March 19, 2010

Robert Collins

LibrePlanet – GNU Hackers Meetup

GNU Hackers meetups are a face to face meeting to balance the online collaboration that GNU maintainers and contributors do all the time. These are a recent (since 2007) thing, and are having a positive effect within GNU and the FSF.

The LibrePlanet 2010 GNU Hackers meetup runs concurrent with the first day of LibrePlanet.

We started with some project updates:

SipWitch – a project to do discovery of SIP endpoints and setup encryption etc. This looks quite interesting, and is looking for contributors.
Bazaar – I presented an update on where Bazaar is at and what we’re focusing on now and in the future:
- short term: merging and collaboration:
  - merge behaviour
  - conflict behaviour
  - develop a rebase that can combine unrelated branches
  - looms to be polished, or pipelines extended – something to manage long-standing patches for distributions, or other environments that need long lived patch sets.
- long term
  - continuing optimisation of network and local perf
  - meta-branch operations – mirror collections of branches,
  - work with many branches at once (many branches in one dir (a-la git, hopefully less confusing)
  - easier ‘get up and go’ for new contributors
- now and forever
  - keep fostering community growth
  - we’re aiming for negative bug growth- get on top and stay there

Felipe Sanches presented his list of things that should be on the high priority project list:

accessibility since 1st boot
reconfigurable hardware development (FPGA tools) – this is particularly relevant for handling e.g. wifi cards that have a FPGA in the card, so we can replace the non-free microcode.
nonfree firmware issue

–lunch–

John Eaton on Octave. John compared the octave contributors – 30 or so over the years, and never more than 2 at a time. The Proprietary product Matlab that Octave is very similar to has 2000 staff working at the company producing it. Users seem to expect the two products to be equivalent, and are disappointed that Octave is less capable, and that the community is not as able to do the sort of support that a commercial organisation might have done. Octave would like to gain some more developers and be able to educe users more effectively – convert more to become developers.

Rob Myers, the chief GNU webmaster gave a description of his role: The webmasters deal with adding new content, dealing with mail to webmaster@, which can be queries for the GNU project, random questions about CDs, and an endless flood of spam. The webmasters project is run as a free software project – the site is in CVS (yes CVS), visible on Savannah. Templates could be made nicer and perhaps move to a CMS.

Aubrey Jaffer on cross platform. There is a thing called Water which is meant to replace all the different languages used in web apps – generates html, css, alters the DOM, does what you’d do with javascript. So there is a Water -> backend translator that outputs Java for servers, C# for windows, and so on. (I think, this wasn’t entirely clear). He went on to talk about many of the internals of a thing called Schlep which is used as a compiler to get scheme code running in C/C#/Java so as to make it available to Water backends in different environments.

Matt Lee spoke about GNU FM – GNU FM is a free ‘last.fm’ site. The site is running at http://libre.fm/. 24ish devs, but stalle after 6 months – whats next? Matt has started GNU Social to build a communication framework for GNU projects to talk to each other – e.g. for each GNU FM site to communicate on the back end, with a particular focus on doing social functionality – groups, friendships, personal info. The wiki page needs ideas!

GNU advisory board discussion… too much to capture, but focused GNU wide issues – things like how projects get contributors, contributions, coordination. Teams were a big discussion point, bug trackers – how to coordinate teams followed up of that, and there is s ‘GNU Source Release Collection’ project to do coordinated releases of GNU software that are all known to work together.

19 March, 2010 10:09PM

David Watson

7 Day Photo Challenge - Day 7

Well here it is, the last shot in the challenge. I've quite enjoyed it this week, I post a follow-up over the weekend with some more thoughts but for now the last image...

19 March, 2010 09:02PM

Filip Van Raemdonck

Indeed it is

Here's to another company with a sense of humour.

Granted, this is actually a former Sun webspace, so it wasn't Oracle that put the PostgreSQL “most advanced” badge on there.
But Sun did own the MySQL brand, before.

19 March, 2010 08:33PM by Filip Van Raemdonck

Christoph Egger

Open Game Art did it right

Open Game Art is a newly started site for exchanging free Artwork. While one can easily get the impression that there are loads of such sites around, Open Game Art is one of the very few that actually is done right.

As a Member of the Debian Games Team and the Unknown Horizons Project I was way too often in the need for good artwork searching around the web. I've also already reported once about my trouble.

There are quite some sites like Free Sounds around offering free artwork -- but only free as in beer as the saying goes, not as in speech which of course is really unhelpfull for FOSS projects. And even most of the sites that have free content often only tell you the license on some special pice of arts details page.

Open Game Art is quite different from that. All the license you may choose as a contributor are free (both in Debian and in FSF terms) and the license is available through a search filter so you can find stuff that fits you project's licensing policy. This list, and that's another thing I really like about that site, is the availability of choice among common licenses including, next to the copyleft class of licenses a fair share of more liberal licenses like my personal favourite, the zlib License.

And because such a site is just as good as it's amount and quality of data I've started sharing some recordings. I'm currently really new to audio recording so I guess it'll take some time for me to become really good. I'm considering putting some of my experiences and stuff I've learned here.

19 March, 2010 06:37PM

Julien Blache

pommed v1.32: maintenance release

I’ve just released pommed v1.32, a minor maintenance release for the 12″ PowerBook G4.

I’ve just realized that I did not post an announce for pommed v1.31 a while back, which was also a maintenance release, adding support for the MacBookPro5,4 (15″ June 2009) and the latest wireless keyboard.

19 March, 2010 05:37PM by jblache

Alexander Reichle-Schmehl

RC-Bug statistics for Squeeze, calendar week 11:

Note: Please see RC-Bug statistics for Squeeze, calendar week 6 for an explanation of the numbers.

Total:	615	-84
Affecting Squeeze:	481	-78
Squeeze-only:	105	-12
Unfixed bugs remaining in Squeeze:	376	-66

Of these 376 bugs...

... are pending	20	-16
... are patched:	50	-15
... are duplicates:	49	+2
... are in Non-free or contrib:	7	-3
... are claimed by someone:	12	-2
... are fixed in the delayed queue:	1	-4
... are somehow marked as fixed:	42	-11

Or in other words:
Release critical bugs left in squeeze, when ignoring all these:
228 (-34 compared to previous statistics).

With this release managers views, 402 (-70 compared to previous statistics) bugs remain to be fixed somehow before we can release.

19 March, 2010 03:06PM by Alexander Reichle-Schmehl (alexander@schmehl.info)

Jon Dowland

“The Dice Man” and “Generation X”

The movie '“Fight Club' had a profound effect on me when I first saw it in 1999. I wasn't as fond of the originating novel, although there was something about the prose that Palahniuk used which I did enjoy.

Since then I've read more of Palahniuk's work. My favourite of his books is actually “Non-Fiction” (a.k.a. “Stranger than Fiction”): a collection of essays and interviews. Reading some of the stories in that collection, it becomes very clear where some of the concepts in his fiction originate. There are also a number of pieces on the craft of writing. He writes some really gushing praise about Amy Hempel:

When you study Minimalism in the novelist Tom Spanbauer's workshop, the first story you read is Amy Hempel's The Harvest. After that, you're ruined… every other book you ever read will suck.

I recently read a couple of novels, both of which reminded me a lot of Fight Club. 'Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture' by Douglas Coupland is an interesting tale of three or more societal drop-outs. Fight Club was written five years after Generation X and owes it a lot.

'Generation X' has curt, clipped passages and many dictionary-definition-esque side notes decoding hipster-slang, which add a lot of colour to the non-events of the story. These remind me both of the copous asides in Pratchett novels, or the chapter introductions in Philip K Dick's excellent 'Ubik'.

Historical Overdosing: To live in a period of time when too much seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts.

The novel goes absolutely nowhere, but that's actually one of the appealing things about it. When I mentioned this to my partner (who, as far as I know, has not read the book), she said that it sounded like the perfect tonic to a stressful life: imagine lying on a sunbed, doing nothing, reading about people lying on sunbeds, doing nothing.

This is the first of Coupland's novels that I have read, but I managed to pick up a copy of 'Generation A' (so far as a I can tell, not a sequel, as such) 70% off as part of the closing-down sale at my local Borders store, so I will probably read that too.

I also recently finished “The Dice Man”, by Luke Reinhart. It's a tongue-in-cheek pseudo-autobiography written under a pen-name about a psychiatrist who opts to delegate all life decisions to the throw of dice.

Once again, Fight Club owes a lot to this book. The unhinged situations that occur are used to shine a satirical light on modern society. 'modern society' in the book is the 1970s. The distance between society then and now adds something to the novel's value now. Having said that, the narrator is not a particularly likeable character and it's hard to relate to him. Coincidentally my dad recently read this book and described it as 'misogynistic', which might be an understatement. Mind you, most of the characters, female or otherwise, are fairly 2D: perhaps intentionally the only fleshed out human is the narrator.

In my favourite scene of the book, the narrator is in a situation under the influence of more than one drug. A TV set is on in the background. As the scene progresses, the events taking place on the TV are written about with increasing prominence compared to the main events of the scene. This escalates to a point where they are of equal importance and you can no longer easily distinguish the events taking place in the real world from those taking place on the television.

This is the only part of the book that I can recall that employed any narrative tricks. The rest is by-the-numbers, and mostly internal monologue. The book is also at least 50% too long: the concept just doesn't stretch as far as it's forced to.

19 March, 2010 02:45PM by Jon Dowland

Aigars Mahinovs

Latvijas pavasara Ubuntu Bug Jam un Installest – 27.03.2010

The following is an invitation to the Latvian Ubuntu Bug Jam (in Latvian) sent for a bit of a wider circulation to catch people that monitor Planet Debian, but not Planet Ubuntu.lv.

27. martā LU Linux centrā notiks divi pasākumi vienā – Ubuntu Global Bug Jam Latvijas daļa un installfests. Global Bug Jam ir pasākums, kurā piedalīties ir aicināti interesenti, speciālisti, studenti, lai meklētu kļūdas Ubuntu Lucid Lynx testēšanas versijā. Cilvēki, kas grib uzzināt par Ubuntu Linux, vai kuri grib atrisināt kādu konkrētu problēmu ar Ubuntu Linux tiek aicināti nākt uz šī pasākuma otro daļu no pulksten 14:00 līdz 16:00. Pasākuma būs kafija un bulciņas ar Accenture atbalstu.

