The newsletter for the Debian community
This issue is brought to you from DebConf17 in Montreal by the now extended group of Debian Project News editors. So we expect
DPN will see more frequent releases in the future.

The newsletter for the Debian community

For other news, please read the official Debian blog
Bits from Debian, and follow
https://micronews.debian.org which
RSS-feeds the @debian profile in several social networks too.

Internal News/Happenings

In April, Chris Lamb was
elected as the new Debian Project Leader. Chris has already
posted several monthly updates on his work as DPL, for
April,
May,
June and
July.

Events: Upcoming and Reports

Debian Day is almost here!

Help needed

Debian has a "newcomer" bug tag, used to indicate bugs which are suitable for new
contributors to use as an entry point to working on specific packages.

There are 204
bugs available tagged "newcomer".

More than just code

1635 people and 20 teams are listed on the
Debian Contributors page for 2017.

Outside News

The
Oregon State University Open Source Lab,
one of the Debian partners providing hosting and administration services
to the Debian project, launched a student sponsorship crowdfunding
campaign
with the OSU Foundation, towards
funding students working at the lab along with sending them to open source
conferences in the coming year. The campaign will be active during
August 2017.

Reports

Freexian issues monthly reports
about the work of paid contributors to Debian Long Term Support.

Quick Links from Debian Social Media

This is an extract from the
micronews.debian.org feed, in
which we have removed the topics already commented on in this DPN issue.
You can skip this section if you already follow micronews.debian.org
or the @debian profile in a social network (Pump.io, GNU Social,
Mastodon or Twitter). The items are given unformatted, and in descending order by date
(recent news at the top).

(Comment on this)

The newsletter for the Debian community
For other news, please read the official Debian blog
Bits from Debian, and follow
https://micronews.debian.org which
RSS-feeds the @debian profile in several social networks too.

The newsletter for the Debian community

Debian's Security Team releases current advisories on a daily basis
(Security Advisories 2017). Please
read them carefully and subscribe to the security mailing
list.

Internal News/Happenings

The seventh update of the stable distribution Debian 8 "Jessie" was
published on 14 January 2017.
This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable
release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems.

Events: Upcoming and Reports

On 25–26 February 2017 there will be a Bug Squashing Party
in Endocode AG, in Berlin, Germany.
See the
wiki
page for details.

Help needed

Debian has a 'newcomer' bug tag, used to indicate bugs which are suitable for new
contributors to use as an entry point to working on specific packages.

There are 188
bugs available tagged 'newcomer'.

More than just code

945 people and 17 teams are listed on the
Debian Contributors page for 2017.

Reports

Freexian issues monthly reports
about the work of paid contributors to Debian Long Term Support.

Quick Links from Debian Social Media

This is an extract from the
micronews.debian.org feed, in
which we have removed the topics already commented on in this DPN issue.
You can skip this section if you already follow micronews.debian.org
or the @debian profile in a social network (Pump.io, GNU Social, or
Twitter). The items are given unformatted, and in descending order by date
(recent news at the top).

(Comment on this)

DebConf15 Schedule Published and Additional Featured Speakers Announced

DebConf15 Schedule

The DebConf content team is pleased to announce the schedule of DebConf15, the forthcoming Debian Developers Conference. From a total of nearly 100 talk submissions, the team selected 75 talks. Due to the high number of submissions, several talks had to be shortened to 20 minute slots, of which a total of 30 talks have made it to the schedule.

In addition, around 50 meetings and discussions (BoFs) have been submitted so far, as well as several other events like lightning talk sessions, live demos, a movie screening, a poetry night or stand-up comedy.

The Schedule is available online at the DebConf15 conference site.

Further changes to the schedule can and will be made, but today’s announcement represents the first stable version.

Featured Speakers

In addition to the previously announced invited speakers, the content team also announces the following list of additional featured speakers:

• Allison Randal, President, Open Source Initiative and Distinguished Technologist, HP: “Philosophy of Free Software”
• Peter Eckersley, Chief Computer Scientist, Electronic Frontier Foundation: “Let’s Encrypt”
• John Sullivan, Executive Director, Free Software Foundation: “Debian and the FSF: Ending disagreements by solving problems at the source”
• Jon ‘maddog’ Hall, Executive Director, Linux International: “Two contests, no waiting!”

The full list of invited and featured speakers, including the invited speakers profiles and the titles of their talks is available here.

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DebConf15 registrations temporarily closed due to immense popularity

The interest to participate in DebConf15, which will start in 10 days, has been overwhelming. Thank you so much!

We planned the conference for 350 people and we now expect more than 570. This is fantastic and a wonderful support and encouragement for Debian and its contributors. But we are getting to the point where we have to prioritise considerations about the capacity of the venue and the safety of our attendees.

