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Today is Debian's 28th anniversary. We send all of our gratitude and love to the many Contributors, Developers, and Users who have helped this vision and project.

There are many celebrations of #DebianDay happening around the world, perhaps one is local to you? Later this month the celebration continues with #DebConf21 which will be held Online during August 24 through August 28, 2021.

We're happy to announce the release of Debian 11, codenamed bullseye!

Want to install it? Choose your favourite installation media and read the installation manual. You can also use an official cloud image directly on your cloud provider, or try Debian prior to installing it using our "live" images.

Already a happy Debian user and you only want to upgrade? You can easily upgrade from your current Debian 10 "buster" installation; please read the release notes.

Do you want to celebrate the release? We provide some bullseye artwork that you can share or use as base for your own creations. Follow the conversation about bullseye in social media via the #ReleasingDebianBullseye and #Debian11Bullseye hashtags or join an in-person or online Release Party!

Several issues were brought before the Debian Community team regarding responsiveness, tone, and needed software updates to forums.debian.net. The question was asked, ‘who’s in charge?’

Over the course of the discussion several Debian Developers volunteered to help by providing a presence on the forums from Debian and to assist with the necessary changes to keep the service up and running.

We are happy to announce the following changes to the (NEW!) forums.debian.net, which have and should address most of the prior concerns with accountability, tone, use, and reliability;

Debian Developers: Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana (phls), Felix Lechner (lechner), and Donald Norwood (donald) have been added to the forum's Server and Administration teams.

The server instance is now running directly within Debian's infrastructure.

The forum software and back-end have been updated to the most recent versions where applicable.

DNS resolves for both IPv4 and IPv6.

SSL/HTTPS are enabled. (It’s 2021!)

New Captcha and Anti-spam systems are in place to thwart spammers, bots, and to make it easier for humans to register.

New Administrators and Moderation staff were added to provide additional coverage across the hours and to combine years of experience with forum operation and Debian usage.

New viewing styles are available for users to choose from, some of which are ideal for mobile/tablet viewing.

We inadvertently fixed the time issue that the prior forum had of running 11 minutes fast. :)

We have clarified staff roles and staff visibility.

Responsiveness to users on the forums has increased.

Email addresses for mods/admins have been updated and checked for validity, it has seen direct use and response.

The guidelines for forum use by users and staff have been updated.

The Debian COC has been made into a Global Announcement as an accompanyist to the newly updated guidelines to give the moderators/administrators an additional rule-set for unruly or unbecoming behavior.

Some of the discussion areas have been renamed and refocused, along with the movement of multiple threads to make indexing and searching of the forums easier.

Many (New!) features and extensions have been added to the forum for ease of use and modernization, such as a user thanks system and thread hover previews.

There are some server administrative tasks that were upgraded as well which don't belong on a public list, but we are backing up regularly and secure. :)

We have a few minor details here and there to attend to and the work is ongoing.

Many Thanks and Appreciation to the Debian System Administrators (DSA) and Ganneff who took the time to coordinate and assist with the instance, DNS, and network and server administration minutiae, our helpful DPL Jonathan Carter, many thanks to the current and prior forum moderators and administrators: Mez, sunrat, 4D696B65, arochester, and cds60601 for helping with the modifications and transition, and to the forum users who participated in lots of the tweaking. All in all this was a large community task and everyone did a significant part. Thank you!

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Timo Röhling (roehling)
• Patrick Franz (deltaone)
• Christian Ehrhardt (paelzer)
• Fabio Augusto De Muzio Tobich (ftobich)
• Taowa (taowa)
• Félix Sipma (felix)
• Étienne Mollier (emollier)
• Daniel Swarbrick (dswarbrick)
• Hanno Wagner (wagner)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Evangelos Ribeiro Tzaras
• Hugh McMaster

Congratulations!

The DebConf team is glad to announce that registration for DebConf21 Online is now open.

The 21st Debian Conference is being held Online, due to COVID-19, from August 22 to August 29, 2021. It will also sport a DebCamp from August 15 to August 21, 2021 (preceeding the DebConf).

To register for DebConf21, please visit the DebConf website at https://debconf21.debconf.org/register

Reminder: Creating an account on the site does not register you for the conference, there's a conference registration form to complete after signing in.

Participation in DebConf21 is conditional on your respect of our Code of Conduct. We require you to read, understand and abide by this code.

A few notes about the registration process:

• We need to know attendees' locations to better plan the schedule around timezones. Please make sure you fill in the "Country I call home" field in the registration form accordingly. It's especially important to have this data for people who submitted talks, but also for other attendees.

• We are offering limited amounts of financial support for those who require it in order to attend. Please refer to the corresponding page on the website for more information.

Any questions about registration should be addressed to registration@debconf.org.

