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#use wml::debian::weeklynews::header PUBDATE="1999-3-29" SUMMARY="Belated press releases; are stupid users bad?"
<p>
<b>Welcome</b> to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian
developer community. The next edition of this newsletter may be a few days
late; I will be away from the computer next weekend.
</p>
<p>
<b>Packages of the current Mozilla snapshot</b> are now
<a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-9903/msg02321.html">
available</a>. Be warned that it's got lots of debugging information in it and
is quite slow. But in other respects it's a very good preview of the new
Mozilla/Gecko. And it uses gtk!
</p>
<p>
It turns out that <b>when Debian 2.1 was released, a proper press release
wasn't sent out</b> along with it, because no-one had written one up. Perhaps
part of the problem is that though we all know that 2.1 is a great new
release of Debian representing some 7 months of work, we find it difficult
to articulate what's new and good in 2.1 (except of course for apt). This
week a
<a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-publicity-9903/msg00007.html">
press release</a>, in German, was sent out
<a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-publicity-9903/msg00012.html">
rather precipitously</a> by Martin "Joey" Schulze. An English translation
<a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-publicity-9903/msg00013.html">
is now available</a>. Another interesting development is a
<a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-publicity-9903/msg00016.html">
press release</a> written by Adam Di Carlo and focusing on Debian's
"<i>integrated sgml environment</i>". This and the English
translation of Joey's press release have yet to be distributed.
</p>
<p>
Martin Schulze is also "<i>trying to revive Debian QA</i>", and has posted a
<a href="mail#mail1">call for volunteers</a>. He also posted a
<a href="mail#mail2">proposal</a> to debian-policy to let the QA group work on
packages that have not been formally orphaned.
</p>
<p>
Some <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-9903/msg02269.html">
discussion</a> of anacron's usefulness and its problems segued into talk
about <b>Debian's support for laptops</b> in general when Adam Di Carlo
<a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-9903/msg02351.html">
proposed</a> a laptop meta-package.
</p>
<p>
"<i>1. Stupid Users are Bad. 2. Stupid Users are Bad for Debian. therefore:
3. Stupid Users should be ignored.</i>". This is a beginning of an
<a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-9903/msg02288.html">
essay</a> posted to the list this week and it sounds like a prime candidate for
sparking a flame war. Instead, it started a <b>reasoned discussion about
user friendliness and Debian</b>.
</p>
<p>
Strictly speaking, this isn't news, since it has been around for a while,
but it deserves wider exposure. A
<a href="http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/3328/rh5todeb-howto.txt">
mini-HOWTO</a> on <b>converting a Red Hat system to Debian</b>, in-place,
without a reboot!
</p>
<p>
<b>New packages</b> added to Debian this week include:
</p>
<ul>
<li><a
href="http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/editors/abiword.html">abiword</a>:
A WYSIWYG word processor based on GTK
<li><a href="http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/sound/cccd.html">cccd</a>:
A small GTK CD player program
<li><a href="http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/graphics/fbtv.html">fbtv</a>:
A Video4linux viewer using the kernel framebuffer
<li><a href="http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/net/gq.html">gq</a>:
A GTK-enabled LDAP client
<li><a href="http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/games/hatman.html">hatman</a>:
A customizable high resolution Pacman clone
<li><a href="http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/sound/radio.html">radio</a>:
Listen to the radio available on certain v4l cards.
<li><a href="http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/graphics/streamer.html">
streamer</a>: A video capture program for bt848 and video4linux
</ul>
<p>
<b>Server news</b>:
</p>
<ul>
<li>Kachina Technologies has <a href="mail#mail3">put up</a> 2 UltraSPARC systems
running Debian and will provide any interested Debian developers with accounts
on them.
<li>Adam Heath would like to change the time master sends out its "mirror
pulse", to reduce traffic through Novare's ISP at peak times of day. Adam's
initial email about this was high-handed in tone and drew some criticizm.
It's worth reading his <a href="mail#mail4">annotated clarification</a>
of what he's asking for, if only for all the interesting details about
Debian's mirror system discussed therein. Any actual rescheduling of the
mirror pulse will only happen after talk with the server admins.
<li>You can see the effect of the timing of the mirror pulse - mrtg graphs
of bandwidth, cpu usage, and web page hits are available for
<a href="http://master.debian.org/mrtg/">master</a> and
<a href="http://va.debian.org/mrtg/">va</a>.
</ul>
<p>
Thanks to Randolph Chung who has been contributing the new packages section
for a while. <b>I need more help</b>. If you would like to contribute to
this newsletter, please read <a href="../../contributing">this page</a>.
</p>
#use wml::debian::weeklynews::footer
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