Welcome to this year's 9th issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian
community.
Some of the topics covered in this issue include:

Debian turns 15
On 16 August 1993 Ian Murdock
announced
a new Linux distribution named Debian. 15 years later the project
started by him is the biggest Linux distribution worldwide, offering more than
20 000 software packages maintained by over 1'000 volunteers, supporting more
hardware architectures than any other Linux distribution, and providing a base
for more than twenty active derivatives, like
Knoppix,
Skolelinux or
Ubuntu.

Freespire 5 to be based on Debian
Recently acquired by the Xandros Corporation, the upcoming release of
Freespire will be based on the Debian GNU/Linux Lenny release. The
current release of Freespire (2.0.8) is still based on Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy
Gibbon). A combined Xandros/Linspire development effort will return
Freespire to its Debian GNU/Linux roots and put it in sync with Xandros Desktop
Pro,
said
Andreas Typaldos, Xandros CEO. Freespire 5 is slated to be released in the
fourth quarter of 2008.

8th annual Debian Conference finished
The 8th annual Debian Conference,
allowing Users and Developers to come together, learn new techniques and
discuss further development has finished yesterday on the 17th August 2008.
Some results of the discussions which took place there are mentioned in this
issue. Videos of the conference sessions are available (or will be soon) at
the
meetings archive.
The video team asks for feedback. It is
also possible to give feedback to speakers
and topics. Since most attendees are still on their way home, the next
issue of the Debian Project News will have a deeper coverage of the Debian
Conference and the associated
Debian Day at Buenos
Aires.

Debian on the OpenMoko FreeRunner
Joachim
Breitner announces the start of an official Debian port to the
OpenMoko FreeRunner, a smartphone that was designed and developed in a free and
open manner. This enables Debian users to use the distribution of their choice
even on their telephone. Installation
instructions can be found on the Debian wiki.

Bits from the X Strike Force
Julien Cristau
reports
on the newest developments within the X Strike Force. The X Strike
Force is happy to announce that the configuration of the Xorg server has been
considerably simplified and it is now also possible to configure video output
at runtime. Furthermore new drivers have been packaged, namely the
nouveau driver, a
reverse-engineering effort for nVidia cards and
openchrome, which will support via
chipsets instead of the unmaintained via driver. The nouveau driver does not
yet have release-quality but the X Strike Force asks for testing of the
experimental build. xorg-server 1.5 and mesa 7.1 are also currently in
experimental and are scheduled to advance to sid after the Lenny release. At
around the same time, the team plans to enable hotplugging of input devices,
and their configuration through hal. The X Strike Force concludes their report
with a call for maintainers (DDs and non-DDs). People interested in joining the
team can contact them on #debian-x on irc.debian.org, or on
.

Request for adoption: The Debian Jr. project
Ben Armstrong
is
looking for someone to take over the
Debian Jr. project, since he is
currently too involved with other Debian-internal projects and can no longer
spend the necessary time on it. He recommends several measures to move the
project forward and hopes to find a new leader for the project who will tackle
these and other tasks and carry on his work on a child-friendly custom Debian
distribution.

Upcoming changes to supported architectures
One of the problems discussed during this year's Debian Conference was
ftp-master.debian.org, the main host for the Debian archive, running into
resource constraints. Joerg
Jaspert announced the results: Hardware architectures, which have failed
to be included in 2 successive official releases, will be moved to an other
host (e.g. debian-ports.org). The main
purpose is to free space for architectures that are in a better shape and
therefore have higher chances of being in an release.

Dropping packages in main building packages in contrib
Joerg Jaspert
wondered
if it is a necessary feature, that source packages of a specific component
(main, contrib or non-free) may create binary packages within an other
component. Some source packages in Debian main use that feature to create
binary packages in contrib. Dropping this feature would ease a re-design of
the central project database. When asked for the benefits of dropping this
feature, Stefano Zacchiroli
explained
further that the database should reflect the structure of the project,
especially since only the component main is an official part of Debian.
Blurring the difference might confuse our users and is weird at best.

Bits from the GNU/kFreeBSD porters
Aurelien Jarno gave a
status
report about the kFreeBSD port. Overall it is in very good shape.
Currently i386 and AMD64 based architectures are supported. It has a complete
toolchain (including java) and more than 85% of all packages are built. He
asked for help to qualify as a releasable architecture, since a port of the
debian-installer is currently missing.

FAI developer workshop at the Linuxhotel in Essen/Germany
At the weekend from 8th until 10th of August, the FAI (Fully Automatic
Installation - an installation and update-management framework for Debian and
other distributions) developer team met at the Linuxhotel in Essen, Germany, to
make FAI fit for the Lenny release. In a productive as well as fun meeting,
seven people got a lot of things done, but most importantly, they did a lot of
testing of the current FAI functionality in the Lenny context.

Debian Lenny to Support Low-Power NAS Systems
Martin Michlmayr
updated kernels for MIPS and ARM for kernel version 2.6.26. These kernel
updates bring major improvements to the ARM architecture support, which helps
running Debian on low-power NAS devices like the
QNAP TS-409. With 2.6.26 coming
closer to lenny, lenny is coming closer to run on these devices.

Future of snapshot.debian.net
Since snapshot.debian.net - a
service storing all versions of all Debian packages ever uploaded to the
archive including useful symlinks e.g. for browsing to specific days - has
problems from time to time keeping up its disc space, Eddy Petrisor
wondered,
if a distributed, user supported structure for storing this huge
amount of data would be a good idea. Andrew Pollock
answered
that Debian could spend some of its fund for this service. Cyril
Brulebois added
that it has been announced
that snapshot.debian.net should be made an official service provided by Debian,
making it easier to spend funds on it.

Artwork and Desktop themes for Debian Lenny
Valessio Brito
announced
that the work for artwork and themes for the upcoming stable
release of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0" Lenny has been started during
DebCamp
the hacking session before the annual Debian Conference. In the meantime and
updated
version of the desktop-base
package has been uploaded including a new default theme as
well as a second
one.

CD/DVD Image Downloads - A Reminder / rsync on ftp.debian.org
Josip
Rodin noted that there seems to be a rush of CD/DVD image hoarding
happening. Particularly, it seems that many people are not only downloading
the first image, but the additional images (CDs 2-20+) as well. The full set
of images is published so that they can be downloaded by those who do not have
regular access to a reliable internet connection. However, for those who do
have solid Internet connections, it is more efficient to retrieve packages
directly from the repositories.

Bits from the DPN editors
The editors of the Debian Project News sent a first
status
report on the start-up period of the DPN. After a rough start a workflow has
now been established which overall works but still has some issues, including
the often missing time for native speakers to proofread the drafts and for
translators to prepare versions of the project news in their own language, to
be sent out simultaneously with the original news. But most importantly more
people are needed to contribute to the Debian Project News by writing small
texts on the noteworthy news collected at each issue's
development page.

Other news
Lucas Nussbaum wondered if the technical
solution of freezing the propagation of packages from the unstable development
branch to the to-be-released-soon testing branch is adequate. Since the
requirement of non-disruptive changes are more a social problem, it shouldn't
be solved by strict technical measures and manual approval of exceptions.

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.

Important Debian Security Advisories
If you would like to be kept up to date about the security advisories
released by the Debian Security Team, please subscribe to the
mailing list for security announcements.

Work-needing packages
Currently 468 packages are orphaned and 120 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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