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Debian Weekly News – August 2nd, 2000

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August 3, 2000

Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 16:27:24 -0700
From: Joey Hess joeyh@debian.org
To: debian-news@lists.debian.org
Subject: Debian Weekly News – August 2nd, 2000

Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/

Debian Weekly News – August 2nd, 2000

Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian
community.

There is no news to report about the pending release of Debian
2.2. No show-stopper problems have been found, and nothing else has
come up that could change the release schedule. Most of the news
items this week are related to development of the unstable
tree.

Of course, security fixes continue, as always. A bug in userv
that allowed local users to take over other accounts was [1]quickly
fixed. A remote root exploit in the dhcp-client and
dhcp-client-beta packages is also [2]fixed. (An earlier fix seems
to have been incomplete.)

Porting Debian to the ia64. Several developers would like to
[3]begin a port of Debian to the Intel ia64 architecture. The
problem is that ia64 hardware is not for sale yet, and they’re
having difficulty getting the root access to some that doing a
Debian port would require. Randolph Chung [4]mentioned that “I have
some of the basic tools ported already (dpkg, apt)”, but cautioned,
“I doubt we can do an effective port unless we get machines.” A
[5]new mailing list was created for the port.

Ian Jackson [6]posted plans for a package signing infrastructure
that he, Wichert Akkerman, and Ben Collins developed at a recent
meeting in Atlanta. It is based on the [7]SPKI/[8]SDSI
infrastructure (AKA
“spooky-sudsy”), and it covers not just adding signatures to
.deb’s, but also verifying that a signature is from a member of
Debian, or whatever other organisation a user chooses to trust.

Slashdot interviews Ian Murdock. As the founder of Debian, Ian
has an interesting perspective on the distribution. Some quotes
from [9]the interview:

“Debian has become so much more than I ever dreamed it would
become, so I’m nothing but thrilled with how well it’s all come
together.”
“Debian was the best Linux distribution you’d never heard of,
and that’s started to change this past year. “

Slashdot also [10]ran a story on the dedication of Debian 2.2 to
Joel ‘Espy’ Klecker.

Debian derivatives: The Gibraltar project aims to make a
Debian-based firewall/router that runs entirely off of a bootable
CD-ROM. The [11]first pre-release is now available. A [12]new
version of Libranet Linux has also been released.

Now some changes that should make life easier for Debian
developers:

A [13]keyserver for the Debian keyring is available now, just
point gpg at keyring.debian.org.
The Work-Needing and Prospective Packages list (WNPP) has
itself had a rather spotty maintainence history. It is now
[14]integrated into the bug tracking system, so bugs can be filed
against the [15]wnpp pseudo-package when a package is orphaned or a
new package is requested. This should decentralize the maintenance
of WNPP and help keep it current.

New packages in unstable this week include the following, and
[16]21 more:

[17]gtkhtml: HTML rendering/editing library – bonobo component
binary ([18]dev, [19]runtime)
[20]heroes: Collect powerups and avoids your opponents’
trails
[21]tcpflow: TCP flow recorder

And finally, very beta “phase 1” X 4.0.1 packages are [22]available
for testing. Be sure to read the README first …

References
1. http://www.debian.org/security/2000/20000727

2.
http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce-00/msg00021.html

3. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0007/msg01674.html

4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0007/msg01675.html

5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0007/msg01684.html

6. http://lists.debian.org/debian-dpkg-0007/msg00044.html

7. http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/spki-charter.html

8. http://www.toc.lcs.mit.edu/~cis/sdsi.html

9.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/07/27/1526236&mode=nested

10.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/07/27/0131226&mode=nested

11. http://gibraltar.vianova.at/
12. http://lists.debian.org/debian-commercial-00/msg00000.html