Ubuntu Global Bug Jam ir globāls pasākums, kura mērķis ir iepazīstināt programmētājus un tulkotājus ar rīkiem, kas tiek lietoti, lai labotu problēmas Ubuntu operētājsistēmā un arī izlabot pēc iespējas lielāku skaitu problēmu īsā laikā. Izstrādātāji, kas grib labot Ubuntu problēmas vai iemācīties kā labot Ubuntu problēmas, tiek aicināti ierasties 12:00 un palikt līdz 16:00.

Installfest pasākuma sadaļā tiek aicināti visi esošie Ubuntu lietotaji, kuriem ir kādas konkrētas problēmas un arī cilvēki, kas tikai vēl interesējas par Ubuntu Linux. Ja jums ir konkrēta problēma ar Ubuntu Linux ir ieteicams atnest uz pasākumu savu datoru, kurā šo problēmu var atkārtot, lai pasākumā esošie programmētāji varētu noteikt šīs problēmas iemeslu un palīdzētu no novērst. Installfests sāksies 14:00 un turpināsies līdz 16:00.

Ubuntu ir bezmaksas, uz Linux balstīta pilna apjoma operētājsistēma jebkuram personālajam datoram, serverim un portatīvajai iekārtai. Tās standarta komplektā iekļautas visas nepieciešamās programmas, lai strādātu ar tekstiem, attēliem, elektronisko pastu un Internetu, kā arī jūs varat instalēt papildus programmatūru dažādiem nolūkiem. Pasaulē to šobrīd jau lieto vairāk kā 8 miljoni cilvēku, un to legāli bez maksas var lietot gan mājās, gan komerciālās un nekomerciālās organizācijās.

LU Linux Centrs ir izveidots Latvijas Universitātes Datorikas fakultātē. Linux Centra darbības mērķi ir: popularizēt atvērtā pirmkoda (Open Source) programmatūras, tai skaitā, Linux operētājsistēmas un citu atvērto tehnoloģiju iespējas un priekšrocības; piedalīties LU studiju procesā un īstenot lietišķo IKT pētījumu projektus, tajos izmantojot un attīstot atvērtās tehnoloģijas; sekmēt APP pieejamību Latvijā un pasaulē.

19 March, 2010 10:12AM by aigarius

Jon Dowland

the world we live in

Sometimes the world we live in amazes me.

Rentokil falsify scientific studies that show an alarming number of bugs and pests on public transport. Ben Goldacre calls them out, and fellow marketing people defend the practice as a sound marketing tool.

On the other side of the globe, Viacom sue Youtube for breach of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, specifically for not doing an adequate job of preventing their copyright material from being shared via the site. At the same time, Viacom hired at least 18 marketing agencies to upload its content to Youtube. They even went as far as to apply post-production techniques to make the videos look illegally sourced.

19 March, 2010 09:41AM by Jon Dowland

Andrew Pollock

[debian] Transitioning to a new RSA key

Julien's blog post reminded me that I needed to announce that I'm in the process of transitioning to a new key myself.

I've been meaning to do something about the whole weak 1024-bit DSA key thing ever since everyone started freaking out about them, but I liked how well connected my old key was. Oh well. Time to suck it up and start over.

Here's my transition document, now that I've figured out how sign a file with multiple keys

19 March, 2010 06:27AM

[tech] How to get GPG to sign with multiple keys

I spent way too much time trying to figure out how to get GnuPG to sign a file with multiple keys. It's not at all obvious from the man page, but you can use the -u option multiple times, with each key ID that you want to use.

19 March, 2010 06:23AM

René Mayorga

MiniDebConf Panamá 2010

Finally, after almost 6 months of planing, this event is coming and will be start tomorrow, this is really great, There was a first attempt, and an idea to do a local(central-america based) Debian gathering on 2007 IIRC, now it will happen (almost 3 years later and at the same country).

There was a lot of things that actually change since the fitst attempt, now Central-america has a more strong FLOSS Community, and now this event is possible, and it will happen this weekend yay!

I really need to say thanks to Anto, Mauro Rosero, David, Caro and Gunnar, but I realize that doing all the orga stuffs was hard, I was quite involved since January, and I really say that you need a lot of work and energy to make a small event like this happen, but right now while I still sitting at home trying to finish to prepare my talks I realize that there was a lot of hard work put on this from everyone, and I’m really happy to attend this gathering, also I hope that this event do something good on the local FLOSS people, since we have quite nice people here, but they are afraid to contribute, this is the chance to work together and push a bit to get more contributors from central-america.

19 March, 2010 03:50AM by churro

Dirk Eddelbuettel

R Project selected for the Google Summer of Code 2010

Earlier today, Google announced the list of accepted mentor organizations for the Google Summer of Code 2010 (GSoC 2010). And we are happy to report that the R Project is once again a participating organization (and now for the third straight year) joining a rather august group of open source projects from around the globe.

An R Wiki page had been created and serves as the central point of reference for the R Project and the GSoC 2010. It contains a list of project ideas, currently counting eleven and spanning everything from research-oriented topics (such as spatial statistics or automatic differentiation) to R community-support (regarding CRAN statistics and the CRANtastic site) to extensions (NoSQL, RPy2 data interfaces, Rserve browser integration) and more. I also just created a mailing list gsoc-r@googlegroups.com where prospective students and mentors can exchange ideas and discuss. As for other details, the Google Summer of Code 2010 site has most of the answers, and we will try to keep R-related information on the aforementioned R Wiki page.

19 March, 2010 01:15AM

March 18, 2010

Debian News

Debian selected for the Google Summer of Code 2010

Debian has been selected as a mentor organization for the Google Summer of Code 2010.

Whether your are a Debian Developer or a Student, this might be a good time to:

add and review project ideas and personal proposals on the Ideas page
come join us on IRC (#debian-soc on irc.debian.org) and on our mailing list to talk about your ideas and applications

Remember that the sooner we get project ideas and personal proposals, the longer we can work on them to make them into great summer projects!

You can read more about the Google Summer of Code in their website. Also, if you are interested in participating, it is very important checking the program time line.

Contributed by: Obey Arthur Liu

18 March, 2010 10:03PM by ana

Clint Adams

BSPs and Triage and squeeze

Some people want Debian 6.0 (codename "squeeze") to be released sometime this year. Personally I think there is some kitsch value in releasing it during DebCamp or DebConf, and there is something to be said for doing it just beforehand so that everyone can break unstable into insanity while rolling around on the quad under the hot August sun. Some people want it to happen sooner, possibly as soon as possible. Irrespective of your preferences, or if you care at all, we will repeat the time-honored mantra: it will be released when it's ready.

Readiness is somewhat of a subjective measure, but we typically do not consider a potential release ready when the RC bug count is high. There are a lot of RC bugs right now. Typically these are fixed at some point by their maintainers. There are also some self-motivated individuals who enjoy fixing these bugs themselves, and this practice predates the RCBW initiative, though perhaps not to the same level of combined intensity and endurance. Then there are bug-squashing parties, or BSPs.

A BSP can be held “virtually” which means that a bunch of people get together online and say that they are having a party, or it can be at a designated physical space. I attended one of the latter type not too long ago.

This BSP was targeted specifically to newbies or people who might feel that they are unqualified to help squash bugs, but wished to learn how to contribute. Some group and one-on-one mentoring occurred, in areas of how packages are put together, how to patch things, how to submit patches to the BTS, how to reproduce bugs, and other more problem-specific topics.

I really don't know how successful this endeavor was since getting metrics on the effectiveness of teaching has been a historically difficult problem. On the other hand, we did spend a fair amount of time actually squashing bugs, which is a bit easier to assess. One problem we had was that some people liked to be loud and distracting and demand unreasonable amounts of attention for topics that had nothing to do with bugs, Debian, or free software, but we made progress regardless.

Marc Brockschmidt thinks we need more BSPs and more focus on bug triage. Bug triage can be very demotivating and many people dislike doing it. BSPs seem to have powers of motivation through group camaraderie or friendly competition, so I would agree that it's worth experimenting with.

18 March, 2010 09:00PM

Joachim Breitner

libnss-gw-name: A stable name for your gateway

I often find myself running /sbin/route to get the IP address of the current gateway, especially when using a wireless LAN while traveling. For example, if the “Internet does not work” I usually ping the local gateway to see where the connectivity problem lies. I also need the IP if I want to access the routers configuration web interface. This is somewhat tedious, so I wrote libnss-gw-name, and now:

$ sudo apt-get install libnss-gw-name
[...]
$ ping gateway.current
PING gateway.current (172.20.239.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from hhicalvin.stud.uni-karlsruhe.de (172.20.239.1): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=2.16 ms
64 bytes from hhicalvin.stud.uni-karlsruhe.de (172.20.239.1): icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=1.48 ms
64 bytes from hhicalvin.stud.uni-karlsruhe.de (172.20.239.1): icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=2.73 ms
^C
--- gateway.current ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2003ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 1.482/2.129/2.739/0.513 ms

Once libnss-gw-name is installed, it hooks into the system’s Name Service Switch, which is, among other things, responsible for resolving hostnames to ip addresses. It will only react on the name “gateway.current”, checking the system’s routing table and returning the IP address of the current default gateway.

It’s a pretty simple and small tool, but it could well prove very handy to the power user. I uploaded libnss-gw-name to Debian sid, you can download the source code or access the git repository.

18 March, 2010 08:40PM by nomeata (mail@joachim-breitner.de)

David Paleino

JOSM/1.5 svn3094 in sid

For those of you fans of OpenStreetMap, I just uploaded JOSM 3094 to Sid.

I had to heavily patch this version, to disable OAuth support. Yes, you won't be able to use it with the Debian package. The reason is simple: supporting OAuth requires a set of packages not yet available in Debian. I've filed ITPs, and blocked bugs appropriately, but it'll take some time until the full chain is available.

In the meanwhile, enjoy! Go in the streets and map the world!

18 March, 2010 08:10PM

David Watson

7 Day Photo Challenge - Day 6

Really ran short on time today, which I think is reflected in todays image. In the end I just played around using the contents of my pockets.

