Debian Weekly News - June 29th, 2004

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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2004/25/
Debian Weekly News - June 29th, 2004
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Welcome to this year's 25th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. We have to apologise for not being able to send
out an issue last week and only a short one today, but LinuxTag
organisation kept Joey too busy with other stuff.

General Resolution 2004-004. The project secretary [1]announced the
beginning of the voting period on a [2]general resolution titled
"Sarge Release Schedule in view of GR 2004-003". The full text of the
ballot is quite long. The simplified story is that, if the resolution
passes, the [3]social contract will be modified to allow non-free
data, e.g. documentation and firmware, to be included in the next
release (codename Sarge) of Debian. This would require a 3:1
supermajority. Voting ends Friday 2nd July at 23:59:59 UTC.

 1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2004/06/msg00082.html
 2. http://www.debian.org/vote/2004/vote_004
 3. http://www.debian.org/social_contract

Debian at LinuxTag 2004. The Debian project [4]annonced that it will
attend the upcoming [5]LinuxTag in Karlsruhe, Germany, which takes
place from June 23rd to June 26th. There will be a Debian booth and a
Linux porting booth in the exhibition hall and a Skolelinux class room
in the conference building. In addition to this a Debian mini
[6]conference is organised on Thursday, June 24th. They keynote for
[7]LinuxTag will be delivered by Ian Murdock.

 4. http://www.debian.org/News/2004/20040619
 5. http://www.debian.org/events/2004/0623-linuxtag
 6. http://www.infodrom.org/Debian/events/LinuxTag2004/day.html
 7. http://www.linuxtag.org/

Debian-Installer Screenshots. Martin Krafft [8]announced that he has
made a thorough set of [9]debian-installer screenshots from the
netboot 20040616 and netinst 20040616 images. Martin will be
attempting to keep the screenshots up to date and would appreciate
feedback. There is a [10]README file included.

 8. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2004/06/msg01392.html
 9. http://people.debian.org/~madduck/d-i/screenshots/
 10. http://people.debian.org/~madduck/d-i/screenshots/README

Bi-directional Language Support in Debian-Installer. Christian Perrier
[11]announced that, thanks to the hard work of Steve Langasek (and
before him Shlomi Loubaton) support for bi-directional languages is
now completely included in debian-installer. This appears to make
Debian the first GNU/Linux distribution to use an installer translated
to right-to-left languages such as Arabic, Hebrew and Farsi in text
mode. Screenshots and an i386-netboot.iso are [12]available.

 11. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2004/06/msg01453.html
 12. http://www.perrier.eu.org/debian/debian-installer/

Ideas for Fully Automated Installations. Christian Perrier
[13]discussed his idea for achieving fully automated installations. He
is thinking about a simple package that would run early in the
installation process, load the floppy module and read a file from the
floppy containing simple debconf variables. It would then feed these
values to debconf and run the installer. Jushua Kwan [14]agreed it was
a good idea, although he thought partitioning would be difficult.

 13. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2004/06/msg01459.html
 14. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2004/06/msg01489.html

Skolelinux 1.0 released. After about three years of hard work,
[15]Skolelinux 1.0 is [16]released to the public. The distribution was
started as a reaction to how much the Norwegian schools and the
government relied on systems using closed source. Skolelinux is meant
to be an easy way to set up a large and secure network of LTSP thin
clients (normally PXE boot) for regular users.

 15. http://www.skolelinux.org/
 16. ftp://developer.skolelinux.no/skolelinux-cd/

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

 * [17]krb5 -- Buffer overflows.
 * [18]sup -- Format string vulnerabilities.
 * [19]super -- Format string vulnerabilities.
 * [20]www-sql -- Buffer overflow.
 * [21]rlpr -- Several vulnerabilities.
 * [22]Apache -- Buffer overflow.

 17. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-520
 18. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-521
 19. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-522
 20. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-523
 21. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-524
 22. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-525

Debian Packages introduced last Week. Every day, a different Debian
package is [23]featured from the testing distribution. If you know
about an obscure package you think others should also know about, send
it to [24]Andrew Sweger. Debian package a day introduced the following
packages last week.

 23. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/
 24. http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=debaday

 * [25]octave -- GNU Octave language for numerical computations.
 * [26]dmidecode -- Dump Desktop Management Interface data
 * [27]meld -- Graphical tool to diff and merge files
 * [28]apt-listchanges -- Display change history from .deb archives
 * [29]popularity-contest -- Vote for your favourite packages
   automatically
 * [30]libmodule-install-perl -- Cornucopiae of Module::Install
   Recipes
 * [31]units -- Converts between different systems of units
 * [32]pinfo -- Alternative info-file viewer
 * [33]atool -- Script for managing file archives of various types

 25. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/18485.html
 26. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/18692.html
 27. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/19198.html
 28. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/19228.html
 29. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/19643.html
 30. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/19793.html
 31. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/20040.html
 32. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/20360.html
 33. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/20562.html

Orphaned Packages. 4 packages were orphaned this week and require a
new maintainer. This makes a total of 175 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free
Software community. Please see the [34]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.

 34. http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/

 * [35]dia2sql -- Dia UML to SQL converter. ([36]Bug#256479)
 * [37]linuxlogo -- Color ANSI System Logo. ([38]Bug#256685)
 * [39]login.app -- Login application designed with the NeXTStep look
   in mind. ([40]Bug#256681)
 * [41]newspost -- Usenet binary autoposter. ([42]Bug#255807)

 35. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/dia2sql
 36. http://bugs.debian.org/256479
 37. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/misc/linuxlogo
 38. http://bugs.debian.org/256685
 39. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/login.app
 40. http://bugs.debian.org/256681
 41. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/news/newspost
 42. http://bugs.debian.org/255807

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 [43]contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your
mail at [44]dwn@debian.org.

 43. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
 44. mailto:dwn@debian.org


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