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A first look at the Debian Project Leader candidates

A record number of nine candidates have been nominated for this year's Debian Project Leader elections and the campaigning period has started. The platform statements were not posted in time for this article, but a few questions to the candidates have been posted to the debian-vote mailing list. Here's a look at what the candidates are saying.

We have quotes from Wouter Verhelst, Gustavo Franco, Sam Hocevar, Raphaël Hertzog and Anthony Towns. Aigars Mahinovs, Sven Luther, Steve McIntyre and Simon Richter have not responded to any questions so far.

Curt Larson asked:

As kind of a follow-up to the basic 'what would you do as DPL that you could not do as DD?' I would like to know more about how you would handle marketing Debian. The very hot topic this week is Dell's move to offer open source alternatives. Buried several clicks away from Dells 'Ideas in Action' page is a vague reference to Debian pertaining to 8G servers. Would you as DPL make it a primary goal to attract as many DD's as you could to work specifically on eliminating the gotchas of installing Debian on Dell Desktops, Laptops and Servers working towards putting Debian at the top of Dells (and maybe others to follow) list of approved and pre-installed OS's?

Wouter Verhelst

First of all, I would like to make clear that I do not view marketing as the DPL's primary job. It's one of the DPL's responsibilities to be a central point of contact to non-Debian folks, which does indeed involve marketing, but there are other, more important, jobs the DPL has.

I don't think there's very much a DPL by himself could do to help Dell in this regard. However, I do think Debian as a whole could do much, and someone to guide Dell and its employees in our community, to bring them into contact with the right Debian Developers and/or contributors would most likely be very helpful. This someone could very well be the DPL or one of his delegates.

Raphaël Hertzog

I would promote more the debian-publicity@lists.debian.org mailing list that we started after the last Debconf.

People started submitting stuff to improve our marketing, now we needs some more volunteers who start playing a more active role and actually organize this group.

The problem is reversed, once Dell understands that people are asking for Linux, they will start checking how they can properly support it and then we need to make sure they understand that Debian is one of the most important distribution out there (given that the Ubuntu distribution that is so popular on www.dellideastorm.com is a Debian derivative) and that they should work with us to ensure their hardware is properly supported.

Gustavo Franco

This is a great question. I've a chapter in my platform that covers the Debian relationship with major hardware vendors and their approach handling server and desktop support. Based on HP results, i'll do my best to push more vendors to support us, even hiring developers to make sure that Debian works well over their hardware.

I also want to push more ideas out of the paper in terms of marketing. There is a chapter on my platform about this too. You will be able to read soon.

Anthony Towns

No -- I think that's a great thing to do, but it's not something I could work on myself. If someone else were to, I'd be happy to provide support for them to do so -- whether that just be being able to call themself "Debian's representative", or funds to ship donated machines to someone who can work on checking them, or similar.

Sam Hocevar

However I see no reason to make it a primary goal. I have little knowledge of what the gotchas could be, but my feeling is that the major ones are not Debian-specific at all anyway (ACPI woes, 3D drivers, wireless firmware...) and the NM process does not train us into low-level hacking, so I wouldn't see how to attract DDs anyway.

If the DPL approaching Dell as the project representative and asking for specification documents, test laptops or a privileged communication channel with Dell engineers qualifies as "attracting DDs", then I'd happily do that or appoint someone.

Anthony Towns is the current DPL, running for a second term. He was asked, "Is there anything you regret doing in the past year (as DPL of course)?"

Anthony replied:

I'd prefer a bunch of things to have worked out differently; but I can't say there's much I regretted *doing*. I certainly regret *not* doing more on the "maintainers" thing after debconf, not proposing the constitutional amendment to shorten the DPL nominations/voting period, and not getting anywhere with regular, semi-automatic beta releases of testing.

As far as doing things goes, mostly that ends up being at worst a learning experience, and as far as I can see, you should be spending your time learning from it, not regretting it. So the only thing I can come up with on the regret score is going overboard with John on -legal, but ultimately that's ended up okay anyway.

