Debian Project mourns the loss of Ian Murdock

Debian Project News:

The Debian Project sadly announces that it has lost the founder of its community and project, Ian Murdock. Debian is only a part of Ian’s legacy but perhaps the one that he is most known for. Ian was introduced to computers early in his life, and his curiosity turned to familiarity which led him to start actively programming at nine years of age. Later as a young adult at the Krannert School of Management a mandatory programming class rekindled his fascination with computer programming along with an idea and an opportunity to make something better. …

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Happy 17th Birthday Debian!

So sayeth the email list: Debian celebrates its 17th birthday.

I first came across Debian in 1998 around version 1.3 or so, and moved to it from Slackware (my first(ish) Linux) not only because the package management seemed a bit like magic, but the dot com I started working at used it as the base of it's software stack. I've bounced in and out of the Debian world over the last 12 years, flirting for a while with Gentoo and others, and currently running Ubuntu (a variant of Debian of course). Huge applause for the team for creating and constantly putting out a high quality and stable product, a shining example of the power and success of open source.

Randall Donald Retires From Debian

My buddy Khensu retired from Debian. Also known as Khensu he was best known for the nVidia driver packaging. My thanks for your contributions over the last 9 years, many many users have been the beneficiaries of your hard work. Thanks dude!

Debian 6.0 Plans Posted

Debian has posted their 6.0 "Squeeze" release goals for the release coming at some point in the future. As always, the Debian team is focused on support for multiple architectures, speed, and stability. Of note though is full IPV6 support (hasn't that been in Linux forever?) and faster boot time.

In a related note, they also announced new time based release plans, adopting a 2 year cycle. Personally I think that 2 years is way too long, and will drive any desktop users to something like Ubuntu (which will have 4 releases in that timespan). For the server though, this isn't all that bad :)

Apt-Pinning for Debian Wim pointed out Apt-Pinning for Beginners which is a system where you can safely mix and match components from Debian stable/testing/unstable. Wish I'd had this when I set up ufies on debian unstable ages ago!

Debian Wallpapers Amayita has posted links to some very cool debian wallpapers. Sweet!

Mix Debian Stable, Testing and Unstable Wim just threw me a link to Apt-Pinning for Beginners. Pinning allows you to run a mix of debian stable, unstable, and testing by setting a weighting for packages from each category. Check it out.

My Love/Hate Relationship With Debian This bug is why I have a love/hate relationship with Debian. This server runs unstable due to the fact that long, long ago I decided that unstable was stable enough and running unstable got me the latest packages so I wasn't a year or two out of date.

Since then things have been mostly stable... mostly. 99% of the time everything is just dandy. I update to the latest packages and everything goes great. The 1% of the time however, I'm completely fubar. Due to the aformentioned bug, mod_perl has been shut down on this box completely, pending new packages. It's stupid. It's also my fault for going with the unstable debian tree instead of stable or testing. However, with no easy access to the physical server anymore (ie: it's not sitting on my bedroom floor) and now a strong desire for server availability (with the tdi messageboard and it's rampant viewers ready to go for blood anytime the server goes down :), means that a re-install isn't really possible.

If anyone knows a safe way to go from unstable to say, testing, without screwing things up even more, I'd be interested in hearing it.

And yes, I will stop updating things that are working :\

Debian System Recovery This isn't me for once.... but the Debian Weekly News has a link to an interesting article on the lessons learned when you a) don't make backups and b) lose your /var partition. A good read.

apt-get.org announced apt-get.org, the unofficial repository of apt sources.list sources has been opened. Kudos to debianplanet.org for the note. This site looks like the place to go when you say "where would I find .debs of xxx obscure package..."

Debian Unstable Libc6 Upgrade To anyone who runs debian, beware, unstable just upgraded to libc6 2.3.1-2, which causes some problems with at least one package that I know of, that being php, which prevents apache from loading.

To reverse this, go to /var/cache/apt/archives and look for libc6-dev_2.2.5-*, libc6_2.2.5-* and locales_2.2.5-*, and do a dpkg -i on them, then restart apache and all should be good again.

Thanks to the guys in #debian for pointing me in the direction to fix this. Sadly this shows the downside of debian.... to get the new stuff, you gotta be in unstable, but in unstable, you run the risk of being bitten if you don't pay attention :)

New Dpkg Format Debianplant has a neat article and link on a new debian packaging format. This will support some pretty nifty stuff. Something interesting to follow...

Wiki Support for Debian Cool! Someone has set up a wiki for a Debian support forum. This will allow users to freely add and modify documentation about the debian project.

New Debian Based Distro TelemetryBox is a new distro out there, based on debian. It has a few interesting features. You can run it live from CD to test things out without touching your hard drive, and boots up (apparently) full configuration (via webmin) over a browser. It also claims to have "...network diagnostics, X and complete gui, E-mail server, list server and firewalling functionality all bundled together for easy installation" (blatently ripped from this debian planet story).

Read on for more of my tale.... I'm currently waiting for telemetrybox to finish installing under vmware, but I have played with their system running from CD. It has some problems, like being unable to configure X as the XF86Config is a symlink to a file on the CD, and no idea where the webmin link is. The default web page has some interesting things built in though, squirrelmail, mantis (bug tracking system) and mailman are all there built right in. They also have a nifty configuration system to do pretty much all the config right in the browser. This includes (as advertised) things like ACID, nessus, snort, netsaint, ipaudit, a port and ip scanner using nmap, with the ability to dump results right into nessus' config, and other nifty stuff.

They have some problems in the vmware drivers, so I had to fake out the webserver by adding the IP as "testbox.telemetrybox.org" in my hosts file before it would recognize the admin user properly, but after that happened, it was much easier to deal with. End result, it's woody with a nice admin interface, but still worth a look, if only to be able to mess about with nice preconfigured stuff :)

KDE 3.0 Experimental Debs Just saw on kde-look that there are instructions for debian users on how to get kde3 on their machines via deb.