Bits from Debian

New Debian Developers and Maintainers (May and June 2019)

2019-08-03T10:00:00+02:00

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

Jean-Philippe Mengual (jpmengual)
Taowa Munene-Tardif (taowa)
Georg Faerber (georg)
Kyle Robbertze (paddatrapper)
Andy Li (andyli)
Michal Arbet (kevko)
Sruthi Chandran (srud)
Alban Vidal (zordhak)
Denis Briand (denis)
Jakob Haufe (sur5r)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

Bobby de Vos
Jongmin Kim
Bastian Germann
Francesco Poli

Congratulations!

DebConf19 closes in Curitiba and DebConf20 dates announced

2019-07-27T23:40:00+02:00

Today, Saturday 27 July 2019, the annual Debian Developers and Contributors Conference came to a close. Hosting more than 380 attendees from 50 different countries over a combined 145 event talks, discussion sessions, Birds of a Feather (BoF) gatherings, workshops, and activities, DebConf19 was a large success.

The conference was preceded by the annual DebCamp held 14 July to 19 July which focused on individual work and team sprints for in-person collaboration toward developing Debian and host to a 3-day packaging workshop where new contributors were able to start on Debian packaging.

The Open Day held on July 20, with over 250 attendees, enjoyed presentations and workshops of interest to the wider audience, a Job Fair with booths from several of the DebConf19 sponsors and a Debian install fest.

The actual Debian Developers Conference started on Sunday 21 July 2019. Together with plenaries such as the the traditional 'Bits from the DPL', lightning talks, live demos and the announcement of next year's DebConf (DebConf20 in Haifa, Israel), there were several sessions related to the recent release of Debian 10 buster and some of its new features, as well as news updates on several projects and internal Debian teams, discussion sessions (BoFs) from the language, ports, infrastructure, and community teams, along with many other events of interest regarding Debian and free software.

The schedule was updated each day with planned and ad-hoc activities introduced by attendees over the course of the entire conference.

For those who were not able to attend, most of the talks and sessions were recorded for live streams with videos made, available through the Debian meetings archive website. Almost all of the sessions facilitated remote participation via IRC messaging apps or online collaborative text documents.

The DebConf19 website will remain active for archival purposes and will continue to offer links to the presentations and videos of talks and events.

Next year, DebConf20 will be held in Haifa, Israel, from 23 August to 29 August 2020. As tradition follows before the next DebConf the local organizers in Israel will start the conference activites with DebCamp (16 August to 22 August), with particular focus on individual and team work toward improving the distribution.

DebConf is committed to a safe and welcome environment for all participants. During the conference, several teams (Front Desk, Welcome team and Anti-Harassment team) are available to help so both on-site and remote participants get their best experience in the conference, and find solutions to any issue that may arise. See the web page about the Code of Conduct in DebConf19 website for more details on this.

Debian thanks the commitment of numerous sponsors to support DebConf19, particularly our Platinum Sponsors: Infomaniak, Google and Lenovo.

About Debian

The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of volunteers from all over the world work together to create and maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal operating system.

About DebConf

DebConf is the Debian Project's developer conference. In addition to a full schedule of technical, social and policy talks, DebConf provides an opportunity for developers, contributors and other interested people to meet in person and work together more closely. It has taken place annually since 2000 in locations as varied as Scotland, Argentina, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. More information about DebConf is available from https://debconf.org/.

About Infomaniak

Infomaniak is Switzerland's largest web-hosting company, also offering backup and storage services, solutions for event organizers, live-streaming and video on demand services. It wholly owns its datacenters and all elements critical to the functioning of the services and products provided by the company (both software and hardware).

About Google

Google is one of the largest technology companies in the world, providing a wide range of Internet-related services and products such as online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, software, and hardware.

Google has been supporting Debian by sponsoring DebConf for more than ten years, and is also a Debian partner sponsoring parts of Salsa's continuous integration infrastructure within Google Cloud Platform.

About Lenovo

As a global technology leader manufacturing a wide portfolio of connected products, including smartphones, tablets, PCs and workstations as well as AR/VR devices, smart home/office and data center solutions, Lenovo understands how critical open systems and platforms are to a connected world.

Contact Information

For further information, please visit the DebConf19 web page at https://debconf19.debconf.org/ or send mail to press@debian.org.

DebConf19 starts today in Curitiba

2019-07-21T21:10:00+02:00

DebConf19, the 20th annual Debian Conference, is taking place in Curitiba, Brazil from from July 21 to 28, 2019.

Debian contributors from all over the world have come together at Federal University of Technology - Paraná (UTFPR) in Curitiba, Brazil, to participate and work in a conference exclusively run by volunteers.

Today the main conference starts with over 350 attendants expected and 121 activities scheduled, including 45- and 20-minute talks and team meetings ("BoF"), workshops, a job fair as well as a variety of other events.

The full schedule at https://debconf19.debconf.org/schedule/ is updated every day, including activities planned ad-hoc by attendees during the whole conference.

If you want to engage remotely, you can follow the video streaming available from the DebConf19 website of the events happening in the three talk rooms: Auditório (the main auditorium), Miniauditório and Sala de Videoconferencia. Or you can join the conversation about what is happening in the talk rooms: #debconf-auditorio, #debconf-miniauditorio and #debconf-videoconferencia (all those channels in the OFTC IRC network).

You can also follow the live coverage of news about DebConf19 on https://micronews.debian.org or the @debian profile in your favorite social network.

Debian thanks the commitment of numerous sponsors to support DebConf19, particularly our Platinum Sponsors: Infomaniak, Google and Lenovo.

DebConf19 invites you to Debian Open Day at the Federal University of Technology - Paraná (UTFPR), in Curitiba

2019-07-20T18:30:00+02:00

DebConf, the annual conference for Debian contributors and users interested in improving the Debian operating system, will be held in Federal University of Technology - Paraná (UTFPR) in Curitiba, Brazil, from July 21 to 28, 2019. The conference is preceded by DebCamp from July 14 to 19, and the DebConf19 Open Day on July 20.

The Open Day, Saturday, 20 July, is targeted at the general public. Events of interest to a wider audience will be offered, ranging from topics specific to Debian to the greater Free Software community and maker movement.

The event is a perfect opportunity for interested users to meet the Debian community, for Debian to broaden its community, and for the DebConf sponsors to increase their visibility.

Less purely technical than the main conference schedule, the events on Open Day will cover a large range of topics from social and cultural issues to workshops and introductions to Debian.

The detailed schedule of the Open Day's events includes events in English and Portuguese. Some of the talks are:

"The metaverse, gaming and the metabolism of cities" by Bernelle Verster
"O Projeto Debian quer você!" by Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana
"Protecting Your Web Privacy with Free Software" by Pedro Barcha
"Bastidores Debian - Entenda como a distribuição funciona" by Joao Eriberto Mota Filho
"Caninos Loucos: a plataforma nacional de Single Board Computers para IoT" by geonnave
"Debian na vida de uma Operadora de Telecom" by Marcelo Gondim
"Who's afraid of Spectre and Meltdown?" by Alexandre Oliva
"New to DebConf BoF" by Rhonda D'Vine

During the Open Day, there will also be a Job Fair with booths from our several of our sponsors, a workshop about the Git version control system and a Debian installfest, for attendees who would like to get help installing Debian on their machines.

Everyone is welcome to attend. As the rest of the conference, attendance is free of charge, but registration in the DebConf19 website is highly recommended.

The full schedule for the Open Day's events and the rest of the conference is at https://debconf19.debconf.org/schedule and the video streaming will be available at the DebConf19 website

DebConf is committed to a safe and welcome environment for all participants. See the DebConf Code of Conduct and the Debian Code of Conduct for more details on this.

Debian thanks the numerous sponsors for their commitment to DebConf19, particularly its Platinum Sponsors: Infomaniak, Google and Lenovo.

Debian 10 "buster" has been released!

2019-07-07T03:25:00+02:00

You've always dreamt of a faithful pet? He is here, and his name is Buster! We're happy to announce the release of Debian 10, codenamed buster.

Want to install it? Choose your favourite installation media and read the installation manual. You can also use an official cloud image directly on your cloud provider, or try Debian prior to installing it using our "live" images.

Already a happy Debian user and you only want to upgrade? You can easily upgrade from your current Debian 9 "stretch" installation; please read the release notes.

Do you want to celebrate the release? We provide some buster artwork that you can share or use as base for your own creations. Follow the conversation about buster in social media via the #ReleasingDebianBuster and #Debian10Buster hashtags or join an in-person or online Release Party!

Upcoming Debian 10 "buster"!

2019-07-05T08:00:00+02:00

The Debian Release Team in coordination with several other teams are preparing the last bits needed for releasing Debian 10 "buster" on Saturday 6 July 2019. Please, be patient! Lots of steps are involved and some of them take some time, such as building the images, propagating the release through the mirror network, and rebuilding the Debian website so that "stable" points to Debian 10.

If you are considering create some artwork on the occasion of buster release, feel free to send us links to your creations to the (publicly archived) debian-publicity mailing list, so that we can disseminate them throughout our community.

Follow the live coverage of the release on https://micronews.debian.org or the @debian profile in your favorite social network! We'll spread the word about what's new in this version of Debian 10, how the release process is progressing during the weekend and facts about Debian and the wide community of volunteer contributors that make it possible.

If you want to celebrate the release of Debian 10 buster, join one of the many release parties or consider organizing one in your city! Celebration will also happen online on the Debian Party Line.

DebConf19 Cheese and Wine Party

2019-07-02T14:30:00+02:00

In less than one month we will be in Curitiba to start DebCamp and DebConf19 \o/

This C&W is the 15th official DebConf Cheese and Wine party. The first C&W was improvised in Helsinki during DebConf 5, in the so-called "French" room. Cheese and Wine parties are now a tradition for DebConf.

The event is very simple: bring good edible stuff from your country. We like cheese and wine, but we love the surprising stuff that people bring from all around the world or regions of Brazil. So, you can bring non-alcoholic drinks or a typical food that you would like to share as well. Even if you don't bring anything, feel free to participate: our priorities are our attendants and free cheese.

We have to organize for a great party. An important part is planning - We want to know what you are bringing, in order to prepare the labels and organizing other things.

So, please go to our wiki page and add what you will bring!

If you don't have time to buy before travel, we list some places where you can buy cheese and wine in Curitiba. There are more information about C&W, what you can bring, vegan cheese, Brazil customs regulations and non-alcoholic drinks at our site.

C&W will happen on July 22nd, 2019 (Monday) after 19h30min.

We are looking forward to seeing you all here!

Diversity and inclusion in Debian: small actions and large impacts

2019-06-29T00:40:00+02:00

The Debian Project always has and always will welcome contributions from people who are willing to work on a constructive level with each other, without discrimination.

The Diversity Statement and the Code of Conduct are genuinely important parts of our community, and over recent years some other things have been done to make it clear that they aren't just words.

One of those things is the creation of the Debian Diversity Team: it was announced in April 2019, although it had already been working for several months before as a welcoming space for, and a way of increasing visibility of, underrepresented groups within the Debian project.

During DebConf19 in Curitiba there will be a dedicated Diversity and Welcoming Team. It will consist of people from the Debian community to offer a contact point when you feel lost or uneasy. The DebConf team is also in contact with a local LGBTIQA+ support group for exchange of safety concerns and information with respect to Brazil in general.

Today Debian also recognizes the impact LGBTIQA+ people have had in the world and within the Debian project, joining the worldwide Pride celebrations. We show it by changing our logo for this time to the Debian Diversity logo, and encourage all Debian members and contributors to show their support of a diverse and inclusive community.

100 Paper cuts kick-off

2019-06-13T20:30:00+02:00

Introduction

Is there a thorny bug in Debian that ruins your user experience? Something just annoying enough to bother you but not serious enough to constitute an RC bug? Are grey panels and slightly broken icon themes making you depressed?

Then join the 100 papercuts project! A project to identify and fix the 100 most annoying bugs in Debian over the next stable release cycle. That also includes figuring out how to identify and categorize those bugs and make sure that they are actually fixable in Debian (or ideally upstream).

The idea of a papercuts project isn't new, Ubuntu did this some years ago which added a good amount of polish to the system.

Kick-off Meeting and DebConf BoF

On the 17th of June at 19:00 UTC we're kicking off an initial brainstorming session on IRC to gather some initial ideas.

We'll use that to seed discussion at DebConf19 in Brazil during a BoF session where we'll solidify those plans into something actionable.

Meeting details

When: 2019-06-17, 19:00 UTC Where: #debian-meeting channel on the OFTC IRC network

Your IRC nick needs to be registered in order to join the channel. Refer to the Register your account section on the OFTC website for more information on how to register your nick.

You can always refer to the debian-meeting wiki page for the latest information and up to date schedule.

Hope to see you there!

DebConf19 welcomes its sponsors!

2019-06-11T14:20:00+02:00

DebConf19 is taking place in Curitiba, Brazil, from 21 July to 28 July 2019. It is the 20th edition of the Debian conference and organisers are working hard to create another interesting and fruitful event for attendees.

We would like to warmly welcome the first 29 sponsors of DebConf19, and introduce you to them.

So far we have three Platinum sponsors.

Our first Platinum sponsor is Infomaniak. Infomaniak is Switzerland's largest web-hosting company, also offering backup and storage services, solutions for event organizers, live-streaming and video on demand services. It wholly owns its datacenters and all elements critical to the functioning of the services and products provided by the company (both software and hardware).

Next, as a Platinum sponsor, is Google. Google is one of the largest technology companies in the world, providing a wide range of Internet-related services and products as online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, software, and hardware. Google has been supporting Debian by sponsoring DebConf since more than ten years, and is also a Debian partner.

Lenovo is our third Planinum sponsor. Lenovo is a global technology leader manufacturing a wide portfolio of connected products, including smartphones, tablets, PCs and workstations as well as AR/VR devices, smart home/office solutions and data center solutions. This is their first year sponsoring DebConf.

Our Gold sponsor is Collabora, a global consultancy delivering Open Source software solutions to the commercial world. Their expertise spans all key areas of Open Source software development. In addition to offering solutions to clients, Collabora's engineers and developers actively contribute to many Open Source projets.

Our Silver sponsors are: credativ (a service-oriented company focusing on open-source software and also a Debian development partner), Cumulus Networks, (a company building web-scale networks using innovative, open networking technology), Codethink (specialists in system-level software infrastructure supporting advanced technical applications), the Bern University of Applied Sciences (with over 6,800 students enrolled, located in the Swiss capital), Civil Infrastructure Platform, (a collaborative project hosted by the Linux Foundation, establishing an open source “base layer” of industrial grade software), \WIT (offering a secure cloud solution and complete data privacy via Kubnernetes encrypted hardware virtualisation), Hudson-Trading, (a company researching and developing automated trading algorithms using advanced mathematical techniques), Ubuntu, (the Operating System delivered by Canonical), NHS (with a broad product portfolio, they offer solutions, amongst others, for data centres, telecommunications, CCTV, and residential, commercial and industrial automation), rentcars.com who helps customers find the best car rentals from over 100 rental companies at destinations in the Americas and around the world, and Roche, a major international pharmaceutical provider and research company dedicated to personalized healthcare.

Bronze sponsors: 4Linux, IBM, zpe, Univention, Policorp, Freexian, globo.com.

And finally, our Supporter level sponsors: Altus Metrum, Pengwin, ISG.EE, Jupter, novatec, Intnet, Linux Professional Institute.

Thanks to all our sponsors for their support! Their contributions make it possible for a large number of Debian contributors from all over the globe to work together, help and learn from each other in DebConf19.

Become a sponsor too!

DebConf19 is still accepting sponsors. Interested companies and organizations may contact the DebConf team through sponsors@debconf.org, and visit the DebConf19 website at https://debconf19.debconf.org.

Debian welcomes its GSoC 2019 and Outreachy interns

2019-05-31T14:15:00+02:00

We're excited to announce that Debian has selected seven interns to work with us during the next months: two people for Outreachy, and five for the Google Summer of Code.

Here is the list of projects and the interns who will work on them:

Android SDK Tools in Debian

Saif Abdul Cassim
Katerina

Package Loomio for Debian

utkarsh2102

Debian Cloud Image Finder

Arthur Diniz

Debian Patch Porting System

Jaskaran Singh

Continuous Integration

Congratulations and welcome to all the interns!

The Google Summer of Code and Outreachy programs are possible in Debian thanks to the efforts of Debian developers and contributors that dedicate part of their free time to mentor interns and outreach tasks.

Join us and help extend Debian! You can follow the interns weekly reports on the debian-outreach mailing-list, chat with us on our IRC channel or on each project's team mailing lists.

Ask anything you ever wanted to know about Debian Edu!

2019-05-29T17:30:00+02:00

You have heard about Debian Edu or Skolelinux, but do you know exactly what we are doing?

Join us on the #debian-meeting channel on the OFTC IRC network on 03 June 2019 at 12:00 UTC for an introduction to Debian Edu, a Debian pure blend created to fit the requirements of schools and similar institutions.

You will meet Holger Levsen, contributing to Debian Edu since 2005 and member of development team. Ask him anything you ever wanted to know about Debian Edu!

Your IRC nick needs to be registered in order to join the channel. Refer to the Register your account section on the oftc website for more information on how to register your nick.

You can always refer to the debian-meeting wiki page for the latest information and up to date schedule.

Lenovo Platinum Sponsor of DebConf19

2019-05-20T10:00:00+02:00

We are very pleased to announce that Lenovo has committed to supporting DebConf19 as a Platinum sponsor.

"Lenovo is proud to sponsor the 20th Annual Debian Conference." said Egbert Gracias, Senior Software Development Manager at Lenovo. "We’re excited to see, up close, the great work being done in the community and to meet the developers and volunteers that keep the Debian Project moving forward!”

Lenovo is a global technology leader manufacturing a wide portfolio of connected products, including smartphones, tablets, PCs and workstations as well as AR/VR devices, smart home/office solutions and data center solutions.

With this commitment as Platinum Sponsor, Lenovo is contributing to make possible our annual conference, and directly supporting the progress of Debian and Free Software, helping to strengthen the community that continues to collaborate on Debian projects throughout the rest of the year.

Thank you very much Lenovo, for your support of DebConf19!

Become a sponsor too!

New Debian Developers and Maintainers (March and April 2019)

2019-05-11T16:35:00+02:00

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

Jean-Baptiste Favre (jbfavre)
Andrius Merkys (merkys)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

Christian Ehrhardt
Aniol Marti
Utkarsh Gupta
Nicolas Schier
Stewart Ferguson
Hilmar Preusse

Congratulations!

Introduction to the new DPL, ask him anything!

2019-04-26T19:20:00+02:00

We have a new DPL! On 21 April 2019 Sam Hartman started his term as Debian Project Leader.

Join us on the #debian-meeting channel on the OFTC IRC network on 10 May 2019 at 10:00 UTC for an introduction to our new DPL, and also to have the chance to ask him any questions that you may have.

Your IRC nick needs to be registered in order to join the channel. Refer to the Register your account section on the oftc website for more information on how to register your nick.

We plan to have many more project-wide IRC sessions in the future.

You can always refer to the debian-meeting wiki page for the latest information and up to date schedule.

DPL elections 2019, congratulations Sam Hartman!

2019-04-21T14:00:00+02:00

The Debian Project Leader elections just finished and the winner is Sam Hartman!

His term as project leader starts immediately today April 21st and expires on April 20th 2020.

Of a total of 1003 developers, 378 developers voted using the Condorcet method. More information about the result is available in the Debian Project Leader Elections 2019 page.

Many thanks to Joerg Jaspert, Jonathan Carter and Martin Michlmayr for running.

And special thanks to Chris Lamb for his service as DPL during these last twenty-four months!

Debian Web Team Sprint 2019

2019-04-16T09:20:00+02:00

The Debian Web team held a sprint for the first time, in Madrid (Spain) from March 15th to March 17th, 2019.

We discussed the status of the Debian website in general, review several important pages/sections and agreed on many things how to improve them.

For the sections we want to reorganise (mainly the homepage and a new section "download" which will group our current "CD" and "distrib" sections) , we have designed this workflow:

Create branches in the webwml repo,
Agreed on the new or modified content (started already during the sprint), and work on them further after the sprint
Review a lot of related open bugs to see if we can address them with the new content (done during the sprint)
Create bug reports for the things that cannot be solved quickly to keep them tracked (started during the sprint)
We agreed we should get further help from web designers/information architects (pending)
Once the English version is more or less settled, call for translations on the branch (pending)
If we have English and the main translations ready, merging into the master branch (pending)
We will try to have at least the homepage and the download section ready for the Buster release.

We also agreed that the press delegates should decide what new News entry is worth to be posted in the homepage instead of showing the last 6 entries.

For some other pages or areas (e.g. doc/books, misc/merchandise, /users) we found that the content is outdated and the team can not maintain it, we agreed in issuing a call for help (request for adoption) and if we cannot find volunteers for those pages/areas, we'll remove the content or move it to wiki.debian.org at the end of 2019.

We have agreed that we'll need to reduce the size (number of pages) of the website (*see some numbers about statistics at bottom) so it's more sustainable to keep the whole website up-to-date (content wise), so we'll remove some pages having content already covered in other pages, having content that currently is easy discoverable with a web search engine, can be maintained better in the wiki, etc.

We have talked a bit about certain other aspects like point release workflow, the build time of the website, team memberships and governance. In general the sprint has shown that for most of the discussed topics the migration to git as VCS and the existence of Salsa is a huge step forward for the usability and attractiveness for contributors of the webwml repository.

The core webteam is happy that the sprint has also attracted new people to jump in and which are also members of the webteam now. We welcome Thomas Lange and Carsten Schoenert in our team!

Finally, we have passed time together to socialize and knowing each other better, and got very motivated to continue working on the web.

Left to right: Rhonda D'Vine, Laura Arjona Reina, Thomas Lange, Carsten Schoenert, Steve McIntyre

A more detailed report has been sent to the debian-www mailing list.

The participants would like to thank all donors to the Debian project who helped to cover a large part of our expenses.

Bursary applications for DebConf19 are closing in less than 72 hours!

2019-04-13T10:15:00+02:00

If you intend to apply for a DebConf19 bursary and have not yet done so, please proceed as soon as possible!

Bursary applications for DebConf19 will be accepted until April 15th at 23:59 UTC. Applications submitted after this deadline will not be considered.

You can apply for a bursary when you register for the conference.

Remember that giving a talk or organising an event is considered towards your bursary; if you have a submission to make, submit it even if it is only sketched-out. You will be able to detail it later. DebCamp plans can be entered in the usual Sprints page at the Debian wiki.

Please make sure to double-check your accommodation choices (dates and venue). Details about accommodation arrangements can be found on the accommodation page.

See you in Curitiba!

Debian is welcoming applicants for Outreachy and GSoC 2019

2019-03-28T12:15:00+01:00

Debian is dedicated to increasing the diversity of contributors to the project and improving the inclusivity of the project. We strongly believe working towards these goals provides benefits both for people from backgrounds that are currently under-represented in free software, and for the wider movement, by increasing the range of skills, experiences and viewpoints contributing to it.

As part of this outreach effort, Debian is participating in the next round of Outreachy.

The application period for the May 2019 to August 2019 round has been extended until April 2, and Debian offers the following projects:

Outreachy invites applicants who are women (both cis and trans), trans men, and genderqueer people to apply. Anyone who faces systemic bias or discrimination in the technology industry of their country is also invited to apply.

Don't wait up! You can learn more details on how to submit your application or get help in our wiki page for Outreachy and the Outreachy website.

Debian is also participating in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) with eight projects, and the student application period is open until April 9.

You can learn more details on how to submit your GSoC application or get help for in our wiki page for GSoC and the Google Summer of Code website.

We encourage people who are elegible for Outreachy and GSoC to submit their application to both programs.

Call for Proposals: Debconf 19, Curitiba, Brazil

2019-03-26T19:00:00+01:00

The DebConf Content team would like to call for proposals in the DebConf 19 conference, which will take place in Curitiba, Brazil, between July 21th and 28th. It will be preceded by DebCamp from July 14th to 19th, and Open Day on the 20th.

You can find this Call for Proposals, in its latest form, online:

https://debconf19.debconf.org/cfp/

Please refer to this URL for updates on the present information.

Submitting an Event

You can now submit an event proposal. Events are not limited to traditional presentations or informal sessions (BoFs): we welcome submissions of tutorials, performances, art installations, debates, or any other format of event that you think would be of interest to the Debian community.

Regular sessions may either be 20 or 45 minutes long (including time for questions), other kinds of sessions (workshops, demos, lightning talks, ...) could have different durations. Please choose the most suitable duration for your event and explain any special requests.

You will need to create an account on the site, to submit a talk. We suggest that Debian account holders (including DDs and DMs) to use Debian SSO when creating an account. However, this isn't required, as you can sign up with an e-mail address and password.

Timeline

If you depend on having your proposal accepted in order to attend the conference, please submit it in a timely fashion so that it can be considered (and potentially accepted) as soon as possible.

All proposals must be submitted before Sunday April 28th, 2019 to be evaluated for the official schedule.

Topics and Tracks

Though we invite proposals on any Debian or FLOSS related subject, we have some broad topics on which we encourage people to submit proposals, including but not limited to:

Cloud and containers
Debian Blends
Debian in Science
Embedded
Introduction to Free Software & Debian
Packaging, policy, and Debian infrastructure
Security
Social context
Systems administration, automation and orchestration

You are welcome to either suggest more tracks, or to become a coordinator for any of them. For more information, see the Content team wiki.

Open Day

This call for proposals also targets Open Day, a day of activities targeted at the general public on July 20th. Topics of interest range from topics specific to Debian to the greater Free Software community and maker movement. The idea of Open Day is to bring the general public closer to Debian and vice-versa, so activity proposals that go in that direction are more than welcome.

If you are interested in presenting on Open Day, let us know in the "Notes" field of your submission. We might also invite proponents that are not specifically targeting Open Day to present in it if we find that the topic fits the above goals.

