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The sarge freeze is now official. The expected timeline for the release is as follows: 3rd May (Today): Freeze time and security support now available for testing 5-8th May: BSP to bring bug count down from ~85 to ~60/70 15th May: Debian installer finalised 27th May: Zarro RC boogs 30th May: Release Now that there is official security support for testing you are very much encouraged to test the upgrade path between woody and sarge and report any issues to the BTS.

The release team, in a recent IRC meeting. Have decided that pretty much everything necessary for the complete freeze (base and standard are already frozen) is in place: "We came to the conclusion that the freeze can get into effect as of now. (Except that there was no icecream available, but well - we all have to make sacrifices.)". This follows on from the recent Release Update which contained the excellent news that most of the infrastructure needed for testing-security (one of the key release blockers) is in place. The hope among everyone I've spoken to is that this freeze will not last very long, since we are certainly in a very good situation with regards the RC bug count (significantly lower than when woody's freeze was announced). This is something that should be further improved by the upcoming BSP this weekend.

Steve Kemp's Debian System Administrator Resources site has been growing from strength to strength and is a fantastic resource for all those little hints and tips that you wanted to know. Some interesting articles that have appeared recently are: Managing USB keys and card readers with udev, Using dpkg-divert for replacing binaries and Reducing build time with distcc. In respect for the high quality of the site we've begun syndicating the site into our sidebar.

Branden Robinson, the newly elected Debian Project Leader, has posted his first report as DPL. He discusses the sarge release, problems with ARM buildds, Debian's assets, his interviews and public appearances and some discussion of Project Scud. The Debian leadership team had their first meeting recently, and although the agenda has been published the minutes have yet to be published. This will only happen once all the members in attendence have approved them. Benjamin "mako" Hill has also now joined their ranks.

Porter Andreas Jochens sent in an update on the status of the AMD64 port of Debian: "Almost all packages build now on amd64 without problems using the pristine Debian sarge sources." At the moment though sarge will ship with sources that are capable of being used to build packages for the AMD64 architecture, unfortunately however the architecture will not be included in the official sarge archive due to mirror constraints. Miquel van Smoorenburg however pointed out that many mirrors will end up mirroring the unofficial port, wasting space by storing the sources twice. Andreas has suggested is that the binary port be maintained by the Debian AMD64 team and stored on Alioth as it currently is and that project officially recognises the port and includes pointers to it in the appropriate release documentation. Release manager, Steve Langasek expressed his concerns regarding debian-installer, the support of security team, source synchronisation and the ability to do point releases.

Official Debian support for the 80386 sub-architecture in Sarge is currently uncertain - it is currently unmaintained according to a recent release update. The kernels that ship with sarge will contain support for emulating the appropriate i486+ instructions needed to maintain C++ ABI compatibility with other distributions, although there are known root security holes with the patch, and nobody has stepped up to fix them. Unless a maintainer can be found for this sub-architecture the release managers will be forced to drop official support for the 80386 both for new installs and upgrades.

Since becoming DPL on Monday, Branden Robinson has been interviewed by Linux Magazine, Rob Levin and Linux.com. Lots of interesting reading especially with regards the leadership, Project Scud and the Vancouver proposal. Debian Planet are considering an interview, since however these previous interviews have been so comprehensive we're asking the readership for any questions they might like to ask Branden, or the previous DPL, Martin Michlmayr.

ExtremeTech has some coverage of MIT's AUV's (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle). These little underwater robotic devices are being used for underwater archaeological surveys without disturbing the shipwrecks. The specialised robotic control software runs atop a woody core. Debian is certainly the Universal OS.

There has been a considerable amount of news coverage regarding Munich's choice of Debian as the replacement for 14,000 Windows NT workstations used by the city authorities. This is fantastic news for Debian since with more users it becomes easier to improve the quality of distribution for all. The news is also somewhat suprising since many believed that SuSE, given its German origins, and strong backing from Novell would be the obvious choice. There is a little bit more detail on the people behind the tender in Michael Banck's blog

Jordi Mallach has announced the availability of GNOME 2.10 packages for Debian. The packages are currently spread across experimental and the pkg-gnome archive on alioth whilst waiting for some new and updated packages to enter experimental. Full instructions are in the blog linked to above however readers should be aware that currently this build depends on a new glibc which some people have had problems with.

There are unfortunately several problems with the XFS support included in the 2.6.8.1 kernel included with sarge. This is of course used by the "linux26" flavour in the installer, this is not however the default since sarge is shipping with 2.4.27 as the default kernel. Many users however will want to use the 2.6 variant for improved hardware support.

The Debian Project Leader elections have ended and the result was very close, as can be seen from the results. Congratulations to Branden Robinson who has stood every year since 2001 has been elected. Well done! He is a member of the controversial Project Scud team who want to take a somewhat radical approach to the leadership of Debian. The proposal is a source of some concern, especially how it would integrate within the constitution and existing organisational structure.

Debian received its 300,000th bug report this week. Bug #300000 provides a patch to fix some typos in the description of libcrypt-ssleay-perl. Its not been fixed yet though.

Linux Magazine has taken a look at the good Linux distributions out there and they discovered that a lot of them have one thing in common - they are based on Debian.

Matthew Garrett has posted a write-up of some interviews with the FTP master team he did last year at the request of the current project leader (Martin Michlmayr) to try and clean up some of the mysteries surrounding this important role in the project. On a related note, the handy list of NEW packages awaiting FTP master approval has moved onto the ftp-master server, and now lists the packages & versions along with their age, maintainers, destination (unstable, experimental, etc), and bugs closed by the upload.