For more details, please click on the link to read the article.

There are few people who would deny that autoconf, automake and libtool have revolutionized the free software world. While there are many thousands of Autotools advocates, some developers absolutely hate the Autotools, with a passion. Why? Let me try to explain with an analogy.

Welcome to this year's 2nd issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. We would like to thank everyone for his feedback on the last issue of the Debian Project News! We didn't reckoned a tiny newsletter would cause such an sensation - we where even mentioned in some print magazines! So many, many thanks! We'll try our very best to come up and exceed your expectations!

The Debian Project announced to participate again in Googles Summer of Code Program. Twelve students will get the opportunity to work on different projects during their summer vacation while Google will fund them.

The development efforts to release the next stable Debian release codenamed "Lenny" in September continue. While the transition to Python 2.5 as default python version is allready completed, the transition to Perl 5.10 is still ongoing. So the freeze, the phase when developers will concentrate on fixing bugs instead of adding new features, will be called soon.

In two recently published interviews of our the new elected Debian Project Leader, Steve McIntyre presented a bit more about the Debian Project. The interviews can be found on ZDNet, and ComputerWorld UK.

debimg is software designed to replace debian-cd. It current feature set is very limited, but building single disks for i386 and amd64 is possible (netinst disks build in about 5 seconds. It still misses many features like disk sets and multi-arch.

From Wednesday the 21st of May 2008 to Thursday the 22nd of May 2008, Geneva, Switzerland, Debian Project will participate with a booth at Swiss Linux Days 2008. Debian-Med will also be presented at a talk. Please see our events page for further details.

From Wednesday the 28th of May 2008 to Saturday the 31st of May 2008, Berlin, Germany, Debian Project will participate with a booth at Linux Tag 2008. Please see our events page for further details.

Lior Kaplan reported, that he finished triage of oover 300 bugs reported against the iceweasel / firefox packages. Of those 300 bugs only 70 are still valid for a version of firefox shipped in a Debian release.

Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers who watch the Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see our HOWTO contribute page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at debian-publicity@lists.debian.org.

In our article earlier this week looking at the status of X.Org 7.4, one of the features originally planned for integration in this X Server release was MPX, or Multi-Pointer X. While it's been in development for over two years and has been at an experimental state, it's been featured in popular YouTube videos as this is the technology on Linux that allows multiple keyboards and mice to be attached to a single system and MPX allows these input devices to function independently on the same windowing system. For those of you interested in this desktop technology, it's been announced that MPX will finally be merged into the mainline X.Org tree later this month.

For more details, please click on the link to read the article.

For more details, please click on the link to read the article.

Dry dock workers of the Curacao Dry Dock Company (CDM) discovered dangerous levels of blue asbestos while conducting routine repairs on the Freewinds, flagship of the Church of Scientology's Sea Org and home to the Flag Ship Service Organization (FSSO). Scientologists like John Travolta and Tom Cruise attended several events and religious get-aways aboard the luxury cruise liner and subsequentally were potentially exposed to the deadly carcinogen. Worse yet, an affidavit signed in 2001 alleging the presence of blue asbestos has surfaced. In it, Lawrence Woodcraft describes encountering "a powdery blue fibrous substance" he identified as asbestos on the ship early 1987. Thousands of tweenage girls the world over are expressing their outrage over the potential threat to their #1 crush by pre-ordering Battletoads this Saturday, May 10th.

Kuro5hin.org sure has changed a lot over the years. When it was first fired up it promptly drained what little brain power existed at slashdot including the more intelligent slashdot trolls, which was fine by taco as they've been able to revel in half-baked ideology and presumptions ever since, with nary a challenge to spoil the party. K5 went on to produce a stimulating culture and an excellent body of work, and things were looking pretty good. But then something odd happened. Some genuine mentally ill people appeared and started to wreck up the place. Perhaps they resented the superior intelligence of k5 discourse, or maybe they got riled up when their stupid opinions were brushed aside and deservedly ignored. Their response however was quite ferocious- aggressive and persistent vulgarity flooded the site. Any attempt by smart people to have a good conversation would be targeted and clobbered under their offensive offensive.

"It's coming down pretty hard. Maybe we should just come back and get my car tomorrow." It was the first week of June, 2001. 9/11 was still months away. People just mildly disliked Bush, and for comparitively trivial reasons. Iraq was something that happened about 10 years ago. I was just wrapping up my first year of graduate school. My daughter was 6 weeks old, and we were on our way home from the obligatory 6 week checkup. I had had a test that afternoon, so I had been up at the school. My wife is insane, so she had insisted on getting to the appointment herself. This meant driving 25 minutes through Houston traffic with a baby, after extracting said baby from her body just a bit more than a month prior. She even picked me up at school to go to the appointment, and even that only at my insistance. She had planned to go solo.

The collapse of the U.S. housing industry is the big news of the day. While independent journalists and other comentators have been covering the rise and fall of the housing industry blow by blow, the corporate media joined the party just as the bubble was peaking, and only caught on to the perils of the situation in the 7th inning of the market cycle. It is now common for people who owe more on their mortgage than the home is worth to not bother contesting foreclosure filings. The unsavy borrower stops making payments and sends "Jingle Mail" (keys) to the lender after they've vacated the property. More sophisticated borrowers delay for a few more months, perhaps by declaring bankruptcy or using the services of a business that understands the foreclosure process. Sometimes people stop making payments and wait for the eviction notice - sometimes it comes, sometimes it doesn't. When they can, the savviest homeowners politely tell their mortgage manager to go fuck themselves, get the foreclosure proceedings dismissed, and stay in their home in perpetuity sans mortgage payments. Poll inside.

Leave your kids at home. A national alert has been issued (finally). Yes, there was apparently a cover-up of news about the spread of the EV71 virus, just as there was a cover-up in 2003 at the start of the SARS outbreak.

Nintendo redefined the relationship between man and games console with the creation of the Wiimote, and continued to riff on that successful theme. Ever since the Wii came out, Wii crossbows, guns, wheels, golf clubs, baseball bats, tennis rackets and balance boards have all appeared. In their latest release, Nintendo continues to push the limits of a games console with the release of Wii Love. For the uninitiated, Wii Love isn't really a game, but rather a lifestyle accessory. Similar to Wii Fit, Nintendo have co-opted a boring and mundane everyday activity and made it fun and engaging. I managed to get my hands on a (second hand) early preview box from a corporate client, so I thought I'd give you a quick look at the technology that wowed the crowd at the Nintendo stand at the last E3 conference, and has taken Japan by storm, shifting over 2,000,000 units in the first three months.