The Open Day will host activities in multiple languages. We expect to have activities in English, Portuguese, and Spanish.

If your talk will be in portuguese, you can write the Abstract field in portuguese too.

Talk proposal help on IRC

This year we will be holding holding office hours on IRC. Those will be designated times where the DebConf content team will be available to help potential speakers prepare their talk proposals for DebConf.

Dates and times for those will be announced later.

Code of Conduct

Our event is covered by a Code of Conduct designed to ensure everyone’s safety and comfort. The code applies to all attendees, including speakers and the content of their presentations. Do not hesitate to contact us at content@debconf.org if you have any questions or are unsure about certain content you’d like to present.

Video Coverage

Providing video is one of the conference goals, as it makes the content accessible to a wider audience. Unless speakers opt-out, scheduled talks may be streamed live over the Internet to promote remote participation, and recordings will be published later under the DebConf license (MIT/Expat), as well as presentation slides and papers whenever available.

Closing note

DebConf 19 is still accepting sponsors; if you are interested, or think you know of others who would be willing to help, please get in touch with sponsors@debconf.org.

In case of any questions, or if you wanted to bounce some ideas off us first, please do not hesitate to reach out to the content team at content@debconf.org.

We hope to see you in Curitiba!

The DebConf team

Google Platinum Sponsor of DebConf19

2019-03-25T12:30:00+01:00

We are very pleased to announce that Google has committed to support DebConf19 as a Platinum sponsor.

"The annual DebConf is an important part of the Debian development ecosystem and Google is delighted to return as a sponsor in support of the work of the global community of volunteers who make Debian and DebConf a reality" said Cat Allman, Program Manager in the Open Source Programs and Making & Science teams at Google.

Google is one of the largest technology companies in the world, providing a wide range of Internet-related services and products as online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, software, and hardware.

Google has been supporting Debian by sponsoring DebConf since more than ten years, and is also a Debian partner sponsoring parts of Salsa's continuous integration infrastructure within Google Cloud Platform.

With this additional commitment as Platinum Sponsor for DebConf19, Google contributes to make possible our annual conference, and directly supports the progress of Debian and Free Software helping to strengthen the community that continues to collaborate on Debian projects throughout the rest of the year.

Thank you very much Google, for your support of DebConf19!

Become a sponsor too!

DebConf19 registration is open!

2019-03-20T20:30:00+01:00

Registration for DebConf19 is now open. The event will take place from July 21st to 28th, 2019 at the Central campus of Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná - UTFPR, in Curitiba, Brazil, and will be preceded by DebCamp, from July 14th to 19th, and an Open Day on the 20th.

DebConf is an event open to everyone, no matter how you identify yourself or how others perceive you. We want to increase visibility of our diversity and work towards inclusion at Debian Project, drawing our attendees from people just starting their Debian journey, to seasoned Debian Developers or active contributors in different areas like packaging, translation, documentation, artwork, testing, specialized derivatives, user support and many other. In other words, all are welcome.

To register for the event, log into the registration system and fill out the form. You will be able to edit and update your registration at any point. However, in order to help the organisers have a better estimate of how many people will attend the event, we would appreciate if you could access the system and confirm (or cancel) your participation in the Conference as soon as you know if you will be able to come. The last day to confirm or cancel is June 14th, 2019 23:59:59 UTC. If you don't confirm or you register after this date, you can come to the DebConf19 but we cannot guarantee availability of accommodation, food and swag (t-shirt, bag…).

For more information about registration, please visit Registration Information

Bursary for travel, accomodation and meals

In an effort to widen the diversity of DebConf attendees, the Debian Project allocates a part of the financial resources obtained through sponsorships to pay for bursaries (travel, accommodation, and/or meals) for participants who request this support when they register.

As resources are limited, we will examine the requests and decide who will receive the bursaries. They will be destined:

To active Debian contributors.
To promote diversity: newcomers to Debian and/or DebConf, especially from under-represented communities.

Giving a talk, organizing an event or helping during DebConf19 is taken into account when deciding upon your bursary, so please mention them in your bursary application. DebCamp plans can be entered in the usual Sprints page at the Debian wiki.

For more information about bursaries, please visit Applying for a Bursary to DebConf

Attention: the registration for DebConf19 will be open until Conference, but the deadline to apply for bursaries using the registration form before April 15th, 2019 23:59:59 UTC. This deadline is necessary in order to the organisers use time to analyze the requests, and for successful applicants to prepare for the conference.

To register for the Conference, either with or without a bursary request, please visit: https://debconf19.debconf.org/register

DebConf would not be possible without the generous support of all our sponsors, especially our Platinum Sponsors Infomaniak and Google. DebConf19 is still accepting sponsors; if you are interested, or think you know of others who would be willing to help, please get in touch!

New Debian Developers and Maintainers (January and February 2019)

2019-03-12T13:00:00+01:00

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana (phls)
Unit 193 (unit193)
Marcio de Souza Oliveira (marciosouza)
Ross Vandegrift (rvandegrift)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

Romain Perier
Felix Yan

Congratulations!

Infomaniak Platinum Sponsor of DebConf19

2019-02-21T15:45:00+01:00

We are very pleased to announce that Infomaniak has committed to support DebConf19 as a Platinum sponsor.

"Infomaniak is proud to support the annual Debian Developers' Conference", said Marc Oehler, Chief Operating Officer at Infomaniak. "The vast majority of our hostings work using Debian and we share this community's values: promoting innovation whilst ensuring that security, transparency and user freedom remains top priority."

Infomaniak is Switzerland's largest web-hosting company, also offering backup and storage services, solutions for event organizers, live-streaming and video on demand services. It wholly owns its datacenters and all elements critical to the functioning of the services and products provided by the company (both software and hardware).

With this commitment as Platinum Sponsor, Infomaniak contributes to make possible our annual conference, and directly supports the progress of Debian and Free Software helping to strengthen the community that continues to collaborate on Debian projects throughout the rest of the year.

Thank you very much Infomaniak, for your support of DebConf19!

Become a sponsor too!

Projects and mentors for Debian's Google Summer of Code 2019 and Outreachy

2019-02-03T10:40:00+01:00

Debian is applying as a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code 2019, an internship program open to university students aged 18 and up, and will apply soon for the next round of Outreachy, an internship program for people from groups traditionally underrepresented in tech.

Please join us and help expanding Debian and mentoring new free software contributors!

If you have a project idea related to Debian and can mentor (or can coordinate the mentorship with some other Debian Developer or contributor, or within a Debian team), please add the details to the Debian GSoC2019 Projects wiki page by Tuesday, February 5 2019.

Participating in these programs has many benefits for Debian and the wider free software community. If you have questions, please come and ask us on IRC #debian-outreach or the debian-outreach mailing list.

Help test initial support for Secure Boot

2019-02-02T11:00:00+01:00

The Debian Installer team is happy to report that the Buster Alpha 5 release of the installer includes some initial support for UEFI Secure Boot (SB) in Debian's installation media.

This support is not yet complete, and we would like to request some help! Please read on for more context and instructions to help us get better coverage and support.

On amd64 machines, by default the Debian installer will now boot (and install) a signed version of the shim package as the first stage boot loader. Shim is the core package in a signed Linux boot chain on Intel-compatible PCs. It is responsible for validating signatures on further pieces of the boot process (GRUB and the Linux kernel), allowing for verification of those pieces. Each of those pieces will be signed by a Debian production signing key that is baked into the shim binary itself.

However, for safety during the development phase of Debian's SB support, we have only been using a temporary test key to sign our GRUB and Linux packages. If we made a mistake with key management or trust path verification during this development, this would save us from having to revoke the production key. We plan on switching to the production key soon.

Due to the use of the test key so far, out of the box Debian will not yet install or run with SB enabled; Shim will not validate signatures with the test key and will stop, reporting the problem. This is correct and useful behaviour!

Thus far, Debian users have needed to disable SB before installation to make things work. From now on, with SB still disabled, installation and use should work just the same as previously. Shim simply chain-loads GRUB and continues through the boot chain without checking signatures.

It is possible to enrol more keys on a SB system so that shim will recognise and allow other signatures, and this is how we have been able to test the rest of the boot chain. We now invite more users to give us valuable test coverage on a wider variety of hardware by enrolling our Debian test key and running with SB enabled.

If you want to help us test our Secure Boot support, please follow the instructions in the Debian wiki and provide feedback.

With help from users, we expect to be able to ship fully-working and tested UEFI Secure Boot in an upcoming Debian Installer release and in the main Buster release itself.

"futurePrototype" will be the default theme for Debian 10

2019-01-14T13:15:00+01:00

The theme "futurePrototype" by Alex Makas has been selected as default theme for Debian 10 'buster'.

After the Debian Desktop Team made the call for proposing themes, a total of eleven choices have been submitted, and any Debian contributor has received the opportunity to vote on them in a survey. We received 3,646 responses ranking the different choices, and futurePrototype has been the winner among them.

We'd like to thank all the designers that have participated providing nice wallpapers and artwork for Debian 10, and encourage everybody interested in this area of Debian, to join the Design Team.

Congratulations, Alex, and thank you very much for your contribution to Debian!

DebConf19 is looking for sponsors!

2019-01-10T18:30:00+01:00

DebConf19 will be held in Curitiba, Brazil from July 21th to 28th, 2019. It will be preceded by DebCamp, July 14th to 19th, and Open Day on the 20th.

DebConf, Debian's annual developers conference, is an amazing event where Debian contributors from all around the world gather to present, discuss and work in teams around the Debian operating system. It is a great opportunity to get to know people responsible for the success of the project and to witness a respectful and functional distributed community in action.

The DebConf team aims to organize the Debian Conference as a self-sustaining event, despite its size and complexity. The financial contributions and support by individuals, companies and organizations are pivotal to our success.

There are many different possibilities to support DebConf and we are in the process of contacting potential sponsors from all around the globe. If you know any organization that could be interested or who would like to give back resources to FOSS, please consider handing them the sponsorship brochure or contact the fundraising team with any leads. If you are a company and want to sponsor, please contact us at sponsors@debconf.org.

Let’s work together, as every year, on making the best DebConf ever. We are waiting for you at Curitiba!

New Debian Developers and Maintainers (November and December 2018)

2019-01-08T14:00:00+01:00

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

Abhijith PA (abhijith)
Philippe Thierry (philou)
Kai-Chung Yan (seamlik)
Simon Quigley (tsimonq2)
Daniele Tricoli (eriol)
Molly de Blanc (mollydb)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

Nicolas Mora
Wolfgang Silbermayr
Marcos Fouces
kpcyrd
Scott Martin Leggett

Congratulations!

Debian Cloud Sprint 2018

2018-12-11T12:30:00+01:00

The Debian Cloud team held a sprint for the third time, hosted by Amazon at its Seattle offices from October 8th to October 10th, 2018.

We discussed the status of images on various platforms, especially in light of moving to FAI as the only method for building images on all the cloud platforms. The next topic was building and testing workflows, including the use of Debian machines for building, testing, storing, and publishing built images. This was partially caused by the move of all repositories to Salsa, which allows for better management of code changes, especially reviewing new code.

Recently we have made progress supporting cloud usage cases; grub and kernel optimised for cloud images help with reducing boot time and required memory footprint. There is also growing interest in non-x86 images, and FAI can now build such images.

Discussion of support for LTS images, which started at the sprint, has now moved to the debian-cloud mailing list). We also discussed providing many image variants, which requires a more advanced and automated workflow, especially regarding testing. Further discussion touched upon providing newer kernels and software like cloud-init from backports. As interest in using secure boot is increasing, we might cooperate with other team and use work on UEFI to provide images signed boot loader and kernel.

Another topic of discussion was the management of accounts used by Debian to build and publish Debian images. SPI will create and manage such accounts for Debian, including user accounts (synchronised with Debian accounts). Buster images should be published using those new accounts. Our Cloud Team delegation proposal (prepared by Luca Fillipozzi) was accepted by the Debian Project Leader. Sprint minutes are available, including a summary and a list of action items for individual members.

Debian welcomes its new Outreachy intern

2018-11-29T20:15:00+01:00

Debian continues participating in Outreachy, and we'd like to welcome our new Outreachy intern for this round, lasting from December 2018 to March 2019.

Anastasia Tsikoza will work on Improving the integration of Debian derivatives with the Debian infrastructure and the community, mentored by Paul Wise and Raju Devidas.

Congratulations, Anastasia, and welcome!

From the official website: Outreachy provides three-month internships for people from groups traditionally underrepresented in tech. Interns work remotely with mentors from Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities on projects ranging from programming, user experience, documentation, illustration and graphical design, to data science.

The Outreachy programme is possible in Debian thanks to the efforts of Debian developers and contributors who dedicate their free time to mentor students and outreach tasks, and the Software Freedom Conservancy's administrative support, as well as the continued support of Debian's donors, who provide funding for the internships.

Join us and help extend Debian! You can follow the work of the Outreachy interns reading their blogs (they are syndicated in Planet Debian), and chat with us in the #debian-outreach IRC channel and mailing list.

New Debian Developers and Maintainers (September and October 2018)

2018-11-08T14:00:00+01:00

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

Joseph Herlant (aerostitch)
Aurélien Couderc (coucouf)
Dylan Aïssi (daissi)
Kunal Mehta (legoktm)
Ming-ting Yao Wei (mwei)
Nicolas Braud-Santoni (nicoo)
Pierre-Elliott Bécue (peb)
Stephen Gelman (ssgelm)
Daniel Echeverry (epsilon)
Dmitry Bogatov (kaction)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

Sagar Ippalpalli
Kurt Kremitzki
Michal Arbet
Peter Wienemann
Alexis Bienvenüe
Gard Spreemann

Congratulations!

New Debian Developers and Maintainers (July and August 2018)

2018-09-09T17:00:00+02:00

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

William Blough (bblough)
Shengjing Zhu (zhsj)
Boyuan Yang (byang)
Thomas Koch (thk)
Xavier Guimard (yadd)
Valentin Vidic (vvidic)
Mo Zhou (lumin)
Ruben Undheim (rubund)
Damiel Baumann (daniel)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

Phil Morrell
Raúl Benencia
Brian T. Smith
Iñaki Martin Malerba
Hayashi Kentaro
Arnaud Rebillout

Congratulations!

25 years and counting

2018-08-16T08:50:00+02:00

When the late Ian Murdock announced 25 years ago in comp.os.linux.development, "the imminent completion of a brand-new Linux release, [...] the Debian Linux Release", nobody would have expected the "Debian Linux Release" to become what's nowadays known as the Debian Project, one of the largest and most influential free software projects. Its primary product is Debian, a free operating system (OS) for your computer, as well as for plenty of other systems which enhance your life. From the inner workings of your nearby airport to your car entertainment system, and from cloud servers hosting your favorite websites to the IoT devices that communicate with them, Debian can power it all.

Today, the Debian project is a large and thriving organization with countless self-organized teams comprised of volunteers. While it often looks chaotic from the outside, the project is sustained by its two main organizational documents: the Debian Social Contract, which provides a vision of improving society, and the Debian Free Software Guidelines, which provide an indication of what software is considered usable. They are supplemented by the project's Constitution which lays down the project structure, and the Code of Conduct, which sets the tone for interactions within the project.

Every day over the last 25 years, people have sent bug reports and patches, uploaded packages, updated translations, created artwork, organized events about Debian, updated the website, taught others how to use Debian, and created hundreds of derivatives.

Here's to another 25 years - and hopefully many, many more!

DebConf18 closes in Hsinchu and DebConf19 dates announced

2018-08-05T22:00:00+02:00

Today, Sunday 5 August 2018, the annual Debian Developers and Contributors Conference came to a close. With over 306 people attending from all over the world, and 137 events including 100 talks, 25 discussion sessions or BoFs, 5 workshops and 7 other activities, DebConf18 has been hailed as a success.

Highlights included DebCamp with more than 90 participants, the Open Day, where events of interest to a broader audience were offered, plenaries like the traditional Bits from the DPL, a Questions and Answers session with Minister Audrey Tang, a panel discussion about "Ignoring negativity" with Bdale Garbee, Chris Lamb, Enrico Zini and Steve McIntyre, the talk "That's a free software issue!!" given by Molly de Blanc and Karen Sandler, lightning talks and live demos and the announcement of next year's DebConf (DebConf19 in Curitiba, Brazil).

The schedule has been updated every day, including 27 ad-hoc new activities, planned by attendees during the whole conference.

For those not able to attend, most talks and sessions were recorded and live streamed, and videos are being made available at the Debian meetings archive website. Many sessions also facilitated remote participation via IRC or a collaborative text document.

The DebConf18 website will remain active for archive purposes, and will continue to offer links to the presentations and videos of talks and events.

Next year, DebConf19 will be held in Curitiba, Brazil, from 21 July to 28 July, 2019. It will be the second DebConf held in Brazil (first one was DebConf4 in Porto Alegre. For the days before DebConf the local organisers will again set up DebCamp (13 July – 19 July), a session for some intense work on improving the distribution, and organise the Open Day on 20 July 2019, open to the general public.

DebConf is committed to a safe and welcome environment for all participants. See the DebConf Code of Conduct and the Debian Code of Conduct for more details on this.

Debian thanks the commitment of numerous sponsors to support DebConf18, particularly our Platinum Sponsor Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

About Debian

About DebConf

About Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is an industry-leading technology company providing a comprehensive portfolio of products such as integrated systems, servers, storage, networking and software. The company offers consulting, operational support, financial services, and complete solutions for many different industries: mobile and IoT, data & analytics and the manufacturing or public sectors among others.

HPE is also a development partner of Debian, and providing hardware for port development, Debian mirrors, and other Debian services (hardware donations are listed in the Debian machines page).

Contact Information

For further information, please visit the DebConf18 web page at https://debconf18.debconf.org/ or send mail to press@debian.org.

DebConf18 thanks its sponsors!

2018-08-02T12:00:00+02:00

DebConf18 is taking place in Hsinchu, Taiwan, from July 29th to August 5th, 2018. It is the first Debian Annual Conference in Asia, with over 300 attendees and major advances for Debian and for Free Software in general.

Thirty-two companies have committed to sponsor DebConf18! With a warm "thank you", we'd like to introduce them to you.

Our Platinum sponsor is Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). HPE is an industry-leading technology company providing a comprehensive portfolio of products such as integrated systems, servers, storage, networking and software. The company offers consulting, operational support, financial services, and complete solutions for many different industries: mobile and IoT, data & analytics and the manufacturing or public sectors among others.

HPE is also a development partner of Debian, and providing hardware for port development, Debian mirrors, and other Debian services (hardware donations are listed in the Debian machines page).

We have four Gold sponsors:

Google, a technology company specialized in Internet-related services as online advertising and search engine,
Infomaniak, Switzerland's largest web-hosting company, also offering live-streaming and video on demand services,
Collabora, which offers a comprehensive range of services to help its clients to navigate the ever-evolving world of Open Source, and
Microsoft, the American multinational technology company developing, licensing and selling computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers and related services.

As Silver sponsors we have credativ (a service-oriented company focusing on open-source software and also a Debian development partner), Gandi (a French company providing domain name registration, web hosting, and related services), Skymizer (a Taiwanese company focused on compiler and virtual machine technology), Civil Infrastructure Platform, (a collaborative project hosted by the Linux Foundation, establishing an open source “base layer” of industrial grade software), Brandorr Group, (a company that develops, deploys and manages new or existing infrastructure in the cloud for customers of all sizes), 3CX, (a software-based, open standards IP PBX that offers complete unified communications), Free Software Initiative Japan, (a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting Free Software growth and development), Texas Instruments (the global semiconductor company), the Bern University of Applied Sciences (with over 6,800 students enrolled, located in the Swiss capital), ARM, (a multinational semiconductor and software design company, designers of the ARM processors), Ubuntu, (the Operating System delivered by Canonical), Cumulus Networks, (a company building web-scale networks using innovative, open networking technology), Roche, (a major international pharmaceutical provider and research company dedicated to personalized healthcare) and Hudson-Trading, (a company researching and developing automated trading algorithms using advanced mathematical techniques).

ISG.EE, Univention Private Internet Access, Logilab, Dropbox and IBM are our Bronze sponsors.

And finally, SLAT (Software Liberty Association of Taiwan), The Linux foundation, deepin, Altus Metrum, Evolix, BerryNet and Purism are our supporter sponsors.

Thanks to all our sponsors for their support! Their contributions made possible that a large number of Debian contributors from all over the globe work together, help and learn from each other in DebConf18.

New Debian Developers and Maintainers (May and June 2018)

2018-07-30T19:45:00+02:00

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

Andre Bianchi
Simon Quigley
Andrius Merkys
Tong Sun
James Lu
Raphaël Halimi
Paul Seyfert
Dustin Kirkland
Yanhao Mo
Paride Legovini

Congratulations!

Application managers are needed to help contributors get their Debian Developer accounts. See the call from New Member Front Desk for details.

DebConf18 starts today in Hsinchu

2018-07-29T03:30:00+02:00

DebConf18, the 19th annual Debian Conference, is taking place in Hsinchu, Taiwan from July 29th to August 5th, 2018.

Debian contributors from all over the world have come together at National Chiao Tung University, Microelectronics and Information Research Center (NCTU MIRC) during the preceding week for DebCamp (focused on individual work and team sprints for in-person collaboration developing Debian), and the Open Day on July 28th (with presentations and workshops of interest to a wide audience).

Today the main conference starts with over 300 attendants and 118 activities scheduled, including 45- and 20-minute talks and team meetings, workshops, a job fair, talks from invited speakers, as well as a variety of other events.

The full schedule at https://debconf18.debconf.org/schedule/ is updated every day, including activities planned ad-hoc by attendees during the whole conference.

If you want to engage remotely, you can follow the video streaming available from the DebConf18 website of the events happening in the three talk rooms: Yushan (玉山) (the main auditorium), Xueshan (雪山), and Zhongyangjianshan (中央尖山), or join the conversation about what is happening in the talk rooms: #debconf18-y, #debconf18-x and #debconf18-z (all those channels in the OFTC IRC network).

DebConf is committed to a safe and welcome environment for all participants. See the DebConf Code of Conduct and the Debian Code of Conduct for more details on this.

Debian thanks the commitment of numerous sponsors to support DebConf18, particularly our Platinum Sponsor Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Platinum Sponsor of DebConf18

2018-07-28T13:45:00+02:00

We are very pleased to announce that Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has committed to support DebConf18 as a Platinum sponsor.

"Hewlett Packard Enterprise is excited to support Debian's annual developer conference for the third consecutive year," said Steve Geary, Senior Director R&D, Advanced Software Development, Hewlett Packard Labs. "The Debian community and open distribution are true innovation enablers for our Memory-Driven Computing work and products all across HPE."

HPE is an industry-leading technology company providing a comprehensive portfolio of products such as integrated systems, servers, storage, networking and software. The company offers consulting, operational support, financial services, and complete solutions for many different industries: mobile and IoT, data & analytics and the manufacturing or public sectors among others.

HPE is also a development partner of Debian, and providing hardware for port development, Debian mirrors, and other Debian services (hardware donations are listed in the Debian machines page).

With this additional commitment as Platinum Sponsor, HPE contributes to make possible our annual conference and directly supports the progress of Debian and Free Software, helping to strengthen the community that continues to collaborate on Debian projects throughout the rest of the year.

Thank you very much Hewlett Packard Enterprise, for your support of DebConf18!

DebConf18 invites you to Debian Open Day at National Chiao Tung University, Microelectronics and Information Research Center (NCTU MIRC), in Hsinchu

2018-07-27T12:00:00+02:00

DebConf, the annual conference for Debian contributors and users interested in improving the Debian operating system, will be held in National Chiao Tung University, Microelectronics and Information Research Center (NCTU MIRC) in Hsinchu, Taiwan, from July 29th to August 5th, 2018. The conference is preceded by DebCamp, July 21th to July 27th, and the DebConf18 Open Day on July 28th.

Debian is an operating system consisting entirely of free and open source software, and is known for its adherence to the Unix and Free Software philosophies and for its extensiveness. Thousands of volunteers from all over the world work together to create and maintain Debian software, and more than 400 are expected to attend DebConf18 to meet in person and work together more closely.

The conference features presentations and workshops, and video streams are made available in real-time and archived.

The DebConf18 Open Day, Saturday, July 28, is open to the public with events of interest to a wide audience.

The detailed schedule of the Open Day's events include, among others:

Questions and Answers Session with Minister Audrey Tang,
Debian Meets Smart City Applications with SZ Lin
a Debian Packaging Workshop,
panel discussion: Story of Debian contributors around the world,
sessions in English or Chinese about different aspects of the Debian project and community, and other free software projects like LibreOffice, Clonezilla and DRBL, LXDE/LXQt desktops, EzGo...

Everyone is welcome to attend, attendance is free, and it is a great possibility for interested users to meet the Debian community.

The full schedule for Open Day's events and the rest of the conference is at https://debconf18.debconf.org/schedule and the video streaming will be available at the DebConf18 website

DebConf is committed to a safe and welcome environment for all participants. See the DebConf Code of Conduct and the Debian Code of Conduct for more details on this.

Debian thanks the numerous sponsors for their commitment to DebConf18, particularly its Platinum Sponsor Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the Bureau of Foreign Trade, Ministry of Economic Affairs via the MEET TAIWAN program, and its venue sponsors, the National Chiao Tung University 國立交通大學 and the National Center for High-performance Computing 國家高速網路與計算中心.

For media contacts, please contact DebConf organization: 林上智 (SZ Lin), Cell: 0911-162297

Debian Perl Sprint 2018

2018-06-27T18:40:00+02:00

Three members of the Debian Perl team met in Hamburg between May 16 and May 20 2018 as part of the Mini-DebConf Hamburg to continue perl development work for Buster and to work on QA tasks across our 3500+ packages.

The participants had a good time and met other Debian friends. The sprint was productive:

21 bugs were filed or worked on, many uploads were accepted.
The transition to Perl 5.28 was prepared, and versioned provides were again worked on.
Several cleanup tasks were performed, especially around the move from Alioth to Salsa in documentation, website, and wiki.
For src:perl, autopkgtests were enabled, and work on Versioned Provides has been resumed.

