Debian Weekly News - October 5th, 2004

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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2004/39/
Debian Weekly News - October 5th, 2004
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Welcome to this year's 39th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. Robert Millan [1]reported that GNOME basically
[2]works on kfreebsd-gnu. The AGNULA Team has [3]released version
1.2.0 of DeMuDi using the Debian installer and supporting Custom
Debian Distributions. Santiago Garcia Mantinan [4]noticed that
current Debian CDs don't provide the required files to start the
installer from within DOS.

 1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-bsd/2004/09/msg00001.html
 2. http://people.debian.org/~rmh/kfreebsd-gnu/gnome.png
 3. http://lwn.net/Articles/104837/
 4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-cd/2004/09/msg00128.html

Debian-Installer Testing Candidate 2. Joey Hess [5]announced the
testing candidate 2 alias pre-release-candidate 2 (rc2) of the
debian-installer has been released, with lots of fun new features. In
only one week, the installer people want to start the release process
for rc2 itself. Christian Perrier additionally [6]announced a string
freeze on October 6th.

 5. http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/d-i_pre-rc2-2004-10-01-00-18.html
 6. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2004/10/msg00075.html

Status of the non-US Archive. Andreas Barth [7]investigated the
non-US archive and discovered that it does only contain two valid
packages: one for main and one in non-free. While [8]vtun will be
uploaded into the main archive, [9]PGP 5i cannot and somebody is
[10]willing to maintain it as well.

 7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2004/09/msg00409.html
 8. http://packages.debian.org/vtun
 9. http://packages.debian.org/pgp5i
 10. http://bugs.debian.org/237370

Dropping real 80386 Support? Andres Solomon [11]reported that the
Debian kernel team is considering to drop support for real 80386
machines because the i486 emulation patch is unmaintained and said to
be [12]insecure. Current versions of GCC generate i486 code so for a
real i386 the kernel emulation is required. Debian sarge cannot be
installed on such a machine due to the memory requirements, but older
releases can and be upgraded after their installation.

 11. http://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2004/10/msg00027.html
 12. http://bugs.debian.org/250468

Release Policy Updates? Andreas Barth, who recently became a release
assistant, [13]discussed whether recommends to packages out of main
are permitted for packages in main. Since some package managers handle
recommends similar to dependencies this is bound to break. He noted
that packages in sarge have to be buildable in sarge, since otherwise
security support won't work. He also asked if it is ok for a package
in main to provide binary packages in main and contrib.

 13. http://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2004/10/msg00043.html

DebConf5 Preparations. Lars Wirzenius [14]put together [15]minutes
from the recent IRC meeting to prepare the upcoming [16]Debian
Conference in Finland, taking place from Friday, July 1 through
Monday, July 18, 2005. The first week is meant for working on various
issues, the middle weekend for social stuff, and the second week is
meant for talks. Andreas Schuldei [17]announced the possibility of
sponsorship for the trip.

 14. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2004/10/msg00009.html
 15. http://wiki.debian.net/index.cgi?DebConf5Meeting20041003
 16. http://www.debconf.org/
 17. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2004/10/msg00002.html

State of the graphical Installer. Martin 'Joey' Schulze [18]asked
about the status of the [19]graphical frontend to the [20]installer,
Michael Cardenas once started. Colin Watson [21]listed several issues
he is working on and reported that most of his time in [22]Oldenburg
was spent doing this. Bart Cornelis [23]added that a Spanish company
called Tuxum were in the process of changing their installer (GPL) to
be a Qt frontend for the Debian installer.

 18. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2004/09/msg01892.html
 19. http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/gtk-frontend
 20. http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
 21. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2004/09/msg01904.html
 22. http://meeting.ffis.de/Oldenburg2004/
 23. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2004/09/msg01894.html

Debian GNU/Hurd K7 CDs released. Philip Charles [24]announced the
[25]seventh iteration of the K-series [26]Debian GNU/Hurd CDs. He said
that the main feature of the K7 set is its quality. The main addition
over previous CDs packages is XFree86 4.3. The installation
instructions for the Debian GNU/Hurd CDs are located [27]here.

 24. http://lists.debian.org/debian-hurd/2004/09/msg00084.html
 25. http://ftp.gnuab.org/pub/debian-cd/K7/
 26. http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/
 27. http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-cd

Missing Package Conflicts. Frank Lichtenheld [28]reported about 42
packages that lack a conflict definition but contain the same file as
a different package without replacing it. This usually renders either
package uninstallable when the other one is already installed. Petter
Reinholdtsen [29]suggested to use the [30]popularity contest database
to decide upon popularity which files should be renamed to resolve
such a conflict.

 28. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/09/msg01658.html
 29. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/10/msg00013.html
 30. http://popcon.debian.org/

Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure that you update
your systems if you have any of these packages installed.

 * [31]freenet6 -- Potential Information leak.
 * [32]netkit-telnet -- Arbitrary code execution.
 * [33]rp-pppoe -- Potential root compromise.

 31. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-555
 32. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-556
 33. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-557

New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the
unstable Debian archive [34]recently or contain important updates.

 34. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/newpkg_main

 * [35]alexandria -- GNOME application for managing book collections.
 * [36]ams -- Realtime modular synthesiser for ALSA.
 * [37]amsynth -- Two oscillator software synthesiser.
 * [38]caps -- C* Audio Plugin Suite.
 * [39]creox -- Real-time guitar effects.
 * [40]dirmngr -- Module that handles certificate revocation lists
   for gpgsm.
 * [41]dnsdoctor -- DNS (Domain Name System) checking tool.
 * [42]fityk -- General-purpose nonlinear curve fitting and data
   analysis.
 * [43]harbour -- Compiler for the xBase superset language often
   referred to as Clipper.
 * [44]jackeq -- Routes and manipulates audio from/to multiple
   sources.
 * [45]magma -- Magma cluster abstraction - tool.
 * [46]onak -- OpenPGP Key Server.
 * [47]tclmagick -- Tcl bindings for ImageMagick.
 * [48]viewglob -- Graphical display of directories referenced at the
   shell prompt.
 * [49]wmdonkeymon -- Shows the status of edonkey's downloads in
   progress.
 * [50]wmmisc -- Dock app that monitors your system.

 35. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/interpreters/alexandria
 36. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/ams
 37. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/amsynth
 38. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/caps
 39. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/creox
 40. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/dirmngr
 41. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/dnsdoctor
 42. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/science/fityk
 43. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/harbour
 44. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/jackeq
 45. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/magma
 46. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/onak
 47. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/graphics/tclmagick
 48. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/viewglob
 49. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/wmdonkeymon
 50. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/wmmisc

Debian Packages introduced last Week. Every day, a different Debian
package is [51]featured from the testing distribution. If you know
about an obscure package you think others should also know about, send
it to [52]Andrew Sweger. Debian package a day introduced the following
packages last week.

 51. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/
 52. http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=debaday

 * [53]busybox -- Tiny utilities for small and embedded systems.
 * [54]exmh -- X user interface for MH mail.
 * [55]vpnc -- Cisco-compatible VPN client.
 * [56]rblcheck -- Tool to query RBL servers.
 * [57]vsound -- Virtual loopback sound recorder and real audio
   converter.

 53. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/35972.html
 54. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/36126.html
 55. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/36452.html
 56. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/36696.html
 57. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/36958.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 [58]contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your
mail at [59]dwn@debian.org.

 58. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
 59. mailto:dwn@debian.org


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