Bits from Debian

The Debian Project Leader election has concluded and the winner is Lucas Nussbaum. Of a total of 1003 developers, 401 developers voted using the Condorcet method.

More information about the result is available in the Debian Project Leader Elections 2014 page.

The new term for the project leader will start on April 17th and expire on April 17th 2015.

This post was an April Fools' Day joke.

In accordance with its constitution, the Debian Project has just elected Javier Merino Cacho as Debian Project Leader. More than 80% of voters put him as their first choice (or equal first) on their ballot papers.

Javier's large majority over his opponents shows how his inspiring vision for the future of the Debian project is largely shared by the other developers. Lucas Nussbaum and Neil McGovern also gained a lot of support from Debian project members, both coming many votes ahead of the None of the above ballot choice.

Javier has been a Debian Developer since February 2012 and, among other packages, works on keeping the mercurial package under control, as mercury is very poisonous for trouts.

After it was announced that he had won this year's election, Javier said: I'm flattered by the trust that Debian members have put in me. One of the main points in my platform is to remove the "Debian is old and boring" image. In order to change that, my first action as DPL is to encourage all Debian Project Members to wear a clown red nose in public.

Among others, the main points from his platform are mainly related to improve the communication style in mailing lists through an innovative filter called aponygisator, to make Debian less "old and boring", as well as solve technical issues among developers with barehanded fights. Betting on the fights will be not only allowed but encouraged for fundraising reasons.

Javier also contemplated the use of misleading talk titles such as The use of cannabis in contemporary ages: a practical approach and Real Madrid vs Barcelona to lure new users and contributors to Debian events.

Javier's platform was collaboratively written by a team of communication experts and high profile Debian contributors during the last DebConf. It has since evolved thanks to the help of many other contributors.

It's again that time of the year for the Debian Project: the elections of its Project Leader! Starting on March 31st, and during the following two weeks, the Debian Developers will vote to choose the person who will guide the project for one year.

Among this year's candidates there is the current DPL, Lucas Nussbaum, who admits that "the workload involved in being the DPL is just huge," and motivates his nomination with the need for stability in the project in this release cycle, especially after the difficult decision about the default init system. In his platform, Lucas speaks of technical and social steps to improve the project: from reproducible builds for a more secure archive to a renewed effort to run Debian on new platforms (especially smartphone and tablets); from a more welcoming approach to prospective contributors to an easier collaboration with organizations.

The only other candidate left after Gergely Nagy withdrew his nomination, is former Release Manager Neil McGovern. Neil's platform focuses mainly on the need to "ensure that we cater to our users, and there's millions of them. From those running the latest software in unstable, to people who simply want a rock solid core release." In his opinion "the size of Debian is increasing, and will reach a point where we're unable to guarantee basic compatibility with other packages, or the length of time it takes to do so becomes exponentially longer, unless something changes." To fix this problem, Neil proposes the implementation of PPAs (Personal Package Archives), the modernisation of the current build and infrastructure system as well as generally supporting the various teams.

The campaigning period will last until March 30th: the candidates are already engaged in debates and discussions on the debian-vote mailing list where they'll reply to questions from users and contributors.

The Debian Security Team announced in the bits from their last meeting that they're considering to ask for the addition of a new suite to provide long term support (LTS) for Squeeze.

Quoting their announcement:

• It needs to be pointed out that for this effort to be sustainable actual contributions by interested parties are required. squeeze-lts is not something that will magically fall from the sky. If you're dependent/interested in extended security support you should make an effort to contribute, either by contributing on your own or by paying a Debian developer/consultant to contribute for you. The security team itself is driving the effort, NOT doing it. Some team members will contribute to it individually, however.

• Anyone interested in contributing, please get in touch with team@security.debian.org. We'll setup an initial coordination list with all interested parties. All policies / exact work will be sorted out there.

This means this is still not something settled and if you or your company is insterested in joining this effort, you should contact the security team ASAP. So they can see if there is enough people and resources to launch the LTS.

