Since the introduction of the 3.0 (quilt) source format, it is now possible to integrate multiple upstream tarballs in Debian source packages. This article will show you how to do the same with your own package shall you need it. It s quite useful to easily integrate supplementary plugins, translations, or documentation that the upstream developers are providing in separate tarballs. Step by step explanation We ll take the spamassassin source package as an example. The upstream version is 3.3.1. The main upstream tarball is named as usual (spamassassin_3.3.1.orig.tar.gz) and contains the top directory of our source package. We already have a debian directory because the package is not new. Upstream provides spamassassin rules in a separate tarball named Mail-SpamAssassin-rules-3.3.1.r901671.tgz. We grab it, rename it to spamassassin_3.3.1.orig-pkgrules.tar.gz and put it next to the main tarball. The pkgrules part is the component name that we choose to identify the tarball, it s also the name of the directory in which it will be extracted inside the source package. For now that directory doesn t exist yet so we must create it.

$ mv Mail-SpamAssassin-rules-3.3.1.r901671.tgz spamassassin_3.3.1.orig-pkgrules.tar.gz
$ cd spamassassin-3.3.1
$ mkdir pkgrules
$ tar -C pkgrules -zxf ../spamassassin_3.3.1.orig-pkgrules.tar.gz

This is already enough, the next time that you will build the source package, the supplementary tarball will be automatically integrated in the generated source package.

$ dpkg-buildpackage -S
[...]
 dpkg-source -b spamassassin-3.3.1
dpkg-source: info: using source format  3.0 (quilt)'
dpkg-source: info: building spamassassin using existing ./spamassassin_3.3.1.orig-pkgrules.tar.gz ./spamassassin_3.3.1.orig.tar.gz
dpkg-source: info: building spamassassin in spamassassin_3.3.1-1.debian.tar.gz
dpkg-source: info: building spamassassin in spamassassin_3.3.1-1.dsc

The supplementary tarball is now part of the source package but we re not making anything useful out of it. We have to modify debian/rules (or debian/spamassin.install) to install the new files in the binary package. A special case: bundling related software In very rare cases, you might want to create a bundle of several software (small perl modules for example) and you don t have any main tarball, you only have several small tarballs. Rename all the tarballs following the same logic as above and when building the source package you can ask dpkg-source to create an empty (and fake) main archive for you with the option --create-empty-orig:

$ dpkg-buildpackage -S --source-option=--create-empty-orig

Use with care as the version number you give to the bundle is what users will see and it s likely unrelated to the version number of each individual software. Common mistakes Forgetting to extract the supplementary tarball If you forget to extract the content of the supplementary tarball in the pkgrules directory, dpkg-source will emit lots of warnings about those files being deleted. In fact, you did not delete them but you only forgot to create them in the first place.

dpkg-source: warning: ignoring deletion of directory pkgrules
dpkg-source: warning: ignoring deletion of file pkgrules/20_fake_helo_tests.cf
dpkg-source: warning: ignoring deletion of file pkgrules/60_shortcircuit.cf
[...]

Using a bad version number for the supplementary tarball Sometimes the supplementary tarball has a version of its own that does not match the upstream version. You must still name the file in a way that matches the upstream version of the main tarball otherwise it will not be picked up by dpkg-source and it will generate a new patch in debian/patches/ containing the whole new directory. It s possible to encode the version number of the supplementary tarball in the component name (in our example above we could have picked pkgrules-r901671 as component name) but this means that the name of the associated directory will regularly change and you must adapt your packaging rules to cope with this. However this last trick has the benefit of being able to update the additional tarball without bumping the upstream version. A sourceful upload of a new revision of the package will be accepted by the archive: the main tarball is ignored since it s unchanged but the supplementary tarball is taken since it s a new file for the archive (it has a different filename). Be sure to move away old versions of the additional tarball when you do that if you don t want to upload several versions of the same tarball by mistake! Misextracting the supplementary tarball dpkg-source is very smart when it extracts the supplementary tarball and you should be as well when you manually extract it. If the tarball contains only a single top-level directory, that directory is extracted, renamed to match the component name and moved in the source package directory.
If the tarball contains several top-level files or directories, then the target directory is first created and the content of the archive is directly extracted into that directory. Here are commands to install the files in both cases (we re already in the source package directory):

$ mkdir pkgrules
# Archive contains a single top-level directory
$ tar -C pkgrules --strip-components=1 -zxf ../spamassassin_3.3.1.orig-pkgrules.tar.gz
# Archive contains many top-level entries
$ tar -C pkgrules -zxf ../spamassassin_3.3.1.orig-pkgrules.tar.gz

