Distributions

How to vote in the Debian Project Leader election

Those who looked at the statistics packaged with the second call for votes in this year's Debian Project Leader election noticed something interesting: 54 ballots, so far, have been rejected by the election system. That is rather higher than last year's total (14, at the end of the election). So, it was asked, what's going on and how does one actually manage to cast a valid ballot this year?

The problem, as it turns out, is that one of the candidates (Raphaël Hertzog) has a non-ASCII character in his name. Evidently, this is the first time such a name has shown up on the Debian ballot. Mr. Hertzog's difficult name is creating trouble for certain Debian developers who are using electronic mail clients which, it seems, have not entirely kept up with the times. Debian, it seems, is shipping software which cannot send a valid vote in its own elections.

A number of possible remedies have been discussed. Asking Mr. Hertzog to change his name seemed like a bit of a non-starter, though he did indicate his willingness to accept a non-accented version of his name in the ballot. It was suggested the the vote-accepting software could be fixed to accept ballots with corrupted names or to accept a non-accented alternative, but the Debian project secretary (Manoj Srivastava) is not enthusiastic about those ideas:

Finally, it was also suggested that developers with non-ASCII names should simply be ruled ineligible for the Project Leader position, but that eminently sensible idea fell on deaf ears as well.

So, for Debian developers who are having trouble voting, the options seem to come down to this: "I think your options are to send in an ascii armored encrypted ballot, or use mutt or gnus to send a proper PGP/MIME signed ballot. Either should work." Then, perhaps, the Debian developers can work on fixing various old mail clients for etch+1.

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New Releases

pure:dyne 2.3.52 release

Pure:dyne is a GNU/Linux Live CD distribution for media artists. "The pure:dyne project provides tools and an optimized platform to try out and work on a large range of applications. It comes with optimized and tested software such as Supercollider, Icecast, csound, Packet Forth, fluxus and much more, including of course Pure Data and a great collection of essential externals and abstractions (PDP, PiDiP, Gem, GridFlow, RRadical, PixelTango ...). The Studio "classics" have not been forgotten (Ardour, LADSPA, seq24, Audacity ...) and numerous essential graphics software are also bundled (Inkscape, Gimp, Blender ...)."

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Ubuntu 7.04 Beta released

Ubuntu has released the first beta for version 7.04, aka Feisty Fawn. Desktop highlights include a Windows migration tool, easy-to-install codec wizards and plug and play network sharing with Avahi. "Ubuntu 7.04 server edition adds support for hardware facilities that speed up the use of virtual machines as well as other improved hardware support, making it an excellent choice as a web, database, file and print server, the fastest growing area of Linux server use." The full release notes can be found here. The Kubuntu beta is also available.

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Announcing XORP Release 1.4

Release 1.4 of XORP, the eXtensible Open Router Platform, is available. "The major new feature with this release is: OSPFv3 (draft-ietf-ospf-ospfv3-update-14.txt) In addition, this release contains numerous bug fixes." XORP is released under the BSD license and builds on DragonFlyBSD-1.8, FreeBSD-6.2, Linux Fedora Core6, Linux Debian-3.1 (sarge), NetBSD-3.1 and OpenBSD-4.0.

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Terra Soft Released YDL v5.0.1 for Apple PowerPC

Terra Soft has released Yellow Dog Linux v5.0.1 for Apple G3, G4, and G5 computers. Yellow Dog Linux v5.0.1 adds more than 500 package updates to the operating system released last fall for the Sony Computer Entertainment PLAYSTATION(R)3 with support for the former Apple PowerPC product line.

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Distribution News

Debian announcements

Debian developers have voted for a general resolution that will enable those developers currently allowed to perform combined source and binary packages uploads to also perform binary-only packages uploads for the same set of architectures.

A call for testing of the sarge to etch upgrade path has gone out. "Any upgrade tests that could be done over the next days to verify this procedure would be most welcome. Please file a bug in the BTS against "upgrade-reports" with your results."

A second call for votes was followed by another call for votes in the Debian Project Leader Elections. Votes must be received by the end of April 7, 2007.

