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Welcome to this year's 9th issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Some of the topics covered in this issue include:

TODO:

Freespire 5 to be based on Debian

Recently acquired by the Xandrox Corporation, the upcoming release of Freespire will be based on the Debian GNU/Linux Lenny release. The current release of Freespire (2.0.8) is based on Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). "A combined Xandros/Linspire development effort will return Freespire to its Debian GNU/Linux roots and put it in sync with Xandros Desktop Pro," [http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/freespire-returns-debian-roots/story.aspx?guid={21713CB4-464B-4292-89EB-BE41F67FDD92}&dist=hppr said Andreas Typaldos], Xandros CEO. Freespire 5 is slated to be released in the fourth quarter of 2008.

Debian on the OpenMoko FreeRunner

[http://lists.linuxtogo.org/pipermail/smartphones-standards/2008-August/000232.html Joachim Breitner announces] the start of an offical Debian port to the OpenMoko FreeRunner, a smartphone that was designed and developed in a free and open manner. This enables Debian users to use the distribution of their choice even on their telephone. [http://wiki.debian.org/DebianOnFreeRunner Installation instructions] can be found on the Debian wiki.

Bits from the X Strike Force

Julien Cristau [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/08/msg00010.html reports] on the newest developments within the X Strike Force. The X Strik Force is happy to announce that the configuration of the Xorg server has been considerably simplified and it is now also possible to configure video output at runtime. Furthermore new drivers have been packaged, namely the [http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/ nouveau driver], a reverse-engineering effort for nVidia cards and [http://www.openchrome.org/ openchrome], which will support via chipsets instead of the unmaintained via driver. At least the nouveau driver does not yet have release-quality but the X Strike Force asks for testing of the experimental build. xorg-server 1.5 and mesa 7.1 are also currently in experimental and are scheduled to advance to sid after the Lenny release. At around the same time, the team plans to enable hotplugging of input devices, and their configuration through hal. The X Strike Force concludes their report with a call for maintainers (DDs and non-DDs). People interested in joining the team can contact them on #debian-x on irc.debian.org, or on debian-x@lists.debian.org.

Request for adoption: The Debian Jr. project

Ben Armstrong [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/08/msg00004.html is looking for someone] to take over the [http://wiki.debian.org/DebianJr Debian Jr.] project, since he is currently too involved with other Debian-internal projects and can no longer spend the necessary time on it. He recommends several measures to move the project forward and hopes to find a new leader for the project who will tackle these and other tasks and carry on his work on a child-friendly custom Debian distribution.

Upcoming changes to supported architectures

During the Debian Conference the problem ftp-master.debian.org, main host for the debian archive, running into resource constraints has been discussed. [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/08/msg00009.html Jörg Jaspert announced] the results: Hardware architectures, which have failed to be included in 2 successive official releases, will be moved to an other host (e.g. debian-ports.org). The main purpouse is to free space for archtitectures being in a better shape and have therefore have higher chances of being in an release.

The current candidates for removals [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/08/msg00369.html are] m68k, hurd-i386 and arm (which will be replaced by armel anyway), while kfreebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64 as well as [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/08/msg00371.html other architectures] could be added.

Of course removed architectures can be added to the main archive, when they have shown to be fit a release.

Deprecating packages in main building packages in contrib

Joerg Jaspert [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/08/msg00148.html wondered] if it is a necessary feature, that source packages of a specific component may create binary packages of an other component. Some source packages in Debian main use that feature to create binary packages in contrib. Deprecating this feature would ease a re-design of the central project database. When asked for the benefits of droping this feature, Stefano Zacchiroli [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/08/msg00173.html explained] further that the database should reflect the structure of the project, especially since only the component main is offical part of Debian. Bluring the difference might confuse our user and is "weird at best".

Bits from the GNU/kFreeBSD porters

Aurelien Jarno gave a [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/08/msg00007.html status report] about the kFreeBSD port. Overall it is in very good shape. Currently i386 and AMD64 based architectures are supported. It has a complete toolchain (including java) and more than 85% of all packages are build. He asked for help to qualify as a releasable architecture, since a port of the debian-installer is currently missing.