I think I'd better start planning for tomorrow.

18 March, 2010 08:08PM

C.J. Adams-Collier

IronRuby on OS X

We had a visitor on #ironruby today asking for help getting IR running on his mac. I gave him the following directions, and they seemed to work aside from one glitch. I tested them on my wife’s mac, and it worked for me, too.

Install Mono

You can grab the Mono .dmg from go-mono.com. This will install the framework and put the required programs (mono, xbuild) in your PATH.

Fetch the IronRuby source

Since Jim Deville likes macs, I’m sure more recent versions will work, but this is the one we’ve recently packaged up for Debian and tested on Ubuntu. If you want to be certain that the IronRuby code you write on Debian works on OS X, then you should probably build from the same version of the source. You should probably also install version 2.4.3 of Mono, but that may be more effort than it’s worth ;)

http://github.com/mletterle/ironruby/tarball/20090805+git.e6b28d27

Unpack the tarball

Open up a terminal and unpack the thing you just downloaded:

$ mkdir ~/src/
$ cd ~/src/
$ tar xfz ~/Desktop/mletterle-ironruby-e6b28d2.tar.gz
$ cd mletterle-ironruby-e6b28d2/

Build IronRuby

At this point, you should be able to build the IronRuby assemblies using xbuild. I don’t recommend using rake, as it has some dependencies, and I’m not a fan of dependencies.

$ xbuild /p:TreatWarningsAsErrors=false Merlin/Main/Languages/Ruby/Ruby.sln
<snip/>
Build succeeded.
	 2817 Warning(s)
	 0 Error(s)

Time Elapsed 00:00:28.8378230

Run the IronRuby interactive interpreter

Our guest mentioned that he was using a terminal with a white background. Do note that the font color of the interactive interpreter (aka Read-Eval-Print Loop or REPL) is white, so if you’re using a white background, you might want to change it. IIRC, there is a way to change the font color using a configuration setting. Figuring it out is left as an exercise for the reader.

$ mono Merlin/Main/Bin/Debug/ir.exe
IronRuby 0.9.0.0 on 2.6.3 (tarball Wed Mar 10 18:18:12 MST 2010)
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

>>> 1+2
=> 3
>>> exit()

Extra credit: IronPython

The tarball you downloaded also included the source to IronPython. The procedure to build/run IronPython is pretty similar to IronRuby.

Build IronPython

Unlike IronRuby’s .sln, this version of IronPython’s .sln does not have a default configuration parameter, so we need to specify it with the /p:Configuration=Debug argument.

$ xbuild /p:TreatWarningsAsErrors=false /p:Configuration=Debug Merlin/Main/Languages/IronPython/IronPython.sln
<snip/>
	 69 Warning(s)
	 0 Error(s)

Time Elapsed 00:00:38.8057450

Run the IronPython interactive interpreter

IronPython has a REPL interface like IronRuby’s. Or is it the other way around? Anyway, here’s an example.

$ mono .//Merlin/Main/Bin/Debug/ipy.exe
IronPython 2.6 Beta 2 DEBUG (2.6.0.20) on .NET 2.0.50727.1433
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> 1+2
3
>>> ^D

18 March, 2010 07:28PM by C.J. Adams-Collier

Joachim Breitner

Video of my CeBIT talk online

As tolimar already said, videos of talks at the Linux New Media booth at CeBIT are online now, including mine about how to submit patches. It is in German, though.

18 March, 2010 04:18PM by nomeata (mail@joachim-breitner.de)

Tore S. Bekkedal

Film wannabe FAIL

Some quick hints for this aspiring photographer:

1) If you want it to look like you shot it on film, SHOOT IT ON FILM.

2) If you want to fake shooting on film, DON’T MARK YOUR FILM WITH “320TXP” because that film, Kodak Tri-X Panchromatic 320, is BLACK AND WHITE.

3) The aspect ratio suggests the film would be 6×9cm, in which case the film markings would be on the SIDES.

44) There is no medium-format film long enough to take 44 pictures in any common format, let alone 6×9.

5) If you’re going to include the film frame counter, then make sure it’s showing the SAME NUMBER on both sides. “44″ and “3″ are different numbers.

Love,
Tore.

(Shot by the entrance to the Aker Brygge shopping center)

18 March, 2010 03:51PM by toresbe

Alexander Reichle-Schmehl

[CeBIT] Video of my kFreeBSD talk online

For those, who couldn't attend my talk about Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, but where interested in the topic: I just got the news, that the video of my talk is now available in Linux magazines video archive.

Other videos from this years CeBIT Open Source Forum are also available.

PS: Oh, and the talk was held in German. If you don't understand that, you can at least take a look at Axel Beckert's slided, which are also available in English.

18 March, 2010 01:25PM by Alexander Reichle-Schmehl (alexander@schmehl.info)

Russell Coker

Maintaining Screen Output

In my post about getting started with KVM I noted the fact that I had problems keeping screen output after the program exits [1].

The following snippet of shell code demonstrates the solution I’ve discovered for this problem. It determines whether SCREEN is the parent process of the shell script and if so it sleeps for 60 seconds before exiting so I can see the KVM error messages. The other option is for the script to call “exec bash” to give me a new shell in the same window. Note that if I start a screen session and then run my KVM script I don’t want it to do anything special on exit as I will return to the command-line in the same window. If I run “exec kvm-unstable” or have a system boot script run “start-stop-daemon -S -c USER --exec /usr/bin/screen -- -S kvm-unstable -d -m /usr/local/bin/kvm-unstable” then on exit I will be able to see what happened.

#!/bin/bash
set -e
kvm ETC || echo “KVM gave an error return code”
COUNT=$(ps aux|grep $PPID|grep SCREEN|wc -l)
if [ "$COUNT" = "1" ]; then
echo "screen is the parent"
sleep 60
else
echo no screen
fi

Update: Thanks to John for the Slee for suggesting the following:
#!/bin/bash
set -e
kvm ETC || echo “KVM gave an error return code”
if grep -q SCREEN /proc/$PPID/cmdline ; then
echo "screen is the parent"
sleep 60
else
echo no screen
fi

[1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/03/17/starting-with-kvm/

18 March, 2010 09:00AM by etbe

Neil Williams

Possibilities for Emdebian Crush

Crush 2.0 was abandoned last year when the freeze for Debian Squeeze was still scheduled to start at the end of 2009. Even with the expected delays in the timetable for the Debian release, there never was going to be enough time to get Crush 2.0 released with the resources available. Subsequent Crush releases have always been planned, only the release of Crush 2.0 alongside Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) was abandoned.

However, Emdebian Grip has developed nicely and Grip 2.0 is going to be a significant advance over Grip 1.0 - lots more packages, lots of bugs fixed for smoother installations, multistrap support, etc.

The success of Grip has led to a slim chance of working out something for Emdebian Crush. The current state of cross-building / multiarch in Debian means that cross-building more than a handful of packages is simply unrealistic with the resources available within Emdebian. Instead, Crush will be based on Grip for 2.0 and subsequent releases, until things settle out.

Packages that are in Grip and which are designed upstream for embedded situations will simply be made accessible in Crush without further changes. Cross-building packages like this results in binaries that are all but identical to the Grip equivalent. (There is a massive difference between adapting a package for Crush and designing the package from scratch for embedded use. Emdebian is not taking on that task.)

The changes that Crush will make are being calculated, using a shortlist of packages that are (typically) not designed for embedded use but which support a long, long string of --enable-foo options in the build system - most of which Crush can change into --disable-foo. This results in fewer dependencies for the resulting binary packages so that things like LDAP can be removed. The packages themselves are being selected on the basis of what was released in Crush 1.0 for compatibility reasons. The source packages and the resulting binary packages will be renamed (busybox-crush etc.) and suitable Provides: Replaces: and Conflicts: deployed, allowing mixing of Grip and Crush packages on one device.

Other changes are then based around replacing coreutils with a reconfigured busybox and removing perl completely. Wrapper scripts, helpers and other changes will try to stitch the gaps.

It's a chance, a bit slim but a chance nonetheless. The plan offers a possibility, a worthwhile experiment. If it works, Emdebian Crush 2.0 could be a reality on seven architectures and with 2,000 packages available, released alongside Debian 6.0 (Squeeze). If it fails, people will just have to wait for multiarch to settle out and Crush 3.0, due for release alongside Debian 7.0 (Squeeze+1). In the meantime, there's always Emdebian Grip.

18 March, 2010 08:08AM by Neil Williams (nospam@example.com)

Andrew Pollock

[life] The saga of the kitchen remodel continues

Well, it's been a month since the initial demolition started

It's nearly finished.

We had a slight bit of scope creep in that we decided to redo the floor now as well. This was brought on by the fact that the new cabinets didn't quite meet up with the footprint of the old ones, on one side, leaving maybe a 5 centimetre gap between the new cabinets and the floor.

I wasn't a fan of having to haul the fridge and stove back into the living room again at some point in the future (the fridge is too big for the doorway and needs to have its doors removed) so it seemed like the best thing was to do it while everything else was being done.

Fortunately, it hasn't blown out the overall time of the work, as we're still waiting for the counter tops to be cut or manufactured or something. The ETA for them to be installed is Friday or Monday.

So in the meantime we got just the kitchen floor tiled.

The plan is to replace all of the floating wooden floor with tiles, but just not right now. To do the rest would involve faffing around with the downstairs bathroom, and pulling out the washer and dryer, as well as the hot water heater. Doing that now, on top of having all of the kitchen stuff in the living room just gives me the heebie jeebies, so the compromise is to keep the existing flooring for the rest of downstairs, and just buy enough tiles to cover it later. Maybe at Christmas time, if we go back to Australia, we'll get it done then while we're not around to be disrupted.

When they ripped up the floor in the kitchen, some huge cracks in the slab were immediately apparent, so they had to put down some DITRA as a foundation to prevent the tiles cracking as a result of the slab expanding and contracting.

The tiling should be finished by tomorrow I hope, and then we have to let the grout cure for 72 hours before we seal it.

The one small delay we've had was due to a miscommunication with the kitchen company: we'd never ordered any handles for the cabinets and drawers, so they only got ordered after the cabinet installation was completed. Had we had them on hand, we could have started occupying the cabinets and drawers already, which would have reduced the chaos in the living room a bit. Oh well.

