Debian Weekly News – October 29th, 2002

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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2002/42/
Debian Weekly News - October 29th, 2002
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Welcome to this year's 42nd issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. This week we are pleased to include items by
Matt Black and Andre Lehovich. As if we didn't know this already,
IndustryWeek [1]reports that more and more companies are adopting
Linux. After reading many of the posts regarding the recent Debian
review Clinton De Young took the opportunity and wrote a very verbose
[2]installation walkthrough. The Danish Board of Technology
[3]suggested the use of an open exchange format for text documents
within the public administration, paving the way for Free Software.

 1. http://www.industryweek.com/CurrentArticles/Asp/articles.asp?ArticleId=1344
 2. http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=2016
 3. http://lwn.net/Articles/13301/

Debian Desktop Subproject Initiated. Colin Walters [4]started the
[5]Debian desktop subproject that aims at bringing Debian, GNU, and
Linux to the mainstream world. The goal is to create the best possible
operating system for home and corporate workstation use. In short,
this subproject wants to ensure that installing, configuring, and
using Debian is as easy and foolproof as possible. Slashdot [6]notes
that the Debian Project is now officially addressing its usability on
the desktop.

 4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0210/msg00016.html
 5. http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-desktop/
 6. http://slashdot.org/articles/02/10/24/128257.shtml

New Progeny Graphical Installer Images. John Daily [7]writes that, in
light of recent negative reviews of the current Debian distribution in
which the installer was roundly criticized, it may be interesting for
users to know about PGI. [8]Progeny has made available an [9]image
based on PGI, the Progeny Graphical Installer for the i386
architecture, targetting Debian 3.0 (woody).

 7. http://slashdot.org/articles/02/10/24/0025210.shtml
 8. http://www.progeny.com/
 9. http://archive.progeny.com/progeny/pgi/

Geek Activism forces Congress to reconsider Open Source. Robin Miller
[10]writes on Newsforge about how Open Source advocates are lobbying
the U.S. congress as members decide which software licenses are and
are not allowed for release of [11]government-sponsored software. The
original letter had no anti-GPL language in it, but language was added
by a Representative from Washington State whose largest campaign
donation [12]source is a well-known corporation.

 10. http://newsforge.com/newsforge/02/10/24/1739254.shtml?tid=19
 11. http://newsvac.newsforge.com/newsvac/02/10/23/1247236.shtml?tid=4
 12. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10655-2002Oct24.html

Debian at UK Linux Expo 2002. Wookey wrote a [13]report about the
Debian booth at this years' Debian at UK Linux Expo 2002. Phil Hands
gave a talk on Debian and Free Software. The trend of recent years
continued with a large contingent of Debian/ARM showing off
interesting devices and entertaining the visitors. Debian/NetBSD was
also demonstrated at the booth.

 13. http://www.debian.org/events/2002/1009-linuxexpo-report

LWN Subscription for Debian Developers. Bdale Garbee [14]announced
that he has arranged group access for Debian developers to [15]Linux
Weekly News (LWN). They offered to treat Debian developers as a group,
and HP offered to fund Debian's subscription fee. His thanks go to
both parties for their continuing support of the Debian development
community. If you're a Debian developer and you want to have full
access to LWN, you should create an normal account first and contact
him afterwards.

 14. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0210/msg00018.html
 15. http://lwn.net/

Removing Packages from Unstable. Anthony Towns [16]reported that he
plans to remove a large set of packages from unstable which look like
they are not maintained anymore. These packages are listed on one
[17]page denoted with the string [REMOVE]. This would remove packages
like Emacs20, kaffee, kpackage and RFC packages.

 16. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0210/msg00019.html
 17. http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/other/all.html

GNOME 2 Transition. Colin Walters finally [18]announced that the GNOME
2 Desktop will be uploaded to unstable this Sunday (Oct 27th), and it
will replace the GNOME 1.4 Desktop. However due to weather delays the
upload did not occur on schedule; upload from incoming to unstable is
in progress and should complete over the next few days. Looks like the
[19]plan to keep GNOME 1 while working on GNOME 2 was reverted. Third
party applications like Evolution and others should continue to work,
though. Colin and Christian Marillat even wrote transition scripts for
.gnome directories.

