Welcome to this year's third issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include: Update for Debian 6.0: 6.0.4 released The fourth update for Debian 6.0 (codenamed "Squeeze") has been released. This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with some adjustments for serious problems. Bits from the Release Team Niels Thykier sent some bits from the Release Team where he announced various bits of news: the addition of armhf and s390x to testing (though these architectures may be temporarily out of sync with the others), the acceptance of a new release goal ("security hardening build flags"), and the completion of more than fourteen transitions to testing (including GNOME 3, Perl 5.14, Python 2.7, etc.). Niels also issued a reminder that the freeze is due in June, even if an exact freeze date has not been selected. Bits from the piuparts maintainers Holger Levsen sent some bits from the piuparts maintainers announcing that piuparts is again maintained by a team and they're receiving various patches and other contributions. piuparts is an important tool for Quality Assurance within Debian as it runs various tests in order to verify that packages can be installed, upgraded and removed without problems. Tests results are publicly available on the piuparts website, where they are updated on a daily basis. Holger urged maintainers to regularly check their personal status pages on piuparts in order to fix issues related to their packages. In addition to their regular tests, since December 2011, the piuparts maintainers have been testing the upgrade of individual packages from "Squeeze" to "Wheezy": 158 packages failed the test (and another 130 failed it due to dependencies) while 33,708 passed it. Report from Debian Med sprint Andreas Tille sent a report from the Debian Med sprint held in Southport, UK on 27-29 January. Among other activities, the Debian Med team fixed some bugs, mentored new members and students (consolidating the effort made via the "Mentoring of the Month" initiative) and packaged new software.
For more information on Debian Med activity, you can check their real time activity page. Setting up a new school with Debian Edu/Squeeze Petter Reinholdtsen announced on his blog that the next version of Debian Edu/Squeeze will contain a new tool, called sitesummary2ldapdhcp, which allows all the computers of a school to be quickly set up with a minimal number of manual steps. Once the central server is installed, this tool collects data from the network to generate system objects in the LDAP database. After a few modifications of the configuration from a GUI, the network of computers is ready to use.
A third beta version of Debian Edu based on "Squeeze" and containing this tool has just been released. Answering Debian users' questions Raphaël Hertzog wrote a useful blogpost about how to answer the questions of Debian users and, in general, how to support new users. There are many places for helping users (mailing lists, IRC channels, questions & answers websites, etc.) each with different characteristics, but the golden rule for every support channel is to be respectful and courteous (as stated in the Debian Community Guidelines). Debian/Ubuntu games screenshot party Paul Wise announced a Debian/Ubuntu games screenshot party to be held on 25 and 26 February and organised by the Games Team. The idea is to create screenshots for as many games in Debian/Ubuntu as possible and upload them to screenshots.debian.net in order to have them available to goplay (a games package browser).
For more information, you can visit the related wiki page. GNOME Shell 3.2 in "Wheezy": a retrospective Jordi Mallach wrote an article on the transition from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 in Debian from the Debian GNOME Team point of view. "When you’re dealing with dozens of GNOME source packages at the same time, many of which introduce new libraries, or worse, introduce incompatible APIs that affect many more unrelated packages, things get hairy, and you need a plan" Jordi said. But even with a plan for a smooth transition, they encountered a lot of difficulties, such as failures to build from source on various architectures and incompatibilities with other packages. Finally GNOME Shell 3.2 has transitioned to Debian's testing suite and Jordi thanks not only all Debian GNOME Team members, but also Release Team members Julien Cristau and Cyril Brulebois and FTP assistant Luca Falavigna, who helped in reaching this goal. Interviews

There has been a "People behind Debian" interview with Josselin Mouette, founder of the Debian GNOME team. Other news The 28th issue of the miscellaneous news for developers has been released and covers the following topics: Upcoming events You can find more information about Debian-related events and talks on the events section of the Debian web site, or subscribe to one of our events mailing lists for different regions: Europe, Netherlands, Hispanic America, North America.

