Arm Cambridge - pre-mini-Debconf days 20261106

Another interesting morning so far. Lots of interesting side conversations (and, of course, people using IRC to talk to the person next to them as is traditional).

It's nice to hear somebody ask a question and be told, effectively  "Oh, you need to talk to XX - they're sitting over there" or " I need to talk to someone about X, Y and Z - and they all resolve to you".

Especially noticeable in  this room, perhaps, but it does point to the fact that many things in Debian ultimately  resolve to one or two people. There are a lot of people each with multiple areas of expertise which overlap - and then a few individuals who are essential as points of reference for *everyone* else.

Thanks again to Arm for hosting us, for excellent food, coffee and facilities which make this _so much easier_ as a working environment for these days.

Arm Cambridge - pre mini-Debconf days 20261105

 At Arm in Cambridge for two hackathon-type days before the main mini-Debconf on Saturday and Sunday. A roomful of people, mostly very quiet this morning but with people gradually arriving and greeting each other.

Just had an excellent lunch. Arm are excelling themselves, as ever. With particular thanks to Charlie Dixon who has arranged excellent facilities for us all and to Liv for the catering provision. Other old friends here have also helped as ever.

This sort of thing is ideal for cross-fertilization of experience, ideas - the side conversations where you realise that three people are converging to a consensus of discussion from three different starting points. It's fun and intensely interesting and it's the sort of thing that keeps me running Debian - and trusting the colleagues behind it because I've seen them here. 

Face and name recognition is sometimes at least as valuable as rockstar coding and the social element and shared history keeps us pulling together.

Debian 11 is at end of life from Long Term Support

 Lots of posts in the debian-user mailing list complaining about updates with Debian 11.11 suddenly failing.

See Debian 11 Long Term Support reaches end-of-life

August 31st, 2026

The Debian Long Term Support (LTS) Team hereby announces that Debian 11 bullseye support has reached its end-of-life today, 31 August 2026, five years after its initial release on 14 August 2021.

Starting in September, Debian will not provide further security updates for Debian 11. A subset of bullseye packages will be supported by external parties. Detailed information can be found at Extended LTS.

The Debian LTS Team is currently providing security support for Debian 12 bookworm, the current oldstable release. Thanks to the combined efforts of different teams including the Security Team, the Release Team, and the LTS Team, the Debian 12 life cycle encompasses five years. Debian 12 will receive Long Term Support until 30 June 2028. The supported architectures in Debian 12 LTS are amd64, i386, arm64, armhf and ppc64el.

For further information about using bookworm LTS and upgrading from bullseye LTS, please refer to LTS/Using.

Debian and its LTS Team would like to thank all contributing users, developers, sponsors and other Debian teams who are making it possible to extend the life of previous stable releases, and who have made Bullseye LTS a success.

If you rely on Debian LTS, please consider joining the team, providing patches, testing or funding the efforts.

 

2025-11-15 17:16 UTC Debian media testing for point release 13.2 of Trixie

*Busy* day in Cambridge. A roomful of people, large numbers of laptops and a lot of parallel installations.

Joined here by Emyr, Chris, Helen and Simon with Isy doing speech installs from her university accommodation. Two Andy's always makes it interesting. Steve providing breakfast, as ever.

We're almost there: the last test install is being repeated to flush out a possible bug. Other release processes are being done in the background.

Thanks again to Steve for hosting and all the hard work that goes into this from everybody.

 

Debian 12.11 - testing completed, images being signed and we'll be back for the next point release on ???

 All finished and wrapping up. The bug I thought was fixed has been identified on two distinct sets of hardware. There are workarounds: the most sensible is *not* to use i386 without a modeset parameter but to just use amd64 instead. amd64 works on the identical problematic hardware in question - just use 64 bit.

Debian 12.11 testing - and we're nearly there

 Almost finished the testing we're going to do at 15:29 UTC. It's all been good - we've found that at least one of the major bug reports from 12.10 is not reproducible now. All good - and many thanks to all testers: Sledge, rattusrattus, egw, smcv (and me).

Debian 12.11 images testing - progress

 We're now well under way: Been joined by a Simon McVittie (smcv) and we're almost through testing most of the standard images. Live image testing is being worked through. All good so far without identifying problems other than mistyping :)