While the Debian 6 release was accompanied by much less buzz and fanfare than the previous release, “Lenny”, Debian 6 does come with gigatons of new features. Let’s have a look at it all, in this LFY-exclusive review of Debian 6.0. More here

It has been a long time since we sent the last bits from the Debian
Installer Team. Since then Debian 6.0 ‘Squeeze’ was released and a lot has changed inside the team and in the installer itself. We intend to use this e-mail to summarise it and communicate better with people interested on helping with the development of d-i.

Infrastructure changes
———————-

Debian Installer has moved from Subversion to GIT[??REF] – thanks to
Joey Hess. This was planned a long time ago but just happened
recently. This is a major step towards making contributing easier for
the involved people and porters.

The daily builds have been moved to buildd machines to address some
unavailability of some architectures and allowing for faster action
when something goes wrong. Sparc still needs to be addressed.

New contributors
—————-

The Debian Installer team are looking for more people to help. The
installer development is a huge but quite pleasant task and nowadays
it is centered on a small number of people.

The right time to start contributing is “Right Now(TM)” as we’re
starting a new development cycle and many new and exciting features
are being developed. Come and join us!

Installation Guide
——————

Maintenance of the installation guide clearly suffered from the loss
of Frans Pop. The current team members will do their best to keep it
in good shape, but this is definitely an area where help would be
appreciated.

Non-Linux ports
—————

As you may have noticed, Squeeze was released with kfreebsd support,
d-i indeed now has tested support for non-Linux ports, kfreebsd and
hurd notably.

L10N
—-

As usual, more localization is always welcomed, but good maintenance
of existing localization is also needed. We have small worries about
the maintenance for the following languages: Albanian, Macedonian,
Tagalog, Kurdish, Wolof, Welsh. If you have skills in one of these
languages, then you can help.

Several translations of D-I are a one-(wo)man effort. Feel free to
join one of the existing teams.

..for Wheezy
————

Right after the release of Debian Squeeze some new features are being
worked on. In netcfg, we plan to add wireless support for WPA
networks, IPv6, vlan network infrastructure support and link detection
by Matthew Palmer and Robert Edmonds. For accessibility, we plan to
add software speech support.

As well as being a vital component of d-i, Busybox is a core component
for Emdebian and other embedded efforts that use Debian as a base. Two
new contributors have stepped in to help to improve it (Cristian Greco
and Michael Tokarev). It has been updated to the latest stable release
(1.18.3) and had substantial modifications to improve its quality.

Some discussion is being done to make eaiser to add support for new
hardware into d-i and flash-kernel.

We have also had a number of usability discussions, and maybe we can
get new ideas to improve usability and functionality of the installer.

There is also a bug squashing effort in progress, and we need help
with triaging and corrections.

The installer has been updated with a new Linux kernel (2.6.37)
supporting more hardware, such as more storage controllers, network
cards, keyboards and USB 3.0.

–
Otavio Salvador
on behalf of the Debian Installer Team

В дистрибутивах Linux, построенных на Debian (Ubuntu, Mint и др.), несмотря на то, какой браузер выбран по умолчанию в самом браузере, при нажатии на ссылку в Pidgin и некоторых других программах она открывается не всегда там, где ожидаешь.

This guide explains how you can install and use KVM for creating and running virtual machines on a Debian Squeeze server. I will show how to create image-based virtual machines and also virtual machines that use a logical volume (LVM). More here

The launch of Debian 6.0 Squeeze may mark the end of Debian’s unpredictable release schedule, but it’s still the domain of FOSS purists, says Linux User & Develop columnist, Richard Hillesley… More here

The news are collected on http://wiki.debian.org/DeveloperNews
Please contribute short news about your work/plans/subproject. In this issue: + DebConf news + Multiarch support + win32-loader.exe available from the mirrors network + Team-specific NM questions + Debian games team meeting

DebConf news
————

The DebConf team recently had meetings discussing DebConf12 bids[1] and
preparations for DebConf11[2]. The meeting to decide where DebConf12 will
be held will occur on 22nd March, from 20:00 UTC.

