Search Results: "sunweaver"

11 December 2015

Mike Gabriel: First impressions of my new Jolla Smartphone

"It" has arrived [1]. Finally... Summary first... In a nutshell: Support Jolla, support the Mer Project, support the development of Sailfish OS!!! If you are brave enough, even get a Jolla device yourself and find out what it's like. Impressions then... First impression... Go and get one yourself. Jolla smartphones are awesome. Second impression... Wow, there are some bugs here and there that require being fixed. Dropping the idea of giving away Jolla phones for X-mas to family members for now... Third impression... The Jolla Oy company currently goes through some sort of a death valley [2] that startups regularly face. Let's keep fingers crossed that the company survives. Well, then... Fourth impression... The hosting location of the source code of the free parts of the SailfishOS is not always evident. I am still investigating this... Especially software offered via http://openrepos.net does not always come with a reference to the source code of provided binary blobs. Overall impression... If you are a nerd or brave enough otherwise, go and get one!!! Especially if your N900 gradually starts falling apart. Personally, my impression is that the Jolla smartphone is the best of an "up-to-date" Free Software phone, we can get at the moment. read more

Mike Gabriel: My FLOSS activities in November 2015

November 2015 was a month where I could not work on much FLOSS, unfortunately. Due to family members and myself being ill, things got stalled and delayed. Local customer projects always receive prioritized attention in such phases. Ayatana Indicators As already posted in a separate article [1], I spent quite some time on studying the architectural design of Ayatana/Ubuntu Application Indicators. For the pure purpose of studying I forked various code projects around Indicators and tested them on Debian unstable. Unfortunately, I did not come to a point where things really started working at runtime. Git projects of the various Ayatana Indicators compenents can be found on Github [2]. Debian and Debian LTS For Debian LTS, I had to dispatch several of the open hours to other team members, because things got delayed here. I spent 6.5h on backporting a patch for CVE-2015-1335 [3] to lxc 0.7.x (as found in Debian squeeze and Ubuntu 12.04) [4]. This is still work in progress and I hope for a solution before X-mas. Locally, I did a lot of work for our Debian Edu / Skolelinux customers, but there has not been much to contribute back to the FLOSS realm, so far. read more

11 November 2015

Mike Gabriel: My FLOSS activities in October 2015

October 2015 has been mainly dedicated to contracted/payed work. Only a few issues I could address during the last month: Arctica Project While having a week off from work, I managed to get Arctica Greeter to build on non-Ubuntu systems. The issue was very simple. The build crashed during the test suite run and it was caused by the XDG_DATA_DIRS variable not being set in my clean build environment. Furthermore, I added various more session type icons to Arctica Greeter (XFCE, LXDE, MATE, OpenBox, TWM, Default X11 Session, etc.) and also rebased the Arctica Greeter code base against all recent commits found in Unity Greeter for Ubuntu 15.10 / upcoming 16.04. Together with Ulrich Sibiller, I continued our work on the new Xinerama implementation for the remote X11 server nxagent (used as x2goagent in X2Go). However, this is unfortunately still work in progress, because various theoretical monitor layout issues became evident that require being handled in the new code before it can get merged into nx-libs's current 3.6.x branch. Also, I managed to do some little work on https://arctica-project.org, the still too rudimentary project homepage. read more

9 November 2015

Mike Gabriel: Making appindicators available for non-Ubuntu platforms

As many (Debianic) people possibly know, the appindicator support (libindicator, libappindicator, etc.) in Debian is very weak and outdated. Various native indicators (e.g. indicator-* packages , where * is "datetime", "sound", "session", etc.) are missing or unmaintained in Debian and neither is the indicator-application service available (a service that allows other applications e.g., like the nm-applet tool to dock to the indicator area of the desktop's panel bar). Furthermore, no recent appindicator related uploads have been seen in Debian (last seen uploads are from 2013). I recently e-mailed with Andrew Starr-Bochicchio, one of the Ayatana Packaging team members, about the current Debian status of indicator packages specifically and Ayatana packages [1] in general. The below information summarizes (I hope) what I got from the mail exchange: read more

6 November 2015

Mike Gabriel: Do Jolla Smartphones really exist?