The full report was posted to the relevant Debian mailing lists.

The participants would like to thank the Mini-DebConf Hamburg organizers for providing the framework for our sprint, and all donors to the Debian project who helped to cover a large part of our expenses.

Debian Artwork: Call for Proposals for Debian 10 (Buster)

2018-06-17T13:30:00+02:00

This is the official call for artwork proposals for the Buster cycle.

For the most up to date details, please refer to the wiki.

We would also like to take this opportunity to thank Juliette Taka Belin for doing the Softwaves theme for stretch.

The deadlines for submissions is: 2018-09-05

The artwork is usually picked based on which themes look the most:

''Debian'': admittedly not the most defined concept, since everyone has their own take on what Debian means to them.
''plausible to integrate without patching core software'': as much as we love some of the insanely hot looking themes, some would require heavy GTK+ theming and patching GDM/GNOME.
''clean / well designed'': without becoming something that gets annoying to look at a year down the road. Examples of good themes include Joy, Lines and Softwaves.

If you'd like more information, please use the Debian Desktop mailing list.

Debian welcomes its GSoC 2018 and Outreachy interns

2018-05-30T20:45:00+02:00

We're excited to announce that Debian has selected twenty-six interns to work with us during the next months: one person for Outreachy, and twenty-five for the Google Summer of Code.

Here is the list of projects and the interns who will work on them:

A calendar database of social events and conferences

Doğukan Çelik

Android SDK Tools in Debian

Saif Abdul Cassim (GSoC 2018 Android SDK tools in Debian)
Chandramouli Rajagopalan (Packaging and Updating Android SDK Tools)
Umang Parmar (Android SDK Tools in Debian)

Automatic builds with clang using OBS

Athos Ribeiro

Automatic Packages for Everything

Alexandre Viau

Click To Dial Popup Window for the Linux Desktop

Design and implementation of a Debian SSO solution

Birger Schacht

EasyGnuPG Improvements

Divesh Uttamchandani

Extracting data from PDF invoices and bills for financial accounting

Harshit Joshi

Firefox and Thunderbird plugin for free software habits

Enkelena Haxhija

GUI app for EasyGnuPG

Yugesh Ajit Kothari

Improving Distro Tracker to better support Debian teams

Arthur Del Esposte

Kanban Board for Debian Bug Tracker and CalDAV servers

Chikirou Massiwayne

OwnMailbox Improvements

Georgios Pipilis

P2P Network Boot with BitTorrent

Shreyansh Khajanchi

PGP Clean Room Live CD

Jacob Adams

Port Kali Packages to Debian

Samuel Henrique

Quality assurance for biological applications inside Debian

Liubov Chuprikova

Reverse Engineering Radiator Bluetooth Thermovalves

Sergio Alberti

Virtual LTSP Server

Deepanshu Gajbhiye

Wizard/GUI helping students/interns apply and get started

Congratulations and welcome to all of them!

Join us and help extend Debian! You can follow the interns weekly reports on the debian-outreach mailing-list, chat with us on our IRC channel or on each project's team mailing lists.

New Debian Developers and Maintainers (March and April 2018)

2018-05-02T22:03:00+02:00

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

Andreas Boll (aboll)
Dominik George (natureshadow)
Julien Puydt (jpuydt)
Sergio Durigan Junior (sergiodj)
Robie Basak (rbasak)
Elena Grandi (valhalla)
Peter Pentchev (roam)
Samuel Henrique (samueloph)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

Andy Li
Alexandre Rossi
David Mohammed
Tim Lunn
Rebecca Natalie Palmer
Andrea Bolognani
Toke Høiland-Jørgensen
Gabriel F. T. Gomes
Bjorn Anders Dolk
Geoffroy Youri Berret
Dmitry Eremin-Solenikov

Congratulations!

Bursary applications for DebConf18 are closing in 48 hours!

2018-04-12T12:30:00+02:00

If you intend to apply for a DebConf18 bursary and have not yet done so, please proceed as soon as possible!

Bursary applications for DebConf18 will be accepted until April 13th at 23:59 UTC. Applications submitted after this deadline will not be considered.

You can apply for a bursary when you register for the conference.

Please make sure to double-check your accommodation choices (dates and venue). Details about accommodation arrangements can be found on the wiki.

See you in Hsinchu!

DebConf20 in a cruise

2018-04-01T20:15:00+02:00

The last editions of DebConf, the annual Debian conference, have been in unalike places like Heidelberg (Germany), Cape Town (South Africa) and Montreal (Canada). Next summer DebConf18 will happen in Hsinchu (Taiwan) and the location for DebConf19 is already decided: Curitiba (Brazil). During all these years an idea has been floating in the air (aka the Debian IRC channels) about organising a DebConf in a cruise. Today, the Debian Project is happy to announce that a group of Debian contributors have teamed-up to propose an actual bid for DebConf20 in a cruise.

The Cruise Team is confident about their ability to provide a detailed and strong bid by the end of the year. However, a brief plan and preparation is already done: the conference would happen in July and August 2020, during a trip around the world in a "rolling conference" scheme. This means that Debian contributors could choose when to arrive and leave by embarking/disembarking in one of the harbours the boat will stop. A DebCamp focused in sprinting the development of Debian blends and an "Open Day" with install parties under the sea and other interesting activities for the wide public is also planned.

There will be a sprint to discuss the bid details during DebConf18 in Hsinchu. The team has also initiated conversations with several cruise ship companies and satellite network providers in order to explore the possible venues and connectivity options for the conference. Interested parties can contact press@debian.org to join the Cruise Team in the preparation of the future conference.

New Debian Developers and Maintainers (January and February 2018)

2018-03-04T08:30:00+01:00

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

Alexandre Mestiashvili (mestia)
Tomasz Rybak (serpent)
Louis-Philippe Véronneau (pollo)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

Teus Benschop
Kyle John Robbertze
Maarten van Gompel
Dennis van Dok
Innocent De Marchi
David Rabel

Congratulations!

Debian won Linux Journal's Readers' Choice Award for Best Linux Distribution!

2018-02-14T23:00:00+01:00

Debian won Linux Journal's Readers' Choice Award for Best Linux Distribution.

Thank you for all your support!

DebConf18: Call for Proposals

2018-02-07T15:30:00+01:00

The DebConf Content team would like to call for proposals in the DebConf18 conference, which will take place in Hsinchu, Taiwan, from 29 July to 5 August 2018.

You can find this Call for Proposals, in its latest form at: https://debconf18.debconf.org/cfp/.

Please refer to this URL for updates on the present information.

Suggesting a Speaker

The content team has a (limited) number of spots for invited speakers and is open to suggestions. Priority will be given to speakers who are not regular DebConf attendees, and 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. Therefore, we would like to start inviting speakers as soon as possible.

In order to suggest a speaker, please email content@debconf.org; your email should provide the following information:

The speaker's preferred name
Their location (for travel budget considerations)
Their affiliation (institution and/or project)
The suggested talk topic
Brief biography (50-100 words) as it relates to the suggested topic
The topic's relevance to Debian and/or DebConf

Please, note that the Code of Conduct applies to invited speakers and their talks, and coming to DebConf (incl. accepting an invitation) requires them to accept it.

Submitting an Event

While we cannot offer travel funding for all speakers, DebConf has various bursaries for attendees, including a diversity one, and having your event accepted is something that is taken into account.

You will need to create an account on the site, to submit a talk. We suggest that Debian account holders (including DDs and DMs) to use Debian SSO when creating an account. However, this isn’t required, as you can sign up with an e-mail address and password.

Timeline

If you depend on having your proposal accepted in order to attend the conference, please submit it in a timely fashion so that it can be considered (and potentially accepted) as soon as possible.

All proposals must be submitted before Sunday 17 June 2018 to be evaluated for the official schedule.

Topics and Tracks

Though we invite proposals on any Debian or FLOSS related subject, we have some broad topics on which we encourage people to submit proposals, including but not limited to:

Blends
Cloud and containers
Debian in Science
Embedded
Packaging, policy and infrastructure
Security
Social context
Systems administration, automation and orchestration

You are welcome to either suggest more tracks, or to become a coordinator for any of them; please refer to the Content Tracks wiki page for more information on that.

Code of Conduct

Video Coverage

Closing note

DebConf18 is still accepting sponsors; if you are interested, or think you know of others who would be willing to help, please get in touch!

In case of any questions, or if you wanted to bounce some ideas off us first, please do not hesitate to reach out to the content team at content@debconf.org.

We hope to see you in Hsinchu!

The DebConf team

Debian welcomes its Outreachy interns

2018-02-02T08:30:00+01:00

We'd like to welcome our three Outreachy interns for this round, lasting from December 2017 to March 2018.

Juliana Oliveira is working on reproducible builds for Debian and free software.

Kira Obrezkova is working on bringing open-source mobile technologies to a new level with Debian (Osmocom).

Renata D'Avila is working on a calendar database of social events and conferences for free software developers.

Congratulations, Juliana, Kira and Renata!

Debian will also participate this summer in the next round for Outreachy, and is currently applying as mentoring organisation for the Google Summer of Code 2018 programme. Have a look at the projects wiki page and contact the Debian Outreach Team mailing list to join as a mentor or welcome applicants into the Outreachy or GSoC programme.

Join us and help extend Debian!

Mentors and co-mentors for Debian's Google Summer of Code 2018

2018-01-23T00:50:00+01:00

Debian is applying as a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code 2018, an internship program open to university students aged 18 and up.

Debian already has a wide range of projects listed but it is not too late to add more or to improve the existing proposals. Google will start reviewing the ideas page over the next two weeks and students will start looking at it in mid-February.

Please join us and help extending Debian! You can consider listing a potential project for interns or listing your name as a possible co-mentor for one of the existing projects on Debian's Google Summer of Code wiki page.

At this stage, mentors are not obliged to commit to accepting an intern but it is important for potential mentors to be listed to get the process started. You will have the opportunity to review student applications in March and April and give the administrators a definite decision if you wish to proceed in early April.

Mentors, co-mentors and other volunteers can follow an intern through the entire process or simply volunteer for one phase of the program, such as helping recruit students in a local university or helping test the work completed by a student at the end of the summer.

Participating in GSoC has many benefits for Debian and the wider free software community. If you have questions, please come and ask us on IRC #debian-outreach or the debian-outreach mailing list.

New Debian Developers and Maintainers (November and December 2017)

2018-01-01T20:30:00+01:00

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

Ben Armstrong (synrg)
Frédéric Bonnard (frediz)
Jerome Charaoui (lavamind)
Michael Jeanson (mjeanson)
Jim Meyering (meyering)
Christopher Knadle (krait)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

Chris West
Mark Lee Garrett
Pierre-Elliott Bécue
Sebastian Humenda
Stefan Schörghofer
Stephen Gelman
Georg Faerber
Nico Schlömer

Congratulations!

Debsources now in sources.debian.org

2017-12-13T18:40:00+01:00

Debsources is a web application for publishing, browsing and searching an unpacked Debian source mirror on the Web. With Debsources, all the source code of every Debian release is available in https://sources.debian.org, both via an HTML user interface and a JSON API.

This service was first offered in 2013 with the sources.debian.net instance, which was kindly hosted by IRILL, and is now becoming official under sources.debian.org, hosted on the Debian infrastructure.

This new instance offers all the features of the old one (an updater that runs four times a day, various plugins to count lines of code or measure the size of packages, and sub-apps to show lists of patches and copyright files), plus integration with other Debian services such as codesearch.debian.net and the PTS.

The Debsources Team has taken the opportunity of this move of Debsources onto the Debian infrastructure to officially announce the service. Read their message as well as the Debsources documentation page for more details.

New Debian Developers and Maintainers (September and October 2017)

2017-11-02T20:30:00+01:00

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

Allison Randal (wendar)
Carsten Schoenert (tijuca)
Jeremy Bicha (jbicha)
Luca Boccassi (bluca)
Michael Hudson-Doyle (mwhudson)
Elana Hashman (ehashman)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

Ervin Hegedüs
Tom Marble
Lukas Schwaighofer
Philippe Thierry

Congratulations!

New Debian Developers and Maintainers (July and August 2017)

2017-09-01T20:30:00+02:00

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

Ross Gammon (rossgammon)
Balasankar C (balasankarc)
Roland Fehrenbacher (rfehren)
Jonathan Cristopher Carter (jcc)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

José Gutiérrez de la Concha
Paolo Greppi
Ming-ting Yao Wei
Boyuan Yang
Paul Hardy
Fabian Wolff
Moritz Schlarb
Shengjing Zhu

Congratulations!

Work on Debian for mobile devices continues

2017-08-17T15:40:00+02:00

Work on Debian for mobile devices, i.e. telephones, tablets, and handheld computers, continues. During the recent DebConf17 in Montréal, Canada, more than 50 people had a meeting to reconsider opportunities and challenges for Debian on mobile devices.

A number of devices were shown at DebConf:

PocketCHIP: A very small handheld computer with keyboard, Wi-Fi, USB, and Bluetooth, running Debian 8 (Jessie) or 9 (Stretch).
Pyra: A modular handheld computer with a touchscreen, gaming controls, Wi-Fi, keyboard, multiple USB ports and SD card slots, and an optional modem for either Europe or the USA. It will come preinstalled with Debian.
Samsung Galaxy S Relay 4G: An Android smartphone featuring a physical keyboard, which can already run portions of Debian userspace on the Android kernel. Kernel upstreaming is on the way.
ZeroPhone: An open-source smartphone based on Raspberry Pi Zero, with a small screen, classic telephone keypad and hardware switches for telephony, Wi-Fi, and the microphone. It is running Debian-based Raspbian OS.

The photo (click to enlarge) shows all four devices, together with a Nokia N900, which was the first Linux-based smartphone by Nokia, running Debian-based Maemo and a completely unrelated Gnuk cryptographic token, which just sneaked into the setting.

If you like to participate, please

check the Debian Mobile wiki page,
subscribe to the Debian mobile mailing list,
or join the #debian-mobile IRC chatroom at irc.oftc.net.

Debian turns 24!

2017-08-16T17:50:00+02:00

Today is Debian's 24th anniversary. If you are close to any of the cities celebrating Debian Day 2017, you're very welcome to join the party!

If not, there's still time for you to organize a little celebration or contribution to Debian. For example, spread the word about Debian Day with this nice piece of artwork created by Debian Developer Daniel Lenharo de Souza and Valessio Brito, taking inspiration from the desktop themes Lines and softWaves by Juliette Belin:

If you also like graphics design, or design in general, have a look at https://wiki.debian.org/Design and join the team! Or you can visit the general list of Debian Teams for many other opportunities to participate in Debian development.

Thanks to everybody who has contributed to develop our beloved operating system in these 24 years, and happy birthday Debian!

DebConf17 closes in Montreal and DebConf18 dates announced

2017-08-12T23:59:00+02:00

Today, Saturday 12 August 2017, the annual Debian Developers and Contributors Conference came to a close. With over 405 people attending from all over the world, and 169 events including 89 talks, 61 discussion sessions or BoFs, 6 workshops and 13 other activities, DebConf17 has been hailed as a success.

Highlights included DebCamp with 117 participants, the Open Day, where events of interest to a broader audience were offered, talks from invited speakers (Deb Nicholson, Matthew Garrett and Katheryn Sutter), the traditional Bits from the DPL, lightning talks and live demos and the announcement of next year's DebConf (DebConf18 in Hsinchu, Taiwan).

The schedule has been updated every day, including 32 ad-hoc new activities, planned by attendees during the whole conference.

For those not able to attend, talks and sessions were recorded and live streamed, and videos are being made available at the Debian meetings archive website. Many sessions also facilitated remote participation via IRC or a collaborative pad.

The DebConf17 website will remain active for archive purposes, and will continue to offer links to the presentations and videos of talks and events.

Next year, DebConf18 will be held in Hsinchu, Taiwan, from 29 July 2018 until 5 August 2018. It will be the first DebConf held in Asia. For the days before DebConf the local organisers will again set up DebCamp (21 July - 27 July), a session for some intense work on improving the distribution, and organise the Open Day on 28 July 2018, aimed at the general public.

DebConf is committed to a safe and welcome environment for all participants. See the DebConf Code of Conduct and the Debian Code of Conduct for more details on this.

Debian thanks the commitment of numerous sponsors to support DebConf17, particularly our Platinum Sponsors Savoir-Faire Linux, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Google.

About Savoir-faire Linux

Savoir-faire Linux is a Montreal-based Free/Open-Source Software company with offices in Quebec City, Toronto, Paris and Lyon. It offers Linux and Free Software integration solutions in order to provide performance, flexibility and independence for its clients. The company actively contributes to many free software projects, and provides mirrors of Debian, Ubuntu, Linux and others.

About Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is one of the largest computer companies in the world, providing a wide range of products and services, such as servers, storage, networking, consulting and support, software, and financial services.

HPE is also a development partner of Debian, and provides hardware for port development, Debian mirrors, and other Debian services.

About Google

Google has been supporting Debian by sponsoring DebConf since more than ten years, at gold level since DebConf12, and at platinum level for this DebConf17.

DebConf17 starts today in Montreal

2017-08-06T16:00:00+02:00

DebConf17, the 18th annual Debian Conference, is taking place in Montreal, Canada from August 6 to August 12, 2017.

Debian contributors from all over the world have come together at Collège Maisonneuve during the preceding week for DebCamp (focused on individual work and team sprints for in-person collaboration developing Debian), and the Open Day on August 5th (with presentations and workshops of interest to a wide audience).

Today the main conference starts with nearly 400 attendants and over 120 activities scheduled, including 45- and 20-minute talks and team meetings, workshops, a job fair, talks from invited speakers, as well as a variety of other events.

The full schedule at https://debconf17.debconf.org/schedule/ is updated every day, including activities planned ad-hoc by attendees during the whole conference.

If you want to engage remotely, you can follow the video streaming of the events happening in the three talk rooms: Buzz (the main auditorium), Rex, and Bo, or join the conversation about what is happening in the talk rooms: #debconf17-buzz, #debconf17-rex and #debconf17-bo, and the BoF (discussions) rooms: #debconf17-potato and #debconf17-woody (all those channels in the OFTC IRC network).

DebConf is committed to a safe and welcome environment for all participants. See the DebConf Code of Conduct and the Debian Code of Conduct for more details on this.

Debian thanks the commitment of numerous sponsors to support DebConf17, particularly our Platinum Sponsors Savoir-Faire Linux, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Google.

Google Platinum Sponsor of DebConf17

2017-08-05T23:30:00+02:00

We are very pleased to announce that Google has committed to support DebConf17 as a Platinum sponsor.

Google has been supporting Debian by sponsoring DebConf since more than ten years, and at gold level since DebConf12.

With this additional commitment as Platinum Sponsor for DebConf17, Google contributes to make possible our annual conference, and directly supports the progress of Debian and Free Software helping to strengthen the community that continues to collaborate on Debian projects throughout the rest of the year.

Thank you very much Google, for your support of DebConf17!

DebConf17 is starting!

Many Debian contributors are already taking advantage of DebCamp and the Open Day to work individually or in groups developing and improving Debian. DebConf17 will officially start on August 6, 2017. Visit the DebConf17 website at https://debconf17.debconf.org to know the schedule, live streaming and other details.

DebConf17 Open Day

2017-08-05T16:00:00+02:00

Today, the day preceeding the official start of the annual Debian Conference, is the Open Day at DebConf17, at Collège Maisonneuve in Montreal (Canada).

This day is open to the public with events of interest to a wide audience.

The schedule of today's events include, among others:

A Newbie's Newbie Guide to Debian
Ask Anything About Debian
Debian Packaging 101
Debian InstallFest
Presentations or workshops related to free software projects and local organizations.

Everyone is welcome to attend! It is a great possibility for interested users to meet our community and for Debian to widen our community.

See the full schedule for today's events at https://debconf17.debconf.org/schedule/open-day/.

If you want to engage remotely, you can watch the video streaming of the Open Day events happening in the "Rex" room, or join the conversation in the channels #debconf17-rex, #debconf17-potato and #debconf17-woody in the OFTC IRC network.

DebConf is committed to a safe and welcome environment for all participants. See the DebConf Code of Conduct and the Debian Code of Conduct for more details on this.

Debian thanks the commitment of numerous sponsors to support DebConf17, particularly our Platinum Sponsors Savoir-Faire Linux, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Google.

DebConf17 Schedule Published!

2017-07-25T01:15:00+02:00

The DebConf17 orga team is proud to announce that over 120 activities have been scheduled so far, including 45- and 20-minute talks, team meetings, and workshops, as well as a variety of other events.

Most of the talks and BoFs will be streamed and recorded, thanks to our amazing video team!

We'd like to remind you that Saturday August 5th is also our much anticipated Open Day! This means a program for a wider audience, including special activities for newcomers, such as an AMA session about Debian, a beginners workshop on packaging, a thoughtful talk about freedom with regard to today's popular gadgets and more.

In addition to the published schedule, we'll provide rooms for ad-hoc sessions where attendees will be able to schedule activities at any time during the whole conference.

The current schedule is available at https://debconf17.debconf.org/schedule/

This is also available through an XML feed. You can use ConfClerk in Debian to consume this, or Giggity on Android devices: https://debconf17.debconf.org/schedule/mobile/

We look forward to seeing you in Montreal!

New Debian Developers and Maintainers (May and June 2017)

2017-07-02T14:30:00+02:00

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

Alex Muntada (alexm)
Ilias Tsitsimpis (iliastsi)
Daniel Lenharo de Souza (lenharo)
Shih-Yuan Lee (fourdollars)
Roger Shimizu (rosh)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

James Valleroy
Ryan Tandy
Martin Kepplinger
Jean Baptiste Favre
Ana Cristina Custura
Unit 193

Congratulations!

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Platinum Sponsor of DebConf17

2017-06-23T16:15:00+02:00

We are very pleased to announce that Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has committed to support DebConf17 as a Platinum sponsor.

"Hewlett Packard Enterprise is excited to support Debian's annual developer conference again this year", said Steve Geary, Senior Director R&D at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. "As Platinum sponsors and member of the Debian community, HPE is committed to supporting Debconf. The conference, community and open distribution are foundational to the development of The Machine research program and will our bring our Memory Driven Computing agenda to life."

HPE is one of the largest computer companies in the world, providing a wide range of products and services, such as servers, storage, networking, consulting and support, software, and financial services.

HPE is also a development partner of Debian, and provides hardware for port development, Debian mirrors, and other Debian services (hardware donations are listed in the Debian machines page).

With this additional commitment as Platinum Sponsor, HPE contributes to make possible our annual conference, and directly supports the progress of Debian and Free Software helping to strengthen the community that continues to collaborate on Debian projects throughout the rest of the year.

Thank you very much Hewlett Packard Enterprise, for your support of DebConf17!

Become a sponsor too!

DebConf17 is still accepting sponsors. Interested companies and organizations may contact the DebConf team through sponsors@debconf.org, and visit the DebConf17 website at https://debconf17.debconf.org.

Debian 9.0 Stretch has been released!

2017-06-18T08:25:00+02:00

Let yourself be embraced by the purple rubber toy octopus! We're happy to announce the release of Debian 9.0, codenamed Stretch.

Want to install it? Choose your favourite installation media among Blu-ray Discs, DVDs, CDs and USB sticks. Then read the installation manual.

Already a happy Debian user and you only want to upgrade? You can easily upgrade from your current Debian 8 Jessie installation, please read the release notes.

Do you want to celebrate the release? Share the banner from this blog in your blog or your website!

Upcoming Debian 9.0 Stretch!

2017-06-17T00:30:00+02:00

The Debian Release Team in coordination with several other teams are preparing the last bits needed for releasing Debian 9 Stretch. Please, be patient! Lots of steps are involved and some of them take some time, such as building the images, propagating the release through the mirror network, and rebuilding the Debian website so that "stable" points to Debian 9.

Follow the live coverage of the release on https://micronews.debian.org or the @debian profile in your favorite social network! We'll spread the word about what's new in this version of Debian 9, how the release process is progressing during the weekend and facts about Debian and the wide community of volunteer contributors that make it possible.

New Debian Developers and Maintainers (March and April 2017)

2017-05-15T12:30:00+02:00

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

Guilhem Moulin (guilhem)
Lisa Baron (jeffity)
Punit Agrawal (punit)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

Sebastien Jodogne
Félix Lechner
Uli Scholler
Aurélien Couderc
Ondřej Kobližek
Patricio Paez

Congratulations!

Bursary applications for DebConf17 are closing in 48 hours!

2017-05-08T22:30:00+02:00

This is a final reminder: if you intend to apply for a DebConf17 bursary and have not yet done so, please proceed as soon as possible.

Bursary applications for DebConf17 will be accepted until May 10th at 23:59 UTC. Applications submitted after this deadline will not be considered.

You can apply for a bursary when you register for the conference.

Remember that giving a talk is considered towards your bursary; if you have a submission to make, submit it even if it is only sketched-out. You will be able to detail it later.

Please make sure to double-check your accommodation choices (dates and venue). Details about accommodation arrangements can be found on the wiki.

Note: For DebCamp we only have on-site accommodation available. The option chosen in the registration system will only be for the DebConf period (August 5 to 12).

See you in Montréal!

Call for Proposals for DebConf17 Open Day

2017-04-18T09:00:00+02:00

The DebConf team would like to call for proposals for the DebConf17 Open Day, a whole day dedicated to sessions about Debian and Free Software, and aimed at the general public. Open Day will preceed DebConf17 and will be held in Montreal, Canada, on August 5th 2017.

DebConf Open Day will be a great opportunity for users, developers and people simply curious about our work to meet and learn about the Debian Project, Free Software in general and related topics.

Submit your proposal

We welcome submissions of workshops, presentations or any other activity which involves Debian and Free Software. Activities in both English and French are accepted.

Here are some ideas about content we'd love to offer during Open Day. This list is not exhaustive, feel free to propose other ideas!

