Debian News

Last weekend both the Debian Reference and the Developers Reference, got minor updates.

You can read them online following the links given above or installing the package of the same name (debian-reference, developers-reference ).

The Debian Reference is an important document for users and it is currently translated to 9 languages, most of them needing to be updated. Join the i18n efforts in Debian if you want to help translating it !

udev 146 has been uploaded to experimental.(see changelog)
Marco d’Itri has asked for help in testing and fixing bugs.

Finally, the latest major release of nmap 5.0 has been uploaded to unstable. Look at the changelog from the nmap 5.0 page if you want to know more about the improvements.

GnuPG 1.4.10 Release Candidate 1 has been packaged and uploaded to experimental. The upload closes a lot of bugs (see changelog) and the maintainers are asking for testing.

Rob Browning announced in debian-devel that emacs23 has been uploaded to unstable. You can see the emacs and emacs-nonfree upload emails.

Currently, the archive contains emacs21, emacs22 and emacs23. Rob has filed a bug to begin the removal of emacs21.

ia32-libs and ia32-libs-gtk were used by a lot of people to run 32-bit software on an amd64 installation. They have been removed recently from the archive (bug #535645), on the basis they are hackish packages (which is true), and replaced by something even more hackish, ia32-apt-get.

ia32-apt-get failed to work correctly for a lot of persons, which broke a lot of systems. Fortunately Mark Hymers reintroduced the packages in the archive. In the long term, those packages will be replaced by multiarch support (planned for squeeze), which will allow, among other things, the installation of 32-bit packages on an amd64 installation.

KDE 4.3.0 is now available in unstable. See the release announcement to know about the new features.

There are 3 new source packages:

• oxygen-icons (used to be kde-icons-oxygen, split from kdebase-workspace)
• kdepim-runtime (used to be akonadi-kde, split from kdepim)
• kdelibs-experimental, that provides new kde libraries not API- nor -ABI- stable, provided by KDE developers for testing them for a future stabilization and inclusion in kdelibs.

The first (and largest) bunch of TurboGears 2 packaging in Debian has been uploaded to unstable. As a consequence, TurboGears 2 should now be mostly usable in unstable to develop and run TurboGears 2 applications. The only missing bits are an offline version of the framework documentation and the fancy web-based administrative interface (which are currently waiting in NEW).

More info have been posted at
http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2009/08/turbogears_2_in_debian_unstable/

Bug #535624, which resulted in an empty xorg.conf file, even when that was not the desired result, had been bothering several users since the 5.0.2 lenny release. A new version of xorg (1:7.3+20) was uploaded to proposed-updates last week, fixing this problem.