Having ordered a Jolla smartphone in the last week of September 2015, I already accepted by now that possibly Jolla smartphones don't really exist. But today (finally!) after six weeks of acceptance... / waiting... I received a mail with the below subject:
    Subject: Jolla Shop: Shipping confirmation for order #500010511
Maybe Jolla smartphones do really exist... Let's see if that phone will be a venerable successor for my beloved N900.
\o/ .oO ( Hurray ! )
I will keep you posted, so stay tuned...
light+love
Mike

30 October 2015

Mike Gabriel: New plugin for GOsa: gosa-plugin-pwreset

For a school customer here in Nothern Germany, I developed another GOsa Add-On this week, the Add-On's name is: Password Management Add-On for GOsa (gosa-plugin-pwreset). This password management and reset tool allows one to administratively mass-reset user passwords in GOsa based on various approaches.
  1. A CSV file can be uploaded containing user IDs and new passwords. The CSV file format for this is: comma-separated, no quotes, two columns (<uid>, <userPassword>).
  2. An organizational unit of the LDAP tree can be selected and for all user accounts in that section of the LDAP tree (i.e., the selected OU and all sub-OUs), new passwords can be set. The passwords will get auto-generated when using this approach.
  3. Other approach needed? Please get in touch and provide me with a description of your potential use case.
Before passwords are actually changed, the site admin has various options: The source code of this new GOsa Add-On is available on Github [1] and has also been uploaded to Debian's NEW queue already. light+love
Mike [1] https://github.com/gosa-project/gosa-plugin-pwreset

16 October 2015

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, September 2015

A Debian LTS logoLike each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In September, 71.50 work hours have been dispatched among 7 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation October is back to the highest level of funding with 85.5 hours funded. The late sponsors have all caught up now. And next month will again rise to a new record with multiple sponsors having joined up. So far we already have two new silver sponsors (Universit Jean Monnet de Saint- tienne and Univention GmbH) and a new bronze sponsor (Entr ouvert). Many thanks to them! With those sponsors we crossed the 50% mark that was our first objective. \o/ But we still need more support to reach our second goal of funding the equivalent of a full time position. That said the increased level of support already allows us to do a better job in some areas that have been neglected : I asked the paid contributors to work towards providing mysql-5.5 in squeeze since version 5.1 is no longer supported by Oracle. We need beta testers to test the upgrade, see this message on the mailling list. In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation is close to last month: the dla-needed.txt file lists 15 packages awaiting an update (3 less than last month), the list of open vulnerabilities in Squeeze shows about 23 affected packages in total (7 less than last month). Thanks to our sponsors The new sponsors are in bold.

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1 October 2015

Mike Gabriel: My FLOSS activities in August/September 2015

Here comes my "monthly" FLOSS report for August and September 2015. As 50% of August 2015 had been dedicated to taking some time off (spending time in Sweden with the family), it happened that even more workload had to be processed in September 2015. Received Sponsorship My monthly 8h portion of working for the Debian LTS project I had to dispatch from August into September. Thus, I received 16h of paid work for working on Debian LTS in September 2015. For details, see below. Thanks to Raphael Hertzog for having me on the team [1]. Thanks to all the people and companies sponsoring the Debian LTS Team's work. The development of GOsa Plugin SchoolManager (for details, see below) was done on contract for a school in Nothern Germany. The code will be released under the same license as the GOsa software itself. Completion of MATE 1.10 in Debian testing/unstable and Ubuntu 15.10 In the first half of September all MATE 1.10 packages finally landed in Debian testing (aka stretch). Martin Wimpress handled most of the packaging changes, whereas my main job was being reviewer and uploader of his efforts. Thanks to John Paul Adrian Glaubitz for jumping in as reviewer and uploader during my vacation time. read more

Mike Gabriel: Nightly builds for Arctica Project (Debian / Ubuntu)

