DebConf, the annual conference for Debian contributors and users interested in improving the Debian operating system, will be held in National Chiao Tung University, Microelectronics and Information Research Center (NCTU MIRC) in Hsinchu, Taiwan, from July 29th to August 5th, 2018. The conference is preceded by DebCamp, July 21th to July 27th, and the DebConf18 Open Day on July 28th.

Debian is an operating system consisting entirely of free and open source software, and is known for its adherence to the Unix and Free Software philosophies and for its extensiveness. Thousands of volunteers from all over the world work together to create and maintain Debian software, and more than 400 are expected to attend DebConf18 to meet in person and work together more closely.

The conference features presentations and workshops, and video streams are made available in real-time and archived.

The DebConf18 Open Day, Saturday, July 28, is open to the public with events of interest to a wide audience.

The detailed schedule of the Open Day's events include, among others:

• Questions and Answers Session with Minister Audrey Tang,
• Debian Meets Smart City Applications with SZ Lin
• a Debian Packaging Workshop,
• panel discussion: Story of Debian contributors around the world,
• sessions in English or Chinese about different aspects of the Debian project and community, and other free software projects like LibreOffice, Clonezilla and DRBL, LXDE/LXQt desktops, EzGo...

Everyone is welcome to attend, attendance is free, and it is a great possibility for interested users to meet the Debian community.

The full schedule for Open Day's events and the rest of the conference is at https://debconf18.debconf.org/schedule and the video streaming will be available at the DebConf18 website

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 numerous sponsors for their commitment to DebConf18, particularly its Platinum Sponsor Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the Bureau of Foreign Trade, Ministry of Economic Affairs via the MEET TAIWAN program, and its venue sponsors, the National Chiao Tung University 國立交通大學 and the National Center for High-performance Computing 國家高速網路與計算中心.

For media contacts, please contact DebConf organization: 林上智 (SZ Lin), Cell: 0911-162297

Three members of the Debian Perl team met in Hamburg between May 16 and May 20 2018 as part of the Mini-DebConf Hamburg to continue perl development work for Buster and to work on QA tasks across our 3500+ packages.

The participants had a good time and met other Debian friends. The sprint was productive:

• 21 bugs were filed or worked on, many uploads were accepted.
• The transition to Perl 5.28 was prepared, and versioned provides were again worked on.
• Several cleanup tasks were performed, especially around the move from Alioth to Salsa in documentation, website, and wiki.
• For src:perl, autopkgtests were enabled, and work on Versioned Provides has been resumed.

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

The participants would like to thank the Mini-DebConf Hamburg organizers for providing the framework for our sprint, and all donors to the Debian project who helped to cover a large part of our expenses.

This is the official call for artwork proposals for the Buster cycle.

For the most up to date details, please refer to the wiki.

We would also like to take this opportunity to thank Juliette Taka Belin for doing the Softwaves theme for stretch.

The deadlines for submissions is: 2018-09-05

The artwork is usually picked based on which themes look the most:

• ''Debian'': admittedly not the most defined concept, since everyone has their own take on what Debian means to them.
• ''plausible to integrate without patching core software'': as much as we love some of the insanely hot looking themes, some would require heavy GTK+ theming and patching GDM/GNOME.
• ''clean / well designed'': without becoming something that gets annoying to look at a year down the road. Examples of good themes include Joy, Lines and Softwaves.

If you'd like more information, please use the Debian Desktop mailing list.

We're excited to announce that Debian has selected twenty-six interns to work with us during the next months: one person for Outreachy, and twenty-five for the Google Summer of Code.

Here is the list of projects and the interns who will work on them:

A calendar database of social events and conferences

• Doğukan Çelik

Android SDK Tools in Debian

• Saif Abdul Cassim (GSoC 2018 Android SDK tools in Debian)
• Chandramouli Rajagopalan (Packaging and Updating Android SDK Tools)
• Umang Parmar (Android SDK Tools in Debian)

Automatic builds with clang using OBS

• Athos Ribeiro

Automatic Packages for Everything

• Alexandre Viau

Click To Dial Popup Window for the Linux Desktop

• Diellza Shabani
• Sanjay Prajapat
• Vishal Gupta

Design and implementation of a Debian SSO solution

• Birger Schacht

EasyGnuPG Improvements

• Divesh Uttamchandani

Extracting data from PDF invoices and bills for financial accounting

• Harshit Joshi

Firefox and Thunderbird plugin for free software habits

• Enkelena Haxhija

GUI app for EasyGnuPG

• Yugesh Ajit Kothari

Improving Distro Tracker to better support Debian teams

• Arthur Del Esposte

Kanban Board for Debian Bug Tracker and CalDAV servers

• Chikirou Massiwayne

OwnMailbox Improvements

• Georgios Pipilis

P2P Network Boot with BitTorrent

• Shreyansh Khajanchi

PGP Clean Room Live CD

• Jacob Adams

Port Kali Packages to Debian

• Samuel Henrique

Quality assurance for biological applications inside Debian

• Liubov Chuprikova

Reverse Engineering Radiator Bluetooth Thermovalves

• Sergio Alberti

Virtual LTSP Server

• Deepanshu Gajbhiye

Wizard/GUI helping students/interns apply and get started

• Elena Gjevukaj
• Minkush Jain
• Shashank Kumar

Congratulations and welcome to all of them!

The Google Summer of Code and Outreachy programs are possible in Debian thanks to the efforts of Debian developers and contributors that dedicate part of their free time to mentor interns and outreach tasks.

Join us and help extend Debian! You can follow the interns weekly reports on the debian-outreach mailing-list, chat with us on our IRC channel or on each project's team mailing lists.

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

• Andreas Boll (aboll)
• Dominik George (natureshadow)
• Julien Puydt (jpuydt)
• Sergio Durigan Junior (sergiodj)
• Robie Basak (rbasak)
• Elena Grandi (valhalla)
• Peter Pentchev (roam)
• Samuel Henrique (samueloph)

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

• Andy Li
• Alexandre Rossi
• David Mohammed
• Tim Lunn
• Rebecca Natalie Palmer
• Andrea Bolognani
• Toke Høiland-Jørgensen
• Gabriel F. T. Gomes
• Bjorn Anders Dolk
• Geoffroy Youri Berret
• Dmitry Eremin-Solenikov

Congratulations!