Debian News

The following developers got their Debian accounts in the last month:

• Ludovico Cavedon (cavedon)
• Gilles Filippini (pini)
• Christopher Taylor (ctaylor)
• Oliver Korff (okoli)
• Franck Joncourt (franck)
• Antonio Radici (antonio)
• Emmanuel Bouthenot (kolter)
• Tim Retout (diocles)
• Dario Minnucci (midget)
• Hector Oron (zumbi)
• Albin Tonnerre (lutin)
• Modestas Vainius (modax)
• Christoph Egger (christoph)
• Andrea Veri (and)

Congratulations!

• 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.

The following packages have been orphaned and are looking for a new maintainer:

• O: gnuserv — Allows you to attach to an already running Emacs
• O: halevt — Generic handler for HAL events
• O: and — Auto Nice Daemon

The following packages have been put up for adoption by the current maintainers:

• RFA: pearpc – PowerPC architecture emulator
• RFA: crossvc — graphical CVS frontend
• RFA: dpatch — Debian patch management system

Somebody asked for the following software to be packaged in Debian:

• RFP: ubuntuwintv — software to watch TVs and RADIOs streaming over internet
• RFP: gwallpapers — gWallpapers – change desktop wallpaper automatically
• RFP: hongere — Web TV Viewer
• RFP: pinkytagger — fasa, easy and powerful music tagger
• RFP: Please package jQuery 1.2 as well (libjs-jquery-1.2)
• RFP: iFolder — keeps synchronized the directories on many computers

You can read more information about how to help at Work-Needing and Prospective Packages page.

There are 62 new packages in the Debian archive, 4 were uploaded to experimental and 58 were uploaded to unstable:

Continue reading…

The following packages have been orphaned and are looking for a new maintainer:

• O: esmtp — User configurable relay-only MTA

The following packages have been put up for adoption by the current maintainers:

• RFA: mrtg-ping-probe — Ping module for Multi Router Traffic Grapher

Somebody asked for the following software to be packaged in Debian:

• RFP: libmoosex-simpleconfig-perl – A Moose role for setting attributes from a simple configfile
• RFP: mozilla-lightning – brings Sunbird together with Mozilla Thunderbird.
• RFP: zookeeper — Information management inside a cluster. Part of the hadoop family.
• RFP: katta — scalable, failure tolerant, distributed, indexed, data storage using hadoop
• RFP: hudson — extensible continuous integration server
• RFP: diffpdf — compares two PDF files textually or visually

You can read more information about how to help at Work-Needing and Prospective Packages page.

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

There are 68 new packages in the Debian archive, all of them uploaded to unstable:

Continue reading…

The following packages have been orphaned and are looking for a new maintainer:

• O: libpkg-guide — Debian Library Packaging guide
• O: xview — XView UI toolkit library and client programs
• O: openrpg — client/server application to play RPG over the Internet
• O: bygfoot — soccer (football) manager game featuring the most important European leagues
• O: sphinx2 — speech recognition utilities
• O: xpaint — simple paint program for X
• 0: mailreader — Simple, but powerful WWW mail reader system
• O: libfrontier-rpc-perl — Perl module to implement RPC calls using XML requests
• O: sffview – Structured Fax File (SFF) Viewer
• O: pgn-extract — Portable Game Notation (PGN) extractor
• O: gambit — Game theory analysis software and tools
• O: gambit-doc — documentation for gambit
• O: tex-chess — Chess fonts for TeX/LaTeX
• O: tex-skak — Chess fonts for TeX/LaTeX

The following packages have been put up for adoption by the current maintainers:

• RFA: mediawiki-metavidwiki – A MediaWiki extension for associative temporal metadata
• RFA: mediawiki-semediawiki – Semantic MediaWiki helps to organise and search MediaWiki content
• RFA: xdaliclock — Melting digital clock

Somebody asked for the following software to be packaged in Debian:

• RFP: libindicate — panel indicator applet
• RFP: idea-free — Java IDE with intelligent code editor and various refactorings
• RFP: mysql-cluster-7 — MySQL Cluster is the flexibility and a high availability database.
• RFP: ncl — Nexus Class Library
• RFP: heekscad — Free CAD based on Open CASCADE
• RFP: launchy — Launchy: The Open Source Keystroke Launcher
• RFP: prado — Component framework for php5
• RFP: heekscnc — CNC machining add-in for HeeksCAD
• RFP: pmb — an Integrated Library System entirely free
• RFP: minitube — a native YouTube client
• RFP: jansson — C library for encoding, decoding and manipulating JSON data
• RFP: cba — continuous beam analysis

You can read more information about how to help at Work-Needing and Prospective Packages page.

The IANA port allocated for ManageSieve is 4190/tcp, and the old port used by timsieved and other managesieve software in many distros (2000/tcp) is allocated for Cisco SCCP usage, according to the IANA registry.

Starting with the version 4.38 of the Debian “netbase” package, the “sieve” service will be moved from port 2000 to port 4190 in the /etc/services file. This affects to those using Debian Squeeze, and Debian Sid. Debian Etch and Debian Lenny users are NOT affected.

Continue reading…