September has been a busy month in terms of milestones: alpha5 and alpha6 were pushed out of the door. And a BetaFreeze went in effect during the last week of the month. Here is a selection of what happened in the archive during the month of September.
clamav protected by apparmor
The clamav anti-virus package saw the addition of an apparmor profile to increase the protection of the virus scanning daemon.
freeradius 2.1
A new upstream release of freeradius made its way to the intrepid archive. Support for ipv6, virtual servers and an improved administration tool are some of the new features. The server core has also been rewritten to be event based. This resulted in fixing lots of bugs that were difficult to address in the 1.1.X version.
Virtualization
A helper script that checks if the hardware supports virtualization extensions has been added to the kvm package. Support for hal and policykit has also been integrated thus improving the kvm experience in a desktop environment.
Both kvm and qemu have been fixed to use evdev for keycode mapping based on the code from gtk-vnc. That lead to the resolution of a particular bug causing grief to kvm users, namely the unfortunate loss of ability to use arrow keys, function keys, and any other sort of extended keys.
vm-builder has seen an big update to its documentation as well as support for creating vmware and xen images.
AD integration with likewise-open
Likewise-open has been integrated with the new pam-auth-update infrastructure available in Intrepid. likewise-open is also able to properly register DDNS entries on domain join.
Boot in degraded mode
The final integration work for boot in degraded mode has been done: the installer asks whether the system should be set to boot from a degraded array if the /boot partition is located on an mirrored array.
Landscape integration
The landscape client has been split in two packages: a -common package that is installed by default. It does not require a landscape account and provides system monitoring information in the motd (via the update-motd package). Here is a example of the information included in the motd:
System information as of Tue Oct 7 15:32:45 EDT 2008 System load: 0.79 Memory usage: 54% Processes: 56 Usage of /: 30.3% of 5.60GB Swap usage: 0% Users logged in: 1 Graph these measurements at https://landscape.canonical.com
The -client package is used with a Landscape account. Registration of the system with Landscape is now available at installation time when selecting the package update policy.
Status action for init scripts
Another round of packages have seen a status action added to their init script: openvpn, asterisk, mythtv and net-snmp.
Tomcat5.5
Following the work done on the tomcat6 package, tomcat5.5 has also been updated to integrate nicely with the intrepid java environment. And security fixes have been applied to the package.
