From:	 Martin Schulze <joey@infodrom.org>
To:	 Debian News Channel <debian-news@lists.debian.org>
Subject: Debian Weekly News - May 15th, 2002
Date:	 Wed, 15 May 2002 22:13:45 +0200

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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2002/20/
Debian Weekly News - May 15th, 2002
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Welcome to this year's twenteeth issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter
for the Debian community. According to this [1]list of excuses, which
says "Gimme an F, gimme an R, gimme an E, E, Z, E. What does it
spell?", it looks like Woody entered the next step. Not all of you
will know this, but Bdale Garbee is a ham, and as such he will deliver
the keynote at [2]Dayton Hamvention Activities.

 1. http://ftp-master.debian.org/testing/update_excuses.html
 2. http://www.tapr.org/tapr/dayton/

BTS Redesign Underway. On the [3]debian-debbugs list people are
discussing a redesign of Debian's [4]Bug Tracking System (BTS). Manoj
Srivastava is working on a [5]design document, which will be kept
up-to-date. It contains goals, boundaries, interfaces and use cases.
If you are missing a certain feature, please drop Manoj a line at
[6]srivasta@debian.org.

 3. http://lists.debian.org/debian-debbugs/
 4. http://bugs.debian.org/
 5. http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/bugtracking.txt
 6. mailto:srivasta@debian.org

Update for DebConf 2. Debian Conference 2 (DebConf) will be held at
York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, from July 5th - 7th,
2002. Joe Drew, who took the burden of organizing this year's DebConf,
sent in an [7]update report. More than 100 people, including more
than 25 Debian developers, have already signed up for the conference.
Due to York University requirements, the last day you can [8]sign up
for Debconf and stay at the university is May 31, 2002. If you don't
make this deadline you can still attend, but you won't be able to have
the arrangements made through Joe and his crew.

 7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0205/msg00002.html
 8. http://net2.com/debconf2/

Woody DVDs Working Fine. Steve McIntyre sent in a [9]success report
for the Woody DVD. He tested the ones he created from a local mirror
on several random machines around his office, including a Thinkpad, a
small Dell server box and some older self-built machines. All seem to
work fine with the Isolinux code and will load up to the installation
system just fine.

 9. http://lists.debian.org/debian-cd-0205/msg00136.html

Proposed Java Policy. Ola Lundqvist [10]believes that since Woody is
almost released, it is time discuss the maturity of the [11]proposed
Java policy. Please comment on the proposal and send your oppinion to
the [12]debian-java list.

 10. http://lists.debian.org/debian-policy-0205/msg00114.html
 11. http://people.debian.org/~opal/java/policy.html/
 12. http://lists.debian.org/debian-java/

Installation of Debian through an USB Floppy Drive. Gernot Weber
[13]wondered how he could manage to install Debian with an USB-Floppy.
The rescue disk booted but the installer couldn't find the root-disk
after changing. Werner Heuser [14]pointed out that a special boot
option may be required in order to make Linux recognize the floppy
drive. If this doesn't work one could still try another installation
method as described in the [15]Linux-Mobile-Guide.

 13. http://lists.debian.org/debian-laptop-0205/msg00157.html
 14. http://lists.debian.org/debian-laptop-0205/msg00158.html
 15. http://mobilix.org/Mobile-Guide.db/Mobile-Guide.html

Debian for Hams. A new subproject was created: [16]Debian-Ham, a
distribution for Hamradio operators. SunSITE.dk [17]provides a CVS
repository, a MySQL database and several mailing lists. Joop
Stakenborg [18]explained that this effort is not an attempt to create
a distribution fork and continues with reasons why a subproject seems
to be useful and when the idea came up.

 16. http://debianham.sunsite.dk/
 17. http://lists.debian.org/debian-hams-0205/msg00006.html
 18. http://lists.debian.org/debian-hams-0205/msg00016.html

Hurd within Bochs? Neil Levine [19]wondered if the Hurd would run in
Bochs (an IA-32 (x86) PC emulator) and Robert Millan replied with
appropriate net resources. Alfred Szmidt wrote a fine [20]tutorial
about creating a GNU/Hurd image that can be used with Bochs. An image
shall be uploaded to the [21]list of disk images with pre-installed
systems.