FAI developer workshop at the Linuxhotel in Essen/Germany

At the weekend from 8th until 10th of August, the FAI (Fully Automatic Installation - an installation and update-management framework for Debian and other distributions) developer team met at the Linuxhotel in Essen, Germany, to make FAI fit for the Lenny release. In a productive as well as fun meeting, seven people got a lot of things done, but most important, they did a lot of testing of the current FAI functionality in the Lenny context.

Important bugs where and solved and future development has been discussed, e.g. integrating tests for classes as well as software regressions, how to deal with copyright issues and how contributors should be mentioned in the Debian copyright files, and, last but not least, how more developers could be attracted to add their code into FAI, make it available for testing by users, and get those patches into mainline FAI - which is currently only written to by the main developer. A (not totally complete) documentation of what we did can be found in the [http://faiwiki.informatik.uni-koeln.de/index.php/DeveloperWorkshopAugust2008#Documentation faiwiki].

The meeting was sponsored the [http://www.linuxhotel.de Linuxhotel] in Essen, the [http://www.linux-ag.de Linux Information Systems AG] and [http://lt-ec.de/ LT-ec].

Debian Lenny to Support Low-Power NAS Systems

Martin Michlmayr [http://www.cyrius.com/journal/debian/2.6.26-udebs updated kernels for MIPS and ARM for kernel 2.6.26]. These kernel updates bring major improvements on ARM which help running Debian on low-power NAS devices like the [http://www.cyrius.com/debian/orion/ QNAP TS-409]. With 2.6.26 coming closer to lenny, lenny is coming closer to run on these devices.

Future of snaphsot.debian.net

Since [http://snapshot.debian.net snapshot.debian.net] - a service storing all debian packages ever upload to the archive including usefull symlinks e.g. for browsing to specific days - has from time to time problems keeping up its the disc space, Eddy Petrisor [http://ramblingfoo.blogspot.com/2008/08/crazy-idea-user-supported.html wondered], if a distributed user supported structure for storing these huge amount of data would be a good idea. Andrew Pollock [http://blog.andrew.net.au/2008/08/16#fund_snapshot.debian.net answered] that Debian could spend some of its fund for this service. Cyril Brulebois [http://ikibiki.org//blog/2008/08/16/snapshot.debian.org/ added] that it was [http://lists.debian.org/debian-qa/2008/08/msg00060.html announced] to make snapshot.debian.net an official service provided by Debian, making it easier to spend funds on it.

Artwork and Desktop themes for Debian "Lenny"

Valessio Brito [http://lists.debian.org/debian-desktop/2008/08/msg00000.html announced] that the work for artwork and themes for the upcoming stable release of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0" Lenny has been started during [http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20080804.231055.943faaa6.en.html DebCamp] the hacking session before the annual Debian Conference. Jeremy Bobbio noted that some people started to work on a [http://lists.debian.org/debian-desktop/2008/08/msg00064.html theme for the Debian Installer], too, and reminded them to [http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2007/01/msg00107.html previous discussions] about Debian Installer themes as well as to coordinate with the d-i release managers soonish. Frans Pop [http://lists.debian.org/debian-desktop/2008/08/msg00067.html argued] that it would allready be to late, and reminded the artist about severl [http://lists.debian.org/debian-desktop/2007/06/msg00010.html requirements] for a theme for the Debian Installer.

CD/DVD Image Downloads - A Reminder / rsync on ftp.debian.org

[http://lists.debian.org/debian-mirrors/2008/08/msg00000.html Josip Rodin noted] that there seems to be a rash of CD/DVD image hoarding happening. Particularly, it seems that many people are not only downloading the first image, but the additional images (CDs 2-20+) as well. The full set of images are posted so that they can be downloaded by those who do not have regular access to a reliable connection. However, for those who do have solid Internet connections, it is more efficient to retrieve packages directly from the repositories.

