Debian Weekly News - September 14th, 2004

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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2004/36/
Debian Weekly News - September 14th, 2004
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Welcome to this year's 36th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. Graham Williams has written a [1]book entitled
Debian GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide which is intended to deliver a
fun and productive environment. It guides you through the many
different regions of a GNU/Linux system with a focus on getting your
desktop environment to do what you want it to do.

 1. http://www.togaware.com/linux/survivor/

Preparation of Sarge CD and DVD Images. Steve McIntyre [2]explained
how dual layer DVD discs work and mentioned the types of CD and DVD he
would like to see supported for the upcoming sarge release. This
includes business card and network installation ISO images as well as
full 13 or 15 CD image sets for each architecture. He also mentioned
two 4.7 GB size DVD images and one 8.5 GB size double layer DVD image
for each architecture. The latter should only be provided via
[3]jigdo, though.

 2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-cd/2004/09/msg00042.html
 3. http://www.debian.org/CD/jigdo-cd/

Using Debian in commercial Environments. Somebody [4]asked on
Slashdot about experience shoe-horning Debian into a commercial
scenario when the third-party vendor (IBM) doesn't officially support
this distribution. He also mentioned about anecdotal evidence that
most of such software can be persuaded to work on Debian as well.

 4. http://ask.slashdot.org/askslashdot/04/09/07/2219255.shtml

GNOME 2.6 Transition complete. Jordi Mallach [5]reported that the
transition of GNOME 2.6 into sarge is finished. The last missing
package from the GNOME meta package, [6]Eye of GNOME has finally
entered testing. The only missing package is [7]gdm 2.6 which will
allow GNOME users to shutdown the computer directly when they close
their session.

 5. http://oskuro.net/blog/freesoftware/gnome-2.6-sarge-2004-09-08-01-39
 6. http://packages.debian.org/eog
 7. http://packages.debian.org/gdm

Debian.net Web Forums in Beta. Jeroen van Wolffelaar [8]announced
that since many people like web-based forums for discussion and
support, he would try providing a web forum for the Debian community.
The [9]web forums are still in beta, so any suggestions for
improvements or problem reports should be sent to
[10]admin@forums.debian.net. Of course, like all *.debian.net sites,
the forums are not an official Debian service, and it's been
[11]merged with [12]debianplaza.

 8. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2004/09/msg00014.html
 9. http://forums.debian.net/
 10. mailto:admin@forums.debian.net
 11. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2004/09/msg00024.html
 12. http://debianplaza.net/

Partman needs testing. Joey Hess [13]pointed out that recent changes
to partman have introduced a lot of bugs, including problems with
reiserfs and xfs. He doesn't know at this point if the new partman is
suitable to be in the next [14]debian-installer release. To help fix
the problem, he has called for volunteers to test partman in the daily
builds to not only do automated partitioning tests, but manual
partitioning to try all the strange combinations that are not often
used and make sure it works at least as well as it did in rc1.

 13. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2004/09/msg00408.html
 14. http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/

New legal Counsel for SPI. The Board of Directors of [15]Software in
the Public Interest, Inc. (SPI), Debian's umbrella organisation,
[16]announced the appointment of new legal counsel after the former
one, Chris Rourk, had resigned. The firm of [17]Cleary, Gottlieb,
Steen & Hamilton, represented by Greg Pomerantz, was willing to serve
as SPI's pro bono legal counsel and was duly appointed as such by the
board.

 15. http://www.spi-inc.org/
 16. http://lists.spi-inc.org/pipermail/spi-announce/2004/000100.html
 17. http://www.cgsh.com/

UserLinux releases first beta CD. Slashdot [18]discussed the [19]beta
release of [20]UserLinux, a new Debian-based distribution. Bruce
Perens explained that UserLinux is closely based on Debian and aims to
provide businesses with freely available, high quality GNU/Linux
operating systems accompanied by certifications, service, and support
options. Their i386 install CD is only 4.5 MB large, with the
remainder downloaded directly from Debian mirrors and they want to do
all of their Free Software development within Debian.