An introduction to various aspects of the Debian Project
Talks about Debian and Free Software in art, education and/or research
A primer on contributing to Free Software projects
Free software & Privacy/Surveillance
An introduction to programming and/or hardware tinkering
A workshop about your favorite piece of Free Software
A presentation about your favorite Free Software-related project (user group, advocacy group, etc.)

To submit your proposal, please fill the form at https://debconf17.debconf.org/talks/new/

Volunteer

We need volunteers to help ensure Open Day is a success! We are specifically looking for people familiar with the Debian installer to attend the Debian installfest, as resources for people seeking help to install Debian on their devices. If you're interested, please add your name to our wiki: https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf17/OpenDay#Installfest

Attend

Participation to Open Day is free and no registration is required.

The schedule for Open Day will be announced in June 2017.

DPL elections 2017, congratulations Chris Lamb!

2017-04-16T18:40:00+02:00

The Debian Project Leader elections finished yesterday and the winner is Chris Lamb!

Of a total of 1062 developers, 322 developers voted using the Condorcet method.

More information about the result is available in the Debian Project Leader Elections 2017 page.

The current Debian Project Leader, Mehdi Dogguy, congratulated Chris Lamb in his Final bits from the (outgoing) DPL message. Thanks, Mehdi, for the service as DPL during this last twelve months!

The new term for the project leader starts on April 17th and expires on April 16th 2018.

Unknown parallel universe uses Debian

2017-04-01T15:30:00+02:00

This post was an April Fools' Day joke.

The space agencies running the International Space Station (ISS) reported that a laptop accidentally threw to space as waste in 2013 from the International State Station may have connected with a parallel Universe. This laptop was running Debian 6 and the ISS engineers managed to track its travel through the outer space. In early January, the laptop signal was lost but recovered back two weeks later in the same place. ISS engineers suspect that the laptop may had met and crossed a wormhole arriving a parallel Universe from where "somebody" sent it back later.

Eventually the laptop was recovered and in an first analysis the ISS engineers found that the laptop have a dual boot: a partition running the Debian installation made by them and a second partition running what seems to be a Debian fork or derivative totally unknown until now.

The engineers have been in contact with the Debian Project in the last weeks and a Debian group formed with delegates from different Debian teams have begun to study this new Debian derivative system. From the early results of this research, we can proudly say that somebody (or a group of beings) in a parallel universe understand Earth computers, and Debian, enough to:

Clone the existing Debian system in a new partition and provide a dual boot using Grub.
Change the desktop wallpaper from the previous Spacefun theme to one in rainbow colors.
Fork all the packages whose source code was present in the initial Debian system, patch multiple bugs in those packages and some patches more for some tricky security problems.
Add ten new language locales that do not correspond to any language spoken in Earth, with full translation for four of them.
A copy of the Debian website repository, migrated to the git version control system and perfectly running, has been found in the /home/earth0/Documents folder. This new repo includes code to show the Debian micronews in the home page and many other improvements, keeping the style of not needing JavaScript and providing a nice control of up-to-date/outdated translations, similar to the one existing in Debian.

The work towards knowing better this new Universe and find a way to communicate with them has just began; all the Debian users and contributors are invited to join the effort to study the operating system found. We want to prepare our Community and our Universe to live and work peacefully and respectfully with the parallel Universe communities, in the true spirit of Free Software.

In the following weeks a General Resolution will be proposed for updating our motto to "the multiversal operating system".

Debian Project Leader elections 2017

2017-03-25T22:30:00+01:00

It's that time of year again for the Debian Project: the elections of its Project Leader!

The Project Leader position is described in the Debian Constitution.

Two Debian Developers run this year to become Project Leader: Mehdi Dogguy, who has held the office for the last year, and Chris Lamb.

We are in the middle of the campaigning period that will last until the end of April 1st. The candidates and Debian contributors are already engaging in debates and discussions on the debian-vote mailing list.

The voting period starts on April 2nd, and during the following two weeks, Debian Developers can vote to choose the person that will fit that role for one year.

The results will be published on April 16th with the term for new the project leader starting the following day.

DebConf17 welcomes its first eighteen sponsors!

2017-03-20T15:15:00+01:00

DebConf17 will take place in Montreal, Canada in August 2017. We are working hard to provide fuel for hearts and minds, to make this conference once again a fertile soil for the Debian Project flourishing. Please join us and support this landmark in the Free Software calendar.

Eighteen companies have already committed to sponsor DebConf17! With a warm welcome, we'd like to introduce them to you.

Our first Platinum sponsor is Savoir-faire Linux, a Montreal-based Free/Open-Source Software company which offers Linux and Free Software integration solutions and actively contributes to many free software projects. "We believe that it's an essential piece [Debian], in a social and political way, to the freedom of users using modern technological systems", said Cyrille Béraud, president of Savoir-faire Linux.

Our first Gold sponsor is Valve, a company developing games, social entertainment platform, and game engine technologies. And our second Gold sponsor is Collabora, which offers a comprehensive range of services to help its clients to navigate the ever-evolving world of Open Source.

As Silver sponsors we have credativ (a service-oriented company focusing on open-source software and also a Debian development partner), Mojatatu Networks (a Canadian company developing Software Defined Networking (SDN) solutions), the Bern University of Applied Sciences (with over 6,600 students enrolled, located in the Swiss capital), Microsoft (an American multinational technology company), Evolix (an IT managed services and support company located in Montreal), Ubuntu (the OS supported by Canonical) and Roche (a major international pharmaceutical provider and research company dedicated to personalized healthcare).

ISG.EE, IBM, Bluemosh, Univention and Skroutz are our Bronze sponsors so far.

And finally, The Linux foundation, Réseau Koumbit and adte.ca are our supporter sponsors.

Become a sponsor too!

Would you like to become a sponsor? Do you know of or work in a company or organization that may consider sponsorship?

Please have a look at our sponsorship brochure (or a summarized flyer), in which we outline all the details and describe the sponsor benefits.

For further details, feel free to contact us through sponsors@debconf.org, and visit the DebConf17 website at https://debconf17.debconf.org.

Build Android apps with Debian: apt install android-sdk

2017-03-15T12:00:00+01:00

In Debian stretch, the upcoming new release, it is now possible to build Android apps using only packages from Debian. This will provide all of the tools needed to build an Android app targeting the "platform" android-23 using the SDK build-tools 24.0.0. Those two are the only versions of "platform" and "build-tools" currently in Debian, but it is possible to use the Google binaries by installing them into /usr/lib/android-sdk.

This doesn't cover yet all of the libraries that are used in the app, like the Android Support libraries, or all of the other myriad libraries that are usually fetched from jCenter or Maven Central. One big question for us is whether and how libraries should be included in Debian. All the Java libraries in Debian can be used in an Android app, but including something like Android Support in Debian would be strange since they are only useful in an Android app, never for a Debian app.

Building apps with these packages

Here are the steps for building Android apps using Debian's Android SDK on Stretch.

sudo apt install android-sdk android-sdk-platform-23
export ANDROID_HOME=/usr/lib/android-sdk
In build.gradle, set compileSdkVersion to 23 and buildToolsVersion to 24.0.0
run gradle build

The Gradle Android Plugin is also packaged. Using the Debian package instead of the one from online Maven repositories requires a little configuration before running gradle. In the buildscript block:

add maven { url 'file:///usr/share/maven-repo' } to repositories
use compile 'com.android.tools.build:gradle:debian' to load the plugin

Currently there is only the target platform of API Level 23 packaged, so only apps targeted at android-23 can be built with only Debian packages. There are plans to add more API platform packages via backports. Only build-tools 24.0.0 is available, so in order to use the SDK, build scripts need to be modified. Beware that the Lint in this version of Gradle Android Plugin is still problematic, so running the :lint tasks might not work. They can be turned off with lintOptions.abortOnError in build.gradle. Google binaries can be combined with the Debian packages, for example to use a different version of the platform or build-tools.

Why include the Android SDK in Debian?

While Android developers could develop and ship apps right now using these Debian packages, this is not very flexible since only build-tools-24.0.0 and android-23 platform are available. Currently, the Debian Android Tools Team is not aiming to cover the most common use cases. Those are pretty well covered by Google's binaries (except for the proprietary license on the Google binaries), and are probably the most work for the Android Tools Team to cover. The current focus is on use cases that are poorly covered by the Google binaries, for example, like where only specific parts of the whole SDK are used. Here are some examples:

tools for security researchers, forensics, reverse engineering, etc. which can then be included in live CDs and distros like Kali Linux
a hardened APK signing server using apksigner that uses a standard, audited, public configuration of all reproducibly built packages
Replicant is a 100% free software Android distribution, so of course they want to have a 100% free software SDK
high security apps need a build environment that matches their level of security, the Debian Android Tools packages are reproducibly built only from publicly available sources
support architectures besides i386 and amd64, for example, the Linaro LAVA setup for testing ARM devices of all kinds uses the adb packages on ARM servers to make their whole testing setup all ARM architecture
dead simple install with strong trust path with mirrors all over the world

In the long run, the Android Tools Team aims to cover more use cases well, and also building the Android NDK. This all will happen more quickly if there are more contributors on the Android Tools team! Android is the most popular mobile OS, and can be 100% free software like Debian. Debian and its derivatives are one of the most popular platforms for Android development. This is an important combination that should grow only more integrated.

Last but not least, the Android Tools Team wants feedback on how this should all work, for example, ideas for how to nicely integrate Debian's Java libraries into the Android gradle workflow. And ideally, the Android Support libraries would also be reproducibly built and packaged somewhere that enforces only free software. Come find us on IRC and/or email! https://wiki.debian.org/AndroidTools#Communication_Channels

New Debian Developers and Maintainers (January and February 2017)

2017-03-08T00:30:00+01:00

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

Ulrike Uhlig (ulrike)
Hanno Wagner (wagner)
Jose M Calhariz (calharis)
Bastien Roucariès (rouca)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

Dara Adib
Félix Sipma
Kunal Mehta
Valentin Vidic
Adrian Alves
William Blough
Jan Luca Naumann
Mohanasundaram Devarajulu
Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana
Vincent Prat

Congratulations!

DebConf17: Call for Proposals

2017-02-08T20:50:00+01:00

The DebConf Content team would like to Call for Proposals for the DebConf17 conference, to be held in Montreal, Canada, from August 6 through August 12, 2017.

You can find this Call for Proposals in its latest form at: https://debconf17.debconf.org/cfp

Please refer to this URL for updates on the present information.

Submitting an Event

Submit an event proposal and describe your plan. Please note, events are not limited to traditional presentations or informal sessions (BoFs). We welcome submissions of tutorials, performances, art installations, debates, or any other format of event that you think would be beneficial to the Debian community.

Please include a short title, suitable for a compact schedule, and an engaging description of the event. You should use the field "Notes" to provide us information such as additional speakers, scheduling restrictions, or any special requirements we should consider for your event.

Regular sessions may either be 20 or 45 minutes long (including time for questions), other kinds of sessions (like workshops) could have different durations. Please choose the most suitable duration for your event and explain any special requests.

You will need to create an account on the site, to submit a talk. We'd encourage Debian account holders (e.g. DDs) to use Debian SSO when creating an account. But this isn't required for everybody, you can sign up with an e-mail address and password.

Timeline

The first batch of accepted proposals will be announced in April. If you depend on having your proposal accepted in order to attend the conference, please submit it as soon as possible so that it can be considered during this first evaluation period.

All proposals must be submitted before Sunday 4 June 2017 to be evaluated for the official schedule.

Topics and Tracks

Though we invite proposals on any Debian or FLOSS related subject, we have some broad topics on which we encourage people to submit proposals, including:

Blends
Debian in Science
Cloud and containers
Social context
Packaging, policy and infrastructure
Embedded
Systems administration, automation and orchestration
Security

You are welcome to either suggest more tracks, or become a coordinator for any of them; please refer to the Content Tracks wiki page for more information on that.

Code of Conduct

Our event is covered by a Code of Conduct designed to ensure everyone's safety and comfort. The code applies to all attendees, including speakers and the content of their presentations. For more information, please see the Code on the Web, and do not hesitate to contact us at content@debconf.org if you have any questions or are unsure about certain content you'd like to present.

Video Coverage

Providing video of sessions amplifies DebConf achievements and is one of the conference goals. Unless speakers opt-out, official events will be streamed live over the Internet to promote remote participation. Recordings will be published later under the DebConf license, as well as presentation slides and papers whenever available.

DebConf would not be possible without the generous support of all our sponsors, especially our Platinum Sponsor Savoir-Faire Linux. DebConf17 is still accepting sponsors; if you are interested, or think you know of others who would be willing to help, please get in touch!

In case of any questions, or if you wanted to bounce some ideas off us first, please do not hesitate to reach out to us at content@debconf.org.

We hope to see you in Montreal!

The DebConf team

Debian welcomes its Outreachy interns

2017-02-05T12:00:00+01:00

Better late than never, we'd like to welcome our three Outreachy interns for this round, lasting from the 6th of December 2016 to the 6th of March 2017.

Elizabeth Ferdman is working in the Clean Room for PGP and X.509 (PKI) Key Management.

Maria Glukhova is working in Reproducible builds for Debian and free software.

Urvika Gola is working in improving voice, video and chat communication with free software.

From the official website: Outreachy helps people from groups underrepresented in free and open source software get involved. We provide a supportive community for beginning to contribute any time throughout the year and offer focused internship opportunities twice a year with a number of free software organizations.

The Outreachy program is possible in Debian thanks to the effort of Debian developers and contributors that dedicate part of their free time to mentor students and outreach tasks, and the help of the Software Freedom Conservancy, who provides administrative support for Outreachy, as well as the continued support of Debian's donors, who provide funding for the internships.

Debian will also participate in the next round for Outreachy, during the summer of 2017. More details will follow in the next weeks.

Congratulations, Elizabeth, Maria and Urvika!

Savoir-faire Linux Platinum Sponsor of DebConf17

2017-01-30T17:50:00+01:00

We are very pleased to announce that Savoir-faire Linux has committed to support DebConf17 as a Platinum sponsor.

"Debian acts as a model for both Free Software and developer communities. Savoir-faire Linux promotes both vision and values of Debian. Indeed, we believe that it's an essential piece, in a social and political way, to the freedom of users using modern technological systems", said Cyrille Béraud, president of Savoir-faire Linux.

Savoir-faire Linux was present at DebConf16 program with a talk about Ring, its GPL secure and distributed communication system. Ring package was accepted in Debian testing during DebCamp in 2016 and will be part of Debian Stretch. OpenDHT, the distributed hash table implementation used by Ring, also appeared in Debian experimental during last DebConf.

With this commitment as Platinum Sponsor, Savoir-faire Linux contributes to make possible our annual conference, and directly supports the progress of Debian and Free Software helping to strengthen the community that continues to collaborate on Debian projects throughout the rest of the year.

Thank you very much Savoir-faire Linux, for your support of DebConf17!

Become a sponsor too!

Debian at FOSDEM 2017

2017-01-28T13:00:00+01:00

On February 4th and 5th, Debian will be attending FOSDEM 2017 in Brussels, Belgium; a yearly gratis event (no registration needed) run by volunteers from the Open Source and Free Software community. It's free, and it's big: more than 600 speakers, over 600 events, in 29 rooms.

This year more than 45 current or past Debian contributors will speak at FOSDEM: Alexandre Viau, Bradley M. Kuhn, Daniel Pocock, Guus Sliepen, Johan Van de Wauw, John Sullivan, Josh Triplett, Julien Danjou, Keith Packard, Martin Pitt, Peter Van Eynde, Richard Hartmann, Sebastian Dröge, Stefano Zacchiroli and Wouter Verhelst, among others.

Similar to previous years, the event will be hosted at Université libre de Bruxelles. Debian contributors and enthusiasts will be taking shifts at the Debian stand with gadgets, T-Shirts and swag. You can find us at stand number 4 in building K, 1 B; CoreOS Linux and PostgreSQL will be our neighbours. See https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEvents/be/2017/FOSDEM for more details.

We are looking forward to meeting you all!

New Debian Developers and Maintainers (November and December 2016)

2017-01-09T00:30:00+01:00

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

Karen M Sandler (karen)
Sebastien Badia (sbadia)
Christos Trochalakis (ctrochalakis)
Adrian Bunk (bunk)
Michael Lustfield (mtecknology)
James Clarke (jrtc27)
Sean Whitton (spwhitton)
Jerome Georges Benoit (calculus)
Daniel Lange (dlange)
Christoph Biedl (cbiedl)
Gustavo Panizzo (gefa)
Gert Wollny (gewo)
Benjamin Barenblat (bbaren)
Giovani Augusto Ferreira (giovani)
Mechtilde Stehmann (mechtilde)
Christopher Stuart Hoskin (mans0954)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

Dmitry Bogatov
Dominik George
Gordon Ball
Sruthi Chandran
Michael Shuler
Filip Pytloun
Mario Anthony Limonciello
Julien Puydt
Nicholas D Steeves
Raoul Snyman

Congratulations!

Free FPGA programming with Debian

2016-12-22T18:15:00+01:00

FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) are increasingly popular for data acquisition, device control and application acceleration. Debian now features a completely Free set of tools to program FPGA in Verilog, prepare the binary and have it executed on an affordable device.

See http://wiki.debian.org/FPGA/Lattice for details. Readers familiar with the technology may rightly guess that this refers to the yosys package together with berkeley-abc, arachne-"Place-and-Route" and the icestorm tools to communicate with the device.

The packages have been contributed by the Debian Science team.

We hope this effort to support the FPGA community to collect an increasing number of skills to further smoothen the Open Source experience and lower the entry barriers for this tantalising technology.

Debian Contributors Survey 2016

2016-11-16T15:45:00+01:00

The Debian Contributor Survey launched last week!

In order to better understand and document who contributes to Debian, we (Mathieu ONeil, Molly de Blanc, and Stefano Zacchiroli) have created this survey to capture the current state of participation in the Debian Project through the lense of common demographics. We hope a general survey will become an annual effort, and that each year there will also be a focus on a specific aspect of the project or community. The 2016 edition contains sections concerning work, employment, and labour issues in order to learn about who is getting paid to work on and with Debian, and how those relationships affect contributions.

We want to hear from as many Debian contributors as possible—whether you've submitted a bug report, attended a DebConf, reviewed translations, maintain packages, participated in Debian teams, or are a Debian Developer. Completing the survey should take 10-30 minutes, depending on your current involvement with the project and employment status.

In an effort to reflect our own ideals as well as those of the Debian project, we are using LimeSurvey, an entirely free software survey tool, in an instance of it hosted by the LimeSurvey developers.

Survey responses are anonymous, IP and HTTP information are not logged, and all questions are optional. As it is still likely possible to determine who a respondent is based on their answers, results will only be distributed in aggregate form, in a way that does not allow deanonymization. The results of the survey will be analyzed as part of ongoing research work by the organizers. A report discussing the results will be published under a DFSG-free license and distributed to the Debian community as soon as it's ready. The raw, disaggregated answers will not be distributed and will be kept under the responsibility of the organizers.

We hope you will fill out the Debian Contributor Survey. The deadline for participation is: 4 December 2016, at 23:59 UTC.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact us via email at:

Mathieu ONeil mathieu.oneil@canberra.edu.au
Molly de Blanc deblanc@riseup.net
Stefano Zacchiroli zack@debian.org

New Debian Developers and Maintainers (September and October 2016)

2016-11-03T12:00:00+01:00

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

Adriano Rafael Gomes (adrianorg)
Arturo Borrero González (arturo)
Sandro Knauß (hefee)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

Abhijith PA
Mo Zhou
Víctor Cuadrado Juan
Zygmunt Bazyli Krynicki
Robert Haist
Sunil Mohan Adapa
Elena Grandi
Eric Heintzmann
Dylan Aïssi
Daniel Shahaf
Samuel Henrique
Kai-Chung Yan
Tino Mettler

Congratulations!

"softWaves" will be the default theme for Debian 9

2016-10-25T19:50:00+02:00

The theme "softWaves" by Juliette Taka Belin has been selected as default theme for Debian 9 'stretch'.

After the Debian Desktop Team made the call for proposing themes, a total of twelve choices have been submitted, and any Debian contributor has received the opportunity to vote on them in a survey. We received 3,479 responses ranking the different choices, and softWaves has been the winner among them.

We'd like to thank all the designers that have participated providing nice wallpapers and artwork for Debian 9, and encourage everybody interested in this area of Debian, to join the Design Team. It is being considered to package all of them so they are easily available in Debian. If you want to help in this effort, or package any other artwork (for example, particularly designed to be accessibility-friendly), please contact the Debian Desktop Team, but hurry up, because the freeze for new packages in the next release of Debian starts on January 5th, 2017.

This is the second time that Debian ships a theme by Juliette Belin, who also created the theme "Lines" that enhances our actual stable release, Debian 8. Congratulations, Juliette, and thank you very much for your continued commitment to Debian!

Debian is participating in the next round of Outreachy!

2016-10-09T19:50:00+02:00

Following the success of the last round of Outreachy, we are glad to announce that Debian will take part in the program for the next round, with internships lasting from the 6th of December 2016 to the 6th of March 2017.

Currently, internships are open internationally to women (cis and trans), trans men, and genderqueer people. Additionally, they are open to residents and nationals of the United States of any gender who are Black/African American, Hispanic/Latin@, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander.

If you want to apply to an internship in Debian, you should take a look at the wiki page, and contact the mentors for the projects listed, or seek more information on the (public) debian-outreach mailing-list. You can also contact the Outreach Team directly. If you have a project idea and are willing to mentor an intern, you can submit a project idea on the Outreachy wiki page.

Here's a few words on what the interns for the last round achieved within Outreachy:

Tatiana Malygina worked on Continuous Integration for Bioinformatics applications; She has pushed more than a hundred commits to the Debian Med SVN repository over the last months, and has been sponsored for more than 20 package uploads.
Valerie Young worked on Reproducible Builds infrastructure, driving a complete overhaul of the database and software behind the tests.reproducible-builds.org website. Her blog contains regular updates throughout the program.
ceridwen worked on creating reprotest, an all-in-one tool allowing anyone to check whether a build is reproducible or not, replacing the string of ad-hoc scripts the reproducible builds team used so far. She posted regular updates on the Reproducible Builds team blog.
While Scarlett Clark did not complete the internship (as she found a full-time job by the mid-term evaluation!), she spent the four weeks she participated in the program providing patches for reproducible builds in Debian and KDE upstream.

Debian would not be able to participate in Outreachy without the help of the Software Freedom Conservancy, who provides administrative support for Outreachy, as well as the continued support of Debian's donors, who provide funding for the internships. If you want to donate, please get in touch with one of our trusted organizations.

Debian is looking forward to welcoming new interns for the next few months, come join us!

DebConf17 organization started

2016-09-05T14:00:00+02:00

DebConf17 will take place in Montreal, Canada from August 6 to August 12, 2017. It will be preceded by DebCamp, July 31 to August 4, and Debian Day, August 5.

We invite everyone to join us in organizing DebConf17. There are different areas where your help could be very valuable, and we are always looking forward to your ideas.

The DebConf content team is open to suggestions for invited speakers. If you'd like to propose somebody who is not a regular DebConf attendee follow the details in the call for speaker proposals blog post.

We are also beginning to contact potential sponsors from all around the globe. If you know any organization that could be interested, please consider handing them the sponsorship brochure or contact the fundraising team with any leads.

The DebConf team is holding IRC meetings every two weeks. Have a look at the DebConf17 website and wiki page, and engage in the IRC channels and the mailing list.

Let’s work together, as every year, on making the best DebConf ever!

New Debian Developers and Maintainers (July and August 2016)

2016-09-03T12:00:00+02:00

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

Edward John Betts (edward)
Holger Wansing (holgerw)
Timothy Martin Potter (tpot)
Martijn van Brummelen (mvb)
Stéphane Blondon (sblondon)
Bertrand Marc (bmarc)
Jochen Sprickerhof (jspricke)
Ben Finney (bignose)
Breno Leitao (leitao)
Zlatan Todoric (zlatan)
Ferenc Wágner (wferi)
Matthieu Caneill (matthieucan)
Steven Chamberlain (stevenc)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

Jonathan Cristopher Carter
Reiner Herrmann
Michael Jeanson
Jens Reyer
Jerome Benoit
Frédéric Bonnard
Olek Wojnar

Congratulations!

Debian turns 23!

2016-08-16T14:30:00+02:00

Today is Debian's 23rd anniversary. If you are close to any of the cities celebrating Debian Day 2016, you're very welcome to join the party!

If not, there's still time for you to organize a little celebration or contribution to Debian. For example, you can have a look at the Debian timeline and learn about the history of the project. If you notice that some piece of information is still missing, feel free to add it to the timeline.

Or you can scratch your creative itch and suggest a wallpaper to be part of the artwork for the next release.

Our favorite operating system is the result of all the work we have done together. Thanks to everybody who has contributed in these 23 years, and happy birthday Debian!

Debian and Tor Services available as Onion Services

2016-08-01T17:30:00+02:00

We, the Debian project and the Tor project are enabling Tor onion services for several of our sites. These sites can now be reached without leaving the Tor network, providing a new option for securely connecting to resources provided by Debian and Tor.

The freedom to use open source software may be compromised when access to that software is monitored, logged, limited, prevented, or prohibited. As a community, we acknowledge that users should not feel that their every action is trackable or observable by others. Consequently, we are pleased to announce that we have started making several of the various web services provided by both Debian and Tor available via onion services.

While onion services can be used to conceal the network location of the machine providing the service, this is not the goal here. Instead, we employ onion services because they provide end-to-end integrity and confidentiality, and they authenticate the onion service end point.

For instance, when users connect to the onion service running at http://sejnfjrq6szgca7v.onion/, using a Tor-enabled browser such as the TorBrowser, they can be certain that their connection to the Debian website cannot be read or modified by third parties, and that the website that they are visiting is indeed the Debian website. In a sense, this is similar to what using HTTPS provides. However, crucially, onion services do not rely on third-party certification authorities (CAs). Instead, the onion service name cryptographically authenticates its cryptographic key.

