.''. .''. . *''* :_/_: . :_/_: _(/_ .:.*_/_* : / : .'.:.'. .''.: / : ./) ':'* / * : '..'. -=:o:=- :_/_:'.:::. | ' *''* * '.'/.' _(/_'.':'.' : / : ::::: = *_/_* -= o =- /) ' * '..' ':::' === * / * .'/.'. '._____ * | *..* : |. |' .---"| * | _ .--'| || | _| | * | .-'| __ | | | || | .-----. | |' | || | | | | | || | ___' ' /" | '-."". '-' '-.' '` |_. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Debian Weekly News http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2002/51/ Debian Weekly News - December 31st, 2002 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Welcome to this year's 51st issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Many of you will probably be celebrating New Year's Eve, whilst doing so take a moment to reflect on the past year: What needs to be done in the Free Software community? Where would be able to participate actively? 51 Issues of DWN produced. You are currently reading the 51st issue, which means that this is also the 51st week of gathering information on interesting activities of the Debian Project, writing items, proofreading and translation. Even though the English version is prepared only by a small group of people including one main editor, many more people are involved before you can read the issue. Each issue is sent to proofreaders, and translators also improve it. Each issue is also translated into several other languages simultaneously. Thanks to Contributors and Translators. A big thanks go to Andre Lehovich and Matt Black who have contributed several items as well as the many more people who contributed items less frequently. Many thanks to Rob Bradford, Andreas Schuldei and Thomas Bliesener who proofread the issues. Thanks also go to David Martínez Moreno, Frédéric Bothamy, Gustavo Noronha Silva, Ignacio García, Lukasz Jachowicz, Miquel Vidal, Nobuhiro Imai, Oohara Yuuma, Peter Karlsson, Pierre Machard and Thomas Bliesener who are translating all issues into Catalan, French, German, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. 2002 GNU/Linux Timeline. End of the year is the time people take a rest and reflect on what has happened in the ending year. Our collegues from [1]Linux Weekly News prepared the [2]2002 GNU/Linux Timeline. Even though the economy was difficult worldwide, Free Software continues to develop and gain strength. The timeline is split up by months, as usual. 1. http://lwn.net/ 2. http://lwn.net/Articles/16858/ New Boot-Floppies for Woody. Eduard Bloch [3]volunteered to [4]coordinate the next release of Debian's boot-floppies. The next update to Debian 3.0 is planned for about two months after r1, so there are at least one and a half months left. The new boot-floppies will fix known outstanding problems in some architectures and include a more recent kernel. 3. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot-0212/msg00798.html 4. http://people.debian.org/~blade/bf3024/ Donations Sought. At the end of this year, several non-profit organizations that support Free Software are seeking donations. For US residents these donations are tax-deductible. Over two thirds of the [5]Free Software Foundation (FSF) budget comes from individual donors. The FSF recently launched their associate [6]membership program. The GNOME Foundation hopes to provide [7]travel grants to some developers attending the annual GUADEC conference. [8]Software in the Public Interest (SPI) accepts [9]donations for the Debian project. 5. http://www.gnu.org/ 6. http://member.fsf.org/ 7. http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2002-December/msg00004.html 8. http://www.spi-inc.org/ 9. http://www.spi-inc.org/donations Automatically Testing Users Existence. Matt Hope [10]noticed that a few packages check /etc/passwd to discover whether a user exists. He thought that this could be a problem in systems that use alternate authentication schemes such as NIS or LDAP. Matt Zimmerman [11]advised him to file bug reports against those packages and ask their respective maintainers to use getent instead. 10. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0212/msg01393.html 11. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0212/msg01413.html GTK+ 2.2 for Debian. Akira Tagoh [12]reported that the GTK+ team has released version 2.2 of the [13]Gimp Toolkit family libraries (GTK+). The libraries are compatible with version 2.0 but trigger a problem in libgnomeui. [14]Hence GNOME 2 won't work with GTK 2.2 but GNOME 2.1 requires it. Therefore Akira intends to upload new packages to unstable interimly. 12. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0212/msg01396.html 13. http://www.gtk.org/ 14. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0212/msg01404.html More Alpha and Sparc Users soon? Jaldhar Vyas [15]informed us that Red Hat [16]stopped official support for all its releases for the Alpha and Sparc architectures. Debian, however, still supports these architectures among others and users enjoy the vast breadth of Free Software, bug fixes, and timely security updates. 15. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0212/msg01319.html 16. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/12/20/1040174386902.html KDE 3.0.5a Packages for Woody. Ralf Nolden [17]announced that he uploaded Debian packages for KDE 3.0.5a to the KDE masterserver. This upload includes the latest security updates for KDE. The archive can be accessed via apt-get from [18]download.us.kde.org/. Packages for KDevelop 2.1.4 were also [19]uploaded the next day. 17. http://lists.debian.org/debian-kde-0212/msg00268.html 18. http://download.us.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/latest/Debian/ 19. http://lists.debian.org/debian-kde-0212/msg00278.html Embedding Debian GNU/Linux in a 32 MB CompactFlash. Bao C. Ha [20]describes the techniques he used to reduce a Debian installation to less than 32 MB. Bao started with debootstrap which created a 121 MB bootable Debian filesystem with VPN/firewall/router functionality. By removing documentation and compressing the root filesystem using the cloop kernel module, he was able to reduce the size to 27.6 MB. The resulting [21]image is designed for the [22]OpenBrick, a small hardware platform optimized for Open Source/Free Software solutions. However, the video card requires a non-free binary only XFree86 release. 