Debian Weekly News - December 27th, 2005

Welcome to this 52nd and thus last issue of this year of DWN, the
weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Merry Christmas to those
readers who celebrate the Christian event and a Happy New Year to all
of you who feel like celebrating New Years Eve. In an [1]essay David
Chisnall took a look at the cost of Free Software in connection to the
freedom people gain by using Free Software.

 1. http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=431711&rl=1

Package Backports for Sarge. Norbert Tretkowski [2]announced, that
[3]backports.org eventually supports the current stable Debian
[4]release code-named sarge. Debian developers can upload their
backported packages into the archive. Norbert also provided some
[5]notes on using backports.org for end users and [6]developers.

 2. http://www.inittab.de/blog/2005/12/16#20051216_sarge
 3. http://www.backports.org/
 4. http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/
 5. http://www.backports.org/instructions.html
 6. http://lists.backports.org/lurker/message/20051207.140929.3a97ba5c.en.html

The Debian KDE Team in an Interview. The [7]Debian KDE team has been
[8]interviewed by "The people behind KDE", a site that aims to
present the people involved in the KDE community. The interview
features technical aspects as well as a some personal questions.

 7. http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/docs/people.html
 8. http://people.kde.nl/debian.html

Status of Debian unstable. Kamaraju Kusumanchi [9]started a Wiki
[10]page to summarise up current major unstable upgrade issues and to
give some workarounds to users. Ari Pollack [11]announced another Wiki
[12]page tracking the topic of the #debian-devel channel on
irc.debian.org which provides a useful idea of what is broken and what
is fixed in [13]sid. However, he recommends the use of
apt-listbugs/apt-listchanges and [14]debian-devel-announce.

 9. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/12/msg00621.html
 10. http://wiki.debian.org/StatusOfUnstable
 11. http://www.livejournal.com/users/go_team_ari/11093.html
 12. http://wiki.debian.org/TopicDebianDevel
 13. http://www.debian.org/releases/sid/
 14. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce

Common Power Management Framework. Kevin Locke [15]announced the
creation of a project to create a common power-management
[16]framework for Debian. Developers will be able to respond to
power-related events, regardless of architecture or daemon by
installing a single script for the common event handler. This script
will be properly handled even as new power-systems and daemons are
created with no necessary changes from the developer.

 15. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/12/msg00044.html
 16. http://powermgmt.alioth.debian.org/

Kernel Package Hooks Transition. Manoj Srivastava [17]warned about new
versions of [18]kernel-package which may produce binary kernel
packages whose postinst script fails, even though the kernel will work
fine. This is a result of the conversion to [19]debconf and scripts
that expect an interactive installation script or produce output.

 17. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/12/msg00012.html
 18. http://packages.debian.org/kernel-package
 19. http://packages.debian.org/debconf

Next Release Architectures. Steve Langasek, member of the Debian
[20]release team, [21]informed about the end of the architecture
requalification [22]phase. As an outcome the next stable Debian
release called [23]etch probably wont support the [24]arm, [25]m68k,
[26]s390 and [27]sparc architectures. With the etch release the
[28]amd64 architecture will be supported for the first time.

 20. http://release.debian.org/
 21. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/12/msg00013.html
 22. http://release.debian.org/etch_arch_qualify.html
 23. http://www.debian.org/releases/etch/
 24. http://www.debian.org/ports/arm/
 25. http://www.debian.org/ports/m68k/
 26. http://www.debian.org/ports/s390/
 27. http://www.debian.org/ports/sparc/
 28. http://www.debian.org/ports/amd64/

Mozilla and Friends based on XULRunner? Mike Hommey [29]reported about
his plans to package [30]xulrunner, which ought to become the central
engine for all future Mozilla technology, meaning that all Mozilla
products (firefox, thunderbird, etc.) will be built on top of it. The
mid-term plan is to migrate the applications that use Mozilla as a
platform (such as epiphany, galeon, kazehakase, etc.) to xulrunner.

 29. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/12/msg00082.html
 30. http://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php/XUL:Xul_Runner

Debian in Munich. The City of Munich [31]published an update about
their [32]migration to a Debian-based GNU/Linux solution. The current
steps are to migrating their document management to an
OpenOffice-based solution so that both the current windows clients and
the new GNU/Linux clients can use it. They also shipped the first test
versions of the Debian-based client to users in order to get feedback.
The client administration is based on [33]FAI (fully automated
installer) and GOsa (Gonicus System Administrator).

 31. http://www.muenchen.de/vip8/prod2/mde/_de/rubriken/Rathaus/40_dir/presse/2005/ru/246.pdf
 32. http://www.muenchen.de/limux
 33. http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/

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

 * DSA 924: [34]nbd -- Potential arbitrary code execution.
 * DSA 925: [35]phpbb2 -- Several vulnerabilities.
 * DSA 926: [36]ketm -- privilege escalation.
 * DSA 927: [37]tkdiff -- Insecure temporary file creation.
 * DSA 928: [38]dhis-tools-dns -- Insecure temporary file creation.

 34. http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-924
 35. http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-925
 36. http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-926
 37. http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-927
 38. http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-928

New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the
unstable Debian archive [39]recently or contain important updates.

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

 * [40]bmp-alarm -- General plugin using beep-media-player as an
   alarm clock.
 * [41]gearhead -- Rogue-like mecha role playing game.
 * [42]lighttpd -- Fast webserver with minimal memory footprint.
 * [43]nanourl -- Lightweight analog of TinyURL.
 * [44]smtpguard -- SMTP flow control.
 * [45]widelands-dbg -- Fantasy real-time strategy game (debug
   cruft).
 * [46]xdms -- Uncompressor for Amiga DMS archives.
 * [47]xen-tools -- Tools to manage debian XEN virtual servers.
 * [48]yakuake -- Yet Another Kuake, KDE terminal emulator.

 40. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/bmp-alarm
 41. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/gearhead
 42. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/lighttpd
 43. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/nanourl
 44. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/mail/smtpguard
 45. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/widelands-dbg
 46. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/xdms
 47. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/xen-tools
 48. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/kde/yakuake

Orphaned Packages. 4 packages were orphaned this week and require a
new maintainer. This makes a total of 174 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free
Software community. Please see the [49]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.

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

 * [50]libmldbm-sync-perl -- Perl module for safe concurrent access
   to MLDBM databases. ([51]Bug#344324)
 * [52]poppler -- PDF rendering library. ([53]Bug#344738)
 * [54]psh -- Interactive shell with the power of perl.
   ([55]Bug#344748)
 * [56]tinycdb -- Package for creating and reading constant
   databases. ([57]Bug#344572)

 50. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/perl/libmldbm-sync-perl
 51. http://bugs.debian.org/344324
 52. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/libpoppler0c2
 53. http://bugs.debian.org/344738
 54. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/shells/psh
 55. http://bugs.debian.org/344748
 56. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/tinycdb
 57. http://bugs.debian.org/344572

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