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:
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:
The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:
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:
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 situationDuring 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 groupsDebian 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 groupDebian 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 GroupsHaving 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 effortsEfforts 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.
On Saturday 29 August 2020, the annual Debian Developers and Contributors Conference came to a close.
DebConf20 has been held online for the first time, due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) disease pandemic.
All of the sessions have been streamed, with a variety of ways of participating: via IRC messaging, online collaborative text documents, and video conferencing meeting rooms.
With more than 850 attendees from 80 different countries and a total of over 100 event talks, discussion sessions, Birds of a Feather (BoF) gatherings and other activities, DebConf20 was a large success.
When it became clear that DebConf20 was going to be an online-only event, the DebConf video team spent much time over the next months to adapt, improve, and in some cases write from scratch, technology that would be required to make an online DebConf possible. After lessons learned from the MiniDebConfOnline in late May, some adjustments were made, and then eventually we came up with a setup involving Jitsi, OBS, Voctomix, SReview, nginx, Etherpad, and a newly written web-based frontend for voctomix as the various elements of the stack.
All components of the video infrastructure are free software, and the whole setup is configured through their public ansible repository.
The DebConf20 schedule included two tracks in other languages than English: the Spanish language MiniConf, with eight talks in two days, and the Malayalam language MiniConf, with nine talks in three days. Ad-hoc activities, introduced by attendees over the course of the entire conference, have been possible too, streamed and recorded. There have also been several team gatherings to sprint on certain Debian development areas.
Between talks, the video stream has been showing the usual sponsors on the loop, but also some additional clips including photos from previous DebConfs, fun facts about Debian and short shout-out videos sent by attendees to communicate with their Debian friends.
For those who were not able to participate, most of the talks and sessions are already available through the Debian meetings archive website, and the remaining ones will appear in the following days.
The DebConf20 website will remain active for archival purposes and will continue to offer links to the presentations and videos of talks and events.
Next year, DebConf21 is planned to be held in Haifa, Israel, in August or September.
DebConf is committed to a safe and welcome environment for all participants. During the conference, several teams (Front Desk, Welcome team and Community team) have been available to help so participants get their best experience in the conference, and find solutions to any issue that may arise. See the web page about the Code of Conduct in DebConf20 website for more details on this.
Debian thanks the commitment of numerous sponsors to support DebConf20, particularly our Platinum Sponsors: Lenovo, Infomaniak, Google and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
About DebianThe Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of volunteers from all over the world work together to create and maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal operating system.
About DebConfDebConf is the Debian Project's developer conference. In addition to a full schedule of technical, social and policy talks, DebConf provides an opportunity for developers, contributors and other interested people to meet in person and work together more closely. It has taken place annually since 2000 in locations as varied as Scotland, Argentina, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. More information about DebConf is available from https://debconf.org/.
About LenovoAs a global technology leader manufacturing a wide portfolio of connected products, including smartphones, tablets, PCs and workstations as well as AR/VR devices, smart home/office and data center solutions, Lenovo understands how critical open systems and platforms are to a connected world.
About InfomaniakInfomaniak is Switzerland's largest web-hosting company, also offering backup and storage services, solutions for event organizers, live-streaming and video on demand services. It wholly owns its datacenters and all elements critical to the functioning of the services and products provided by the company (both software and hardware).
About GoogleGoogle is one of the largest technology companies in the world, providing a wide range of Internet-related services and products such as online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, software, and hardware.
Google has been supporting Debian by sponsoring DebConf for more than ten years, and is also a Debian partner sponsoring parts of Salsa's continuous integration infrastructure within Google Cloud Platform.
About Amazon Web Services (AWS)Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platforms, offering over 175 fully featured services from data centers globally (in 77 Availability Zones within 24 geographic regions). AWS customers include the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises and leading government agencies.
Contact InformationFor further information, please visit the DebConf20 web page at https://debconf20.debconf.org/ or send mail to press@debian.org.
DebConf20 is taking place online, from 23 August to 29 August 2020. It is the 21st Debian conference, and organizers and participants are working hard together at creating interesting and fruitful events.
We would like to warmly welcome the 17 sponsors of DebConf20, and introduce them to you.
We have four Platinum sponsors.
