Debian Weekly News - May 23rd, 2006
Welcome to this year's 21st issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Julien Danjou reported that he has successfully installed NetBSD 3 inside the new Xen 3 virtual machine monitor available in Debian unstable. Eric Dorland explained the creation of library packages with debugging capabilities.
Graphical Debian Installer Images. Frans Pop reported
that the graphical installer is part of the regular daily built images for the i386 platform with
AMD and PowerPC following soon. To use the new installer the boot argument
"installgui
" or "expertgui
" has to be used. Frans
Pop explained that the graphical installer could be the default in the release
after etch.
Sun Java distributed by Debian. Jeroen van Wolffelaar announced the availability of Sun's Java package in the non-free section of Debian after Sun has reworked their license. Debian still remains committed to supporting free runtime and development environments for Java, such as Kaffe and GCJ. Red Hat, however, complained that this is not free enough and that Sun should free their virtual machine (JVM) at least.
DebConf6 successfully finished. The 6th Debian Conference, which was held last week in Mexico, has ended. Many thanks go to the sponsors and the organisation team, who made this great Debian event possible. A lot of photos were taken and in about four weeks a DVD with all talks will be available.
Splitting Changelog Files. Nico Golde wondered about the proper way to handle large and old debian changelog files when they are edited quite often and grew very large. The predominant opinion is to keep the entire file as it contains information about why and when bugs have been fixed. Since it is compressed in the package, the space consumption is usually acceptable.
Project Leader Report. Anthony Towns encouraged everybody to think about ways the Debian project could help organisations that would like to be partners to cooperate better with Debian. He pondered about a social contract for partners and is seeking input. He also reported about the large number of sponsors for this year's Debian Conference and the participation in Google's Summer of Code.
Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure that you update your systems if you have any of these packages installed.
- DSA 1058: awstats -- Arbitrary command execution.
- DSA 1059: quagga -- Several vulnerabilities.
- DSA 1060: kernel-patch-vserver -- Privilege escalation.
- DSA 1061: popfile -- Denial of service.
- DSA 1062: kphone -- Information disclosure.
- DSA 1063: phpgroupware -- Execution of arbitrary web script code.
- DSA 1064: cscope -- Arbitrary code execution.
- DSA 1065: hostapd -- Denial of service.
- DSA 1066: phpbb2 -- Execution of arbitrary web script code.
- DSA 1067: Linux 2.4.16 -- Several vulnerabilities.
- DSA 1068: fbi -- Denial of service.
- DSA 1069: Linux 2.4.18 -- Several vulnerabilities.
- DSA 1070: Linux 2.4.19 -- Several vulnerabilities.
- DSA 1071: MySQL 3.23 -- Several vulnerabilities.
- DSA 1072: nagios -- Arbitrary code execution.
- DSA 1073: MySQL 4.1 -- Several vulnerabilities.
New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently or contain important updates.
- anjuta-dev — GNOME development IDE for C/C++ - development files.
- boinc — Core client for the BOINC distributed computing infrastructure.
- kdevelop — IDE for Unix/X11 - development version.
- tasksel-data — Official tasks used for installation of Debian systems.
Orphaned Packages. 6 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 298 orphaned packages. Many thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free Software community. Please see the 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.
- aqsis — Suite of applications implementing the RenderMan Interface. (Bug#368070)
- cyrus-sasl2 — Authentication abstraction library. (Bug#368370)
- libsdl-erlang — Erlang bindings to the Simple Direct Media Library. (Bug#368073)
- websieve — Web based Cyrus IMAP user admin client. (Bug#368099)
- wings3d — Nendo-inspired 3D polygon mesh modeller. (Bug#368072)
- yaws — High performance HTTP 1.1 webserver written in Erlang. (Bug#368071)
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 contributing page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at dwn@debian.org.
To receive this newsletter weekly in your mailbox, subscribe to the debian-news mailing list.
Back issues of this newsletter are available.
This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Sebastian Feltel, Thomas Bliesener and Martin 'Joey' Schulze.