New Linux news source and Debian popularity contest

For all of you people who enjoy staying up on the latest Linux news I thought I'd recommend a new Linux news site that I have found useful. It is www.lxer.com (pronounced elixer). I heard about this site a few weeks ago when it's creator was interviewd on The Linux Show. He is apparently the same who originally created linuxtoday.com. He consolidates a LOT of linux news from a LOT of different sources on lxer.com One of the benifits of this site is that you can become a member and have only those topice you are interested in displayed (I still look at them all :-).

Secondly, I happened to be visting lxer.com today and came upon a story about something called the Debian popularity contest. I had not heard of this before, but from my reading I gather that this is being done by Debian to assist them in the next stable release. How does it assist? There are some 13500 packages to be introduced in the next release! This will take up approximately 13 cds! Obviously everyone will not need all 13 cds. How then do you organize and priortize? This is where the popularity contest comes in. The apps on the first 2 cds are pretty much set, but the order of those on the remaining 11 cds is yet to be determined. As far as I can tell, the idea behind the popularity contest is as follows. First you download the popularity package (apt-get install popularity-contest). Next you make sure that PARTICIPATE=yes' is in /etc/popularity-contest.conf. After this, I'm not quite sure what happens, but it appears that your package list is somehow relayed back to the popularity-contest manager or whoever is keeping track of this. This then is used to assist those who are attempting to organize the remaining pacakages onto 11 remaining cds. It's a pretty interesting concept. I know that many Knoppix users will have most of the packages included with Knoppix on their systems, but I'm sure that most of you have augmented your systems as well so I suppose this would prove useful. If any others of you have any further information on how this all works I'd be interested in hearing it.