We’ve therefore had to close registrations until we have evaluated further options for accomodating even more attendees. For those of you who did not register for DebConf on time, but still want to participate, please bear with us and make sure to check back soon.

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TecKids @ DebConf: Register Until Tuesday

We are happy to announce that TecKids, a non-profit specialising in working with kids, teaching them technonology, and fostering self-sustaining communities amongst them, will be holding a workshop from 15.08. to 18.08.

The focus is on kids aged 10-15 years old, but kids aged 8-16 years old are welcome to attend if they can follow the course without supervision of theirs parents.

Admission is free of charge, but registration through TecKids’ web form is mandatory. Registration is open until Tuesday, 11 August.

The rough schedule for now is:

• robotics
• game programming
• Arduino

You will be kept up to date on any changes to the schedule and other details by the TecKids team after registration. It is important that you check mail before heading to DebConf in order to receive any last-minute informations.

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DebConf15: Farewell, and thanks for all the Fisch

A week ago, we concluded our biggest DebConf ever! It was a huge success.

We are overwhelmed by the positive feedback, for which we’re very grateful. We want to thank you all for participating in the talks; speakers and audience alike, in person or live over the global Internet — it wouldn’t be the fantastic DebConf experience without you!

Many of our events were recorded and streamed live, and are now available for viewing, as are the slides and photos.

To share a sense of the scale of what all of us accomplished together, we’ve compiled a few statistics:

• 555 attendees from 52 countries (including 28 kids)
• 216 scheduled events (183 talks and workshops), of which 119 were streamed and recorded
• 62 sponsors and partners
• 169 people sponsored for food & accommodation
• 79 professional and 35 corporate registrations

Our very own designer Valessio Brito made a lovely video of impressions and images of the conference.

We’re collecting impressions from attendees as well as links to press articles, including Linux Weekly News coverage of specific sessions of DebConf. If you find something not yet included, please help us by adding links to the wiki.

We tried a few new ideas this year, including a larger number of invited and featured speakers than ever before.

On the Open Weekend, some of our sponsors presented their career opportunities at our job fair, which was very well attended.

And a diverse selection of entertainment options provided the necessary breaks and ample opportunity for socialising.

On the last Friday, the Oscar-winning documentary “Citizenfour” was screened, with some introductory remarks by Jacob Appelbaum and a remote address by its director, Laura Poitras, and followed by a long Q&A session by Jacob.

DebConf15 was also the first DebConf with organised childcare (including a Teckids workshop for kids of age 8-16), which our DPL Neil McGovern standardised for the future: “it’s a thing now,” he said.

The participants used the week before the conference for intensive work, sprints and workshops, and throughout the main conference, significant progress was made on Debian and Free Software. Possibly the most visible was the endeavour to provide reproducible builds, but the planning of the next stable release “stretch” received no less attention. Groups like the Perl team, the diversity outreach programme and even DebConf organisation spent much time together discussing next steps and goals, and hundreds of commits were made to the archive, as well as bugs closed.

DebConf15 was an amazing conference, it brought together hundreds of people, some oldtimers as well as plenty of new contributors, and we all had a great time, learning and collaborating with each other, says Margarita Manterola of the organiser team, and continues: The whole team worked really hard, and we are all very satisfied with the outcome. Another organiser, Martin Krafft adds: We mainly provided the infrastructure and space. A lot of what happened during the two weeks was thanks to our attendees. And that’s what makes DebConf be DebConf.

Our organisation was greatly supported by the staff of the conference venue, the Jugendherberge Heidelberg International, who didn’t take very long to identify with our diverse group, and who left no wishes untried. The venue itself was wonderfully spacious and never seemed too full as people spread naturally across the various conference rooms, the many open areas, the beergarden, the outside hacklabs and the lawn.

The network installed specifically for our conference in collaboration with the nearby university, the neighbouring zoo, and the youth hostel provided us with a 1 Gbps upstream link, which we managed to almost saturate. The connection will stay in place, leaving the youth hostel as one with possibly the fastest Internet connection in the state.

And the kitchen catered high-quality food to all attendees and their special requirements. Regional beer and wine, as well as local specialities, were provided at the bistro.

DebConf exists to bring people together, which includes paying for travel, food and accomodation for people who could not otherwise attend. We would never have been able to achieve what we did without the support of our generous sponsors, especially our Platinum Sponsor Hewlett-Packard. Thank you very much.

See you next year in Cape Town, South Africa!

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Proposing speakers for DebConf17

As you may already know, next DebConf will be held at Collège de Maisonneuve in Montreal from August 6 to August 12, 2017. We are already thinking about the conference schedule, and the content team is open to suggestions for invited speakers.

Priority will be given to speakers who are not regular DebConf attendees, who are more likely to bring diverse viewpoints to the conference.