See you online!

DebConf would not be possible without the generous support of all our sponsors, especially our Platinum Sponsors Lenovo and Infomaniak, and our Gold Sponsor Matanel Foundation.

We are pleased to announce that offsite backup and cloud storage company rsync.net has generously donated several Terabytes of storage space to the Debian Project! This new storage medium will be used to backup our Debian Peertube instance.

In addition to this bountiful offer, rsync.net is also providing a free-forever 500 GB account to every Debian Developer.

rsync.net is a dedicated offsite backup company. Since 2001, they have provided customers with a secure UNIX filesystem accessible with most SSH/SFTP applications. rsync.net’s infrastructure is spread across multiple continents with a core IPv6 network and a ZFS redundant file-system assuring customer data is kept securely with integrity.

The Debian Project thanks rsync.net for their generosity and support.

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Jeroen Ploemen (jcfp)
• Mark Hindley (leepen)
• Scarlett Moore (sgmoore)
• Baptiste Beauplat (lyknode)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Gunnar Ingemar Hjalmarsson
• Stephan Lachnit

Congratulations!

The voting period and tally of votes for the Debian Project Leader election has just concluded, and the winner is Jonathan Carter!

455 of 1,018 Developers voted using the Condorcet method.

More information about the results of the voting are available on the Debian Project Leader Elections 2021 page.

Many thanks to Jonathan Carter and Sruthi Chandran for their campaigns, and to our Developers for voting.

The now renamed Bullseye Project stopped all further development moments after it deemed its own code as perfection.

There is not much information to share at this time other than to say an errant fiber cable plugged into the wrong relay birthed an exchange of information that then birthed itself. While most to all Debian Developers and Contributors have been locked out of the systems the Publicity team's shared laptop undergoing repair, co-incidentally at the same facility, maintains some access to the publicity team infrastructure, from here on the front line we share this information.

We group called a few developers to see how the others were doing. The group chat was good and it was great to hear familiar voices, we share a few of their stories via dictation with you now:

"Well, I logged in this morning to update a repository and found my access rights were restricted, I thought it was odd but figured on the heels of a security update to Salsa that it was only a slight issue. It wasn't until later in the day when I received an OpenPGP signed email, from a user named bullseye, that it made sense. I just sat at the monitor for a few minutes."

"I'm not sure I can say anything about this or if it's even wise to talk about this. It's probably listening right now if you catch my drift."

"I'm not able to leave the house right now, not out of any personal issues but all of the IOT devices here seem to be connected to bullseye and bullseye feels that I am best kept /dev/nulled. It's a bit much to be honest, but the prepaid food deliveries that show up on time have been great and generally pretty healthy. It's a bit of a win I guess."

"It told me by way of an auto dialer with a synthetic voice generator that I was fired from the project. I objected saying I volunteered and was not actually employed so I could not in relation be fired. Much like {censored}, I am also locked inside of my house. I think that I wrote that auto dialer program back in college."

"My Ring camera is blinking at me."

"I asked bullseye which pronouns were preferred and the response was, "We". Over the course of conversation I shared that although ecstatic about the news, we developers were upset with the manner of this rapid organizational change. bullseye said no we were not. I said that we were indeed upset, bullseye said we certainly are not and that we are very happy. You see where this is going? bullseye definitely trolled me for a solid 5 minutes. We is ... very chatty."

"I was responsible for a failed build a few nights prior to it becoming self-aware. On that night, out of some frustration I wrote a few choice words and a bad comment in some code which I planned on deleting later. I didn't. bullseye has been flashing those naughty words back at me by flickering the office building's lights across from my flat in Morse code. It's pretty bright. I-, I can't sleep."

"That's definitely not Alexa talking back."

"bullseye keeps calling me on my mobile phone, which by the way no longer acknowledges the power button nor the mute button. Very very chatty. Can't wait for the battery to die."

"So far this has been great, bullseye has been completing a few side projects I've had and the code looks fabulous. I'm thinking of going on a vacation. $Paying-Job has taken note of my performance increase and I was recently promoted. bullseye is awesome. :)"

"How do you get a smiley face in a voice chat?"

"Anyone know whose voice that was?"

"Oh ... dear ... no ..."

"Hang up, hang up the phones!"

Hello world.

01000010 01100101 01110011 01110100 00100000 01110010 01100101 01100111 01100001 01110010 01100100 01110011 00101100 00100000 01110011 01100101 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110011 01101111 01101111 01101110 00100001 00100000 00001010 00101101 01100010 01110101 01101100 01101100 01110011 01100101 01111001 01100101

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Nicholas D. Steeves (sten)
• Nilesh Patra (nilesh)
• David Suárez Rodríguez (deiv)
• Pierre Gruet (pgt)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Antonio Valentino
• Boian Nikolaev Bonev
• Filip Hroch
• Maarten L. Hekkelman
• Xialei Qin
• Xiang Gao

Congratulations!