I am happy to announce that The Arctica Project can now provide automatic nightly builds of its developers' coding code work. Packages are built automatically via Jenkins, see [1] for an overview of the current build queues. The Jenkins system builds code as found on our CGit mirror site [2]. NOTE: The Arctica Project's nightly builds may especially be interesting to people that want to try out the latest development steps on nx-libs (3.6.x branch) as we provide nx-libs 3.6.x binary preview builds. Currently, we only build our code against Debian and Ubuntu (amd64, i386), more distros and platforms are likely to be added. If people can provide machine power (esp. non-Intel based architectures), please get in touch with us on Freenode IRC (channel: #arctica). This is how you can add our package repositories to your APT system. Debian APT (here: stretch) Please note that we only support recent Debian versions (currently version 7.x and above).
$ echo 'deb http://packages.arctica-project.org/debian-nightly stretch main'   sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/arctica.list
$ sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver pgp.mit.edu 0x98DE3101
$ sudo apt-get update
Ubuntu APT (here: trusty) Please note that we support recent Ubuntu LTS versions only (Ubuntu 14.04 only at the moment).
$ echo 'deb http://packages.arctica-project.org/ubuntu-nightly trusty main'   sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/arctica.list
$ sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver pgp.mit.edu 0x98DE3101
$ sudo apt-get update
read more

9 September 2015

Mike Gabriel: MATE 1.10 has fully arrived in Debian unstable

Yesterday, I uploaded the last missing piece for fully having MATE Desktop Environment 1.10 in Debian unstable and soon in Debian stretch and Ubuntu 15.10. Providing MATE in Debian is, in the first place, a team effort. People from four Linux distributions plus the developers from upstream work on providing the MATE experience to the users of Debian. There are many people to thank. This time I will only mention two of them. Two guys that have worked really hard on the MATE 1.10 release in Debian: Martin Wimpress (from the Ubuntu MATE team, aka flexiondotorg) and Vlad Orlov (from MATE upstream, aka monsta). May the MATE Desktop Environment be of use to all of you... light+love,
Mike (aka sunweaver)

26 August 2015

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, July 2015

A Debian LTS logoLike each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In July, 79.50 work hours have been dispatched among 7 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation August has seen a small decrease in terms of sponsored hours (71.50 hours per month) because two sponsors did not pay their renewal invoice on time. That said they reconfirmed their willingness to support us and things should be fixed after the summer. And we should be able to reach our first milestone of funding the equivalent of a half-time position, in particular since a new platinum sponsor might join the project. DebConf 15 happened this month and Debian LTS was featured in a talk and in a work session. Have a look at the video recordings: In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation is better than last month: the dla-needed.txt file lists 20 packages awaiting an update (4 less than last month), the list of open vulnerabilities in Squeeze shows about 22 affected packages in total (11 less than last month). The new LTS frontdesk ensures regular triage of CVE reports and the difference between both counts dropped significantly. That s good! Thanks to our sponsors Thanks to Sig-I/O, a new bronze sponsor, which joins our 35 other sponsors.

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7 August 2015

Mike Gabriel: New plugin for GOsa : gosa-plugin-mailaddress

During last week, I hacked a new plugin together for GOsa . Simply quoting parts from debian/control here to inform you on its functionality:
Package: gosa-plugin-mailaddress
Architecture: all
Depends:
$ misc:Depends ,
gosa (>= 2.7),
Conflicts:
gosa-plugin-mail,
Description: Simple plugin to manage user mail addresses in GOsa
This plugin is a very light-weighted version of the GOsa mail plugin.
Whereas gosa-plugin-mail can be used to manage a complete mail server
farm, this tiny plugin only provides means to modify the user's mail
address via a text field.
.
This plugin is useful for people that need to maintain users' email
addresses via GOsa , but do not run their own mailserver(s).
.
GOsa is a combination of system-administrator and end-user web
interface, designed to handle LDAP based setups.
light+love
Mike (aka sunweaver)

