At Debconf 9, Steve Langasek delivered a talk on pam-auth-update, which included a tongue-in-cheek slide about how it had come to be. He pointed out that this project had required about six years of “thinking” and two months of actual development, and that this seemed to be a pattern exhibited by a number of notable Debian projects.

Debian Project Leader Zacchiroli: "I think we should either get Debian in Free Sosftware Foundation free-distros list or document (from our POV) why Debian is not there. I'm looking for volunteers interested in the topic and willing to participate in a joint Debian / FSF team that will work toward that goal without prejudices." Debian is upstream for about 50% of GNU/Linux distributions!

A contributor to the Debian GNU/Linux project since 1994, Garbee has also been leader of this project, and currently is chairman of the Debian technical committee and also the acting secretary. Hence, it came as no surprise that his talk on "Collaborating successfully with large corporations" at the Australian national Linux conference in Hobart today was well attended.

Since being let go by Novell last year where he worked on the RadeonHD Linux graphics driver and X.Org support within SuSE Linux, Luc Verhaegen has continued work on his VIA Unichrome DDX driver as well as other X.Org code and he has also become involved with the CoreBoot project that aims to create a free software BIOS for most chipsets and motherboards on the market.

«The Debian project announced yesterday that it has renamed the former “Custom Debian Distribution” concept (under which Debian projects such as Debian Edu, Debian Jr, Debian Med, Debian GIS and Debian Science were collectively known) to the catchier name “Debian Pure Blends.” ...»

If there's an upside to the Debian community's recent attacks on Ubuntu and Mark Shuttleworth it's that there'll be more conversation between engineers on the two distros.

The Debian GNU/Linux project is looking at a development freeze in March. Earlier this year, the owner of Canonical, Mark Shuttleworth, had proposed that Debian sync releases with Ubuntu so that the work could be spread.

Guido Günther joined the Debian Project while completing his degree in physics at the University of Konstanz. He helped with development of Debian for new processor architectures, and co-initiated Debian’s Groupware Meetings. He also enjoys contributing to the GNOME project, and advanced Free Software virtualisation technologies. He works as a professional Free Software developer and consultant.

"Giving up on a position within a free software project when you know you’re no longer managing to do an effective job is a wonderfully liberating experience. Now that I have started to talk with Miriam Ruiz about handing over the Debian Jr. project, I can stop worrying about the leadership task and just have fun with it..."