Distributions

Debian Project Leader elections - who votes

The third call for votes has gone out for this year's Debian Project Leader elections and the project secretary reports a low ebb for voter participation. By this time next week a new DPL will have been chosen. As the Debian developers muddle though their decision, others ask why this election is restricted to Debian Developers. What about all the other people who regularly contribute time and effort to the Debian project?

All Debian elections are open to the Developers, those people who have their key on the official key ring. This makes validation of votes easier. All votes must be signed by a key and if that key isn't on the keyring, it doesn't count. Also the secretary can track who has voted and make sure that each person's vote is counted only once. (It's possible to change your vote by sending in an amended ballot, which then invalidates the previous ballot.)

But the Debian Project continues to grow and part of that is an increasing number of people who contribute to Debian without becoming Debian Developers. They help out as translators, package maintainers, and other places and they care about the issues. What they don't have is their key on the keyring, so they can't vote.

Those people who are Debian Developers have worked hard to get there. Voting is a privilege that they have earned. Still, it seems clear that Debian cannot afford to disenfranchise the many others who contribute to the project. As Benjamin Mako Hill posted, "I'd like to see those who have made long-term, sustained, and significant contributions to Debian enfranchised. That could mean broadening the category of developer through changes to NM or it could also mean another enfranchised category of contributor."

Perhaps it's time for a second keyring. One that doesn't give it's members all the privileges of a Debian Developer (like access to the servers), but shows that one has made a commitment to the project and deserves the right to vote.

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Debian Live Initiative releases first code (DebianPlanet)

DebianPlanet reports that the website live.debian.net is now available. "Debian Live aims to make software to produce official Debian Live CDs, rather like Knoppix. The first version uses the Casper technology created by Ubuntu."

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Dapper Drake Flight 6

Ubuntu has announced the availability of Flight 6 ISO images, the latest alpha of Dapper Drake. Flight 6 is available in Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Edubuntu flavors as a Live CD image and an install image. Xubuntu install CDs are also available this time around.

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SUSE Linux 10.1 Beta9

SUSE Linux has released a ninth beta for the upcoming 10.1. The schedule for 10.1 has changed. Beta 9 should be followed by RC1 on April 12, with a Goldmaster release by the end of the month.

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Musix GNU+Linux 0.39 has been released!

Musix GNU+Linux v0.39 has been released. This is an experimental version using the latest versions of many applications, so be ready to file bug reports.

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New CDMEDIC Live CD (LinuxMedNews)

LinuxMedNews covers the release of CDMEDIC Live CD fusion.iso v2.0. This is a live CD created with Linux Live Scripts, based on Debian sid and UnionFS. "The aim of this new CDMEDIC Live CD is to make a free distribution for complex medical data such as PET-CT, with the possibility of creating, reviewing, manipulating and distributing medical images and reports accessible from any operating system."

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The end of the Fedora Foundation

Red Hat has sent out a rather long (but worth reading - click below) message on why there will not be an independent Fedora Foundation after all. It comes down to this: "Red Hat *must* maintain a certain amount of control over Fedora decisions, because Red Hat's business model *depends* upon Fedora. Red Hat contributes millions of dollars in staff and resources to the success of Fedora, and Red Hat also accepts all of the legal risk for Fedora. Therefore, Red Hat will sometimes need to make tough decisions about Fedora." Instead, there will be a new Project Board populated initially by five Red Hat people (Jeremy Katz, Bill Nottingham, Elliot Lee, Chris Blizzard, and Rahul Sundaram) and four community members (Seth Vidal, Paul W. Frields, Rex Dieter, and one to be named). The project chairman, who can veto board decisions, will be Max Spevack.

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New Grimoire Lead for Source Mage

The Source Mage GNU/Linux project has elected a new lead for the Grimoire Team. "So who is our new Grimoire Lead? Well I have a surprise for you as the new Grimoire Lead is none other than Arwed von Merkatz (50%, 56% with the roll-over votes), with Seth Woolley (34%, 47% with the roll-over votes) coming in a close second! We had an 91% turnout (with 16% abstaining) for this vote, so I would like to thank all of those who voted to make this one of our highest turnouts yet. =)"

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The end of AudioSlack

Luke Yelavich, creator of AudioSlack, has announced that he is moving on to new pursuits and will no longer maintain the distribution.

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Ehad Linux

'Ehad' (the Hebrew word for the numeral '1') and Ehad Linux is an Israeli project offering a repackaging of standard Mandriva Linux binary packages, in order to provide a single localized installation CD for Mandriva users in Israel. The current stable release is Ehad 2006 Classic edition - release 2 (compatible with Mandriva Linux 2006). (Thanks to Shlomi Fish)

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Games Knoppix

Games Knoppix is live CD/DVD with lots of games. Here's a list of what you'll find on the most release, 4.0.2-0.3 DVD. (Thanks to Shlomi Fish)

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Debian Weekly News

The Debian Weekly News for April 4, 2006 covers a CD installer images for GNU/kFreeBSD on AMD64, moving GFDL Documentation to non-free, the Debian Project Leader Election, extending voting privileges to (some) non-DDs, an Oracle repository for Debian, the Debian Conference Video License, and several other topics.

