Debian Weekly News - December 21st, 2004

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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2004/50/
Debian Weekly News - December 21st, 2004
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Welcome to this year's 50th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. The Oxford University's computer centre will
[1]complete its move to PostgreSQL running on Debian as the back-end
database over the next year. The next [2]stable update is being
[3]prepared and expected before New Year's eve. For those of you who
celebrate Christmas we wish you a Merry Christmas.

 1. http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/applications/0,39020384,39173013,00.htm
 2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2004/12/msg00134.html
 3. http://people.debian.org/~joey/3.0r4/

Sarge Release Progress Update. Andreas Barth sent in an [4]update on
the release progress for Debian 3.1. He reported that GNOME 2.8 has
been added to sarge and that a kernel update is inadvertently binary
incompatible with its predecessor. The KDE maintainers have presented
a plan for getting KDE 3.3 into testing that meets the release team's
requirements.

 4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2004/12/msg00006.html

Debian GNU/Hurd supports large Partitions. The latest [5]upload of
the [6]hurd package features a [7]patch by Ognyan Kulev which has
support for ext2 partitions larger than 2 GB on 32 bit systems. A
Kerneltrap [8]story has more details on the history and
implementation of the [9]patch. Over the last years, this limit had
become an increasingly annoying issue of the GNU/Hurd system, so this
change represents an important milestone for Debian's GNU/Hurd
[10]port with respect to user expectations.

 5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2004/12/msg00874.html
 6. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/base/hurd
 7. http://debian.fmi.uni-sofia.bg/~ogi/hurd/ext3fs/
 8. http://kerneltrap.org/node/4429
 9. http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2004-01/msg00095.html
 10. http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/

Packaging the Katie Suite. Andreas Barth [11]reported that he has
installed [12]DAK (the Debian Archive Kit) on volatile.debian.net. The
installation of packages prepared by Jörg Jaspert went quite painless.
It has integrated proper NEW handling and some staging area for the
review before inclusion.

 11. http://blogs.turmzimmer.net/2004/12/19#katie-volatile
 12. http://ganneff.de/blog/2004/12/19#dak2

Debian on AMD64. Ladislav Bodnar [13]reviewed the unofficial port of
Debian to the AMD64 architecture, noting that almost all the Free
Software he uses is already in the archive, with the notable exception
of OpenOffice.org. He discussed use of an i386 chroot to run legacy
32 bit software and described the installer as "rather dull (in a
positive sense of the word)".

 13. http://lwn.net/Articles/113527/

Standard CDD Tool? Sergio Talens-Oliag finished a [14]proposal for a
tool to be used by the custom Debian distribution (CDD) developers. It
tries to standardise the way developers define their CDD and provide
tools to distribute, install, update and manage the customised system.
Comments should be sent to the [15]debian-custom list.

 14. http://wiki.debian.net/index.cgi?CDDTool
 15. http://lists.debian.org/debian-custom/

Unattended Debian Installations. Carla Schroder posted the [16]second
part of her tutorial on installing Debian using Fully Automatic
Installation (FAI). The [17]first part covered the basic configuration
for a Debian FAI server, whilst the second part explained
configuration of the client installations - network server settings,
what software is going to be installed and the client boot methods.
She concluded that although initial configuration of FAI can get
complicated, it is perfect for mixed networks that contain different
kinds of PCs and once it's set up client installations are
lightning-fast.

 16. http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/5675/1/
 17. http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/5667/1/

Debian Project at FOSDEM? Wouter Verhelst [18]called for help for the
Debian presence at next year's [19]FOSDEM (Free and Open Source
Developers European Meeting). The developers room is well on its way
with five confirmed talks already, but for the booth, more people are
required.

 18. http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-eu/2004/12/msg00001.html
 19. http://www.fosdem.org/2005/

Status of the Debian AMD64 Port. Due to an older [20]mail accidently
processed again, Martin Michlmayr [21]stated that all technical
concerns were addressed and that the port would go in after the mirror
issues will be sorted out, which will happen some point after the
release of sarge.

