First time ever I have been at a conference and attending so few talks. Needed to talk to sooo many people. But anyways, it was quite interesting to put some faces of the people I kind of work with. Especially my favourite kde upstream people. So many keys to sign, but I guess I am finally thru it. If you are expecting a signature from me and haven’t got one yet, please check your spam filters and/or try poke me. I guess I will keep my paper notes a couple of days before ditching them. Beer event was bigger this year, but still too crowded. Fosdem is also quite crowded - so crowded that I missed some talks because of it. But anyway, see you next year - probably.

Dear lazyweb I have been looking for a small nice digital camera, one that of course takes nice pictures, but besides that have the following technical features:

• connected with a “generic” usb cable
• a usb mass storage device for the computer
• battery charged over the usb cable
• uses a generic memory card type (eg. sd)

I want it to be using a generic cable for charging and transfering pictures because I am not that good at not loosing cables and chargers and such so a replacement cable should be very easy to get. And I want it to be a usb mass storage because I want it working with any computer. It kind of seems hard to figure out what devices to look at. Most “technical specifications” doesn’t contain information on wether it is a USB A => USB mini B cable or some vendor specific cable, nor do they contain information on wether it is a usb mass storage device or a device requiring mtp/ptp. Canon looks like it is doing mtp/ptp over a generic cable - and with a external charger.
Samsung tells deep inside their manuals that it uses the usb mass storage driver. Samsung uses a vendor specific cable, but is also charged thru this cable.
Kodak seems to be using a generic cable, a external charger and undefined how the communication with the computer is.
Olympus seems to be using a vendor specific cable and a external charger. But it is a bit unclear. Seems to be able to do both mtp and usb mass storage
HP seems to use a generic cable, standard AA batteries and no charger bundled, seems to be configured to use usb mass storage.
Sony uses memory sticks which are just too expensive.
Casio seems to use a generic cable, a external charger and is a bit unclear about communication. Could be usb mass storage though.
Nikon seems to use generic cable, mtp protocol and a external charger Argf. What have I missed?

/me++

libqt3-compat-headers is a debian package containing headers from qt3 to help migrating from qt2 to qt3.
This is long ago. Qt people laughed at me when I asked about how long ago that would have been. Apparantly, this package is still build-depended upon by 66 different debian packages. A big bunch of them are probably just leftovers from the past. The rest is probably a 5 minute job (+build time) pr package. For me, it kind of makes the packages look kind of unmaintained. grep-dctrl -sPackage -FBuild-Depends libqt3-compat-headers /var/lib/apt/lists/ftp.de.debian.org_debian_dists_unstable_main_source_Sources to see the full list. I just filed bugs with patches on 3 random of them.

Hi! Thank you ubuntu people for wanting to give back to debian. This goes to people trying to contribute back patches and new packages. Please please please as a bare minimum do the following two steps:

• Try build your package in debian unstable
• Try run your package in debian unstable

Thanks in advance.

Hi people! Please check your interactive bugscripts and check wether the interactivity is really needed - and not something that should be better solved by using presubj files. /Sune

Ah. Back home. All in all, it was a quite nice trip. I like to get actually to meet the people that I communicate a lot electronically with. Thanks Extremadura for making this happen. The last day, we stayed at the residense instead of going to the local university, as the internet at the residense was much more stable than the one at the university.
But it was still heavily firewalled. Having the svn:// port firewalled doesn’t make it too easy to work with svn - and having ssh connection time out every 5 minutes also makes it difficult to try work on some remote machine. Please. Get the network better for next time. And more bandwidth. And thanks to Nekral for the champagne && cheese ;) Now tired - and times to sleep.

Day three in Extremadura
Yesterday after dinner, we phoned “Telepizza” and got a pizza with cheese and cheese a cheese - and a pizza with barbecue sauce and bacon and bacon.
After a long night of hacking we finally got to sleep. And I almost got my debian working again.
Sleeping until 10 was kind of needed after that - and I got my debian finally working again. No more ubuntu live cd.
We skipped breakfast and found a supermarket. Yay! Best food this trip so far.
A sneak peek on the lunch - and we kind of ate it, but … I feel sorry for the students dining here 3 meals every day. So far we have gotten some discussions about kde3 packaging and kde4 packaging. Lenny will probably ship with a kde3 desktop and with kde4 development platform. - and everytime someone is thirsty, the question arises: “why do they get drinking water from swimming pools?” And tomorrow it is “back home”. Kind of sad, but I miss my bed. And my hardware.

So - this is Extremadura day 2 Bedroom: Cold, but works. I think I saw penguins there last night Wireless: still crap Breakfast: awful Other food: Better Dining schedule: still on crack Last night: Very good - lots of small kinds of food and free drinks In general satisfied, except the network.