Blow-by-blow photos of the work so far (I'm lacking photos of the cabinets with the doors on) are here.

18 March, 2010 05:11AM

[life/americania] We've officially left our mark on the US

We received our US census form the other day. Sarah's already filled it out, but I wanted to look at it before we mailed it back, just out of curiosity.

I'm astounded at how incredibly basic it is. Literally all it asks is name, age, date of birth and race. It's somewhat laughable how you're either "white", or one of a bazillion other racial ethnicities. They don't seem to be interested that I'm Australian. Or if I were a white Samoan, for example.

I can only remember having filled out one Australian census since I moved out of home, which was the 2001 census. I missed the 2006 census since I was living in the US. The US census seems to be a 10 year affair, compared to Australia's 5 years.

"Census night" was always a big deal in Australia. You were supposed to fill out the form on that particular date, for whoever was in that particular dwelling. So you really didn't want to be out visiting friends that night.

The US census form claims to care about the state of affairs on April 1, but it also says to mail it back immediately. It seems to only care about "full-time residents", so the whole visitor problem doesn't seem to exist over here.

Wikipedia tells me that the 2006 Australia Census had 60 questions, all compulsory, except for the questions about religion. I'm still gobsmacked by how small an amount of data the US tries to collect. I just quickly reviewed the 2001 Australia Census form, and I'm rather amazed at how many questions it asked.

I remember there being a meme at the time of the 2001 census to put down "Jedi" as your religion, with the word on the street being that if enough people said that was their religion, it would become officially recognised as one.

18 March, 2010 04:53AM

Ben Hutchings

Debian Linux packages: the 'Big Bang' release

Max Attems uploaded a new version of the Linux kernel package (linux-2.6) today. This includes the last major changes to the package before Debian 6.0 'squeeze', which led me to label it the 'Big Bang' release:

The Xen (dom0 and enhanced domU) flavour is back. It should probably be considered experimental at the moment.
The OpenVZ flavour is back. This should also be considered experimental.
The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) system and drivers were updated to the versions in Linux 2.6.33. This brings some bug fixes and extra features for the i915 driver, and working Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) for the radeon driver. It also includes the kernel-mode part of the nouveau driver for Nvidia GPUs, but this will not yet be loaded automatically as the user-mode parts of nouveau have not been packaged.
The libata transition for PATA (IDE) controller drivers. After some review we realised that this only affects PC hardware at the moment, so only users of the i386 or amd64 architectures will see the upgrade prompts. Thanks to everyone who tested and reported bugs in the experimental packages.

18 March, 2010 03:01AM

Tore S. Bekkedal

Agitprop

As you may know: When developing black-and-white film, you periodically have to shake the tank for the chemistry to be effective, normally every 30 seconds. This is called agitation, and it’s quite boring.

I wanted to create a device which you can prop the film tank onto, which agitates the film according to a preset – continuous, 30 sec, 60 sec, etc – with a little LCD display or similar – which, when turned on, would print a random selection of Soviet propaganda phrases.

I wonder if it isn’t too much effort for a single pun, but I’m not sure it is.

18 March, 2010 01:14AM by toresbe

March 17, 2010

Chris Lamb

Per-channel BTS bot filtering

Just a short announcement that my Debian BTS IRC bot which hangs out on #debian-devel-changes can now spam your favourite subproject's channel with specific bug activity and uploads.

Filtering is done with a regular expression tested against the package name. /msg me with your (channel, regex) tuples (in Python re format, please).

17 March, 2010 10:54PM

Gustavo Noronha Silva

WebKitGTK+ 1.1.90 is out!

We’re coming close to GNOME 2.30 release date, and we are getting ready to branch a stable release off of WebKit’s svn trunk in preparation for that. The idea of the stable branch is to try to maintain, and improve stability, with no additional features going in. Speaking of features, though, if you’ve been paying attention you will have noticed WebKitGTK+ has come a long way, now.

We came from not having basic features such as download support or openning links in new tabs, a more-or-less working HTML5 media implementation, and very few or missing in action developers to a thriving project, that gets more, and more attention, and contributors every day, with advanced features available, and rocking HTML5 media support that leaves little to be desired. It’s been just over one year since we started rolling mostly bi-weekly releases, each adding more awesome features.

There are still many issues, and we are not always equipped as a team to handle all the specifics of the engine ourselves, but I am really happy with the progress we’ve made, and really thankful for the support my employer Collabora has given all the way for this to happen, including the early work on plugins, and many other things before my time as a contributor. When I switched to using Epiphany with the WebKit backend as my default browser back in January 2009, that meant having to deal with a whole lot of misbehaviour, and work-around a lot of painful brokeness. These days I enjoy a snappy, functional browser that makes me happy.

If you haven’t done so yet, go download, and test the newest Epiphany, with the latest WebKitGTK+, and help us make the GNOME 2.30’s web browser rock even more!

17 March, 2010 10:11PM by kov

David Watson

7 Day Photo Challenge - Day 5

Here is my shot for day 5, it is St. Patrick's day after all.

Only two more days left...

17 March, 2010 07:47PM

Gunnar Wolf

Getting away from Panamá

Several months ago, around the Central American Free Software Encounter (ECSL) in Estelí, Nicaragua, I started stirring the waters — The Central American regions have vibrant, beautiful Free Software communities, but have mostly (with some very notable examples, of course) shied away from being active participants in major development projects. What was I to do about it? Of course, try to get them to become Debian contributors!

During the following weeks, I talked about it with several friends from the region, and the result was an announcement and lots of arguments that followed it. Panamá was decided as the host country, and many people have put a lot of work into making the MiniDebConf happen.

Mauro Rosero and Anto Recio came up with what appears to be a wonderful local venue and a set of sponsored amenities, and the Debian project is sponsoring what is needed in terms of transportation for people from the whole region (spanning from Mexico to Ecuador and Venezuela IIRC).

I am very sorry, however, that I cannot attend this meeting. This very same weekend, I will fly three hours, but in the opposite direction: I will go to Tijuana, where fate decided I will present my first round of CENEVAL equivalence exams (Acuerdo 286 Licenciatura). I expect that to be the topic of another post, to come soon.

So, while my friends will be having a good time and talking about Debian and group work, I will sit through three periods of four hours, answering an exam for the first time in a very long time. Fun, hah? Anyway, I will meet Guillermo Amaral (thanks for hosting me! ;-) ), which ensures I will not miss all of the fun ;-)

17 March, 2010 06:40PM by gwolf

Martin Michlmayr

Using the installer to flash the kernel again

Every once in a while someone asks how they can use the Debian installer to access their system on disk to run commands, for example to write the kernel and ramdisk to flash again. This is particularly useful on headless NAS devices. So here's how to do it:

Start the Debian installer.
Remove the SSH key from ~/.known_hosts because the installer will always generate a new key.
Connect to the installer with SSH: ssh installer@...
Follow the installer until you reach the partitioner, then choose "go back".
Open a shell (look for Execute a shell towards the end of the menu).
Run the commands below (the example assumes that /boot is /dev/sda1 and / is /dev/sda2.

mkdir -p /target
mount /dev/sda2 /target
mount /dev/sda1 /target/boot
mount --bind /dev /target/dev
mount -t proc none /target/proc
mount -t sysfs none /target/sys
chroot /target /bin/sh
# the prompt will change
# make modifications to the system and regenerate the initramfs
update-initramfs -u
exit
# the prompt will change again as you're leaving the chroot
umount /target/sys
umount /target/proc
umount /target/dev
umount /target/boot
umount /target
reboot

17 March, 2010 04:37PM

Theodore Ts'o

The history of General Tso’s Chicken

I just came across this story (http://goo.gl/EbqP) today, and given my name, and given that I fancy myself a bit of a foodie, who could resist? (Not that I considered the deep-fried, dunked-in-sugar-syrup mess that passes for General Tso’s chicken in most fast food Chinese restaurants to be gourmet food, mind you!)

Here’s the first thing you should know: The general had nothing to do with his chicken. You can banish any stories of him stir-frying over the flames of the cities he burned, or heartbreaking tales of a last supper, prepared with blind courage, under attack from overwhelming hordes. Unlike the amoeba-like mythologies that follow so many traditional dishes, the story of General Tso’s chicken is compellingly simple. One man, Peng Chang-kuei — very old but still alive — invented it.

But what’s “it”? Because while chef Peng is universally credited with inventing a dish called General Tso’s chicken, he probably wouldn’t recognize the crisp, sweet, red nuggets you get with pork fried rice for $4.95 with a choice of soda or soup. All that happened under his nose. It all got away from him…

No related posts.

17 March, 2010 03:38PM by tytso

Steve Kemp

Are you sure you don't mind me going without you?

Recently I received a small flurry of patches to my blog compiler, from Chris Frey. These patches significantly speedup rebuilding a static blog when using Danga's memcached.

The speedup is sufficiently fast that my prior SQLite based approach is no longer required - and (re)building my blog now takes on the order of 5 seconds.

On the topic of other people's blogs I've been enjoying David Watson's recent photo challenge. I was almost tempted to join in, but I'm not sure I could manage one every day - Although I can pretend I recently carried out my my first real photoshoot.

I'm still taking pictures of "things/places" but I'm starting to enjoy "people" more. With a bit of luck I'll get some more people to pose in the near future, even if I have to rely upon posting to gumtree for local bodies!

ObFilm: Love Actually

17 March, 2010 02:10PM

David Pashley

Letter to my MP regarding the Digital Economy Bill

I have just sent the following email to my MP, David Lepper MP, outlining my concerns about the Digital Economy Bill. I urge you to write to your MP with a similar letter.

Open Rights Group's guide to writing to your MP

From: David Pashley <david@davidpashley.com>
To: David Lepper
Cc: 
Bcc: 
Subject: Digital Economy Bill
Reply-To: 

Dear Mr Lepper, 

I'm writing to you so express my concern at the Digital Economy Bill
which is currently working its way through the House of Commons. I
believe that the bill as it stands will have a negative effect on
the digital economy that the UK and in particular Brighton have
worked so hard to foster. 