Please keep in mind that some speakers may have very busy schedules and need to be booked far in advance. So, we would like to start inviting speakers in the middle of September 2016.

If you would like to suggest a speaker to invite, please follow the procedure described on the Inviting Speakers page of the DebConf wiki.

DebConf17 team </p>

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The newsletter for the Debian community
For other news, please read the official Debian Blog
Bits from Debian, and follow
https://micronews.debian.org which
RSS-feeds the @debian profile in several social networks too.

The newsletter for the Debian community

Debian's Security Team releases current advisories on a daily basis
(Security Advisories 2016). Please
read them carefully and subscribe to the security mailing
list.

Internal News/Happenings

Debian "Stretch" has
entered
its transition freeze. There will be no new library transitions or package
transitions that involve a large number of packages.

Events: Upcoming and Reports

On 4 December 2016 there will be a Bug Squashing Party in Dresden, Germany.
See the
wiki
page for details.

Help needed

All Debian contributors - from bug reporters to Debian project
members and participants in any Debian team - are invited to take part
in the first edition of the
Debian contributors survey.
The deadline for participation is: 4 December 2016, at 23:59 UTC.
See more details in the
call
for participation mail.

More than just code

1,898 people and 19 teams are listed on the Debian Contributors page for 2016.

Outside News

Daniel Pocock attended the first summit of the Free Software Foundation
Europe (FSFE), and sent a
report
about it.

Reports

Freexian issues monthly reports
about the work of paid contributors to Debian Long Term Support.

Quick Links from Debian Social Media

This is an extract from the
micronews.debian.org feed, in
which we have removed the topics already commented on in this DPN issue.
You can skip this section if you already follow micronews.debian.org
or the @debian profile in a social network (Pump.io, GNU Social, or
Twitter). The items are given unformatted, and in descending order by date
(recent news at the top).

Sorry for the long list, we expect to deliver these "digests" more
often in the future.

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DebConf13 matching fund

As part of the DebConf13 fundraising effort, a generous sponsor, Brandorr Group, has proposed to start a matching fund in USD for DebConf13; in place through the end of April 30th. The rules are quite simple:

• for each dollar donated by an individual to DebConf13 through the mechanism, Brandorr Group will donate another dollar;
• individual donations will be matched only up to 100 USD each;
• only donations in USD will be matched;
• Brandorr Group will match the donated funds up to a maximum total of 5 000 USD;
• this generous offer will only stay in place through the end of April 30th, please act quickly, and help spread the word!

For details, please see our Monetary support from individuals page, which also has a short url, for convenience: http://deb.li/dc13donate.

Help welcome

As always, the DebConf team is looking for volunteers. Some jobs need technical skills, but many DebConf tasks are about working to deadlines on non-technical issues (e.g. fundraising, budgeting, talk scheduling). You can see more information about some of the jobs to be done on the DebConf wiki.

Please do think about getting involved and sharing your ideas with us, to help us make DebConf an even more useful event for Debian in the future.

We look forward to welcoming you to Vaumarcus!

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The newsletter for the Debian community
Holger Levsen announced the first update of Debian Edu Squeeze since its initial release. "This update contains all the changes between Debian 6.0.4 and 6.0.7, as well as Debian Edu specific bugfixes and enhancements", explained Holger. The updated installer images are available for downloading.

DPL election campaign

This year's DPL election campaign has now officially started. Three candidates are running for DPL this year: Moray Allan, Gergely Nagy and Lucas Nussbaum. There is already quite an active debate on the debian-vote mailing list, where people can ask the candidates questions about their platforms. So far, the main topics discussed have been: questions about recruitment of new contributors and mentoring; the use of Debian's money and the possibility of fundraising campaigns to renew Debian's core hardware infrastructure; and possible changes to the constitutional role of the DPL, including the creation of a DPL board or changing the length of the term of office.
The campaign will end on 30 March, and will be followed by a two-week voting period. "These early days of the 2013 DPL campaign have been very intense; as a mere voter I'm struggling to keep up with the debian-vote backlog. Still, it's incredibly refreshing to see such a democratic battle between volunteers eager to offer their free time as DPL. Volunteerism in free software is in very good health, it seems", said Stefano Zacchiroli, who has been DPL for the last three years.

A deeper look inside the freeze

Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer blogged about his experience with the Debian freeze as a Debian Developer. Lisandro, who is a member of the Qt/KDE team, intensified his activity during the freeze, reviewing patches, applying them and testing the fixes. With help from the other members of the team, Lisandro has done eleven uploads of Qt to get it ready for the new release. He explains that during the freeze, communication within and between teams is crucial, as the energies of all Debian Developers are focused on releasing, and that requires a great deal of coordination. And the team that is put under the greatest amount of stress during the freeze is the Release Team. "From the outside, communicating with the RT was a kind of "special art", and not an easy one", explained Lisandro, who then lists some useful hints for communicating with the Release Team in an effective way.