2 comments Support my work

I started to give flattr a try, too. It is a social micropayment site and the similarity of its name to the verb flatter is on intention. It is meant to say thanks in small amounts month by month to "things" you like. One such thing I created is my blog you can find the link to it below every entry. To be able to flattr someone one needs to create an account on the site and put money into their account. After that it's possible to follow the flattr button links. If you are reading my blog on my site and have JavaScript enabled you just have to click the flattr part of the image (not the number) to do so. If you are reading it through my feed or with JavaScript disabled you will have to click a second time on the flattr site to make the flattring happen. Another thing I've created is Debian BTS: cleaning up. I use this link in my mails to the Debian BTS for my stable RC cleanup efforts, or general proper closing of bugs that aren't getting archived. Through the help of UDD I've created me helpful overview pages of bugs that need attention for this. The third thing I've created is Package Maintenance. If you are a fan of one of the packages I maintain and want to thank me for taking proper care of it, feel free to also click this one. Please be aware that this shouldn't be seen as an Upstream appreciation if one of the projects I package for Debian uses flattr themself then you should definitely (also) consider flattring them for their own. About Upstream projects that use flattr: One of the packages I invest quite a lot of effort into started using flattr: wesnoth. They have put the flattr button on their entry page at wesnoth.org, here is the direct link to their first and general thing: The Battle for Wesnoth. Please be reminded that the things you did flattr in a previous month can again be flattred the next month. This is especially true for general purpose things like what I am using currently. Others might create things for every single blog entry, or very specific tasks, to allow people to flattr them more often in a month and get a bigger share of the cake. So keep in mind which things are general ones and consider returning to them. Enjoy!

/debian permanent link Comments: 1

After a semi-recent thread on debian-devel, I poked around and realized that I'd never actually gotten around to formally announcing the release of source code for Selectricity, a piece of web-based election software designed to allow for preferential decision-making and to provide "election machinery for the masses." Selectricity is useful for a range of decisions but it targets all those quick little decisions that we might want to decide preferentially but where running a vote would be overkill. Things were delayed through a drawn out set of negotiations with the MIT Technology Licensing Office over how to release the code under a free software license of my choosing. I was swamped when things finally came through. Over time, I managed to forget that I never did a formal announcement, never setup a mailing list, and never did all those things that I have tried to teach other people in the Free Software Project Management HOWTO. Code just sort of appeared on my website under the GNU Affero General Public License. It was until the debian-devel thread that I remembered I'd never made a formal announcement. Sorry about that! The git repository has been online and accessible through searches for more than a year now. Most folks who wanted the code seem to have been able to find it there. Indeed, a number of people have set up their own instances and a few have submitted patches to the code! But more visibility for the source means more empowered users, more visibility for free software, and more developers. So I've shipped all the code into a project in Gitorious (its like GitHub, except free), announced things on the Selectricity Blog, changed the Selectricity footer of to include a prominent link to the source. I've also created a mailing list. The Gitorious project page includes a wiki. I also want to mention this all here because the attention of the current development team seems mostly to have moved on to other projects. The current team seems able to keep the hosted version up and running, and even gets around to little improvements now and then, but there's definitely room for new life and new leadership. There are some nearly-complete and "complete minus further testing" features in the development tree that might provide low hanging fruit for folks interested in elections and decision-making who might want to get involved in Selectricity development. If you're interested and know (or want to learn) Rails, feel free to check out the code, introduce yourself on the list or contact team@selectricity.org to coordinate.

