path: root/english/News/weekly/2003/31/index.wml

#use wml::debian::weeklynews::header PUBDATE="2003-08-05" SUMMARY="Eye-candy, MPlayer, Knoppix, BTS, DebConf, Schools, AMD64, Benchmarks, CUPS, LinuxTag, LSB, Licenses"
# $Id$

<p>Welcome to this year's 31st issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the
Debian community.  Few of you may have noticed this already, but as per the <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0302/msg00010.html">\
results</a> of last year's security <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0211/msg00001.html">\
survey</a> the Debian Security Team doesn't support potato (Debian 2.2)
anymore.  Also, Robin 'Roblimo' Miller <a
href="http://www.newsforge.com/newsforge/03/07/19/1713232.shtml">explained</a> 
why governments should be allowed to specify Free Software.</p>

<p><strong>Booting Debian with Eye-Candy.</strong>  Martin Michlmayr <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot-0307/msg00471.html">wondered</a>
about having Debian show nice graphics during boot up, rather than boot
messages in text mode.  He discussed this with Herbert Xu, who explained that
this is no longer a kernel issue.  Once the framebuffer driver is loaded, a
user space process can do arbitrary graphical operations on the console.
Alastair McKinstry <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot-0307/msg00479.html">pointed
out</a> that <code>debian-installer</code> already uses framebuffer support
in modules and that work is under way to divert all <code>stderr</code>
towards a logging solution.</p>

<p><strong>MPlayer moves closer to being Free.</strong>  Andrea Mennucc and
Dariush Pietrzak <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal-0307/msg00243.html">worked</a>
on <code>mplayer</code> checking copyright information and <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal-0307/msg00241.html">asked</a>
for volunteers to re-check the <a
href="http://tonelli.sns.it/pub/mplayer">source code</a> to ensure it
satisfies the <a href="$(HOME)/social_contract#guidelines">Debian Free
Software Guidelines</a>.  Adam Warner was <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal-0307/msg00246.html">pleased</a>
with the work and made some suggestions.  After it was <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0307/msg01827.html">pointed
out</a> that <code>mplayer</code> contains problematic DVD Content Scrambling
System (CSS) code, Andrea <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal-0307/msg00283.html">repackaged</a>
it with the CSS code removed.  He would appreciate feedback on its
suitability for Debian main.</p>

<p><strong>Linux is a Process, not a Product.</strong> In a <a
href="http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1107_2-5057755.html">commentary</a> on
ZDNet.com.com Ian Murdock explained that Linux is not a
product but a process. "To think of Linux as a product is to freeze an
inherently dynamic thing in time and to close something that is
inherently open.  It cannot be done without losing something -- and
something significant at that".</p>

<p><strong>Philosophy behind Knoppix.</strong> Klaus Knopper was <a
href="http://www.pctechtalk.com/view.php?id=1239">interviewed</a>
about Free Software, the roots of and ideas behind <a
href="http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/">Knoppix</a>, his interests and the
future of his Knoppix project.  In his opinion, the GNU software suite,
together with the Linux kernel, have become the most flexible and usable
operating system and application software available for a vast variety of
hardware platforms.</p>

<p><strong>More automatic BTS Reports.</strong> Nikita Youshchenko <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0307/msg02168.html">suggested</a>
that the bug tracking system (BTS) generates more automatic mails than just the
list of <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0307/msg00012.html">\
release critical bugs</a> and the <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0307/msg00011.html">work
needing packages report</a>.  He would like to see a list of bugs that have a
"patch" tag for (e.g.) 2 weeks and no "wontfix" tag, a list of bugs that are
more than N months old and also don't carry a "wontfix" tag and a list of
packages with huge bug lists that probably need community help.</p>

<p><strong>DebConf 2005 in Vienna?</strong> Gerfried Fuchs <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0307/msg02189.html">proposed</a> to
organise the Debian conference for 2005 in Vienna, since he would like to
attend a Debian conference as well.  A good <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0307/msg02226.html">argument</a>
for Vienna is that it is centrally located in Europe and is close to the eastern
countries of the continent, which could help our friends from Eastern Europe
to attend the conference more conveniently.  Finally, Tollef sent in his <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0307/msg02284.html">experiences</a>
from the Oslo Debian conference.</p>

<p><strong>Synchronising the BTS and Bugzilla.</strong> Erich Schubert has <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0307/msg02212.html">written</a> a
small Perl <a
href="http://people.debian.org/~erich/debugzilla-html.pl.renamed.txt">\
script</a> which queries the Debian bug tracking system for bugs forwarded to
bugzilla (GNOME in this case) and creates a list of the bugs and their status in
bugzilla.  This should help tracking which forwarded bugs were closed by
upstream.</p>

<p><strong>Debian in Schools.</strong> Thomas Lindemans <a
href="http://news.eun.org/eun.org2/eun/en/_News_search_news/content.cfm?ov=28498&amp;lang=en&amp;id_area=109">\
explained</a> at the <a href="http://www.eun.org/eun.org2/eun/en/index_eun_corporate.cfm">\
European Schoolnet</a>, a partnership of 26 Ministries of Education,  why
educators should try GNU/Linux.  Debian is mentioned as being
"built for stability" and good for those who enjoy a "fast and secure
operating system".  The article suggests that using Debian in a school would
require somebody with knowledge of Linux because of text configuration files,
however no mention is made of <a
href="http://www.skolelinux.no/">Skolelinux</a> or the <a
href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu">Debian-Edu</a> subproject.</p>

