Just stumbled over Debian beamer themes by
Richard Darst. Very cool and exactly what I needed! Thanks!
By the way: For DebConf attendees from Germany (or passing through Germany)
might be interesting, that you can currently book the night train from Munich to Zagreb
with a special price (called Spar Nightor something like that); quite cheap: It's cheaper for Meike and me in a double cabin of that train, than to fly for one of us. As far as I know it is a limited offer, to book fast while you can! Apparently you can't book that train via the web interface, but you can buy it in their offices and via phone. Oh, an it seems that the train on the 22nd of July there and on the 31st back might become a
Debian train. Seems there are already five of us taking that one ;) Update: Fixed a typo: DebConf is taking place in July, not in June.
The readers of debian-devel-games@l.d.o and games@l.fd.o do already know, but the fact pkg-games has it s next (second) meeting on April 30th at 12:00 UTC in #debian-games needs the attention of the whole planet (pun intended)!All overrides listing files with a prefix of ./ or / will not work as of 2.5.0~rc1If you are curious as to why, please have a look at #534940. Fixing the override is simply a matter of removing the ./ or / prefix(es). If you discover a tag that still uses ./ or / as file name prefix, please file a bug (assuming someone did not beat you to it). I am not entirely sure if the FTP-masters have updated the copy of Lintian that handles auto-rejects[2], so you may have keep the old/broken override if it is for a non-fatal auto-reject tag. This is especially true for the embedded-zlib tag that were merged into embedded-library. [1] On a related note, this is why this is 2.5.0~rc1 and not 2.4.4. [2] I also do not know when they plan to do it if they have not already done so, but Tolimar has informed me that 2.5.0~rc2 is in squeeze-backports. >.>
I'm sure you already heard the news about the new
joined
Canterbury
Distribution,
and are eager about details.
While our teams are struggling to integrate all the existing
infrastructure, it's my pleasure to announce that the first pieces of the
collaboration are already available for our users.
As a first measurement, a common Canterbury Package Manager, called
cant will be made available in all distributions. It is already
available for the distribution formerly known as Archlinux, and
with the next mirror push will also be available for those used to run
Debian.
You'll be pleased to know, that the command line syntax isn't much of a
change, you can still run cant search, cant install or
cant remove, but future version will also introduce all the
features known from the other distributions.
Stay tuned for further updates of Canterbury Linux!
If you are wondering, how we will manage to have the DebCamp preceding
DebConf 11 in 2009, it's quite easy: Each attendee will find a time
machine in his conference back.
By the way: To make that happen, the DebConf orga team is
looking
for help in fund raising. Please consider helping us, or we will have
to cancel the time machines and fall back to the boring DebCamp directly preceding DebConfsolution.
I've just been told, that the video of the Linux New Media Award Ceremony
(you might remember that Debian won in two
categories) is now available
online.
Update: To watch that video without a proprietary plugin, you can
download the
video and watch with xine or some other free media player. Thanks to
Rhonda for the hint!
My
(German) interview with RadioTux is also available online.
Someone asked me during CeBIT for official packages of mendeley. I didn't
knew much about it at that time, but mentioned it in my report on the
debian-project mailing list.
It appears, that mendeley won't be packaged anytime soon, however
Charles
Plessy and others commented on that and mentioned some similar
tools.
As I don't have any contact data for the visitor, who asked me about
it, the best thing I can do for now is mention it here, so he might notice
it and read the comments on the list.
