The first release candidate of the installer for Debian Wheezy was released on 17 February. Many fixes are included in this release of the installer, along with new improvements, including better speech synthesis support, various improvements for GNU/kFreeBSD, fixes for the grub2 package, new supported hardware, etc.
A full list of known issues with details is collected on the errata page. Everyone is encouraged to test the installer and report bugs; media and further information are available on the Debian Installer pages.
This release was delayed a few weeks because of a technical disagreement about one package. Thanks to prompt action in response to the problem, a solution has now been implemented.
Christian Perrier won the 700,000th bug contest, by betting more than two years ago on the date of bug #700000, which was recently reported by Cédric Boutillier. He now invites everyone to participate in contests to predict the dates when Debian's 800,000th and 1,000,000th bug reports will be filed.
Stefano Zacchiroli sent his monthly report of DPL activities for January 2013. Stefano reminded readers that the election process for the next DPL term will start in early March, so there are only a few days left to convince Debian developers to run. He confirmed that he will not run again for another term. Meanwhile he is also looking for help in organising Debian activities in the Google Summer of Code program, and in maintaining an authoritative list of DFSG-free licenses. Among other things, Stefano also mentioned an updated policy draft for Debian marks.
During the first weekend of February, the Debian Project participated at FOSDEM 2013 in Brussels, Belgium. In addition to the official Debian booth, several project members delivered talks about different topics: among others, Andreas Tille presented the Debian Med project (video), Tollef Fog Heen and Michael Biebl gave an overview of systemd in Debian (video), Samuel Thibault reported on the GNU/Hurd architecture in Debian, and Ian Campbell spoke about the future of paravirtualisation under Xen. Most of the FOSDEM talks are available as video recordings.
Sylvestre Ledru posted an article on his blog about the results of rebuilding the archive using Clang 3.2. To make the results more visible, Paul Wise has integrated them into the Package Tracking System. In the meantime, Hideki Yamane has written a patch to make it easier to use Clang instead of gcc when building with pbuilder. You can find more information about current efforts related to building Debian with Clang and other alternative compilers in Sylvestre's FOSDEM talk.
Stefano Zacchiroli renewed Kurt Roeckx's appointment as Project Secretary.
Julien Danjou wrote an article about Cloud tools for Debian, explaining the basics and giving hints about the tools needed to run a cloud platform.
Francesca Ciceri published instructions on making your own Debian swirl plush keyring.
Raphael Geissert has continued his A bashism a week series, now containing more than ten articles.