration to UTF-8 [38], so the Debian website [39] is now available for everyone in UTF-8, thanks to all the translators who worked on this issue. 38 : http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=567781 39 : http://www.debian.org Asheesh Laroia wrote an interesting article about short key IDs with OpenPGP and GNU Privacy Guard [40], arguing that using them is fundamentally insecure as it's easy to generate collisions for short key IDs. 40 : http://www.asheesh.org/note/debian/short-key-ids-are-bad-news.html The Debian Project was mentioned in an article by Bruce Byfield on Datamation titled [41] "2011: The Year of Linux Disappointments" . According to the author, in fact, while various Open Source projects saw a decline in 2011, the Debian project "spent much of 2011 reinventing itself. In the past few twelve months, it has -- among other things -- tried to encourage cooperation among its derivatives, revamped its new member process, and experimented with IRC training sessions." 41 : http://www.datamation.com/open-source/2011-the-year-of-linux-disappointments-1.html Martin Zobel-Helas announced that he has applied the main theme of Debian website to db.debian.org, the internal LDAP directory of Debian Developers [42]. In the previous days, thanks to Cristoph Berg, the Debian Quality Assurance website [43] had also switched to the main theme. 42 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2012/01/msg00040.html 43 : http://qa.debian.org/ Russ Allbery wrote an interesting blog post [44] about Debian and popularity. 44 : http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2012-01/004.html Upcoming events --------------- There are several upcoming Debian related events: * January 18, Ballarat, AU -- Freedom, Out of the Box! [45] by Bdale Garbee * January 18, 's-Hertogenbosch, NL -- workshop onDebian Packaging [46] * January 20-22, Los Angeles, US -- Debian booth at the Tenth Annual Southern California Linux Expo [47] You can find more information about Debian related events and talks on the events section [48] of the Debian web site, or subscribe to one of our events mailing lists for different regions: Europe [49], Netherlands [50], Hispanic America [51], North America [52]. 45 : http://linux.conf.au/schedule/36/view_talk?day=wednesday 46 : http://lug.project073.nl/blog/events/debian-packaging-derde-bijeenkomst/ 47 : http://www.debian.org/events/2012/0120-scale10x 48 : http://www.debian.org/events 49 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-eu 50 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-nl 51 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-ha 52 : 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 and want to link it on our talks page [53]? Send an email to the Debian Events Team [54]. 53 : http://www.debian.org/events/talks 54 : mailto:eve...@debian.org New Debian Contributors ----------------------- Fifteen people have started to maintain packages [55] since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Werner Detter, Fredrik Thulin, Eleanor Chen, Sergiusz Pawlowicz, Brian Thomason, Mike Gabriel, Ko van der Sloot, Paul Boddie, Mark Vejvoda, Patrick Ulbrich, Lucia Prado, Jon Ludlam, Kamil Ignacak, Mike McClurg, and Leo Iannacone into our project! 55 : 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 [56], the upcoming release, Debian 7.0 "Wheezy", is currently affected by 797 release-critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 532 release-critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen. 56 : http://udd.debian.org/bugs.cgi There are also more detailed statistics [57] as well as some hints on how to interpret [58] these numbers. 57 : http://blog.schmehl.info/Debian/rc-stats/7.0-wheezy/2012-01 58 : http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/RC-Stats Status of Debian Installer localisation --------------------------------------- In his last report on Debian Installer localisation [59], Christian Perrier noted that eighteen languages are currently up to date for D-I's core files; ten (Czech, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Kazakh, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian and Slovak) are 100% complete for the moment. Christian informed us previously [60] that "A very important and critical fix to partman-zfs broke a string in sublevel 4." That explains why the results are lower than thelast time [61] we relayed the translation status, but translators are quickly working to make the Debian Installer completely available in many languages. 59 : http://www.perrier.eu.org/weblog/2012/01/05#di-l10n-update-2012-03 60 : http://www.perrier.eu.org/weblog/2012/01/02#di-l10n-update-2012-02 61 : http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2011/14/#di Important Debian Security Advisories ------------------------------------ Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): tor [62], xorg [63], dtc [64], mediawiki [65], asterisk [66], lighttpd [67], libsoup2.4 [68], unbound [69], jasper [70], heimdal [71], inetutils [72], openswan [73], krb5, krb5-appl [74], ipmitool [75], cyrus-imapd-2.2 [76], ffmpeg [77], krb5 [78], foomatic-filters [79], squid3 [80], ecryptfs-utils [81] and super [82]. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures. 62 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2363 63 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2364 64 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2365 65 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2366 66 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2367 67 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2368 68 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2369 69 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2370 70 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2371 71 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2372 72 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2373 73 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2374 74 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2375 75 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2376 76 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2377 77 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2378 78 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2379 79 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2380 80 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2381 81 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2382 82 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2383 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 [83] (and the separate backports list [84], and stable updates list [85] or volatile list [86], for "Lenny", the oldstable distribution) for announcements. 83 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/ 84 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-backports-announce/ 85 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-stable-announce/ 86 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-volatile-announce/ New and noteworthy packages --------------------------- 367 packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently. Among many others [87] are: 87 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/newpkg * coccinella -- communication tool (XMPP/Jabber) with a built-in whiteboard [88] * colorhug-client -- Tools for the Hughski colorimeter [89] * eclipse-gef -- Eclipse graphical editing framework [90] * exfat-utils -- utilities to create, check, label and dump exFAT filesystem [91] * gnome-documents -- document manager for GNOME [92] * ho22bus -- simple application to memorize words [93] * jgit-cli -- Java implementation of Git version control [94] * xcp-xapi -- Xen Cloud Platform XenAPI server [95] * zanshin -- to-do list manager for KDE [96] 88 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/coccinella 89 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/colorhug-client 90 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/eclipse-gef 91 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/exfat-utils 92 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/gnome-documents 93 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/ho22bus 94 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/jgit-cli 95 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/xcp-xapi 96 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/zanshin Work-needing packages --------------------- Currently 203 packages are orphaned [97] and 111 packages are up for adoption [98]: please visit the complete list of packages which need your help [99]. 97 : http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/orphaned 98 : http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/rfa 99 : 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 [100] to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at debian-public...@lists.debian.org [101]. 100 : http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/HowToContribute 101 : mailto:debian-public...@lists.debian.org This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Cedric Boutillier, Francesca Ciceri, David Prevot, Justin B Rye and Paul Wise [102]. 102 : mailto:debian-public...@lists.debian.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-news-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20120109215046.gb7...@melusine.alphascorpii.net