Kali Linux: a new Debian derivative for penetration tests

Raphaël Hertzog blogged about the birth of Kali Linux 1.0, a new Debian derivative developed by Offensive Security to be an advanced and stable penetration testing distribution.
Mati Aharoni, lead Kali developer, explained that "Debian provides a reliable base to build a new distribution and yet can easily be customized to add bleeding edge features, thanks to the unstable and experimental distributions". Raphaël, who helped the Kali team in setting up their technical infrastructure as a Debian derivative, also added that not only will most Kali applications be integrated into Debian, but Offensive Security is also willing to dedicate a node of their armhf cluster for Debian's own use.

Other news

Lucas Nussbaum published some statistics about changes in Debian packaging and structure since 2005 gathered by mining data from snapshot.debian.org. The majority of the software in Debian is now team-maintained through a VCS repository (mostly Git), and packaged using dh.

The newsletter for the Debian community

Luca Falavigna blogged about his experience in one of Debian's core teams, the FTP Team.

Upcoming events

There is one upcoming Debian-related event:

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

Call for projects and mentors for Debian GSoC 2013

Paul Tagliamonte, newly appointed administrator
for Debian participation in the Google Summer of Code
program 2013, asked all Debian contributors for projects
and mentors to help Debian participate in the initiative this year.
"Everyone (member of the Debian project or not, student or
not) is welcome to submit
their ideas, and to try and find people willing to mentor the
projects", explained Paul in his mail. Information on how to
submit proposals is available in the
relevant wiki page.
You can also contact Paul and the other GSoC administrators for Debian on their
mailing
list or on their IRC channel, #debian-soc on irc.debian.org.

Wheezy release progress

Niels Thykier, release team member, noticed that the
current
pace of RC bug fixes
is slowing down, with only 1.1 RC bugs fixed a day since
his
last report.
About 200 RC bugs are left to be fixed, and if the pace
of RC bug fixes does not pick up, the release team may
need to remove packages along with their reverse dependencies.

Debian at Open Source Conference 2013 Tokyo/Spring

Hideki Yamane reported about Debian
participation at Open Source Conference 2013 Tokyo/Spring at Meisei
University, in Tokyo, Japan. Debian was present with a booth where Hideki
and other contributors talked with users and enthusiasts. Takahide Nojima
delivered a talk titled "Debian Update" focused on the latest Debian
achievements.

arm64 image available

Wookey announced the
availability
of the arm64 image. This is the culmination of a
three year long effort to make Debian bootstrappable, which has been
used for the first time on the port to the 64-bit ARMv8
architecture. Whilst it should be considered alpha-grade for now, it
represents a great achievement: "all these packages were cross-built on
raring, untangling cyclic dependencies with build profiles making this the first
(non x86) self-bootstrapped Debian port ever", explained Wookey.
"Getting this port working has been "interesting" because it's
attempting four new things all at once: multiarch (file layouts and dependencies),
crossbuilding (tools and packaging support in a distro that historically
was always natively built), arm64 (aarch64) support in
packages that need it, and build-profiles to linearise the
build-order", he added.
The current
status of the bootstrap is online,
whilst more information on the port (and how to build
images) is available on the
wiki page of the project.

Other news

Paul Wise blogged about a
QA tool for finding packages' inadequacies (broken symlinks, missing
copyright files, obsolete conffiles, etc.) called
adequate and developed
by Jakub Wilk. People interested in software quality
are invited to participate in
Debian's QA initiatives.

The newsletter for the Debian community

Kurt Roeckx, Debian Project Secretary, announced
the timetable for the DPL election.

Upcoming events

There is one upcoming Debian-related event:

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DebConf11: Short insiders summary of recent developments in DC11 organization

Recently there has been some major developments in DebConf11 organization. In short, I will list some of the most important.

Website

Official DC11 website has finally been completed and now contains a great deal of information for those interested in attending this years conference. Some of the most notable changes include:

Navigation

Frontpage now contains a small menu with links to most important parts of website, like About, Registration, Contact… Sidebar menu is now divided in 3 categories:

• The Conference Links to pages which are directly connected with the Conference like About DC, Debian Day, Registration, Call for Papers, Talk Schedules, Payments… Most of these links are hidden at the moment, and will be until the registration is open, to avoid any unnecessary confusion.
• More Information Basic information for attendees like Important Dates, Accommodations, Venue, Visa… Everything you need to know about your stay in Banja Luka.
• Practical While these pages have almost nothing to do with the Conference itself, they do provide a vast information about city, getting to Bosnia, some practical information, as well as the Map of the whole city made my me :) …

