One year after the release of Debian 6.0 alias "Squeeze", and nearly three years after the release of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 alias "Lenny", security support for the old "Lenny" release has been terminated. The Debian project is proud to have been able to support its old distribution for such a long time, even continuing for a full year after the new version was released.

Samuel Thibault sent some bits from Debian GNU/Hurd porters reporting recent achievements of the team. Among other news items, Samuel confirmed that Debian GNU/Hurd might be available as a technological preview for the "Wheezy" release: the percentage of packages built for it has passed 70% and the installer is available with a graphical interface.

Stefano Zacchiroli sent some bits from the DPL which, as usual, reported his monthly activities. During the last month, Stefano has mostly worked on patents and legal issues, including helping David Prévot and other webmasters in their effort to relicense the Debian website, writing a draft for a Debian trademark policy (with the help of Benjamin Mako Hill and the SPI lawyers), and writing a patent policy for the Debian archive that has just been published.

Cyril Brulebois mentioned on his blog that "thanks to the hard work of dpkg developers and many (generations of) developers", dpkg with multiarch was uploaded to experimental. He invites everyone to try and install packages with a foreign architecture.

Sam Varghese wrote an article analysing John Sullivan's study on the use of the GNU General Public Licence (GPL) in the Debian project. John, executive director at the Free Software Foundation, said during his FOSDEM 2012 talk titled "Is copyleft being framed?" that 93% of Debian "Squeeze"'s packages are released under licences in the GPL family (including the GPL, the Affero GPL and LGPL), showing a constant and significant increase from the previous releases. The numbers in the talk were calculated using an existing Debian tool, but Russ Allbery mentioned that it wasn't designed to be used this way, so the current figures are only preliminary.

There has also been one further "People behind Debian" interview: with Ana Beatriz Guerrero López, member of the Debian KDE team.

The Debian Project is calling for contributors to design graphics for the next release of the Universal Operating System, called "Wheezy".

You can find more information about Debian-related events and talks on the events section of the Debian web site, or subscribe to one of our events mailing lists for different regions: Europe, Netherlands, Hispanic America, North America.

Welcome to this year's fourth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:

Linux Magazine Online lets us know that Debian will have official LiveCDs with the 5.0 release. More news about Lenny is that the Debian-Live team headed by Daniel Baumann is working on official live images. With these distributions users can employ Linux off the CD without needing to install it.

Something to watch for, Google’s Summer of Code is sponsoring a graphical utility to create custom LiveCDs! My proposal is to construct a graphical user interface that can be used in conjunction with live-helper to build Debian Live systems, allowing editing of existing configurations and including a ‘wizard’-style walkthrough for the first-time user. Providing less [...]

Digg is pointing to a email announcing a Debian based LiveCD for the PS3. Digg incorrectly announces it as the first, as a Gentoo LiveCD already exists. The creator of the new LiveCD makes no such claim.

DistroWatch Weekly has a quick summary of new LiveCDs from Ubuntu, Debian, and SLAX.

This week’s Debian Weekly News has links to the Debian Live project. The site has links to downloadable ISO images, and a wiki site, with much more information about the Debian Live project.

The fourth update for Debian 6.0 (codenamed "Squeeze") has been released. This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with some adjustments for serious problems.

Niels Thykier sent some bits from the Release Team where he announced various bits of news: the addition of armhf and s390x to testing (though these architectures may be temporarily out of sync with the others), the acceptance of a new release goal ("security hardening build flags"), and the completion of more than fourteen transitions to testing (including GNOME 3, Perl 5.14, Python 2.7, etc.). Niels also issued a reminder that the freeze is due in June, even if an exact freeze date has not been selected.

Holger Levsen sent some bits from the piuparts maintainers announcing that piuparts is again maintained by a team and they're receiving various patches and other contributions. piuparts is an important tool for Quality Assurance within Debian as it runs various tests in order to verify that packages can be installed, upgraded and removed without problems. Tests results are publicly available on the piuparts website, where they are updated on a daily basis. Holger urged maintainers to regularly check their personal status pages on piuparts in order to fix issues related to their packages. In addition to their regular tests, since December 2011, the piuparts maintainers have been testing the upgrade of individual packages from "Squeeze" to "Wheezy": 158 packages failed the test (and another 130 failed it due to dependencies) while 33,708 passed it.

Andreas Tille sent a report from the Debian Med sprint held in Southport, UK on 27-29 January. Among other activities, the Debian Med team fixed some bugs, mentored new members and students (consolidating the effort made via the "Mentoring of the Month" initiative) and packaged new software.
For more information on Debian Med activity, you can check their real time activity page.