This is just a quick note to tell you that the video stream of the Barcelona MiniDebConf will be available at the following URL:

http://bcn2014.video.debconf.org/

If you were not able to make it to Barcelona, now you can still follow from home!

May you have a productive and joyful MiniDebConf - and thanks for volunteering and talking if you do so! The MiniDebConf is what you make it.

The Google Summer of Code is a program that allows post-secondary students aged 18 and older to earn a stipend writing code for Free and Open Source Software projects during the summer.

Debian has just been accepted as a mentoring organization for this year's program! We're looking for students and mentors to make this GSoC in Debian the best ever!

Eligible students, now is the time to take a look at our project ideas list, engage with the mentors for the projects you find interesting, and start working on your application! For more information, please read the FAQ and the Program Timeline on Google's website.

Mentors for prospective projects can still submit proposals on the project ideas list. You also need to send an email to the mailing list linked below to present your project in a few words. Feel also free to propose yourself as a co-mentor for one of the listed projects, more help is always welcome!

If you are interested, we encourage you to come and chat with us on irc (#debian-soc on irc.oftc.net), or to send an email to the SoC coordination mailing-list (subscribe). Most of the Debian-specific GSoC information can be found on our wiki pages, but don't be afraid to ask us directly on irc or via email.

We're looking forward to work with an amazing team of students and mentors again this summer!

Debian Women will hold a MiniDebConf in Barcelona on Saturday 15th and Sunday 16th of March, 2014. Everyone is invited to both talks and social events, but the speakers will all be people who identify themselves as female. This is not a conference about women in Free Software, or women in Debian, rather a usual Debian Mini-DebConf where all the speakers are women.

The talks schedule has already been published. It is going to be an exciting event, packed with interesting talks for all audiences, in a beautiful venue, in one of the most famous European cities.

Registration is not mandatory, but strongly encouraged, as it helps the event's organisation and logistics. Please, register in the wiki.

We are still raising funds to cover the costs of running the conference and to offer travel sponsorship to people who can't pay for it. Please, consider donating any amount you can in our crowd-funding campaign, or contact us if you would like to become a sponsor.

The conference organisers want to thank the organisations that have already became sponsors, making this event possible, and specially our Platinum sponsor, Google; our Gold sponsors, Càtedra de Programari Lliure - Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Blue Systems and our Silver sponsors, CAtalan LInux Users, CAPSiDE and Fluendo.

For more information, visit the website of the event: http://bcn2014.mini.debconf.org

This is a repost from Stefano Zacchiroli's post

how-can-i-help by Lucas Nussbaum is one of the best things that happened in the area of attracting contributions to Debian in quite a while. It can be used both as a standalone tool to list opportunities for contributing to Debian which are related to your installed packages, and as an APT hook (which is also the default configuration) that at each upgrade will inform you of new contribution opportunities.

how-can-i-help is great for newbies who are looking for ways to give back to Debian which are a good match for their skills: among other things, how-can-i-help shows bugs tagged "gift" related to packages you use.

how-can-i-help is also great for experienced developers, as it allows them to find out, in a timely manner, that packages they use are in dire need of help: RC bugs, pending removals, adoptions needed, requests for sponsor, etc. (As highly unscientific evidence: I've noticed a rather quick turnover of RFA/O/ITA bugs on packages installed on my machine. I suspect how-can-i-help is somehow responsible for that, due to the fact that it increases awareness of ongoing package issues directly with the people using them.)

So, if you haven't yet, please apt-get install how-can-i-help RIGHT NOW.

I daresay that we should aim at installing how-can-i-help by default on all Debian machines, but that might be an ambitious initial goal. In the meantime I'll settle for making how-can-i-help's popcon count skyrocket. As of today, it looks like this:

which is definitely too low for my taste. Please spread the word about how-can-i-help. And let's see what we can collectively do to that graph.

how-can-i-help is just a tiny teeny helper, but I'm convinced it can do wonders in liberating dormant contributions to the Debian Project.

Debian System Administrators working in conjunction with pkg-voip team member Daniel Pocock have set up a SIP proxy and TURN server for debian.org.

