Unfortunately I have an ATI display card in my laptop, it is a wide screen laptop and so far I used the 1024x768 resolution instead of the native 1280x768. Some girl (sorry, forgot your name and you're not in mugshots) prodded me to fix that since my screen looked pretty warped. Today I finally got to do it and install fglrx to get my native resolution working and boy, is it a change!

The ingredients for this recipe:

1. A computer with ATI display driver
2. Debian unstable (though testing and etch should work as well)
3. A network connection

Instructions:

1. su -
2. aptitude install fglrx-control fglrx-driver fglrx-driver-dev fglrx-kernel-src modula-assistant linux-headers-2.6-686
3. m-a -t auto-install fglrx
4. aticonfig -f --install
5. Restart X, you can do it with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, or just restart the computer
6. Enjoy the beautiful new look of your desktop!

If you are using an AMD machine replace the linux-headers-2.6-686 with linux-headers-2.6-k7.

KVM is a Kernel-based Virtual Machine for Linux, it has a kernel module that enables a modified Qemu to use the Intel VT extension for full virtualisation, with the benefit of making the virtualisation very fast. In the future it will also support the SVM extension of AMD.

It will be available in Debian once the ftp-masters clear the backlog, and is currently available in a temporary location. The manpage is missing but the instructions to get it to work are:

• sudo apt-get install kvm kvm-source
• sudo m-a build kvm
• sudo m-a install kvm
• sudo modprobe kvm

At this stage you have KVM ready for usage, simply use the kvm program as if it was the Qemu program, to boot a Debian Live CD use: kvm -cdrom live.iso -boot d

In the future the KVM patches will be merged into both the kernel and Qemu and these packages will be gone, but for now, that's the easiest way to use KVM.

Update: KVM entered the archive, instructions above were updated.

My graphical skills are known to be poor but I still managed to use the gimp to create a hackergotchi for myself out of the ugly image from my student web page. The hackergotchi was quickly added to the Debian Planet, before I regret that move.

I probably should raid my digital photos for a better picture, if a skilled hackergotchi maker is interested in making something more palatable I'd be happy to privately offer some other possible pictures for the conversion.

Congratulations to all whose projects were accepted, Debian received 60 eligible proposals, many of those were great projects which we would have loved to accept but we only had 10 slots that are paid for by Google so the competition was tough.

The accepted projects are:

• "Improve the boot system" by Carlos Villegas
• "Translation Coordination System" by Gintautas Miliauskas
• "BTS GUI front-end" by Philipp Kern
• "debian-cd-ng" by Carlos Parra Camargo
Debtags, using AI classifiers for automating the tagging of Debian packages" by Alex de Landgraaf
• "Distribution wide-tracker tools (DWTT) and collaborative repository of meta-informations about source packages (CRMI)" by Arnaud Fontaine
• "Automation of Debian Based live-cd creation process" by Robert Pickel
• "Improve Britney, the scripts used to update testing" by FABIO TRANCHITELLA
• "Debian installer on Debian GNU/Hurd" by Matheus Eduardo B. Morais
• "BitTorrent Extensions" by Matthew Wronka

All the accepted projects received email to them and their mentor, if you are a student whose project wasn't accepted, we'd still be happy if you will do the project even without the funding, if you need a helping hand or a mentor we will surely be happy to help you out, contact me at baruch@debian.org.

The plan is that students who have a blog or setup one for the Summer of Code will be added to Planet Debian so everyone can follow their progress on their quest to help Debian improve.

Cheers and thanks to everyone who helped make this happen!
Baruch Even
Debian SoC coordinator

Debian is officially in the Google Summer of Code 2006 program, we already have some projects. If you have more ideas/requests add them to the wiki, if you are willing to be a mentor the details were sent to -private.

If you are a student and have a project that you want to do for Debian, add it to the wiki.

Finally, after about a year and five months(!) of endless patience, Lior Kaplan (packages) got his account and is officially a Debian Developer. There is now another DD to help uploading packages for the Debian-Hebrew (English at the bottom) project and he doesn't need me to sponsor his packages.

Lior has been instrumental to the Debian-Hebrew project so far and I'm sure it will only help to have him on board with full privileges. Keep up the good work!

Steve, You say that most DDs care about the DPL election, I don't know about others, but I don't really care about the DPL election. I participated in all the former elections for DPLs and I never really saw any effect to the choice no matter if I was with the Condorcet majority or not. The DPL is in effect (or at least in my eyes) a pure figurehead whose identity is mostly meaningless.

I don't really care who the DPL will be since it is unlikely to have any real effect on my work or on Debian itself. I'm not quite sure I will bother to vote and think that not voting is the same as casting an empty vote as Raphaël Hertzog suggested.

A few days ago I was told about localization-config and tasksel support for localization. Now I know where the strange XFree86 definitions for Hebrew keyboard comes from.

This makes the Debian-Hebrew work simpler, by enabling us to integrate our work into pure Debian. Which is the whole point of CDDs, as far as I'm concerned. If it depends on me, the only thing Debian-Hebrew would need to do will be to update the various definitions and create the simple install CD.

Off I went to file bugs #323241 (tasksel) and #323237 (localization-config) to put some setting changes to their proper place in Debian.

Debian-Hebrew 1.0-rc2 was released today, with fixes from rc1 and some improvements to make the desktop start as a real Hebrew desktop layouted right-to-left. This is a Custom-Debian-Distribution, we simply took Debian Sarge and customized the install program to provide a fully Hebrew Debian system when the install finishes. For this to work we set as many debconf questions as possible and run a script at the end of the installation to convert the configs that are not controlled by debconf.

The end result is a simple install with very few questions and smooth user experience, we hope :-)

You can get the ISO (600MB) via BitTorrent: Debian-Hebrew 1.0-rc2.

Next on the agenda is finding and fixing bugs that users find, Find and set more configurations to make the system more RTL friendly, and possibly find someone who wants to make Debian-Arabic or Debian-Farsi or Debian-RTL, the configuration should be pretty much the same!

While looking at what else can I do for Debian-Hebrew I decided to do an install CD for it. And I found simple-cdd to be a big help in making it easy to create an install CD.

As a result of the ease of use, this was seen on IRC:

  <baruch> I do have to say a BIG THANKS for simple-cdd, it made my life simple!
  * vagrantc bows

A real install CD will take a bit more work to finish though. I'm now testing a quick hack for it, and testing installation takes quite a bit of time.