In addition to the Tor and Debian websites, the Debian FTP and the Debian Security archives are available from .onion addresses, enabling Debian users to update their systems using only Tor connections. With the apt-transport-tor package installed, the following entries can replace the normal debian mirror entries in the apt configuration file (/etc/apt/sources.list):

  deb  tor+http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/debian          jessie            main
  deb  tor+http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/debian          jessie-updates    main
  deb  tor+http://sgvtcaew4bxjd7ln.onion/debian-security jessie/updates    main

Likewise, Tor's Debian package repository is available from an onion service :

  deb tor+http://sdscoq7snqtznauu.onion/torproject.org   jessie    main

Where appropriate, we provide services redundantly from several backend machines using OnionBalance. The Debian OnionBalance package is available from the Debian backports repository.

Lists of several other new onion services offered by Debian and Tor are available from https://onion.debian.org and https://onion.torproject.org respectively. We expect to expand these lists in the near future to cover even more of Debian's and Tor's services.

Looking for the artwork for the next Debian release

2016-07-29T19:15:00+02:00

Each release of Debian has a shiny new theme, which is visible on the boot screen, the login screen and, most prominently, on the desktop wallpaper.

Debian plans to release Stretch next year. As ever, we need your help in creating its theme! You have the opportunity to design a theme that will inspire thousands of people while working in their Debian systems.

They might be people working in exciting NASA missions:

Or DYI users who decided to make a matching keyboard:

If you're interested, please take a look at https://wiki.debian.org/DebianDesktop/Artwork/Stretch

New Debian Developers and Maintainers (May and June 2016)

2016-07-10T17:30:00+02:00

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

Josué Ortega (josue)
Mathias Behrle (mbehrle)
Sascha Steinbiss (satta)
Lucas Kanashiro (kanashiro)
Vasudev Sathish Kamath (vasudev)
Dima Kogan (dkogan)
Rafael Laboissière (rafael)
David Kalnischkies (donkult)
Marcin Kulisz (kula)
David Steele (steele
Herbert Parentes Fortes Neto (hpfn)
Ondřej Nový (onovy)
Donald Norwood (donald)
Neutron Soutmun (neutrons)
Steve Kemp (skx)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

Sean Whitton
Tiago Ilieve
Jean Baptiste Favre
Adrian Vondendriesch
Alkis Georgopoulos
Michael Hudson-Doyle
Roger Shimizu
SZ Lin
Leo Singer
Peter Colberg

Congratulations!

Debian Perl Sprint 2016

2016-07-06T23:45:00+02:00

Six members of the Debian Perl team met in Zurich over the weekend from May 19 to May 22 to continue the development around perl for Stretch and to work on QA across 3000+ packages.

The participants had a good time, met friends from local groups and even found some geocaches. Obviously, the sprint was productive this time too:

36 bugs were filed or worked on, 28 uploads were accepted.
The plan to get Perl 5.24 transition into Stretch was confirmed, and a test rebuild server was set up.
Cross building XS modules was demoed, and the conditions where it is viable were discussed.
Several improvements were made in the team packaging tools, and new features were discussed and drafted.
A talk on downstream distribution aimed at CPAN authors was proposed for YAPC::EU 2016.

The full report was posted to the relevant Debian mailing lists.

The participants would like to thank the ETH Zurich for hosting us, and all donors to the Debian project who helped to cover a large part of our expenses.

DebConf16 schedule available

2016-06-27T09:00:00+02:00

DebConf16 will be held this and next week in Cape Town, South Africa, and we're happy to announce that the schedule is already available. Of course, it is still possible for some minor changes to happen!

The DebCamp Sprints already started on 23 June 2016.

DebConf will open on Saturday, 2 July 2016 with the Open Festival, where events of interest to a wider audience are offered, ranging from topics specific to Debian to a wider appreciation of the open and maker movements (and not just IT-related). Hackers, makers, hobbyists and other interested parties are invited to share their activities with DebConf attendees and the public at the University of Cape Town, whether in form of workshops, lightning talks, install parties, art exhibition or posters. Additionally, a Job Fair will take place on Saturday, and its job wall will be available throughout DebConf.

The full schedule of the Debian Conference thorough the week is published. After the Open Festival, the conference will continue with more than 85 talks and BoFs (informal gatherings and discussions within Debian teams), including not only software development and packaging but also areas like translation, documentation, artwork, testing, specialized derivatives, maintenance of the community infrastructure, and other.

There will also be also a plethora of social events, such as our traditional cheese and wine party, our group photo and our day trip.

DebConf talks will be broadcast live on the Internet when possible, and videos of the talks will be published on the web along with the presentation slides.

DebConf is committed to a safe and welcome environment for all participants. See the DebConf Code of Conduct and the Debian Code of Conduct for more details on this.

Debian thanks the commitment of numerous sponsors to support DebConf16, particularly our Platinum Sponsor Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

About Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Hewlett Packard Enterprise actively participates in open source. Thousands of developers across the company are focused on open source projects, and HPE sponsors and supports the open source community in a number of ways, including: contributing code, sponsoring foundations and projects, providing active leadership, and participating in various committees.

Debian 7 Wheezy LTS now supporting armel and armhf

2016-06-02T08:00:00+02:00

Debian Long Term Support (LTS) is a project created to extend the life of all Debian stable releases to (at least) 5 years.

Thanks to the LTS sponsors, Debian's buildd maintainers and the Debian FTP Team are excited to announce that two new architectures, armel and armhf, are going to be supported in Debian 7 Wheezy LTS. These architectures along with i386 and amd64 will receive two additional years of extended security support.

Security updates for Debian LTS are not handled by the native Debian Security Team, but instead by a separate group of volunteers and companies interested in making it a success.

Wheezy's LTS period started a few weeks ago and more than thirty updates have been announced so far. If you use Debian 7 Wheezy, you do not need to change anything in your system to start receiving those updates.

More information about how to use Debian Long Term Support and other important changes regarding Wheezy LTS is available at https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Using

Imagination accelerates Debian development for 64-bit MIPS CPUs

2016-05-18T09:30:00+02:00

Imagination Technologies recently donated several high-performance SDNA-7130 appliances to the Debian Project for the development and maintenance of the MIPS ports.

The SDNA-7130 (Software Defined Network Appliance) platforms are developed by Rhino Labs, a leading provider of high-performance data security, networking, and data infrastructure solutions.

With these new devices, the Debian project will have access to a wide range of 32- and 64-bit MIPS-based platforms.

Debian MIPS ports are also possible thanks to donations from the aql hosting service provider, the Eaton remote controlled ePDU, and many other individual members of the Debian community.

The Debian project would like to thank Imagination, Rhino Labs and aql for this coordinated donation.

More details about GNU/Linux for MIPS CPUs can be found in the related press release at Imagination and their community site about MIPS.

New Debian Developers and Maintainers (March and April 2016)

2016-05-17T00:10:00+02:00

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

Sven Bartscher (kritzefitz)
Harlan Lieberman-Berg (hlieberman)

Congratulations!

What does it mean that ZFS is included in Debian?

2016-05-15T22:55:00+02:00

Petter Reinholdtsen recently blogged about ZFS availability in Debian. Many people have worked hard on getting ZFS support available in Debian and we would like to thank everyone involved in getting to this point and explain what ZFS in Debian means.

The landing of ZFS in the Debian archive was blocked for years due to licensing problems. Finally, the inclusion of ZFS was announced slightly more than a year ago, on April 2015 by the DPL at the time, Lucas Nussbaum who wrote "We received legal advice from Software Freedom Law Center about the inclusion of libdvdcss and ZFS in Debian, which should unblock the situation in both cases and enable us to ship them in Debian soon.". In January this year, the following DPL, Neil McGovern blogged with a lot of more details about the legal situation behind this and summarized it as "TLDR: It’s going in contrib, as a source only dkms module."

ZFS is not available exactly in Debian, since Debian is only what's included in the "main" section archive. What people really meant here is that ZFS code is now in included in "contrib" and it's available for users using DKMS.

Many people also mixed this with Ubuntu now including ZFS. However, Debian and Ubuntu are not doing the same, Ubuntu is shipping directly pre-built kernel modules, something that is considered to be a GPL violation. As the Software Freedom Conservancy wrote "while licensed under an acceptable license for Debian's Free Software Guidelines, also has a default use that can cause licensing problems for downstream Debian users".

Debian welcomes its 2016 summer interns

2016-04-24T21:00:00+02:00

We're excited to announce that Debian has selected 29 interns to work with us this summer: 4 in Outreachy, and 25 in the Google Summer of Code.

Here is the list of projects and the interns who will work on them:

Android SDK tools in Debian:

APT - dpkg communications rework:

David Kalnischkies

Continuous Integration for Debian-Med packages:

Extending the Debian Developer Horizon:

Harsh Daftary

Improving and extending AppRecommender:

Improving the debsources frontend:

Aaron Delaney

Improving voice, video and chat communication with Free Software:

MIPS and MIPSEL ports improvements:

Jonathan Jackson

Reproducible Builds for Debian and Free Software:

Support for KLEE in Debile:

Marko Dimjašević

The Google Summer of Code and Outreachy programs are possible in Debian thanks to the effort of Debian developers and contributors that dedicate part of their free time to mentor students and outreach tasks.

Join us and help extend Debian! You can follow the students weekly reports on the debian-outreach mailing-list, chat with us on our IRC channel or on each project's team mailing lists.

Congratulations to all of them!

DPL elections 2016, congratulations Mehdi Dogguy!

2016-04-17T18:40:00+02:00

The Debian Project Leader elections finished yesterday and the winner is Mehdi Dogguy! Of a total of 1023 developers, 282 developers voted using the Condorcet method.

More information about the result is available in the Debian Project Leader Elections 2016 page.

The new term for the project leader starts today April 17th and expire on April 17th 2017.

Debian announces partnership to sub-contract publicity and press to an outside marketing agency

2016-04-01T07:10:00+02:00

Last year we started to push more of Debian news and information away the single news source of the DPN into other media services. Debian has been more active than ever on our many IRC channels, free software based social networks, and unofficial Twitter and Facebook feeds. Today we have decided to announce the next stage in keeping Debian at the forefront of media by sub-contracting publicity and press to an outside marketing agency.

The marketing agency (name will be disclosed soon) has provided an AI system (running entirely with free software) which will be fed with all the content of Debian mailing lists and sources.debian.net to understand the character of the Debian community and then better customize future articles, interviews, and event news.

However, some bits of personal information are also needed. Please install the "publicity" package and you'll be presented a form to fill in your data: name, surname, phone, snail mail address, place of birth, names of family members, employers or employees. Each person providing their data to the agency will receive coupon for a 20% discount in the download (purchase) of next Debian release (valid only for downloads from the official site www.debian.org).

We kindly ask every Debian community member to sign up in, at least, one of theses services: Twitter, Whatsapp, Slack or Facebook (IRC, mailing lists, and free software based RTC are allegedly not so 'cool'). Users need not be concerned with losing the features that the IRC bots provide (so long KGB!) as they will be replaced by Tay-like AI systems. The most visible change will be that MeetBot will no longer log the meetings anymore, but we have bribed an NSA employee so they pass the relevant messages to us.

"If this 'centralization, outsourcing and pay-and-forget' approach goes well with publicity, I'm considering running for DPL in 2017 to extend this model to other areas of Debian" said Laura Arjona Reina, (now) former publicity delegate.

A new logo and mascot has been designed too, as a symbol of this new era embracing the standards of branding and corporate messaging. Please consider voting in favor of it, in the General Resolution that will be proposed soon:

DebConf16 welcomes its first nine sponsors!

2016-03-30T17:00:00+02:00

DebConf16 will take place in Cape Town, South Africa in July 2016. We strive to provide an intense working environment and enable good progress for Debian and for Free Software in general. We extend an invitation to everyone to join us and to support this event. As a volunteer-run non-profit conference, we depend on our sponsors.

Nine companies have already committed to sponsor DebConf16! Let's introduce them:

Our first Platinum sponsor is Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). HPE is one of the largest computer companies in the world, providing a wide range of products and services, such as servers, storage, networking, consulting and support, software, and financial services.

HPE is also a development partner of Debian, and provides hardware for port development, Debian mirrors, and other Debian services (hardware donations are listed in the Debian machines page).

Our first Gold sponsor is Valve, a company developing games, social entertainment platform, and game engine technologies.

Our second Gold sponsor is Google, the technology company specialized in Internet-related services as online advertising and search engine.

Rusbitech (developers of the Astra Linux Debian derivative), credativ (a service-oriented company focusing on open-source software and also a Debian development partner), Catalyst (a company offering IT solutions using open source software), the Bern University of Applied Sciences (with over 7,000 students enrolled, located in the Swiss capital), and Texas Instruments (the global semiconductor company) are our four Silver sponsors.

And last but not least, the open source company Univention has agreed to support us as Bronze-level.

Become a sponsor too!

Would you like to become a sponsor? Do you know of or work in a company or organization that may consider sponsorship?

Please have a look at our sponsorship brochure (or a summarized flyer), in which we outline all the details and describe the sponsor benefits.

For further details, feel free to contact us through sponsors@debconf.org, and visit the DebConf16 website at https://debconf16.debconf.org.

Debian Project Leader elections 2016

2016-03-27T20:55:00+02:00

It's that time of year again for the Debian Project: the elections of its Project Leader!

Neil McGovern who has held the office for the last year will not be seeking reelection. Debian Developers will have to choose between voting for the only candidate running Mehdi Dogguy or None Of The Above. If None Of The Above wins the election then the election procedure is repeated, many times if necessary.

Mehdi Dogguy was a candidate for the DPL position last year, finishing second with a close amount of votes to the winner Neil McGovern.

We are in the middle of the campaigning period that will last until April 2nd. The candidate and Debian contributors are expected to engage in debates and discussions on the debian-vote mailing list.

The voting period starts on April 3rd, and during the following two weeks, Debian Developers will vote to choose the person who will guide the project for one year. The results will be published on April 17th with the term for new the project leader starting immediately that same day.

DebConf16: Call for Proposals

2016-03-24T10:00:00+01:00

The DebConf Content team is pleased to announce the Call for Proposals for the DebConf16 conference, to be held in Cape Town, South Africa from 2 through 9 July 2016.

Submitting an Event

In order to submit an event, go to "Submit a talk" on your profile page in the DebConf16 website and describe your proposal. Please note, events are not limited to traditional presentations or informal sessions (BoFs). We welcome submissions of tutorials, performances, art installations, debates, or any other format of event that you think would be beneficial to the Debian community.

Please include a short title, suitable for a compact schedule, and an engaging description of the event. You should use the field "Notes" to provide us information such as additional speakers, scheduling restrictions, or any special requirements we should consider for your event.

Timeline

The first batch of accepted proposals will be announced in April. If you depend on having your proposal accepted in order to attend the conference, please submit it as soon as possible so that it can be considered during this first evaluation period.

All proposals must be submitted before Sunday 1 May 2016 to be evaluated for the official schedule.

Topics and Tracks

Though we invite proposals on any Debian or FLOSS related subject, we have some broad topics on which we encourage people to submit proposals, including:

Debian Packaging, Policy, and Infrastructure
Security, Safety, and Hacking
Debian System Administration, Automation and Orchestration
Containers and Cloud Computing with Debian
Debian Success Stories
Debian in the Social, Ethical, Legal, and Political Context
Blends, Subprojects, Derivatives, and Projects using Debian
Embedded Debian and Hardware-Level Systems

Video Coverage

Contact and Thanks to Sponsors

DebConf would not be possible without the generous support of all our sponsors, especially our platinum sponsor HPE. DebConf16 is still accepting sponsors; if you are interested, please get in touch!

You are welcome to contact the Content Team with any concerns about your event, or with any ideas or questions about DebConf events in general. You can reach us at content@debconf.org.

Registration Reminder

Registration for DebConf is open. Please log into the DebConf16 website and register from your profile page.

To request bursaries (sponsorship) for food, accommodation, or travel, you must be registered by Sunday, 10 April 2016.

After this date, registrations will still be accepted in any of the basic, professional, and corporate categories. However, accommodation on the campus will no longer be guaranteed, and requests for sponsorship will no longer be accepted.

Even if you are not certain you will be able to attend, we recommend registering now. You can always cancel your registration, before the deadline. We do suggest that attendees begin making travel arrangements as soon as possible, of course.

We hope to see you all in Cape Town!

New Debian Developers and Maintainers (January and February 2016)

2016-03-14T21:30:00+01:00

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

Otto Kekäläinen (otto)
Dariusz Dwornikowski (darek)
Daniel Stender (stender)
Afif Elghraoui (afif)
Victor Seva (vseva)
James Cowgill (jcowgill)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

Giovani Augusto Ferreira
Ondřej Nový
Jason Pleau
Michael Robin Crusoe
Ferenc Wágner
Enrico Rossi
Christian Seiler
Daniel Echeverry
Ilias Tsitsimpis
James Clarke
Luca Boccassi

Congratulations!

Debian selected to participate in the Google Summer of Code

2016-03-13T16:00:00+01:00

For the tenth time running, Debian has been selected as a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code (Debian-specific program page), an internship program open to university students aged 18 and up.

Our team of amazing mentors has cooked up an exciting list of projects this year, and we would be glad to have you on board with Debian for one of those summer internships. The student application period will open on March 14 (and close on March 25), but feel free to subscribe to our mailing list and get in touch with our mentors. You can also catch us on our IRC channel #debian-soc.

Debian is looking for three interns in the Outreachy Program

2016-03-12T20:10:00+01:00

As part of its diversity outreach initiatives, Debian will be participating in the upcoming 12th round (May - August 2016) of Outreachy, an internship program open worldwide to women (cis and trans), trans men and genderqueer people, as well as nationals and residents of the United States of any gender who are Black/African American, Hispanic/Latin@, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander.

Thanks to the generosity of our donors, and specifically of our sponsor Intel who has given us funds specifically for one intern, Debian will be able to welcome three interns this round.

Applications for the program are open until March 22nd, so don't wait up! Debian has a lot of interesting internship opportunities this year. More info about the program is available on the Debian specific program page, as well as on the official website. Feel free to contact the outreach team and mentors on our mailing list or IRC channel #debian-soc in irc.oftc.net

If you want Debian to keep participating in such programs, and expand its outreach efforts, you can donate to one of the organizations supporting the Debian project, or volunteer some time by participating in discussions on our mailing list.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Platinum Sponsor of DebConf16

2016-03-08T12:00:00+01:00

We are very pleased to announce that Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has committed to support DebConf16 as a Platinum sponsor.

"We're excited to support Debian's annual conference which brings together Debian contributors from all around the world. In addition to our sponsorship, we will actively participate in DebConf", said Steve Geary, Senior Director at Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

HPE is also a development partner of Debian, and provides hardware for port development, Debian mirrors, and other Debian services (hardware donations are listed in the Debian machines page).

Thank you very much Hewlett Packard Enterprise, for your support of DebConf16!

Become a sponsor too!

DebConf16 is still accepting sponsors. Interested companies and organizations may contact the DebConf team through sponsors@debconf.org, and visit the DebConf16 website at http://debconf16.debconf.org.

I love Free Software Day 2016: Show your love for Free Software

2016-02-14T01:10:00+01:00

Today February 14th, the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) celebrates the "I Love Free Software" day. I Love Free Software day is a day for Free Software users to appreciate and thank the contributors of their favourite software applications, projects and organisations.

We take this opportunity to say "thank you" to all the Debian upstreams and downstreams, and all the Debian developers and contributors. Thanks for your work and dedication to free software!

There are many ways to participate in this ILoveFS day and we encourage everybody to join in and celebrate. Show your love to Debian developers, contributors and teams virtually on social networks using the #ilovefs hashtag and spreading the word in your own social media circles, or by visiting the ILoveFS campaign website to find and use some of the promotional materials available such as postcards and banners.

To learn more about the FSFE, you can read their announcement of this campaign or visit their general website.

Tails installer is now in Debian

2016-02-11T14:30:00+01:00

Tails (The amnesic incognito live system) is a live OS based on Debian GNU/Linux which aims at preserving the user's privacy and anonymity by using the Internet anonymously and circumventing censorship. Installed on a USB device, it is configured to leave no trace on the computer you are using unless asked explicitly.

As of today, the people the most needy for digital security are not computer experts. Being able to get started easily with a new tool is critical to its adoption, and even more in high-risk and stressful environments. That's why we wanted to make it faster, simpler, and more secure to install Tails for new users.

One of the components of Tails, the Tails Installer is now in Debian thanks to the Debian Privacy Tools Maintainers Team.

Tails Installer is a graphical tool to install or upgrade Tails on a USB stick from an ISO image. It aims at making it easier and faster to get Tails up and running.

The previous process for getting started with Tails was very complex and was problematic for less tech-savvy users. It required starting Tails three times, and copying the full ISO image onto a USB stick twice before having a fully functional Tails USB stick with persistence enabled.

This can now be done simply by installing Tails Installer in your existing Debian system, using sid, stretch or jessie-backports, plugging a USB stick and choosing if one wants to update the USB stick or to install Tails using a previously downloaded ISO image.

Tails Installer also helps Tails users to create an encrypted persistent storage for personal files and settings in the rest of the available space.

New Debian Developers and Maintainers (November and December 2015)

2016-01-12T12:30:00+01:00

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

Stein Magnus Jodal (jodal)
Prach Pongpanich (prach)
Markus Koschany (apo)
Bernhard Schmidt (berni)
Uwe Kleine-König (ukleinek)
Timo Weingärtner (tiwe)
Sebastian Andrzej Siewior (bigeasy)
Mattia Rizzolo (mattia)
Alexandre Viau (aviau)
Lev Lamberov (dogsleg)
Adam Borowski (kilobyte)
Chris Boot (bootc)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

Alf Gaida
Andrew Ayer
Marcio de Souza Oliveira
Alexandre Detiste
Dave Hibberd
Andreas Boll
Punit Agrawal
Edward Betts
Shih-Yuan Lee
Ivan Udovichenko
Andrew Kelley
Benda Xu
Russell Sim
Paulo Roberto Alves de Oliveira
Marc Fournier
Scott Talbert
Sergio Durigan Junior
Guillaume Turri
Michael Lustfield

Congratulations!

Debian mourns the passing of Ian Murdock

2015-12-30T20:15:00+01:00

With a heavy heart Debian mourns the passing of Ian Murdock, stalwart proponent of Free Open Source Software, Father, Son, and the 'ian' in Debian.

Ian started the Debian project in August of 1993, releasing the first versions of Debian later that same year. Debian would go on to become the world's Universal Operating System, running on everything from embedded devices to the space station.

Ian's sharp focus was on creating a Distribution and community culture that did the right thing, be it ethically, or technically. Releases went out when they were ready, and the project's staunch stance on Software Freedom are the gold standards in the Free and Open Source world.

Ian's devotion to the right thing guided his work, both in Debian and in the subsequent years, always working towards the best possible future.

Ian's dream has lived on, the Debian community remains incredibly active, with thousands of developers working untold hours to bring the world a reliable and secure operating system.

The thoughts of the Debian Community are with Ian's family in this hard time.

His family has asked for privacy during this difficult time and we very much wish to respect that. Within our Debian and the larger Linux community condolences may be sent to in-memoriam-ian@debian.org where they will be kept and archived.

Software Freedom Conservancy needs your support!

2015-12-04T00:30:00+01:00

"Software Freedom Conservancy helps promote, improve, develop, and defend Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects. Conservancy provides a non-profit home and infrastructure for FLOSS projects.", that is how Software Freedom Conservancy defines itself. Organizations like Conservancy allow free software developers to focus on what they do the best by doing copyleft enforcement, taking care of legal aspects and provide many services to its project members.

Last August, Debian and Conservancy announced a partnership and formed the Copyright Aggregation Project where, among other things, Conservancy will be able to hold copyrights for some Debian works and ensure compliance with copyleft so that those works remain in free software.

Recently, Conservancy launched a major fundraising campaign and needs more individual supporters to gain more sustainable and independent funding. This will allow the Conservancy to continue its efforts towards convincing more companies to comply with free software licenses such as the GPL and take legal actions when dialogue turns out to be unsuccessful. Conservancy needs your support now, more than ever!

Many Debian Developers and Contributors have already become Conservancy supporters. Please consider signing up as a supporter on https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/!

New Debian Developers and Maintainers (September and October 2015)

2015-11-11T22:35:00+01:00

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

ChangZhuo Chen (czchen)
Eugene Zhukov (eugene)
Hugo Lefeuvre (hle)
Milan Kupcevic (milan)
Timo Weingärtner (tiwe)
Uwe Kleine-König (ukleinek)
Bernhard Schmidt (berni)
Stein Magnus Jodal (jodal)
Prach Pongpanich (prach)
Markus Koschany (apo)
Andy Simpkins (rattustrattus)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

Miguel A. Colón Vélez
Afif Elghraoui
Bastien Roucariès
Carsten Schoenert
Tomasz Nitecki
Christoph Ulrich Scholler
Mechtilde Stehmann
Alexandre Viau
Daniele Tricoli
Russell Sim
Benda Xu
Andrew Kelley
Ivan Udovichenko
Shih-Yuan Lee
Edward Betts
Punit Agrawal
Andreas Boll
Dave Hibberd
Alexandre Detiste
Marcio de Souza Oliveira
Andrew Ayer
Alf Gaida

Congratulations!

New Debian Developers and Maintainers (July and August 2015)

2015-09-01T13:45:00+02:00

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

Gianfranco Costamagna (locutusofborg)
Graham Inggs (ginggs)
Ximin Luo (infinity0)
Christian Kastner (ckk)
Tianon Gravi (tianon)
Iain R. Learmonth (irl)
Laura Arjona Reina (larjona)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

Senthil Kumaran
Riley Baird
Robie Basak
Alex Muntada
Johan Van de Wauw
Benjamin Barenblat
Paul Novotny
Jose Luis Rivero
Chris Knadle
Lennart Weller

Congratulations!