Specifically, the SIP proxy provides a way for Debian Developers to use their Debian email ID as a SIP address for making calls to other project members and exchanging calls with any other domain that is enabled for SIP. The repro SIP proxy from reSIProcate has been chosen for this project.

The TURN server provides a mechanism for users of SIP or XMPP (Jabber) to relay audio and video streams through a public IP address when necessary, eliminating many of the quality issues that arise when NAT devices block the media streams in one or both directions.

The service allows the users to connect directly with the SIP device or softphone of their choosing, including many of those packaged in Debian such as Jitsi and Empathy or third party solutions like Lumicall or CSipSimple on Android. The SIP proxy also includes a WebRTC interface, allowing Debian Developers to immediately try WebRTC voice and video calls without installing or configuring any software of their own other than a web browser.

A second stage of the project involves providing an XMPP (Jabber) server with similar capabilities for federated communications between debian.org users and other domains. Further details will be announced in the weeks ahead.

It is a significant feature of the Debian Project philosophy that we can operate the entire project using free software, specifically, using software available in Debian packages running on our own infrastructure and without a dependency on third party cloud solutions.These new services for project members fulfill those expectations. It is particularly relevant for situations where real-time communication (voice or video) collaboration takes place with third parties such as applicants for Google Summer of Code, Outreach Program for Women, sponsors, media and other free software projects.

Project specific details and a user guide are available now on the Debian Wiki at http://wiki.debian.org/UnifiedCommunications/DebianDevelopers

Debian Women will hold a MiniDebConf in Barcelona on March 15-16, 2014. Everyone is invited to both talks and social events, but the speakers will all be people who identify themselves as female. This is not a conference about women in Free Software, or women in Debian, rather a usual Debian Mini-DebConf where all the speakers are women.

Debian Women invites submissions of proposals for papers, presentations, discussion sessions and tutorials for the event. Submissions are not limited to traditional talks: you could propose a performance, an art installation, a debate or anything else. All talks are welcome, whether newbie or very advanced level. Please, forward this call to potential speakers and help us make this event a great success!

Please send your proposals to proposals@bcn2014.mini.debconf.org. Don't forget to include in your message: your name or nick the title of the event, description, language, and any other information that might be useful. Please submit your proposal(s) as soon as possible.

For more information, visit the website of the event: http://bcn2014.mini.debconf.org

We hope to see you in Barcelona!

The matching program to help fund Debian participation in OPW will end in 6 days (November 14th). We need your help, and still have a ways to go to reach our funding targets. Please consider donating today!

The rules are simple:

• for each dollar donated by an individual to Debian through the mechanism, a sponsor will donate another dollar to Debian's OPW program;
• individual donation in USD will be matched only up to 200 USD each;
• only donations in USD will be matched;
• the sponsor will match the donated funds up to a maximum total of 2500 USD;
• all money raised through this program will be earmarked for OPW participation, either in 2013 or in the future;
• this program will be in place until Nov 14th, so please act quickly!

If you'd like to participate as intern, the application deadline is very near (November 11th). You can find here more info on how to apply.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day:

"Ada Lovelace Day is about sharing stories of women - whether engineers, scientist, technologists or mathematicians - who have inspired you to become who you are today. The aim is to create new role models for girls and women in these male-dominated fields by raising the profile of other women in STEM". source

To celebrate, we asked to some of the "women behind Debian" to share their stories with us. Enjoy!

Ana Guerrero Lopez (ana)

Who are you?

I'm a 30-something years old geek. I'm from Andalusia, Spain but live in France.

What do you do in Debian?

I work mostly on my packages, in sponsoring new people's packages and in this very blog you're reading now. I also maintain an unofficial Google+ page about Debian. At $PAID job, I work in an internal Debian distribution so from time to time, I get the opportunity to contribute back some of the stuff we do there.

How and why did you start contributing to Debian?

