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

Imagination Technologies recently donated several high-performance SDNA-7130 appliances to the Debian Project for the development and maintenance of the MIPS ports.

The SDNA-7130 (Software Defined Network Appliance) platforms are developed by Rhino Labs, a leading provider of high-performance data security, networking, and data infrastructure solutions.

With these new devices, the Debian project will have access to a wide range of 32- and 64-bit MIPS-based platforms.

Debian MIPS ports are also possible thanks to donations from the aql hosting service provider, the Eaton remote controlled ePDU, and many other individual members of the Debian community.

The Debian project would like to thank Imagination, Rhino Labs and aql for this coordinated donation.

More details about GNU/Linux for MIPS CPUs can be found in the related press release at Imagination and their community site about MIPS.

Last year we started to push more of Debian news and information away the single news source of the DPN into other media services. Debian has been more active than ever on our many IRC channels, free software based social networks, and unofficial Twitter and Facebook feeds. Today we have decided to announce the next stage in keeping Debian at the forefront of media by sub-contracting publicity and press to an outside marketing agency.

The marketing agency (name will be disclosed soon) has provided an AI system (running entirely with free software) which will be fed with all the content of Debian mailing lists and sources.debian.net to understand the character of the Debian community and then better customize future articles, interviews, and event news.

However, some bits of personal information are also needed. Please install the "publicity" package and you'll be presented a form to fill in your data: name, surname, phone, snail mail address, place of birth, names of family members, employers or employees. Each person providing their data to the agency will receive coupon for a 20% discount in the download (purchase) of next Debian release (valid only for downloads from the official site www.debian.org).

We kindly ask every Debian community member to sign up in, at least, one of theses services: Twitter, Whatsapp, Slack or Facebook (IRC, mailing lists, and free software based RTC are allegedly not so 'cool'). Users need not be concerned with losing the features that the IRC bots provide (so long KGB!) as they will be replaced by Tay-like AI systems. The most visible change will be that MeetBot will no longer log the meetings anymore, but we have bribed an NSA employee so they pass the relevant messages to us.

"If this 'centralization, outsourcing and pay-and-forget' approach goes well with publicity, I'm considering running for DPL in 2017 to extend this model to other areas of Debian" said Laura Arjona Reina, (now) former publicity delegate.

A new logo and mascot has been designed too, as a symbol of this new era embracing the standards of branding and corporate messaging. Please consider voting in favor of it, in the General Resolution that will be proposed soon:

Today February 14th, the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) celebrates the "I Love Free Software" day. I Love Free Software day is a day for Free Software users to appreciate and thank the contributors of their favourite software applications, projects and organisations.

We take this opportunity to say "thank you" to all the Debian upstreams and downstreams, and all the Debian developers and contributors. Thanks for your work and dedication to free software!

There are many ways to participate in this ILoveFS day and we encourage everybody to join in and celebrate. Show your love to Debian developers, contributors and teams virtually on social networks using the #ilovefs hashtag and spreading the word in your own social media circles, or by visiting the ILoveFS campaign website to find and use some of the promotional materials available such as postcards and banners.

To learn more about the FSFE, you can read their announcement of this campaign or visit their general website.