The theme "futurePrototype" by Alex Makas has been selected as default theme for Debian 10 'buster'.

After the Debian Desktop Team made the call for proposing themes, a total of eleven choices have been submitted, and any Debian contributor has received the opportunity to vote on them in a survey. We received 3,646 responses ranking the different choices, and futurePrototype has been the winner among them.

We'd like to thank all the designers that have participated providing nice wallpapers and artwork for Debian 10, and encourage everybody interested in this area of Debian, to join the Design Team.

Congratulations, Alex, and thank you very much for your contribution to Debian!

DebConf19 will be held in Curitiba, Brazil from July 21th to 28th, 2019. It will be preceded by DebCamp, July 14th to 19th, and Open Day on the 20th.

DebConf, Debian's annual developers conference, is an amazing event where Debian contributors from all around the world gather to present, discuss and work in teams around the Debian operating system. It is a great opportunity to get to know people responsible for the success of the project and to witness a respectful and functional distributed community in action.

The DebConf team aims to organize the Debian Conference as a self-sustaining event, despite its size and complexity. The financial contributions and support by individuals, companies and organizations are pivotal to our success.

There are many different possibilities to support DebConf and we are in the process of contacting potential sponsors from all around the globe. If you know any organization that could be interested or who would like to give back resources to FOSS, please consider handing them the sponsorship brochure or contact the fundraising team with any leads. If you are a company and want to sponsor, please contact us at sponsors@debconf.org.

Let’s work together, as every year, on making the best DebConf ever. We are waiting for you at Curitiba!

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

• Abhijith PA (abhijith)
• Philippe Thierry (philou)
• Kai-Chung Yan (seamlik)
• Simon Quigley (tsimonq2)
• Daniele Tricoli (eriol)
• Molly de Blanc (mollydb)

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

• Nicolas Mora
• Wolfgang Silbermayr
• Marcos Fouces
• kpcyrd
• Scott Martin Leggett

Congratulations!

The Debian Cloud team held a sprint for the third time, hosted by Amazon at its Seattle offices from October 8th to October 10th, 2018.

We discussed the status of images on various platforms, especially in light of moving to FAI as the only method for building images on all the cloud platforms. The next topic was building and testing workflows, including the use of Debian machines for building, testing, storing, and publishing built images. This was partially caused by the move of all repositories to Salsa, which allows for better management of code changes, especially reviewing new code.

Recently we have made progress supporting cloud usage cases; grub and kernel optimised for cloud images help with reducing boot time and required memory footprint. There is also growing interest in non-x86 images, and FAI can now build such images.

Discussion of support for LTS images, which started at the sprint, has now moved to the debian-cloud mailing list). We also discussed providing many image variants, which requires a more advanced and automated workflow, especially regarding testing. Further discussion touched upon providing newer kernels and software like cloud-init from backports. As interest in using secure boot is increasing, we might cooperate with other team and use work on UEFI to provide images signed boot loader and kernel.

Another topic of discussion was the management of accounts used by Debian to build and publish Debian images. SPI will create and manage such accounts for Debian, including user accounts (synchronised with Debian accounts). Buster images should be published using those new accounts. Our Cloud Team delegation proposal (prepared by Luca Fillipozzi) was accepted by the Debian Project Leader. Sprint minutes are available, including a summary and a list of action items for individual members.

Debian continues participating in Outreachy, and we'd like to welcome our new Outreachy intern for this round, lasting from December 2018 to March 2019.

Anastasia Tsikoza will work on Improving the integration of Debian derivatives with the Debian infrastructure and the community, mentored by Paul Wise and Raju Devidas.

Congratulations, Anastasia, and welcome!

From the official website: Outreachy provides three-month internships for people from groups traditionally underrepresented in tech. Interns work remotely with mentors from Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities on projects ranging from programming, user experience, documentation, illustration and graphical design, to data science.

The Outreachy programme is possible in Debian thanks to the efforts of Debian developers and contributors who dedicate their free time to mentor students and outreach tasks, and the Software Freedom Conservancy's administrative support, as well as the continued support of Debian's donors, who provide funding for the internships.

Join us and help extend Debian! You can follow the work of the Outreachy interns reading their blogs (they are syndicated in Planet Debian), and chat with us in the #debian-outreach IRC channel and mailing list.