Our first Platinum sponsor is Lenovo. As a global technology leader manufacturing a wide portfolio of connected products, including smartphones, tablets, PCs and workstations as well as AR/VR devices, smart home/office and data center solutions, Lenovo understands how critical open systems and platforms are to a connected world.
Our next Platinum sponsor is Infomaniak. Infomaniak is Switzerland's largest web-hosting company, also offering backup and storage services, solutions for event organizers, live-streaming and video on demand services. It wholly owns its datacenters and all elements critical to the functioning of the services and products provided by the company (both software and hardware).
Google is our third Platinum sponsor. Google is one of the largest technology companies in the world, providing a wide range of Internet-related services and products such as online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, software, and hardware. Google has been supporting Debian by sponsoring DebConf for more than ten years, and is also a Debian partner.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is our fourth Platinum sponsor. Amazon Web Services is one of the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platforms, offering over 175 fully featured services from data centers globally (in 77 Availability Zones within 24 geographic regions). AWS customers include the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises and leading government agencies.
Our Gold sponsors are Deepin, the Matanel Foundation, Collabora, and HRT.
Deepin is a Chinese commercial company focusing on the development and service of Linux-based operating systems. They also lead research and development of the Deepin Debian derivative.
The Matanel Foundation operates in Israel, as its first concern is to preserve the cohesion of a society and a nation plagued by divisions. The Matanel Foundation also works in Europe, in Africa and in South America.
Collabora is a global consultancy delivering Open Source software solutions to the commercial world. In addition to offering solutions to clients, Collabora's engineers and developers actively contribute to many Open Source projects.
Hudson-Trading is a company led by mathematicians, computer scientists, statisticians, physicists and engineers. They research and develop automated trading algorithms using advanced mathematical techniques.
Our Silver sponsors are:
Linux Professional Institute, the global certification standard and career support organization for open source professionals, Civil Infrastructure Platform, a collaborative project hosted by the Linux Foundation, establishing an open source “base layer” of industrial grade software, Ubuntu, the Operating System delivered by Canonical, and Roche, a major international pharmaceutical provider and research company dedicated to personalized healthcare.
Bronze sponsors: IBM, MySQL, Univention.
And finally, our Supporter level sponsors, ISG.EE and Pengwin.
Thanks to all our sponsors for their support! Their contributions make it possible for a large number of Debian contributors from all over the globe to work together, help and learn from each other in DebConf20.
Participating in DebConf20 onlineThe 21st Debian Conference is being held online, due to COVID-19, from August 23 to 29, 2020. Talks, discussions, panels and other activities run from 10:00 to 01:00 UTC. Visit the DebConf20 website at https://debconf20.debconf.org to learn about the complete schedule, watch the live streaming and join the different communication channels for participating in the conference.
We are very pleased to announce that Lenovo, Infomaniak, Google and Amazon Web Services (AWS), have committed to supporting DebConf20 as Platinum sponsors.
As a global technology leader manufacturing a wide portfolio of connected products, including smartphones, tablets, PCs and workstations as well as AR/VR devices, smart home/office and data center solutions, Lenovo understands how critical open systems and platforms are to a connected world.
Infomaniak is Switzerland's largest web-hosting company, also offering backup and storage services, solutions for event organizers, live-streaming and video on demand services. It wholly owns its datacenters and all elements critical to the functioning of the services and products provided by the company (both software and hardware).
Google is one of the largest technology companies in the world, providing a wide range of Internet-related services and products such as online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, software, and hardware.
Google has been supporting Debian by sponsoring DebConf for more than ten years, and is also a Debian partner sponsoring parts of Salsa's continuous integration infrastructure within Google Cloud Platform.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 175 fully featured services from data centers globally (in 77 Availability Zones within 24 geographic regions). AWS customers include the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises and leading government agencies.
With these commitments as Platinum Sponsors, Lenovo, Infomaniak, Google and Amazon Web Services are contributing to make possible our annual conference, and directly supporting the progress of Debian and Free Software, helping to strengthen the community that continues to collaborate on Debian projects throughout the rest of the year.
Thank you very much for your support of DebConf20!
Participating in DebConf20 onlineThe 21st Debian Conference is being held Online, due to COVID-19, from August 23rd to 29th, 2020. There are 7 days of activities, running from 10:00 to 01:00 UTC. Visit the DebConf20 website at https://debconf20.debconf.org to learn about the complete schedule, watch the live streaming and join the different communication channels for participating in the conference.
