First of all, I don't want to blame individual persons. This is just a note of how disappointed I'm about some parts of Debian that are not complying to licenses when it comes to distributing software.
debian-cd embedds copy of syslinux without source
A couple of years ago, I took over the maintenance of the
syslinux package since its previous maintainer was MIA. The takeover was motivated by to the fact, that having started to take care about live systems, I also started to use syslinux on a daily basis and that the syslinux package in Debian was horribly outdated.
At that time, I found out that
debian-cd, the toolkit to build the official Debian Installer images, doesn't take syslinux out of the archive at build-time of the image, but rather embedds a copy of the required binaries inside the package itself. So I asked Steve to update the binary what he did. Before the
etch release, I needed to ask the debian-cd team to sync again their embedded syslinux copy to match the one I had uploaded to the archive, as it was again outdated.
On the other hand,
live-helper, the toolkit to build the official Debian Live images, was always using the package out of the archive and did never had that problem.
After we have released the
Debian Lenny Live Beta 1 images last week, we got reports from people trying them on Apple MacBooks and failed because syslinux, taken out of the archive (version 3.71), is broken on that hardware. Some people stated that Debian Installer images do work. That is because debian-cd has an embedded copy of syslinux (version 3.63) which doesn't have that regressions.
Since syslinux version 3.71 is present in testing/lenny as well as unstable/sid, and stable/etch has version 3.31, that means... if debian-cd is embedding a syslinux binary with a different version, it must contain the sources for it (it also needs to contain the sources for it anyway, even if it would embedd binaries of the current version, however, it would be a tiny bit less arguable if its sources would be at least present in the Debian archive). So I checked debian-cd, and surprise, it doesn't contain syslinux sources.
Syslinux is licensed under the
GNU General Public License, version 2 or later. That means, that if you distribute the binaries and sources together, you can remove both at the same time if you decide to no longer distribute the binary (that is what Debian uses to do). This let me to bug
#497270. The option to distribute the binary with a note on how to get the sources, valid for three years, could theoretically be done, but isn't used so far (since it has pretty bad practical implications of keeping sources arround even after having stopped to distribute the binaries).
Debian sarge release has incomplete source images
Checking fo the consequences for embedding bootloader binaries in debian-cd, I just saw that the Debian
sarge release does ship syslinux version 2.04 in its images, but is shipping syslinux 2.11 in its source images. This is another violation of the GPL and I've filled this as bug
#497471.
...and syslinux is just one bootloader, only used for i386 and amd64. Someone still needs to check for all the other bootloaders for the other architectures we support (and those also for the etch release).
cdimage.debian.org distributes images without sources
While browsing arround on
cdimage.debian.org, I also found the
kde4beta livecds made by the Debian KDE team back in November 2007. Although these images are nice, there is no source available for them at all. They use packages that are not available anymore in Debian since a long time. This time, this doesn't only violate the GPL as in the previous two cases, but almost any copyleft license under which we distribute software in main and that is included on these images. I've filled this as bug
#497462.
Again, this is not about blaming individual persons. But I'm pretty disappointed by these things. In Debian, we spend a big chunk of time checking licenses of packages before we start distributing them. We have our beloved
NEW queue where, after the Debian Developer who has initial uploaded a package and has checked the sources, also ftp-masters are re-checking each and every package to ensure that our archive is kept legal. The NEW queue is a mesurement that consumes a big deal of our time, making uploading packages new packages slow, but this is the prize we pay for ensuring our freedom. And we do also make a big fuss about cluebating upstreams that don't respect licenses (be it intentionally or by accident). However, it appears that as good as our package checks are, we spend little to no time to check our resulting products made from these packages.
Update: kde4beta livecds have been removed now from cdimage.debian.org, see
#497462.
Update 2:
debimg does the same
crap.
Lenny well supported
We re pleased that Lenny released with good support for the Eee PC and are now turning our efforts to make Squeeze even better, while continuing to provide support for our Lenny user base. The standard Lenny installer can install Debian on all models of Eee and our custom installer provides the ability to install over wireless for almost every model (more about this later) from a very small image. The latter continues to be our recommended install method, since in addition to being wireless-ready, the custom installer also handles a few other small eee-specific configuration chores to make as much as possible just work right after the install.
