Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2003/41/
Debian Weekly News – October 14th, 2003
Welcome to this year’s 41st issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter
for the Debian community. A new site, [1]Russian Debian, has just
opened its doors especially to the Russian Debian community. Just
like [2]Debian Planet, they also use Drupal to power the site.
Additionally there has been a [3]review of Libranet 2.8.1, which is
a Debian-based distribution.
1. http://debian.linuxrulez.ru/
2. http://www.debianplanet.org/
3. http://linux-universe.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=1063
SPI/Debian Trademark Committee. Martin Michlmayr [4]reported
about the formation of a trademark committee based on a resolution
by Mako Hill and Gregory Pomerantz which was passed by the [5]SPI
board in June. The goal is to draft a new policy on the use of the
Debian trademark. It will attempt to balance the restrictive
elements of trademark law with the need for certain types of open
use that are important to community driven Free Software projects
like Debian.
4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0310/msg00003.html
Debian GNU/Linux the Favorite Distribution. The Debian project
[6]announced that Debian GNU/Linux was [7]awarded this year’s Linux
Journal Ninth Annual Readers’ Choice Award in the category favorite
distribution with over 7,500 readers participating in the poll. “I
would like to thank the Linux Journal readers on behalf of the
Debian community, for taking the time to make their preferences
known and for choosing Debian,” said Martin Michlmayr in response
to receiving the award.
6. http://www.debian.org/News/2003/20031010
7. http://pr.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=785
Ballot for the Constitutional Amendment. Manoj Srivastava
proposed a [8]draft ballot for the [9]general resolution currently
under discussion. Three variants have been proposed, and hence the
ballot covers all of them as well as no-action and further
discussion. The first call for votes will go out on Tuesday when
DWN is released.
8. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote-0310/msg00013.html
9. http://www.debian.org/vote/2003/vote_0003
Report from the Linux Expo UK 2003. Steve McIntyre wrote a short
[10]report about the Debian presence at the Linux Expo UK 2003 last
week. It was a very successful show overall which kept Debian
people busy for the two days. They spoke to a lot of people and
sold loads of T and polo shirts in addition to CDs and DVDs. Many
existing GNU/Linux and Debian users came to talk or ask particular
questions.
10. http://www.debian.org/events/2003/1008-linuxexpo-report
Language Suffixes for Programs. Marco Paganini [11]wondered
whether programs in /usr/bin are allowed to have a language suffix
such as .pl or .py. Marcelo Magallon strongly [12]opposed this idea
and Daniel Burrows [13]explained that adding .py to programs in
/usr/bin can cause problems with Python’s module importing.
11. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg00730.html
12. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg00746.html
13. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg00789.html
Debian GNU/Linux is the Best Enterprise Distribution. The German
Linux Enterprise [14]magazine conducted a “Readers Choice”
[15]survey. Among various questions readers also had to vote for
the “Best Enterprise Distribution”. The winner is, Debian GNU/Linux
which received 33 % of votes. It was followed by SuSE Linux
Enterprise Server with 32 % and Red Hat Advanced Server at 22
%.
14. http://www.linuxenterprise.de/
15.
http://www.linuxenterprise.de/itr/service/show.php3?id=104&nodeid=35
Eating Spam and Viruses with Debian GNU/Linux. Ugo Bellavance
recently discovered MailScanner, which is a powerful
security/spam/virus filter for mail servers. He wrote a short
[16]introduction on its use and installation. It can also be used
in connection with an anti-virus product. The behaviour for spam
and virus catching is highly customisable using several settings,
and the defaults usually make sense, if one is using a recent
version.
16.
http://www.debianhelp.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=3178
Building Packages consume too much Memory. Sam Hocevar
[17]noticed that building [18]openvrml on [19]arm, [20]mips and
[21]mipsel consumes too much memory so that the automatic build is
terminated. He [22]admitted that g++ uses about 200 MB of memory on
his own system. Adam Majer [23]suggested not to use the -O2 switch
for optimisation in order to save memory on these
architectures.
17. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg00985.html
18. http://packages.debian.org/openvrml-lookat
19. http://buildd.debian.org/build.php?pkg=openvrml&arch=arm
20. http://buildd.debian.org/build.php?pkg=openvrml&arch=mips
21. http://buildd.debian.org/build.php?pkg=openvrml&arch=mipsel
22. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg01044.html
23. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg01013.html
SysFS – Managing Device Nodes. Martin Pitt [24]read about the
new [25]architecture for Linux kernel device nodes and wondered how
to package its library. A user-space daemon will provide a
consistent interface to the kernel device information file system
sysfs and replace devfs. Marco d’Itri [26]contributed preliminary
[27]packages for udev.
24. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg01017.html
25.
http://archive.linuxsymposium.org/ols2003/Proceedings/All-Reprints/Reprint-Kroah-Hartman-OLS2003.pdf
26. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg01062.html
27. http://www.bofh.it/~md/debian/
Booting a Debian System faster. Andrea Mennucc [28]wondered if
there have been any effort in speeding up the boot sequence by
implementing [29]parallel starting of daemons, [30]minit or Richard
Gooch’s [31]boot scripts. Henrique de Moraes Holschuh has been
[32]working on the [33]init system. Joe Drew [34]added that he has
converted an embedded machine from busybox init to simpleinit plus
tools that support dependencies and saved some time during boot.