Today is Debian's 27th anniversary. We recently wrote about some ideas to celebrate the DebianDay, you can join the party or organise something yourselves :-)
Today is also an opportunity for you to start or resume your contributions to Debian. For example, you can scratch your creative itch and suggest a wallpaper to be part of the artwork for the next release, have a look at the DebConf20 schedule and register to participate online (August 23rd to 29th, 2020), or put a Debian live image in a DVD or USB and give it to some person near you, who still didn't discover Debian.
Our favorite operating system is the result of all the work we do together. Thanks to everybody who has contributed in these 27 years, and happy birthday Debian!
We encourage our community to celebrate around the world the 27th Debian anniversary with organized DebianDay events. This year due to the COVID-19 pandemic we cannot organize in-person events, so we ask instead that contributors, developers, teams, groups, maintainers, and users promote The Debian Project and Debian activities online on August 16th (and/or 15th).
Communities can organize a full schedule of online activities throughout the day. These activities can include talks, workshops, active participation with contributions such as translations assistance or editing, debates, BoFs, and all of this in your local language using tools such as Jitsi for capturing audio and video from presenters for later streaming to YouTube.
If you are not aware of any local community organizing a full event or you don't want to join one, you can solo design your own activity using OBS and stream it to YouTube. You can watch an OBS tutorial here.
Don't forget to record your activity as it will be a nice idea to upload it to Peertube later.
Please add your event/activity on the DebianDay wiki page and let us know about and advertise it on Debian micronews. To share it, you have several options:
PS: DebConf20 online is coming! It will be held from August 23rd to 29th, 2020. Registration is already open.
The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:
The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:
Congratulations!
On July 18th Stretch LTS starts, offering two more years of security support to the Debian Stretch release. Stretch LTS will be the fourth iteration of LTS, following Squeeze LTS which started in 2014, Wheezy LTS in 2016 and Jessie LTS in 2018.
However, for the first time, we have prepared a small survey about our users and contributors, who they are and why they are using LTS.
Filling out the survey should take less than 10 minutes. We would really appreciate if you could participate in the survey online!
In two weeks (July 27th 2020) we will close the survey, so please don't hesitate and participate now! After that, there will be a followup email with the results.
More information about Debian LTS is available at https://wiki.debian.org/LTS, including generic contact information.
Eight members of the Debian Perl team met online between May 15 and May 17 2020, in lieu of a planned physical sprint meeting. Work focussed on preparations for bullseye, and continued maintenance of the large number of perl modules maintained by the team.
Whilst an online sprint cannot fully replace an in-person sprint in terms of focussing attention, the weekend was still very productive, and progress was made on a range of topics including:
The full report was posted to the relevant Debian mailing lists.
The participants would like to thank OpusVL for providing the Jitsi instance for the weekend.
The DebConf team has had to take the hard decision that DebConf 20 cannot happen in-person, in Haifa, in August, as originally planned. This decision is based on the status of the venue in Haifa, the local team's view of the local health situation, the existing travel restrictions and the results of a survey of potential participants.
DebConf 20 will be held online instead!
The Debian community can still get together to share ideas, discuss plans in Birds of a Feather sessions, and eat cheese, from the safety of the desks at home.
So, please submit your talk, sprint, and BoF proposals for DebConf 20 Online.
It will be held within the same dates, as before, 23-29 August. The DebConf team expects the event to be significantly shorter than a usual DebCamp + DebConf, but that will depend on the volume of proposals received.
Hopefully in 2021 we can once again hold conferences in person. DebConf 21 is scheduled to be taking place in Haifa. The following planned DebConfs will be held a year later than originally scheduled: 2022 in Kosovo and 2023 in Kochi, India.
See you online in August!
Debian comes with tons of fonts for all kinds of purposes, you can easily list them all (almost) with: apt-cache search ^fonts-
Above you can see a nice composition with examples of several fonts. The composition is published under the MIT (Expat) license and the source SVG (created with Inkscape) can be downloaded here. You will need the fonts to be installed in your system so the SVG is correctly rendered.
If you want to learn more you can have a look at the wiki page about fonts (https://wiki.debian.org/Fonts), and if you want to contribute or maintain fonts in Debian, don't hesitate to join the Fonts Team!