Yesterday she approached me, touched me gently on my shoulder and said: “You are hot today”. I replied: “I am always hot” and stepped away from the fire.

Debian-KDE && Debian-i18n meeting in extremadura. I’m attending. Yay. Flight: on time for once, but apparantly Iberia has added one extra row of seats, so very little space.
Bus ride: okay. but still a 3-4 hour bus ride.
Beds/bedrooms: Is working.
Breakfast: Crap.
Network: Heavily firewalled, but ssh works on port 22. Extremely laggy, connections dropped, …. In general, crap.
Lunch: Quite okay. Probably because the standard lunch got cancelled, so we got better lunch.
Dining schedules: Completely weird.
The people: Debian people quite nice.
Why does so few spanish people speak english? Except the network, I am kind of satisfied.

There seems to be some kind of tradition for publically telling when one finally gets a debian account. It was apparantly my turn late last night. Unfortunately my internet was gone at that time, so no possibility to see for myself. But now net is back and time to celebrate. It seems to be a tradition to thank all sorts of people, so I guess I need to follow that tradition as well. Thanks everybody who helped me on the way. Including but not limited to the big group of regular sponsors, one time sponsors and NMU sponsors that have put my work in the archive. (and that also covers my application manager - he sponsored the second or third attempt to NMU a *urgh* yada-using package). Time to try break stuff.

Congratulations to Yves-Alexis Perez (Corsac), Nicolas Fran ois (Nekral) and Sune Vuorela (Pusling) too \o/ Finally, some accounts (~30 ?) were created and i’m in. Thanks to all people involved in Debian and Kubuntu. In particular (no order) my co-maintainers, sponsors, helpers and application manager:
* Pierre habouzit (Madcoder)
* Mark Purcell (msp)
* Ana Beatriz Guerrero (Ana)
* Enrico Zini (enrico)
* Gustavo Franco (stratus)
* Lo c Minier (lool)
* Jonathan Riddell (riddell)
* Sarah Hobbs (hobbsee)
* and many many others But I don’t forget other people who missed this train: Cyril Brulebois (kibi). Next time, it’s your turn ! (i hope soon).

I think my title is some tagline from some tv show I am not following, but anyway. Today my laptop stopped working. *GRR*. The usual: The power plug in the laptop stops working because it has been molested over the last 4 years. I haven’t planned in investing in a new laptop currently, so the alternative was fixing it. After splitting it into every little part I finally found the plug. And yes. The soldering was broken, the plug itself was broken. Needs replacement. I never bragged about my soldering skills before, but \o/ - I managed to get it removed - the only spare one I had came with 8 cm wire I now have this wire hanging out my laptop, but it is working again. Even better than before. The last weeks, I constantly needed to wiggle the powerplug. No need for that anymore. Finishing off with a big piece of warm glue to keep everything at its place. It is not beatiful, but it works:
I wonder for how long. It is probably time to consider saving up for a new laptop.

Now that dpkg-dev actually is slightly usable again, trying to work with it instead of working against it is something that could be tried. In order to find relevant -lfoo’s missing that new dpkg-dev complains about I ended up knitting a small script. I guess I am not the only one having these issues, so I thought I would share.

$ cat which find-symbol
#! /bin/sh for i in /usr/lib/*.so*
do
if objdump -T $i 2>/dev/null grep \.text grep -q $1
then
echo $i ; objdump -T $i grep $1
fi
done
Comments welcome. And people wanting to shut up dpkg-shlibdeps in kde are most welcome to speak up and provide patches. A lot of build power is needed - and quite some patience.

Oh well.. I asked for a couple of brave testers some time ago. I guess it is time to try make my attempted work public. Use it at your own risk and fun. And please don’t comment on my ability to (not) use gimp and (not) to remove white. For brave people, try look at http://users.alioth.debian.org/~pusling-guest/.desktop-base/ Comments are welcome

It’s 106 miles to Chicago. We’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark and we’re wearing sunglasses.

Some people have been looking for the following, so I thought I would share it: DEB_DH_SHLIBDEPS_ARGS_ALL=--dpkg-shlibdeps-params=--ignore-missing-info


but where is the debian kde dual quadcore super extreme multiple Gb ram build host ? Needs. Faster. Hardware. The rest of the team is doing it so much faster than me.

I have created a couple of packages trying to implement a way to have debian themed splash screens and other images for a group of applications. I have tested it a couple of times in different computers, trying to make it break and such - and I think it is more or less working now. So - I am looking for brave test persons wanting to test it/screw up their systems. Requirements:

• Able to recover from messed up dpkg-diverts
• Able to recover from messed up alternatives

As the average reader probably have guessed it involves dpkg-diverts and alternatives. To be a bit more detailed, I have a list of splash screens, divert them, set up alternatives and register the new images. Comments? Testers? feel free to speak up.