 18. http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/10/1544203
 19. http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS2694988953.html
 20. http://www.userlinux.com/

Testing Debian-Installer Improvements. Joey Hess [21]reported about
the techniques he uses for [22]installer tests. The first and
preferred method includes creating a new netboot image to boot a
test-laptop. The second method refers to writing it on a USB stick to
boot from. He also [23]reported that he managed to pre-seed the
[24]debian-installer so that the first stage installer runs with only
one single keystroke.

 21. http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/my_debian-installer_test_methods-2004-09-12-00-24.html
 22. http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
 23. http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/one_keystroke_to_debian-2004-09-10-19-58.html
 24. http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer

Using Auto* Tools for Building Packages? Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona
[25]wondered if he should run [26]automake at build-time instead of
just using configure provided by upstream. Andrew Suffield
[27]asserted that this would render the package unbuildable once
automake changes. Marcelo Magallon [28]added that automake versions
are not compatible at source level and asked to keep the amount of
included cruft as small as possible.

 25. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/09/msg00495.html
 26. http://packages.debian.org/automake
 27. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/09/msg00500.html
 28. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/09/msg00504.html

Patent Lawsuit Prohibition. Matthew Garrett had a [29]look at licenses
that are designed to discourage patent lawsuits. He noted that both
[30]Free Software Foundation and the [31]Open Source Initiative appear
to consider those licenses free, but the compatibility with the
[32]Debian Free Software Guidelines seems to be unclear. If Debian
decides to consider these (or some) licenses non-free, the project
needs to make it clear precisely why it holds this opinion, and then
set about trying to change other people's minds.

 29. http://people.debian.org/~terpstra/message/20040914.112541.76c4237d.en.html
 30. http://www.fsf.org/
 31. http://www.opensource.org/
 32. http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines

System Binaries linked against unreachable Libraries. Fabrice Lorrain
[33]noticed that several programs in /sbin are linked against
libraries located in /usr/lib. These programs won't work unless /usr/
is mounted. Hence they should either be moved into /usr/sbin or the
libraries need to be moved into /lib instead. Jeroen van Wolffelaar
[34]explained that [35]lintian cannot warn about this currently.

 33. http://lists.debian.org/debian-qa/2004/09/msg00033.html
 34. http://lists.debian.org/debian-qa/2004/09/msg00035.html
 35. http://packages.debian.org/lintian

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

 * [36]webmin -- insecure temporary directory.

 36. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-544

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]blam -- RSS aggregator for GNOME.
 * [39]clamsmtp -- SMTP virus-scanning proxy.
 * [40]f-spot -- Personal photo management application.
 * [41]flobopuyo -- Clone of the PuyoPuyo game.
 * [42]gimp-dcraw -- GIMP plug-in for loading RAW digital photos.
 * [43]ifrit -- Powerful tool for visualizing 3-dimensional data
   sets.
 * [44]php4-lasso -- Liberty ID-FF library - PHP 4 bindings.
 * [45]somaplayer -- Player audio for the soma suite.
 * [46]somaplayer-doc -- Documentation for somaplayer.
 * [47]wpasupplicant -- Client support for WPA and WPA2 (IEEE
   802.11i).

 38. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/gnome/blam
 39. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/mail/clamsmtp
 40. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/gnome/f-spot
 41. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/flobopuyo
 42. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/graphics/gimp-dcraw
 43. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/science/ifrit
 44. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/php4-lasso
 45. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/somaplayer
 46. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/doc/somaplayer-doc
 47. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/wpasupplicant

Debian Packages introduced last Week. Every day, a different Debian
package is [48]featured from the testing distribution. If you know
about an obscure package you think others should also know about, send
it to [49]Andrew Sweger. Debian package a day introduced the following
packages last week.

 48. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/
 49. http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=debaday

 * [50]splitvt -- Run two programs in a split screen.
 * [51]ddrescue -- Copies data from one file or block device to
   another.
 * [52]mmv -- Move/Copy/Append/Link multiple files.
 * [53]slocate -- Secure replacement of findutil's locate.
 * [54]zssh -- Interactive file transfers over ssh.

 50. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/33504.html
 51. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/33766.html
 52. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/33924.html
 53. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/34234.html
 54. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/34541.html

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 [55]contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your
mail at [56]dwn@debian.org.

 55. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
 56. mailto:dwn@debian.org


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