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.