Petter Reinholdtsen announced on his blog that the next version of Debian Edu/Squeeze will contain a new tool, called sitesummary2ldapdhcp, which allows all the computers of a school to be quickly set up with a minimal number of manual steps. Once the central server is installed, this tool collects data from the network to generate system objects in the LDAP database. After a few modifications of the configuration from a GUI, the network of computers is ready to use.
A third beta version of Debian Edu based on "Squeeze" and containing this tool has just been released.

Raphaël Hertzog wrote a useful blogpost about how to answer the questions of Debian users and, in general, how to support new users. There are many places for helping users (mailing lists, IRC channels, questions & answers websites, etc.) each with different characteristics, but the golden rule for every support channel is to be respectful and courteous (as stated in the Debian Community Guidelines).

Paul Wise announced a Debian/Ubuntu games screenshot party to be held on 25 and 26 February and organised by the Games Team. The idea is to create screenshots for as many games in Debian/Ubuntu as possible and upload them to screenshots.debian.net in order to have them available to goplay (a games package browser).
For more information, you can visit the related wiki page.

Jordi Mallach wrote an article on the transition from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 in Debian from the Debian GNOME Team point of view. "When you’re dealing with dozens of GNOME source packages at the same time, many of which introduce new libraries, or worse, introduce incompatible APIs that affect many more unrelated packages, things get hairy, and you need a plan" Jordi said. But even with a plan for a smooth transition, they encountered a lot of difficulties, such as failures to build from source on various architectures and incompatibilities with other packages. Finally GNOME Shell 3.2 has transitioned to Debian's testing suite and Jordi thanks not only all Debian GNOME Team members, but also Release Team members Julien Cristau and Cyril Brulebois and FTP assistant Luca Falavigna, who helped in reaching this goal.

According to a recent W3Techs survey, Debian has just surpassed CentOS to become the most popular GNU/Linux distribution on web servers. The survey is based on the analysis of the top million web sites according to Alexa, in order to select a representative sample of established sites, and focused only on the technologies used for web sites (and not individual web pages or desktop installations). In fact, at the beginning of 2012, Debian was used by 29.4% of all Linux-based sites (and by 9.7% of all web sites), while CentOS was used by 29.1% of all Linux-based sites (and by 9.5% of all web sites). Debian "is also the fastest growing operating system at the moment: every day 54 of the top 1 million sites switch to Debian", said Matthias Gelbmann in the article. With regard to the geographical distribution of web sites using Debian, the most are in Europe (with 39.7% of all sites in Germany, 36.1% in Poland, 33.6% in France and 26.4% in Russia).

Thomas Goirand recently proposed to relax or even remove some dependencies of web applications on a web server package. This would help users wanting to install such web applications in chroots, while the web server is installed only outside the chroot. During the following discussion, several solutions were proposed, such as providing a dummy web server package in Debian. It was pointed out that such dummy packages are actually very easy to create with the equivs package, which deserves to be better known.

Christian Perrier blogged about the recent revival of the aptitude package manager. As the main maintainer had less time to dedicate to it, the number of bugs against aptitude was continually growing and reached more than 800. But last November, Daniel Harwig and Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo started working on it, triaging bugs and preparing a possible new version. If you want to help them, join the aptitude-devel mailing list on Alioth.

Stefano Zacchiroli blogged about how donations to Debian are used by the project. First of all, Stefano explained how money is used in the Debian Project: to buy hardware and hardware-related services for Debian infrastructure, to sponsor contributor sprints, or to support travel expenses in order to allow Debian Developers to represent Debian at conferences and meetings. Then, Stefano noted that almost all donations to Debian come from private citizens and not from big corporate sponsors: corporates mostly sponsor DebConf (the Debian annual conference). At the end, Stefano pointed out that it's possible to check how Debian spends donated money: by reading the minutes of SPI monthly meetings or the list of sprints, visiting the DPL wiki page and consulting the DebConf reports. Stefano also added that over the next month he will be working to further improve the transparency of Debian's budget.

Steve McIntyre blogged about the status of the armhf port in Debian. Since mid-2011, he has been working on armhf as a new architecture in "debian-ports"; then in December it was imported into the main Debian archive. The current state of auto-building can be viewed at the armhf buildd status page.

Ben Hutchings wrote an interesting report on a security issue in Linux found by himself while working on bug #654876. As his laptop running Linux 3.0 or 3.1 crashed repeatedly, Simon McVittie — the bug submitter — thought it could be a driver bug. But, analysing the log of the crash, Ben noted that "a packet received through the wireless interface was being processed by IGMP, which then divided by zero." IGMP packets are used to support multicast routers: as Ben explained, "every multicast address corresponds to a dynamic set of hosts, called a multicast group". In order to know which hosts belong to which groups, the router sends packets and the computer replies at intervals. There are three different versions of the IGMP protocol used to define the Maximum Response Time (MRT) of the computer. Ben found that the crash was caused by a division by 0 of packets with an MRT of 0. The patch is included in Linux 3.0.17, 3.1.9, 3.2.1, and the Debian packaged version 3.1.8-2.
Well done, Ben!

