FreeSoftNews

The Debian project’s maintainer, Luk Claes, announced in an email Saturday that he will freeze the “testing” or “Lenny” tree, in preparation for a new stable release of Debian Linux. On Claes’s checklist for September 2008: “Release lenny!”

The freeze means that open source software developers have only a couple more days to package any applications that they want to be included in the next release of Debian — and by extension, in the inner sanctum source lists of distributions such as Ubuntu that are based on it. After the freeze starts next week, Debian maintainers will no longer accept new packages, but instead will turn their attention to about 360 release-critical bugs.

Read more at DesktopLinux.com

Debian, arguably the most important Linux distribution, is readying to celebrate its 15th birthday on August 16.

While a respected and widely-used Linux distribution in its own right, Debian has, over the 15 years, also been widely used as the base for numerous other Linux distributions, including the popular Ubuntu distribution created by South African entrepreneur, Mark Shuttleworth.

Ambitious beginnings

On 16 August 1993 Debian founder Ian Murdock announced the brand new Linux distribution:

Read more at Tectonic

Debian Project News
http://www.debian.org/News/project/
Debian Project News - July 21st, 2008

Welcome to this year’s 7th issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian
community.
Some of the topics covered in this issue:

* Updates to the Lenny release process
* Debian-installer to support loading of external firmwares
* Best practice for debug packages
* … and much more.

• Read more: Debian Project News - July 21st, 2008

Cherry Pal: Green Computer
Many people only use their computers to check email, browse the web, do word processing, spreadsheets, etc. For them, many of today’s PCs are overkill, but it’s not clear what a good alternative would be, especially if they want low energy consumption. Enter stage left: The CherryPal, a tiny PC based on a Freescale CPU and the Linux (Debian) operating system. It’s about the size of a paperback book and uses 80% fewer components than a regular PC. To make the trade-off acceptable, the CherryPal will use “cloud computing”, meaning that many applications will run on an online server (same basic concept as web-based email). Read on for more technical specifications.

Read more at http://www.treehugger.com/

I have been quiet about Linux this week because I have been busy trying several new versions. In the process, I have learned quite a bit more, and started to think about the philosophy behind Linux, operating system choices, and Free / Open Source software in general.

The first thing that became clear to me this week, although I already knew it on a more superficial level, was that Linux distributions run across a sort of a scale from easy to install and use to complex to install and requiring a lot of manual setup and configuration.

Read more at ZDNet

Last week we introduced ourselves to Sidux, the excellent Debian Sid implementation that makes Debian Sid a bit friendlier. Even though I thought I gave a number of reasons why a user might prefer Sidux to Debian Sid, or Ubuntu, or some other Debian derivative, they apparently were not clear to a number of readers. So here they are in nice bullet-pointed lists:

Read more at Linux Planet

Max Stotsky reported bug #490000 on Wednesday July 9th. Yet another i18n-related bug for a round number mark: “apt-cache search and ddtp”. As bug #480000 was reported as of May 7th 2008, we’re still keeping nearly exactly the pace of 2 months for 10,000 bugs, so 60,000bugs a year. Bug #500000 should then be reported around Sept 9th 2008.

Read more at Bubulle’s weblog

Welcome to this year’s 6th issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian
community.
Some of the topics covered in this issue:

* DebianDay 2008
* DPL-initiated teams survey finished
* Bits from the testing security team
* … and much more.

• Read more: Debian Project News - July 7th, 2008

Reading this week’s DistroWatch Weekly, I was surprised to see an interesting news story I had, apparently, completely missed. Normally, I try not to write about stories that are more than a couple of days old. But considering how many Linux news sources I read daily and considering I never saw this story, I have to assume that a large portion of you also missed this story, so I am making an exception.

Read more at Linux Loop

The security team for the Debian Testing distribution has sent out a status report; it seems that there is now almost complete security update coverage for Testing. “The only remaining blocker for full security support at this point is the kernel. We are talking to the kernel security team about providing testing-security support, but at the moment this task lacks manpower. If you are willing to work on this, please feel free to contact us. Otherwise, in terms of security at this point we recommend using the stable kernel or if that is not an option, the unstable kernel.”

Read more at LWN.net

Debian’s “Iceweasel” build of Firefox 3.0 is out. Working fine for me so far with one exception.

“There was an error launching the default action command associated with this location.”

Read more at LinuxWorld

I have been tracking the Debian release goals progress for a while now, through bug-squashing parties and using various iterations of wiki pages. It’s time to write down some thoughts.

