Registration for DebConf19 is now open. The event will take place from July 21st to 28th, 2019 at the Central campus of Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná - UTFPR, in Curitiba, Brazil, and will be preceded by DebCamp, from July 14th to 19th, and an Open Day on the 20th.

DebConf is an event open to everyone, no matter how you identify yourself or how others perceive you. We want to increase visibility of our diversity and work towards inclusion at Debian Project, drawing our attendees from people just starting their Debian journey, to seasoned Debian Developers or active contributors in different areas like packaging, translation, documentation, artwork, testing, specialized derivatives, user support and many other. In other words, all are welcome.

To register for the event, log into the registration system and fill out the form. You will be able to edit and update your registration at any point. However, in order to help the organisers have a better estimate of how many people will attend the event, we would appreciate if you could access the system and confirm (or cancel) your participation in the Conference as soon as you know if you will be able to come. The last day to confirm or cancel is June 14th, 2019 23:59:59 UTC. If you don't confirm or you register after this date, you can come to the DebConf19 but we cannot guarantee availability of accommodation, food and swag (t-shirt, bag…).

For more information about registration, please visit Registration Information

Bursary for travel, accomodation and meals

In an effort to widen the diversity of DebConf attendees, the Debian Project allocates a part of the financial resources obtained through sponsorships to pay for bursaries (travel, accommodation, and/or meals) for participants who request this support when they register.

As resources are limited, we will examine the requests and decide who will receive the bursaries. They will be destined:

• To active Debian contributors.
• To promote diversity: newcomers to Debian and/or DebConf, especially from under-represented communities.

Giving a talk, organizing an event or helping during DebConf19 is taken into account when deciding upon your bursary, so please mention them in your bursary application. DebCamp plans can be entered in the usual Sprints page at the Debian wiki.

For more information about bursaries, please visit Applying for a Bursary to DebConf

Attention: the registration for DebConf19 will be open until Conference, but the deadline to apply for bursaries using the registration form before April 15th, 2019 23:59:59 UTC. This deadline is necessary in order to the organisers use time to analyze the requests, and for successful applicants to prepare for the conference.

To register for the Conference, either with or without a bursary request, please visit: https://debconf19.debconf.org/register

DebConf would not be possible without the generous support of all our sponsors, especially our Platinum Sponsors Infomaniak and Google. DebConf19 is still accepting sponsors; if you are interested, or think you know of others who would be willing to help, please get in touch!

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana (phls)
• Unit 193 (unit193)
• Marcio de Souza Oliveira (marciosouza)
• Ross Vandegrift (rvandegrift)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Romain Perier
• Felix Yan

Congratulations!

We are very pleased to announce that Infomaniak has committed to support DebConf19 as a Platinum sponsor.

"Infomaniak is proud to support the annual Debian Developers' Conference", said Marc Oehler, Chief Operating Officer at Infomaniak. "The vast majority of our hostings work using Debian and we share this community's values: promoting innovation whilst ensuring that security, transparency and user freedom remains top priority."

Infomaniak is Switzerland's largest web-hosting company, also offering backup and storage services, solutions for event organizers, live-streaming and video on demand services. It wholly owns its datacenters and all elements critical to the functioning of the services and products provided by the company (both software and hardware).

With this commitment as Platinum Sponsor, Infomaniak contributes to make possible our annual conference, and directly supports the progress of Debian and Free Software helping to strengthen the community that continues to collaborate on Debian projects throughout the rest of the year.

Thank you very much Infomaniak, for your support of DebConf19!

Become a sponsor too!

DebConf19 is still accepting sponsors. Interested companies and organizations may contact the DebConf team through sponsors@debconf.org, and visit the DebConf19 website at https://debconf19.debconf.org.

Debian is applying as a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code 2019, an internship program open to university students aged 18 and up, and will apply soon for the next round of Outreachy, an internship program for people from groups traditionally underrepresented in tech.

Please join us and help expanding Debian and mentoring new free software contributors!

If you have a project idea related to Debian and can mentor (or can coordinate the mentorship with some other Debian Developer or contributor, or within a Debian team), please add the details to the Debian GSoC2019 Projects wiki page by Tuesday, February 5 2019.

Participating in these programs has many benefits for Debian and the wider free software community. If you have questions, please come and ask us on IRC #debian-outreach or the debian-outreach mailing list.

The Debian Installer team is happy to report that the Buster Alpha 5 release of the installer includes some initial support for UEFI Secure Boot (SB) in Debian's installation media.

This support is not yet complete, and we would like to request some help! Please read on for more context and instructions to help us get better coverage and support.

On amd64 machines, by default the Debian installer will now boot (and install) a signed version of the shim package as the first stage boot loader. Shim is the core package in a signed Linux boot chain on Intel-compatible PCs. It is responsible for validating signatures on further pieces of the boot process (GRUB and the Linux kernel), allowing for verification of those pieces. Each of those pieces will be signed by a Debian production signing key that is baked into the shim binary itself.

However, for safety during the development phase of Debian's SB support, we have only been using a temporary test key to sign our GRUB and Linux packages. If we made a mistake with key management or trust path verification during this development, this would save us from having to revoke the production key. We plan on switching to the production key soon.

Due to the use of the test key so far, out of the box Debian will not yet install or run with SB enabled; Shim will not validate signatures with the test key and will stop, reporting the problem. This is correct and useful behaviour!

Thus far, Debian users have needed to disable SB before installation to make things work. From now on, with SB still disabled, installation and use should work just the same as previously. Shim simply chain-loads GRUB and continues through the boot chain without checking signatures.

It is possible to enrol more keys on a SB system so that shim will recognise and allow other signatures, and this is how we have been able to test the rest of the boot chain. We now invite more users to give us valuable test coverage on a wider variety of hardware by enrolling our Debian test key and running with SB enabled.

If you want to help us test our Secure Boot support, please follow the instructions in the Debian wiki and provide feedback.

With help from users, we expect to be able to ship fully-working and tested UEFI Secure Boot in an upcoming Debian Installer release and in the main Buster release itself.