<p><strong>Status of Debian/AMD64.</strong> Access to an Opteron machine was
<a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-x86-64-0307/msg00029.html">granted</a>
to the Debian project after a discussion with AMD at this year's <a
href="http://www.linuxtag.org/">LinuxTag</a>.  Bart Trojanowski also <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-x86-64-0307/msg00007.html">announced</a>
a <a href="http://www.linuxsymposium.org/2003/view_abstract.php?talk=192">\
birds of a feather</a> session targeting the Debian port to AMD64 at this
year's <a href="http://www.linuxsymposium.org/2003/">Ottawa Linux
Symposium</a>.  Bart <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-x86-64-0307/msg00041.html">explained</a>
that a few libraries are <a href="http://jukie.net/~bart/debian/amd64/">ported</a>
to the AMD64 architecture but they are not yet sufficient to run
applications.</p>

<p><strong>Benchmarking Debian's Performance.</strong>  Indranath Neogy tried
to <a
href="http://articles.linmagau.org/modules.php?op=modload&amp;name=Sections&amp;file=index&amp;req=viewarticle&amp;artid=227&amp;page=1">\
discover</a>
what kind of gains the source based nature of Gentoo might give it over
Debian and Mandrake.  The tests included timing how
long it took to open a large sheet in Gnumeric, how long to compile the Linux
kernel and how long to perform various operations in GIMP.  Gentoo was
expected to lead in the tests, but the results showed no significant
variation between the distributions.  Simple recompiling doesn't seem to speed
things up, fine grained tuning may.</p>

<p><strong>CUPS as the default Print Service.</strong>  Petter Reinholdtsen <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0307/msg02384.html">suggested</a>
that the default print system in the next release of Debian (sarge) be
changed to <a href="http://www.cups.org">CUPS</a>, because it is a more
complete, more user friendly and RFC compliant printing system.  Daniel
Jacobowitz <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0307/msg02385.html">found</a>
that CUPS lacked functionality, but Cyrille Chepelov <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0307/msg02387.html">thought</a>
CUPS has improved over the last 18 months.</p>

<p><strong>LinuxTag Show Report.</strong> Nicholas Blachford <a
href="http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=4185"> reported</a> on his experience at
this year's <a href="http://www.linuxtag.org/">LinuxTag</a>.  He said that
"the Debian stand seemed to be one of the most popular stands,
constantly getting a crowd of people, many of whom picked up the Debian CDs they were
giving away.  At the back of the booth they ran an ASCII art animation via a
beamer which got some very bewildered looks at times".</p>

<p><strong>LSB Presentations at LinuxWorld.</strong>  The <a
href="http://www.linuxbase.org/">Linux Standard Base</a> (LSB) project will
be delivering a tutorial, two presentations, and a "Taste of Linux"
discussion at <a
href="http://www.linuxworldexpo.com/linuxworldny03/V40/index.cvn">LinuxWorld</a>
in San Francisco.  These <a
href="http://www.linuxbase.org/modules.php?name=News&amp;file=article&amp;sid=21">presentations</a>
will take place on August 5 and 6 and will include "Designing and
Implementing Great Shared Libraries", presented by Ted Ts'o.  Amongst other
things, Ted is a Debian Developer and Linux kernel contributor.</p>

<p><strong>Inconsistencies in our Handling of Licenses.</strong> John Goerzen is
<a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal-0307/msg00338.html">getting</a>
an increasingly uneasy feeling about the consensus that appears to be starting
to coalesce around our handling of the <a
href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html">FDL</a>, RFC issues and related
matter.  He mentions that the <a href="$(HOME)/social_contract#guidelines">\
DFSG</a> are guidelines, not a definition, that we allow information to be
distributed with software under even more stricter terms than the FDL, that
standards have to be handled different to software, and that we need to think
about whether the actions we take are advancing our goals or not.</p>

<p><strong>DeCSS for Debian?</strong> There has been an <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0307/msg02296.html">Intent to
Package</a> for DeCSS, a utility for stripping CSS tags from an HTML page.
Sam Hocevar <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0307/msg02301.html">objected</a> to
this cluttering of the package namespace with a useless program.  Brian Nelson
<a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0307/msg02304.html">quoted</a>
the project's <a href="http://www.pigdog.org/decss/">website</a> which admits
that it is pretty much useless.</p>

