Debian Weekly News – May 14th, 2001

From:   Debian Weekly News <dwn@debian.org>
Subject:        Debian Weekly News - May 14th, 2001
Date:   14 May 2001 23:19:06 +0200
 

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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2001/11/
Debian Weekly News - May 14th, 2001
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You like us, you really like us! We got a slew of letters (well,
emails...) saying that it was good to see DWN back. Thanks for the
show of support, we'll do our best to keep you informed! A big Kudos
to Joey Hess for providing helpful guidance.

Boot floppy success. Santiago Garcia Mantinan [1]reports that he has
had success with a complete install of Woody using the new boot
floppies, and a few modifications of his own. And there was much
rejoicing... A little later, an [2]updated progress report, was
posted. According to this, the freeze will start in June.

Why care about boot floppies? A few inquisitive minds wanted to know
what all the fuss about boot floppies was, when they just wanted to
install from CD-ROM. The software used for installation are all
designed to fit on floppy disks, though they may actually reside on
CD-ROM, a hard drive, hard disk or on a network. For instance, you can
download a bootable image sized for 1.2MB, 1.44MB or 2.88MB floppies -
but that image can actually reside on just about any bootable media
that your system can handle. Floppy disks were a much more common
install method several years ago, though many folks install from
CD-ROM or do a network install rather than fussing with floppies.

Tasks policy proposal. Anthony Towns [3]raised the topic of creating
a proper tasks policy for Woody. Anthony proposes a set of guidelines
for task-* packages that would make a task-* package more flexible,
and allow for selection of packages rather than all packages mentioned
in the task header.

Separate phases. Glenn McGrath [4]proposed separating the preparation
and installation phases of the Debian installer to make the installer
more versatile. Debian-installer is the installer project for the
version of Debian after woody. It has a whole new design, while
boot-floppies are going to be used for the last time for woody.

Security notices. Several packages have been the subject of Debian
Security Alerts this week. If you're using Zope, mandb, gftp or Samba,
be sure to visit the [5]Debian Security Page for information on
upgrading to newer versions.

JBuilder4 on Debian/PPC. In case you want to run JBuilder4 on PPC,
Franck Routier was kind enough to contribute his success story and
[6]instructions on getting it running. Thanks for the report, Franck!

Package list for 2.2r4 A list of proposed updated packages for 2.2r4
was [7]announced by Martin Schulze.

New packages this week. New to Debian this week are the IDS filesystem
checker [8]fcheck, the Java VM [9]japhar, XFS filesystem support
[10]kernel-patch-xfs, the [11]serpento dict server and [12]vcr, a
video capture program.

Have a suggestion?
If you've got a suggestion, comment or news item for us send it to
[13]dwn@debian.org.

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References
  1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot-0105/msg00071.html
  2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0105/msg00003.html
  3. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot-0105/msg00075.html
  4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot-0105/msg00110.html
  5. http://www.debian.org/security/
  6. http://lists.debian.org/debian-java-0105/msg00004.html
  7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0105/msg00005.html
  8. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/fcheck.html
  9. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/interpreters/japhar.html
  10. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/kernel-patch-xfs.html
  11. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/text/serpento.html
  12. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/graphics/vcr.html
  13. mailto:dwn@debian.org