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Fedora Weekly News Issue 40

The Fedora Weekly News for April 3, 2006 looks at the FC5 SELinux FAQ, Fedora Tracker lives again!, FC5 Flash Font bug and workaround, Fedora's Way Forward, Thinkpad, Thinkpad, Thinkpad, Ogg, Ogg, Ogg, Fedora Core 5 Reviews, Textbooks on OpenOffice.org, and more.

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Gentoo Weekly Newsletter

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of April 3, 2006 covers Gentoo/MIPS stage 3 for Cobalt servers, Gentoo at LinuxWorld Expo Boston, and several other topics.

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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 145

The DistroWatch Weekly for April 3, 2006 is out. "As always, April 1st was a perfect day for many web sites to come up with most unlikely stories, catching great many people. Now back to serious business, we are pleased to announce our first ever competition - a chance to win a copy of Beginning Ubuntu Linux. This new book for Linux novices is a great introduction to the world of Debian and Ubuntu and has already received a positive review on Slashdot. In other news: SUSE Linux 10.1 delayed once again, miscellaneous Debian happenings, an update on the Linux DVD that can boot 10 different live distributions, and a link to Hack In The Box - a web site that does a great job at keeping us informed about cybercrime. Finally, the recipient of our March 2006 donation is the GParted project."

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Fedora updates

Updates for Fedora Core 5: scim-hangul (new upstream release), scim-anthy (new upstream release), mrtg (update to mrtg-2.13.2), wpa_supplicant (bug fixes), policycoreutils (not specified), selinux-policy (not specified), mc (bug fixes), k3b (update to version 0.12.14), openoffice.org (fixes for a11y and font handling), pcmciautils (bug fixes), gnome-applets (bug fix), perl-HTML-Parser (upgrade to 3.51), perl-DBD-Pg (upgrade to upstream version 1.47), perl-Net-DNS (upgrade to upstream version 0.57), binutils (fix ld error message formatting), wpa_supplicant (work around older & incorrect drivers), logwatch (update to 7.2.1), gthumb (update to 2.7.5.1), newt (bug fix).

Updates for Fedora Core 4: kernel (2.6.16.1), rpm (makefile fix, selinux fix), k3b (update to version 0.12.14), dovecot (bug fix).

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Slackware updates

Progress on Slackware 11.0 continues. Abiword has been removed, KDE has been upgraded to 3.5.2, libmusicbrainz-2.1.2 and libtunepimp-0.4.2 have been added, plus lots of other upgrades. Click below to see a slice of the change log.

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Trustix updates

Trustix Secure Linux has various bug fixes available for courier-imap, sqlgrey (v2.2 & 3.0) and kernel, samba (v2.2, 3.0 & Enterprise Server 2).

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Updating made easy with EasyUbuntu (Linux.com)

Linux.com examines EasyUbuntu, a script which simplifies the installation of utilities for non-free media formats. "Ubuntu uses only open/free formats, so it doesn't include playback support for formats such as MP3, Windows Media Audio (WMA), and Audio Video Interleave (AVI) that may have some restrictions. If your country has no such restrictions or legal issues with these formats, the Restricted Formats article on the Ubuntu wiki can help you install software that plays such files. Or you can do it they easy way, with EasyUbuntu, a Python script that gives Ubuntu users access to commonly used applications and codecs through a neat graphical user interface (GUI)."

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Mandriva RPM site is a labor of love (NewsForge)

NewsForge takes a look at SeerOfSouls.com, a place to get RPMs for Mandriva Linux. "SeerOfSouls.com was born because of Wade's desire to help other people who are learning about Linux. "It started as a simple request one day to rebuild a package for a stable release, and it was appreciated by the user," he says. "I got a couple more requests and it escalated. I decided I would start doing it as much as I could. Little did I know it would end up being as big as it is currently, and still growing."" The site will soon branch out to include Fedora Core 5 RPMs.

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The Perfect Xen 3.0 Setup For Debian (HowtoForge)

HowtoForge covers the setup of Xen 3.0 on Debian Sarge (3.1). "I will use Debian Sarge for both the host OS (dom0) and the guest OS (domU). In an additional section at the end I will also show how to create a virtual local network with virtual machines, with dom0 being the router. This howto is meant as a practical guide; it does not cover the theoretical backgrounds. They are treated in a lot of other documents in the web."

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My desktop OS: CentOS 4.2 (NewsForge)

NewsForge hears from a CentOS fan. " I have been a Unix and Linux system administrator for more than 20 years, and have worked with many different operating systems. Over the last several years I've spent a lot of time with various versions of Red Hat Linux and Fedora Core, and I'm the editor of the Fedorazine online magazine. I run a Web consulting company, where I maintain several production servers for Web and email, and I need to have a stable production Linux environment for them. I chose to use CentOS as a platform for the servers, and since I already had a commitment to maintaining a number of different servers in CentOS, I decided a while ago to start using it on my desktop as well."

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My Desktop OS: OpenVMS with CDE (NewsForge)

NewsForge takes a look at OpenVMS. "Low cost: My desktop runs on the world's fastest workstation (as of 11 years ago). This investment, injected with a few expense dollars, has paid dividends 24x7 for years. Countless x86s and MIPSes have been come and gone, and the killer OS of the time was entombed long ago, yet critical software continues to run even on new hardware. Other OSes are camouflaged as backward-compatible, and porting existing software to these new versions is commonplace. OpenVMS's middle name is "backward compatible"; it continues to run the same 64-bit images that I compiled years ago."

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