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Debian - After the fire

On November 20, 2002 a fire destroyed the University of Twente Network Operations Center in the Netherlands. Among the computers housed there was one known as satie.debian.org, former home of security.debian.org, non-us.debian.org, nm.debian.org and qa.debian.org.

Security was the first priority and the Debian Team had reinstalled security.debian.org on the host klecker within two days time. Some security fixes were lost, particularly those that were uploaded, but not yet installed. Most have probably been reconstructed by now, but if you downloaded security fixes before the fire, check the previous announcment to see if you can help.

The new maintainer service, nm.debian.org is in the process of getting back on track. Here's a status report on how nm.debian.org was affected and how it is being restored. As part of the New Maintainer web site, there is a new GPG Key Signing Coordination page as well. Anyone applying for new maintainer status should be aware that your information may have been lost. If you are applying for Debian developer status please read this information, and verify your status.

There is no word yet on the status of non-us and qa, but we expect those services to be restored soon. Remember that Debian is a volunteer organization, so those people who are working on restoring these services are taking time away from jobs, families and other commitments. Help out if you can, if not, please be patient.

In other Debian news, we have the most recent debian-installer status report for November 22, 2002. If you would like to help with the installer you can get more information from the installer's home page.

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Distribution News

Mandrake Linux

The Mandrake Linux Community Newsletter for November 21, 2002 is available. This week covers Christmas at MandrakeStore; Mandrake 9.0 Standard Edition at a Glance; Mandrake Desktop Linux v. Microsoft; Mandrake Linux for Power and Enterprise Users; Stability; and more.

A new initscripts package is available for Mandrake Linux 9.0, that fixes problems with certain locales including pl, sq, fi, lv, ru, sk, and Danish translation encoding. This package also corrects some issues with wireless link detection.

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Slackware Linux

Slackware reports more changes to the slackware-current tree. Samba was upgraded to samba-2.2.7, mysql recompiled --with-extra-charsets=complex, Pine was upgraded to pine-4.50, gcc updates and more. See the change log for complete details.

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Trustix Secure Linux

Trustix has announced that as of March 31, 2003 updates for Trustix Secure Linux versions 1.01 and 1.1 will no longer be maintained, so they can focus on future versions.

Trustix has released a bug fix advisory for freeswan. "The previous package had the wrong path to the internal tools. This has now been corrected. Since we did a new package, it has also been updated to the latest release. The kernel patch has also been updated, and a new kernel is thus shipped as well."

There is also an enhancement to rpm which adds a %makeinstall macro to the older versions to make it easier to maintain packages over serveral distributions.

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Minor distribution updates

Astaro Security Linux

Astaro Security Linux has released v2.031 with major security fixes. "Changes:This Up2Date fixes BIND vulnerabilities (VU#844360, VU#852283, VU#229595)."

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Cool Linux CD

Cool Linux CD has released v2.01 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: This version allows you to save your options on a CD as a second track (in multisession mode). ALSA 0.9.0rc5 drivers and utilites were added, as well as some more software."

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LEAF (Linux Embedded Appliance Firewall)

LEAF Bering branch has released v1.0. "Changes: Fixes for some minor bugs from rc4, and addition of Shorewall version 1.3.10, PCMCIA-CS 3.2.3, and FreeSWAN/IPSec 1.99."

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MURIX Cross Hardware Linux

MURIX Cross Hardware Linux has released v1.1 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: This release has automatic redial if the line is dropped or busy, and a simple configuration."

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Phrealon Linux

Phrealon Linux has released v0.81 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: This release adds a tulip.o.gz module and changes name of the distribution to Phrealon Linux to avoid trademark issues."

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PXES Linux Thin Client

PXES Linux Thin Client has released v0.5.1-9 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: VNC was included, and some small changes and corrections were made to auto-detection."

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RxLinux

RxLinux has been busy this week. Features were added to version 1.0.8, which was followed by bug fixes in 1.0.8a. Version 1.0.9 with released soon after that with more major feature enhancements. "Changes: New packages have been added for Rxlinux: Samba, X11R6, and Mozilla. With these new packages, Rxlinux can be configure to be a file server, an X terminal, or a standalone diskless Web browser (128M RAM needed)."

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ttylinux

ttylinux has released v2.6 with minor bug fixes. "Changes: This release updates busybox, e2fsprogs, e3, LILO, and modutils to their latest versions. There is also a bootable ISO image for download using the Linux 2.2.22 kernel."

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Distribution reviews

Mandrake 9.0 Review (LinuxLookup)

LinuxLookup reviews Mandrake Linux 9.0. "If I were looking for a Linux distro that would meet the demands of the newest Linux customer, then Mandrake would probably be my first choice. All of the icons representing the applications are straightforward as to their function. The layout is incredibly simple (Hello! Hey, Red Hat! Are you listening?), the groupings are logically divided, and the desktop has a nice default pattern and style."

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Page editor: Rebecca Sobol
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