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

<ul>
<li><a href="$(HOME)/security/2003/dsa-354">xconq</a> --
    Buffer overflows.
<li><a href="$(HOME)/security/2003/dsa-355">gallery</a> --
    Cross-site scripting.
<li><a href="$(HOME)/security/2003/dsa-356">xtokkaetama</a> --
    Buffer overflows.
<li><a href="$(HOME)/security/2003/dsa-357">wu-ftpd</a> --
    Buffer overflow.
<li><a href="$(HOME)/security/2003/dsa-358">Linux 2.4.18</a> --
    Several vulnerabilities.
<li><a href="$(HOME)/security/2003/dsa-359">atari800</a> --
    Buffer overflows.
<li><a href="$(HOME)/security/2003/dsa-360">xfstt</a> --
    Several vulnerabilities.
<li><a href="$(HOME)/security/2003/dsa-361">kdelibs</a> --
    Several vulnerabilities.
<li><a href="$(HOME)/security/2003/dsa-362">mindi</a> --
    Insecure temporary file creation.
<li><a href="$(HOME)/security/2003/dsa-363">postfix</a> --
    Remote denial of service, bounce scanning.
<li><a href="$(HOME)/security/2003/dsa-364">man-db</a> --
    Buffer overflows, arbitrary command execution.
</ul>

<p><strong>New or Noteworthy Packages.</strong> The following packages were
added to the unstable Debian archive recently or contain important updates.</p>

<ul>
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/text/acheck">acheck</a>
    -- Check common localisation mistakes.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/aget">aget</a>
    -- Multi-threaded HTTP Download Accelerator.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/ardour-gtk">ardour-gtk</a>
    -- Digital Audio Workstation.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/backup2l">backup2l</a>
    -- Low-maintenance backup/restore tool for mountable media.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/hamradio/baken">baken</a>
    -- Visualisation of European VHF/UHF and microwave beacons.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/graphics/cinepaint">cinepaint</a>
    -- Motion picture editing and retouching tool.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/cpufreqd">cpufreqd</a>
    -- Speedstep applet clone.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/dvdbackup">dvdbackup</a>
    -- Tool to rip DVD's from the command line.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/etherboot">etherboot</a>
    -- Bootstrapping for various network adapters.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/fakechroot">fakechroot</a>
    -- Gives a fake chroot environment.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/fortunes-it-off">fortunes-it-off</a>
    -- Data files containing Italian fortune cookies, offensive section.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/gift">gift</a>
    -- Meta-package for the giFT file-sharing system.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/giftcurs">giftcurs</a>
    -- Text-based interface to the giFT file-sharing system.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/icecast2">icecast2</a>
    -- Streaming Ogg Vorbis/MP3 media server.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/jetty">jetty</a>
    -- Java servlet engine and webserver.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/kde/kflog">kflog</a>
    -- Flight planner and logger for glider pilots.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/hamradio/klog">klog</a>
    -- KDE ham radio logging program.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/lightning">lightning</a>
    -- Library for assembly code compilation at runtime.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/linux32">linux32</a>
    -- Wrapper to set the execution domain.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/litmus">litmus</a>
    -- WebDAV server protocol compliance test suite.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/lspowertweak">lspowertweak</a>
    -- Simple front end to powertweak.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/pathological">pathological</a>
    -- Puzzle game involving paths and marbles.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/pdsh">pdsh</a>
    -- Efficient rsh-like utility, for using hosts in parallel.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/puredata">puredata</a>
    -- Realtime computer music and graphics system.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/sins">sins</a>
    -- Snake game playable with only one key.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/slimp3">slimp3</a>
    -- MPEG Layer III Streaming Server.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/mail/spamass-milter">spamass-milter</a>
    -- Sendmail milter for filtering mail through spamassassin.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/kde/superkaramba">superkaramba</a>
    -- Program based on karamba improving the eyecandy of KDE.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/editors/vimoutliner">vimoutliner</a>
    -- Script for building an outline editor on top of Vim.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/wmclockmon">wmclockmon</a>
    -- Displays a clock in 12/24h mode with alarm mode and 3 different LCD styles.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/xa65">xa65</a>
    -- cross-assembler and utility suite for 65xx/65816 processors.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/zynaddsubfx">zynaddsubfx</a>
    -- Realtime software synthesizer for Linux.
</ul>

<p><strong>Orphaned Packages.</strong> 3 packages were orphaned this week and
require a new maintainer.  This makes a total of 183 orphaned packages.  Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free Software
community.  Please see the <a href="$(HOME)/devel/wnpp/">WNPP pages</a> 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.</p>

<ul>
<li> <a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/smm++">smm++</a>
     -- Graphical MUD client with mapping functionality.
     (<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/203933">Bug#203933</a>)</li>
<li> <a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/tnt">tnt</a>
     -- AIM client for Emacs.
     (<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/203894">Bug#203894</a>)</li>
<li> <a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/yydecode">yydecode</a>
     -- Decode yEnc archives.
     (<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/203896">Bug#203896</a>)</li>
</ul>

<p><strong>Want to continue reading DWN?</strong> Please help us create this
newsletter.  We still need more volunteer writers who investigate the Debian
community and report about events in the community.  Please see the <a
href="$(HOME)/News/weekly/contributing">contributing page</a> to find out how
to help.  We're looking forward to receiving your mail at <a
href="mailto:dwn@debian.org">dwn@debian.org</a>.</p>

#use wml::debian::weeklynews::footer editor="Matt Black, Dan Hunt, Martin 'Joey' Schulze"