New Pages added

• How Can I Help This page contains some basic information for anyone who wants to help out. Weather by volunteering, sponsoring, or just by adding a banner on their website…
  DC11: How Can I Help?
• Contact Instead of just sending visitors to mailto, we replaced it by a page which contains ALL contact information, emails AND phone numbers (which will be added just before DebCamp starts).
  DC11: Contact
• Sponsorship Just like with the contact page, we made a page to be more user friendly to any interested parties or individuals, and contains most important info, such as sponsorship levels and contact address.
  DC11: Sponsorship
• About DebConf11 Actually it’s just a page with a content copied from frontpage (which is now used for something else).
  DC11: About DebConf11

New features:

• Documentation Is now used to store all important documents and records for public use and sharing, like brochures, official government documents, important public mails, as well as the recordings of all IRC meeting logs. Can be found at:
  DC11: Documentation
• Frontpage: Navigation To ensure the main goal of website, information availability, frontpage has been redesigned to provide maximum accessibility as well as easy access to any part of the website. DC11: Frontpage
• Frontpage: Latest News To keep the public and attendees well informed of any important events and developments, we decided to add ‘latest news’ section. Note however, that if you want to stay completely informed of any changes and updates, we still recommend subscribing to our mailing list, which can be found under contact page.
  DC11: Frontpage
• Map of Banja Luka Because of lack of data on Google Maps and Open Street Map, as well as some other minor local maps, we made a small map of almost whole city and added around 60 or 70 locations which we consider to be of importance for our attendees. Such locations include hotels, parking spots, restaurants, bars, clubs, petrol stations, taxi stations, etc. This page uses simple JavaScript and is not ‘dragable’. Therefore we added Index Location to auto-locate the needed locations, as well as the legend to clarify the category of locations. Pointing your mouse over a certain location will open a small bubble with some info on that location/object. We should also point out that some of this data may not be 100% correct (ie working hours may be off…). Map is available at:
  DC11: Banja Luka City Map

Bosnian language

Site is now available on Bosnian language for native speaking attendees, should they have problems with English version. Every page is available on both languages, which can be changed by clicking on ba/en flag in upper left corner, or DC11: Bosnian Version.

Design

As you may have noticed, the official page received a small face lift. New header with the Government building, a small token of appreciation for all the help the Government is providing; as well as some minor changes in CSS and color scheme. While talking about design, we’d like to thank Leandro Gómez for his help with the header.

Sponsorship

Sponsorship Levels

As agreed on the meeting, which took place on 22. of February, [Meeting logs], following sponsorship levels will be used for this years conference:

• Steel < 1.000 €
• Bronze > 1.000 €
• Silver > 5.000 €
• Gold > 10.000 €
• Platinum > 20.000 €

Main reason for lowering amounts is due to last years results of high increase in the same. As for the benefits of these levels, the only thing changed is t-shirts / bags places; we believe t-shirts are much more noticeable than bags, and have therefore been promoted to Silver, while bags have been downgraded to Bronze. For a full list of requirements and benefits, please visit: DC11: Sponsorship

Sponsorship Brochure

Sponsorship brochures have finally been completed and are available for a public distribution. The brochures are available in 3 qualities: low, high and original. Low and high quality brochures, ~6Mb and ~8Mb respectively, are for normal distribution to our sponsors, while original quality, at around 240Mb, is intended for maximum quality printing. Just as with the website, each quality is available in both Bosnian and English. Current version of the brochure is 1.1 and is most likely the final one. These brochures are available at Documentation page: DC11: Documentation >> Documents made by Local Team

Or download them directly:

• Sponsorship Brochure LQ [en]
• Sponsorship Brochure HQ [en]
• Sponsorship Brochure OQ [en]
• Sponsorship Brochure LQ [ba]
• Sponsorship Brochure HQ [ba]
• Sponsorship Brochure OQ [ba]

Also, I’d like to thank Mirosal Remetic for making a great template and Pablo Duboue for some very valuable suggestions regarding the structure of the brochure.

Visas and Customs Rules

Many questions have been raised regarding Bosnian visa regime. We got in contact with the embassy and they clarified who can enter our country with(out) Visa. The list can be found on DC11 Wiki: Visa regime. It also states, which countries have a privilidge of ‘ID-only’ entrance. If your country is not listed, that means you will need visa. If you want to know what exactly you need to get one, please visit the this official Government page and chose your country from a drop-down menu. As for the visa itself, as well as the list of Customs Rules, please read DC11: Visa.

Also, thanks to Darjan Prtic for getting the list from the Government officials.

So, what’s next?

If you think, that is it for now, you are dead wrong. At this very moment following is being organized and developed:

• Registration Registration Team is currently hacking penta and modifying it for this years needs and conditions. We expect to have registrations open by the end of March / beginning of April.
• Travel and getting to Banja Luka Being one of the greatest obstacle, Travel Team is working hard on finding best routes for attendees and mapping the city…
• Sponsorship With final decision and agreement for sponsorship levels and brochures ready for public distribution, Sponsorship Team is now actively looking for new sponsors, global and local, preparing various promotional material, as well as planning our advertising strategy.