Section 4-17 deals with disconnecting people reported as infringing
copyright. As it stands, this section will result in the possibility
that my internet connection could be disconnected as a result of the
actions of my flatmate. My freelance web development business is
inherently linked to my access of the Internet. I currently allow my
landlady to share my internet access with her holiday flat above me.
I will have to stop this arrangement for fear of a tourist's actions
jeopardising my business. 

This section will also result in the many pubs and cafes, much
favoured by Brighton's freelancers, from removing their free wifi. I
have often used my local pub's wifi when I needed a change of
scenery. I know a great many freelancers use Cafe Delice in the
North Laine as a place to meet other freelancers and discuss
projects while drinking coffee and working.

Section 18 deals with ISPs being required to prevent access to sites
hosting copyrighted material. The ISPs can insist on a court
injunction forcing them to prevent access. Unfortunately, a great
many ISPs will not want to deal with the costs of any court
proceedings and will just block the site in question. A similar law
in the Unitied States, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA)
has been abused time and time again by spurious copyright claims to
silence critics or embarrassments.  A recent case is Microsoft
shutting down the entire Cryptome.org website because they were
embarrassed by a document they had hosted.  There are many more
examples of abuse at http://www.chillingeffects.org/

A concern is that there's no requirement for the accuser to prove
infringement has occured, nor is there a valid defense that a user
has done everything possible to prevent infringement. 

There are several ways to reduce copyright infringement of music and
movies without introducing new legislation. The promotion of legal
services like iTunes and spotify, easier access to legal media, like
Digital Rights Management free music. Many of the record labels and
movie studios are failing to promote competing legal services which
many people would use if they were aware of them. A fairer
alternative to disconnection is a fine through the courts. 

You can find further information on the effects of the Digital
Economy Bill at http://www.openrightsgroup.org/ and
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8544935.stm

The bill has currently passed the House of Lords and its first
reading in the Commons. There is a danger that without MPs demanding
to scrutinise this bill, this damaging piece of legislation will be
rushed through Parliament before the general election.

I ask you to demand your right to debate this bill and to amend the
bill to remove sections 4-18. I would also appreciate a response to
this email. If you would like to discuss the issues I've raised
further, I can be contacted on 01273 xxxxxx or 07966 xxx xxx or via
email at this address.

Thank you for your time.

-- 
David Pashley
david@davidpashley.com

Read Comments (0)

17 March, 2010 12:35PM by David Pashley

Sandro Tosi

Check Nagios from the desktop: nagstamon

I just discovered nagstamon and all the team fallen in love with it!

I tried to use Nagios Checker, the Firefox plugin to notify of any Nagios alert, but that doesn't play nicely with several opened windows (alerts are multiplied for the number of windows, since it seems everyone does the checks, not just one) and it tends to slow down Firefox, that's already quite slow per se :)

The upstream author provides a Debian package, so promptly I wrote to him asking if he can consider maintain the package in Debian, with me as mentor/co-maintainer and so (it's in Python so I can that :) ); let's see how it goes.

Give it a try, it's really simple and awesome!

17 March, 2010 11:31AM by Sandro Tosi (noreply@blogger.com)

Wouter Verhelst

Baobab

So, we recorded the performance. As I mentioned in my previous blog post, the sound for sunday was not recorded properly, so while the image looks far better, having a video with no sound is hardly interesting.

But as a 'sneak preview' for the people involved, I uploaded one fragment of the Saturday recording to youtube:

There's a lot of grain in this image, courtesy of the fact that two of our three cameras just weren't very good. But beyond that, it looks quite good, I'd say...

17 March, 2010 10:57AM by Wouter Verhelst (w@uter.be)

Robert Collins

LCA 2010 videos are showing up

Not all the videos are there yet, but they are starting to show up . Yay. See http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/linux.conf.au/2010/index.html or your local LA mirror.

17 March, 2010 04:08AM

March 16, 2010

Ben Hutchings

KVM reliability

Russell Coker writes:

I had also hoped that it would be really reliable and work with the latest kernels (unlike Xen) but it is giving me problems with 2.6.32 on Opteron.

This is a regression caused by a recent security fix (CVE-2010-0298, "KVM: x86 emulator: fix memory access during x86 emulation"). It appears to affect only recent Linux kernels running as guests on AMD systems, and it will probably be fixed soon.

16 March, 2010 11:35PM

Torsten Landschoff

New notebook: Dell Latitude E6400

It has been some time since I blogged about something. I wanted to write this post for a while, but never got around.

Since beginning of february 2010, I have a new job and got a new work notebook: A shiny Dell Latitude E6400. Interestingly, the company usually relies on getting Lenovo Notebooks due to good Linux support, but we were unable to find a notebook without integrated camera and decent specs. We also researched some HP Notebooks. We ended up with a Dell since the website makes it really easy to find a system that fits your requirements.

There is still room for improvement though – you still have to select between Vostro, Latitude, Precision Mobile and XPS before you are allowed to configure the system. There is a filter on the left side of the shop, but filtering for a Core 2 Duo and 4 GB RAM won’t show you the notebook I got. Instead there is some overpriced Latitude (~ €3000) and an XPS system. I just tried the XPS, but was unable to find a Core 2 Duo processor in the options.

Anyway, somehow I made it through and got the following configuration:

Processor	Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU P8700 @ 2.53GHz
RAM	4 GB 800MHz DDR2
Graphics	Mobile Intel Integrated Graphics Media Accelerator X4500HD
Display	14.1″ Widescreen WXGA+ (1440X900), LED backlight, non-glare
Hard Drive	Seagate ST9250410ASG 250GB
Webcam	None, but microphone fitted
Battery	9-cell 85 Wh
WLAN	Intel Wireless WiFi Link 5100 (according to lspci, I did not care too much)
LAN	Intel 82567LM Gigabit Network Connection

I installed Ubuntu karmic (amd64) the day it arrived and I am impressed. I have yet to find a serious problem with hardware support. Everything just worked out of the box, installation was done after half an hour (I needed 10 minutes to find a network cable since the installer did not support the wireless). I wanted to install Debian on it but so far I did not get around to actually do it. But I expect sid to perform just as well with lenny probably lacking some of the needed drivers.

So why am I writing this? The main point is that you can buy a notebook today and have it fully supported wrt. Linux. Open Source has come a long way!

Second: If I replace my personal notebook (a Sony Vaio), I will probably buy Dell as well. Definitely nothing from Sony, because I did not find any way to change the display brightness for the 3 years old system, which makes it usable only next to a power outlet.

16 March, 2010 11:22PM by admin

Bdale Garbee

TeleMetrum v1.0 Order Placed

I've been too busy (work, family, and fighting a nasty cold!) to write much text lately, other than the comments I put on launch photos uploaded to my Flickr stream, but the remainder of our testing of the prototype TeleMetrum v0.2 boards went really well!

The only significant change we decided to make before going to production was to change the 3.3 volt regulator from a 100mA to a 150mA part. This will ensure adequate power for the companion boards we have planned, even when the GPS chip is in maximum power mode searching for satellites during a cold start.

So... [drum roll, please]

Keith and I just placed the orders for our first production lot of TeleMetrum v1.0 boards! With any luck, in 3-4 weeks we should have a pile of altimeters to sell, along with the associated TeleDongle ground stations already in stock.

Stay tuned!

16 March, 2010 11:08PM

Russell Coker

Starting with KVM

I’ve just bought a new Thinkpad that has hardware virtualisation support and I’ve got KVM running.

HugePages

The Linux-KVM site has some information on using hugetlbfs to allow the use of 2MB pages for KVM [1]. I put “vm.nr_hugepages = 1024” in /etc/sysctl.conf to reserve 2G of RAM for KVM use. The web page notes that it may be impossible to allocate enough pages if you set it some time after boot (the kernel can allocate memory that can’t be paged and it’s possible for RAM to become too fragmented to allow allocation). As a test I reduced my allocation to 296 pages and then increased it again to 1024, I was surprised to note that my system ran extremely slow while reserving the pages – it seems that allocating such pages is efficient when done at boot time but not so efficient when done later.

hugetlbfs /hugepages hugetlbfs mode=1770,gid=121 0 0

I put the above line in /etc/fstab to mount the hugetlbfs filesystem. The mode of 1770 allows anyone in the group to create files but not unlink or rename each other’s files. The gid of 121 is for the kvm group.

I’m not sure how hugepages are used, they aren’t used in the most obvious way. I expected that allocating 1024 huge pages would allow allocating 2G of RAM to the virtual machine, that’s not the case as “-m 2048” caused kvm to fail. I also expected that the number of HugePages free according to /proc/meminfo would reliably drop by an amount that approximately matches the size of the virtual machine – which doesn’t seem to be the case.

I have no idea why KVM with Hugepages would be significantly slower for user and system CPU time but still slightly faster for the overall build time (see the performance section below). I’ve been unable to find any documents explaining in which situations huge pages provide advantages and disadvantages or how they work with KVM virtualisation – the virtual machine allocates memory in 4K pages so how does that work with 2M pages provided to it by the OS?

But Hugepages does provide a slight benefit in performance and if you have plenty of RAM (I have 5G and can afford to buy more if I need it) you should just install it as soon as you start.

I have filed Debian bug report #574073 about KVM displaying an error you normally can’t see when it can’t access the hugepages filesystem [6].

Permissions

open /dev/kvm: Permission denied
Could not initialize KVM, will disable KVM support

One thing that annoyed me about KVM is that the Debian/Lenny version will run QEMU instead if it can’t run KVM. I discovered this when a routine rebuild of the SE Linux Policy packages in a Debian/Unstable virtual machine took an unreasonable amount of time. When I halted the virtual machine I noticed that it had displayed the above message on stderr before changing into curses mode (I’m not sure the correct term for this) such that the message was obscured until the xterm was returned to the non-curses mode at program exit. I had to add the user in question to the kvm group. I’ve filed Debian bug report #574063 about this [2].

