Insider infos, master your Debian/Ubuntu distribution
I just wanted to highlight that Muhammad Saied, a volunteer translator of the Debian Administrator’s Handbook, is currently running a crowdfunding campaign with Mohamed Amine so that they can complete the Arabic translation that they started.
There’s only 6 days left to collect the last $2500… click here to help spread Debian to the Arabic world.
Barely one and half month after the release of the Wheezy version of the Debian Administrator’s Handbook, I’m proud to announce that two translations have been completed: French and Spanish.
And, as promised in the last liberation campaign, the French translation has been published as a paperback by Eyrolles (see the cover above).
Check out the article on debian-handbook.info for more information.
This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you’re among the people who made a donation to support my work (147.56 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.
I spent a good chunk of December on the book. First finalizing the English version and getting it out (BTW, just for the launch, there’s a 10% discount on the paperback that lasts only until January 9th!). Then working on updating the French translation. Eyrolles will publish a new edition of the French book based on this translation. Expect some further news about this during January!
I contributed to many discussions within Debian France.
Starting with a complaint that most events are organized in Paris, I proposed to map the location of Debian France members. We added new fields in the membership management page so that members can add their GPS coordinates and Frédéric Decou made some experiments with Openstreetmap. Someone else (Kiriarat) volunteered to write the required glue code. A manual map is currently maintained on the website.
In the discussions about the setup of the Debian France shop, I suggested to update our logo with a nicer looking one. We got a few suggestions and after further discussions with Alexandre Delanoë and Sylvestre Ledru, we organized a small contest to entice designers to submit a logo proposal to us (the winner earns a set of Debian goodies). We got 46 proposals (see my favorite on the right)! The board is currently pre-selecting the logos and setting up the final vote for our members. The winner shall be announced at the end of the upcoming mini-debconf in Paris.
I also continued the work to finalize new bylaws and new internal rules. They shall be adopted during the next general assembly which will happen during the mini-debconf.
WordPress maintenance. I mentored Pablo Vasquez to do his first small contribution to the WordPress packaging. I really appreciate this but he’s not yet ready to assume maintenance of a big package like WordPress on his own. I got multiple other offers of help and pinged them all while filing #733726 to coordinate the work on the new upstream version. But I got no reply 🙁 Handing over packages to new maintainers is hard…
Init system discussion. The technical committee has the hard task of picking the default init system that will replace the traditional System V init (see #727708). I followed this huge discussion closely and contributed a bit where I add something meaningful to say. Final decision is expected sometimes in January. FWIW, I share entirely Russ Allbery’s point of view in those discussions. I have been running systemd on some of my computers for a few months already.
Fixing lxc in stable. The lxc package in stable has a non-working “debian” template. I really dislike documenting that things are broken so instead of doing that in the Debian Administrator’s Handbook, I opted to do something about it. I prepared a non maintainer upload for stable (see #680469 for the problem and #732358 for the stable update request).
Misc stuff. I sponsored a tcpdf upload. I filed an enhancement request on Publican to have it keep processing instructions present in translations. I uploaded new versions of publican-librement and debian-handbook. I filed #732678 against git-buildpackage because it failed to properly call lintian when given the -A dpkg-buildpackage argument.
See you next month for a new summary of my activities.
After multiple months of hard work, I’m pleased to announce that Roland and I finished updating the Debian Administrator’s Handbook for Debian Wheezy.
By the way, as part of the launch of this updated edition, you can benefit from a 10% discount on any paperback copy ordered before January 9th 2014. Just click here and place your order.
We have put lots of hard work on this edition, doing quite some janitorial work. We didn’t cover as many new topics as I would have liked, but I’m still proud of the end result.
The book has a nice preface co-signed by the current and former Debian Project Leaders. Let me quote a short extract:
The book you have in your hands is different. It’s a free as in freedom book, a book which is up to Debian freedom standards for every aspects of your digital life. […] You can
apt-get installthis book, you can redistribute it, you can fork this book or, better, submit bug reports and patches for it, so that other in the future can benefit from your contributions. The “maintainers” of this book — who are also its authors — are longstanding members of the Debian Project, who grok the freedom ethos that permeates every aspect of Debian.
Enjoy it and share your comments! Even better if you write up a review that we can link from the website.