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Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring: Here Comes The Spring

Mandriva is announcing the upcoming release of its new distribution: Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring. Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring provides Metisse (another 3D window manager) and the newest versions of Compiz and Beryl 3D-accelerated desktops. Mandriva will also distribute O3Spaces Workplace as part of the Corporate Server 4 and Mandriva Linux Powerpack+ 2007 Spring editions. O3Spaces Workplace is an enterprise extension for OpenOffice.org.

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YaST, LiMaL, libzypp mailing lists now @openSUSE.org

OpenSUSE has new mailing lists for the discussion of the YaST, ZYPP and LiMaL projects. YaST is the installation and configuration tool for SuSE Linux. libzypp is the integration of SUSE's yast2 Package manager and Ximian's libredcarpet. LiMaL (Linux Management Library) provides a system library style, object oriented way of access to the operating system.

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March meeting of PC-BSD Core

PC-BSD is a desktop operating system featuring KDE 3.5, based on FreeBSD. Tim McCormick, lead developer of PC-BSD, has posted a summary of the March meeting of the PC-BSD core team. Topics include documentation and product life-cycle.

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Distribution Newsletters

Gentoo Weekly Newsletter

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for March 19, 2007 looks at the Dell Linux survey, Gentoo/Java changes, Firefox 1.5 upcoming removal, Developer of the week (welp) and several other topics.

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Ubuntu Weekly News: Issue #33

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter for March 24, 2007 covers Feisty Fawn's beta release, newly approved Ubuntu members, the big effort the "Ubuntu Desktop Effects" team is doing, and all the buzz about Ubuntu going on in the press and the blogosphere.

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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 195

The DistroWatch Weekly for March 26, 2007 is out. "As expected, the developers of the Ubuntu family of Linux distributions announced their beta releases late last week, edging towards that last month of intensive debugging before the final release. Other distributions are also hard at work: Mandriva has announced details about the upcoming Mandriva 2007 "Spring", KNOPPIX has delivered a new CeBIT DVD to the attendees of the popular show in Hannover, and Fedora is expected to publish its third development build, version 7 test3, in just a few days. In other news, Red Hat unveils plans for a new desktop distribution, Ian Murdoch criticises the project he founded for lacking strong leadership, and François Bancilhon is dismayed by the decision of the French Assemblée Nationale to choose Ubuntu over Mandriva for its Windows-to-Linux migration."

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Newsletters and articles of interest

Mandriva Linux Spring 2007 Edition to Arrive Soon (Linux Electrons)

Linux Electrons looks forward to the release of Mandriva 2007 Spring. "What is the key innovation of Spring? The breakthrough technology presented last January during the Solutions Linux event in Paris: Metisse, an innovative window management technology. Unlike the widely known 3D-accelerated desktops with the "cube" effect and other visual enhancements, Metisse offers an innovative way to manage windows: only the windows move, making the possible variations endless! Metisse is not a 3D-accelerated desktop but a Human-Computer Interface (HCI) technology that revolutionizes the user experience."

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Here come the RHEL 5 clones (Linux-Watch)

Linux-Watch looks at the upcoming release of Startcom Enterprise Linux AS-5.0.0 and other RHEL 5 clones. "Of course if you go with a cloned RHEL, while you get the code goodies, you don't get Red Hat's support. Various Red Hat clone distributions, such StartCom AS-5, CentOS, and White Box Enterprise Linux, are built from Red Hat's source code, which is freely available at the Raleigh, NC company's FTP site. The "cloned" versions alter or otherwise remove non-free packages within the RHEL distribution, or non-redistributable bits such as the Red Hat logo."

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Distribution reviews

Review: Dreamlinux 2.2 (Linux.com)

Linux.com reviews Dreamlinux 2.2. "When it comes to choosing a Linux distribution, people tend to stick with the major players, such as Ubuntu, SUSE, or Fedora. However, every once in a while a distro comes along that offers a look at Linux in a new and fun way. One such distribution is Dreamlinux, a Morphix-based implementation of Linux that can be run from a single CD or installed on a hard drive. Dreamlinux 2.2 aims to offer a full range of desktop applications while providing a wealth of multimedia tools for easy production of professional-grade media."

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