Performance

Below is a table showing the time taken for building the SE Linux reference policy on Debian/Unstable. It compares running QEMU emulation (using the kvm command but without permission to access /dev/kvm), KVM with and without hugepages, Xen, and a chroot. Xen is run on an Opteron 1212 Dell server system with 2*1TB SATA disks in a RAID-1 while the KVM/QEMU tests are on an Intel T7500 CPU in a Thinkpad T61 with a 100G SATA disk [4]. All virtual machines had 512M of RAM and 2 CPU cores. The Opteron 1212 system is running Debian/Lenny and the Thinkpad is running Debian/Lenny with a 2.6.32 kernel from Testing.

	Elapsed	User	System
QEMU on Opteron 1212 with Xen installed	126m54	39m36	8m1
QEMU on T7500	95m42	42m57	8m29
KVM on Opteron 1212	7m54	4m47	2m26
Xen on Opteron 1212	6m54	3m5	1m5
KVM on T7500	6m3	2m3	1m9
KVM Hugepages on T7500 with NCurses console	5m58	3m32	2m16
KVM Hugepages on T7500	5m50	3m31	1m54
KVM Hugepages on T7500 with 1800M of RAM	5m39	3m30	1m48
KVM Hugepages on T7500 with 1800M and file output	5m7	3m28	1m38
Chroot on T7500	3m43	3m11	29

I was surprised to see how inefficient it is when compared with a chroot on the same hardware. It seems that the system time is the issue. Most of the tests were done with 512M of RAM for the virtual machine, I tried 1800M which improved performance slightly (less IO means less context switches to access the real block device) and redirecting the output of dpkg-buildpackage to /tmp/out and /tmp/err reduced the built time by 32 seconds – it seems that the context switches for networking or console output really hurt performance. But for the default build it seems that it will take about 50% longer in a virtual machine than in a chroot, this is bearable for the things I do (of which building the SE Linux policy is the most time consuming), but if I was to start compiling KDE then I would be compelled to use a chroot.

I was also surprised to see how slow it was when compared to Xen, for the tests on the Opteron 1212 system I used a later version of KVM (qemu-kvm 0.11.0+dfsg-1~bpo50+1 from Debian/Unstable) but could only use 2.6.26 as the virtualised kernel (the Debian 2.6.32 kernels gave a kernel Oops on boot). I doubt that the lower kernel version is responsible for any significant portion of the extra minute of build time.

Storage

One way of managing storage for a virtual machine is to use files on a large filesystem for it’s block devices, this can work OK if you use a filesystem that is well designed for large files (such as XKS). I prefer to use LVM, one thing I have not yet discovered is how to make udev assign the KVM group to all devices that match /dev/V0/kvm-*.

Startup

KVM seems to be basically designed to run from a session, unlike Xen which can be started with “xm create” and then run in the background until you feel like running “xm console” to gain access to the console. One way of dealing with this is to use screen. The command “screen -S kvm-foo -d -m kvm WHATEVER” will start a screen session named kvm-foo that will be detached and will start by running kvm with “WHATEVER” as the command-line options. When screen is used for managing virtual machines you can use the command “screen -ls” to list the running sessions and then commands such as “screen -r kvm-unstable” to reattach to screen sessions. To detach from a running screen session you type ^A^D.

The problem with this is that screen will exit when the process ends and that loses the shutdown messages from the virtual machine. To solve this you can put “exec bash” or “sleep 200” at the end of the script that runs kvm.

start-stop-daemon -S -c USERNAME --exec /usr/bin/screen -- -S kvm-unstable -d -m /usr/local/sbin/kvm-unstable

On a Debian system the above command in a system boot script (maybe /etc/rc.local) could be used to start a KVM virtual machine on boot. In this example USERNAME would be replaced by the name of the account used to run kvm, and /usr/local/sbin/kvm-unstable is a shell script to run kvm with the correct parameters. Then as user USERNAME you can attach to the session later with the command “screen -x kvm-unstable“. Thanks to Jason White for the tip on using screen.

I’ve filed Debian bug report #574069 [3] requesting that kvm change it’s argv[0] so that top(1) and similar programs can be used to distinguish different virtual machines. Currently when you have a few entries named kvm in top’s output it is annoying to match the CPU hogging process to the virtual machine it’s running.

It is possible to use KVM with X or VNC for a graphical display by the virtual machine. I don’t like these options, I believe that Xephyr provides better isolation, I’ve previously documented how to use Xephyr [5].

kvm -kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-2-amd64 -initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-2-amd64 -hda /dev/V0/unstable -hdb /dev/V0/unstable-swap -m 512 -mem-path /hugepages -append "selinux=1 audit=1 root=/dev/hda ro rootfstype=ext4" -smp 2 -curses -redir tcp:2022::22

The above is the current kvm command-line that I’m using for my Debian/Unstable test environment.

Networking

I’m using KVM options such as “-redir tcp:2022::22” to redirect unprivileged ports (in this case 2022) to the ssh port. This works for a basic test virtual machine but is not suitable for production use. I want to run virtual machines with minimal access to the environment, this means not starting them as root.

One thing I haven’t yet investigated is the vde2 networking system which allows a private virtual network over multiple physical hosts and which should allow kvm to be run without root privs. It seems that all the other networking options for kvm which have appealing feature sets require that the kvm process be started with root privs.

Is KVM worth using?

It seems that KVM is significantly slower than a chroot, so for a basic build environment a secure chroot environment would probably be a better option. I had hoped that KVM would be more reliable than Xen which would offset the performance loss – however as KVM and Debian kernel 2.6.32 don’t work together on my Opteron system it seems that I will have some reliability issues with KVM that compare with the Xen issues. There are currently no Xen kernels in Debian/Testing so KVM is usable now with the latest bleeding edge stuff (on my Thinkpad at least) while Xen isn’t.

Qemu is really slow, so Xen is the only option for 32bit hardware. Therefore all my 32bit Xen servers need to keep running Xen.

I don’t plan to switch my 64bit production servers to KVM any time soon. When Debian/Squeeze is released I will consider whether to use KVM or Xen after upgrading my 64bit Debian server. I probably won’t upgrade my 64bit RHEL-5 server any time soon – maybe when RHEL-7 is released. My 64bit Debian test and development server will probably end up running KVM very soon, I need to upgrade the kernel for Ext4 support and that makes KVM more desirable.

So it seems that for me KVM is only going to be seriously used on my laptop for a while.

Generally I am disappointed with KVM. I had hoped that it would give almost the performance of Xen (admittedly it was only 14.5% slower). I had also hoped that it would be really reliable and work with the latest kernels (unlike Xen) but it is giving me problems with 2.6.32 on Opteron. Also it has some new issues such as deciding to quietly do something I don’t want when it’s unable to do what I want it to do.

16 March, 2010 08:42PM by etbe

David Watson

7 Day Photo Challenge - Day 4

I took a walk today during lunch and discovered this statue in a local park.

16 March, 2010 08:24PM

Jaldhar Vyas

Favorite German Word Status Update

Old favorite German word: weltschmerz

New favorite German word: lustmord

16 March, 2010 06:06PM

Wouter Verhelst

Stuff

I'm running again.

No, not running in a bubulle style; I'm running for DPL. It started as a fairly last-minute decision because I would hate to see an election with only one candidate, but then two other people submitted their candidacy right after me.

As I stated in my candidacy email, I had "a concert" this weekend. Actually, there were three two-hour performances; two on saturday, one on sunday. Early on, I also suggested videotaping the performance (using the excellent dvswitch, for which I added a patch to support crossfading transitions) to the organising group within the choir, and they liked that. Apart from dvswitch, we used the theatre's own audio mixing setup (so I wouldn't have to worry about that too much) and the theatre's intercom system. I'd made some tally lights, but in the end we were not entirely able to use them, because there were some issues to be dealt with that meant I couldn't quite get them working properly.

So on saturday, I was in the theatre pretty early to get everything set up, did some explanations to the volunteers who would do the actual recording, drove my dad (who'd done the direction for the video parts) home, went home, and found my bed at around midnight.

On sunday, I got up fairly early, booted my laptop to update the live images with some fixes for some issues we'd encountered on saturday, left for the theatre fairly early again, set up the extra camera position, found out that one of the laptops was actually running at 100Mbit rather than a gigabit and that therefore the extra camera wasn't going to work, learned that one of the volunteers for sunday had done some other camera work for another performance right before that, for which he'd rented some high-end DV-capable cameras. So we broke down the two low-end set-ups, set up the high-end cameras, connected them to the laptops, recalibrated the whitebalance and the diaphragm setting, and restarted the streams. Then one laptop started failing. Since we had had to remove one camera anyway, I just replaced it. By that time, I had about 15 minutes left before sunday's performance would start, so I went to prepare for that.

After the performance had finished, I found out that something had gone wrong with the sound of sunday's performance; rather than music, we only heard crackling all the time. Luckily, the sound had also been separately recorded to a different medium, and that recording is fine, so we only need to resync the audio to the video, which should not be a problem.

All in all, I had an extremely busy weekend. The alert reader will note that I didn't mention 'food' anywhere in the above paragraphs, mostly because I hardly ever found the time to eat. But it was also extremely satisfying. We still have some postprocessing to do, but I expect I'll put some videos online once we've done that. They're truly stunning, at times.

And then yesterday I still had to spend some time writing my DPL platform, and doing some campaigning work. All in all, I didn't find my bed until approximately 4 AM... oh well.

I look forward to the election time, and hope that I will do well. I don't need to win, but I'd hope my result will be at least as good as the last time...

Update: we used the theatre's audio setup, not video setup -- oops :-)

16 March, 2010 04:20PM by Wouter Verhelst (w@uter.be)

Andrew Pollock

[life] T minus 10 weeks

Sarah hit the 30 week mark yesterday, and we had the 30 week anatomical ultrasound.

Fortunately, it was far less eventful than the 20 week one.

She's growing really well. She's on average in the 51st percentile, so we couldn't ask for better than that. She's currently head up, but there's still time for her to flip over.

We've got another ultrasound in 6 weeks.

Looking back at my blog, it's amazing how much has happened in 10 weeks.

Sarah's Mum booked her flights to come out for the birth. I think she gets here the week before the due date.

Quite by accident, we managed to find a second hand nursing chair at the Home Consignment Center (which we'd only learned of the day before, and is an awesome place for a browse), so I think that rounds out the large items we need to get.

