In case you haven't heard of Skanlite let me give you a quick overview: Skanlite is a really simple scanning application for KDE 4 (if you used Kooka with KDE 3 you'll probably be happy with Skanlite too). It doesn't offer too much options besides preview and real scans except some basic colour corrections, a selection whether you want colour scans or not and whatever options the SANE driver for your scanner offers. But then it doesn't offer too much options, finds your scanners automatically (if SANE can find them) and suffices most needs.

With the basic "what does it do" question out of the way, I'd like to point out, that version 0.8 just entered Debian's experimental suite. The reason for the upload to experimental instead of Sid is, that 0.8 needs a method in KSaneWidget, that was added in the 4.7 branch. Sid has only the 4.6 branch. As soon as KDE 4.7 becomes available in Sid, I'll upload a version of Skanlite to unstable.

If you want to give Skanlite 0.8 a try, you need to upgrade most parts of your KDE installation to the 4.7 versions in experimental. So be careful not to break anything (on the other hand 4.7 has been working quite nicely for me so far), maybe try it out in a virtual machine or something similar.

I just uploaded my unofficial wine-unstable packages to dev.carbon-project.org (I skipped 1.3.36 over the holiday period). These new packages come with an important and often-requested change: they use GCC 4.5 to build the binaries, this works around an upstream GCC bug, see WineHQ bug report #22053 for further details. Unfortunately that clashes with the recent multi-archification on Debian and can lead to FTBFS in an automated build environment (like pbuilder would set up). The reason is the missing symlink from /usr/include/asm to /usr/include/DEB_BUILD_MULTIARCH/asm which then leads to GCC not finding e.g. errno.h (see #638418 for further details). That gives you the following options to make your build work again:

• Change the source package back to using the default GCC (ie. 4.6 at the moment).
• Modify your base.tgz for pbuilder and add the symlink manually.
• Modify the build environment "on the fly". You can either do this with a script in your hook directory for pbuilder (see pbuilder(8) on how to do that) or by setting up the symlink manually while pbuilder is installing the dependencies for wine-unstable (the last option is fragile and requires "good timing").

Otherwise you can also use the pre-built binary packages.

Just a short announcement: yaWP 0.4.2 is available from Debian Sid and should enter Testing (Wheezy) in ten days. One of the main changes (compatibility with KDE SC 4.7+) isn't affecting Debian yet, but the fixes to e.g. the Wunderground ION are nice to have (no matter which wheather frontend you use).

Thanks to Ulf, the current main upstream developer, for keeping yaWP the (in my partial opinion) best weather Plasmoid out there!

Now a little request to the various users around the world: It'd be nice if some of you would upload a screenshot of your yaWP instance to screenshots.debian.net in order to get a little variety on the package page for plasma-widget-yawp. Other themes or usage in the bar would be most welcome.