The Debian Project has announced the availability, for its testing distribution, of some packages to create a private cloud: among others, xcp-xapi and nova-xcp-plugins. Preserving user freedoms in the cloud is a tricky business and one of the major challenges ahead for Free Software. By easing the deployment of Debian-based private clouds we want to help our users in resisting the lure of giving up their freedoms in exchange of some flexibility, said Stefano Zacchiroli, Debian Project Leader.

The Debian Nicaraguan community is organising the Debian Tour: from April to June, members of the local Debian community will deliver talks in several universities in Nicaragua, helping students to learn about the Debian Project and Free Software in general. The tour started in the city of Masaya, and will touch other cities such as Managua and León. On May 5th, Debian Tour will take place at UCA (the future DebConf12 venue) and special visitors, the Debian Developers and DebConf chairs, Gunnar Wolf and Holger Levsen, will attend this time.

Jérôme Kieffer noticed that the European Synchrotron in Grenoble is migrating its computing infrastructure to Debian: the computer controlling the particle accelerator has already been migrated, as well as some data analysis servers and part of the computer cluster. The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) is a joint facility supported and shared by various European countries which operates the most powerful synchrotron radiation source in Europe. For data analysis Debian offers both the richest environment including the most used software and libraries in our field of research, and a rock solid distribution with security fixes, added Jérôme in another mail.

Stefano Zacchiroli sent his monthly report on DPL activities. During the last month, Stefano informed the project about a proposal for a revenue sharing agreement from DuckDuckGo, marked DEP-5 as accepted, and worked with Kenshi Muto to transfer the ownership of the Debian trademark in Japan to SPI. Stefano also gave an interview about Debian and Free Software in general (in Italian) to one of the major newspapers in Italy, La Repubblica. Thanks to Matteo Cortese, who translated it, an English version of the interview is also available.

Raphaël Hertzog published a People behind Debian interview with Samuel Thibault, member of the accessibility and Hurd teams.

Vincent Bernat wrote a tutorial on how to install XBMC on Debian Wheezy. XBMC is a media centre supporting a wide range of digital media and remote controls, which — thanks to the hard work of Andres Mejia — has recently been accepted into Debian.

Loïc Dachary sent a report from the OpenStack summit where he represented the Debian Project.

Ben Hutchings, member of the Debian Kernel Team, announced that he will maintain the Linux kernel version 3.2 as long-term kernel at kernel.org, in place of Greg Kroah-Hartman. Last January, Ben announced that Debian Wheezy will use Linux 3.2.

Paul Wise noticed that two Debian derivatives shut down in the last two months. Thanks to the derivatives census, some patches are still available and he provided an analysis of them.

Ana Guerrero announced that fifteen Debian projects have been selected for the Google Summer of Code 2012, which is six more projects than last year.

There are several upcoming Debian-related events:

• April 29-30, Shanghai, China — Debian Bug Squashing Party
• May 11-13, York, UK — Debian Bug Squashing Party

You can find more information about Debian-related events and talks on the events section of the Debian web site, or subscribe to one of our events mailing lists for different regions: Europe, Netherlands, Hispanic America, North America.

Do you want to organise a Debian booth or a Debian install party? Are you aware of other upcoming Debian-related events? Have you delivered a Debian talk that you want to link on our talks page? Send an email to the Debian Events Team.

One applicant has been accepted as Debian Developers and Nine people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Eduardo Trápani, Norman Messtorff, Frank Neuber, Daniel Pocock, Artur Rona, Yongzhi Pan, Nuno Carvalho, Daniel Martí, Jussi Hakala, and Eric Beuque into our project!