OStatic

The Linux Foundation welcomed its newest member today, the European-based free and open source standards consulting firm, credativ. This new partnership is a particularly exciting one, thanks to credativ's presence in the United Kingdom, Germany and Canada, and its focus on creating and implementing standards.

Naturally, credativ's business -- providing consulting and support services to businesses using free and open source software -- means it will take an active role in the Linux Standard Base workgroup. Because credativ is one of Europe's largest employers of Debian developers, the company also plans to participate in the Desktop Linux workgroup.

The Debian team has tangled with more than its fair share of demons during the development cycle of the 5.0 Lenny release. Lenny, which was loosely scheduled for release in September 2008, was delayed due to the number of release-critical bugs that were awaiting patches. As the year came to a close, Lenny faced other challenges, including team management shake-ups and a vote on how to handle Lenny's inclusion of non-free binary blobs to best meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines.

On February 1st, Lenny's second release candidate was announced, as well as the release's deep freeze status. Lenny is scheduled for general release over the weekend of February 14th.

Every software project, especially one with a history as long and colorful as Debian's, is bound to occasionally run into a release that it'd rather just put behind it and move onwards. The release itself, when finalized, might be the best ever -- but getting to the finalized point will induce flashbacks for years.

Debian's Lenny hopefully isn't that emotionally scarring, but it's undoubtedly been a release fraught with more than the usual amount of headaches. In October, Lisa reported that Lenny faced a delay due to some critical bugs. As the voting period on whether the inclusion of non-free binary blobs in Lenny meshed with the Debian Free Software Guidelines was held, Manoj Srivastava announced his resignation from the secretary post.

Last week, the votes were tabulated, and Lenny is set to move forward.

Canonical has announced that because of increased demand from hardware manufacturers, it will begin supporting ARMv7 processors (used in many smaller and system-on-a-chip (SoC) devices) with an optimized, commercially supported, full version of the Ubuntu desktop.

On Monday, the Debian project announced that it was renaming the former Custom Debian Distribution concept (the umbrella term under which Debian projects such as Debian Junior, Debian Med, and DebiChem were collectively known) to the more accurate (and catchier) name Debian Pure Blends.

Though Debian Pure Blends for some reason makes me think gourmet coffee, Andreas Tille of the Debian project makes a good deal of sense when he says that Custom Debian Distributions stated the obvious (yes, these projects use Debian code) without giving a clear picture of what the customizations were, or how closely they were related to the Debian base.

The fateful day has arrived for the first Android-powered phone. This Google-backed open phone will likely be sufficient for a large number of users -- if not in its first incarnation, certainly within a few models and revisions.

But it certainly isn't the only open phone. It isn't the first by any means, and it has another competitor hot on its heels.

Some more pioneering souls might forego the tamer Android for the Neo FreeRunner or the upcoming NeoPwn.

On Monday, Michael DeHaan cast his net into Debian/Ubuntu waters, seeking out those who might be interested in packaging and maintaining the Red Hat-centric installation/provisioning server, Cobbler.

DeHaan states that recent additions and improvements added to Cobbler's development branch are shaping the project into a viable alternative to Debian's FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) package.