Mike Gabriel: My FLOSS activities in July 2015

July 2015 has been mainly dedicated to these five fields of endeavour: Debian Edu rollout at a grammar school (Gymnasium) in L beck, Germany In spring 2015, we got contacted by the IT coordinator of a grammar school (Gymnasium) in L beck, Germany. He asked for some consultancy on the existing school network based on Debian and Linux Mint. The school has been running on Linux all-over for the past 5 years (at least, IIRC). After several phone calls and a personal meeting, the decision was reached to switch over the educational segment of their school IT completely to Debian Edu / Skolelinux. GOsa and Debian Edu testing and fixing This new customer gave us the opportunity of intensively testing Debian Edu jessie. Diverting from previous rollouts, we dropped LibVirt as virtualization technology and switched over to Ganeti. The Debian Edu machines all run in KVM virtual machines. Our Diskless Workstations and diskfull workstations have been running on Debian Edu jessie plus MATE desktop environment for a while already. But the main servers at other customers' are still on Debian Edu squeeze. read more

16 July 2015

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, June 2015

A Debian LTS logoLike each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In June, 73.50 work hours have been dispatched among 7 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation July has seen a nice increase in terms of sponsored hours (79.50 hours per month) but the trend is unlikely to continue for the next month, worse it might be negative. While most sponsors who joined us last year in July will renew their support, there are a few where I have no confirmation yet. Many thanks to those who confirmed early: Universit Lille 3, MyTux. Our first milestone of funding the equivalent of a half-time position is unlikely to be reached before DebConf or even this summer. If you want to prove me wrong, it s time to get in touch with your management and convince your company to contribute a small amount. In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation is similar to last month: the dla-needed.txt file lists 24 packages awaiting an update (5 more than last month), the list of open vulnerabilities in Squeeze shows about 33 affected packages in total (3 less than last month). Thanks to our sponsors There are no new sponsors this month. But I decided to include the number of months that the sponsor has been with us. Since we value long-lasting relations, it seemed quite natural to add this.

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6 July 2015

Mike Gabriel: My FLOSS activities in June 2015

June 2015 has been mainly dedicated to these five fields of endeavour: Received Sponsorship Last month's contributions of mine (8h) to the Debian LTS project had been contracted by Freexian [1] again. Thanks to Raphael Hertzog for having me on the team. Thanks to all the people and companies sponsoring the Debian LTS Team's work. Also a big thanks to people from Hetzner GmbH for sponsoring my stay at X2Go: The Gathering 2015 @ Linuxhotel (in Essen, Germany). MATE 1.10 entering Debian experimental Together with Martin Wimpress from Ubuntu MATE and other people in the Debian MATE Packaging Team I managed to upload a great portion of the MATE 1.10 packages to Debian experimental. Please note that this is still work in progress. Not all MATE 1.10 packages have been uploaded yet and several packages from the MATE 1.10 series in Debian have grave bugs still (mostly packaging and installation issues). The plan is to make the complete MATE 1.10 stack available in Debian experimental by the end of July and also get all the open kinks fixed by then. Development nx-libs 3.6.x In June 2015, I have looked at various aspects of nx-libs development: read more

5 June 2015

Mike Gabriel: My FLOSS activities in May 2015

May 2015 has been mainly dedicated to these three fields of endeavour: Received Sponsorship I am happy to report that I received a personal sponsoring over 3.000,- EUR from a sponsor not to be named in May 2015. The sponsoring has been dedicated to supporting my work on The Arctica Project. Last month's contributions of mine (8h) to the Debian LTS project had been contracted by Freexian [1] again. Thanks to Raphael Hertzog for having me on the team. Thanks to all the people and companies sponsoring the Debian LTS Team's work. Development and License of nx-libs 3.6.x What has been achieved in May 2015 concerning the nx-libs development? read more

29 May 2015

Mike Gabriel: DXPC retroactively re-licensed as BSD-2-clause, nx-libs(-lite) now really DFSG-compliant