Gerrit Pape also [35]implemented [36]runit, but it’s not a drop-in
replacement for the SysV init system.
28. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg01078.html
29. http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-boot.html
30. http://www.fefe.de/minit/
31. http://www.atnf.csiro.au/people/rgooch/linux/boot-scripts/
32. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg01080.html
33.
http://people.debian.org/~hmh/invokerc.d-policyrc.d-specification.txt
34. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg01119.html
35. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg01131.html
36. http://packages.debian.org/runit
Helping busy Maintainers. Martin Michlmayr [37]called for a
group of people who are willing to help busy [38]developers by
co-maintaining their packages for a while. Interested people don’t
need to be registered as Debian developer yet, but should
[39]contact him.
37. http://lists.debian.org/debian-qa-0310/msg00017.html
38. http://lists.debian.org/debian-qa-0310/msg00032.html
39. mailto:[email protected]
Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure that you
update your systems if you have any of these packages
installed.
- [40]OpenSSL 0.9.5 — Denial of service issues.
40. http://www.debian.org/security/2003/dsa-394
New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to
the unstable Debian archive recently or contain important
updates.
- [41]apachetop — Realtime Apache monitoring tool.
- [42]bibclean — Pretty-printer for BibTeX databases.
- [43]chasen-cannadic — Japanese dictionary for ChaSen derived
from Canna dictionary. - [44]crywrap — Simple TCP service encryption using
TLS/SSL. - [45]cvsreport — Extract activity reports from a CVS
repository. - [46]genders — Collection of cluster config management
utilities. - [47]gtkboard — Many board games in one program.
- [48]juman — Japanese Morphological Analysis System.
- [49]liferea — Simple FeedReader clone for GNOME2.
- [50]nabi — Korean X input method server plus imhangul status
monitor. - [51]qtads — Qt text-only interpreter for TADS.
41. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/apachetop.html
42. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/tex/bibclean.html
43. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/misc/chasen-cannadic.html
44. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/crywrap.html
45. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/cvsreport.html
46. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/genders.html
47. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/gtkboard.html
48. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/misc/juman.html
49. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/gnome/liferea.html
50. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/nabi.html
51. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/qtads.html
Orphaned Packages. 17 packages were orphaned this week and
require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 180 orphaned
packages. Many thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed
to the Free Software community. Please see the [52]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.
52. http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/
- [53]ent — Pseudo-random number sequence test program.
([54]Bug#214925) - [55]gcvs — GTK+ front-end for cvs. ([56]Bug#215380)
- [57]gnade — Runtime library for the GNat Ada Database
Environment. ([58]Bug#215518) - [59]gnats — GNU problem report management system (central
database). ([60]Bug#215366) - [61]gutenbook — Graphical document reader for Gutenberg Etext
documents. ([62]Bug#214930) - [63]gutenbrowser — Project Gutenberg Etext reader.
([64]Bug#214931) - [65]intel-rng-tools — Daemon to use the RNG on i810
motherboards. ([66]Bug#214926) - [67]libextutils-f77-perl — Simple interface to F77 libs.
([68]Bug#215542) - [69]libsdl-sge — Set of graphic functions that use SDL.
([70]Bug#215097) - lsadb — Utility to scan devices on the ADB bus.
([71]Bug#214927) - [72]mps — Mtop and mps for the Mosix multicomputer.
([73]Bug#214929) - [74]pdfscreen — Make PDF documents which are printable and
readable on screen too. ([75]Bug#214928) - [76]pdl — Perl data language. Perl extensions for numerics.
([77]Bug#215543) - [78]sash — Stand-alone shell. ([79]Bug#215544)
- [80]simpleproxy — Simple TCP socket proxy.
([81]Bug#215381) - [82]xcruise — Fly about 3D-formed file system.
([83]Bug#215195) - [84]xmms-singit — Display and edit lyrics with XMMS.
([85]Bug#214946)
53. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/science/ent.html
54. http://bugs.debian.org/214925
55. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/gcvs.html
56. http://bugs.debian.org/215380
57. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/gnade-dev.html
58. http://bugs.debian.org/215518
59. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/gnats.html
60. http://bugs.debian.org/215366
61. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/non-us/gutenbook.html
62. http://bugs.debian.org/214930
63. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/non-us/gutenbrowser.html
64. http://bugs.debian.org/214931
65. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/intel-rng-tools.html
66. http://bugs.debian.org/214926
67.
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/perl/libextutils-f77-perl.html
68. http://bugs.debian.org/215542
69. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/libsdl-sge.html
70. http://bugs.debian.org/215097
71. http://bugs.debian.org/214927
72. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/mps.html
73. http://bugs.debian.org/214929
74. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/tex/pdfscreen.html
75. http://bugs.debian.org/214928
76. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/math/pdl.html
77. http://bugs.debian.org/215543
78. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/shells/sash.html
79. http://bugs.debian.org/215544
80. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/simpleproxy.html
81. http://bugs.debian.org/215381
82. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/xcruise.html
83. http://bugs.debian.org/215195
84. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/xmms-singit.html
85. http://bugs.debian.org/214946
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Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see the
[86]contributing page to find out how to help. We’re looking
forward to receiving your mail at [87][email protected].
86. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
87. mailto:[email protected]