Debian Weekly News - July 2nd, 2002
Welcome to this year's twentyfifth issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. We are happy to learn that UnitedLinux will apparently be based on the Debian distribution, since Ex-CEO of Caldera, Ransom Love, will be trying to find a way to include members such as Debian, which don't have the commercial focus of the current UnitedLinux partners -- and to us this looks like the only logical way.
HomePNA HOWTO with Debian GNU/Linux. On Debian Planet, Jeremy Avnet posted a link to a HOWTO that describes how to set up HomePNA with GNU/Linux. HomePNA is a technology that uses the unused pairs on a plain old analogue line (or in fact a cat 5 cable), as a relatively slow networking system.
More than 10,000 Debian Packages for Sid. Recently, the
number of Debian packages for Sid (also known as "unstable") has reached the
10k mark. The binary-i386 distribution contains 6961 packages and binary-all
adds 3149 packages to the list. They are built from 6345 source packages.
These numbers include non-US as well as non-free and contrib. If you use
dselect method, the message, "Information about (the number of packages) was
updated", shows up after [U]pdate. When you are familiar with apt,
apt-cache stats
shows the number of package in the package
database on your system.
Security Updates for Woody. Some of you may have noticed
already that the Security Team is already supporting Woody in their advisories. Apparently the new security build structure is working properly. In order to use the updated
packages automatically, you should add
deb http://security.debian.org/ woody/updates main contrib non-free
to your sources.list
if you are running Woody.
Java Beans for Debian People. Adam Heath announced
that he finished building Debian packages of JBoss. All changes left are just minor bug
fixes. This is an implementation of Sun's
Java2 Enterprise Edition EJB specification. It provides container based
persistence, message queues, transaction management and other services.
While JBoss itself is GPL, it requires non-free software to run. JBoss
developers, in order to provide an easier to run download, have elected to
include these non-free programs and libraries with their source. Because of
this, Adam has placed the files in the non-free
directory.
Newer Versions of Perl Modules? Ardo van Rangelrooij
wanted to
know how a package maintainer is supposed to handle the case when a Perl
module requires a newer version of another module than the version included in
the perl-modules
package. This package contains modules from the
core Perl distribution. The solution is to simply package the new module as
usual. The files will be placed in a directory which is preferred over the
system provided one, so both modules can coexist.
Pilot Sync Software Recommendation. A question came up asking which software for synchronizing data on the handheld with the main machine should be used, if one depends on data integrity. Karl Jørgensen summarized his experience with pilot-manager, gnome-pilot and jpilot. People seem to be happy with jpilot. For those who don't require a graphical user interface, coldsync may be worth a try.
Daily Debian Snapshots. Fumitoshi Ukai
(鵜飼文敏) set up a
new host called snapshot.debian.net
that contains both a debian and debian-non-US mirror. The server has a
160 GB hard disk and provides daily snapshots of the Debian archive
dating back from 2002/06/04. To access this repository you'll have to direct
apt-get
to a specific date, relative dates are ok.
Abandoning /etc/mtab? Nikita Youshchenko made an attempt to
remove /etc/mtab
and link it to /proc/mounts
.
However, it was made clear very quickly that one file reflects the users point of
view and the other file reflects the kernel's point of view. For example, bind
mounts, loopback
mounts and disk quotas
are displayed differently.
Red Hat using Debian alternatives. After reading the release notes of Red Hat Linux 7.3, Tollef Fog Heen reported, that this distribution includes a port of the Debian alternatives system, as a way to support multiple packages providing a particular service. Wichert Akkerman explained, that he's talking with Red Hat about keeping these two implementations in sync.
Is Linux really Free Software? In his talk during this year's Ottawa Kernel Summit Bdale Garbee raised the question, whether Debian violates its Social Contract by shipping the Linux kernel? This issue reflects the inclusion of proprietary firmware in a number of device drivers. The consensus during his talk was that this problem would be best discussed and investigated on the debian-legal list, where he is seeking assistance.
HTTPS Method for apt-get. Tomas Pospisek announced https
support for apt-get
. He implemented it as
patch against version 0.5.4 of apt, which is the current version in Woody.
The upstream developer, however, has some reservations
against including pieces of stunnel
.
dpkg 1.10 released. Finally a new version of
dpkg
made it into the archive. This is a long awaited upload which also closes no less than 63
open bugs. It contains several improvements, like a split off
dselect
package with improved handling of Recommends and
Suggests. It also understands a per-user configuration file. The entire list
of changes is impressive, you shouldn't forget to read it.
Debian in SpamCop's List. We have recently been informed that master.debian.org is listed in SpamCop's database. Marco d'Itri noted that this database has to be used with special care because mailing lists are routinely blocked by it.
Final Bits for DebConf2. Joe Drew released the final announcement covering the upcoming Debian Conference 2 which will take place from July 5th to 7th in Toronto, Canada. In addition to the Debian-specific talks which make up the majority of the program, there are several non-Debian related. Among these is Damian Conway, a well-known speaker and Perl developer will give a talk entitled with Extreme Perl.
Another Potato Update on the Way? Joey sent in a report about the current work done for another update (r7) to the stable Debian release (also known as Potato). Even though Woody will probably be released soon, Potato is still supported and received a couple of security updates that should be addressed properly.
Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure that you update your systems if you have any of these packages installed.
- libapache-mod-ssl -- Buffer overflow.
After heated debates resulting from the OpenSSH vulnerability, we'd like to mention a small quote from the Revised OpenSSH Security Advisory: The most helpful vendors were OpenWall Linux and Debian.
New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the Debian archive recently or contain important updates.
- apache2 -- Next generation, scalable, extendable web server.
- bluez-utils -- Utilities for controlling Bluetooth devices.
- brag -- Downloads and assembles multipart Usenet binaries.
- dia2sql -- A Dia UML to SQL converter.
- doctorj -- A tool to analyze Java code.
- firebird -- DFSG-free RDBMS based on the InterBase 6.0 code.
- gimp1.3 -- The GNU Image Manipulation Program, unstable version 1.3.
- jswat2 -- JPDA java debugger.
- moin -- MoinMoin - a Python clone of WikiWiki.
- oav-update -- OpenAntiVirus virus signature update script using many sites.
- offlineimap -- IMAP/Maildir synchronization and reader support.
- openag -- Open alternative to AudioGalaxy Satellite.
- orca -- Router Monitoring and Graphing System.
- zaptel -- Zapata telephony utilities.
Orphaned Packages. Five packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 84 orphaned packages. Many thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free Software community. Please see the WNPP pages for the full list, and please add a note to the bug report and retitle it to ITA: if you plan to take over a package.
- libgifgraph-perl -- GIF Graph Plotting Module for Perl 5.. (Bug#151249)
- libiniconf-perl -- Module for reading .ini-style configuration files. (Bug#151250)
- po-utils -- Tool collection for handling PO files. (Bug#151360)
- rep-xmms -- Rep language bindings for XMMS (Bug#151340)
- taper -- Full-screen system backup utility. (Bug#151256)
Seen something interesting? Please drop us a note whenever you see something noteworthy that you think is appropriate for inclusion in DWN. We don't notice everything, unfortunately. Of course, we are also thankful for completely written items from volunteer writers. Please see the contributing page. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at dwn@debian.org.
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This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Yooseong Yang and Martin 'Joey' Schulze.