I started using Debian around 2003 switching from Mandrake. I was a happy Debian user when the Debian Women project started in the summer 2004. When I saw the project announced, I asked myself why I wasn't contributing to Debian and the rest is history... in a couple of weeks it'll be my 7 years DD-versary! If for some reason you want a longer reply to this question, read here.

Beatrice

Who are you?

I am a PhD student with a degree in Biology. I am a computer fan since my first C64 and I am a self-taught computer geek wanna-be. And I am a bug fan - not software bugs, real bugs :)

What do you do in Debian?

I work on translations - doing the translation work itself, but also reviewing other translators' work and helping in coordinating the translation effort.

How and why did you start contributing to Debian?

I started using Linux because I liked the idea of an open source operative system based on collaboration and I began reviewing open source software translations. Since my first Linux system was Debian Potato and I sticked to Debian ever since, it only seemed natural to focus my translation work on Debian.

Christine Caulfield

Who are you?

My name is Christine Caulfield. My day job is principal software engineer at Red Hat working on the cluster infrastructure components corosync & pacemaker. Outside computing I'm a musician and sound engineer. I play violin with lots of technology attached, and love avant garde music.

What do you do in Debian?

I'm not that active on Debian any more due to pressure of time, and maturity of the packages I work on. I currently maintain the, little-used, DECnet userspace packages and the, even less used I suspect, mopd bootloader. I used to maintain lvm2 for a while but dropped that a few years ago.

How and why did you start contributing to Debian?

My initial reasons for joining Debian were slightly selfish, to find a home for the DECnet project that I was heavily involved in at the time. I was a keep Debian user and people wanted a distribution where the software was easy to set up. DECnet is quite complicated for users to configure, being a totally independant networking stack to IP and so OS support is needed. Debian seemed like the logical place to make this happen. As mentioned above I got quite involved for a time and maintained other packages too. I picked up lvm2 because I was on the lvm2 dev team at work in Red Hat and as it was a new package at that time I seemed a logical choice.

Elena Grandi (valhalla)

Who are you?

I'm a 30-something years old geek and Free Software enthusiast from Italy.

What do you do in Debian?

I'm currently maintaining a few packages (2 python modules and a python program) as a sponsored uploader; I'm also slowly looking around for other things to do (by preference technical, but not limited to packaging), with the aim to spend more time contributing to Debian.

How and why did you start contributing to Debian?

For a while I had being distro-hopping between "fun" distributions (the ones that break now and then) on the desktop while using Debian stable on the home server and in chroots. I was already doing marginal contributions to those distributions, where finding stuff that was missing was easy, but my perception as a stable user was that Debian was already working fine and probably didn't really need any help. Then I started to socialize on IRC with some DDs and DMs, and realized that my perception was superficial and that in reality there were dark holes in the depths of the archive where Evil festered and prospered and... ok, sorry, I got carried away :) Anyway, since I was actually using Debian more and more I decided to start contributing: I read documentation, I attended the useful IRC sessions on #debian-women and decided that it was probably best not to add new stuff, but look for things that I used and that needed help. Then nothing happened for a while, because finding stuff that doesn't work is hard (at least on my mostly textual systems). Then one day I was trying to write a python script that needed to verify gpg signed messages; it had to run on my Debian server, so I was trying to use python-pyme and its documentation was painful to use, while I remembered an earlier attempt using python-gnupg that was much more pythonic, but not available in Debian. In a fit of anger I decided to forgo all of my good intentions and actually add a new package: I checked the sources for problems, packaged, sent it to mentors@d-o, got reviews, fixed problems, resent and finally got sponsored and well, everything started.

Francesca Ciceri (madamezou)

Who are you?

I'm Francesca, a 30-something Italian graduated in Social Sciences.

What do you do in Debian?

I'm a (non uploading) Debian Developer since 2011 and have been DPN editor, press officer, webmaster for www.debian.org and translator for the Italian l10n team. Recently, due to time constraints, I had to reduce my involvement and now only work on two things: writing/editing articles for bits.debian.org together with Ana Guerrero, and creating subtitles for the DebConf talks, in the DebConf Subs team.

How and why did you start contributing to Debian?

