Debian News

• Interesting software updates in unstable:
  • reprepro 4.1.0
  • sylpheed 3.0.0
• Linux Kernel 2.6.33 is available in experimental. Special kudos to Ben Hutchings.
• Debian Installer Team has released the first alpha of the Debian Installer 6.0
• It is that time of the year again, the DPL election process begins this week.
• The Debian Qt/KDE Maintainers are already working in KDE 4.4.1. However, for uploading it to unstable Qt 4.6.2 will need to go in first.
• In case you missed the “New Developer of the past month” post, there were no new Developers in February.

• A year ago yesterday, Lenny was lovely released. With the current stable release becoming 1 year old, the security support for oldstable (Etch) is ending.
• Following the release of the fourth update of Lenny 5.0.4., the stable release team has sent an email asking for help and clarifying a few aspects of point releases and stable updates.
• The release team has also sent an important update about the status of Squeeze. Freezing in March is highly unlikely due to the high number of release critical bugs. Consider helping if you want to release soon.
• Kudos to the debian-edu team for the release of Debian Edu 5.0.4+edu0 (Skolelinux 5.0) based in the Debian Lenny.
• And finally, but not less important, the registration for Debconf10 is now open! Register before April 15th if you want to apply for sponsorship.

• Python 2.6 is now available in unstable and testing . Also, Python 2.6 is now a supported version (while writing these lines only in unstable). It will take at least a couple of weeks until 2.6 is the default version.
• Python 2.7 alpha 2 is available in experimental. It is not expected to be in squeeze.
• Python 3.1.1 also has been uploaded to unstable and it is co-installable with python 2.6. However, Python 3.1 is not a supported version and the Python Policy for handling 3.1 needs to be updated; this means some modules might not be available. You can try Python 3.1 by installing the package «python3» and running «python3».

• Interesting software updates:
  • SpamAssassin 3.3.0 (unstable)
  • Sylpheed 3.0.0 betas continue being uploaded to experimental, latest is beta7.
• X.Org 7.5 reached testing some days ago.
• KDE 4.3.5 won’t be packaged and KDE 4.4.0 expected next February 9th might take a while.
• René Mayorga has announced a mini-DebConf in Panamá, during March 19-21, 2010.

• OpenOffice.org 3.2 Release Candidate 3 is available in experimental.
• If you run into problems with Java networking, e. g. if your Java apps suddenly start failing to connect to the database. You might be affected by this bug.
• schroot version 1.4.0 has been released
• The security support for Etch will be discontinued next 15th February, exactly one year after the Lenny release. If you are still using Etch, it is time to update to Lenny that have its point release 5.0.4 planned for the end of this month.
• Theppitak Karoonboonyanan has announced a mini-DebCamp in Khon Kaen, Thailand, during March 13-19, 2010.

• Kenshi Muto has released custom debian-installer images for Lenny with Linux kernel 2.6.32. The images are available only for i386 and amd64.
• The GPG key signing coordination pages are now hosted in the Debian Wiki. Read first the coordination page before register your key signing request.
  If you registered to offer keysigning to others, take a moment to check if your data is up-to-date.
• If you are a user of debian-ports.org, there is a new archive signing key.
• For Python developers, the latest upload of http://packages.debian.org/sid/python-stdeb 0.5, includes pypi-install for installing packages from the Python Package Index . Read more in this email from debian-python.
• Upcoming Bug Squashing Parties: Tokyo, New York city and Mönchengladbach (Gemany).

The Lenny version of the spamassassin package contains a regular expressions that considers as “coming from the future” mails dated in 2010. Starting from a couple of days ago, that has increased the possibility of false positives.
More information about that can be found in some blog posts such as this one and in the Debian BTS, bug #563245.

If you are running spamassassin on a Debian machine, you should probably upgrade it to avoid false positives. That can be easily achieved using the volatile version of spamassassin 3.2.5-2+lenny1.1~volatile1. More information about this update and instructions of how to update in this announcement from the debian-volatile-announce mailing list.

Generally, it is a good idea to have a volatile line in your sources.list. Read more about the debian-volatile project in their website.

Unstable users only need to make sure they update to the latest version available in the archive 3.2.5-7.

Contributed by: Stefano Zacchiroli

• Interesting software updates uploaded to experimental:
  • GCC 4.5 (Read changelog).
  • Blender 2.50 alpha 0. More info in Cyril’s blog post.
  • Icedove 3.0 RC2. (Read changelog)
• Linux kernel 2.6.32 has been available in unstable for about 2 weeks. Ben Hutchings posted a quick update about the status the plans announced by the kernel team after their meeting.
• Christian Perrier blogged about what is going on in the Font packaging Team.
• The Python Policy has been updated. The last step remaining before uploading Python 2.6 to unstable, it is dropping Python 2.4 as supported version. About 50 bugs needs to be addressed for this.
• Russ Allbery blogged about the release of lintian 2.3.0 with a lot of improvements and code changes. It is interesting to highlight the new option -F or --ftp-master-rejects that shows only those tags that might result in an automated reject when uploading the package to the Debian achive.

Ten years ago, on December 21st, 1999, Thomas Lange announced the release of version 1.0 of FAI (Fully Automatic Installation).

FAI is a non-interactive system to install, customize and manage Linux systems and software configurations on computers as well as virtual machines and chroot environments, from small networks to large infrastructures and clusters.

It is a tool for mass unattended Linux installation. You can take one or more virgin systems, turn on the power, and after a few minutes, the systems are installed, and completely configured to your exact needs, without any interaction necessary.

The tool was developed at the University of Cologne, because the author was too lazy to install Debian on 16 hosts manually.FAI now also supports the installation of Ubuntu and RPM-based Linux distributions. It is used worldwide in very different environments; even installations on two zSeries z10 mainframes are reported.

A detailed report in German about the 10 years of the FAI project can be found at http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/otherdocs/10jahre.html.

Contributed by: Thomas Lange

Several LXDE components have been updated recently in sid. They bring some new features and improve flexibility of customization. Below you have a summary of the most important changes:

• lxde-common 0.5.0-2:
  The nuoveXT2 icon theme has been removed from lxde-common and it is has been moved to lxde-icon-theme package instead.
  The startlxde script now executes 'lxsession -s LXDE -e LXDE' rather than 'lxsession -s LXDE' to reflect the changes in lxsession.
• lxsession 0.4.1-1:
  There is a new command line argument: -e. This let you set the internal name of the DE. This value is exported via the environment variable $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP. The DE name can be used to match desktop files which contain compatible OnlyShowIn and NotShowIn key values.
  The -s argument is reserved for session name only and was used to load related config files for the desktop session. For example, you can execute: lxsession -s Lubuntu -e LXDE This should load config files from Lubuntu directory, but the DE is still recognized as LXDE by applications.
• lxpanel 0.5.4.1-1:
  Now you can determine the visibility of applications in the menu by comparing OnlyShowIn and NotShowIn key values and $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP. This means, you can have lxpanel show Gnome menu by the following export XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=3DGNOME . Then lxpanel will show gnome applications instead of LXDE ones.
• Finally, lxnm and lxpanel-netstat-plugin are now deprecated.
  lxnm has been already requested to be removed from the archive and it is recommended to use wicd instead. lxpanel-netstat-plugin has also dropped from lxpanel in the upload 0.5.4.1-1.

Contributed by: Andrew Lee