16 March, 2010 03:10PM

Joachim Breitner

kexec saved my day

Yesterday evening, when returning from a two-day trip with no connectivity, I found my server to be broken. I still reacted on ping, but no service would respond. I tried to restart it using my hoster’s web interface, but it would not come back up.

I booted into the recovery system and checked the hard disk, but could not find any issues. File system checks went through without a hitch. But it would still not boot. Unfortunately, my hoster does not provide access to the system console, so I had no idea what was going wrong.

I never did anything with kexec, (a relatively new feature of the Linux kernel to act as a bootloader to load another system) and I was very positively surprised to find that it works out-of-the-box and flawlessly: I was able to load my system’s kernel and initrd from the recovery system and successfully booted it. I then ran lilo and rebooted right again, which now worked. I’m not sure if running lilo fixed it, or the clean shut-down, nor do I know what caused the problem in the first place, but kexec saved my day here.

16 March, 2010 10:38AM by nomeata (mail@joachim-breitner.de)

Stefano Zacchiroli

Elections!

DPL elections strike back

So ... here we go, it's DPL election time again, and I'm a candidate.

After a few long days of suspense with me as the only candidate, we are now 4 candidates. I was not particularly happy of the scenario of being the only candidate: it would have given (both to the world and to DDs) an unjustified impression of disinterest towards the position, and would have also made quite pointless to discuss topics of Debian "politics" (« so, NOTA, what do you think of time-based freezes? »). With 4 candidates, campaigning is now much more useful, interesting, and challenging, as the archives of -vote already show.

As last year, I've setup a page documenting my attempt, which includes an index of questions posed to the candidates on -vote. (To maintain the index, it helps quite a lot to maintain one-subject-per-question. Hint, hint.)

Good luck to all candidates!
... and don't forget the DPL campaigning law! (with credits to Rhonda)

16 March, 2010 09:53AM

Tollef Fog Heen

A small explanation about the yubikey

Russell Coker recently reviewed the Yubikey. The article mentions me, so I figured I'd correct a minor thing and respond to one of the comments.

First, the yubikey-server-c is my reimplementation of the Yubikey authentication protocol. Yubico provides two implementations, one in PHP and one in Java, neither which I'm particuarly interesting on building my system security on. Any bugs, misfeatures, etc in the C implementation are mine and mine alone.

Barak A. Pearlmutter, one of the commenters on Russell's blog writes:

i don’t understand. isn’t this thing vulnerable to eavesdropping and replaying? even if it has a counter which changes etc, the things it is talking to (web sites) can’t know that some generated string is being reused. and it doesn’t even have a clock, so these things can be old.

The way the Yubikey works is you have a central authentication server. This has a secret shared with the key. Setting this secret is the primary function of the personalisation tool. When you press the button, the key takes its internal state (various counters, uid field, etc) and encrypts this using AES-128. This is then sent to the application you are trying to access, be it Wordpress, SSH or something else. Said application then contacts the authentication server which decrypts the ticket, checks the values of the counters to make sure it's not a replay and responds with OK, bad ticket, replay and various other status codes. Based on this, the application grants or denies access.

There are really two places you could attack this: in the communication between the web browser and application or between application and authentication server. Both of those can be secured using SSL.

There is no way to use a single yubikey in multiple authentication realms without extra software. To do this, you would have a OpenID provider that uses the Yubikey for authentication, or you could have a Kerberos server with cross-realm trust.

As for the PAM modules and other tools so far not being packaged, yes, I know, I might fix it, but the current setup has the bits I use, as I use RADIUS authentication to get services to support both Yubikey and passwords.

16 March, 2010 07:41AM

Ian Wienand

Handling hostnames, UDP and IPv6 in Python

So, you have some application where you want the user to specify a remote host/port, and you want to support IPv4 and IPv6.

For literal addresses, things are fairly simple. IPv4 addresses are simple, and RFC2732 has things covered by putting the IPv6 address within square brackets.

It gets more interesting as to what you should do with hostnames. The problem is that getaddrinfo can return you multiple addresses, but without extra disambiguation from the user it is very difficult to know which one to choose. RFC4472 discusses this, but there does not appear to be any good solution.

Possibly you can do something like ping/ping6 and have a separate program name or configuration flag to choose IPv6. This comes at a cost of transparency.

The glibc implementation of getaddrinfo() puts considerable effort into deciding if you have an IPv6 interface up and running before it will return an IPv6 address. It will even recognise link-local addresses and sort addresses more likely to work to the front of the returned list as described here. However, there is still a small possibility that the IPv6 interface doesn't actually work, and so the library will sort the IPv6 address as first in the returned list when maybe it shouldn't be.

If you are using TCP, you can connect to each address in turn to find one that works. With UDP, however, the connect essentially does nothing.

So I believe probably the best way to handle hostnames for UDP connections, at least on Linux/glibc, is to trust getaddrinfo to return the sanest values first, try a connect on the socket anyway just for extra security and then essentially hope it works. Below is some example code to do that (literal address splitter bit stolen from Python's httplib).

import socket

DEFAULT_PORT = 123

host = '[fe80::21c:a0ff:fb27:7196]:567'

# the port will be anything after the last :
p = host.rfind(":")

# ipv6 literals should have a closing brace
b = host.rfind("]")

# if the last : is outside the [addr] part (or if we don't have []'s
if (p > b):
    try:
        port = int(host[p+1:])
    except ValueError:
        print "Non-numeric port"
        raise
    host = host[:p]
else:
    port = DEFAULT_PORT

# now strip off ipv6 []'s if there are any
if host and host[0] == '[' and host[-1] == ']':
    host = host[1:-1]

print "host = <%s>, port = <%d>" % (host, port)

the_socket = None

res = socket.getaddrinfo(host, port, socket.AF_UNSPEC, socket.SOCK_DGRAM)

# go through all the returned values, and choose the ipv6 one if
# we see it.
for r in res:
    af,socktype,proto,cname,sa = r

    try:
        the_socket = socket.socket(af, socktype, proto)
        the_socket.connect(sa)
    except socket.error, e:
        # connect failed!  try the next one
        continue

    break

if the_socket == None:
    raise socket.error, "Could not get address!"

# ready to send!
the_socket.send("hi!")

16 March, 2010 04:54AM

Russ Allbery

backport 1.25

This little script to help with Debian package backporting seems to be more widely used than I ever expected. I'm glad people are finding it useful!

This release incorporates changes based on a patch by Eddy Petrișor to extract the correct version number from the source package *.dsc file. Previously, backport grabbed the version from the file name, but this fails in the presence of epochs. (I should also extract the package name from the *.dsc file, at which point the name of the *.dsc file doesn't matter, but I'll do that another day.)

Also new in this release is the addition of the backporter to the Uploaders control field automatically if they're not already in Maintainer or Uploaders. This is currently unconditional, since I think it's generally the right thing to do, but if someone complains I can make it conditional.

Mostly to help with testing, I also added a new command-line option to just prepare the backport and not actually call pbuilder. Instead, the pbuilder command line is printed out. This may also be useful if additional work is required on the source package before actually building it; one can do that work and then cut and paste the command line.

You can get the latest version from my scripts page.

16 March, 2010 04:02AM

Russell Coker

Thinkpad T61

I’ve now had my new Thinkpad T61 [1] for almost a month. The letters on the keyboard are not even starting to wear off which is unusual, either this Thinkpad is built with harder plastic than the older ones or I’m typing more softly.

Memory

The first thing I did after receiving it was to arrange a RAM upgrade. It shipped with two 1GB DDR2 666MHz PC2-5300 SODIMM modules and as I want to run KVM I obviously need a lot more than that. The Intel Chipset page on Wikipedia is one of the resources that documents the Intel GM965 chipset as supporting up to 8G of RAM. Getting 4G in two 2G modules seemed like a bad idea as that would limit future expansion options and also result in two spare modules. So I decided to get a 4G module for a total of 5G of RAM. I’ve updated my RAM speed page with the test results of this system [2], I get 2,823MB/s with a matched pair of DIMMs and 2,023MB/s with a single DIMM. But strangely with a pair of unmatched DIMMs Memtest86+ reported 2,823MB/s – I wonder whether the first 2G of address space is interleaved for best performance and the last 3G runs at 2,023MB/s. In any case I think that losing 29% of the maximum RAM speed would be an acceptable trade-off for saving some money and I can always buy another 4G DIMM later. I had to order a DDR2-800MHz PC2-6400 module because they are cheaper than the PC2-5300 modules and my Thinkpad works equally well with either speed. I have used the spare 1G SODIMM in my EeePC701 which takes the same RAM – presumably because the EeePC designers found PC2-5300 modules to be cheaper than slower modules (I think that the 701 was at the time it was released the slowest PC compatible system that was selling in quantity). The EeePC gets only 798MB/s out of the same memory. My document about Memtest86+ results has these results and more [2].

I noticed that if I run Memtest86+ booted from a USB flash device then inserting or removing a USB device can cause memory errors, but if I boot memtest86+ from a CD it seems to work correctly. So it seems that Memtest86+ doesn’t disable some aspect of USB hardware, this might be considered a bug – or it might just be a “don’t do that” issue.

Misc

To get the hardware virtualisation working (needed to load the kvm_intel kernel module) I had to enable it in the BIOS and then do a hard reset (power off). Telling the BIOS to save and reboot was not adequate. This would be a BIOS bug, it knew that I had changed the virtualisation setting so it should have either triggered a hard reset or instructed me to do so.

The default configuration of Debian/Lenny results in sound not working, I had to run alsaconf as suggested on the Debian Etch on Thinkpad T61 howto [3] which solved it.

Generally I’m happy with this system, the screen resolution is 1680*1050 which has 20% more pixels than the 1400*1050 screen on my Thinkpad T41p, it’s a lot faster for CPU operations and should be a lot faster for video when I get the drivers sorted out (currently it’s a lot slower), and I have virtualisation working again. But when you buy a system that’s much like the last one but 6 years newer you expect it to be better.

Generally the amount of effort involved in the process of buying a new system, upgrading the RAM to the desired specs, installing Linux and tweaking all the options is enough to make me want to wait at least another 6 years before buying another. Part of the reason for this difficulty is that I want to get so much functionality from the machine, a machine with more modest goals (such as a Netbook) takes a lot less time to configure.