First of all, I think the concept of release goals is a fantastic idea. It may be one of the most important conceptual moves in Debian of late. It allows developers to implement distribution-wide changes without having to negotiate with every package maintainer individually and without having to go through the vicious no-change-without-policy/no-policy-without-established-practice maze. It moves the focus back on operating system development instead of package hoarding.

Read more at Peter Eisentraut’s Blog

This article will try to provide a contrast between ‘the Debian way’ and ‘the Slackware way’ when it comes to distribution management. The idea is to really attempt to illuminate people on why Debian, and many other distributions may not be ideal, and why a classic approach such as Slackware still has merit in this world of modern feature-crazy distributions.

I start this article knowing full well that it will offend people, even so, I think this needs to be said.

Read more at blog.sillica.com

This is to announce availability of NexentaCore 2.0 Alpha1 - Debian
Native OpenSolaris environment and platform. (unstable “Hardy” branch)

NexentaCore 2.0 Alpha1 Release Highlights:
——————————————

* 3392 packages ported over just two weeks of Hardy Hackathon
Fest! This includes latest dpkg/apt, gcc, binutils, coreutils,
perl, python, ruby, Qt libs, GTK libs, etc you name it..
* Based on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron)

• Read more: NexentaCore 2.0 Alpha1 “Hardy” Released

A team of scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics have created Germany’s 4th largest supercomputer by using Debian GNU/Linux.

The Observational Relativity and Cosmology Research Group is a team of scientists working at the Hannover Branch of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Hannover, Germany. Their goal is the direct detection of gravitational waves, which were first predicted by Albert Einstein. They are working with the friends and colleagues within the LIGO Scientific Community and VIRGO.

The massive computing effort necessary for this research is provided by a Debian GNU / Linux cluster of 1342 nodes called ATLAS. Using 10+ TB RAM, approximately 1.3 PB storage and a special network able to transfer almost 4 days worth of DVD movies each second, the cluster achieves a measured performance of 32.8 TFlops. This performance places the ATLAS Debian GNU / Linux supercomputer at 4th place in Germany, 11th in Europe and 34th worldwide, at a cost of EUR 1.8m (~ US$ 2.8m).

Read more at Debian

Many readers have asked us to publish release announcements of the Debian installers for Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 “Lenny”, especially since these releases come as full sets of installation CD and DVD images. So here you go: the second beta of Debian Installer for “Lenny” is out ready for….

Read more at DistroWatch

This is not a rant about Debian vs. Ubuntu. I used both, loved both, and I’m currently using Debian Lenny. It’s not about Debian versus any other distribution either: in fact, I only tried a few other distros, and most of them were Debian-based. Here are the top 10 reasons for which I enjoy using Debian:

Read more ….

The Debian GNU/Linux project has just endured what is probably its worst week on the security front in the 15 years of its existence following the disclosure on May 13 of a serious vulnerability in the distribution’s OpenSSL package.
In the days since, there has been scathing criticism, some thoughtful analysis and quite a bit of discussion, both within and outside the project, about the how and why of the vulnerability.

(Disclosure: I have been a Debian user for the last eight years and currently run the AMD64, x86 and MIPS ports of the distribution).

What made the situation even worse was the fact that the bug was introduced as a result of a Debian-specific change made in September 2006.

Read more at iTWire

Despite having an aversion to configuring and maintaining security and crypto software, I accepted that I had to update my system in response to the recent big Debian security problem. If I can do it, you can do it. Below are my notes, but keep in mind that my security rank is somewhere between ignorant and uninterested.

Read more at FreeSoftwareMagazine

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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2008/02/
Debian Weekly News - May 9th, 2008
—————————————————————————

Welcome to this year’s 2nd issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian
community. We would like to thank everyone for his feedback on the last
issue of the Debian Project News! We didn’t reckoned a tiny newsletter
would cause such an sensation - we where even mentioned in some print
magazines! So many, many thanks! We’ll try our very best to come up and
exceed your expectations!

While visiting Stefano Zacchiroli the www 2008 conference[1] in china Sir
Tim Berners-Lee[2] offered Debian kudos[3] for its well thought-out
encapsulation/packaging of libraries. Paul Wise will close[4] his Debian
user[5] and Debian new contributor[6] surveys on June 1st so that
analysis of the results can begin. Please participate if you haven’t done
so, yet.

• Read more: Debian Project News - May 9th, 2008