Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2003/35/
Debian Weekly News – September 2nd, 2003
Welcome to this year’s 35th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter
for the Debian community. The discussion about legalizing
[1]software patents in Europe was held so [2]controversial that the
vote was postponed, as Ciaran O’Riordan from the [3]FSF reported.
At the 10th international conference of [4]European Association for
Japanese Studies in Warsaw Janusz Bien gave a [5]talk on Debian
GNU/Linux as a Japanese language teaching platform.
1. http://swpat.ffii.org/
2.
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/foren/go.shtml?read=1&msg_id=4088125&forum_id=46660
3. http://www.fsf.org/
4. http://www.eajs.org/
5. http://www.mimuw.edu.pl/~jsbien/slajdy/JSB-EAJS03-s.pdf
Opteron Support for Debian. The Debian project has [6]received
full access to a Dual Opteron [7]machine for [8]porting efforts.
Mattias Wadenstein also maintains a similar machine and hands out
accounts to interested developers. This port aims at supporting a
mixed 32/64 bit userland, which requires significant [9]changes in
the Debian infrastructure that will most probably not happen in
time for the release of sarge. The developer list has also been
[10]renamed to [11]debian-amd64 to [12]reflect the general
architecture name.
6. http://lists.debian.org/debian-amd64-0308/msg00035.html
7. http://db.debian.org/machines.cgi?host=pergolesi
8. http://www.debian.org/ports/amd64/
9. http://lists.debian.org/debian-amd64-0308/msg00046.html
10. http://lists.debian.org/debian-amd64-0308/msg00104.html
11. http://lists.debian.org/debian-amd64/
12. http://lists.debian.org/debian-amd64-0308/msg00022.html
Per-User Init System. Jerry Haltom [13]wondered what others
thought about a per-user init system that would be able to start
user-based services upon system startup without handing out root
access to the users. However, Colin Watson [14]pointed out that
this can already be achieved with an @reboot line in the normal
crontab.
13. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0308/msg03466.html
14. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0308/msg03476.html
Binary Packages from multiple Sources. Glenn McGrath
[15]investigated lists of source and binary packages and discovered
that, according to the .dsc files, several binary packages were
provided by more than one source package. In his opinion a virtual
package should be used when a binary package is provided by
multiple source packages.
15. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0308/msg03560.html
LWN Subscription for Debian Developers. Bdale Garbee
[16]reported about HP sponsoring LWN subscription for Debian
developers since many people asked whether this offer still stands.
If you are a Debian developer and want full access to [17]lwn.net,
go to their website, create an account for yourself, then send a
mail to [email protected]
containing your LWN account name and sign this mail with your key
on the Debian keyring. Eventually, Bdale will process the request
and send an acknowledgement.
16. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0308/msg00019.html
17. http://lwn.net/
Debian Archive Growth. Jason Andrade [18]noticed that the Debian
archive is about to hit the 100 GB mark on his [19]mirror and
wondered if there is any way to reduce the size of the archive over
the next weeks before he can insert a new disk. Josip Rodin
[20]answered that about 7 GB will be freed when potato is moved to
[21]archive.debian.org/.
Marcelo Magallon [22]added the size of all binary packages
belonging to the given architecture in the specified suites.
18. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0308/msg03887.html
19. http://ftp.au.debian.org/debian/
20. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0308/msg03914.html
21. http://archive.debian.org/debian-archive/
22. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0308/msg03929.html
Survey about the Freeness of the FDL. Branden Robinson posted
the [23]results of a [24]survey to measure the level of consensus
on whether the [25]GNU Free Documentation License (FDL) is
considered a free license according to the [26]Debian Free Software
Guidelines (DFSG) or not. The majority of Debian developers and
also the majority of non-developers don’t regard the GNU FDL as a
license that can easily satisfy the DFSG.
23. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0308/msg00017.html
24. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal-0308/msg01031.html
25. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
26. http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines
Installer Packages spread throughout “main” and “contrib”. Tore
Anderson [27]wondered why installers of non-free software are
located in supposedly free sections. He [28]explained that one
would not expect non-free software to be installed on the system,
when using the contrib section. Mathieu Roy [29]added that software
in contrib that has only the purpose of installing non-free
software in its postinst script is a good candidate for non-free
itself.
27. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0308/msg03987.html
28. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0308/msg03990.html
29. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0308/msg03991.html
Interview with Morphix Founder. Prakash Advani conducted an
[30]interview with Alex de Landgraaf, the founder and the lead
maintainer of the [31]Morphix project. He explained that Morphix,
which is based on [32]Knoppix, has a modular design to build a live
CD, which would relieve all remasterers and let them work on the
actual task at hand.
30. http://newsforge.com/newsforge/03/08/19/1518217.shtml
31. http://morphix.sourceforge.net/
32. http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/
Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure that you
update your systems if you have any of these packages
installed.
- [33]libpam-smb — Buffer overflow.
- [34]node — Remote root vulnerability.
33. http://www.debian.org/security/2003/dsa-374
34. http://www.debian.org/security/2003/dsa-375
New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to
the unstable Debian archive recently or contain important
updates.
- [35]atlc — Arbitrary Transmission Line Calculator.
- [36]beneath-a-steel-sky — Science fiction adventure game.
- [37]cgdb — Curses-based interface to the GNU Debugger
(GDB). - [38]darkice — Live audio streamer.
- [39]duali — Arabic Spell Checker.
- [40]knutclient — KDE GUI that displays UPS statistics from
NUT’s upsd. - [41]macchanger — Utility for manipulating the MAC address of
network interfaces. - [42]meterbridge — Collection of Audio meters for the JACK
audio server. - [43]nicotine — Graphical client for the SoulSeek peer-to-peer
system. - [44]raggle — Console RSS aggregator.
- [45]uncc — Decompiler for i386.
- [46]xtrojka — Fast paced columns-like game.
35. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/electronics/atlc.html
36.
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/beneath-a-steel-sky.html
37. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/cgdb.html
38. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/darkice.html
39. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/text/duali.html
40. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/knutclient.html
41. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/macchanger.html
42. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/meterbridge.html
43. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/nicotine.html
44. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/news/raggle.html
45. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/uncc.html
46. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/xtrojka.html
Orphaned Packages. 1 package was orphaned this week and require
a new maintainer. This makes a total of 206 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free
Software community. Please see the [47]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.
47. http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/
- [48]fpm — Password Manager. ([49]Bug#207849)
48. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/gnome/fpm.html
49. http://bugs.debian.org/207849
Want to continue reading DWN? Please help us create this
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the Debian community and report about events in the community.
Please see the [50]contributing page to find out how to help. We’re
looking forward to receiving your mail at [51][email protected].
50. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
51. mailto:[email protected]