Solid mainstream support
We ve made good on our promise to make Debian work on the Eee PC, not a derivative, many of which use a custom kernel instead of the stock kernel as we do and use a special desktop instead of our users favourites. While we agree that some intriguing things can be done in these areas, it is no substitute for mainstream support. Our users are better served by a solid foundation than specialised modifications that limit their choices. We want them to be able to enjoy the freedom to mold Debian, the universal OS, into whatever suits them best.
Squeeze support started
Work is well underway on supporting all Eee models in Squeeze. For months, several team members have been experimenting with new kernels, producing support for them in eeepc-acpi-scripts. The current release of this key package (version 1.1.0) supports Linux 2.6.29 and contains enhancements for wifi, sound hotkeys, bluetooth, external displays and OSD.
Squeeze will support wired & wifi on all current models
With the appearance of 2.6.29 in Sid, all ethernet and wifi cards used in all models of Eee today are supportable without the need for out-of-kernel or non-free drivers. Madwifi is replaced by the free ath5k driver, the non-free rt2860 package is replaced by mainstream kernel support, (though it still requires non-free firmware provided separately,) rtl8187se is included, making it possible now for us to support the model 701SD, and ath9k is included, making full support for newer models such as the 1000HE possible.
Lenny backports and live demo
All of these changes can be enjoyed today by Lenny users. Just add Daniel Baumann s Lenny kernel backport repository and then install the 2.6.29 kernel and an updated acpid. See our upgrade howto for details. You can try a small (less than 256M) demo of this configuration by downloading beta 2 of our Live USB image.
Accessibility
Late last year, we discussed how to make it easier for the blind to install Debian unassisted on their Eee PCs. As it was a simple change, we now include brltty in the custom installer, but we understand that some users also need software synthesized text-to-speech, something for which there is no support yet in the standard Debian-installer. We understand this isn t an easy thing to fix, but hope someone will rise to the challenge.
Growing team of developers
We welcome Darren Salt and Raphael Geissert to the team this year. Both have been actively making contributions to the eeepc-acpi-scripts package over the past months, fixing some outstanding bugs and readying it to handle changes in more recent kernel releases.
Moved eeepc.debian.net to new hosting
Nico Golde, who hosted eeepc.debian.net for the first year development, has turned his focus to other areas of Debian. Glenn Saberton has stepped in to provide a new home for it. We thank them both for their efforts and for a smooth, uneventful transition from one host to the other.
Size of user community
Speaking of the move, earlier this year, Glenn shared with us some interesting archive traffic statistics that give us a rough idea how many users we have. For the months of December and January, after factoring out bot hits, we were seeing about 300,000 hits from 15,000 unique users per month. The site handles roughly 60G of traffic per month, most of that from thousands of downloads of our custom installer image. It s hard to draw any firm conclusions about the size of our user base from these stats, as many users may be on dynamic IP numbers, inflating the numbers, but we can conservatively say we have at least 5000 users. Other interesting statistics are that we have anywhere up to 80 users at any given time on our irc channel and over 250 users on the mailing list.
Help wanted
The Asus Eee PC line continues to expand, with 24 models listed so far. It is a challenge to keep up support for all of them. We re encouraged to see Asus choose a new b/g/n wifi chipset for their 1002HA that is supported by a DFSG free driver ath9k in this case. It appears that the new Atom N280-based 1000HE uses the same chipset as well (though be careful: I know of at least one user who bought a 1000HE in Argentina expecting it to have this chipset and was disappointed to find it had the Ralink chipset instead, we guess because of availability). If this trend continues, we ll be that much closer to our goal of full support for Squeeze main. As it stands, we re already as close as we can get given the state of rt2860 and no prospect on the horizon for replacing the non-free firmware.
If you would like to help us out in any way, whether by testing, debugging, patching, or improving our documentation, get in touch with our team. We rely on your feedback to keep Lenny in good shape and work towards making Squeeze even better for all users of Debian on the Eee PC.
A few days ago I was awarded 
Daniel Baumann 
This is the result of Swiss voting on ISO/IEC DIS 29500, the fast-tracking of the Microsoft Office Open XML file format.