Debian News

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Thank you for following all this 19 months!

The Debian Volatile archive is discontinued starting with squeeze. It has been replaced by the suite squeeze-updates on the official mirrors. Read the full announcement to know all the details.

The Debian Installer team has announced the Debian Installer 6.0 Release Candidate 1 release. Read about all the changes and improvements at their announcement.

Remember Squeeze will ship with a completely free Linux Kernel, although if you require use of the non-free bits you can keep fetching them from non-free. Non-free is not part of the Debian default installation and must be enabled manually.

Your help is welcome:

• With any of the bugs at http://tinyurl.com/squeeze-sort, especially with the bugs marked as blocked.
• With the release notes, report a bug to release-notes (with patch!) if you see any information missing or incomplete or if you have something worthwhile to add.
• Translating the release notes with the Debian internationalization teams.
• And you are still on time to do upgrade and installation tests and report any big issue you may encounter.

• 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.

Proposed timeline of the Release Team

We hope to have sorted out all the details and resolved the remaining blockers by the end of October, with the focus during November being on translation updates, testing and coordination with different teams to prepare the new release.
This means that it’s possible to have a release out in time for Christmas, but to do this we need YOUR help. Please, squash bugs, write release notes, squash bugs, support our translators and squash some bugs.

• Chromium browser is now available from experimental, the package name is chromium-browser. Install chromium-browser-l10n if you want it localized.
• KDE 4.4.3 and Qt 4.6.2 are now available in unstable. More information.
• The Debian GNOME team is working hard on uploading GNOME 2.30 to unstable. It’s almost there, and the delay has mostly been due to the need to coordinate the library transitions. Check out its status here!
• Debconf, the annual Debian developers meeting, is seeking for sponsors and donors to help covering the costs implied by this event. If you are interested in becoming a sponsor please contact us at sponsors (at) debconf.org, or if you want to make a donation please read here.
• Debian gets ported to Ben NanoNote, a copyleft hardware micro notebook developed by Hong Kong startup company Sharism at Work. More info in their announcement and in the how to.

• Christian Perrier have reported about the localization status in the debian-installer, 26 languages are in danger of being deactivated. if you are a native speaker of one of them, you can join and help!
• The old (and no longer updated) archive snapshot http://snapshot.debian.net has been revamped as an official Debian service at http://snapshot.debian.org/.
  More information in the press release.
• You are still on time of submitting your event proposal for DebConf 10. Deadline is May 1st, 2010, 23h59 UTC
  Daniel Kahn Gillmor have blogged about the changes introduced this year.
• If you are a long time Debian contributor who never have attended to DebConf and you are interested, you no longer have an excuse, read about the special funding for DebConf Newbies.
  Joey Hess and Stefano Zacchiroli have blogged about this.
• Guido Günther wrote a summary about the 3rd Debian Groupware Meeting.

• Debian got 9 students accepted for this edition of the Google Summer of Code. Welcome to the project!
  Read a brief summary about their projects.

• And finally, a bit late, but still important, congratulations Stefano!

• Surely, you already found out ftp-master is back.
• Andreas Barth wrote a good post about how to help the Debian release team.
• Bernd Zeimetz introduced the deb.li – the Debian ShortURL Service, still in beta phase!
• Sylvestre Ledru blogged about an important update of the linear algebra libraries, BLAS and LAPACK, in Debian:
  • a refactoring of the ATLAS libraries (a BLAS implementation) with an upgrade to the version 3.8.3 fixing many issues
  • the switch between the different BLAS/LAPACK implementations is now way easier:
    http://wiki.debian.org/DebianScience/LinearAlgebraLibraries
• Some important deadlines are approaching:
  • April 9th, GSOC: student application deadline.
  • April 15th, Debian Project Leader Elections 2010 voting.
  • April 15th, DebConf: Early registration deadline if you want to be eligible for free food and accommodation and/or travel sponsorship
  • May 1st, DebConf: Event submission deadline. See also, DebConf important dates

• Steve McIntyre has sent a final report closing his 2 years as DPL. Steve, we are grateful for all the work you did during the past two years!
• Debian Project Leader Elections 2010: After 3 intense weeks of electoral campaigning, the voting period started today. You can read the questions and answers from the DPL candidates in the archives of the debian-vote mailing list. The new DPL term will start on April 17th, 2010.
• ries.debian.org, the host behind ftp-master.debian.org, has suffered some grave hardware problems and it has been down for one week now. If you were wondering why there were no new packages in your upgrades, this is the reason.
  This problem is actively being worked on, but until it is fixed, uploading new packages to the archive is not possible.
• The release team has sent a detailed update about the status of the transitions and release goals for Squeeze.
  A freeze in late May/June might be possible, if people work hard on getting these transitions done. Read the email to see how you can help!
• There were no new Debian Developers in March.
• Some developers participated in the traditional April Fools’ Day jokes, see: the Canonical vs. SPI lawsuit in planet: initial post by Adrian von Bidder, followed by this post by Alexander Reichle-Schmehl; and the Intend to package (ITP) bugs:
  ITP: jidanni — a natural intelligence to find many bugs
  ITP: cpan — All possible perl modules you could ever need

• Luk Claes resigned as Release Manager. Thanks Luk for all of your hard work!
  The rest of the release team keeps working in the release of Squeeze and they have sent a small update. A longer update will follow soon.
• Other teams has also sent updates to debian-devel-announce: ftp-master and new maintainer teams.
  If you are interested on them, you should be already subscribed to this list
• Eclipse 3.5.2 is now in Debian unstable. Special kudos to Niels Thykier.
• The Debian Kernel team is working in the kernel for Squeeze and Ben Hutchings has blogged some details about it.
• In the past week, there were two Debian mini-DebCamps in so distant places as Thailand and Panama.
  This week, Debian will have a booth in the OpenExpo 2010 in Bern and the Spanish Debian community will meet in the third edition of the Dudesconf in April 9-11.