Debian Weekly News - August 29th, 2006

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2006/35/
Debian Weekly News - August 29th, 2006
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Welcome to this year's 35th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. Bug squashing parties have been announced for
September 8th to 10th in [1]Vienna and for September 15th to 17th in
[2]Jülich, Germany. OSDir has taken [3]screenshots of the new
graphical [4]Debian installer. Petr Stehlik [5]reported that the
installation of [6]sarge and [7]etch worked flawlessly in the
recently [8]fixed version of [9]ARAnyM, a 32bit Atari ST/TT/Falcon
virtual machine.

 1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/08/msg00012.html
 2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/08/msg00013.html
 3. http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=724&slide=2
 4. http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
 5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-68k/2006/08/msg00234.html
 6. http://www.debian.org/releases/sarge/
 7. http://www.debian.org/releases/etch/
 8. http://lists.debian.org/debian-68k/2006/08/msg00226.html
 9. http://packages.debian.org/aranym

General Resolution: Handling Firmware. Steve Langasek [10]proposed a
general resolution to establish how DFSG#2 should be understood to
apply to firmware, especially when distributed with the Linux kernel.
When accepted firmware will be considered as data without the
requirement of matching source code. It would also clarify the
situation for other works such as images, video, and fonts.

 10. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2006/08/msg00032.html

FrOSCon Report. Joey Schulze [11]reported about the Debian presence at
the first [12]Free and Open Source Software Conference in Sankt
Augustin, Germany. The Debian project successfully maintained a
one-day [13]conference and ran a booth in the exhibition area. This
community event featured both official tracks and sub-conferences
maintained by several projects. Alexander Wirt also managed to get
some pretzels that looked like Debian swirls.

 11. http://www.debian.org/events/2006/0624-froscon-report
 12. http://www.debian.org/events/2006/0624-froscon
 13. http://wiki.snow-crash.org/FrosCon06

Event Coordination Meeting Report. Meike Reichle [14]summarised the
main results of the event coordination [15]meeting. Several ideas were
collected during the meeting how Debian booth participations and talks
could be improved to make them more attractive to visitors. To help
the booth organisers there are new [16]FAQ and [17]Howto Wiki pages.

 14. http://lists.debian.org/debian-publicity/2006/08/msg00080.html
 15. http://lists.debian.org/debian-publicity/2006/08/msg00031.html
 16. http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEventsFaqs
 17. http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEventsHowto

Debian and Free Software in Cuba. David Moreno Garza wrote a
[18]report about his visit to Cuba as a representative of the Debian
project. A workshop on package creation and maintenance and talks
about Custom Debian Distributions, internationalisation and
localisation were organised by David and Maykel Moya at the
Mathematics and Computing Faculty in the University of Havana.

 18. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/08/msg00010.html

Translation of Package Descriptions. Martijn van Oosterhout
[19]announced that he wrote a system that can send and receive e-mails
from the [20]Debian Description Translation Project and provides a web
[21]frontend where translating actually takes place. The most
important advantage over the pure e-mail interface is that this
additional system provides a review mechanism for translations.

 19. http://lists.debian.org/debian-i18n/2006/08/msg00030.html
 20. http://ddtp.debian.net/
 21. http://kleptog.org/cgi-bin/ddtss2-cgi/xx

GIT Transition Plans. Ian Beckwith [22]explained that /usr/bin/git
will be maintained via alternatives. Both [23]GNU Interactive Tools
and Linus Torvald's source code management system [24]git provide the
same program name. The GNU interactive tools have been renamed into
gitfm to resolve this conflict and in etch will contain a wrapper that
is able to execute the other program.

 22. http://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2006/08/msg00351.html
 23. http://packages.debian.org/git
 24. http://packages.debian.org/git-core

Updates for Debian Sarge. Martin Zobel-Helas [25]announced the
[26]preparations done for the next stable update. It will include an
updated version of the [27]Debian Installer to reflect the recent
kernel changes introduced by the last round of kernel [28]security
updates. Most other packages are updated to incorporated the security
that have accumulated.