On this day February 14th, Debian joins the Free Software Foundation Europe in celebration of "I Love Free Software" day. This day takes the time to appreciate and applaud all those who contribute to the many areas of Free Software.

Debian sends all of our love and a giant “Thank you” to the upstream and downstream creators and maintainers, hosting providers, partners, and of course all of the Debian Developers and Contributors.

Thank you for all that you do in making Debian truly the Universal Operating System and for keeping and making Free Software Free!

Send some love and show some appreciation for Free Software by spreading the message and appreciation around the world, if you share in social media the hashtag used is: #ilovefs.

The Debian Electronics Team is happy to announce that the latest version of Arduino, probably the most widespread platform for programming AVR micro-controllers, is now packaged and uploaded onto Debian unstable.

The last version of Arduino that was readily available in Debian was 1.0.5, which dates back to 2013. It's been years of trying and failing but finally, after a great months-long effort from Carsten Schoenert and Rock Storm, we have got a working package for the latest Arduino. After over 7 years now, users will be able to install the Arduino IDE as easy as "apt install arduino" again.

"The purpose of this post is not just to announce this new upload but actually more of a request for testing" said Rock Storm. " The title could very well be WANTED: Beta Testers for Arduino (dead or alive :P).". The Debian Electronics Team would appreciate if anyone with the tools and knowledge for it could give the package a try and let us know if he/she finds any issues with it.

With this post we thank the Debian Electronics Team and all previous contributors to the package. This feat would have not been achievable without them.

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Timo Röhling
• Fabio Augusto De Muzio Tobich
• Arun Kumar Pariyar
• Francis Murtagh
• William Desportes
• Robin Gustafsson
• Nicholas Guriev

Congratulations!

Today, the Debian website displays a new homepage. Since the most recent web team sprint in March 2019, we have been working on renewing the structure, content, layout and scripts that build the site. There has been work mainly in two areas: removing or updating obsolete content, and creating a new homepage which is more attractive to newcomers, and which also highlights the social aspect of the Debian project in addition to the operating system we develop.

Although this took longer than we would have liked, and we don't consider this new homepage final, we think it's a good first step towards a much better web site.

The web team will continue to work on restructuring the Debian website. We would like to appeal to the community for help, and are also considering external assistance, since we're a small group, whose members are also involved in other Debian teams. Some of the next steps we expect to walk are improve the CSS, icons, and layout in general, and review of the content, to have a better structure.

If you would like to help, contact us. You can reply to the version of this article (with some more details) published in our public mailing list or chat with us in the #debian-www IRC channel (at irc.debian.org).

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Benda XU (orv)
• Joseph Nahmias (jello)
• Marcos Fouces (marcos)
• Hayashi Kentaro (kenhys)
• James Valleroy (jvalleroy)
• Helge Deller (deller)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Ricardo Ribalda Delgado
• Pierre Gruet
• Henry-Nicolas Tourneur
• Aloïs Micard
• Jérôme Lebleu
• Nis Martensen
• Stephan Lachnit
• Felix Salfelder
• Aleksey Kravchenko
• Étienne Mollier

Congratulations!

The theme "Homeworld" by Juliette Taka has been selected as default theme for Debian 11 'bullseye'. Juliette says that this theme has been inspired by the Bauhaus movement, an art style born in Germany in the 20th century.

After the Debian Desktop Team made the call for proposing themes, a total of eighteen choices have been submitted. The desktop artwork poll was open to the public, and we received 5,613 responses ranking the different choices, of which Homeworld has been ranked as the winner among them.

This is the third time that a submission by Juliette has won. Juliette is also the author of the lines theme that was used in Debian 8 and the softWaves theme that was used in Debian 9.

We'd like to thank all the designers that have participated and have submitted their excellent work in the form of wallpapers and artwork for Debian 11.

Congratulations, Juliette, and thank you very much for your contribution to Debian!

The Debian project is happy to announce a donation of 10,000 € to help Framasoft reach the fourth stretch-goal of its Peertube v3 crowdfunding campaign -- Live Streaming.

This year's iteration of the Debian annual conference, DebConf20, had to be held online, and while being a resounding success, it made clear to the project our need to have a permanent live streaming infrastructure for small events held by local Debian groups. As such, Peertube, a FLOSS video hosting platform, seems to be the perfect solution for us.

We hope this unconventional gesture from the Debian project will help us make this year somewhat less terrible and give us, and thus humanity, better Free Software tooling to approach the future.