Those who followed the live stream or read our News already knew it:
Debian has been honored with the Linux New Media Award in the Categories
"Best Open Source Server Distribution" and Outstanding Contribution to Open Source/Linux/Free Software. Especially the second one, considered to be the "kings class" of the LNM awards, is a great honour. While it is called the
Linux New Mediaaward, the decision of whom to honor with them isn't done by the company themselves, but by a bigger jury, consisting of over 300 representative community members, developers, journalists and companies. Deciding in a secret vote1. To the best of my knowledge, there's nothing similar. So one can truly say, we weren't awarded by a company, but by the entire Free Software community! Congratulations to everyone involved! For our
Outstanding Contribution to Open Source/Linux/Free Softwareaward, we also had the special pleasure, to receive our presentation speech from Karsten Gerloff, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe, who found words, I can hardly explain myself. As it might take some time for the video of the award ceremony to be published and several people already asked for it, you'll find the text of the speech below. Still, you might want to watch the video for a special surprise by Karsten:
I'm here to congratulate the Debian project. Debian has recently taken a nearly unprecedented step, one that many people thought would never come to pass: The project has updated its website design. Today, Debian receives the Linux New Media Award for its outstanding contribution to Free Software. I could hardly think of a more fitting recipient for such an award. Debian is coming of age, literally. In August, the distribution will turn 18. Debian offers great technology. It's stable. Really stable. It's highly flexible, and performs well in lots of different roles. IT supports more different architectures than almost anything else out there. It runs on pretty much anything. The package management is great. It makes a highly complex system of almost 30,000 packages extremely simple to configure and use. Debian started out as a true pioneer. When the project was created in 1993, the whole concept of a distribution wasn't too well established. Ian Murdock announced the project thus:1: I forgot to mention one small, but important detail: The voting period for the jury ended on December 23, 2010, so long before"Debian Linux is a brand-new kind of Linux distribution. Rather than being developed by one isolated individual or group, as other distributions of Linux have been developed in the past, Debian is being developed openly in the spirit of Linux and GNU. [...] Debian is being carefully and conscientiously put together and will be maintained and supported with similar care." At a recent conference, the current Debian project lead, Stefano Zacchiroli, gave a talk titled Who the bloody hell cares about Debian? Turns out that many people do indeed. Debian is the GNU/Linux distribution that has the most derivatives based on it currently 128, if Distrowatch.com is to be believed: Ubuntu, Knoppix, gNewSense, and many more. And those distributions again have their own derivatives. None of these could function without Debian. Lots of people rely on Debian. That makes it all the more important that Debian is so reliable. The Debian project gives us Free Software that is both rock-solid and exciting. But the greatest thing about Debian is not the fact that it delivers great software. Other distributions do that, too. The big thing about Debian is the *idea* of Debian: The idea that a massive Free Software project can be totally independent. Debian shows how it's possible to build a highly reliable operating system without a formal body. The project has created some pretty complex structures to run itself, as a do-ocracy, based on consensus and running code. This is important. We are currently debating how Free Software projects can best be governed in the long run. How do we make sure that a project's users can always enjoy the freedom they deserve? How can we structure a project in a way that makes it immune to a hostile takeover? Oracle's acquisition of Sun has shown that these are important question. A Free Software license, preferably one like the GPL that protects freedom in the long run, is an important first step. But a Free Software project consists of much more than code. While uncounted people and companies are earning good money with Debian, the Debian project itself can't be bought simply because there is noone you could buy it from. Debian has been doing vendor independence long before it was cool. What I love most about Debian is that like few other big projects, Debian has the idea of freedom at its core. Debian's Free Software guidelines are a central manifesto for software freedom. The Debian Social Contract does not mention a single package or program. But it is without a doubt one of Debian's most important pieces of documentation. In Debian, quality is the focus of everyone's attention. But those who work on the Debian system know that great software is worth nothing without Freedom. With the release of Squeeze, the latest stable version, in February, Debian has taken the important step of offering a completely free kernel, with no binary blobs. This is a first for a major distribution in recent times. Debian is giving its users Freedom by default. And this Freedom for users and developers on a massive scale truly is Debian's outstanding contribution, not just to Free Software, but to the information society. On behalf of the Free Software Foundation Europe, I would like to thank everyone in Debian for their work, and congratulate them on this award. It's well deserved. Keep up the good work!
Squeezewas released. So we can be quite sure, that the Jury didn't followed the Squeeze-Hype with their decision, but really thinks, we did something great :)
The taz(short for
die tageszeitung) is one of the major German daily newspapers. And they currently feature the Squeeze release on their frontpage! The article is very good (and well investigated), managing to explain some technical details quite well, and...
der Standardhas also an article about the Squeeze release!
Wow, that was a night. I'm still quite tired from the weekend. Someone
told me, that ~ 1 000 people subscribed to our live denting via
identi.ca, and about 12 000 via twitter. And that does not even include
those, who followed us via the respective web interfaces!