Welcome to this year's second issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include: Debian ahead on web servers According to a recent W3Techs survey, Debian has just surpassed CentOS to become the most popular GNU/Linux distribution on web servers. The survey is based on the analysis of the top million web sites according to Alexa, in order to select a representative sample of established sites, and focused only on the technologies used for web sites (and not individual web pages or desktop installations). In fact, at the beginning of 2012, Debian was used by 29.4% of all Linux-based sites (and by 9.7% of all web sites), while CentOS was used by 29.1% of all Linux-based sites (and by 9.5% of all web sites). Debian "is also the fastest growing operating system at the moment: every day 54 of the top 1 million sites switch to Debian", said Matthias Gelbmann in the article. With regard to the geographical distribution of web sites using Debian, the most are in Europe (with 39.7% of all sites in Germany, 36.1% in Poland, 33.6% in France and 26.4% in Russia). Dummy web server in Debian? Thomas Goirand recently proposed to relax or even remove some dependencies of web applications on a web server package. This would help users wanting to install such web applications in chroots, while the web server is installed only outside the chroot. During the following discussion, several solutions were proposed, such as providing a dummy web server package in Debian. It was pointed out that such dummy packages are actually very easy to create with the equivs package, which deserves to be better known. Aptitude strikes back Christian Perrier blogged about the recent revival of the aptitude package manager. As the main maintainer had less time to dedicate to it, the number of bugs against aptitude was continually growing and reached more than 800. But last November, Daniel Harwig and Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo started working on it, triaging bugs and preparing a possible new version. If you want to help them, join the aptitude-devel mailing list on Alioth. About donations to Debian Stefano Zacchiroli blogged about how donations to Debian are used by the project. First of all, Stefano explained how money is used in the Debian Project: to buy hardware and hardware-related services for Debian infrastructure, to sponsor contributor sprints, or to support travel expenses in order to allow Debian Developers to represent Debian at conferences and meetings. Then, Stefano noted that almost all donations to Debian come from private citizens and not from big corporate sponsors: corporates mostly sponsor DebConf (the Debian annual conference). At the end, Stefano pointed out that it's possible to check how Debian spends donated money: by reading the minutes of SPI monthly meetings or the list of sprints, visiting the DPL wiki page and consulting the DebConf reports. Stefano also added that over the next month he will be working to further improve the transparency of Debian's budget. Armhf status in Debian Steve McIntyre blogged about the status of the armhf port in Debian. Since mid-2011, he has been working on armhf as a new architecture in "debian-ports"; then in December it was imported into the main Debian archive. The current state of auto-building can be viewed at the armhf buildd status page. IGMP denial of service in Linux Ben Hutchings wrote an interesting report on a security issue in Linux found by himself while working on bug #654876. As his laptop running Linux 3.0 or 3.1 crashed repeatedly, Simon McVittie — the bug submitter — thought it could be a driver bug. But, analysing the log of the crash, Ben noted that "a packet received through the wireless interface was being processed by IGMP, which then divided by zero." IGMP packets are used to support multicast routers: as Ben explained, "every multicast address corresponds to a dynamic set of hosts, called a multicast group". In order to know which hosts belong to which groups, the router sends packets and the computer replies at intervals. There are three different versions of the IGMP protocol used to define the Maximum Response Time (MRT) of the computer. Ben found that the crash was caused by a division by 0 of packets with an MRT of 0. The patch is included in Linux 3.0.17, 3.1.9, 3.2.1, and the Debian packaged version 3.1.8-2.
Well done, Ben! Interviews

There has been one "People behind Debian" interview: with Steve McIntyre (Debian CD maintainer and former Debian Project Leader). Other news Gerfried Fuchs wrote an interesting article about a Release Critical bug-squashing effort for Stable. Stable RC bugs are often not noted, as people usually concentrate on Unstable RC bugs, but - as Gerfried noted - "it is one of our supported releases and thus should receive quite some attention, at least by the corresponding package maintainers themself." Upcoming events You can find more information about Debian-related events and talks on the events section of the Debian web site, or subscribe to one of our events mailing lists for different regions: Europe, Netherlands, Hispanic America, North America. Status of Debian Installer localisation In his last report on Debian Installer localisation, Christian Perrier noted that twenty-two languages are currently up to date for D-I's core files; ten (Czech, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Kazakh, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian and Slovak) are 100% complete for the moment.

