Debian is applying as a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code 2019, an internship program open to university students aged 18 and up, and will apply soon for the next round of Outreachy, an internship program for people from groups traditionally underrepresented in tech.

Please join us and help expanding Debian and mentoring new free software contributors!

If you have a project idea related to Debian and can mentor (or can coordinate the mentorship with some other Debian Developer or contributor, or within a Debian team), please add the details to the Debian GSoC2019 Projects wiki page by Tuesday, February 5 2019.

Participating in these programs has many benefits for Debian and the wider free software community. If you have questions, please come and ask us on IRC #debian-outreach or the debian-outreach mailing list.

The Debian Installer team is happy to report that the Buster Alpha 5 release of the installer includes some initial support for UEFI Secure Boot (SB) in Debian's installation media.

This support is not yet complete, and we would like to request some help! Please read on for more context and instructions to help us get better coverage and support.

On amd64 machines, by default the Debian installer will now boot (and install) a signed version of the shim package as the first stage boot loader. Shim is the core package in a signed Linux boot chain on Intel-compatible PCs. It is responsible for validating signatures on further pieces of the boot process (GRUB and the Linux kernel), allowing for verification of those pieces. Each of those pieces will be signed by a Debian production signing key that is baked into the shim binary itself.

However, for safety during the development phase of Debian's SB support, we have only been using a temporary test key to sign our GRUB and Linux packages. If we made a mistake with key management or trust path verification during this development, this would save us from having to revoke the production key. We plan on switching to the production key soon.

Due to the use of the test key so far, out of the box Debian will not yet install or run with SB enabled; Shim will not validate signatures with the test key and will stop, reporting the problem. This is correct and useful behaviour!

Thus far, Debian users have needed to disable SB before installation to make things work. From now on, with SB still disabled, installation and use should work just the same as previously. Shim simply chain-loads GRUB and continues through the boot chain without checking signatures.

It is possible to enrol more keys on a SB system so that shim will recognise and allow other signatures, and this is how we have been able to test the rest of the boot chain. We now invite more users to give us valuable test coverage on a wider variety of hardware by enrolling our Debian test key and running with SB enabled.

If you want to help us test our Secure Boot support, please follow the instructions in the Debian wiki and provide feedback.

With help from users, we expect to be able to ship fully-working and tested UEFI Secure Boot in an upcoming Debian Installer release and in the main Buster release itself.

The theme "futurePrototype" by Alex Makas has been selected as default theme for Debian 10 'buster'.

After the Debian Desktop Team made the call for proposing themes, a total of eleven choices have been submitted, and any Debian contributor has received the opportunity to vote on them in a survey. We received 3,646 responses ranking the different choices, and futurePrototype has been the winner among them.

We'd like to thank all the designers that have participated providing nice wallpapers and artwork for Debian 10, and encourage everybody interested in this area of Debian, to join the Design Team.

Congratulations, Alex, and thank you very much for your contribution to Debian!

DebConf19 will be held in Curitiba, Brazil from July 21th to 28th, 2019. It will be preceded by DebCamp, July 14th to 19th, and Open Day on the 20th.

DebConf, Debian's annual developers conference, is an amazing event where Debian contributors from all around the world gather to present, discuss and work in teams around the Debian operating system. It is a great opportunity to get to know people responsible for the success of the project and to witness a respectful and functional distributed community in action.

The DebConf team aims to organize the Debian Conference as a self-sustaining event, despite its size and complexity. The financial contributions and support by individuals, companies and organizations are pivotal to our success.

There are many different possibilities to support DebConf and we are in the process of contacting potential sponsors from all around the globe. If you know any organization that could be interested or who would like to give back resources to FOSS, please consider handing them the sponsorship brochure or contact the fundraising team with any leads. If you are a company and want to sponsor, please contact us at sponsors@debconf.org.

Let’s work together, as every year, on making the best DebConf ever. We are waiting for you at Curitiba!

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

• Abhijith PA (abhijith)
• Philippe Thierry (philou)
• Kai-Chung Yan (seamlik)
• Simon Quigley (tsimonq2)
• Daniele Tricoli (eriol)
• Molly de Blanc (mollydb)

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

• Nicolas Mora
• Wolfgang Silbermayr
• Marcos Fouces
• kpcyrd
• Scott Martin Leggett

Congratulations!