While it was quite exhausting (we tried to watch about 7 irc channels
for the important stuff, I partly had ~80 windows in my irssi (which is
especially bad, since I only have keyboard shortcuts for the first 40) and
there whas also a constant need to watch for mails and due to
translations also our spamfilters), it was also very nice to think that
somewhere there are release parties going on with people looking at our
dents, maybe even having them running on a big monitor or projector ;)
One thing that remains to be done, are the left-over dents we prepared as time killers: Since the release process went quite smoothly (and we didn't have the time to check all our dents for the limit of 140 chars ;) we still have some of them left. Since some of them where requested (and I poked other people to get me the numbers) here are the remaining dents:
Lennygot released on the 14th of February 2009, the first website was translated into Vietnamese.
All the funny stuff regarding Debianis only read by 946 persons. It is very low traffic.
... and look, what has just been brought to us, by some friends and Debian
users:
A surprise Debian Squeeze release cake! Many thanks, it was delicious!
Could some please put a picture of one of the new spacefun
themed T-Shirts somewhere? I really want to see them...
Update: Christoph Kluenter was so nice to upload some
pictures.
The bug webinterface of the
Ultimate Debian Database
currently knows about the following release critical bugs:
| In Total: | 574 |
|---|---|
| Affecting Squeeze: | 2 |
| Squeeze only: | 2 |
| Remaining to be fixed in Squeeze: | 0 |
| Pending in Squeeze: | 0 |
|---|---|
| Patched in Squeeze: | 0 |
| Duplicates in Squeeze: | 0 |
| Can be fixed in a security Update: | 0 |
| Contrib or non-free in Squeeze: | 0 |
| Claimed in Squeeze: | 0 |
| Delayed in Squeeze: | 0 |
| Otherwise fixed in Squeeze: | 0 |
Squeezereleased. However, with the view of the Release Managers, 2 need to be dealt with for the release to happen. Please see
Interpreting the release critical bug statisticsfor an explanation of the different numbers.
33 is a nice number; it's symmetrical both in decimal in in binary!
And very tasteful!
Thanks!
Apparently I forgot to put my initial call
for release parties on planet.debian.org. Sorry, so much
things to do, so little time...
As Debian Squeezewill be released next weekend, it's a good time to start preparing a release party in your city. Be it in a pub, a pizzeria, or your living room: Organizing and hosting a release party is an ideal opportunity to meet, exchange GPG fingerprints, exchange knowledge and of course be merry and celebrate :) If there's going to be an event in your city, please add it to our wiki page so others can find it and join you :) Oh, and the publicity got the idea to do some live commenting of the release process via Debian's official identi.ca account. Might become interesting to watch that, too, as we also plan to fill boring waiting parts with funny and interesting facts :) Oh, and if you should know / or would be interested in an interesting facts (e.g. the the 150'000 closed bugs since Lenny got released please contact us, as we are still preparing them ;)
The bug webinterface of the
Ultimate Debian Database
currently knows about the following release critical bugs:
| In Total: | 575 |
|---|---|
| Affecting Squeeze: | 14 |
| Squeeze only: | 6 |
| Remaining to be fixed in Squeeze: | 8 |
| Pending in Squeeze: | 1 |
|---|---|
| Patched in Squeeze: | 0 |
| Duplicates in Squeeze: | 0 |
| Can be fixed in a security Update: | 2 |
| Contrib or non-free in Squeeze: | 0 |
| Claimed in Squeeze: | 0 |
| Delayed in Squeeze: | 0 |
| Otherwise fixed in Squeeze: | 0 |
Squeezereleased. However, with the view of the Release Managers, 9 need to be dealt with for the release to happen. Please see
Interpreting the release critical bug statisticsfor an explanation of the different numbers.
The bug webinterface of the
Ultimate Debian Database
currently knows about the following release critical bugs:
| In Total: | 575 |
|---|---|
| Affecting Squeeze: | 25 |
| Squeeze only: | 10 |
| Remaining to be fixed in Squeeze: | 15 |
| Pending in Squeeze: | 0 |
|---|---|
| Patched in Squeeze: | 7 |
| Duplicates in Squeeze: | 2 |
| Can be fixed in a security Update: | 1 |
| Contrib or non-free in Squeeze: | 0 |
| Claimed in Squeeze: | 0 |
| Delayed in Squeeze: | 0 |
| Otherwise fixed in Squeeze: | 6 |
Squeezereleased. However, with the view of the Release Managers, 21 need to be dealt with for the release to happen. Please see
Interpreting the release critical bug statisticsfor an explanation of the different numbers.
Next.
