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.