Welcome to this year's first issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include: Debian Edu/Skolelinux 6.0.3 beta2 released Petter Reinholdtsen announced the release of Debian Edu Squeeze 6.0.3 beta2: download and installation instructions are available on the wiki, and in particular a useful "Getting Started" chapter in which you can find explanations of how to log in for the first time. Feedback and installation reports can be sent to the Debian Edu mailing list. Bits from the DPL Stefano Zacchiroli sent some bits from the DPL in which he reported about the work done by Martin Michlmayr as Auditor, in order to reconstruct Debian's expenses and budgets. Stefano also sent a call for help for Wheezy artwork organisation, and announced that Gunnar Wolf has volunteered to monitor the discussion regarding the Creative Commons process for revision 4.0 on behalf of Debian. Forthcoming new release of the X server Cyril Brulebois blogged about the forthcoming X server release 1.12: one major change is the addition of XI2.2 patches, which are related to multitouch support. Another significant change is the addition of support for Intel's Sandy Bridge New Acceleration in the Debian packages. Scientific article on Debian in PNAS Michael Hanke noted that the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science ("PNAS") of the United States of America has a paper on the evolution of software in Debian. New Debian Infographic Claudio Filho has published a beautiful infographic about Debian. The main motivation was, as Claudio said, "to "draw" for final users how Debian can be good for them".
Similar efforts have been made by Stéphane Blondon and Chris Lamb, who created the Debian Timeline website and the related Debian package. New interface for Debtags website Enrico Zini announced a new interface for the Debtags website. Debtags is a project to classify Debian packages by adding tags to them: "Debtags attaches categories (we call them tags) to packages, creating a new set of useful structured metadata that can be used to implement more advanced ways of presenting, searching, maintaining and navigating the package archive", Enrico said while presenting the project in 2005. Using the new interface, it is possible to search packages, take a look at statistics about Debtags and, obviously, help with the tagging effort. For more information about Debtags, you can visit the related wiki page. apt-get purge defoma Paul Wise reported that the transition from defoma to fontconfig is finally complete. Defoma is the Debian-specific font manager, long unmaintained, while the replacement (fontconfig) is cross-distribution and also has wide support from upstreams. In the past three years the Debian Fonts Task Force has worked a lot in order to gain this result, thanks especially to the work of Christian Perrier and Paul Wise. Please note that the transition is not completely smooth: "Xorg does not yet support fontconfig so for now programs relying on server-side fonts will only be able to use the xfonts- packages shipping their fonts in the directories known by the X server" and in addition "there are some issues with Ghostscript and CJK", Paul said. Further interviews

Since the last issue of the Debian Project News, two new issues of the "This week in Debian" podcast have been published: with Jonathan Nadeau, about the Northeast GNU/Linux Fest; and with Raphaël Hertzog, about the Debian handbook. Other news The 27th issue of the miscellaneous news for developers has been released and covers the following topics: Upcoming events You can find more information about Debian related events and talks on the events section of the Debian web site, or subscribe to one of our events mailing lists for different regions: Europe, Netherlands, Hispanic America, North America. Status of Debian Installer localisation In his last report on Debian Installer localisation, Christian Perrier noted that eighteen languages are currently up to date for D-I's core files; ten (Czech, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Kazakh, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian and Slovak) are 100% complete for the moment.