Debian turns 22!

2015-08-16T23:59:00+02:00

Sorry for posting so late, we're very busy at DebConf15!

Happy 22nd birthday Debian!

Debian Perl Sprint 2015

2015-07-13T21:00:00+02:00

The Debian Perl team had its first sprint in May and it was a success: 7 members met in Barcelona the weekend from May 22nd to May 24th to kick off the development around perl for Stretch and to work on QA tasks across the more than 3000 packages that the team maintains.

Even though the participants enjoyed the beautiful weather and the food very much, a good amount of work was also done:

53 bugs were filed or worked on, 31 uploads were accepted.
The current practice of patch management (quilt) was discussed and possible alternatives were shown (git-debcherry and git-dpm).
Improvements were made in the Debian Perl Tools (dpt) and discussed how to get track of upstream git history and tags.
Team's policies, documentation and recurring tasks were reviewed and updated.
Perl 5.22 release was prepared and src:perl plans for Stretch were discussed.
autopkgtest whitelists were reviewed, new packages added, and IRC notificacions by KGB were discussed.
Outstanding migrations were reviewed.
Reproducibility issues with POD_MAN_DATE were commented.

The full report was posted to the relevant Debian mailing lists.

The participants would like to thank the Computer Architecture Department of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya for hosting us, and all donors to the Debian project who helped to cover a large part of our expenses.

Reproducible Builds get funded by the Core Infrastructure Initiative

2015-06-23T14:00:00+02:00

The Core Infrastructure Initiative announced today that they will support two Debian Developers, Holger Levsen and Jérémy Bobbio, with $200,000 to advance their Debian work in reproducible builds and to collaborate more closely with other distributions such as Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenWrt to benefit from this effort.

The Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) was established in 2014 to fortify the security of key open source projects. This initiative is funded by more than 20 companies and managed by The Linux Foundation.

The reproducible builds initiative aims to enable anyone to reproduce bit by bit identical binary packages from a given source, thus enabling anyone to independently verify that a binary matches the source code from which it was said it was derived. For example, this allow the users of Debian to rebuild packages and obtain exactly identical packages to the ones provided by the Debian repositories.

Debian Ruby team sprint 2015

2015-05-12T00:01:00+02:00

The Debian Ruby Ruby team had a first sprint in 2014. The experience was very positive, and it was decided to do it again in 2015. Last April, the team once more met at the IRILL offices, in Paris, France.

The participants worked to improve the quality Ruby packages in Debian, including fixing release critical and security bugs, improving metadata and packaging code, and triaging test failures on the Debian Continuous Integration service.

The sprint also served to prepare the team infrastructure for the future Debian 9 release:

the gem2deb packaging helper to improve the semi-automated generation of Debian source packages from existing standard-compliant Ruby packages from Rubygems.
there was also an effort to prepare the switch to Ruby 2.2, the latest stable release of the Ruby language which was released after the Debian testing suite was already frozen for the Debian 8 release.

Left to right: Christian Hofstaedtler, Tomasz Nitecki, Sebastien Badia and Antonio Terceiro.

A full report with technical details has been posted to the relevant Debian mailing lists.

Debian 8.0 Jessie has been released!

2015-04-26T03:15:00+02:00

There's a new sheriff in town. And her name is Jessie. We're happy to announce the release of Debian 8.0, codenamed Jessie.

Want to install it? Choose your favourite installation media among Blu-ray Discs, DVDs, CDs and USB sticks. Then read the installation manual. For cloud users Debian also offers pre-built OpenStack images ready to use.

Already a happy Debian user and you only want to upgrade? You are just an apt-get dist-upgrade away from Jessie! Find how, reading the installation guide and the release notes.

Do you want to celebrate the release? Share the banner from this blog in your blog or your website!

Hewlett-Packard Platinum Sponsor of DebConf15

2015-03-25T15:00:00+01:00

We are very pleased to announce that HP has committed support of DebConf15 as Platinum sponsor.

"The hLinux team is pleased to continue HP's long tradition of supporting Debian and DebConf," said Steve Geary, Senior Director at Hewlett-Packard.

Hewlett-Packard is one of the largest computer companies in the world, providing a wide range of products and services, such as servers, PCs, printers, storage products, network equipment, software, cloud computing solutions, etc.

Hewlett-Packard has been a long-term development partner of Debian, and provides hardware for port development, Debian mirrors, and other Debian services (HP hardware donations are listed in the Debian machines page).

With this additional commitment as Platinum Sponsor, HP contributes to make possible our annual conference, and directly supports the progress of Debian and Free Software, helping to strengthen the community who continue to collaborate on their Debian projects throughout the rest of the year.

Thank you very much, Hewlett-Packard, for your support of DebConf15!

Become a sponsor too!

DebConf15 is still accepting sponsors. Interested companies and organizations may contact the DebConf team through sponsors@debconf.org, and visit the DebConf15 website at http://debconf15.debconf.org.

DebConf15 welcomes new sponsors

2015-03-18T16:00:00+01:00

The organization of DebConf15 (from 15 to 22 August 2015, in Heidelberg, Germany) is going smoothly, the call for proposals is open and today we want to provide some updates about our sponsors.

Twelve more companies have joined our nine first sponsors in supporting DebConf15. Thank you to all of them!

Our third Gold sponsor is the Matanel Foundation, which encourages social entrepreneurship in all over the world.

IBM, the technology and consulting corporation, has also joined the DebConf15 sponsorship at a Gold level.

Google, the search engine and advertising company, has increased its sponsorship level from Silver to Gold.

Mirantis, 1&1 (which is also one of Debian's service partners), MySQL and Hudson River Trading have committed sponsorship at Silver level.

And last but not least, six more sponsors have agreed to support us at Bronze level: Godiug.net, the University of Zurich, Deduktiva, Docker, DG-i (which is also one of Debian's service partners), and PricewaterhouseCoopers (which also provides consultancy support for DebConf15).

The DebConf15 team is very thankful to all the DebConf sponsors for their support.

Become a sponsor too!

Debian is now welcoming applicants for Outreachy and GSoC Summer 2015

2015-03-16T21:45:00+01:00

We'd like to reshare a post from Nicolas Dandrimont.

Hi all,

I am delighted to announce that Debian will be participating in the next round of Outreachy and GSoC, and that we are currently welcoming applications!

Outreachy helps people from groups underrepresented in free and open source software get involved. The current round of internships is open to women (cis and trans), trans men, genderqueer people, and all participants of the Ascend Project regardless of gender.

Google Summer of Code is a global program, sponsored by Google, that offers post-secondary student developers ages 18 and older stipends to write code for various open source software projects.

Interns for both programs are granted a $5500 stipend (in three installments) allowing them to dedicate their summer to working full-time on Debian.

Our amazing team of mentors has listed their project ideas on the Debian wiki, and we are now welcoming applicants for both programs.

If you want to apply for an internship with Debian this summer, please fill out the template for either Outreachy or GSoC. If you’re eligible to both programs, we’ll encourage you to apply to both (using the same application), as Debian only has funds for a single Outreachy intern this round.

Don’t wait up! The application period for Outreachy ends March 24th, and the GSoC application period ends March 27th. We really want applicants to start contributing to their project before making our selection, so that mentors can get a feel of how working with their intern will be like for three months. The small task is a requirement for Outreachy, and we’re strongly encouraging GSoC applicants to abide by that rule too. To contribute in the best conditions, you shouldn’t wait for the last minute to apply :-)

I hope we’ll work with a lot of great interns this summer. If you think you’re up for the challenge, it’s time to apply! If you have any doubts, or any question, drop us a line on the soc-coordination mailing list or come by on our IRC channel (#debian-soc on irc.debian.org) and we’ll do our best to guide you.

apt install dpl-candidate: Mehdi Dogguy

2015-03-14T20:36:00+01:00

0. Who are you and what is your history with Debian Project?

I guess this part is well covered in my platform.

1. What is your most proud moment as Debian Developer?

I am pretty proud of having been part of the few who implemented the first automatic dependency resolver for OCaml programs and libraries in Debian packages. It was really the first one in the OCaml community and we were quite proud of it. But that was done before I become a Debian Developer.

As a DD, I have to admit I am quite proud to be part of the Release Team. It is a fantastic team where there is so much to do. Helping the team means something to me, and I invested a considerable amount of time (a few months) working on reviewing patches for Squeeze and helping to get it ready by our standards. My best moment was Squeeze's release, my first Debian release as Release Team member.

2. In your opinion what is the strongest part of Debian Project?

I am not sure we can identify one single strength of the Debian project. But, when I think about your question, I remember something I've heard many times: “Debian is about people”. I have to admit that I didn't realize it myself until I heard it for the first time and I completely share the idea! For me, all the technical side of the project comes after the community. With time, I think we managed to build a strong community. Many contributors became friends with time. We are seeing many Developers having babies and bringing them to Debian events. I find that really amazing.

3. And what is the weakest part of Debian Project?

Our strength is somehow also our weakness. We are humans and make mistakes. We have feelings and some discussions get heated sometimes. It is not easy to keep everyone calm and focused. We have seen the damage that was caused to our core community last year with all the flamewars. Many people lost their motivation and we have seen some of them stepping down. We are also having troubles on-boarding new contributors, which is a problem today because some teams are under-staffed and could become an even bigger issue on the longer term.

4. How do you intend to resolve the weakest part?

An effort has already been made on this front. We can mention the introduction of the Code of Conduct and the diversity statement, for example. Both are important and make us a more welcoming and caring community.

In my platform, I mentioned some ideas about recruitment and change management. I believe that both sides will help us to get a stronger community. Moreover, a DPL should act as a mediator to help some situation get through. This is one of the DPL tasks that is not formally identified and is usually under-estimated.

5. DPL term lasts for one year - what would you challenge during that term and what have you learned from previous DPL's?

Personally, the main thing I have learned from past DPLs is that communication is very important. A DPL should dedicate time to communicate about ongoing actions and achievements. It is also important to remind a few things even if it may sound repetitive or trivial:

Why such action/subject is important.
What actions have been tried/done in the past.
What progress has been made since last time.
What is possibly the next step.

If the communication is only about listing some actions, many people will miss its essence and its goals. It is even more important when we know that some actions may take years (thus, several DPL terms) to complete.

If I am elected as DPL, I'd really like to help the project to publish a roadmap. I think it is very important to set goals to the project to better explain our philosophy and approach in the Free Software world. This may also help to attract new contributors which may be interested by one or some items. Of course, I will not work on that subject only. I invite you to read the rest of my platform to see the other ideas.

6. What motivates you to work in Debian and run for DPL?

Many many things. And more importantly, many many people

As many of us, I like programming and socializing. It feels nice to be part of such a big project and where you can do many different things. I contribute to Debian because I find it fun and let me meet people I will not have been able to meet elsewhere.

In my platform, I tried to identify ideas I'd like to see implemented, or at least started. Since Debian is a do-ocracy, I thought I could try to get them implemented by myself. I think that those ideas are important for the Debian community and will help us moving forward. Running for DPL is also another way of contributing to Debian and I'd feel honored to represent Debian.

apt install dpl-candidate: Gergely Nagy

2015-03-14T20:35:00+01:00

0. Who are you and what's your history with Debian Project?

I'm a little mouse behind a keyboard, going by the nickname "algernon". I used to be a lot of things: a flaming youth, an application manager, package maintainer, upstream, ftp-assistant, a student, a mentor, a hacker. In the end, however, I am but a simple, albeit sometimes crazy person.

I did a number of things within Debian - mostly small and marginal things, mind you. With a little break, I've been here for over a decade, and am planning to stay for at least another.

1. What's your most proud moment as Debian Developer?

At last year's LinuxTag, I was wandering around a stand where they sold Raspberry Pis (with cases and other accessories). I had a nice chat with one of the staffers there, inquired about the price (including the case, of course), and a few other things. He asked a few things back: what I'll be using it for, and so on. After it turned out that I'm a Debian Developer, and syslog-ng hacker, he went to the back, and emerged a few minutes later with a boxed up Pi, and gave it to me as a gift, for working on Debian.

This was an incredibly touching moment, in many, many ways.

2. In your opinion what is the strongest part of Debian Project?

That's hard to say, to be honest. There are a good number of things Debian is incredibly strong at, and it would be hard to arbitrarily pick one. Quality, responsibility, safety, predictability are all areas we are very good at. But those are the qualities of the OS. As a project, we are remarkably well organised, given the volunteer & distributed nature of the project.

3. And what is the weakest part of Debian Project?

While we can resolve and work with technical issues in a reasonable manner, the project as a whole is rather lacking in all other areas. To grow beyond being the creators of the Universal OS, we, as a project, need to pursue goals beyond the OS.

Being part of GSoC and Outreachy are great steps forward. But we still have a lot of internal issues that need to be resolved. Areas such as innovation, team work, where we're in dire need of improvement.

4. How do you intend to resolve the weakest part?

As explained in my platform, my primary goal is to remove roadblocks. The DPL can do very little alone, his time and powers are better spent on enabling those who have the required skills and desires, to pursue those.

5. DPL term lasts for one year - what would you challenge during that term and what have you learned from previous DPL's?

The most valuable thing I learned from past DPLs is that the expectations are sky-high, yet, a significant portion of what the DPL does is very different than what I imagined in past years.

I'd like to challenge the status quo of the DPL being a nearly full-time job.

6. What motivates you to work in Debian and run for DPL?

I'm in it for the fame and glory, of course! And because my Tamagotchi told me to.

But on a more serious tone, my main motivation to work on Debian is because contributing makes me happy. It satisfies my hunger for doing useful work. Debian is - in my opinion - the perfect platform to give back to the wider Free Software community. Similarly, my motivation to run for DPL is to allow Debian to be a stronger member of that greater

apt install dpl-candidate: Neil McGovern

2015-03-14T20:34:00+01:00

0. Who are you and what's your history with Debian Project?

My name's Neil, I've been involved with Debian for over 10 years now. I've held a variety of roles, from the SPI board, writing policy and secure testing team, to being one of the Release Managers for Squeeze and Wheezy.

1. What's your most proud moment as Debian Developer?

Probably the release of Squeeze, my first as RM. It was the end of a great effort to get the release out. I particularly remember at the end of DebConf 10 in New York going to the local Disney store and buying every single small squeeze plush toy they had, so I could send a thank you gift to the rest of the release team! Another perhaps was when I first got my Debian kilt.

2. In your opinion what is the strongest part of Debian Project?

I think this is our social contract. It guides us, and is what we all agree on. This is our promise to ourselves, to the wider open source community and to our users.

3. And what is the weakest part of Debian Project?

At a push, I'd say it's the variety of packages we have in the archive. I'm not sure it's weakness, but it's certainly a challenge. It becomes exponentially harder to ensure that everything integrates well as you add more packages. To have made it do so this far is quite impressive.

4. How do you intend to resolve the weakest part?

Well, see the section in my platform on PPAs, and modernising our build and infrastructure system Wouldn't it be great if you could stage a package against all of stable, testing and unstable, and see what fails to build and where, with live build logs on all architectures?

5. DPL term lasts for one year - what would you challenge during that term and what have you learned from previous DPL's?

I think my primary role as DPL for 2015 would be to get a great start of development for Stretch. The start of a new release cycle is the exact time to implement wide changes that are potentially disruptive. Every couple of years we seem to relax after the release, rather than get geared up for the next one, and then time passes, and plans slip, and before we know it, the freeze is fast approaching. If we start planning /now/, then we can hopefully enter the freeze with fewer RC bugs, which should be great news for everyone! For the second part, I've talked to a lot of the previous DPLs, and worked with them in one role or another. The main thing I was told was that I shouldn't try and do everything I planned on. It's hard work, and all sorts of things pop up that derail your original plans.

6. What motivates you to work in Debian and run for DPL?

The people involved. I've met and worked with some of my greatest friends due to the project. The work, dedication and commitment of those over the years is outstanding. Most of these people are still with us, and unfortunately, a few are not. Whenever I'm feeling disheartened or annoyed, usually due to a giant flame-war then I simply remember that what we're doing is truly remarkable, and the effort that everyone has put in over the years isn't something that should be taken for granted.

DebConf15: Call for Proposals

2015-03-12T22:20:00+01:00

The DebConf Content team is pleased to announce the Call for Proposals for the DebConf15 conference, to be held in Heidelberg, Germany from the 15th through the 22nd of August, 2015.

Submitting an Event

In order to submit an event, you must be registered as an attendee of DebConf15. If you have any questions about the registration process, please check the related information on the conference website.

Once registered, go to "Propose an event" and describe your proposal. Please note, events are not limited to traditional presentations or informal sessions (BoFs). We welcome submissions of tutorials, performances, art installations, debates, or any other format of event that you think would be beneficial to the Debian community.

Please include a short title, suitable for a compact schedule, and an engaging description of the event. You should use the field "Notes for Content Team" to provide us information such as additional speakers, scheduling restrictions, or any special requirements we should consider for your event.

Regular sessions may either be 20 or 45 minutes long (including time for questions) and will be followed by a 10 or 15 minutes break, respectively. Other kinds of sessions (like workshops) could have different durations. Please make sure to choose the most suitable duration for your event and justify any special requests.

Timeline

The first batch of accepted proposals will be announced in May. If you depend on having your proposal accepted in order to attend the conference, please submit it as soon as possible so that it can be considered during this first evaluation period.

All proposals must be submitted before June 15th, 2015 to be evaluated for the official schedule.

Topics and Tracks

Though we invite proposals on any Debian or FLOSS related subject, we will have some broad topics arranged as tracks for which we encourage people to submit proposals. The currently proposed list is:

Debian Packaging, Policy, and Infrastructure
Security, Safety, and Hacking
Debian System Administration, Automation and Orchestration
Containers and Cloud Computing with Debian
Debian Success Stories
Debian in the Social, Ethical, Legal, and Political Context
Blends, Subprojects, Derivatives, and Projects using Debian
Embedded Debian and Hardware-Level Systems

If you have ideas for further tracks, or would like to volunteer as a track coordinator, please contact content@debconf.org. In order for a track to take place during DebConf15, we must have received a sufficient amount of proposals on that specific theme. Track coordinators will play an important role in inviting people to submit events.

Video Coverage

Contact and Thanks to Sponsors

DebConf would not be possible without the generous support of all our sponsors, especially our platinum sponsor HP. DebConf15 is still accepting sponsors; if you are interested, please get in touch!

You are welcome to contact the Content Team with any concerns about your event, or with any ideas or questions ambout DebConf events in general. You can reach us at content@debconf.org.

We hope to see you all in Heidelberg!

Debian Project Leader elections 2015

2015-03-12T11:00:00+01:00

It's that time of year again for the Debian Project: the elections of its Project Leader! Starting on April 1st, and during the following two weeks, the Debian Developers will vote to choose the person who will guide the project for one year. The results will be published on April 15th and the term for new the project leader will start on April 17th, 2015.

Lucas Nussbaum who has held the office for the last two years won't be seeking reelection this year and Debian Developers will have to choose between three candidates:

Gergely Nagy and Neil McGovern previously ran for DPL in past years; it's the first run for Mehdi Dogguy.

The campaigning period started today and will last until March 31st. The candidates are expected to engage in debates and discussions on the debian-vote mailing list where they'll reply to questions from users and contributors.

DebConf15 welcomes its first nine sponsors!

2014-11-13T14:35:00+01:00

DebConf15 will take place in Heidelberg, Germany in August 2015. We strive to provide an intense working environment and enable good progress for Debian and for Free Software in general. We extend an invitation to everyone to join us and to support this event. As a volunteer-run non-profit conference, we depend on our sponsors.

Nine companies have already committed to sponsor DebConf15! Let's introduce them:

Our first Gold sponsor is credativ, a service-oriented company focusing on open-source software, and also a Debian development partner.

Our second Gold sponsor is sipgate, a Voice over IP service provider based in Germany that also operates in the United Kingdom (sipgate site in English).

Google (the search engine and advertising company), Farsight Security, Inc. (developers of real-time passive DNS solutions), Martin Alfke / Buero 2.0 (Linux & UNIX Consultant and Trainer, LPIC-2/Puppet Certified Professional) and Ubuntu (the OS supported by Canonical) are our four Silver sponsors.

And last but not least, Logilab, Netways and Hetzner have agreed to support us as Bronze-level.

Become a sponsor too!

Would you like to become a sponsor? Do you know of or work in a company or organization that may consider sponsorship?

Please have a look at our sponsorship brochure (also available in German), in which we outline all the details and describe the sponsor benefits. For instance, sponsors have the option to reach out to Debian contributors, derivative developers, upstream authors and other community members during a Job Fair and through postings on our job wall, and to show-case their Free Software involvement by staffing a booth on the Open Weekend. In addition, sponsors are able to distribute marketing materials in the attendee bags. And it goes without saying that we honour your sponsorship with visibility of your logo in the conference's videos, on our website, on printed materials, and banners.

The final report of DebConf14 is also available, illustrating the broad spectrum, quality, and enthusiasm of the community at work, and providing detailed information about the different outcomes that last conference brought up (talks, participants, social events, impact in the Debian project and the free software scene, and much more).

For further details, feel free to contact us through sponsors@debconf.org, and visit the DebConf15 website at http://debconf15.debconf.org.

Help empower the Debian Outreach Program for Women

2014-10-16T19:30:00+02:00

Debian is thrilled to participate in the 9th round of the GNOME FOSS Outreach Program. While OPW is similar to Google Summer of Code it has a winter session in addition to a summer session and is open to non-students.

Back at DebConf 14 several of us decided to volunteer because we want to increase diversity in Debian. Shortly thereafter the DPL announced Debian's participation in OPW 2014.

We have reached out to several corporate sponsors and are thrilled that so far Intel has agreed to fund an intern slot (in addition to the slot offered by the DPL)! While that makes two funded slots we have a third sponsor that has offered a challenge match: for each dollar donated by an individual to Debian the sponsor will donate another dollar for Debian OPW.

This is where we need your help! If we can raise $3,125 by October 22 that means we can mentor a third intern ($6,250). Please spread the word and donate today if you can at: http://debian.ch/opw2014/

If you'd like to participate as intern, the application deadline is the same (October 22nd). You can find out more on the Debian Wiki.

Debian turns 21!

2014-08-16T11:45:00+02:00

Today is Debian's 21st anniversary. Plenty of cities are celebrating Debian Day. If you are not close to any of those cities, there's still time for you to organize a little celebration!

Happy 21st birthday Debian!

DebConf14 - schedule available

2014-08-03T23:25:00+02:00

Debconf14 will be held in three weeks in Portland, OR, USA and we're happy to announce that the schedule is already available. Of course, it is still possible for some minor changes to happen!

DebConf will open on Saturday, August 23 with the Welcome talk followed by two highlighted talks:

Debian in the Dark Ages of Free Software by Stefano Zacchiroli, former Debian Project Leader. Stefano will speak about the achievements realized by Free Software communities in the past years, and how now, despite the visible success, this freedom is being threatened by the current technology trends, and how can Debian help to preserve the so well deserved freedom.
Weapons of the Geek by Biella Coleman, cultural anthropologist, who researches, writes, and teaches on computer hackers and digital activism will share with us part of her research, explaining how online communities can have a big impact on world politics today.

There will also be also a plethora of social events, such as our traditional cheese and wine party, our group photo and our day trip.

The complete schedule can be found at: https://summit.debconf.org/debconf14/

DebConf talks will be broadcast live on the Internet when possible, and videos of the talks will be published on the web along with the presentation slides.

Jessie will ship Linux 3.16

2014-07-30T23:10:00+02:00

The Debian Linux kernel team has discussed and chosen the kernel version to use as a basis for Debian 8 'jessie'.

This will be Linux 3.16, due to be released in early August. Release candidates for Linux 3.16 are already packaged and available in the experimental suite.

If you maintain a package that is closely bound to the kernel version - a kernel module or a userland application that depends on an unstable API - please ensure that it is compatible with Linux 3.16 prior to the freeze date (5th November, 2014). Incompatible packages are very likely to be removed from testing and not included in 'jessie'.

My kernel module package doesn't build on 3.16 and upstream is not interested in supporting this version. What can I do? The kernel team might be able to help you with forward-porting, but also try Linux Kernel Newbies or the mailing list(s) for the relevant kernel subsystem(s).
There's an important new kernel feature that ought to go into jessie, but it won't be in 3.16. Can you still add it? Maybe - sometimes this is easy and sometimes it's too disruptive to the rest of the kernel. Please contact the team on the debian-kernel mailing list or by opening a wishlist bug.
Will Linux 3.16 get long term support from upstream? The Linux 3.16-stable branch will not be maintained as a longterm branch at kernel.org. However, the Ubuntu kernel team will continue to maintain that branch, following the same rules for acceptance and review, until around April 2016. Ben Hutchings is planning to continue maintenance from then until the end of regular support for 'jessie'.

Introducing the Debian Continuous Integration project

2014-06-12T00:01:00+02:00

Debian is a big system. At the time of writing, the unstable distribution has more than 20,000 source packages, building more then 40,000 binary packages on the amd64 architecture. The number of inter-dependencies between binary packages is mind-boggling: the entire dependency graph for the amd64 architecture contains a little more than 375,000 edges. If you want to expand the phrase "package A depends on package B", there are more than 375,000 pairs of packages A and B that can be used.

Every one of these dependencies is a potential source of problems. A library changes the semantics of a function call, and then programs using that library that assumed the previous semantics can start to malfunction. A new version of your favorite programming language comes out, and a program written in it no longer works. The number of ways in which things can go wrong goes on and on.

With an ecosystem as big as Debian, it is just impossible to stop these problems from happening. What we can do is trying to detect when they happen, and fix them as soon as possible.

The Debian Continuous Integration project was created to address exactly this problem. It will continuously run test suites for source packages when any of their dependencies is updated, as well as when a new version of the package itself is uploaded to the unstable distribution. If any problems that can be detected by running an automated test suite arise, package maintainers can be notified in a matter of hours.