Final word

Well, these are pretty much the highlights of some recent and some future developments of DebConf11 organizational team. Mind you, there’s a lot more going on, but I tried to give a small summary from the inside. Should you be interested in attending, helping out, sponsoring or just have some questions, feel free to ask them on our mailing list at: debconf11-localteam@lists.debconf.org. I should inform you that this is a public mailing list and its archives are available for a broader public. If you do not wish for your mail to be made public, please direct any enquiry directly to me trough the Contact Form or any other member of Core Local Team, Adnan Hodzic or Velimir Iveljic.

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DebConf8 registration open and CfP

Registration is now open for DebConf8, which will take place in Mar del Plata from Sunday 10 to Saturday 16 August 2008.

To register follow one of the processes outlined below:

• If you registered for last years conference, DebConf7, go to this page to login.
• If you haven’t registered for last years conference you need an account in the conference management system. To register one, go to the following page and create an account. After visiting the activation URL sent to you by email, go to your user’s page and log in.

After you logged in

After you successfully logged in, please fill in at least the ‘General’, ‘Contact’ and ‘Travel’ tabs reachable through the ‘Registration details’ button on the bar on the left of the page. Please pay special attention to the ‘DebConf’ and ‘DebCamp’ boxes on the ‘General’ tab. You need to select at least the “I want to attend this conference” checkbox or your registration won’t be valid.

Note to users who have an account from last year: We did our best in making sure you do not have to reenter all your personal data again, just the conference specific changes. But please check if it is all still valid.

We suggest that attendees begin making travel arrangements as soon as possible. Some travel information has already been collected at the DebConf 8 site.

Submitting a paper/event

To submit papers, first register for DebConf as described above. Then use the ‘New event/paper’ button on this page and fill in information about your submission on the various tabs. You can use the same interface to submit papers for DebConf and DebCamp, by choosing the appropriate track.

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We’re off to the daytrip!

We are leaving in a couple hours for Xochicalco, one of the many archeological sites here in Mexico. All in all, we are very pleased with the trip we are offering, and really hope everyone likes it.We do have a long day ahead of us, since it will take almost two hours to get there, then we’ll be touring the place for about three hours, go for lunch and then head for Cuernavaca, where we’ll spend a few more hours before heading back here.

I’m pretty sure there will be plenty of pictures of the site for those of you following along at home, so check people’s galleries afterwards.

And, it’s kind of late to say this, since everyone has seen Gunnar’s feeling better, but still: Gunnar, you’ve made some terrific work here! Us mexicans are very proud of you.

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DebConf11 – Sponsored registration date has been extended

The deadline for sponsored registration for DebConf11 in Banja Luka, originally May 8th, has officially been extended to May 19th. The reasons for the extension are as follows:

Thanks to a significant increase in sponsorship from one of our main sponsors, we have been permitted and encouraged to welcome more people to the conference. The extension is a one-off occurrence in response to this new development, and to allow any potential attendees time to access more information before registering.

Registration is required for everybody who plans to attend any part of Debconf. Access to the conference venue, food and accommodation is controlled through the registration badge. The only exception to the registration requirement is for those who plan to only attend Debian Day.

It is possible to request sponsorship for food, accommodation, and travel. Those who have been involved or contributed to Debian or to other open source projects are eligible to apply for sponsorship, which will be decided on a case-by-case basis.

The professional and corporate categories are for those who are sent and sponsored by their companies. Professional registration covers the actual costs of conference attendance, while corporate registration is just over double that price, and is aimed at those who, besides paying the actual costs, also want to contribute money and help Debian.

— the DebConf team

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DebConf13 venue and dates

This post is a quick status update on DebConf13, for those who aren’t following the debconf-team mailing list.

As you may know, this year’s DebConf will be held at Le Camp, in Vaumarcus, Switzerland.  Our concept for this DebConf is to hold it in a natural environment, away from distractions. We hope you will enjoy spending time together with other Debian collaborators in this beautiful part of Switzerland, on the shore of Lake Neuchâtel.

Dates

DebConf13 will take place from Sunday 11. August 2013 to Sunday 18. August 2013. (We will use Saturday 10. August 2013 to prepare the venue for the conference.)

You may notice that the dates don’t cover two weeks like in the last few years (there is no separate DebCamp week). For budget reasons, current plans are to merge the two weeks’ activities  into an 8 day period. If you think that’s a pity, it’s not too late to change it — just join the fundraising team and start working quickly!