20. http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT4540125636.html 21. http://people.debian.org/~bao/ 22. http://www.openbrick.org/ Debian 3.0r1 Update CD Images. Steve McIntyre [23]announced that he has created a set of update CD images that contain new and updated packages from 3.0r1. The images were originally made as two full CDs containing all 11 supported architectures, but upon [24]feedback from Jason Andrade, Steve created separate CDs for each architecture. Although this will take up more disk space, it should be easier for users and also save bandwidth. The files will be downloadable from regular [25]locations when the server is up again, which will take a couple of days. 23. http://lists.debian.org/debian-cd-0212/msg00177.html 24. http://lists.debian.org/debian-cd-0212/msg00182.html 25. http://www.debian.org/CD/ Removing Detritus from /etc. Joey Hess [26]investigated his /etc directory and noticed a lot of cruft left over by package removals that haven't cleaned up properly: dangling symlinks, abandonded directories and so on. He came up with the idea of a special Debian package that checks for any bits of detritus left over by other packages in its own postrm script, and cleans it up. 26. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0212/msg01504.html Rebuilding all Debian Packages. Junichi Uekawa [27]reported about another [28]pbuilder run. Trying to recompile all source packages took from December 9th to 24th on his machine. Only 529 packages failed to build from source, leaving over 6000 packages that built successfully. Gerhard Tonn also tried to [29]recompile all C++ packages with GCC 3.2 prior to it being introduced as the standard compiler. 27. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0212/msg01508.html 28. http://packages.debian.org/pbuilder 29. http://people.debian.org/~gt/gcc-3.2_transition/ Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure that you update your systems if you have any of these packages installed. * [30]typespeed -- Buffer overflow. * [31]Bugzilla -- Cross site scripting. * [32]dhcpcd -- Remote command execution. 30. http://www.debian.org/security/2002/dsa-217 31. http://www.debian.org/security/2002/dsa-218 32. http://www.debian.org/security/2002/dsa-219 New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently or contain important updates. * [33]autossh -- Automatically restart SSH sessions and tunnels. * [34]culmus -- Type1 Hebrew Fonts for X11. * [35]dpatch -- Used for development of dpatch based source packages. * [36]grdesktop -- GTK+ 2 frontend for the rdesktop client. * [37]hsftp -- FTP emulator which uses ssh as end-to-end transport. * [38]illuminator1 -- Illuminator Distributed Visualization Library. * [39]mnemo -- Notes and Memo Application. * [40]nag -- Multiuser Task List Manager. * [41]obexftp -- File Transfer to Flex.Memory on Siemens GSM Mobiles. * [42]penggy -- Allows you to connect to AOL via modem or TCP/IP. * [43]tclxml -- Tcl library for XML parsing. 33. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/autossh.html 34. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/culmus.html 35. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/dpatch.html 36. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/grdesktop.html 37. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/hsftp.html 38. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/illuminator1.html 39. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/mnemo.html 40. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/nag.html 41. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/comm/obexftp.html 42. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/penggy.html 43. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/tclxml.html Orphaned Packages. 12 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 165 orphaned packages. Many thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free Software community. Please see the [44]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. 44. http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/ * [45]addressbook -- Personal address manager. ([46]Bug#174699) * [47]autolog -- Terminates connections for idle users. ([48]Bug#174336) * [49]btoa -- Convert binary to ascii and vice versa. ([50]Bug#174346) * [51]calctool -- An X window version of the popular Open Look calculator. ([52]Bug#174701) * [53]cle -- Wrap any command-line driven tool with readline. ([54]Bug#174555) * [55]koth -- King of the Hill. ([56]Bug#174548) * [57]lgrind -- A pretty printer for various programming languages. ([58]Bug#174702) * [59]man2html -- Turns a web-browser and an httpd-server into a man pager. ([60]Bug#174343) * [61]mathwar -- A flash card game designed to teach maths. ([62]Bug#174700) * [63]sted2 -- Fast, functional MIDI sequencer. ([64]Bug#174596) * [65]translate-docformat -- Any-to-any document translation system. ([66]Bug#174597) * [67]xinvaders -- Space Invaders game for X. ([68]Bug#174347) 45. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/misc/addressbook.html 46. http://bugs.debian.org/174699 47. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/autolog.html 48. http://bugs.debian.org/174336 49. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/btoa.html 50. http://bugs.debian.org/174346 51. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/math/calctool.html 52. http://bugs.debian.org/174701 53. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/cle.html 54. http://bugs.debian.org/174555 55. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/koth.html 56. http://bugs.debian.org/174548 57. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/tex/lgrind.html 58. http://bugs.debian.org/174702 59. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/doc/man2html.html 60. http://bugs.debian.org/174343 61. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/mathwar.html 62. http://bugs.debian.org/174700 63. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/sted2.html 64. http://bugs.debian.org/174596 65. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/text/translate-docformat.html 66. http://bugs.debian.org/174597 67. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/xinvaders.html 68. http://bugs.debian.org/174347 Want to continue reading DWN? Please help us create this newsletter. Several people are submitting items already, but we are still in need of volunteer writers who prepare items. Please see the [69]contributing page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at [70][email protected]. 69. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing 70. mailto:[email protected] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
Debian Weekly News – December 31st, 2002
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