Basically thanks to the sudden abundance of free time - due to an health problem - and the desire to give something back to this wonderful operating system. After that, I found out that Debian is not only a great OS but also a very special community. Today, some of my dearest friends are people I met through Debian. :)

Laura Arjona

Who are you?

I live in Madrid (Spain), and work as IT Assistant in the Technical University of Madrid (UPM). I'm married and I have a 4-years-old son.

What do you do in Debian?

In 2012 I started to clean spam and to translate Debian web pages into Spanish. I also follow the work of the web and publicity team, I hope I'll get more involved there too. And of course, I'm in Debian Women :)

How and why did you start contributing to Debian?

I'm using Debian at work since 2007 (servers), and in my desktops since 2010. I like very much that it is a community distro and I wanted to participate. I was already doing translations in other (small) free software projects, so I began here too. The Debian-Women list, the planet, and people in identi.ca helped me to learn a lot and feel part of the community even when I was not contributing yet.

Mònica Ramírez Arceda (monica)

Who are you?

My name is Mònica Ramírez Arceda and I am an enthusiast of free software and sharing knowledge cultures: for me it's a kind of philosophy of life. I studied Maths a long time ago but ended up working as a developer for some years. Now I'm working as an IT teacher.

What do you do in Debian?

Debian is a huge project, so you can help in various scopes. Mainly, I work on packaging, fixing wnpp bug inconsistencies in BTS and helping in spam cleaning of the mailing lists. But I also enjoy doing some non-technical work from time to time: the project I am just now involved is organizing, with the rest of Debian Catalan community, a local team to propose Barcelona as the venue for a minidebconf where all the speakers will be women.

How and why did you start contributing to Debian?

In 2000 I discovered Free Software world and I fell deeply in love with its philosophy. Since then, I've been trying to do my best in different activities, like spreading the word, giving free courses, helping collectives and friends in technical stuff (from installing Debian to developing some helping apps for them)... but two years ago I was looking forward to join a free software project and I decided to try Debian, since it has been my first and only distro in my day-to-day life for about ten years. So, I wanted to give back Debian all what it had offered to me, but.... I thought I couldn't (hey, Debian is for real hackers, not for you little ant!), but I started to adopt some orphaned packages, do some QA uploads, fix some RC bugs, talk with some Debian Developers that helped me and encouraged me more than I expected, I traveled to my first Debconf... And one thing takes you to the other, and on March 2012 I became a DD. Now, I'm glad to see that everything that frightened me is not so scary :-)

Today is Debian's 20 anniversary. This anniversary would have been impossible without a strong community of users and developers. That's why for its commemoration, we asked the Debian community what Debian meant to them. Below you have a selection of the answers we got.

First:

Since I run Debian on my computers, I do not play anymore to 3D shooting games, not because of the lack of Free 3D drivers, but because developing Debian is more fun and addictive.

Second:

Debian is a truly community based distro which is devoted to FOSS ideas and standards. It perfectly works on high variety of hardware. Users from all over the world have been using Debian and contributing to it during 20 years. And I am proud to be one of them. Happy Birthday, Debian!

Third:

When I considered switching to Linux I asked friends which distribution to choose. I was told skip other distributions that were considered more newbie-friendly at the time and go straight to Debian instead. It might be more work initially, they said, but it would save me the hassle of switching to Debian later on, which I would inevitably do. Turns out they were right. I started my Linux experience more than ten years ago with Debian and have yet to see a better Linux distribution.

Fourth:

[...] You are a worldwide community of volunteers working together for 20 years now. To me this is an encouraging example and, given the sorry state of the world we live in, more important than the technical quality of the operating system. I wish you another successful twenty years and to stay as independent as you are.

Fifth:

I initially started in Debian as it was an interesting technical challenge. Over the years the community and having good standards around what Free Software is has become more important.

Sixth:

As a user of Debian for 14 years, and a former Debian Developer for 10, I would like to wish a happy birthday to the best project on the internet, and the best Linux distribution ever. Thanks for all of your support over the years!

