Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2003/40/
Debian Weekly News – October 7th, 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.