This article will show how you can rebuild any debian package. You might need to rebuild a package for various reasons: add/remove some compilation options, make some changes to the sources, or compile a newer version from testing/sid into stable, etc. Regardless of your reason, this can be done very easy using debian tools.

First you will need to have some basic debian building tools installed:
apt-get install devscripts build-essential Read the rest of this entry »

It seems that the Debian team doesn’t like to release minor versions anymore. After Debian 4.0 (code name “Etch”) released last year, the next Debian release (code name “Lenny“) will be numbered as Debian 5.0 as announced yesterday by Marc Brockschmidt: “For reading this far, you receive the small reward of the knowledge that Lenny will be shipped as Debian 5.0.”

Also interesting enough he mentioned that Lenny might be released with KDE4:
“There may be a possibility to include KDE 4 in Lenny. The efforts on KDE 4.1 have been quite promising and seem to be leading to a desktop environment which can fully replace KDE 3. The KDE team will provide betas and release candidates of the 4.1 release in experimental. In the event that KDE 4.1 is on time, and there are no major issues, an upload to unstable in order to include it in Lenny is possible.”

The development of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 seems to be on track and the final release is still expected in September 2008.

Debian provides security updates for old stable releases for one year after a new distribution has been released. Yesterday, Debian announced that the support for Debian 3.1 (sarge) is coming to an end this month, as etch was released last year in April, sarge will be supported until March 2008.

Anyone still running Debian sarge, should really be thinking seriously to finally update to etch asap.

Debian’s Official Announcement: http://www.debian.org/News/2008/20080229

“The Debian project is pleased to announce the third update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (codename etch). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems.

Those who frequently install updates from security.debian.org won’t have to update many packages and most updates from security.debian.org are included in this update.”

Note: this is true . I’ve not even noticed this and seen it as a minor apt upgrade

Release Announcement: http://www.debian.org/News/2008/20080217

A complete list of all accepted and rejected packages together with rationale is on the preparation page for this revision: http://release.debian.org/stable/4.0/4.0r3/

DFSG stands for: Debian Free Software Guidelines. This is a set of guidelines about the license of a software package, as outlined in the Debian Social Contract. Debian has three software categories inside the repository: main, non-free and contrib. The packages go into one of the repository depending on whether their license is DFSG-compatible or not. Packages in main meet the DFSG, while packages in non-free fail to meet the DFSG, and packages in contrib are DFSG compatible but depend on packages that fail to meet the DFSG:

• main (packages meet DFSG)
• non-free (packages fail to meet DFSG)
• contrib (packages meet DFSG, but depend on packages that fail DFSG)

Read the rest of this entry »

This article will show how we can install updated versions for memcached (and libevent) for Debian Etch, by backporting the packages from debian testing. Why would we want to do this? Because the versions shipped with Etch are old, and accordingly to the software creators should not be used as the new versions provide much better performance and reliability:
libevent: version in etch: 1.1a (released on 2005-06-12).
memcached: version in etch: 1.1.12 (released on 2005-04-04)
Read the rest of this entry »

I have just noticed that the old looking packages.debian.org website has a new look with some minor visual changes, but with many functional ones. Personally, I like it very much and find it much more functional than before.

Read the rest of this entry »

While still hoping to release Etch as expected in December, the Debian team has revealed the name of the next Debian version: Lenny. This is from debian-news.net and the actual announce is very funny:

“If you managed to read so far: Congratulations! That means you get to be one of the lucky first 10 people to know the codename for the next Debian release: it will be called Lenny.”

Haha… I’m one of the lucky ones

After the announcement from 26 September 2006:
“As Debian experiments with funding, the editor and main author of DWN is going to experiment with spending less time on Debian. Please understand that due to this there may be no future issues of DWN in the current form or that they will only be released less frequently.”

I was not expecting to see a new DWN release soon. And after reading the reason why Joey decided this, you can’t blame him for doing that.

But surprise!… Yesterday I have seen a new release from DWN going live: October 31st, 2006.
With the help of other peoples and Joey’s weekly summaries this was possible, and brought back one of my weekly reads.

Anyone with the proper experience, knowledge and time can help keeping DWN alive… For more details see the DWN contributing page to find out how to help.

This article will show what changes (related to the debian kernel images) can Debian Sarge users expect to see when Etch will reach stable. Users of Debian testing/sid are already familiar with these changes as they are live in Etch for a while.
So what changes will you see in the next Debian stable release? There are many changes, and this article will show the ones related to the Debian kernel packages that are available in the stable release. The examples shown bellow are taken from i386/amd64 systems as they are the most common ones (though most of the changes will apply on all available architectures). Read the rest of this entry »