La Salle Debain

I've made some new .debs of pine available. They add debugging support nothing else.

Emma Jane Hogbin has written a HOWTO on building a multilingual search engine.

There is a quiz on BBSpot to find out which OS matches your personality. Debian is a choice but I actually got this:

I started out with Slackware many moons ago and I still have a soft spot for it so that's ok. Atleast I didn't get Windows ME. :)

Debian is a founding member of the Desktop Linux Consortium. This is an organization that aims to make Linux a better choice for the end-user. This is great news in my opinion. Linux is becoming more and more usable by non-hacker types. There are still some rough edges to be ironed out and hopefully this group can do that. Debian might not be the first choice that comes to mind when one thinks of "Desktop Linux" but it is a good foundation as Lindows , Xandros , and Libranet could tell you. KDE 3.1 and GNOME 2.2 are now in the process of entering SID so Debian proper is fairly usable as a desktop too.

Ok this is not really Debian related but I came across a funny French site www.copinedegeek.com -- a support group for girlfriends of geeks. As a banner on the site says, "vivre avec un geek c'est possible!" They have HOWTO's!

I did two new uploads in quick succession due to problems found by Sami Haatinen. Backports to woody can be found on the open source page.

If you haven't seem much stuff here lately, it is because it has been really, really cold around here the past few days and I got sick. No fever or anything just felt really lethargic and slept a lot.

I'm slowly getting back up to speed with my Debian stuff. I did new releases of libmail-sendmail-perl and my unofficial pine packages Some of the webmin stuff too.

desktoplinux.com reports that Debian beat mandrake as best distro in their 2002 reader poll. They also have a short interview with Bdale.

...as part of their Linuxworld coverage . Their visit to to the booth is entitled "Debian...Um..It's Still Debian" and accompanying it is a picture of Clint (who with typical ZDnet precision they call Quince) and myself. wow, so much for the idea black makes you look slimmer. Though I would like to say that my new years resolution was to go on a diet and I've lost 7lbs already.

Also unlike the last couple of Linuxworlds, this year the attendence did not drop off after the first day. All the .orgs had a tremendous amount of activity throughout the show and I think people were asking more sophisticated and knowledgeable questions than previous years.

We were joined at the booth by Adam DiCarlo and Matt Zimmerman. Josh Narins of debian-user fame also helped out.

If all you know the Linux community is what you read in the likes of Slashdot, you might think all the distros are hyper-competitive but this isn't true. Take Gentoo for instance. This distribution is often perceived as being a direct competitor to Debian (there was a huge thread on debian-devel last year asking if we were losing users to Gentoo) but the people at the Gentoo booth were really nice. I talked to a person there and he cheerfully admitted they used many patches developed by Debian (not to mention ideas like a social contract.) while I applauded them for some of the innovative work they are doing. We also got a bunch of Mandrake users who were concerned about their favorite distro possibly folding and considering Debian as a replacement. I found this surprising as I thought Red Hat or SUSE etc. would have been a better fit for that type of person.

Where were Lindows, Xandros, and Libranet? A lot of people seemed to be interested in "Debian with the rough edges filed off" but the only distro of that ilk available was Knoppix which a couple of people were giving out.

Our own CD supply depended on Matt Taggarts laptop with CD burner. We really need to get, say, 500-600 CD sets made up for next time as many people don't have broadband and can't burn them themselves.

Some people brought their laptops so we could help them install Debian. We tried but with varying degrees of success i'm afraid. As we all know Debian installation sucks. This didn't stop people from reminding us of the fact anyway.

All in all it was a great experience. We made $1600 to support the project and made a lot of new friends at least some of whom I am happy to say are now Debian users.