Debian

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

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

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

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

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

The Debian project is pleased to announce the fourth update of its stable distribution Debian (codename ). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustments to serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.

The Debian Project is happy to announce that as in previous years it will be represented at this year's Free and Open Source Developer's European Meeting (FOSDEM) in Brussels, Belgium on the 4th-5th February. Debian will be present with a booth in ... [More] the K building, ground floor, members of the project will be available for questions and discussion, and various Debian-branded items will be on sale. [Less]

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

Christian informed us previously that "A very important and critical fix to partman-zfs broke a string in sublevel 4." That explains why the results are lower than the last time we relayed the translation status, but translators are quickly working to make the Debian Installer completely available in many languages.

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