Debian Weekly News – March 4, 2003

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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2003/09/
Debian Weekly News - March 4th, 2003
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Welcome to this year's 9th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the
Debian community. Today's issue is a little bit short, so the next one
will probably be a little bit longer. Marek Habersack [1]informed us
about an [2]article about Linux security - a continuing joke. It made
us laugh.

 1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-curiosa-0302/msg00048.html
 2. http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=7598

GNOME 2.2 for Debian Woody. Jamie Strandboge [3]announced on
DesktopLinux.com that he has backported GNOME packages from Debian
unstable, which have been recompiled to run on Debian stable. The list
of packages also include Gnucash, Mozilla, Galeon and Evolution. To
use the packages you only need to add a line to your sources.list
file.

 3. http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS8212380009.html

New Mailing Lists created. Anand Kumria [4]announced several new
lists to support work for non-english languages. Additionally the
[5]deity has been opened to the public and a [6]debian-accessibility
has been created. Earlier he [7]announced that he had installed razor
and crossassassin to reduce the number of spam mails distributed
through the Debian lists.

 4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0302/msg00014.html
 5. http://lists.debian.org/deity/
 6. http://people.debian.org/~mlang/DebianAccessibilityProject.html
 7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0302/msg00000.html

Debian Support for RISC Architectures. Andrew Buckeridge [8]pointed
out that HP, SGI, Sun and IBM are supporting their own architecture
together with their own proprietary operating system. All four,
however, also push the x86 architecture together with GNU/Linux. He
asks anybody interested in these ports to contact their hardware
vendors to clarify support for GNU/Linux, since Debian [9]supports
all of them.

 8. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project-0301/msg00052.html
 9. http://www.debian.org/ports/

New Maintainer Reports. Martin Michlmayr [10]recently [11]announced 18
new maintainers that were accepted by the Debian project. He [12]says
that since Debian is growing so much, it's good to have a [13]listing
of new members together with a little background of them.

 10. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project-0302/msg00076.html
 11. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project-0302/msg00077.html
 12. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0302/msg00015.html
 13. http://nm.debian.org/~tbm/nm-report.html

Out of sync Packages in Testing? Jérôme Marant [14]proposed to let a
package enter the testing distribution when it compiles on some
architectures without the need to compile on all. He believes that a
package should enter testing as soon as possible so it can be tested
by interested users. Anthony Towns [15]said that this would be
problematic since there is only one source package per suite. Colin
Watson finally [16]wondered why so many people are more concerned with
juggling infrastructure details rather than fixing the bugs.

 14. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0302/msg01770.html
 15. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0302/msg01880.html
 16. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0302/msg01863.html

More Release Proposals. Jaldhar Vyas [17]proposed an update for woody
with several backported packages, a central source repository and the
permission for all maintainers to fix bugs, and to stop releasing at
all since this could be done by third parties. Jesus Climent [18]added
that HispaLinux started to create personalised Debian releases
targeted at concrete groups of users (such as universities, education
facilities, government etc.).

 17. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0302/msg01801.html
 18. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0302/msg01849.html

Ceasing unmaintained Documentation. Adam DiCarlo [19]proposed removing
manuals which are obsoleted or unmaintained. He would like to clean up
some unmaintained documents and focus our efforts in a single place.
He asked for opinions about merging the tutorial, user manual, Debian
guide, system administrator guide and the network administrator guide
with the well maintained Debian [20]reference.

 19. http://lists.debian.org/debian-doc-0302/msg00067.html
 20. http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/reference/reference

Debian used for Security Appliance. LinuxDevices [21]reports that
[22]Innominate Security Technologies will unveil what it calls the
"world's smallest security appliance" at the Intel Developer Forum.
Debian GNU/Linux is the first choice as base operating system for
Innominate when developing standard and customized security appliances
since years. Current products are based on version 2.2 and 3.0. While
using Open Source for product development, Innominate of course also
is anxious to [23]contribute their own code.

 21. http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS3541709526.html
 22. http://www.innominate.com/
 23. http://innominate.org/

Report from Hamburger Computer Tage. Jan Palic finished his [24]report
about the Debian presence at Hamburger Computer Tage at the end of
January. Debian was invited to staff a booth and give two talks in
addition to many other talks covering GNU/Linux. The Debian booth was
subject of interest by many visitors during the entire exhibition.

 24. http://www.debian.org/events/2003/0123-hct-report

Report from FOSDEM. Christoph Siess sent in his [25]report about the
Debian presence at the Free and Open Source Software Developers'
Meeting (FOSDEM). The Debian project maintained a booth that attracted
a lot of developers. Martin Michmayr gave a talk about Embedded Debian
and Russell Coker spoke about SE Linux which attracted quite some
visitors.

 25. http://www.debian.org/events/2003/0208-fosdem-report

Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure that you update
your systems if you have any of these packages installed.

 * [26]traceroute-nanog -- Buffer overflow.
 * [27]tcpdump -- Denial of service.
 * [28]mhc -- Predictable temporary filename.

 26. http://www.debian.org/security/2003/dsa-254
 27. http://www.debian.org/security/2003/dsa-255
 28. http://www.debian.org/security/2003/dsa-256

New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the
unstable Debian archive recently or contain important updates.

 * [29]cadaver -- Command-line client for WebDAV server.
 * [30]enemies-of-carlotta -- Mailing list manager.
 * [31]galculator -- A GTK+ 2.0 based calculator.
 * [32]ibackup -- Automated backups (even remote) of machine
   configurations.
 * [33]kphone -- Graphical IP phone client.
 * [34]multisync -- A program to synchronize PIM data.
 * [35]sig2dot -- Converts a list of GPG signatures to a .dot file.
 * [36]springgraph -- Creates a graph from a .dot file (neato
   alternative).
 * [37]vegastrike-music -- Music files for vegastrike.
 * [38]xmaxima -- A fairly complete computer algebra system-- x
   interface.

 29. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/cadaver.html
 30. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/mail/enemies-of-carlotta.html
 31. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/math/galculator.html
 32. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/ibackup.html
 33. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/comm/kphone.html
 34. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/multisync.html
 35. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/graphics/sig2dot.html
 36. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/graphics/springgraph.html
 37. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/vegastrike-music.html
 38. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/math/xmaxima.html

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 39. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
 40. mailto:dwn@debian.org