Travel

If you want to start arranging your travel to attend DebConf, some initial travel suggestions may be useful:

• We recommend that people from nearby countries take advantage of the excellent train connections to Switzerland, rather than looking for flights: the Swiss Federal Railways website, provides a very helpful international travel planner which knows about trains, but also about the local bus connections you will need to reach the DebConf venue.
• The best railway station to aim for is Yverdon-les-Bains. To get to the venue from there, take a local bus to the bus stop called “Concise, Camp de Vaumarcus”, which is very close to the venue. You can also directly use that name as your final destination in the above travel planner.
• Nearby airports include Geneva -  GVA (1h30 from the venue by train), Zurich - ZRH (3h from the venue by train) and Basel-Mulhouse - BSL (3h from the venue by train).

The DebConf13 map shows the venue and the bus line (with some stops).

Registration

We expect to open registration around the start of March. Currently we are still evaluating some possible new conference management systems, which we hope might avoid the frustrations some attendees have had in the past with Pentabarf.

Help welcome

As always, the DebConf team is looking for volunteers. Some jobs need technical skills (e.g. testing conference management system setups, working on the website), but many DebConf tasks are about working to deadlines on non-technical issues (e.g. fundraising, budgeting, talk scheduling). You can see more information about some of the jobs to be done on the  DebConf wiki.

Please do think about getting involved and sharing your ideas with us, to help us make DebConf an even more useful event for Debian in the future.

We look forward to welcoming you to Vaumarcus!

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The newsletter for the Debian community
The first release candidate of the installer for Debian Wheezy was
released on 17 February.
Many fixes are included in this release of the installer, along with new
improvements, including
better speech synthesis support, various improvements for
GNU/kFreeBSD, fixes for the grub2 package, new supported hardware, etc.

The newsletter for the Debian community

A full list of known issues with details is collected on the
errata page.
Everyone is encouraged to test the installer and report bugs;
media and further information are available on the Debian Installer pages.

700,000th bug reported

Christian Perrier won the
700,000th
bug contest, by betting more than two years ago on the date of
bug #700000,
which was recently reported by Cédric Boutillier.
He now
invites
everyone to participate in contests to predict the dates when Debian's
800,000th and
1,000,000th bug reports will be filed.

Bits from the DPL

Stefano Zacchiroli sent his
monthly
report of DPL activities for January 2013.
Stefano reminded readers that the election process for the next DPL term will start in early
March, so there are only a few days left to convince Debian developers to run.
He confirmed that he will not run again for another term.
Meanwhile he is also looking for help in organising Debian activities in
the Google Summer of Code program, and in maintaining an
authoritative
list of DFSG-free licenses.
Among other things, Stefano also mentioned an
updated policy draft for Debian marks.

Reports from FOSDEM

During the first weekend of February, the Debian Project participated at
FOSDEM 2013 in Brussels, Belgium.
In addition to the official Debian booth, several project members
delivered talks about different topics: among others, Andreas Tille presented
the Debian Med project (video),
Tollef Fog Heen and Michael Biebl gave an overview of systemd in
Debian (video),
Samuel Thibault reported on the
GNU/Hurd architecture in Debian, and Ian Campbell spoke about the
future of paravirtualisation under Xen.
Most of the FOSDEM talks are available as video recordings.

Update on Clang and Debian

Sylvestre Ledru posted an article on his blog about the results of
rebuilding
the archive using Clang 3.2. To make the results more visible, Paul Wise has
integrated
them into the Package Tracking System.
In the meantime, Hideki Yamane has written a
patch to
make it easier to use Clang instead of gcc when building with pbuilder.
You can find more information about current efforts related to building Debian
with Clang and other alternative compilers in
Sylvestre's
FOSDEM talk.

Other news

Stefano Zacchiroli renewed
Kurt
Roeckx's appointment as Project Secretary.

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

Reports from the latest BSPs

The bug
squashing party held in Dublin on Saturday, 8 September
was hosted in Google office space and gathered 15 people.
In addition to its impact on the Release-Critical bugs list it triggered
the bootstrapping of a local Debian community with the desire to
hold a second such party in October.

The newsletter for the Debian community

The following weekend, another
bug
squashing party held in Berlin gathered approximately 25 people who also
worked on German translations besides dealing with Release-Critical bugs.

Results from Debian's Google Summer of Code

Ana Guerrero sent a
report
about Debian's Google Summer of Code. Debian has been participating in the
Google Summer of Code since 2006, and sponsored 15 projects this year, of which 12
finished successfully.

Students supervised by Debian mentors worked on various aspects of the
project, including improvements to mentors.debian.net, the development
of multi-arch cross-toolchains, and metrics for team activities, to
name just three. Some of these results have already been included into Debian.

The Debian project thanks those who took part, including especially the
students for their contributions, and invites them to continue being involved
in making Debian better.