Problems

There is Bluetooth hardware which is apparently enabled by default. But a quick search didn’t turn up any information on how to do the basic functions, I would like to just transfer files from my mobile phone in the same way that I transfer files between phones.

The video card is a nVidia Corporation Quadro NVS 140M (rev a1). 3D games seem slow but glxgears reports 300fps. It doesn’t have Xvideo support which appears to be the reason why mplayer won’t allow resizing it’s display area unless run with the -zoom option, and it’s also got performance problems such that switching between virtual desktops will interrupt the sound on a movie that mplayer is playing – although when alsaplayer is playing music the sound isn’t interrupted. Also when I play a Youtube video at twice the horizontal and vertical resolution it takes half of one CPU core. It’s a pity that I didn’t get an Intel video controller.

It seems that Debian is soon going to get the Nouveau NVidia drivers so hopefully video performance will improve significantly when I get them [4].

The next thing I have to do is to get the sound controls working. The older Thinkpads that I used had hardware controls, the T41p that was my previous system had buttons for increasing and decreasing the volume and a mute button that interacted directly with the hardware. The down-side of this was that there was no way for the standard software to know what the hardware was going to do, the up-side was that I could press the mute button and know that it would be silent regardless of what the software wants. Now I have the same buttons on my T61 but they don’t do anything directly, they just provide key-press events. According to showkeys the mute key gives “0×71 0xf1“, the volume down button gives “0×72 0xf2“, and the volume up button gives “0×73 0xf3“. Daniel Pittman has made some suggestions to help me get the keyboard events mapped to actions that can change the sound via software [5] – which I haven’t yet had time to investigate. I wonder if it will ever be possible to change the volume of the system beep.

The system has an SD card slot, but that doesn’t seem to work. I’m not really worried at the moment but in the future I will probably try and get it going. It has a 100G disk which isn’t that big, adding a 32G SD card at some future time might be the easiest way to upgrade the storage – copying 100G of data is going to be painful and usually a small increment in storage capacity can keep a system viable for a while.

Any advice on getting sound, the SD card, and Bluetooth working would be appreciated. I’ll probably upgrade to Debian/Testing in the near future so suggestions that require testing features won’t be ruled out.

16 March, 2010 02:32AM by etbe

Dirk Eddelbuettel

Rcpp 0.7.10

Versions 0.7.7 to 0.7.9 of Rcpp contained a bug: protecting paths with quotes was supposed to help with Windows builds, but did the opposite at least in 'backticks mode' for getting path and/or library information. Using the shQuote() function instead helped. Our thanks to the tireless R-on-Windows maintainer Uwe Ligges for an earlier heads-up about the problem. So another quick bug-fix release 0.7.10 is now in Debian and should be on CRAN some time tomorrow.

We also put two small improvements in, see the full NEWS entry for this release:

0.7.10  2010-03-15

    o	new class Rcpp::S4 whose constructor checks if the object is an S4 object
	
    o	maximum number of templated arguments to the pairlist function, 
	the DottedPair constructor, the Language constructor and the 
	Pairlist constructor has been updated to 20 (was 5) and a script has been
	added to the source tree should we want to change it again

    o   use shQuotes() to protect Windows path names (which may contain spaces)

As always, even fuller details are in Rcpp Changelog page and the Rcpp page which also leads to the downloads, the browseable doxygen docs and zip files of doxygen output for the standard formats. A local directory has source and documentation too. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page

16 March, 2010 02:20AM

Romain Beauxis

Wlan repeater

Just a quick note about something I have been looking for long... Say you have an access to a wireless network but the signal is bad so you'd like to relay it through another wifi network..

In this case, you may be interested into getting this cheap piece of hardware [1] (a used one on craigslist for instance) and look at this page.. Straight and clear :-)

[1] I got version 4.0, not all are enabled for this purpose..

16 March, 2010 01:22AM by Toots

Debian News

DebConf Updates

Debconf 10

As previously announced, DebConf 10 will take place from August 1st to 7th, 2010, at Columbia University, in New York City, USA.

If you have an interesting proposal for an event, the Call for Contributions is already open. Submit your proposal before May 1st.

Also, if you want to request sponsorship for lodging and/or travel, you must submit your request in pentabarf before April 15th.

Debconf 11

The DebConf Team has decided to hold DebConf11 in Banja Luka, Bosnia & Herzegovina. DebConf 11 will take place in 2011 in a date to be defined.

16 March, 2010 12:31AM by ana

March 15, 2010

Joey Hess

pre to droid

in which the Pre unsuprisingly continues to suck

My Palm Pre was killed by a forced over the air WebOS upgrade. You can't avoid those upgrades, even if you are sure they'll be bad news. The previous WebOS upgrade spared my Debian partition, but lost all other customizations (including Palm Pre privacy fixes), and wasted hours. When I went to use my phone and it didn't even boot, and displayed only "http://palm.com/rom", I knew that was the last straw.

(Shouldn't forcing an upgrade that breaks a working phone to the point that it can't even call 911 be well, illegal?)

switching cell providers in the US: suprisingly doable

I thought about ditching the smart phone and using VOIP, but I seem to have gotten addicted. So I got a Droid. That meant switching cell phone companies.

I've heard a lot about how horrible the US cell phone company contracts are. My experience has me wondering if all that is well... not overblown, but oversimplified. I was half a year into a two year contract. Today I got my closing statement, and I really got out of it with no early termination fee.

The trick seems to be, switch to a different cell phone company. They'll be happy to get you out of your old contract, salivating at the chance of locking you in to a new one. They probably have a script to use when calling to cancel. Or "know a guy". Or claim to know a guy, then just use a script, and get lucky. Given the hard sells and vague promises they tried on me, I assume that these places are where all the car salesmen ended up. Trust == 0. But it worked.

If you're good on the phone, and are looking for a new business idea: Start a business of getting people out of their cell phone contracts, for a reasonable fee and no other obligation. Use loopholes like rate changes. As long as the cell phone companies can raise their monthly rate 2 cents, and 99.9999% of their users accept it, and they make untold millions of dollars, for free, they seem to not care if the remaining fraction use a loophole to get out. Especially if they're able to take advantage of other comanies loopholes to switch over users. So there seems to be a niche there in which one could prosper.

droid first impressions

So now I have a slightly larger lump in my pocket and the Pre is on a shelf, and will either be used for future development and testing of Debian piggyback ideas, or donated to someone like Lennart who can make good use of it.

Compared with the Pre, the droid's hardware is all superior. The keyboard, especially, is great, with arrow keys, and all the symbols I need. At the same time, the phone is bigger, and oddly clunky. But in an endearing way. Only thing I really dislike about the hardware is the "back" button is easy to accidentially swipe while typing on the keyboard.

Compared with WebOS, the Android UI has some clunkiness and non-obvious things. Like the status bar at the top not doing anything when you click on it. And there being no way to close an app. Especially annoying is that this means opening the web browser returns to whatever page I was on last, which is never what I want. The UI is however much, much snappier.

I don't use the Google email, etc services so can't comment on them; I assume the amount of info Google is gathering about me went up by a few percentage points; I've blocked their analytics on my network to knock it back down. (PS: DuckDuckGo now avoids logging IP addresses at all.)

The best thing is the ConnectBot application, which is a very usable shell and ssh client. It's a terminal, in my pocket, which I can easily use for an hour without feeling like my interactions are feeding through a stifling soda straw. Between the keyboard and the app, the Pre has nothing at all that compares.

Under the hood, Android annoys me terribly, with its lack of busybox, its kernel that does not even have the ext* filesystem, its hard-partitioned storage, and its general lack of every single thing I like in a Linux system. Compare this with the Pre, which has a package manager, a userspace based on busybox with a full standard Linux stack (all the way up to PulseAudio) and a kernel with lots of standard filesystems, and even LVM. Sigh. It's amazing that WebOS and Android have found such broadly different ways to suck.

There is significant interest and activity around running a Debian chroot on the Droid. The best tries so far put it on a loop mounted ext2 filesystem (which means you need to get ahold of a matching ext2.ko somehow), living on the FAT formatted SSD. And there are apparently some bad problems with IO to that starving/locking the system, so I have not tried it.

15 March, 2010 08:35PM

David Watson

7 Day Photo Challenge - Day 3

And now for the third image this week, I'm not really too happy with todays shot, I will hopefully get outside during lunch tomorrow.

15 March, 2010 08:17PM

Romain Beauxis

Security update: Mediawiki 1.15.2-1

I have just uploaded a new vesion of the mediawiki package, namely 1.15.2-1.

This version fixes two security issues. One of which is present in all versions of mediawiki and the other one since 1.5.

A CSS validation issue was discovered which allows editors to display external images in wiki pages. This is a privacy concern on public wikis, since a malicious user may link to an image on a server they control, which would allow that attacker to gather IP addresses and other information from users of the public wiki. All sites running publicly-editable MediaWiki installations are advised to upgrade. All versions of MediaWiki (prior to this one) are affected.

A data leakage vulnerability was discovered in thumb.php which affects wikis which restrict access to private files using img_auth.php, or some similar scheme. All versions of MediaWiki since 1.5 are affected.

This package should make it to testing quite soon (priority is high). I have also uploaded a similar package in backports.org

I have also prepared a security update for the stable package, based on the diff from the 1.15.2 release. Before it is uploaded, you can find it there. Please, report any issue with this package.

Of course, I recommend that any user of mediawiki upgrade to one of these package as soon as possible... :-)

15 March, 2010 07:55PM by Toots

Brett Parker

Twitter and irssi...

So, from the last post, it appears that most people got fed up with trying to get twirssi working in Lenny, and it was suggested that twircd was the viable alternative - I've not tried that (yet) mostly because it's PHP based, and (strangely) I try to avoid running any PHP unless I absolutely have to. Might be of interest to others though!

I'm likely to see about making a cleaner package of libnet-twitter-lite at some point over the next week (for Lenny), but for the moment it's mostly working (I'm fairly sure the URL shortening bit won't, but I haven't tested that yet... right - tested and it doesn't work - fairly sure that's because it relies on a newer version of LWP than in stable... so I'll add that to the list of things I need to work around :)

15 March, 2010 05:05PM by Brett Parker (iDunno@sommitrealweird.co.uk)