According to the recent DebConf11 report[3], preparations for DebConf11
are going well, especially with the support from the local and national
governments. People who will need a visa or that might have problem with
visas to visit Bosnia should visit the visas[4] web page, register in
penta and then contact the team at [email protected] since the DebConf11
organising team have assistance from the government Republika Srpska.
Registrations for DebConf11 are targeted at being open by April 1st. As
usual; if you need sponsorship to attend DebConf, please apply before the
deadlines and don’t be pessimistic about your eligibility. If you or your
company would like to help DebConf financially, please take a look at the
sponsorship web page[5] and donate as you are able. Take a look at the
“How can I help?”[6] web page for other ways to assist DebConf11, including
volunteering[7] your time during the conference, which can be very
rewarding.

The Debconf10 final report is due out on March 14th so keep an eye out
for it and have a read if you were there or are interested in what
DebConf is like. The reports for earlier years are available[8] and go
back to DebConf5 in Finland.

— Paul Wise

[1] http://meetbot.debian.net/debconf-team/2011/debconf-team.2011-03-01-20.01.html
[2] http://meetbot.debian.net/debconf-team/2011/debconf-team.2011-03-08-20.01.html
[3] http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20110224.204950.5f426a36.en.html
[4] http://debconf11.debconf.org/visas.xhtml
[5] http://debconf11.debconf.org/sponsorship.xhtml
[6] http://debconf11.debconf.org/helpus.xhtml
[7] http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf11/Teams#Volunteers
[8] http://media.debconf.org/

Multiarch support
—————–

dpkg is on good track to support multi-arch[9]. But the possibility to
co-install the same package from multiple architectures is going to break
some assumptions in various packages. Check out this message on
debian-devel[10] to learn more about the problems and how they should be
fixed. Please report back any package that is likely to be affected by
those problems.

— Raphaël Hertzog

[9] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MultiarchSpec
[10] http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]

win32-loader.exe available from the mirrors network
—————————————————

Since its 0.6.22 version and thanks to the help of FTP Masters,
win32-loader.exe is now downloadable from the official Debian
mirrors[11]. When run from a Windows host, this executable (the
standalone flavour of the setup.exe available on the x86 CDs) downloads
the Debian-Installer kernel and initrd and configures the Windows
bootloader to allow a seamless reboot to the Debian-Installer. It is
supposed to work on all known Windows versions and can download both the
GNU/Linux and GNU/kFreeBSD Debian-Installer flavours.

— Didier Raboud

[11] http://ftp.ch.debian.org/debian/tools/win32-loader/unstable/win32-loader.exe

Team-specific NM questions
————————–

I sent a call[12] for teams to send me team-specific P&P and T&S
questions. I’ll collect them and add them in one file per team to the NM
template repository. They can be useful not only for NM, but also to give
people a way to get up to speed on how the team works.

— Enrico Zini

[12] http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]

Debian games team meeting
————————-

The Debian games team is having a meeting[13] on the 18th March 2011 at
9:00PM UTC. If you maintain a game in Debian or outside Debian or are
interested in gaming and Debian we would like to invite you to attend and
discuss various topics with us. The agenda is not yet set, to help us
decide which items to talk about, please fill out the poll[14].

— Paul Wise

[13] http://wiki.debian.org/Games/Meetings/2011-03-18
[14] http://doodle.com/e53i5dad794vxadq

В этом блоге публикуются заметки и решения, найденные в процессе работы, освоения и жизни в дистрибутиве Debian GNU/Linux.

Since its beginnings as a Microsoft Exchange alternative for small- to medium-sized businessed, the Open-Xchange collaboration suite has stretched a bit beyond just a messaging solution. The flagship product, Open-Xchange Server, is regarded as a full collaborative platform, particularly with the addition of the Infostore document sharing module More here

So my question is this: how can Debian honestly argue that they take security very seriously? It looks like it takes ages to get something done, which is usually not a big deal when talking about new features, but is definitely a problem when talking about security. More here

debian, linux, ipv6, squeeze, ip