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New Releases

OpenPKG Community distribution OpenPKG 2-STABLE-20070221 available

OpenPKG Community 2-STABLE-20070221 is a Snapshot from 2-STABLE. "Snapshots enable Community Users creating reproducible setups. In addition, CORE binary packages have been made available for 20 Unix platforms."

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Distribution News

Daniel Robbins returns to Gentoo

The Gentoo project has just welcomed a new developer: Daniel Robbins. From the introduction: "Daniel doesn't have much experience with Gentoo so let's give him a helping hand in the start." The truth of the matter, of course, is that Daniel is the founder of the project, returning after some time spent in the proprietary world.

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KDE-Live-Spin for Fedora Core 6

Sebastian Vahl is working on a KDE-centric Fedora Core 6 live CD. "I don't know if somebody is working on this but I've created a live cd with KDE for fc6-i386 with the livecd-tools. So far it seems to work quite fine."

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Minutes from Ubuntu Technical Board meeting

Here are the minutes from the Ubuntu Technical Board meeting on February 27, 2007. Topics include MOTU Council administrivia and nominations for Board membership.

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Ubuntu's Masters Of The Universe

Ubuntu's Masters of the Universe has a new council. Meetings have been scheduled for the Council and the MOTU team.

The Universe Feisty Feature Freeze is in effect. "The goal of Feature Freeze is to allow developers and contributors time to work out an bugs and quality control issues on the existing set of packages in Universe."

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Expected development releases

Ubuntu's Feisty Fawn herd 5 CD is expected to be released on March 1.

Also expect to see Fedora 7 Test 2 at a mirror near you by March 1.

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Distribution Newsletters

Fedora Weekly News Issue 78

The Fedora Weekly News for February 26, 2007 covers Announcing Desktop User Guide, Wiki is now upgraded!, FudCon Videos are now available, Live from FOSDEM, ESR and Fedora, and several other topics.

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Gentoo Weekly Newsletter

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for February 19, 2007 looks at upcoming ALSA changes, Gentoo in the press, and much more.

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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 191

The DistroWatch Weekly for February 26, 2007 is out. "This week's issue starts with a first look at VectorLinux 5.8 SOHO, an enhanced edition of the Slackware-based distribution designed for small businesses and home users. The news section then covers a variety of topics, including a couple of recent "distro wars" between Ubuntu and its competitors, reasons for the longer than expected delay of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0, an announcement about the upcoming Community edition of Puppy Linux, and a surprise merge between two Slackware-based projects. Information about the upcoming releases of SabayonLinux 3.3 and Pardus Linux 2007.1, followed by the usual list of new distributions, concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly."

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Miscellaneous Articles

Securing Linux by breaking it with Damn Vulnerable Linux (Linux.com)

Linux.com has published a review of Damn Vulnerable Linux - a distribution most of us are unlikely to want to run in a production setting. "It's based on the popular mini-Linux distribution Damn Small Linux (DSL), not only for its minimal size, but also for the fact that DSL uses a 2.4 kernel, which makes it easier to offer vulnerable elements that might not work under the 2.6 kernel. It contains older, easily breakable versions of Apache, MySQL, PHP, and FTP and SSH daemons, as well as several tools available to help you compile, debug, and break applications running on these services, including GCC, GDB, NASM, strace, ELF Shell, DDD, LDasm, LIDa, and more."

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Distribution reviews

Edubuntu: Linux for education (Linux.com)

Linux.com reviews Edubuntu. "Edubuntu is the Ubuntu distribution's educational variant. It provides a software platform that allows educators to spend more time teaching with computers and less time managing them. In addition to Linux and the typical productivity software, Edubuntu provides the organisational package SchoolTool and educational programs for children between preschool and high school, with three age groups within this demographic, each with their own relevant settings."

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Community Linux router distro goes Debian (LinuxDevices)

LinuxDevices reviews the Vyatta Community Edition 2. "A commercial supplier of open-source routing and firewall software has transitioned its community-supported firewall/router Linux distribution to a Debian base. Vyatta Community Edition 2 (VC2) is based on Debian, runs on commodity x86 hardware, includes excellent documentation, and supports numerous enterprise features, including serial T1/E1 cards, VLANs, RIP, and OSPF."

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