 20. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/12/msg01105.html
 21. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/12/msg01137.html

Packaging OSSP Packages for Debian. Raphael Bossek [22]proposed a
common naming scheme for software packages derived from [23]OSSP
software. Since Debian already contains packages and files with the
same name conflicts are preassigned. Basically he proposed using a
common prefix which is what Piotr Roszatycki has already
[24]implemented.

 22. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/12/msg01567.html
 23. http://www.ossp.org/
 24. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/12/msg01742.html

Reporting Bugs in Debian or Upstream? Ian Wienand [25]wondered where
he should file a bug in a GNOME package since the GNOME project
maintains a bug tracking system as well. Paul Hampson [26]replied and
proposed to file the bug upstream and then open a Debian bug report
with that reference. Thomas Bushnell, however, [27]pointed out that
the regular way would be to file a bug in Debian and let the package
maintainer forward the bug to the software authors.

 25. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/12/msg01656.html
 26. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/12/msg01659.html
 27. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/12/msg01991.html

German Free Software License. Martin Michlmayr [28]reported that he
was approached in September by a research institute in Germany about a
new [29]software license. The authors are interested in making sure
that the license conforms with both the [30]Open Source Definition as
well as the [31]Debian Free Software Guidelines and seek comments now
that the license is published.

 28. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/12/msg00123.html
 29. http://www.d-fsl.org/
 30. http://www.opensource.org/
 31. http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines

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

 * DSA 610: [32]cscope -- Insecure temporary file creation.
 * DSA 611: [33]htget -- Arbitrary code execution.
 * DSA 612: [34]a2ps -- Arbitrary code execution.
 * DSA 613: [35]ethereal -- Denial of service.
 * DSA 614: [36]xzgv -- Arbitrary code execution.

 32. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-610
 33. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-611
 34. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-612
 35. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-613
 36. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-614

New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the
unstable Debian archive [37]recently or contain important updates.

 37. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/newpkg_main

 * [38]aewan -- Ascii-art Editor Without A Name.
 * [39]ara-byte -- CLI utility for searching the Debian package
   database.
 * [40]fortunes-bg -- Bulgarian data files for fortune.
 * [41]gimp-ufraw -- GIMP importer for raw images.
 * [42]gpsd -- GPS (Global Positioning System) service daemon.
 * [43]henplus -- JDBC SQL command line frontend with TAB-completion.
 * [44]kmldonkey -- KDE GUI for MLDonkey.
 * [45]mail-notification -- Mail notification in system tray.
 * [46]mod-chroot-common -- Run Apache in a secure chroot
   environment.
 * [47]moniwiki -- MoniWiki is yet another WikiEngine written in PHP.
 * [48]ngspice -- Mixed-level/mixed-signal circuit simulator.
 * [49]uniconfd -- Server that manages UniConf elements.
 * [50]wsola -- Allows one to speed/slow audio without altering its
   pitch.
 * [51]zope-kupu -- Cross-browser document-centric WYSIWYG editor for
   Zope.
 * [52]zope-linguaplone -- Multilingual and translation solution for
   Plone.
 * [53]zsync -- Client-side implementation of the rsync algorithm.

 38. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/text/aewan
 39. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/ara-byte
 40. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/fortunes-bg
 41. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/graphics/gimp-ufraw
 42. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/misc/gpsd
 43. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/henplus
 44. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/kmldonkey
 45. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/gnome/mail-notification
 46. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/mod-chroot-common
 47. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/moniwiki
 48. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/electronics/ngspice
 49. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/uniconfd
 50. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/wsola
 51. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/zope-kupu
 52. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/zope-linguaplone
 53. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/zsync

Orphaned Packages. 1 package was orphaned this week and requires a new
maintainer. This makes a total of 226 orphaned packages. Many thanks
to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free Software
community. Please see the [54]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.

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

 * [55]guppi -- GNOME graph and plot component. ([56]Bug#286012)

 55. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/libguppi16
 56. http://bugs.debian.org/286012

Want to continue reading DWN? Please help us create this newsletter.
We still need more volunteer writers who watch the Debian community
and report about what is going on. Please see the [57]contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your
mail at [58]dwn@debian.org.

 57. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
 58. mailto:dwn@debian.org


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