We recently had an intensive phase while reconsidering the DFSG-compliancy of the nx-libs(-lite) code base. TL;DR; In May 2015, all versions of DXPC released before version 3.8.1 (sometime in 2002) have retroactively been re-licensed by all previous maintainers of DXPC as BSD-2-clause. This blog arcticle is a modified version of the nxcomp/README.on-retroactive-DXPC-license file [1] and gives an overview of the discussion thread that lead to the retroactive re-licensing of DXPC. For the full discussion, see doc/DXPC_re-licensed::debbug_784565.mbox [2] in the nx-libs source project or #784565 on the Debian bug tracker [3]. [1] https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs/blob/3.6.x/nxcomp/README.on-re...
[2] https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs/blob/3.6.x/doc/DXPC_re-license...
[3] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=784565 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ STEP 1 In May 2015, a serious license issue around the nxcomp code shipped in this source project was raised and solved on the Debian bug tracker (thanks to Francesco Poli and many others): http://bugs.debian.org/784565
From: "Francesco Poli \(wintermute\)" 
To: Debian Bug Tracking System 
Date: Wed, 06 May 2015 19:35:32 +0200
I noticed that the debian/copyright states:
[...]
  Parts of this software are derived from DXPC project. These copyright
  notices apply to original DXPC code:
 
read more

18 May 2015

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, April 2015

A Debian LTS logoLike each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In April, 81.75 work hours have been dispatched among 5 paid contributors (20.75 hours where unused hours of Ben and Holger that were re-dispatched to other contributors). Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation May has seen a small increase in terms of sponsored hours (66.25 hours per month) and June is going to do even better with at least a new gold sponsor. We will have no problems sustaining the increased workload it implies since three Debian developers joined the team of contributors paid by Freexian (Antoine Beaupr , Santiago Ruano Rinc n, Scott Kitterman). The Jessie release probably shed some light on the Debian LTS project since we announced that Jessie will benefit from 5 years of support. Let s hope that the trend will continue in the following months and that we reach our first milestone of funding the equivalent of a half-time position. In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation is a bit contrasted: the dla-needed.txt file lists 28 packages awaiting an update (12 less than last month), the list of open vulnerabilities in Squeeze shows about 60 affected packages in total (4 more than last month). The extra hours helped to make a good stride in the packages awaiting an update but there are many new vulnerabilities waiting to be triaged. Thanks to our sponsors The new sponsors of the month are in bold.

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Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, April 2015

A Debian LTS logoLike each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In April, 81.75 work hours have been dispatched among 5 paid contributors (20.75 hours where unused hours of Ben and Holger that were re-dispatched to other contributors). Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation May has seen a small increase in terms of sponsored hours (66.25 hours per month) and June is going to do even better with at least a new gold sponsor. We will have no problems sustaining the increased workload it implies since three Debian developers joined the team of contributors paid by Freexian (Antoine Beaupr , Santiago Ruano Rinc n, Scott Kitterman). The Jessie release probably shed some light on the Debian LTS project since we announced that Jessie will benefit from 5 years of support. Let s hope that the trend will continue in the following months and that we reach our first milestone of funding the equivalent of a half-time position. In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation is a bit contrasted: the dla-needed.txt file lists 28 packages awaiting an update (12 less than last month), the list of open vulnerabilities in Squeeze shows about 60 affected packages in total (4 more than last month). The extra hours helped to make a good stride in the packages awaiting an update but there are many new vulnerabilities waiting to be triaged. Thanks to our sponsors The new sponsors of the month are in bold.

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4 May 2015

Mike Gabriel: Rebasing NXv3 against latest X.Org -- already ~2,700,000 lines of code removed

We have set sails for a great endeavour. We are cleaning up the nx-X11 / nxagent code tree [1] and rebase it against latest / recent X.Org. Until now, we have been able to drop ~2,700,000 lines of code [2] from the source tree that originally got released by NoMachine. The plan is... For more details, see the Readme.md[3] file on our Github project. What we have achieved so far... read more

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