Antonio Terceiro has posted on his blog an introduction to the project with a more detailed description of the project, its evolution since January 2014 when it was first introduced, an explanation of how the system works, and how maintainers can enable test suites for their packages. You might also want to check the documentation directly.

DebConf14 - Call for talks, BoFs and events

2014-06-08T22:30:00+02:00

The Debian project is excited to announce that we are now accepting presentations, discussion sessions and tutorials for our DebConf14 conference which will take place in Portland State University, Oregon, USA from 23 to 31 August.

Submitting an event

To submit an event, first register as an attendee for DebConf14 in the conference management system. If you have any doubts or have problems with the registration process please check the Registration FAQ.

After registering, go to the event submission page, or click on the Create an event option from the management system. Describe your submission in the web form. The most common event types are Lecture or Open Discussion (BoF). Please include a short title (to make it easy to produce a compact schedule) and an engaging description of the event.

Tracks

We will organize some talks into thematic tracks. If you have a proposal for a DebConf track, such as "Debian ARM", "Debian Infrastructure", or "Community Outreach" please contact talks@debconf.org.

If you would like to be a track coordinator, please volunteer on the given mail address.

Format of the events

A regular session will be 45 minutes long, including time for questions. There will be a 15 minute breaks between events.

Submissions are not limited to traditional talks: you could propose a performance, art installation, debate, or anything else. If you have any specific requirements for your event, please send an email to talks@debconf.org with the details of your requirements and be sure to mention your event title in the subject.

Deadline

While we ask speakers to submit their events before the deadline of 7 July 2014, 23:59:59 UTC, late submissions will continue to be accepted for scheduling until the end of DebConf. All attendees will have an opportunity to schedule ad-hoc events during DebConf itself if we have space for them. Very promising late submissions may be considered for inclusion in the main conference. Note that ad-hoc events have a much lower chance of video archiving, and streaming, so if you want these services it's better to get your submissions in early.

DebConf official events will be broadcast live on the Internet when possible, and videos of the talks will be published on the web along with the presentation slides and papers.

For private communication regarding your talk, or for more general ideas, or questions about the event and talks, please mail us

We hope to you see you and share some good times with you this year in Portland during DebConf14!

Debian welcomes its 2014 GSoC students!

2014-04-22T11:00:00+02:00

We're excited to announce that 19 students have been selected to work with Debian during the Google Summer of Code this year!

Here is the list of accepted students and projects:

Abhishek Bhattacharjee: AppStream/DEP-11 for the Debian Archive
Alexander Ovchinnikov: Debian built with clang
Andrew Schurman: Recursively building Java dependencies from source
Arthur Marble: Debian built with clang
Brandon Fairchild: Debian Continuous Integration - Web Interface
Clément Schreiner: Provide some metrics in Debile
Dionysios Fryganas: Project import/export for Alioth (FusionForge)
Floris-Andrei Stoica-Marcu: Get Muon ready
Ian S. Donnelly: Improve Configuration Upgrade Mechansim with Elektra
Joseph Bisch: Debian metrics portal
Juliana Louback: WebRTC portal for the Debian community
Kumar Sukhani: Integrate Debian with Android
Lucas Kanashiro: Debian Continuous Integration
Pavol Rohár: mhonarc replacement for lists.debian.org
Peter Pentchev: Bootstrappable Debian
Plamen Aleksandrov: Improve Debian on mipsel
Sergey Davidoff: Package elementary software
Sphinx Jiang: Improve Debian on mips64el
Xilin Sun: Improve Debian on mipsel

As always, you will be able to follow their progress on the SoC coordination mailing-list

Congratulations to all the students and let's make sure we all have an amazing summer!

DPL election is over, Lucas Nussbaum re-elected

2014-04-14T08:10:00+02:00

The Debian Project Leader election has concluded and the winner is Lucas Nussbaum. Of a total of 1003 developers, 401 developers voted using the Condorcet method.

More information about the result is available in the Debian Project Leader Elections 2014 page.

The new term for the project leader will start on April 17th and expire on April 17th 2015.

Debian Project elects Javier Merino Cacho as Project Leader

2014-04-01T12:25:00+02:00

This post was an April Fools' Day joke.

In accordance with its constitution, the Debian Project has just elected Javier Merino Cacho as Debian Project Leader. More than 80% of voters put him as their first choice (or equal first) on their ballot papers.

Javier's large majority over his opponents shows how his inspiring vision for the future of the Debian project is largely shared by the other developers. Lucas Nussbaum and Neil McGovern also gained a lot of support from Debian project members, both coming many votes ahead of the None of the above ballot choice.

Javier has been a Debian Developer since February 2012 and, among other packages, works on keeping the mercurial package under control, as mercury is very poisonous for trouts.

After it was announced that he had won this year's election, Javier said: I'm flattered by the trust that Debian members have put in me. One of the main points in my platform is to remove the "Debian is old and boring" image. In order to change that, my first action as DPL is to encourage all Debian Project Members to wear a clown red nose in public.

Among others, the main points from his platform are mainly related to improve the communication style in mailing lists through an innovative filter called aponygisator, to make Debian less "old and boring", as well as solve technical issues among developers with barehanded fights. Betting on the fights will be not only allowed but encouraged for fundraising reasons.

Javier also contemplated the use of misleading talk titles such as The use of cannabis in contemporary ages: a practical approach and Real Madrid vs Barcelona to lure new users and contributors to Debian events.

Javier's platform was collaboratively written by a team of communication experts and high profile Debian contributors during the last DebConf. It has since evolved thanks to the help of many other contributors.

Debian Project Leader elections 2014

2014-03-21T00:00:00+01:00

It's again that time of the year for the Debian Project: the elections of its Project Leader! Starting on March 31st, and during the following two weeks, the Debian Developers will vote to choose the person who will guide the project for one year.

Among this year's candidates there is the current DPL, Lucas Nussbaum, who admits that "the workload involved in being the DPL is just huge," and motivates his nomination with the need for stability in the project in this release cycle, especially after the difficult decision about the default init system. In his platform, Lucas speaks of technical and social steps to improve the project: from reproducible builds for a more secure archive to a renewed effort to run Debian on new platforms (especially smartphone and tablets); from a more welcoming approach to prospective contributors to an easier collaboration with organizations.

The only other candidate left after Gergely Nagy withdrew his nomination, is former Release Manager Neil McGovern. Neil's platform focuses mainly on the need to "ensure that we cater to our users, and there's millions of them. From those running the latest software in unstable, to people who simply want a rock solid core release." In his opinion "the size of Debian is increasing, and will reach a point where we're unable to guarantee basic compatibility with other packages, or the length of time it takes to do so becomes exponentially longer, unless something changes." To fix this problem, Neil proposes the implementation of PPAs (Personal Package Archives), the modernisation of the current build and infrastructure system as well as generally supporting the various teams.

The campaigning period will last until March 30th: the candidates are already engaged in debates and discussions on the debian-vote mailing list where they'll reply to questions from users and contributors.

Working in a possible LTS for Debian Squeeze

2014-03-20T11:15:00+01:00

The Debian Security Team announced in the bits from their last meeting that they're considering to ask for the addition of a new suite to provide long term support (LTS) for Squeeze.

Quoting their announcement:

It needs to be pointed out that for this effort to be sustainable actual contributions by interested parties are required. squeeze-lts is not something that will magically fall from the sky. If you're dependent/interested in extended security support you should make an effort to contribute, either by contributing on your own or by paying a Debian developer/consultant to contribute for you. The security team itself is driving the effort, NOT doing it. Some team members will contribute to it individually, however.
Anyone interested in contributing, please get in touch with team@security.debian.org. We'll setup an initial coordination list with all interested parties. All policies / exact work will be sorted out there.

This means this is still not something settled and if you or your company is insterested in joining this effort, you should contact the security team ASAP. So they can see if there is enough people and resources to launch the LTS.

Video streams for the MiniDebConf 2014 Barcelona

2014-03-15T12:10:00+01:00

This is just a quick note to tell you that the video stream of the Barcelona MiniDebConf will be available at the following URL:

http://bcn2014.video.debconf.org/

If you were not able to make it to Barcelona, now you can still follow from home!

May you have a productive and joyful MiniDebConf - and thanks for volunteering and talking if you do so! The MiniDebConf is what you make it.

Call for participants in the Google Summer of Code for Debian

2014-02-25T11:15:00+01:00

The Google Summer of Code is a program that allows post-secondary students aged 18 and older to earn a stipend writing code for Free and Open Source Software projects during the summer.

Debian has just been accepted as a mentoring organization for this year's program! We're looking for students and mentors to make this GSoC in Debian the best ever!

Eligible students, now is the time to take a look at our project ideas list, engage with the mentors for the projects you find interesting, and start working on your application! For more information, please read the FAQ and the Program Timeline on Google's website.

Mentors for prospective projects can still submit proposals on the project ideas list. You also need to send an email to the mailing list linked below to present your project in a few words. Feel also free to propose yourself as a co-mentor for one of the listed projects, more help is always welcome!

If you are interested, we encourage you to come and chat with us on irc (#debian-soc on irc.oftc.net), or to send an email to the SoC coordination mailing-list (subscribe). Most of the Debian-specific GSoC information can be found on our wiki pages, but don't be afraid to ask us directly on irc or via email.

We're looking forward to work with an amazing team of students and mentors again this summer!

Invitation to the MiniDebConf 2014 Barcelona: 15-16 March 2014

2014-02-24T12:00:00+01:00

Debian Women will hold a MiniDebConf in Barcelona on Saturday 15th and Sunday 16th of March, 2014. Everyone is invited to both talks and social events, but the speakers will all be people who identify themselves as female. This is not a conference about women in Free Software, or women in Debian, rather a usual Debian Mini-DebConf where all the speakers are women.

The talks schedule has already been published. It is going to be an exciting event, packed with interesting talks for all audiences, in a beautiful venue, in one of the most famous European cities.

Registration is not mandatory, but strongly encouraged, as it helps the event's organisation and logistics. Please, register in the wiki.

We are still raising funds to cover the costs of running the conference and to offer travel sponsorship to people who can't pay for it. Please, consider donating any amount you can in our crowd-funding campaign, or contact us if you would like to become a sponsor.

The conference organisers want to thank the organisations that have already became sponsors, making this event possible, and specially our Platinum sponsor, Google; our Gold sponsors, Càtedra de Programari Lliure - Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Blue Systems and our Silver sponsors, CAtalan LInux Users, CAPSiDE and Fluendo.

For more information, visit the website of the event: http://bcn2014.mini.debconf.org

skyrocketing how-can-i-help popcon count

2014-02-10T21:00:00+01:00

This is a repost from Stefano Zacchiroli's post

how-can-i-help by Lucas Nussbaum is one of the best things that happened in the area of attracting contributions to Debian in quite a while. It can be used both as a standalone tool to list opportunities for contributing to Debian which are related to your installed packages, and as an APT hook (which is also the default configuration) that at each upgrade will inform you of new contribution opportunities.

how-can-i-help is great for newbies who are looking for ways to give back to Debian which are a good match for their skills: among other things, how-can-i-help shows bugs tagged "gift" related to packages you use.

how-can-i-help is also great for experienced developers, as it allows them to find out, in a timely manner, that packages they use are in dire need of help: RC bugs, pending removals, adoptions needed, requests for sponsor, etc. (As highly unscientific evidence: I've noticed a rather quick turnover of RFA/O/ITA bugs on packages installed on my machine. I suspect how-can-i-help is somehow responsible for that, due to the fact that it increases awareness of ongoing package issues directly with the people using them.)

So, if you haven't yet, please apt-get install how-can-i-help RIGHT NOW.

I daresay that we should aim at installing how-can-i-help by default on all Debian machines, but that might be an ambitious initial goal. In the meantime I'll settle for making how-can-i-help's popcon count skyrocket. As of today, it looks like this:

which is definitely too low for my taste. Please spread the word about how-can-i-help. And let's see what we can collectively do to that graph.

how-can-i-help is just a tiny teeny helper, but I'm convinced it can do wonders in liberating dormant contributions to the Debian Project.

Debian.org enabled for SIP federation and WebRTC, XMPP/Jabber to follow

2014-01-28T17:45:00+01:00

Debian System Administrators working in conjunction with pkg-voip team member Daniel Pocock have set up a SIP proxy and TURN server for debian.org.

Specifically, the SIP proxy provides a way for Debian Developers to use their Debian email ID as a SIP address for making calls to other project members and exchanging calls with any other domain that is enabled for SIP. The repro SIP proxy from reSIProcate has been chosen for this project.

The TURN server provides a mechanism for users of SIP or XMPP (Jabber) to relay audio and video streams through a public IP address when necessary, eliminating many of the quality issues that arise when NAT devices block the media streams in one or both directions.

The service allows the users to connect directly with the SIP device or softphone of their choosing, including many of those packaged in Debian such as Jitsi and Empathy or third party solutions like Lumicall or CSipSimple on Android. The SIP proxy also includes a WebRTC interface, allowing Debian Developers to immediately try WebRTC voice and video calls without installing or configuring any software of their own other than a web browser.

A second stage of the project involves providing an XMPP (Jabber) server with similar capabilities for federated communications between debian.org users and other domains. Further details will be announced in the weeks ahead.

It is a significant feature of the Debian Project philosophy that we can operate the entire project using free software, specifically, using software available in Debian packages running on our own infrastructure and without a dependency on third party cloud solutions.These new services for project members fulfill those expectations. It is particularly relevant for situations where real-time communication (voice or video) collaboration takes place with third parties such as applicants for Google Summer of Code, Outreach Program for Women, sponsors, media and other free software projects.

Project specific details and a user guide are available now on the Debian Wiki at http://wiki.debian.org/UnifiedCommunications/DebianDevelopers

Call for Proposals for the MiniDebConf 2014 Barcelona

2014-01-15T19:40:00+01:00

Debian Women will hold a MiniDebConf in Barcelona on March 15-16, 2014. Everyone is invited to both talks and social events, but the speakers will all be people who identify themselves as female. This is not a conference about women in Free Software, or women in Debian, rather a usual Debian Mini-DebConf where all the speakers are women.

Debian Women invites submissions of proposals for papers, presentations, discussion sessions and tutorials for the event. Submissions are not limited to traditional talks: you could propose a performance, an art installation, a debate or anything else. All talks are welcome, whether newbie or very advanced level. Please, forward this call to potential speakers and help us make this event a great success!

Please send your proposals to proposals@bcn2014.mini.debconf.org. Don't forget to include in your message: your name or nick the title of the event, description, language, and any other information that might be useful. Please submit your proposal(s) as soon as possible.

For more information, visit the website of the event: http://bcn2014.mini.debconf.org

We hope to see you in Barcelona!

Last days to donate to Debian Outreach Program for Women

2013-11-10T00:00:00+01:00

The matching program to help fund Debian participation in OPW will end in 6 days (November 14th). We need your help, and still have a ways to go to reach our funding targets. Please consider donating today!

The rules are simple:

for each dollar donated by an individual to Debian through the mechanism, a sponsor will donate another dollar to Debian's OPW program;
individual donation in USD will be matched only up to 200 USD each;
only donations in USD will be matched;
the sponsor will match the donated funds up to a maximum total of 2500 USD;
all money raised through this program will be earmarked for OPW participation, either in 2013 or in the future;
this program will be in place until Nov 14th, so please act quickly!

If you'd like to participate as intern, the application deadline is very near (November 11th). You can find here more info on how to apply.

Ada Lovelace Day: meet some of the "women behind Debian"!

2013-10-15T00:01:00+02:00

Today is Ada Lovelace Day:

"Ada Lovelace Day is about sharing stories of women - whether engineers, scientist, technologists or mathematicians - who have inspired you to become who you are today. The aim is to create new role models for girls and women in these male-dominated fields by raising the profile of other women in STEM". source

To celebrate, we asked to some of the "women behind Debian" to share their stories with us. Enjoy!

Ana Guerrero Lopez (ana)

Who are you?

I'm a 30-something years old geek. I'm from Andalusia, Spain but live in France.

What do you do in Debian?

I work mostly on my packages, in sponsoring new people's packages and in this very blog you're reading now. I also maintain an unofficial Google+ page about Debian. At $PAID job, I work in an internal Debian distribution so from time to time, I get the opportunity to contribute back some of the stuff we do there.

How and why did you start contributing to Debian?

I started using Debian around 2003 switching from Mandrake. I was a happy Debian user when the Debian Women project started in the summer 2004. When I saw the project announced, I asked myself why I wasn't contributing to Debian and the rest is history... in a couple of weeks it'll be my 7 years DD-versary! If for some reason you want a longer reply to this question, read here.

Beatrice

Who are you?

I am a PhD student with a degree in Biology. I am a computer fan since my first C64 and I am a self-taught computer geek wanna-be. And I am a bug fan - not software bugs, real bugs :)

What do you do in Debian?

I work on translations - doing the translation work itself, but also reviewing other translators' work and helping in coordinating the translation effort.

How and why did you start contributing to Debian?

I started using Linux because I liked the idea of an open source operative system based on collaboration and I began reviewing open source software translations. Since my first Linux system was Debian Potato and I sticked to Debian ever since, it only seemed natural to focus my translation work on Debian.

Christine Caulfield

Who are you?

My name is Christine Caulfield. My day job is principal software engineer at Red Hat working on the cluster infrastructure components corosync & pacemaker. Outside computing I'm a musician and sound engineer. I play violin with lots of technology attached, and love avant garde music.

What do you do in Debian?

I'm not that active on Debian any more due to pressure of time, and maturity of the packages I work on. I currently maintain the, little-used, DECnet userspace packages and the, even less used I suspect, mopd bootloader. I used to maintain lvm2 for a while but dropped that a few years ago.

How and why did you start contributing to Debian?

My initial reasons for joining Debian were slightly selfish, to find a home for the DECnet project that I was heavily involved in at the time. I was a keep Debian user and people wanted a distribution where the software was easy to set up. DECnet is quite complicated for users to configure, being a totally independant networking stack to IP and so OS support is needed. Debian seemed like the logical place to make this happen. As mentioned above I got quite involved for a time and maintained other packages too. I picked up lvm2 because I was on the lvm2 dev team at work in Red Hat and as it was a new package at that time I seemed a logical choice.

Elena Grandi (valhalla)

Who are you?

I'm a 30-something years old geek and Free Software enthusiast from Italy.

What do you do in Debian?

I'm currently maintaining a few packages (2 python modules and a python program) as a sponsored uploader; I'm also slowly looking around for other things to do (by preference technical, but not limited to packaging), with the aim to spend more time contributing to Debian.

How and why did you start contributing to Debian?

For a while I had being distro-hopping between "fun" distributions (the ones that break now and then) on the desktop while using Debian stable on the home server and in chroots. I was already doing marginal contributions to those distributions, where finding stuff that was missing was easy, but my perception as a stable user was that Debian was already working fine and probably didn't really need any help. Then I started to socialize on IRC with some DDs and DMs, and realized that my perception was superficial and that in reality there were dark holes in the depths of the archive where Evil festered and prospered and... ok, sorry, I got carried away :) Anyway, since I was actually using Debian more and more I decided to start contributing: I read documentation, I attended the useful IRC sessions on #debian-women and decided that it was probably best not to add new stuff, but look for things that I used and that needed help. Then nothing happened for a while, because finding stuff that doesn't work is hard (at least on my mostly textual systems). Then one day I was trying to write a python script that needed to verify gpg signed messages; it had to run on my Debian server, so I was trying to use python-pyme and its documentation was painful to use, while I remembered an earlier attempt using python-gnupg that was much more pythonic, but not available in Debian. In a fit of anger I decided to forgo all of my good intentions and actually add a new package: I checked the sources for problems, packaged, sent it to mentors@d-o, got reviews, fixed problems, resent and finally got sponsored and well, everything started.

Francesca Ciceri (madamezou)

Who are you?

I'm Francesca, a 30-something Italian graduated in Social Sciences.

What do you do in Debian?

I'm a (non uploading) Debian Developer since 2011 and have been DPN editor, press officer, webmaster for www.debian.org and translator for the Italian l10n team. Recently, due to time constraints, I had to reduce my involvement and now only work on two things: writing/editing articles for bits.debian.org together with Ana Guerrero, and creating subtitles for the DebConf talks, in the DebConf Subs team.

How and why did you start contributing to Debian?

Basically thanks to the sudden abundance of free time - due to an health problem - and the desire to give something back to this wonderful operating system. After that, I found out that Debian is not only a great OS but also a very special community. Today, some of my dearest friends are people I met through Debian. :)

Laura Arjona

Who are you?

I live in Madrid (Spain), and work as IT Assistant in the Technical University of Madrid (UPM). I'm married and I have a 4-years-old son.

What do you do in Debian?

In 2012 I started to clean spam and to translate Debian web pages into Spanish. I also follow the work of the web and publicity team, I hope I'll get more involved there too. And of course, I'm in Debian Women :)

How and why did you start contributing to Debian?

I'm using Debian at work since 2007 (servers), and in my desktops since 2010. I like very much that it is a community distro and I wanted to participate. I was already doing translations in other (small) free software projects, so I began here too. The Debian-Women list, the planet, and people in identi.ca helped me to learn a lot and feel part of the community even when I was not contributing yet.

Mònica Ramírez Arceda (monica)

Who are you?

My name is Mònica Ramírez Arceda and I am an enthusiast of free software and sharing knowledge cultures: for me it's a kind of philosophy of life. I studied Maths a long time ago but ended up working as a developer for some years. Now I'm working as an IT teacher.

What do you do in Debian?

Debian is a huge project, so you can help in various scopes. Mainly, I work on packaging, fixing wnpp bug inconsistencies in BTS and helping in spam cleaning of the mailing lists. But I also enjoy doing some non-technical work from time to time: the project I am just now involved is organizing, with the rest of Debian Catalan community, a local team to propose Barcelona as the venue for a minidebconf where all the speakers will be women.

How and why did you start contributing to Debian?

In 2000 I discovered Free Software world and I fell deeply in love with its philosophy. Since then, I've been trying to do my best in different activities, like spreading the word, giving free courses, helping collectives and friends in technical stuff (from installing Debian to developing some helping apps for them)... but two years ago I was looking forward to join a free software project and I decided to try Debian, since it has been my first and only distro in my day-to-day life for about ten years. So, I wanted to give back Debian all what it had offered to me, but.... I thought I couldn't (hey, Debian is for real hackers, not for you little ant!), but I started to adopt some orphaned packages, do some QA uploads, fix some RC bugs, talk with some Debian Developers that helped me and encouraged me more than I expected, I traveled to my first Debconf... And one thing takes you to the other, and on March 2012 I became a DD. Now, I'm glad to see that everything that frightened me is not so scary :-)

Happy 20th birthday Debian!

2013-08-16T00:05:00+02:00

Today is Debian's 20 anniversary. This anniversary would have been impossible without a strong community of users and developers. That's why for its commemoration, we asked the Debian community what Debian meant to them. Below you have a selection of the answers we got.

Since I run Debian on my computers, I do not play anymore to 3D shooting games, not because of the lack of Free 3D drivers, but because developing Debian is more fun and addictive.

Debian is a truly community based distro which is devoted to FOSS ideas and standards. It perfectly works on high variety of hardware. Users from all over the world have been using Debian and contributing to it during 20 years. And I am proud to be one of them. Happy Birthday, Debian!

When I considered switching to Linux I asked friends which distribution to choose. I was told skip other distributions that were considered more newbie-friendly at the time and go straight to Debian instead. It might be more work initially, they said, but it would save me the hassle of switching to Debian later on, which I would inevitably do. Turns out they were right. I started my Linux experience more than ten years ago with Debian and have yet to see a better Linux distribution.

[...] You are a worldwide community of volunteers working together for 20 years now. To me this is an encouraging example and, given the sorry state of the world we live in, more important than the technical quality of the operating system. I wish you another successful twenty years and to stay as independent as you are.

I initially started in Debian as it was an interesting technical challenge. Over the years the community and having good standards around what Free Software is has become more important.

As a user of Debian for 14 years, and a former Debian Developer for 10, I would like to wish a happy birthday to the best project on the internet, and the best Linux distribution ever. Thanks for all of your support over the years!

"Rock Solid Stability and Absolute Freedom" Thats what Debian means to me.

Debian gives me a feeling that I am using the best linux has to offer. You know your machine is in safe hands.

As a long time Debian user and sometimes supporter [...] I wish Debian all the best for next 20 years and beyond! Debian is the universal operating system. And it's free (and not just as in beer ;-)

Debian is an awesome combination of obsessive high quality software and software freedom. It's a pleasure to be able to use and contribute to this project. Thanks to all for their excellent work! Cheers to 2**20 years more!

[...] I am so very thankful to all of the people who have contributed to and continue to contribute to such a wonderful ecosystem of tools. I love the commitment to the long term goals of security, freedom and transparency with respect to the computer systems that we all use and rely upon and the information that we store on them.

Debian is the operating system that makes me free.

Debian is a family gathered around great idea. Its pure love.

Martin Michlmayr gets the O'Reilly Open Source Award

2013-07-30T14:00:00+02:00

Longtime Debian Developer Martin Michlmayr was named as one of 6 winners of the 2013 O’Reilly Open Source Awards. This Award recognize individual contributors who have demonstrated exceptional leadership, creativity, and collaboration in the development of Open Source Software.

Martin received the award for his investment in Debian where he served as Debian Project Leader for two terms between 2003 and 2005.

Congratulations tbm!

all Debian source are belong to us

2013-07-02T18:50:00+02:00

This is a verbatim repost from Stefano Zacchiroli's post

TL;DR: go to http://sources.debian.net and enjoy.

Debsources is a new toy I've been working on at IRILL together with Matthieu Caneill. In essence, debsources is a simple web application that allows to publish an unpacked Debian source mirror on the Web.

