Welcome to this year's 8th issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian
community.
Some of the topics covered in this issue include:

"Lenny" frozen
Marc Brockschmidt, a Release Manager, announced that Lenny, the
upcoming new stable release, has been frozen
as planned.
The automatic transition of new versions of packages from the development
branch (sid or unstable) to the current testing branch
(lenny) has been stopped and new versions of packages need manual
approval. New versions which fix release critical bugs, other important bugs,
add documentation, or include translation fixes can be approved by the release
team upon request.

Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 updated to include support for newer hardware
The Debian project released an updated version
of its current stable release Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 etch called etch
and a half. While this update mainly includes security fixes and fixes for
severe bugs, the Debian project has for the first time also added support for
newer hardware by adding new drivers with updated Linux kernel and X.org
packages. The new drivers are optional and the old versions will still be
supported.

Schedule for 8th annual Debian Conference announced
Jörg Jaspert announced the
schedule the 8th annual Debian Conference which will be held
from August 10th to August 16th, 2008 in Mar del Plata, Argentina. As usual the schedule should considered a
"work in progress" as session slots will be filled during the conference with spontaneous sessions,
including so called BoF ("Birds of a feather") sessions.

Debian Days around the world
Debian users around the world are preparing to celebrate the 15th
anniversary of the Debian project on August 16th 2008. Currently Debian Days are planned in Nicaragua,
Portugal, Italy, Bulgaria, Chile, Argentina and eight different locations in Brazil. Apart from general
celebration, the Debian Days will feature install fests, talks, discussion panels, LAN parties, Debian
merchandise, software demonstrations, advanced installation workshops, knowledge exchange, and much
more.

Limited Xen support in Lenny
A recent discussion on the debian-devel list highlighted that due to the
upstream delays in getting Xen support integrated into kernels beyond 2.6.18,
Lenny will need to ship with limited Xen support. Pasi Kärkkäinen explained
the situation
and Bastian Blank wrote an article
about the options the Debian Project has. His conclusion is to support a 2.6.18 kernel in Lenny,
until lenny-and-a-half adds better Xen support. However, the release managers
have not yet made a final decision.

Screenshots of GUI applications
Roberto Sanchez raised the
topic of screenshots for GUI applications. Since it's often difficult to
judge a package based only on the textual package description, he suggested
being able to add screenshots of specific applications to Debian. This would
allow package search and maintenance tools to show the user what can be
expected from a specific package.

Bits from the Debian Eee PC team
Ben Armstrong reported
on the current activities of the Debian Eee PC team: Debian's next
release Lenny will work with all of the earliest models of the Eee PC and the
Eee PC team hopes to soon realize its goal of a completely DFSG free system for
the earliest models of the Eee Pc. Newer models are now able to install using
the atl1e ethernet driver from eeepc.debian.net; support for wireless and other
aspects of the new hardware will follow soon. The wireless custom
Debian-installer is also making good progress. There are currently two
Debian-live USB images available: a demo of the LXDE
desktop (a lightweight desktop environment that is made with the Eee PC in
mind) and a minimal console-only image for rescue/backup. The team is also
always looking for new members to contribute to Debian's support for the Eee
Pc.

SELinux and lenny
Russel Coker gave
several updates
on security enhanced Linux in the upcoming stable release of Debian GNU/Linux
5.0 Lenny.

adept package manager alpha release of version 3.0
Petr Rockai gave a report about his
work on a rewritten version of adept, a package management tool for KDE. He
points out that the new version of adept has improved upon the speed,
reliability and user experience of previous versions. Notable among the new
features he added are full text searching and handling of interactive
installation prompts (for example, debconf prompts and dpkg prompts about
changed configuration files).

Debian Project at FrOSCon 2008
From Saturday the 23rd of August 2008 to Sunday the 24th of August 2008, the
Debian Project will participate with a booth at Free and Open Source Software
Conference 2008 in St. Augustin, Germany. Please see the respective
events page for
further details.

Other news
Stefano Zacchiroli
reminded
package maintainers that the old pseudo-header for upstream Homepages in the
package description has been replaced by a proper header which should now be
used instead.

New and noteworthy packages
By popular request, DPN will once again feature a list of new and noteworthy
packages that have recently been added to the unstable branch. The list will
feature editorial picks from the official list of new packages and
will be appended to each issue of Debian Project News.

Important Debian Security Advisories
Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): libgd,
iceweasel,
xulrunner ,
clamav,
python2.5,
icedove and
cupsys.
Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

Work-needing packages
Currently 461 packages are orphaned and 118 packages are up for adoption.
Please take a look at the recent
reports
to see if there are packages you are interested in or view the complete list of
packages which need
your help.

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