Debian News

DebConf 11 will take place from July 24 to 30, 2011, in the city of Banja Luka, Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The final calendar of the event is:

• July 17, 2011: Setup day (only for people doing initial setup)
• July 18-23, 2011: DebCamp, the yearly developer work sessions.
• July 23, 2011: Arrival Day for DebConf11
• July 24-30, 2011: DebConf11
• July 31, 2011: Departure/cleanup day

The call for papers and registration dates are still to be decided.

More information at the DebConf 11 website.

As part of the Training Sessions initiative organized by the Debian Women project, this week a lesson about Python packaging will be held. The lesson, which is aimed at an intermediate audience, will focus specifically modules and applications packaging and will be held by Piotr Ożarowski who is member of Python Applications Packaging Team and Debian Python Modules Team.

The session will take place, as usual, on #debian-women channel on irc.debian.org on Thursday, 2nd December at 20:00 UTC.

Cause of the advanced topic is madatory to have some knowledge about Debian packaging (see, for example Lars Wirzenius’ tutorial) and about general Python development.

The lesson will consists of a first, theoretical, part in wich Piotr will explain us some basics; and of a Q&A part, entirely dedicated to more advanced problems.

See you on Thursday!

Contributed by: Francesca Ciceri

• An initial development snapshot of Firebird 3 is packaged and available from Debian Experimental. More information.
• Mike Hommey has updated Iceweasel to 4.0 beta7. It is available from the Debian Mozilla team APT archive.
• Google Code-in 2010 is beginning today! Read about Debian participation and if you are student, take a look to the tasks.
• The current Debian project leader, Stefano, was interviewed during the Open World Forum 2010 . The interview is now available in youtube.

If you are user of identi.ca, twitter or both and you want to follow the Debian updates via this services, you can follow the:

- official Debian identi.ca account
- official Debian twitter account

Also, Planet Debian is available at identi.ca with additional accounts for the Spanish and French planets.

If you are a Debian contributor using microblogging or part of a Debian team that uses microblogging to update
about your work, please include it in the list: http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Publicity/Identica

The Debian Release Team has made a status update on Debian 6.0, “Squeeze”. They are proud to report that Debian is moving towards the release like a glacier: “inevitably and unstoppingly”.

Squeeze is almost in its final state: testing of the installer and upgrades are welcome. Once the latest version of the Debian Installer is added, a deep freeze will begin, with minimal changes allowed while the remaining bugs are fixed. Your help is welcome in:

• processing installation/upgrade reports,
• translating of the debian-installer, (read latest translation status update)
• and fixing release-critical bugs.

There are two upcoming bug squashing parties you can join: Bern, Switzerland, November 27-28; and Boulogne-Billancourt, France,December 4-5.

The Debian Women project is pleased to announce the -start of a series of training sessions to be held via IRC in the Debian Women IRC channel, #debian-women on irc.debian.org

The first session has been scheduled for Thursday, 18th November at 20:00 UTC. Lars Wirzenius, will give an introductory lesson titled “Introduction to Debian Packaging”.

The main goal of this initiative is to encourage more people, specifically women, to contribute to Debian while introducing them to different aspects of the Debian Project. Topics will span a wide range of subjects related to daily Debian maintenance efforts as well as advanced tasks and are open to everybody, regardless of gender or previous involvements in the community.

Future sessions will be held on a regular basis, and will cover collaborative maintenance with git, Python modules and applications packaging, and many more. Please visit the Training Sessions wiki page regularly to check the up-to-date agenda and follow our group on identi.ca. You may also refer to the wiki to suggest new topics or sign up yourself as a trainer: we are always looking for more people to share knowledge and complete the schedule, so don’t be shy!

For further information about the Debian Women project, please visit the Debian-Women website or send mail to the Debian Women mailing list.

Google Code-in, Google’s contest to introduce pre-university students of ages between 13 and 18, to the many kinds of contributions that make open source software development possible, is starting on November 22, 2010 and Debian is one of the 20 organizations selected to take part.

If you are student interested in contributing to Debian, you can find more information in the wiki page http://wiki.debian.org/GoogleCodeIn2010.
A list of tasks is available at http://wiki.debian.org/GoogleCodeIn2010/Tasks and if you a Debian Developer, you still can add tasks by filling the template provided in the top of that wiki page.

You can join the IRC channel #debian-soc (on irc.debian.org) and the Debian GSOC mailing list to talk about your ideas and applications or if you have any question.

The Debian Installer team has announced the first beta release of the installer for Debian GNU/Linux Squeeze. This release is dedicated to Frans Pop who recently passed away.

The list of improvements and changes is listed in the announcement and the installer can be downloaded from the Debian-Installer website.