In his last report on Debian Installer localisation, Christian Perrier noted that twenty-two languages are currently up to date for D-I's core files; ten (Czech, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Kazakh, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian and Slovak) are 100% complete for the moment.

Petter Reinholdtsen announced the release of Debian Edu Squeeze 6.0.3 beta2: download and installation instructions are available on the wiki, and in particular a useful "Getting Started" chapter in which you can find explanations of how to log in for the first time. Feedback and installation reports can be sent to the Debian Edu mailing list.

Stefano Zacchiroli sent some bits from the DPL in which he reported about the work done by Martin Michlmayr as Auditor, in order to reconstruct Debian's expenses and budgets. Stefano also sent a call for help for Wheezy artwork organisation, and announced that Gunnar Wolf has volunteered to monitor the discussion regarding the Creative Commons process for revision 4.0 on behalf of Debian.

Cyril Brulebois blogged about the forthcoming X server release 1.12: one major change is the addition of XI2.2 patches, which are related to multitouch support. Another significant change is the addition of support for Intel's Sandy Bridge New Acceleration in the Debian packages.

Michael Hanke noted that the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science ("PNAS") of the United States of America has a paper on the evolution of software in Debian.

Claudio Filho has published a beautiful infographic about Debian. The main motivation was, as Claudio said, "to "draw" for final users how Debian can be good for them".
Similar efforts have been made by Stéphane Blondon and Chris Lamb, who created the Debian Timeline website and the related Debian package.

Enrico Zini announced a new interface for the Debtags website. Debtags is a project to classify Debian packages by adding tags to them: "Debtags attaches categories (we call them tags) to packages, creating a new set of useful structured metadata that can be used to implement more advanced ways of presenting, searching, maintaining and navigating the package archive", Enrico said while presenting the project in 2005. Using the new interface, it is possible to search packages, take a look at statistics about Debtags and, obviously, help with the tagging effort. For more information about Debtags, you can visit the related wiki page.

Paul Wise reported that the transition from defoma to fontconfig is finally complete. Defoma is the Debian-specific font manager, long unmaintained, while the replacement (fontconfig) is cross-distribution and also has wide support from upstreams. In the past three years the Debian Fonts Task Force has worked a lot in order to gain this result, thanks especially to the work of Christian Perrier and Paul Wise. Please note that the transition is not completely smooth: "Xorg does not yet support fontconfig so for now programs relying on server-side fonts will only be able to use the xfonts- packages shipping their fonts in the directories known by the X server" and in addition "there are some issues with Ghostscript and CJK", Paul said.

As you may have noticed, it has been quite some time since the last edition of Debian Project News. To improve the frequency of DPN and expand its other activities, the Debian Publicity team is looking for new contributors. Did you ever want to help Debian, but every piece of software you were interested in was already packaged? You don't consider yourself a "technical person"? You have basic skills in written English? Perfect! Have you considered joining the Publicity Team? If you are a Debian member, the Press team is also looking for new contributors.

The release of Java update 29 from Oracle marks not only security updates, but a change to the licensing, removing Debian's ability to distribute the non-free JVM. The clause in the Java license under which we were able to distribute Java, the DLJ, has been removed. As a result, the sun-java6 package is no longer suitable for the archive, and has been removed, as documented in Debian Bug #646524. Sylvestre Ledru suggests that sun-java6 installs be migrated to openjdk, the open-source alternative, using the following command: apt-get --purge remove sun-java6-jre && apt-get install openjdk-7-jre. Kai Wasserbäch has also been pointed out elsewhere that this upgrade path might not be suitable for all Java programs, and special attention should be paid to re-testing installed Java applications on OpenJDK.

The SDL packaging team has recently been seriously revived, with Dominique Dumont reorganising the team and Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo joining the effort. Packaging is progressively moving to Git for easier collaboration, and developers maintaining SDL-related packages not in the team's repository have been invited to join, too. A lot of old bugs have already been fixed and new SDL 1.3 and sdl-perl packages have been uploaded to experimental. SDL 1.3 brings support for newer OpenGL APIs, input improvements like multi-touch, gestures and force feedback device support, better Unicode support and support for multiple windows and displays.

As part of Ubuntu's recent Community Appreciation Day, Michael Hall sent Debian a message of appreciation, stating "Without you we wouldn't be able to make the contributions we do. Ubuntu is great because Debian is great, and we appreciate all of the work that goes into making it that way." Michael will be joining Canonical's Community Team, focusing on projects that are upstream for Ubuntu.