Each release of Debian has a shiny new theme, which is visible on the boot screen, the login screen and, most prominently, on the desktop wallpaper.

Debian plans to release Stretch next year. As ever, we need your help in creating its theme! You have the opportunity to design a theme that will inspire thousands of people while working in their Debian systems.

They might be people working in exciting NASA missions:

Or DYI users who decided to make a matching keyboard:

If you're interested, please take a look at https://wiki.debian.org/DebianDesktop/Artwork/Stretch

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Josué Ortega (josue)
• Mathias Behrle (mbehrle)
• Sascha Steinbiss (satta)
• Lucas Kanashiro (kanashiro)
• Vasudev Sathish Kamath (vasudev)
• Dima Kogan (dkogan)
• Rafael Laboissière (rafael)
• David Kalnischkies (donkult)
• Marcin Kulisz (kula)
• David Steele (steele
• Herbert Parentes Fortes Neto (hpfn)
• Ondřej Nový (onovy)
• Donald Norwood (donald)
• Neutron Soutmun (neutrons)
• Steve Kemp (skx)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Sean Whitton
• Tiago Ilieve
• Jean Baptiste Favre
• Adrian Vondendriesch
• Alkis Georgopoulos
• Michael Hudson-Doyle
• Roger Shimizu
• SZ Lin
• Leo Singer
• Peter Colberg

Congratulations!

Six members of the Debian Perl team met in Zurich over the weekend from May 19 to May 22 to continue the development around perl for Stretch and to work on QA across 3000+ packages.

The participants had a good time, met friends from local groups and even found some geocaches. Obviously, the sprint was productive this time too:

• 36 bugs were filed or worked on, 28 uploads were accepted.
• The plan to get Perl 5.24 transition into Stretch was confirmed, and a test rebuild server was set up.
• Cross building XS modules was demoed, and the conditions where it is viable were discussed.
• Several improvements were made in the team packaging tools, and new features were discussed and drafted.
• A talk on downstream distribution aimed at CPAN authors was proposed for YAPC::EU 2016.

The full report was posted to the relevant Debian mailing lists.

The participants would like to thank the ETH Zurich for hosting us, and all donors to the Debian project who helped to cover a large part of our expenses.

DebConf16 will be held this and next week in Cape Town, South Africa, and we're happy to announce that the schedule is already available. Of course, it is still possible for some minor changes to happen!

The DebCamp Sprints already started on 23 June 2016.

DebConf will open on Saturday, 2 July 2016 with the Open Festival, where events of interest to a wider audience are offered, ranging from topics specific to Debian to a wider appreciation of the open and maker movements (and not just IT-related). Hackers, makers, hobbyists and other interested parties are invited to share their activities with DebConf attendees and the public at the University of Cape Town, whether in form of workshops, lightning talks, install parties, art exhibition or posters. Additionally, a Job Fair will take place on Saturday, and its job wall will be available throughout DebConf.

The full schedule of the Debian Conference thorough the week is published. After the Open Festival, the conference will continue with more than 85 talks and BoFs (informal gatherings and discussions within Debian teams), including not only software development and packaging but also areas like translation, documentation, artwork, testing, specialized derivatives, maintenance of the community infrastructure, and other.

There will also be also a plethora of social events, such as our traditional cheese and wine party, our group photo and our day trip.

DebConf talks will be broadcast live on the Internet when possible, and videos of the talks will be published on the web along with the presentation slides.

DebConf is committed to a safe and welcome environment for all participants. See the DebConf Code of Conduct and the Debian Code of Conduct for more details on this.

Debian thanks the commitment of numerous sponsors to support DebConf16, particularly our Platinum Sponsor Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

About Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Hewlett Packard Enterprise actively participates in open source. Thousands of developers across the company are focused on open source projects, and HPE sponsors and supports the open source community in a number of ways, including: contributing code, sponsoring foundations and projects, providing active leadership, and participating in various committees.

Debian Long Term Support (LTS) is a project created to extend the life of all Debian stable releases to (at least) 5 years.

Thanks to the LTS sponsors, Debian's buildd maintainers and the Debian FTP Team are excited to announce that two new architectures, armel and armhf, are going to be supported in Debian 7 Wheezy LTS. These architectures along with i386 and amd64 will receive two additional years of extended security support.

Security updates for Debian LTS are not handled by the native Debian Security Team, but instead by a separate group of volunteers and companies interested in making it a success.

Wheezy's LTS period started a few weeks ago and more than thirty updates have been announced so far. If you use Debian 7 Wheezy, you do not need to change anything in your system to start receiving those updates.

More information about how to use Debian Long Term Support and other important changes regarding Wheezy LTS is available at https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Using