Debian Weekly News - October 7, 2003

Welcome to this year's 40th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. DivisionTwo.com wrote an amusing [1]article about a fictitious Barbie OS based on Debian. LinuxIT [2]announced it would release its Linux Professional Institute Certification [3]training manuals under a free license.

1. http://www.divisiontwo.com/articles/barbieOS.htm
2. http://www.linuxit.com/Press/Press030903.html
3. http://www.linuxit.com/lpi.html

emDebian at UK Linux Expo. LinuxDevices.com [4]reports that Debian's Vincent Sanders will attend the upcoming [5]Linux Expo UK to discuss ideas about emDebian at Debian's stand in the [6].Org Village. [7]emDebian's aims are to improve Debian as a whole for embedded use and to provide a set of tools to generate embedded device images simply and quickly. LinuxDevices.com's annual [8]Embedded Linux Market Survey showed Debian to be the third most popular GNU/Linux distribution for embedded development.

4. http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS4146203121.html
5. http://www.linuxexpouk.co.uk/Exhibition/Visiting/
6. http://www.linuxexpo.org.uk/
7. http://www.emdebian.org/
8. http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT7301151332.html

Debian Project at European Conferences. The Debian project [9]announced that its members and affiliates will attend four exhibitions and conferences that cover Free Software and GNU/Linux in Europe. On October 7th and 8th [10]Opensaar takes place in Saarbrücken, Germany, with a talk about mail services with Debian by Marko Jung. On October 8th and 9th [11]Linux Expo UK will take place in Olympia, London, U.K. This is followed by [12]Practical Linux in Giessen Germany on October 11th, where Alexander Schmehl will give a talk and a workshop about Debian. Finally from October 14th to 16th [13]Linux Kongress will take place in Saarbrücken, Germany, where Thomas Lange will give a [14]tutorial about building a beowulf cluster.

9. http://www.debian.org/News/2003/20031005
10. http://www.debian.org/events/2003/1007-opensaar
11. http://www.debian.org/events/2003/1008-linuxexpo
12. http://www.debian.org/events/2003/1011-plgiessen
13. http://www.debian.org/events/2003/1014-linuxkongress
14. http://www.linux-kongress.org/2003/tutorials/index.html#1_1_6

Summary of the Debian-Installer DebCamp. Joey Hess sent in a [15]summary of the [16]DebCamp. He reported that more than ten debian-installer developers met for four days in [17]Oldenburg and worked quite successful on the new installer as the flood of CVS messages demonstrated. As a result PowerPC is perhaps better supported by debian-installer right now than is i386. Quite a lot of work was done on general user interface issues. Many issues have been resolved or worked on.

15. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot-0309/msg00850.html
16. http://people.debian.org/~pere/debian-installer/di-debcamp-2003-1.html
17. http://oldenburger.linuxtage.de/Oldenburg2003/

BrailleSpeak Debian Mini-Distribution. The [18]BrailleSpeak project [19]announced the [20]release of their "BrlSpeak Debian-based Braille-Loopback Mini-Distribution". It provides a (temporary) [21]solution for those who prefer installing a distribution on their FAT32 partition without having to repartition the hard disk. However, installation currently lacks speech support.

18. http://www.brlspeak.net/
19. http://search.luky.org/cola.2003/msg01030.html
20. http://www.brlspeak.net/release/
21. http://brlspeak.net/brlspeak-deb/iso/

Installing different Sets of Debian Machines. Joseph Rawson [22]announced paella, which is based on [23]FAI and intends to support installing different suites of software simultaneously. To achieve this [24]paella uses a PostgreSQL database to store most of the configuration.

22. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0309/msg01585.html
23. http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/
24. http://sourceforge.net/projects/paella/

Sarge Release Status. Scott James Remnant [25]checked how much of Anthony Town's [26]release timetable has been met already. The debian-installer has been tested and proven to work on i386 and PowerPC already. Package removals also dropped the number of release critical bugs a lot. Scott resumed with the statement that we are roughly 14 days behind the schedule.

25. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg00018.html
26. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0308/msg00010.html

Free Debian Logo License? Simon Law sent in a [27]proposal to change the Debian logo [28]license which is currently not free according to the [29]Debian Free Software Guidelines. Mako Hill [30]added that there are a number of problems with Debian trademark policy. This was part of the rationale behind the creation of a [31]trademark committee at SPI that is trying to draft some new legal policy recommendations.

27. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0310/msg00002.html
28. http://www.debian.org/logos/
29. http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines
30. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg00206.html
31. http://lists.spi-inc.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/spi-trademark

Aptitude Annoyances and Improvements. Nathanael Nerode [32]complained about several annoying things in [33]aptitude. Daniel Burrows [34]explained that he currently does not have enough time to get [35]aptitude working the way he likes. He also called for codevelopers who submit patches for the issues he outlined.

32. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg00074.html
33. http://packages.debian.org/aptitude
34. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg00079.html
35. http://alioth.debian.org/projects/aptitude

Package Description Quality. Wolfgang Borgert [36]noticed some package descriptions that were not quite helpful such as "Foo is a GTK+ application, that enables bar". He wondered where guidelines for good package descriptions are located. Mathieu Roy [37]pointed out Colin Walters' [38]guidelines.

36. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg00186.html
37. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg00188.html
38. http://people.debian.org/~walters/descriptions.html

License Requirements for DSP Binaries. Thomas Hood [39]wondered about the [40]mwavem package that includes binaries for the Mwave digital signal processor (DSP) chip found on some ThinkPad laptops. IBM distributes the driver in a [41]tarball that says it is licensed under the GNU [42]GPL. However no source is distributed. Glenn Maynard [43]explained that the package cannot even be distributed in non-free if the source code is not available.

39. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal-0309/msg01020.html
40. http://packages.debian.org/mwavem
41. http://oss.software.ibm.com/acpmodem/
42. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
43. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal-0309/msg01025.html

Embedded Debian Device won Prize. The German company [44]Innominate has won the Wolfsburg AG Competence Prize, this year [45]awarded for the IT category in the field of Network Embedded Systems. The awarded mGuard security appliance runs a hardened Linux kernel 2.4 based on Debian 3.0 that Innominate developed in-house.

44. http://www.innominate.de/
45. http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS8505038381.html

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

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