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Debian 7.0 ('Wheezy') Release Planned For 1st Weekend in May
An anonymous reader writes with this good news from the Debian developers who have been working hard to release the next version of the distro: "We now have a target date of the weekend of 4th/5th May for the release. We have checked with core teams, and this seems to be acceptable for everyone. This means we are able to begin the final preparations for a release of Debian 7.0 — 'Wheezy'. The intention is only to lift the date if something really critical pops up that is not possible to handle as an errata, or if we end up technically unable to release that weekend (e.g. a required machine crashes or d-i explodes in a giant ball of fire). Every other RC fix that does not make it in time will be r1 material. Please be sure to contact us about the RC fixes you would like included in the point release!" Of particular interest to casual users, from the list of changes in 7.0: "Debian wheezy comes with full-featured libav (formerly ffmpeg) libraries and frontends, including e.g. mplayer, mencoder, vlc and transcode. Additional codec support is provided e.g. through lame for MP3 audio encoding, xvidcore for MPEG-4 ASP video encoding, x264 for H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video encoding, vo-aacenc for AAC audio encoding and opencore-amr and vo-amrwbenc for Adaptive Multi-Rate Narrowband and Wideband encoding and decoding, respectively. For most use cases, installation of packages from third-party repositories should not be necessary anymore. The times of crippled multimedia support in Debian are finally over!"
If you would like to help out, check out the following link. Anything you donate will be matched by a generous donor. Note, this money goes towards DebConf13, the Debian developers conference (free admission to all). Lets get Jessie off to a good start! http://nylug.org/pipermail/nylug-announce/2013-April/001231.html
Being stuck with Xfce 4.8 is particularly galling since the default desktop for Wheezy is the unutterably awful GNOME 3. Xfce 4.10 will be OVER ONE YEAR OLD when Wheezy is released and it is absolutely crazy not to have 4.10 in Wheezy.
I'll grant you that even Xfce 4.8 is vastly superior to GNOME 3, but it is very unfortunate not to have 4.10, which has some significant enhancements; the one I find most welcome is FINALLY the ability to configure desktop icons for single-click activation.
I "get" the emphasis on stability, but now we'll be stuck with a badly out of date Xfce for a lengthy period until Wheezy is replaced. And I can SORT OF understand the decision to reverse course on what was once the plan for Debian to change the default desktop from GNOME 3 to Xfce (though I still on balance disagree with it and find it regrettable).
If you've been around any enterprises, then yes, you've seen it. It's one of the components of Active Directory (indeed, it's the "Directory" part of Active Directory.)
LDAP is used to centrally store and manage information about all the entities involved in a network - users, computers, etc. With users that includes everything from their email address to their network password - which brings us to the GP's point.
There are numerous implementations of LDAP out there. Unix systems have been administered using LDAP for decades. So it's a big thing if Debian still doesn't support it properly. It should. And actually, with SAMBA4 now out, we should be moving LDAP (and Kerberos and the other major network administration tools) out of "the enterprise" and start being able to use them in smaller networks, like at home. There's no reason why your D-Link router shouldn't have it built in.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Does anyone know what changed to allow Debian to add MP3 and other libs? There has never been a technical problem with including them, but Debian has always tried to avoid violating patents by distributing patented (or claimed-to-be-patented) software.
I'm glad they've been able to take this step, just wondering what happened.
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