Welcome to this year's fifteenth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include: Volunteers needed for publicity team As you may have noticed, it has been quite some time since the last edition of Debian Project News. To improve the frequency of DPN and expand its other activities, the Debian Publicity team is looking for new contributors. Did you ever want to help Debian, but every piece of software you were interested in was already packaged? You don't consider yourself a "technical person"? You have basic skills in written English? Perfect! Have you considered joining the Publicity Team? If you are a Debian member, the Press team is also looking for new contributors. Removal of sun-java6 from the archive The release of Java update 29 from Oracle marks not only security updates, but a change to the licensing, removing Debian's ability to distribute the non-free JVM. The clause in the Java license under which we were able to distribute Java, the DLJ, has been removed. As a result, the sun-java6 package is no longer suitable for the archive, and has been removed, as documented in Debian Bug #646524. Sylvestre Ledru suggests that sun-java6 installs be migrated to openjdk, the open-source alternative, using the following command: apt-get --purge remove sun-java6-jre && apt-get install openjdk-7-jre. Kai Wasserbäch has also been pointed out elsewhere that this upgrade path might not be suitable for all Java programs, and special attention should be paid to re-testing installed Java applications on OpenJDK. Debian SDL packaging team revival The SDL packaging team has recently been seriously revived, with Dominique Dumont reorganising the team and Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo joining the effort. Packaging is progressively moving to Git for easier collaboration, and developers maintaining SDL-related packages not in the team's repository have been invited to join, too. A lot of old bugs have already been fixed and new SDL 1.3 and sdl-perl packages have been uploaded to experimental. SDL 1.3 brings support for newer OpenGL APIs, input improvements like multi-touch, gestures and force feedback device support, better Unicode support and support for multiple windows and displays. Bits from the DPL Stefano Zacchiroli sent his "Bits from the DPL" for October and November. He reminds us that the New Maintainer Process has been renamed as the New Member Process, and that a list of "easy hacks" is a very effective way of attracting contributors to teams. He notes that Ubuntu plan to deprecate their package review platform (REVU) in favour of converging on mentors.debian.net. This will need some Debexpo changes and also more package sponsorship by Debian members. Stefano has approved funds for the recent DebConf video team sprint and also hardware replacements for lists.debian.org and ftp.debian.org, which have now arrived and are in the process of being set up by DSA. He reports that Fathi Boudra represented Debian at the Software Freedom Day in Algeria. Stefano also reported on his trademark-related activities, including a contact point for inquiries related to the Debian trademark, seeking legal advice on how trademark law applies to Debian packaging activities, and starting a discussion on the relationships between the DFSG and trademark restrictions. He is also working on a statement to make explicit the position of the Debian Project on software patents. The OSI have invited the Debian Project to their upcoming affiliation programme. There is also work in progress to have the Debian Project become a member of the forums for ISC software that we distribute. Stefano also mentioned his continuing work in creating a discussion forum for companies that have a strategic interest in Debian. Ubuntu appreciates Debian As part of Ubuntu's recent Community Appreciation Day, Michael Hall sent Debian a message of appreciation, stating "Without you we wouldn't be able to make the contributions we do. Ubuntu is great because Debian is great, and we appreciate all of the work that goes into making it that way." Michael will be joining Canonical's Community Team, focusing on projects that are upstream for Ubuntu. India mini-DebConf, Mangalore edition Christian Perrier reported on his participation in the mini-DebConf in Mangalore, south-west India. The conference was held at Nitte MahaLinga Adyanthaya Memorial Institute of Technology and organised by Vasudev Kamath and a team of computer-science students from the college with support from staff, including the college principal, Dr. S. Y. Kulakarni. Christian gave the opening talk, introducing Debian, how to contribute, and information about Debian internationalisation and localisation. Later Jonas Smedegaard presented a talk about Debian Pure Blends, focusing on how distributions derived from Debian can work inside Debian instead of outside of it. This was part of his trip promoting Debian and Debian Pure Blends in Asia. The talks were followed on the second day with sessions on localisation, packaging, OpenPGP keys and contributing to Debian. The event was publicised in one of the major newspapers in India, namely "The Hindu". Events such as these are vital to local communities. The participation of "international" contributors in these events often brings more attention to them and is highly appreciated by the local community. New mirror in El Salvador The Debian mirrors team is happy to announce the first mirror in El Salvador, sponsored by the Ministry of Health, with the help of René Mayorga and Carlos Juan Martín Pérez. Salvadorian Debian users are invited to update their /etc/apt/sources.list in order to use ftp.sv.debian.org. To quote Carlos Juan Martín Pérez "For us, the Ministry of Health, and as members of the Salvadorian Community of Free Software, is an honour to belong to the great Debian family." For other countries, the full list of mirrors is available online. There are still many countries lacking good connectivity to a Debian mirror; sponsors interested in hosting are invited to contact the mirrors team. Debexpo maintainers call for contributions Discussing the potential integration of packaging teams into Debexpo, the software behind the mentors.debian.net service, Arno Töll issued a call for contributions, since the current team members are busy. Bug Squashing Party marathon started Similarly to previous releases, a marathon of Bug Squashing Parties (BSPs) has been started with concurrent BSPs being held in Hildesheim, Germany and Portland, OR, USA. While the first one concentrated on fixing Release Critical bugs, the second concentrated on creating multiarch patches for different libraries. Call for talks: FOSDEM 2012 Wouter Verhelst sent a call for talks for the distribution developers room at the upcoming FOSDEM 2012, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting. The FOSDEM takes place in Brussels, Belgium in early February 2012. Acceptable sessions can be any wide range of things, including talks, BoF sessions, and round tables. Two cross-distributions devrooms are intended to be for people from any participating distribution project, and may cover Debian-specific subjects, or indeed targeted at Debian developers only. New s390 buildd at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology Philipp Kern announced that zemlinsky, a new Debian buildd hosted at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, is now available to support the s390(x) ports. Thanks to this new host, s390x is progressing pretty quickly: this new fast builder is one of the reasons why the slope is so steep.