 18. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0210/msg01770.html
 19. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2002/36/

Auditing the Debian Distribution. It's been [20]reported that Steve
Kemp started a [21]project in which he tries to track down software
that is susceptible to buffer overflow attacks, etc. Drew Scott
Daniels started a related [22]project which is a more general audit,
but only a rough automated audit which may make developers and code
auditor's jobs easier. Both projects could use more manpower.

 20. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0210/msg02133.html
 21. http://www.steve.org.uk/Debian/
 22. http://sourceforge.net/projects/debraudit/

Including the VESA Framebuffer? There is a [23]dispute discussed on
the list for the Technical Committee concerning the VESA framebuffer.
Eduard Bloch would like to see this framebuffer included in the Debian
kernel image package, however, Herbert Xu [24]argued against this, and
he's the maintainer. The upstream author [25]noted that this
framebuffer is not used by default, though.

 23. http://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte-0210/msg00021.html
 24. http://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte-0210/msg00040.html
 25. http://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte-0210/msg00038.html

MPlayer to be added to Debian? The latest release of MPlayer
[26]announced that the DivX4 code is finally released under the GNU
[27]General Public License (GPL). Apparently, this was the [28]only
source code that was not GPL'd, so this may ease [29]earlier work at
getting MPlayer into the Debian main archive.

 26. http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/
 27. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
 28. http://mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-users/2002-July/017647.html
 29. http://www.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-dev-eng/2002-April/007279.html

Debian: The Past, The Present and the Future. Christoph Lameter gave a
[30]talk Tuesday at the Free Software Symposium in Tokyo. In the talk
he gave an overview of Debian and discusses packaging and core
elements. Although Christoph calls it "very superficial stuff; not for
hardcore people", there are nice graphs on the statistics for
maintainers, packages and architectures over time and an attempt to
extrapolate the future development from those.

 30. http://telemetrybox.org/tokyo/

Cdrdao License Issue Resolved. Earlier this month there was [31]debate
about the non-free library libedc_ecc which is used in the cdrdao
package. Andreas Metzler has now [32]advised that the issue has been
resolved upstream and the libedc_ecc library is finally released under
the GNU GPL.

 31. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal-0210/msg00005.html
 32. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal-0210/msg00232.html

Desktop Linux Summit. Major technology companies and DesktopLinux.com
[33]announced their sponsorship of the inaugural [34]Desktop Linux
Summit. The Summit will be devoted to GNU/Linux on the Desktop and the
companies involved are trying to make 2003 the 'Year of Desktop
Linux'. The summit will be held in San Diego on Feb 20-21, 2003.

 33. http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS7709909925.html
 34. http://www.desktoplinux.com/summit/

Debian and the LSB. Jason Lim [35]started a discussion about the
Debian distribution not being certified by the [36]Linux Standard Base
(LSB), while other distributions were [37]certified. However, after a
[38]hint about the [39]lsb package people continued to exchange their
experience to use Debian as a commercial software platform.

 35. http://lists.debian.org/debian-isp-0210/msg00036.html
 36. http://www.linuxbase.org/
 37. http://news.com.com/2100-1001-961296.html
 38. http://lists.debian.org/debian-isp-0210/msg00040.html
 39. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/misc/lsb.html

Debian/OpenBSD ceased. Andreas Schuldei [40]announced that he is
discontinuing the effort to combine OpenBSD and Debian. He found out
that there are several indications that security in OpenBSD is mostly
at the same level as it is in Debian. Since the reason to work on this
port was primary to provide a more secure environment for Debian users
this port doesn't seem to be worthwhile anymore.

 40. http://lists.debian.org/debian-bsd-0210/msg00063.html

License Clarification for Debian/NetBSD. Joel Baker sent a
[41]clarification request to Richard Stallman. Files in the NetBSD
source tree use widely varying licenses. While source code owned by
the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) is unproblematic, the
NetBSD Foundation previously expressed a resistance to requests to
move from an old BSD license to a revised one without the advertising
clause. Such code is not compatible with the GNU GPL.

 41. http://lists.debian.org/debian-bsd-0210/msg00039.html

News from Debian/EDU. Raphaël Hertzog [42]announced that debian-edu
metapackages were added to the Debian archive. He's looking for
volunteers for various tasks like [43]wiki editors, web editors for
[44]www.debian.org, documentation writers and people who maintain
packages with educational aspects.