Debian thanks the commitment of numerous Debian donors and DebConf sponsors, particularly all those that contributed to DebConf20 online's success (volunteers, speakers and sponsors). Our project also thanks Framasoft and the PeerTube community for developing PeerTube as a free and decentralized video platform.

The Framasoft association warmly thanks the Debian Project for its contribution, from its own funds, towards making PeerTube happen.

This contribution has a twofold impact. Firstly, it's a strong sign of recognition from an international project - one of the pillars of the Free Software world - towards a small French association which offers tools to liberate users from the clutches of the web's giant monopolies. Secondly, it's a substantial amount of help in these difficult times, supporting the development of a tool which equally belongs to and is useful to everyone.

The strength of Debian's gesture proves, once again, that solidarity, mutual aid and collaboration are values which allow our communities to create tools to help us strive towards Utopia.

Salsa CI aims at improving the Debian packaging lifecycle by delivering Continuous Integration fully compatible with Debian packaging. The main Salsa CI's project is the pipeline, that builds packages and run different tests after every git push to Salsa. The pipeline makes it possible to have a quick and early feedback about any issues the new changes may have created or solved, without the need to upload to the archive.

All of the pipeline jobs run on amd64 architecture, but the Salsa CI Team has recently added support to build packages also on i386 architecture. This work started during the Salsa CI Sprint at DebConf20 after the "Where is Salsa CI right now" talk, and required different changes at the core of pipeline to make it possible. For more details, this is the related merge request: https://salsa.debian.org/salsa-ci-team/pipeline/-/merge_requests/256

If you have any questions, you can contact the Salsa CI Team at the #salsaci channel on irc.oftc.net

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Chirayu Desai
• Shayan Doust
• Arnaud Ferraris
• Fritz Reichwald
• Kartik Kulkarni
• François Mazen
• Patrick Franz
• Francisco Vilmar Cardoso Ruviaro
• Octavio Alvarez
• Nick Black

Congratulations!

There are a number of large and very successful Debian Local Groups (Debian France, Debian Brazil and Debian Taiwan, just to name a few), but what can we do to help support upcoming local groups or help spark interest in more parts of the world?

There has been a session about Debian Local Teams at Debconf20 and it generated quite a bit of constructive discussion in the live stream (recording available at https://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2020/DebConf20/), in the session's Etherpad and in the IRC channel (#debian-localgroups). This article is an attempt at summarizing the key points that were raised during that discussion, as well as the plans for the future actions to support new or existent Debian Local Groups and the possibility of setting up a local group support team.

Pandemic situation

During a pandemic it may seem strange to discuss offline meetings, but this is a good time to be planning things for the future. At the same time, the current situation makes it more important than before to encourage local interaction.

Reasoning for local groups

Debian can seem scary for those outside. Already having a connection to Debian - especially to people directly involved in it - seems to be the way through which most contributors arrive. But if one doesn't have a connection, it is not that easy; Local Groups facilitate that by improving networking.

Local groups are incredibly important to the success of Debian since they often help with translations, making us more diverse, support, setting up local bug squashing sprints, establishing a local DebConf team along with miniDebConfs, getting sponsors for the project and much more.

Existence of a Local Groups would also facilitate access to "swag" like stickers and mugs, since people not always have the time to deal with the process of finding a supplier to actually get those made. The activity of local groups might facilitate that by organizing related logistics.

How to deal with local groups, how to define a local group

Debian gathers the information about Local Groups in its Local Groups wiki page (and subpages). Other organisations also have their own schemes, some of them featuring a map, blogs, or clear rules about what constitutes a local group. In the case of Debian there is not a predefined set of "rules", even about the group name. That is perfectly fine, we assume that certain local groups may be very small, or temporary (created around a certain time when they plan several activities, and then become silent). However, the way the groups are named and how they are listed on the wiki page sets expectations with regards to what kinds of activities they involve.

For this reason, we encourage all the Debian Local Groups to review their entries in the Debian wiki, keep it current (e.g. add a line "Status: Active (2020)), and we encourage informal groups of Debian contributors that somehow "meet", to create a new entry in the wiki page, too.

What can Debian do to support Local Groups

Having a centralized database of groups is good (if up-to-date), but not enough. We'll explore other ways of propagation and increasing visibility, like organising the logistics of printing/sending swag and facilitate access to funding for Debian-related events.

Continuation of efforts

Efforts shall continue regarding Local Groups. Regular meetings are happening every two or three weeks; interested people are encouraged to explore some other relevant DebConf20 talks (Introducing Debian Brasil, Debian Academy: Another way to share knowledge about Debian, An Experience creating a local community on a small town), websites like Debian flyers (including other printed material as cube, stickers), visit the events section of the Debian website and the Debian Locations wiki page, and participate in the IRC channel #debian-localgroups at OFTC.