 19. http://lists.debian.org/debian-hurd-0205/msg00131.html
 20. ftp://walfield.org/pub/people/ams/hurd/creating_bochs_image_for_gnu.txt
 21. http://bochs.sourceforge.net/diskimages.html

Formation of SGML/XML Policy Group. Mark Johnson [22]started to form
an SGML/XML policy group. It should compose a new Debian policy for
packaging, implementation, etc., of XML, SGML, and related stuff. Adam
DiCarlo and Mark started writing up a [23]draft a year ago in an
effort to develop an LSB-compliant implementation. The document is far
away from being finished, though.

 22. http://lists.debian.org/debian-sgml-0205/msg00000.html
 23. http://people.debian.org/~mrj/sgml-policy-draft/

New Boot-Floppies for Woody. David Kimdon [24]announced that a new
version 3.0.23 of boot-floppies will soon be released. He says that
some ports will probably use this version for Woody, depending on a
variety of factors. A test set for i386 is available [25]here,
together with a [26]changes file. Please test and report back to the
[27]debian-boot list.

 24. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot-0205/msg00333.html
 25. http://people.debian.org/~dwhedon/dists/woody/main/disks-i386/current/
 26. http://people.debian.org/~dwhedon/boot-floppies_3.0.23_i386.changes
 27. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/

Debian Seminar Held in Korea. On last Saturday the [28]Korean Debian
Users Community hosted this year's [29]first Debian seminar (english
translation is [30]here). Such an event takes place four times a year.
The seminar preparation team announced that this seminar aims at file
system management and backup of file systems for experienced system
administrators. This encouraged people to use Debian GNU/Linux as a
file system server. Many people discussed file systems, backup
methods, Debian related issues and enjoyed the seminar meeting.

 28. http://debianusers.org/
 29. http://debianusers.org/stories.php?story=02/05/01/9950118
 30. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2002/20/mail#1

New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the
Debian archive recently or contain important updates.

 * [31]ahcd -- Audun Hove's CD player.
 * [32]chemeq -- Parser for chemical formula and equilibria.
 * [33]hddtemp -- Utility to monitor the temperature of your IDE hard
   drive.
 * [34]ipcalc -- Parameter calculator for IPv4 addresses.
 * [35]iprelay -- User-space bandwidth shaping TCP proxy daemon.
 * [36]kmatplot -- A Gnuplot-like tool for plotting data sets in 2D
   or 3D.
 * [37]kmymoney2 -- Personal finance manager for KDE.
 * [38]kover -- WYSIWYG CD cover printer.
 * [39]plywood -- Playwriting typing and typesetting help.
 * [40]xbattbar -- Display battery status in X11.

 31. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/sound/ahcd.html
 32. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/tex/chemeq.html
 33. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/utils/hddtemp.html
 34. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/net/ipcalc.html
 35. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/net/iprelay.html
 36. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/math/kmatplot.html
 37. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/utils/kmymoney2.html
 38. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/graphics/kover.html
 39. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/text/plywood.html
 40. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/x11/xbattbar.html

Orphaned Packages. 1 package was orphaned this week and requires a new
maintainer. This makes a total of 80 orphaned packages currently. Many
thanks to the previous maintainer who contributed to the Free Software
community. Please see the [41]WNPP pages for the full list, and please
add a note to the bug report and retitle it to ITA: if you plan to
take over a package.

 41. http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/

 * [42]honyaku-el -- Honyakudamashii client for emacsen
   ([43]Bug#146961)

 42. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/honyaku-el.html
 43. http://bugs.debian.org/146961

Seen something interesting? Please drop us a note whenever you see
something noteworthy that you think is appropriate for inclusion in
DWN. We don't see everything, unfortunately, and this month will be a
busy one for us. Of course, we are also thankful for completely
written items from volunteer writers. We're looking forward to
receiving your mail at [44]dwn@debian.org.

 44. mailto:dwn@debian.org


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