Welcome to this year's fourteenth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include: Updated Debian: 6.0.3 and 5.0.9 released The third update for Debian 6.0 (codename "Squeeze") and the ninth update for Debian 5.0 (codename "Lenny") have been released. These updates mainly add corrections for security problems to the stable and oldstable releases, along with some adjustments for serious problems. DebConf12 official dates The DebConf team announced the final and official dates for DebConf12: DebCamp will be held from July 1 to 7 2012, followed by DebConf from July 8 to 14, in Managua, Nicaragua. DebConf will be preceded by a day during which the doors are opened to the general public, commonly called Debian Day. For further information, please visit the DebConf12 web pages. Debian Installer localisation Christian Perrier reported some new progress in Debian Installer localisation. Nineteen languages are now up to date for D-I's core files; eight (Czech, Dutch, French, German, Persian, Portuguese, Russian and Swedish) are 100% complete for the moment, and many more should reach this hall of fame pretty soon, thanks to the translators. Feedback after DebConf11 After his "This week in Debian" interview, Adnan Hodzic wrote a summary of DebConf11 and its consequences. He offers an inside view of DebConf organisation, sharing some of the stresses and the amazing experiences he had with other organisers. Among the after-effects: the Government of Republika Srpska may seriously consider free and open source software for their own use, and Adnan has taken a vacation to prepare himself for his next projects. Uses of Emdebian Continuing his series on Emdebian, Neil Williams posted an article about the use of Emdebian on special purpose computers. The common features of special purpose computers include: single task only, single-user support, single mode input, restricted connectivity, constrained user data. On this kind of computer Emdebian is very popular for many reasons, such as the multi-tasking kernel and userspace which provide a responsive machine, or the mere fact that in Emdebian (unlike proprietary competitors) the graphical software is trivially separated from the core software. But the most important reason is that Emdebian Grip allows better debugging: in fact, "Emdebian Grip is binary compatible with the equivalent Debian suite and when a bug appears in the high level user interface, it is much easier to debug that on the desktop than on the device", said Neil. Bits from the DPL Stefano Zacchiroli reminded us that Wheezy is a few months away from its freeze: everyone can help. He reported about some discussions that are worth attention; about maintainers' and porters' responsibilities; reasons not to use private email aliases; etc. Stefano gave updates about sprints (for coordinating which there is a new mailing list) and the trademark policy. He also recently attended the "Linux Day" in Parma, Italy, and the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, Florida. New Member process Enrico Zini announced that the "New Maintainer process" has changed its name, to become the "New Member process": the procedure is still the same, and even its initials are unchanged, but its name is no longer confusing and ambiguous. Thanks to Stefano Zacchiroli for his proposal. Jan Hauke Rahm also joined the New Member Front Desk, which can now be reached at nm@debian.org. Further interviews

Since the last issue of the Debian Project News, two new issues of the "This week in Debian" podcast have been published: with Jonathan Nadeau, who talks about the Ohio LinuxFest and his internship at the FSF; and with Adnan Hodzic, who talks about DebConf11. Other news Julien Cristau announced that in the current testing Debian distribution, the default Python version pointed at by the /usr/bin/python symlink is now Python 2.7.

The DebConf team just sent out a press release announcing the dates for DebConf12 in Nicaragua.

• Dates: July 1-7, 2012 will be DebCamp and July 8-14, 2012 will be DebConf.
• Press release text
• About DebConf12
• Contribute

We hope to see many of you there!