Mini DebConf in Paris

Sylvestre Ledru, on the behalf of the
organisation team, announced that
the second
Mini DebConf in Paris will take place on 24 and 25 November
and will be hosted by EPITA. His
message
mentions that a BSP will be in progress through the entire event,
and that they're currently soliciting talks for the event.

Interviews

There has been a
DebianEdu interview with
Giorgio Pioda
who describes, among other things, how he got involved in Debian Edu and his views about it.

Other news

Since the CIA service for
monitoring VCS repositories via IRC is now dead, Martín Ferrari
proposed
KGB as a replacement.

Upcoming events

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.

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The newsletter for the Debian community
Joerg Jaspert sent some bits
from the FTP Team, announcing the ongoing sprint
during which the team is working on optimising the current code behind
the main archive, finalising a proposal for Debian Personal
Package Archives (PPAs), and merging backports.debian.org into the main
archive host.
This year, participation in the Google Summer of Code initiative
helped the team in implementing a true multi-archive capability, making
it possible to merge separated parts of the Debian archive (like security
and backports) into the main archive.
Joerg also added a call for volunteers: if you are a Debian Developer and
want to help one of the key teams of the Debian infrastructure, please
consider joining them.

Bits from the DPL

Stefano Zacchiroli sent his usual monthly
report of DPL activities: during August, Stefano continued his
efforts on a new trademark policy and on the DFSG-free logo relicensing
(with the help of members of the Software Freedom Law Center).

Technical Committee Nominations

The technical committee
has called
for nominations to fill
Manoj
Srivastava's seat. To nominate yourself or someone else, send
email to debian-ctte-private@debian.org with the subject "CTTE
Nomination of loginname", where loginname is the nominee's Debian
account login. Please see
the call
for nominations for more information.

Interviews

Jennifer Cloer interviewed Ben
Hutchings, member of the Linux kernel team in Debian.

Other news

Cyril Brulebois announced the
second beta release of the Debian Installer 7.0.

The newsletter for the Debian community

Christian Perrier reported about the state
of translations for debconf screens:
five
languages have reached 100%
(German, Russian, Swedish, French, Portuguese). Many thanks to all the
translators!

Upcoming events

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.

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The newsletter for the Debian community
The yearly Libre Software Meeting, better known
by its French name Rencontres Mondiales du
Logiciel Libre (RMLL), took place in Geneva, Switzerland, from 7 to
12 July; Anne Forker
sent a report
about the Debian presence there, completing the
report
by Andreas Tille mentioned in a
previous issue.

The Debian project was well represented with a booth, four lectures and a
workshop. At the booth, T-shirts, umbrellas, Swiss army knives and other
goodies could be purchased. The booth was also a meeting point for fans and
contributors of Debian, a place to discuss computer issues and for socialisation
between conference attendees.

Some pictures of the event taken by Marc "Duck" Dequènes are available on his
website.

64-bit PC: primary Debian architecture

According to the Debian Popularity
Contest, 64-bit PC is now the primary architecture in terms of number of
submissions via the popularity-contest package, which periodically and
anonymously sends statistics about the usage of installed packages.

With a bit more than 60,000 submissions, 64-bit PC just overtook 32-bit PC. These
leading architectures are followed by armel and powerpc, for which the number of
submissions is several orders of magnitude behind.

New mirrors closer to Debian users

The Debian mirrors team, together with our sponsors, is happy to announce three
new mirrors: in Russia, provided
by the National Research Nuclear University
"MEPhI" whose administrators are "pleased to provide a full Debian mirror
to Russian users"; in Vietnam,
provided by MAYCHU; and in Malaysia,
provided by the Multimedia University of Malaysia.

For other countries, the full list of mirrors
is available online, as well as the experimental redirector which will
automatically take into account these new mirrors.
There are still countries lacking good connectivity to a Debian mirror;
sponsors interested in hosting are invited to contact the mirrors team.

Debian translation workflows in a Master's thesis

Laura Arjona recently defended her
Master's degree thesis
entitled "Translations in
libre software". Many aspects of Debian are included,
such as a case study about translation projects and teams in Debian;
another one about "The Debian Administration Handbook"; and an interview
with Javier Taravilla, a member of the l10n-spanish (Spanish localisation) team.
"The more I see of the Debian community, the more I like it and it amazes
me", she said when she announced her project to the Debian mailing list.

Laura started to contribute to the spam cleaning efforts, and she plans to help
in the l10n-spanish team soon.

The manuscript of her thesis as well as the slides are available from her
blog.

Other news

Andrea Mennucci announced that the new GPG key for the debdelta package is now available.

Upcoming events

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.

The newsletter for the Debian community

Do you want to organise a Debian booth or a Debian install party?
Are you aware of other upcoming Debian-related events?
Have you delivered a Debian talk that you want to link on our
talks page?
Send an email to the Debian Events Team.

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