Seventh:

"Rock Solid Stability and Absolute Freedom" Thats what Debian means to me.

Eighth:

Debian gives me a feeling that I am using the best linux has to offer. You know your machine is in safe hands.

Ninth:

As a long time Debian user and sometimes supporter [...] I wish Debian all the best for next 20 years and beyond! Debian is the universal operating system. And it's free (and not just as in beer ;-)

Tenth:

Debian is an awesome combination of obsessive high quality software and software freedom. It's a pleasure to be able to use and contribute to this project. Thanks to all for their excellent work! Cheers to 2**20 years more!

Eleventh:

[...] I am so very thankful to all of the people who have contributed to and continue to contribute to such a wonderful ecosystem of tools. I love the commitment to the long term goals of security, freedom and transparency with respect to the computer systems that we all use and rely upon and the information that we store on them.

Twelfth:

Debian is the operating system that makes me free.

Thirteenth:

Debian is a family gathered around great idea. Its pure love.

Longtime Debian Developer Martin Michlmayr was named as one of 6 winners of the 2013 O’Reilly Open Source Awards. This Award recognize individual contributors who have demonstrated exceptional leadership, creativity, and collaboration in the development of Open Source Software.

Martin received the award for his investment in Debian where he served as Debian Project Leader for two terms between 2003 and 2005.

Congratulations tbm!

This is a verbatim repost from Stefano Zacchiroli's post

TL;DR: go to http://sources.debian.net and enjoy.

Debsources is a new toy I've been working on at IRILL together with Matthieu Caneill. In essence, debsources is a simple web application that allows to publish an unpacked Debian source mirror on the Web.

You can deploy Debsources where you please, but there is a main instance at http://sources.debian.net (sources.d.n for short) that you will probably find interesting. sources.d.n follows closely the Debian archive in two ways:

1. it is updated 4 times a day to reflect the content of the Debian archive
2. it contains sources coming from official Debian suites: the usual ones (from oldstable to experimental), *-updates (ex volatile), *-proposed-updates, and *-backports (from Wheezy on)

Via sources.d.n you can therefore browse the content of Debian source packages with usual code viewing features like syntax highlighting. More interestingly, you can search through the source code (of unstable only, though) via integration with http://codesearch.debian.net. You can also use sources.d.n programmatically to query available versions or link to specific lines, with the possibility of adding contextual pop-up messages (example).

In fact, you might have stumbled upon sources.d.n already in the past few days, via other popular Debian services where it has already been integrated. In particular: codesearch.d.n now defaults to show results via sources.d.n, and the PTS has grown new "browse source code" hyperlinks that point to it. If you've ideas of other Debian services where sources.d.n should be integrated, please let me know.

I find Debsources and sources.d.n already quite useful but, as it often happens, there is still a lot TODO. Obviously, it is all Free Software (released under GNU AGPLv3). Do not hesitate to report new bugs and, better, to submit patches for the outstanding ones.

Acknowledgements

• Matthieu Caneill is the main developer of Debsources web front-end; sources.d.n wouldn't exist without him.
• others have already contributed patches to integrate sources.d.n with other services, in particular:
  • many thanks to Michael Stapelberg (for codesearch.d.n integration), and
  • Paul Wise (for PTS integration).
• a full list of contributors is available and eagerly waiting for new additions
• IRILL has kindly provided sponsoring for Matthieu's initial development work on Debsources, and offered both the server and hosting facilities that power sources.d.n

PS in case you were wondering: at present sources.d.n requires ~381 GB of disk space to hold all uncompressed source packages, plus ~83 GB for the local (compressed) source mirror

The unofficial third party repository Debian Multimedia stopped using the domain debian-multimedia.org some months ago. The domain expired and it is now registered again by someone unknown to Debian. (If we're wrong on this point, please sent us an email so we can take over the domain! ;) )

This means that the repository is no longer safe to use, and you should remove the related entries from your sources.list file.

After all, the need of an external repository for multimedia related packages has been greatly reduced with the release of Wheezy, which features many new and updated codecs and multimedia players.