In related news Josip Rodin [http://lists.debian.org/debian-mirrors/2008/08/msg00018.html noted] that the rsync service on ftp.debian.org has been deprecated since 2001 and has now been disabled completly. Everyone who has used that mirror to synchronise his own should switch to an other mirror. A complete list of Debian mirrors is available at [http://www.debian.org/mirror/list http://www.debian.org/mirror/list].

Bits from the DPN editors

The editors of the Debian Project News send a small [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/08/msg00008.html status report]. After a rough start a workflow has been established which still has some issues, including often missing time for native speakers to proofread the drafts and time for translators to prepare versions of the project news in their own language. But most importantly more people are needed to contribute to the Debian Project News by writing texts.

Other news

Lucas Nussbaum [http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/blog/?p=305 wondered] if the technical solution of freezing the propagation of packages from the unstable development branch to the to-be-released-soon testing branch is aedaquate. Since the requirement of non-disruptive changes are more a social problem, it shouldn't solved by strict technical measures and manual approval of exceptions.

Joey Schulze [http://lists.debian.org/debian-68k/2008/08/msg00002.html announces] the 2008 M68k Linux Porter Meeting, which will take place from August 29th to 31st at the University of Kiel, Germany.

Lucas Nussbaum [http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2008/08/msg00071.html asked for final reviews] for the Debian Enhancement Proposal 1, which tries to improve how to deal with "non maintainer uploads" (NMUs).

Sandro Tosi [http://sandrotosi.blogspot.com/2008/08/another-info-source-for-debian.html noticed] that the #debian-devel@OFTC channel topic is often used to give status messages in the case of severe or exceptional situations (outages, downtimes, etc). In order to stay informed even if not connected to oftc he recommends subscribing to the [http://wiki.debian.org/TopicDebianDevel Debian Wiki page that mirrors that channel's topic].

Neil Williams [http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/serendipity/index.php?/archives/129-po4a-translation-support-from-any-format.html summarized] the usage of [http://packages.debian.org/po4a PO for anything] for maintaining translations of various documents, including manpages.

Nicolas François [http://lists.debian.org/debian-i18n/2008/08/msg00041.html announced] that the services hosted on i18n.debian.net (for example the web frontend to the Debian Package Description Translation Project) is now available via SSL, too.

Stefano Zacchiroli reported [http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2008/08/improved_integration_among_PTS_and_Lintian/ several] [http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2008/08/PTS_integrated_with_mentors_and_gifts/ improvements] he did for the [http://packages.qa.debian.org package tracking system]. He fixed several bugs and feature request including tighter integration with [http://packages.debian.org/lintian lintian], a tools for cheking Debian packages for common errors, and [http://mentors.debian.net mentors.debian.net], a service used by package maintainers searching for Debian Developers to "sponsor" their upload to the Debian archive.

Lucas Nussbaum [http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/blog/?p=303 bloged] about an important usecase for the Ultimate Debian Database, a Google Summer of Code project integrating several information sources within Debian. Recently removals from important packages from the testing Distribution have caused some discussion. Tracking these important packages will be easier throught this database.

Debian Project at FrOSCon 2008

From Saturday the 23rd of August 2008 to Sunday the 24th of August 2008, the Debian Project will participate with a booth at Free and Open Source Software Conference 2008 in St. Augustin, Germany. Please see the respective [http://www.debian.org/events/2008/0823-froscon events page] for further details.

Important Debian Security Advisories

Debian's Security Team hasn't released any important advisories since the last issue.

If you would like to be kept up to date about the security advisories released by the Debian Security Team, please subscribe to the [http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/ mailing list for security announcements.]

New and noteworthy packages

The following packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently ([http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/newpkg among others]):

Work-needing packages

Currently 468 packages are orphaned and 120 packages are up for adoption. Please take a look at the [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/08/msg00212.html recent] [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/08/msg00372.html reports] to see if there are packages you are interested in or view the complete list of [http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/help_requested packages which need your help].

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 [http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/HowToContribute contributing page] to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at debian-publicity@lists.debian.org.

Martin Michlmayr, Joachim Breitner, Rainer Dorsch, Henning Sprang, Jeff Richards and Meike Reichle contributed to this issue of the Debian Project News.


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