 42. http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-0210/msg00005.html
 43. http://wiki.debian.net/DebianEdu
 44. http://www.debian.org/

Global Technology Policy Institute Created. Bruce Perens, former
Debian developer and project leader, sent out a [45]call for donations
to set up the [46]Global Technology Policy Institute (GTPI), a new
non-profit organization focusing on Free Software issues. GTPI will
operate under section 501(c)6 of the US tax code, allowing it to
engage in political activism. Other non-profits such as [47]Software
in the Public Interest, Inc. use section 501(c)3 of the tax code which
limits their political activity, but allows them to receive
tax-deductible donations. Among other issues, GTPI will lobby to
protect publicly-funded researcher's right to release their code under
the GNU GPL.

 45. http://www.techp.org/Articles/CallForDonations.html
 46. http://www.techp.org/
 47. http://www.spi-inc.org/

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

 * [48]kghostview -- Buffer overflow.
 * [49]kerberos 5 -- Buffer overflow.

 48. http://www.debian.org/security/2002/dsa-182
 49. http://www.debian.org/security/2002/dsa-183

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

 * [50]cameleon -- Integrated development environment for OCaml.
 * [51]epydoc -- Edward Loper's API Documentation Generation Tool for
   Python.
 * [52]fnord -- Yet another small httpd.
 * [53]ijsgimpprint -- Inkjet Server - Ghostscript driver for
   GIMP-Print.
 * [54]mlchat -- Small peer-to-peer chat application.
 * [55]runit -- UNIX init scheme with service supervision.
 * [56]xstroke -- X11 Pen-based Character input.

 50. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/cameleon.html
 51. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/interpreters/epydoc.html
 52. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/fnord.html
 53. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/text/ijsgimpprint.html
 54. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/mlchat.html
 55. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/runit.html
 56. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/xstroke.html

Orphaned Packages. 12 packages were orphaned this week and require a
new maintainer. This makes a total of 143 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free
Software community. Please see the [57]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.

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

 * [58]cbb -- The Check-Book Balancer, a Quicken clone.
   ([59]Bug#166249)
 * [60]filemenu-applet -- A directory navigation GNOME applet.
   ([61]Bug#166131)
 * [62]g5 -- gtk-based 5-in-a-row game. ([63]Bug#165500)
 * [64]geas -- GNU Enterprise Application Server. ([65]Bug#166331)
 * [66]gnome-objc -- Objective-c bindings for gtk/gnome
   ([67]Bug#165642)
 * [68]gnue-common -- The shared library for many items of the GNU
   Enterprise Framework. ([69]Bug#166339)
 * [70]gnue-designer -- Rapid Application Development tool for GNU
   Enterprise. ([71]Bug#166343)
 * [72]gnue-forms -- An XML-based forms painter. ([73]Bug#166351)
 * [74]junit-freenet -- basic reimplementation of the JUnit unit
   testing framework. ([75]Bug#165504)
 * [76]kdestudio -- Development environment for KDE. ([77]Bug#166847)
 * [78]konverse -- Jabber client for KDE. ([79]Bug#166846)
 * [80]scannerdaemon -- Virus scanner written in Java.
   ([81]Bug#166545)

 58. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/misc/cbb.html
 59. http://bugs.debian.org/166249
 60. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/filemenu-applet.html
 61. http://bugs.debian.org/166131
 62. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/g5.html
 63. http://bugs.debian.org/165500
 64. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/geas.html
 65. http://bugs.debian.org/166331
 66. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/libobgnome0.html
 67. http://bugs.debian.org/165642
 68. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/interpreters/gnue-common.html
 69. http://bugs.debian.org/166339
 70. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/gnue-designer.html
 71. http://bugs.debian.org/166343
 72. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/interpreters/gnue-forms.html
 73. http://bugs.debian.org/166351
 74. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/junit-freenet.html
 75. http://bugs.debian.org/165504
 76. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/kdestudio.html
 77. http://bugs.debian.org/166847
 78. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/konverse.html
 79. http://bugs.debian.org/166846
 80. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/mail/scannerdaemon.html
 81. http://bugs.debian.org/166545

Want to continue reading DWN? Please help us create this newsletter.
Currently, it's mostly a one-man show, which is anticipated to fail in
the long term. We urgently need volunteer writers who prepare items.
Please see the [82]contributing page to find out how to help. We're
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 82. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
 83. mailto:dwn@debian.org