Debian Weekly News – May 8th, 2002

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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2002/19/
Debian Weekly News - May 8th, 2002
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Welcome to this year's nineteenth issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter
for the Debian community.

Hardware Detection Libraries. People keep thinking that Debian does
not come with any sort of hardware detection. This is wrong, as Petter
Reinholdtsen [1]demonstrated, when he wondered why Debian has so many
hardware detection packages. [2]Jeff Licquia and [3]Noël Köthe
replied and explained the virtue and history of each.

 1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0204/msg02132.html
 2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0204/msg02415.html
 3. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0205/msg00024.html

Open Standards: Principles and Practice. One of the problems Bruce
Perens is [4]facing when he is representing SPI and Debian in various
standards organisations is that every one of them has a different
definition of an Open Standard. Almost all standards organizations
allow the incorporation of software patents, discriminatory licensing,
or other features that seriously damage the "open-ness" of the
standard. Thus, Bruce is [5]presenting to you the first draft of
[6]Open Standards: Principles and Practice with a link for the
disucssion list.

 4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0204/msg02451.html
 5. http://perens.com/OpenStandards/
 6. http://perens.com/OpenStandards/Definition.html

New European Debian Machine. Wichert Akkerman [7]announced a new
machine to host certain parts of Debian in Europe. As pandora has been
suffering from a lack of diskspace and intermittent networking
problems for a while now, it will be replaced by satie, which is a
VA2240 donated by [8]VA Linux Systems and hosted by the [9]Student
Net Twente of the [10]University of Twente. Pandora has hosted [11]QA,
[12]NM, [13]non-US and [14]security.debian.org/.

 7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0204/msg00019.html
 8. http://www.valinux.com/
 9. http://www.snt.utwente.nl/
 10. http://www.utwente.nl/
 11. http://qa.debian.org/
 12. http://nm.debian.org/
 13. http://non-US.debian.org/
 14. http://security.debian.org/

New Debian Developers' Reference Structure. Adam di Carlo
[15]announced his first draft of a thorough re-organization of the
[16]New Debian Developers' Reference which is available [17]here. His
intent of the re-organization is to collect the duties, resources,
packaging hints, and other things to do beyond packaging in their own
chapters.

 15. http://lists.debian.org/debian-doc-0205/msg00086.html
 16. http://www.debian.org/doc/developers-reference/
 17. http://people.debian.org/~aph/developers-reference/developers-reference.html/index.en.html#contents

Debian Preinstalled on HP Blade Server. This will be of interest
mostly for those of you who use Debian in a professional environment.
Hewlett-Packard announced that their [18]HP Blade Server bh7800 are
delivered with Debian GNU/Linux (2.2r3) [19]preinstalled. The HP Blade
Server bh7800 contains multiple server blades. Each server blade is a
single-board computer, running a separate operating system.

 18. http://www.software.hp.com/blade-servers/
 19. http://www.software.hp.com/blade-servers/debian_img.htm

Subproject Howto. Ben Armstrong [20]started writing a
[21]subproject-howto in debiandoc sgml. Based on the experiences
starting and sustaining a development subproject within Debian, Ben
Armstrong explains how to start a subproject within Debian, and why
they are important to the vitality and quality of Debian.

 20. http://lists.debian.org/debian-doc-0205/msg00069.html
 21. http://people.debian.org/~synrg/subproject-howto.html/

Debiandoc-SGML Version 2. Osamu Aoki [22]started to discuss
improvements for the next generation document generation. Since Woody
is practically frozen and debiandoc-sgml is in a very complete shape
for the release, it seems to be time to collect a list of requested
improvements. He already supplied an initial list of items he would
like to have changed.

 22. http://lists.debian.org/debian-doc-0205/msg00040.html

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

 * [23]fnorb -- A pure Python ORB.
 * [24]libncp -- Shared library used by programs that use NetWare
   Core Protocol.
 * [25]lvm2 -- The Linux Logical Volume Manager.
 * [26]mkdecbootcd -- A tool for making CDs bootable on DECstations.
 * [27]tolua -- Tool to integrate C/C++ code with Lua.
 * [28]wmufo -- This is wmseti on steroids!.
 * [29]xbindkeys -- associate a combination of keys or mouse buttons
   with a shell command.

 23. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/interpreters/fnorb.html
 24. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/libs/libncp.html
 25. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/admin/lvm2.html
 26. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/otherosfs/mkdecbootcd.html
 27. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/tolua.html
 28. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/x11/wmufo.html
 29. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/x11/xbindkeys.html

Orphaned Packages. 1 package was orphaned this week and requires a new
maintainer. This makes a total of 83 orphaned packages. Many thanks to
the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free Software
community. Please see the [30]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.

 30. http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/

 * [31]netspades -- server/client spades system. ([32]Bug#145496)

 31. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/netspades-gtk.html
 32. http://bugs.debian.org/145496

Seen something interesting? Please drop us a note whenever you see
something noteworthy that you think is appropriate for inclusion in
DWN. We don't see everything, unfortunately, and this month will be a
busy one for us. Of course, we are also thankful for completely
written items from volunteer writers. We're looking forward to
receiving your mail at [33]dwn@debian.org.

 33. mailto:dwn@debian.org