 25. http://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2006/08/msg00300.html
 26. http://release.debian.org/stable/3.1/3.1r3/
 27. http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
 28. http://www.debian.org/security/

New Features in Etch. Alexander Schmehl [29]started to collect new
[30]features that Debian will probably include in the upcoming
[31]etch release. Nathanael Nerode additionally [32]noted that systems
upgraded from [33]sarge don't see the benefits of certain changes in
the [34]installer such as special tuning of the Ext2 filesystem.

 29. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2006/08/msg00125.html
 30. http://wiki.debian.org/NewInEtch
 31. http://www.debian.org/releases/etch/
 32. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/08/msg00167.html
 33. http://www.debian.org/releases/sarge/
 34. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2006/35/$HOME)/devel/debian-installer/

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

 * DSA 1155: [35]sendmail -- Denial of service.
 * DSA 1156: [36]kdebase -- Information disclosure.
 * DSA 1157: [37]ruby1.8 -- Several vulnerabilities.
 * DSA 1158: [38]streamripper -- Arbitrary code execution.
 * DSA 1159: [39]mozilla-thunderbird -- Several vulnerabilities.
 * DSA 1160: [40]mozilla -- Several vulnerabilities.
 * DSA 1161: [41]mozilla-firefox -- Several vulnerabilities.

 35. http://www.debian.org/security/2006/dsa-1155
 36. http://www.debian.org/security/2006/dsa-1156
 37. http://www.debian.org/security/2006/dsa-1157
 38. http://www.debian.org/security/2006/dsa-1158
 39. http://www.debian.org/security/2006/dsa-1159
 40. http://www.debian.org/security/2006/dsa-1160
 41. http://www.debian.org/security/2006/dsa-1161

New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the
unstable Debian archive [42]recently or contain important updates.

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

 * [43]deb-gview -- Gtk viewer for .deb package files and contents.
 * [44]jspwiki -- WikiWikiWeb clone written in Java.
 * [45]kbibtex -- BibTeX editor for KDE.
 * [46]listen -- Nice music player and manager for GNOME.
 * [47]op-panel -- Switchboard type application for the Asterisk PBX.
 * [48]pcmanfm -- Extremely fast and lightweight file manager for
   X11.
 * [49]pgfouine -- PostgreSQL log analyser.
 * [50]php-xajax -- Library to develop Ajax applications.
 * [51]polymer -- Port of the KDE style Plastic depending on Qt only.
 * [52]quarry -- Multi-purpose GUI for several board games.
 * [53]reniced -- Renice running processes based on regular
   expressions.
 * [54]spl-opengl -- SPL Programming Language -- OpenGL adapter.
 * [55]wifi-radar -- Graphical utility for managing Wi-Fi profiles.

 43. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/deb-gview
 44. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/jspwiki
 45. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/kde/kbibtex
 46. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/listen
 47. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/comm/op-panel
 48. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/pcmanfm
 49. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/misc/pgfouine
 50. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/php-xajax
 51. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/polymer
 52. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/quarry
 53. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/reniced
 54. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/spl-opengl
 55. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/wifi-radar

Orphaned Packages. 4 packages were orphaned this week and require a
new maintainer. This makes a total of 323 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free
Software community. Please see the [56]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. To find out which orphaned packages are
installed on your system the wnpp-alert program from devscripts may be
helpful.

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

 * [57]d4x -- Graphical download manager. ([58]Bug#384524)
 * [59]entity -- XML-based GUI builder for GTK+ (core library
   development files). ([60]Bug#384183)
 * [61]flexbackup -- Flexible backup tool for small to medium sized
   installations. ([62]Bug#384184)
 * [63]madman -- Advanced music manager application. ([64]Bug#384397)

 57. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/d4x
 58. http://bugs.debian.org/384524
 59. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/interpreters/entity
 60. http://bugs.debian.org/384183
 61. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/flexbackup
 62. http://bugs.debian.org/384184
 63. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/madman
 64. http://bugs.debian.org/384397

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 [65]contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your
mail at [66]dwn@debian.org.

 65. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
 66. mailto:dwn@debian.org

This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Sebastian Feltel,
Mohammed Adnène Trojette, Tobias Toedter and Martin 'Joey' Schulze.


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [e-mail:debian-news-REQUEST@lists.debian.org]
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [e-mail:listmaster@lists.debian.org]