Not sure if you're using the debian-multimedia repository? You can easily check it by running:

grep -i debian-multimedia.org /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*

If you can see debian-multimedia.org line in output, you should remove all the lines including it.

We are proud to announce that 16 students have been accepted to work on improving Debian this summer through the Google Summer of Code! This is great news, following our 15 accepted students in 2012, and 9 accepted students in 2011.

Here is the list of accepted students and projects:

• Aarsh Shah: Improvements to Debian Search and the Search Interface
• Aron Xu: ZFS on Linux integration
• Boris Bobrov: Debian Metrics Portal
• Catalin Usurelu: Enabling free multimedia real-time communications (RTC) with Debian
• Eleanor Chen: MIPS N32/N64 ABI Port
• Emmanouil Kiagias: Redesign metapackage creation for Debian Blends
• Eugenio Cano-Manuel: Leiningen & Clojure packaging
• Fabian Grünbichler: Add CROTP support to oath-toolkit and dynalogin
• Gustavo Alkmim: Bootstrappable Debian
• Justus Winter: Debian GNU/Hurd Debianish initialization
• Lei Wang: OpenRC init system in Debian
• Léo Cavaillé: scan-build on the Debian archive
• Marko Lalic: PTS rewrite in Django
• Pawel Sarbinowski: Debian Android Application
• Shuxiong Ye: OpenJDK and Debian
• Simon Chopin: Implementation of message passing in the Debian infrastructure

If you're interested in one of the projects, please follow the links and talk directly to the students or the mentors, or come hang out with us on IRC.

Welcome everyone, and let's make sure we all have an amazing summer!

If you see a bunch of X.org packages upgrades pending in your Squeeze or brand new Wheezy system, don't panic!

Ilja van Sprundel, a security researcher from IOActive, has discovered a large number of issues in the various X client libraries and he has worked with X.Org's security team to analyze, confirm, and fix these issues. You can find more information in the security advisory from X.org.

The Debian Security and X.org teams have quickly updated all the affected packages in Squeeze and Wheezy. You can see the full list of updates in the debian-security-announce mailing list archives.

It is with huge pleasure that the Debian GNU/Hurd team announces the release of Debian GNU/Hurd 2013. This is a snapshot of Debian "sid" at the time of the Debian "wheezy" release (May 2013), so it is mostly based on the same sources. It is not an official Debian release, but it is an official Debian GNU/Hurd port release.

The installation ISO images can be downloaded from Debian Ports in the usual three Debian flavors: NETINST, CD, DVD. Besides the friendly Debian installer, a pre-installed disk image is also available, making it even easier to try Debian GNU/Hurd.

Debian GNU/Hurd is currently available for the i386 architecture with more than 10.000 software packages available (more than 75% of the Debian archive, and more to come!).

Please make sure to read the configuration information, the FAQ, and the translator primer to get a grasp of the great features of GNU/Hurd.

Due to the very small number of developers, our progress of the project has not been as fast as other successful operating systems, but we believe to have reached a very decent state, even with our limited resources.

We would like to thank all the people who have worked on GNU/Hurd over the past decades. There were not many people at any given time (and still not many people today, please join!), but in the end a lot of people have contributed one way or another. Thanks everybody!

This article appeared originally at GNU Hurd news and in News about Debian GNU/Hurd.

The new stable version of Debian, codenamed Wheezy, is finally here. Main features of Debian 7.0 Wheezy are multiarch support, specific tools to deploy private clouds, a greatly improved installer and a complete set of multimedia codecs and front-ends which remove the need for third-party repositories. For a complete list of new features and updated software, take a look at the official announcement.

Want to give it a try? Check out the live images!

Want to install it? Choose your favourite installation media among Blu-ray Discs, DVDs, CDs and USB sticks.

Already a happy Debian user and you only want to upgrade? You are just an apt-get dist-upgrade away from Wheezy! Find how, reading the installation guide and the release notes.

Some useful links:

• getting Wheezy
• FAQ about installation media
• installation manual
• Release Notes