You can deploy Debsources where you please, but there is a main instance at http://sources.debian.net (sources.d.n for short) that you will probably find interesting. sources.d.n follows closely the Debian archive in two ways:

it is updated 4 times a day to reflect the content of the Debian archive
it contains sources coming from official Debian suites: the usual ones (from oldstable to experimental), *-updates (ex volatile), *-proposed-updates, and *-backports (from Wheezy on)

Via sources.d.n you can therefore browse the content of Debian source packages with usual code viewing features like syntax highlighting. More interestingly, you can search through the source code (of unstable only, though) via integration with http://codesearch.debian.net. You can also use sources.d.n programmatically to query available versions or link to specific lines, with the possibility of adding contextual pop-up messages (example).

In fact, you might have stumbled upon sources.d.n already in the past few days, via other popular Debian services where it has already been integrated. In particular: codesearch.d.n now defaults to show results via sources.d.n, and the PTS has grown new "browse source code" hyperlinks that point to it. If you've ideas of other Debian services where sources.d.n should be integrated, please let me know.

I find Debsources and sources.d.n already quite useful but, as it often happens, there is still a lot TODO. Obviously, it is all Free Software (released under GNU AGPLv3). Do not hesitate to report new bugs and, better, to submit patches for the outstanding ones.

Acknowledgements

Matthieu Caneill is the main developer of Debsources web front-end; sources.d.n wouldn't exist without him.
others have already contributed patches to integrate sources.d.n with other services, in particular:
many thanks to Michael Stapelberg (for codesearch.d.n integration), and
Paul Wise (for PTS integration).
a full list of contributors is available and eagerly waiting for new additions
IRILL has kindly provided sponsoring for Matthieu's initial development work on Debsources, and offered both the server and hosting facilities that power sources.d.n

PS in case you were wondering: at present sources.d.n requires ~381 GB of disk space to hold all uncompressed source packages, plus ~83 GB for the local (compressed) source mirror

Remove unofficial debian-multimedia.org repository from your sources

2013-06-14T00:10:00+02:00

The unofficial third party repository Debian Multimedia stopped using the domain debian-multimedia.org some months ago. The domain expired and it is now registered again by someone unknown to Debian. (If we're wrong on this point, please sent us an email so we can take over the domain! ;) )

This means that the repository is no longer safe to use, and you should remove the related entries from your sources.list file.

After all, the need of an external repository for multimedia related packages has been greatly reduced with the release of Wheezy, which features many new and updated codecs and multimedia players.

Not sure if you're using the debian-multimedia repository? You can easily check it by running:

grep -i debian-multimedia.org /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*

If you can see debian-multimedia.org line in output, you should remove all the lines including it.

Debian welcomes its 2013 crop of GSoC students!

2013-05-27T21:45:00+02:00

We are proud to announce that 16 students have been accepted to work on improving Debian this summer through the Google Summer of Code! This is great news, following our 15 accepted students in 2012, and 9 accepted students in 2011.

Here is the list of accepted students and projects:

Aarsh Shah: Improvements to Debian Search and the Search Interface
Aron Xu: ZFS on Linux integration
Boris Bobrov: Debian Metrics Portal
Catalin Usurelu: Enabling free multimedia real-time communications (RTC) with Debian
Eleanor Chen: MIPS N32/N64 ABI Port
Emmanouil Kiagias: Redesign metapackage creation for Debian Blends
Eugenio Cano-Manuel: Leiningen & Clojure packaging
Fabian Grünbichler: Add CROTP support to oath-toolkit and dynalogin
Gustavo Alkmim: Bootstrappable Debian
Justus Winter: Debian GNU/Hurd Debianish initialization
Lei Wang: OpenRC init system in Debian
Léo Cavaillé: scan-build on the Debian archive
Marko Lalic: PTS rewrite in Django
Pawel Sarbinowski: Debian Android Application
Shuxiong Ye: OpenJDK and Debian
Simon Chopin: Implementation of message passing in the Debian infrastructure

If you're interested in one of the projects, please follow the links and talk directly to the students or the mentors, or come hang out with us on IRC.

Welcome everyone, and let's make sure we all have an amazing summer!

Security updates for the X Window System client libraries

2013-05-25T01:30:00+02:00

If you see a bunch of X.org packages upgrades pending in your Squeeze or brand new Wheezy system, don't panic!

Ilja van Sprundel, a security researcher from IOActive, has discovered a large number of issues in the various X client libraries and he has worked with X.Org's security team to analyze, confirm, and fix these issues. You can find more information in the security advisory from X.org.

The Debian Security and X.org teams have quickly updated all the affected packages in Squeeze and Wheezy. You can see the full list of updates in the debian-security-announce mailing list archives.

Debian GNU/Hurd 2013 released!

2013-05-22T22:50:00+02:00

It is with huge pleasure that the Debian GNU/Hurd team announces the release of Debian GNU/Hurd 2013. This is a snapshot of Debian "sid" at the time of the Debian "wheezy" release (May 2013), so it is mostly based on the same sources. It is not an official Debian release, but it is an official Debian GNU/Hurd port release.

The installation ISO images can be downloaded from Debian Ports in the usual three Debian flavors: NETINST, CD, DVD. Besides the friendly Debian installer, a pre-installed disk image is also available, making it even easier to try Debian GNU/Hurd.

Debian GNU/Hurd is currently available for the i386 architecture with more than 10.000 software packages available (more than 75% of the Debian archive, and more to come!).

Please make sure to read the configuration information, the FAQ, and the translator primer to get a grasp of the great features of GNU/Hurd.

Due to the very small number of developers, our progress of the project has not been as fast as other successful operating systems, but we believe to have reached a very decent state, even with our limited resources.

We would like to thank all the people who have worked on GNU/Hurd over the past decades. There were not many people at any given time (and still not many people today, please join!), but in the end a lot of people have contributed one way or another. Thanks everybody!

This article appeared originally at GNU Hurd news and in News about Debian GNU/Hurd.

Debian 7.0 Wheezy released!

2013-05-05T04:00:00+02:00

The new stable version of Debian, codenamed Wheezy, is finally here. Main features of Debian 7.0 Wheezy are multiarch support, specific tools to deploy private clouds, a greatly improved installer and a complete set of multimedia codecs and front-ends which remove the need for third-party repositories. For a complete list of new features and updated software, take a look at the official announcement.

Want to give it a try? Check out the live images!

Want to install it? Choose your favourite installation media among Blu-ray Discs, DVDs, CDs and USB sticks.

Already a happy Debian user and you only want to upgrade? You are just an apt-get dist-upgrade away from Wheezy! Find how, reading the installation guide and the release notes.

Some useful links:

Last days for the DebConf13 matching fund!

2013-04-26T15:30:00+02:00

As part of the DebConf13 fundraising efforts, Brandorr Group is funding a matching initiative for DebConf13, which will be in place for 4 more days (through April 30th).

You can donate here!

Please consider donating $100, or even $5 or any amount in between, as we can use all the help we can get to reach our fundraising target. The rules are simple:

for each dollar donated by an individual to DebConf13 though this mechanism, Brandorr Group will donate another dollar;
individual donations will be matched only up to 100USD each;
only donations in USD will be matched;
Brandorr Group will match the donated funds up to a maximum total of 5000 USD.

This generous offer will only stay in place through the end of April 30th.

Please act quickly, and help spread the world!

Release date for Wheezy announced

2013-04-24T21:04:00+02:00

Neil McGovern, on behalf of the Debian Release Team, announced the target date of the weekend of 4th/5th May for the release of Debian 7.0 "Wheezy".

Now it's time to organize some Wheezy release parties to celebrate the event and show all your Debian love!

DPL election is over, congratulations Lucas Nussbaum!

2013-04-14T12:25:00+02:00

The Debian Project Leader election has concluded and the winner is Lucas Nussbaum. Of a total of 988 developers, 390 developers voted using the Condorcet method.

More information about the result is available in the Debian Project Leader Elections 2013 page.

The new term for the project leader will start on April 17th and expire on April 17th 2014.

Call for participants in Debian for the Google Summer of Code

2013-04-09T21:30:00+02:00

The Google Summer of Code is a program that allows post-secondary students aged 18 and older to earn a stipend writing code for Free and Open Source Software projects during the summer.

For the eighth time, Debian has just been accepted as a mentoring organization for this year's program. If you're an eligible student, now is the time to take a look at our project ideas list, engage with the mentors for the projects you find interesting, and start working on your application! Please read the FAQ and the Program Timeline on Google's website.

If you are interested, we encourage you to come and chat with us on irc (#debian-soc on irc.oftc.net), or to send an email to the SoC coordination mailing-list. Most of the GSoC related information in Debian can be found on our wiki pages, but feel free to ask us directly on irc or via email.

We're looking forward to work with amazing students again this summer!

Debian joins Free & Open Source Software Outreach Program for Women

2013-04-08T08:01:00+02:00

The GNOME Foundation started the Free & Open Source Software Outreach Program for Women, OPW, in 2010. In the January-April 2013 round, many other FOSS organizations joined the program. We are happy to announce that Debian will also join in the next round from June-September and we'll offer one internship.

You can find more details about Debian's participation in the program at Debian OPW page.

Call for mentors and projects

OPW allows applicants to work on any kind of project, including coding, design, marketing, web development... The Debian Google Summer of Code projects will be offered also as possible projects for OPW, but GSoC only allows coding projects. If you have any idea of a non-coding project and you want to mentor it, please contact us in the soc-coordination mailing list adding [OPW] in subject.

OPW works in the same way as GSoC except Google doesn't play a part here. The same advice that is provided for GSoC mentors works for OPW mentors.

Call for participants

The main goal of this program is to increase the number of women in FOSS, so all women who are not yet a Debian Developer or a Debian Maintainer are encouraged to apply. There are no age restrictions and applicants don't need to be a student.

If you want to apply, you must follow three steps:

Choose a project from this list. There are two lists, one for GSoC and another with non-coding tasks that can be only offered by the OPW. Those lists may change and add or remove more projects in the next few weeks.
Make a small contribution to Debian. Projects will add a task the applicant must complete as part of the pre-selection process. If no task is provided, you are welcome to ask the mentors of the project. You can also make a different extra task of the one listed to show your skills and interest.
Create a page in the Debian wiki with your application. You can do so under pseudonym, but in that case, please give us information about yourself privately by email to the coordinators listed in the Debian OPW page!

DebConf14 to be held in Portland, Oregon, USA

2013-04-08T00:01:00+02:00

We are pleased to announce the 15th annual Debian Conference (DebConf14) is to be held in Portland, Oregon, USA in August 2014, with specific dates yet to be announced.

Portland is an open source hotspot in the Pacific Northwest of the US. It is a technologically savvy community, home to Intel and the adopted home of Linus Torvalds. The city plays host to many Free Software conferences including OSCON, and is where Linux Plumbers originated.

The local team has been involved in mulitple DebConfs in the past, and is excited to bring their experience and ideas to fruition in a city well-positioned to host such a prestigious event.

Improvements in Debian's core infrastructure

2013-04-04T10:00:00+02:00

Thanks to a generous donation by Bytemark Hosting, Debian started deploying machines for its core infrastructure services in a new data center in York, UK.

This hardware and hosting donation will allow the Debian Systems Administration (DSA) team to distribute Debian's core services across a greater number of geographically diverse locations, and improve, in particular, the fault-tolerance and availability of end-user facing services. Additionally, the storage component of this donation will dramatically reduce the storage challenges that Debian currently faces.

The hardware provided by Bytemark Hosting consists of a fully-populated HP C7000 BladeSystem chassis containing 16 server blades:

12 BL495cG5 blades with 2x Opteron 2347 and 64GB RAM each
4 BL465cG7 blades with 2x Opteron 6100 series and 128GB RAM each

and several HP Modular Storage Arrays:

3 MSA2012sa
6 MSA2000 expansion shelves

with 108 drive bays in total, mostly 500GB SATA drives, some 2TB, some 600GB 15kRPM SAS, providing a total of 57 TB.

57 TB today could host roughly 80 times the current Debian archive or 3 times the Debian Snapshot archive. But remember both archives are constantly growing!

Debian Project Leader elections 2013: interview with Moray Allan

2013-03-27T18:54:00+01:00

We have asked Moray Allan, one of the three candidates for DPL elections 2013, to tell our readers about himself and his ideas for the Debian Project.

You can also read the interviews to the other two candidates: Lucas Nussbaum and Gergely Nagy.

Please tell us a little about yourself.

I'm Moray Allan, from Edinburgh in Scotland. I'm 32. After working in academic research for a few years, I'm now working freelance on a wide mixture of topics, with recent projects in Indonesia, Romania and Kuwait. When I'm not working, I'm likely to be found walking through a city or the countryside, or otherwise relaxing at home reading a novel in French or Spanish.

What do you do in Debian and how did you started contributing?

In recent years, most of my Debian time was taken up organising the annual Debian conferences. But I still have a load of packages, mostly connected to an upstream Linux-on-handheld-computers project I was working on before I joined Debian to create packages for it.

Why did you decide to run as DPL?

I've been involved in Debian for about 10 years now, including working for the last few years in DebConf in a way similar to how the DPL acts within overall Debian. Previously I'd ruled out running due to lack of time, but currently I'm in a more flexible work situation. It seems the right time to put myself forward, and see if the ideas in my platform interest project members.

Three keywords to summarise your platform.

Transparency, communication, openness. (Three ways I'd like us to think about teams in Debian.)

What are the biggest challenges that you envision for Debian in the future?

I think the biggest challenges are for free software in general. End-users are moving to more closed hardware -- will our software be able to run on the phones and tablets people are shifting towards? At the same time, end-users and server users are moving to "the cloud", and often depending more heavily on non-free infrastructure outside their own control.

What are, in your opinion, the areas of the project more in need of technical and/or social improvements?

In my platform I give a few ideas about teams and delegations, coordination and mediation, and both internal and external communication, including more organised fundraising. These are areas where I think relatively simple changes can give big benefits.

Why should people vote for you?

I have proven leadership experience within Debian, as I've been working on coordination and mediation tasks for some years already. At the same time, I do regular packaging work, and work in other parts of Debian like the press and publicity teams, so I'm in touch with the experience of normal Debian contributors. People should vote for me if they support my platform, which is about coordination-level changes that I would have no mandate or authority to push through unless I am elected.

Name three tools you couldn't stay without.

APT, emacs, ssh.

What keep you motivated to work in Debian?

I've used Debian on all my computers for a long time, and by now working on the distribution myself feels a natural part of that. Fortunately I'm constantly positively surprised by Debian and by the Debian community.

Are there any other fields where you call yourself a geek, besides computers?

Certainly history (such as the eastern Mediterranean region in late antiquity), languages (including dead ones) and music (especially Josquin to Monteverdi).

Debian Project Leader elections 2013: interview with Lucas Nussbaum

2013-03-27T18:52:00+01:00

We have asked Lucas Nussbaum, one of the three candidates for DPL elections 2013, to tell our readers about himself and his ideas for the Debian Project.

You can also read the interviews to the other two candidates: Gergely Nagy and Moray Allan.

Please tell us a little about yourself.

Hi! I'm a 31 years old french computer geek. In my day job, I'm an assistant professor (Maître de Conférences) of Computer Science at Université de Lorraine.

What do you do in Debian and how did you started contributing?

Like many, I started contributing to Debian by creating and maintaining packages for my own software, in the Ruby team. Then, I discovered that, even if it's not so obvious from the outside, there are a lot of areas in Debian that could use more contributors. So I just started to contribute to more and more things.

There's a list of things I did in Debian in my platform. What I have been doing recently is:

rebuild all packages in Debian on a regular basis in order to identify packages that can no longer be built, and file bugs accordingly. In order to do that efficiently, I use cluster and cloud resources (more info)
develop and maintain Ultimate Debian Database, a data aggregator that collects data in most Debian services so that it is possible to expose it in interesting ways (e.g. find release-critical bugs affecting popular packages).
write and maintain a Debian Packaging tutorial, (packaging-tutorial package), to provide an easy-to-read introduction to packaging in Debian.

Why did you decide to run as DPL?

Two main reasons:

Most of my Debian contributions aim at addressing problems at the distribution scale (cross-distro collaboration, Quality Assurance, data-mining). Being DPL is a great way to contribute to Debian at this level.
the DPL campaign is a great time in Debian where we discuss the project's problems, politics and visions. Being a candidate is in itself a way to contribute to Debian (though it would be better if we had those discussions outside DPL campaigns too).

Three keywords to summarise your platform.

(re-)make Debian the center of the Free Software ecosystem; foster innovation inside Debian; reduce barriers to contributions

What are the biggest challenges that you envision for Debian in the future?

I often have the impression that the project is losing momentum, positive energy, and slowing down. It feels like we are living on the benefits of the past. A lot of very cool things happen in the Debian ecosystem, but very often outside the Debian project (in derivative distributions).

Debian should aim at reinforcing its position in the center of the Free Software ecosystem: it should be the main active intermediary between upstream projects and final users. To achieve that, we need to reinforce the visibility and the impact of Debian. This is extremely important because the values we fight for as a project are often neglected by our derivatives.

What are, in your opinion, the areas of the project more in need of technical and/or social improvements?

Fostering innovation inside Debian: we should be more welcoming towards innovation and experiments inside the project. Often, we merely tolerate them, and bureaucracy makes them hard and slow to conduct. As a result, people tends to innovate outside the Debian project.

Making it easier to contribute to Debian: we compete with more and more projects to attract contributors. While we are already quite good at welcoming new contributors with good documentation and mentoring (much better than people usually think), there's still a lot of room for improvement.

Why should people vote for you?

A great thing in Debian's voting system is that you don't vote "for" or "against" a specific candidate. Instead, due to our use of the Condorcet method, you rank candidates (and also indicate those who you consider suitable for the role by ranking a virtual "None of the above" candidate).

Why am I a good candidate? My previous contributions to Debian show that I have a pretty good understanding of the inner workings of the project, and that I have a track record of managing projects successfully inside Debian. I think that those are two required qualities for a DPL.

Name three tools you couldn't stay without.

vim, mutt, ssh.

What keep you motivated to work in Debian?

Debian is a fantastic project from a technical point of view (focus on technical excellence, lots of interesting challenges), but also from a social point of view: the Debian community is a great community where I have lots of good friends. Also, what's great when you contribute to Debian is that your work has a real impact, and that you see people using stuff you worked on everywhere.

Are there any other fields where you call yourself a geek, besides computers?

I'm not sure this really qualifies as "besides computers", but I've gotten very interested in the OpenStreetMap project lately. I very much enjoy exploring unmapped areas on a mountain bike. It feels like being Christopher Columbus or Marco Polo, but 20 minutes from home. ;) The OpenStreetMap and Debian projects also share many values, such as a great attention to quality and details.

Debian Project Leader elections 2013: interview with Gergely Nagy

2013-03-27T18:50:00+01:00

We have asked Gergely Nagy, one of the three candidates for DPL elections 2013, to tell our readers about himself and his ideas for the Debian Project.

You can also read the interviews to the other two candidates: Lucas Nussbaum and Moray Allan.

Please tell us a little about yourself.

I was born in Hungary, a little bit over three decades ago, as a son of a biochemist and a pharmacist, who gave me the name Gergely Nagy (however, online - and offline too by now - I'm mostly known by my nickname, algernon).

I went on to study human arts (hungarian grammar & literature, in particular), and to support this passion, I work as a software engineer, one who gets paid to work on free software. As such, I'm in a fortunate situation where my hobby supports my passion, and my hobby aligns well with my Debian work too.

What do you do in Debian and how did you started contributing?

At the moment, apart from maintaining a few packages, I'm doing a few other, mostly invisible things, like reassigning misfiled bugs so they don't end up being forgotten; or review newly uploaded packages before they enter the archive, making sure we are allowed to distribute them, and that their quality is up to our standards. I used to do quite a lot of other things, but I chose to spend the past year mostly invisible, learning.

I started contributing by packaging an editor I was using at the time, but quickly ended up adopting another package - things escalated from there quickly.

Why did you decide to run as DPL?

There were two reasons that motivated me to run: one is that I believe I can bring something new to the table, that I can help Debian expand in new directions. The other reason is that I'm always on the lookout for new ways to contribute back to Debian, and being the project leader is a position where I believe I could contribute most at this point in time.

Three keywords to summarise your platform.

Non-technical contributors.

What are the biggest challenges that you envision for Debian in the future?

The biggest challenge is growing up, to become more than a group of computer geeks creating an amazing distribution. To become a community of a wide variety of people, where both computer geeks and art geeks feel equally at home. Yet, at the same time, where we as a project, keep our focus straight, and be the champions of Free Software.

We just need to realize that there's much more to Free Software than the software itself.

What are, in your opinion, the areas of the project more in need of technical and/or social improvements?

I believe that while we do have many areas where we could use technical improvements, we are reasonably safe there, because we do have very skilled technical people to help us solve these problems. We can make our tools better, we can develop our infrastructure better to aid us even more - and so on and so forth. While we need work on many areas, we're on the right track there.

However, when it comes to social issues, we're at a loss. We have serious trouble keeping certain topics civilised on mailing lists, we have trouble attracting women, and we have trouble reaching people who are not naturally exposed to Debian (or Free Software). We could really use a more diverse community, but that requires us to overcome quite a lot of social roadblocks, so to say. Outreach is one particular area where we need much more technical and social improvements.

Why should people vote for you?

People should vote me, because they found my platform, my answers on debian-vote@, and my ideas and goals convincing and worthy to pursue. People should vote me, because they trust I'll be able to serve the project well.

Name three tools you couldn't stay without.

Emacs, git and a pencil. Because with these three, I can pretty much do anything.

What keep you motivated to work in Debian?

The community. Over the years, I had the good fortune to meet with a lot of people I hold in high esteem, whose enthusiasm and motivation I found inspiring. For any other common goals Debian and I may share, in the end, it is the people within Debian that keep me motivated.

Are there any other fields where you call yourself a geek, besides computers?

I'm not quite there yet, but I'm working hard on becoming a human arts geek, or at least a geek of the hungarian language.

Candidates for the Debian Project Leader Elections 2013

2013-03-23T15:00:00+01:00

It's the time of the year when Debian Developers vote for a new Debian Project Leader (DPL). After 3 years as DPL, Stefano Zacchiroli is not running again but we have 3 brave candidates to be his successor:

You can find more information about the candidates by following the link on their names to read their platforms, or in the ongoing discussion in the debian-vote mailing list.

The campaigning period ends next Saturday, March 30th. Debian Developers will vote from March 31st to April 13th. The new term for the project leader will start on April 17th, 2013.

All the information about this vote and the final results will be published at the Debian Project Leader Elections 2013 voting page.

Call for Debian projects and mentors in the GSoC 2013

2013-03-23T00:06:00+01:00

As we did in previous years, the Debian Project is applying to become a mentoring organization during the 2013 edition of the Google Summer of Code program. We're now looking for projects and mentors. If you have an idea for a project, please publish it on the wiki page, filling out the template, and send us an email on the coordination mailing-list.

Google Summer of Code is a program that allows students to work over the summer on free software projects, paid supported financially by Google. In order to be accepted as a mentoring organization, Debian needs to present a good list of projects to be proposed to the students.

If you need help with an idea in drafting a project proposal, or on anything else related to GSoC, feel free to contact us by email at the coordination mailing-list, or on our IRC channel #debian-soc (on irc.debian.org). You can also browse the list of project with confirmed mentors for inspiration.

This post is a brief version of this email from GSoC Admins in Debian

Backports integrated into the main archive

2013-03-18T15:00:00+01:00

This is a repost from Gerfried Fuchs's post

Dear users and supporters of the backports service!

The Backports Team is pleased to announce the next important step on getting backports more integrated. People who are reading debian-infrastructure- announce will have seen that there was an archive maintenance last weekend: starting with wheezy- backports the packages will be accessible from the regular pool instead of a separate one, and all backports uploads will be processed through the regular upload queue (including those for squeeze-backports and squeeze-backports- sloppy).

For Users

What exactly does that mean for you? For users of wheezy, the sources.list entry will be different, a simple substitute of squeeze for wheezy won't work. The new format is:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-backports main

So it is debian instead of debian-backports, and offered through the regular mirror network. Feel invited to check your regular mirror if it carries backports and pull from there.

For Contributers

What does it mean for contributing developers? Uploads for backports are no longer to be pushed to backports-master but to ftp.upload.debian.org, like any other regular package. Also, given that the packages are served from the same archive install there is no need to include the original tarball in the upload any longer because the archive knows it (Squeeze and beyond).

Also, given that the upload goes to the same upload queue, there is only one keyring used anymore, so no more pain with expired or replaced keys. We though still keep the rule of adding your UID to an ACL list (this also includes DM additions). This is mostly only to give us the chance to remind you that uploads to backports are directly available for installation onto stable systems and you thus should take special care there. We carefully tried to take over the old ACLs, in case you can't upload anymore, please tell us so we can look into the issue.

I've mentioned wheezy-backports (and squeeze-backports-sloppy) a few times here already, and you might wonder when it will be available. Technically, it is available from now on. Practically, while you could already upload to it, the set up of the buildd network is more painful than expected, so please allow the Buildd Team some days for setting them up.

The upload rules for wheezy-backports are the same: packages that are in the next suite are accepted. Given that Jessie isn't created yet, we want you to think about whether the package you want to upload will go into Jessie final, and that you are taking a closer look once Jessie is created and the package entered there about the upgradeability. For the time until the suite is available, you can see this as relaxed upload rule.

The same goes for squeeze-backports-sloppy: packages from two suites after Squeeze are acceptable, which turns it into the same relaxed rule as wheezy- backports above. Please also keep in mind that uploads to squeeze-backports- sloppy usually should be accompanied by uploads to wheezy-backports so people are able to upgrade from squeeze-backports-sloppy to wheezy with wheezy- backports.

Thanks

Finally, we want to thank the FTP-Master Team for their fine work on making this happen.

The documentation on backports-master has been updated, and in case of any doubt or question, feel free to ask them on either the debian-backports mailinglist, or in case of sensitive topics ask us directly.

Enjoy!

Rhonda for the Backports Team

Welcome to the Debian Blog!

2013-03-17T15:00:00+01:00

Welcome to the Debian Blog!

Please subscribe to the Atom or RSS feed available from the lateral menu and read the About page if you want to know more about this blog.