I skipped a week or two due to injury and lack of energy, but here are some more items for dwn.

d-i etch RC1 was released, featuring a 2.6.17 kernel, easy setup of encrypted LVM, improved installation automation, and the return of installation floppies for i386, plus many other improvements and bug fixes. The improved NSLU2 support in this release in particular seems to be attacting a lot of attention. An RC2 with 2.6.18 is due soon.

A release update was posted by Steve Langasek, it discusses an update of the timeline for release, calls for increased testing of etch, updates the release goals, and last but not least, unveils the codename for etch+1: lenny

Changes are afoot to ftp-master.debian.org. While not yet officially announced anywhere, it's moved to a new, much more powerful server with terabytes of disk. Also, a new gpg key has been added that will be used to sign etch's release files for the lifetime of etch. Since this key isn't yet in the debian-archive-keyring package, there might be some minor issues when using apt, and debmirror is known to be broken by the unknown key. For now, the new key (6070D3A1) can be downloaded from subkeys.pgp.net.

apt-zeroconf was announced by Franz Pletz. This is a decentralised apt cache that uses avahi to find other instances of itself on the LAN and share packages back and forth. Perhaps this will be useful at the next DebConf, which is now open for registration.

The browser generally known as Firefox 2.0 has reached unstable as a new iceweasel package. Bug #354622 contains the sad backstory to this renaming.

discussion

More bits for DWN, which published some of the previous ones last week.

A release update was posted by Andreas Barth. Items discussed include the full freeze of Etch (delayed slightly), the kernel firmware issue (considered resolved by the release team), an analysis of remaining release critical bugs, and some final changes to the release policy including LSB 3.1. All developers should read the full email for details.

Work continues on d-i RC1. Everything is in place and only some building and testing needs to be done before the new version of the installer is released. Development work on etch's installer after this will be limited to bug fixes, and an update to the 2.6.18 kernel. Frans Pop posted a todo list and an updated timeline.

ARM v3 support. There was a thread on debian-arm about whether etch should support the arm v3 instruction set, used in a few older arm systems, but not supported by mono. Wookey said "Yes. I think the time has come for arm to drop v3. It might have been better to anounce this earlier, but never mind." There were no objections.

This is the first in a planned series of weekly posts on what's happening in Debian, which I plan to do to help fill the gap left by Martin Schulze no longer writing DWN. I will post these on Fridays with a dwn tag, and while I don't plan to cover everything that's happening in Debian, like I tried to do when I edited DWN, my hope is that if some other people also do this, we'll cover enough to be useful. On to the news items..

mplayer in sid. The mplayer package has had the longest tenure in NEW of any package ever to be uploaded to Debian. But it's finally been accepted into the archive. Depending on the videos you need to play, you may still need non-free codecs from outside Debian, such as Christian Marillat's repository. Congratulations to mplayer's maintainers and to the ftpmasters for resolving the licencing issues that kept mplayer out of Debian for so long.

d-i string freeze and release plans. In preparation for the first release candidate of d-i for etch, a string freeze has been going on for the last two weeks, and changes to the installer are limited to bug fixing. Frans Pop posted details and a timeline for RC1. Note that preparations for RC1 have already broken most beta 3 d-i images.

alioth move. Alioth has just moved to a new server. Amoung other changes, svn.debian.org moved to the same host as alioth, eliminating some issues caused by splitting them before.

archive.progeny.com decomissioned. This significant Debian mirror was turned off on October 22nd, and anyone still using it should switch to a different mirror.