This summer of 2010 has been memorable. It started with a difficult period following the hospitalization and death of my mother, a series of very intense and equally memorable conferences catapulting me out of my funk and ending with a trip to Ireland, perhaps one of my most pleasant trips ever. I have always wanted to go there, as I have some good Irish friends and I was also quite attracted to the place due to its history, so when the opportunity came for me to go, I did not hesitate to book my ticket. I was not left disappointed in any way, shape or form, although since I barely experienced the gray, misty, and rainy weather Irish is famous for, my experience may admittedly be a bit skewed. These are some of things I did and some of my fragmented thoughts about Ireland and some photos, proof that the weather was UnIrish Ireland and The Irish: Well I can t as no one can speak of The Irish as if they were some unitary group but I did learn a lot about Irish history and managed hang out with a number Irish folks (even a family) and one thing that seems to mark Ireland as distinct, what makes it stand out from the rest of its Western European brothers and sisters, is the pervasive sense of history bleeding into the ambiance, perhaps because it is so tragic. The short version of the history, if you don t know it, is that the Irish, especially the Catholics, got repeatedly screwed by the British monarchs/rulers/planters/government/ for nearly a thousand years, the last five hundred of those being particularly harsh and ugly, a cycle of slight gains crushed by various forms of tyranny and violence at least until part of the country achieved independence (Northern Ireland is a bit of a different story). I may have gone a bit out of my way to learn about Irish history, more than I have done for any other place, but this historical consciousness seemed to be inescapable, precipitating into all sorts of conversations and places. To take one example, I went to see Gaelic Football, one of the two beloved national sports (the other being hurling), and the minute you learn anything about this sport, you learn that it is intimately bound with the Irish fight for independence and nationalism. The Irish are also very warm, kind, and outgoing. They also seem to curse an awful lot as well, so much so cursing is a bit of a national pastime, which yes, I (f*cking) loved as I tend to have a bit of a foul mouth myself, curbed I will admit, in recent years and in the classroom. It crept up in a lot of places but was most pronounced during the All Ireland Semi-Final Gaelic football game when the ladies (not lads, mind you) behind me were constantly yelling at the referee, hurling the c-word (rhymes with trunk) whenever they made a call they disagreed with. EASA/Maynooth.: I went to Ireland to attend the largest Anthropological meetings in Europe, and in specific an all day panel on digital anthropology, which seemed like a great opportunity given we are a a bit of a minority. The conference was impressively large with roughly 1200 attendees (can you believe there are that many anthropologists?), smoothly run, and the all-day panel on digital media was quite lively and I got to meet some really interesting folks. I was a tad sad to find out Maynooth is the only university in Ireland with an Anthropology department (for crying shame lads!!!) but at least it is located in a darn stunning university: the old quarters of the campus are strikingly beautiful. Anonymous: I have done some work on Anonymous and well when I found out there was going to be a raid/protest at the Church of Scientology (a pretty dismal, and run down church), I got in contact with Irish anon to let them know I was coming. Although someone first decapitated me (at least in character with their norms, right?), when I showed up in person, they were not only civil but really quite hospitable (greeting me with one of my favorite songs). Overall it was a great day. I was reminded of important differences among Anons (Irish Anon s take their anonymity pretty seriously, the New York Anons do not) and also good to experience the social life and metabolism of a protest, especially one attended by folks who have lost family to the church. Dublin: Since I stayed with my friend and his family in Dublin, this is where I spent most of my time. I was able to hook up with various friends, including one from graduate school who just got back from years of fieldwork in Rwanda and hearing about his experiences and stunning but stunningly sad project made me feel like mine in comparison was Child s Play (in fact, it really was). I got to see the Debian crew (many who work at Google) and I finally paid a visit to the office, which was exactly how I imagined it to be (good and abundant food, good lighting, lots of toys and bikes, lots of Star Wars posters.. Yep, it could have been in Silicon Valley). But I was surprised at the young age of the marketing and sales folks who were hanging in their lounge when I ran into them. In fact when I saw them I thought like I was looking at my freshman class or something! It was great to see the Debian folks (though no one I met was actually Irish), as well, one of my favorite things to do whenever I visit a foreign city. I walked my heart out in the city getting a blister in a shoe that I thought was blister proof and while not as picturesque as some other European cities, it has a ton of character and no shortage of Guinness and pubs (no surprise there). My favorite places/things were: The National Library (great exhibit on Yeats, but make sure to use the multi-media as that is where all the information is stuffed), St. Stephen s Park (overflowing with chubby ducks and lovely flowers), the prison Kilmainham Gaol (would not advise a visit if you are feeling in any way down, there is some heavy shit you learn during the tour), the simple stained glass that seemed pretty common, and finally the Long Room in Trinity Church, which you enter after the Book of Kells (I realized just how much I adore books when I visited this old library stuffed from floor to ceiling with old old old books). The West Coast: I did not think I was going to head out west but after hurricane Earl started its burst along the eastern Seaboard and I was able to change my ticket for free so I stayed a few more days. I went to the Burren and the Cliffs of Moher both totally stunning, really majestic. As is often the case with these type of these natural wonders, I am often left elated and awed but such strikingly wondrous places also seem to subsequently spur a more melancholic state of mind and heart. Friends, Family, and Dogs: While in Dublin I stayed with my friend A. and his extremely hospitable family, which included, a brother, a father, and three Irish mutts, one of which, Buster (pitt bull/lab mix), pretty much stole my heart. Buster s true love, is food, so much so he almost poised himself to death a little while back snorting down something he shouldn t have costing the family a pretty penny to save him. My friend no longer lives there but came from Berlin and it was a real treat to not only spend days layered upon each other with a friend (it has been an awful long since I have done that outside of conferences) but also meet his family. You learn a lot about your friends that way and in this case, there is some serious and I mean serious intellectual jousting that happens, sometimes bordering on warfare but generally it plays out in more contained, civil and fascinating fashion. Now I understand why my friend is armed with seemingly endless knowledge: it was needed for purposes of defense at home. So in essence, a great, great trip and a fantastic way to end a memorable summer and transition into what I hope will be a bit of a monkish (I call it monk mode) period for this academic year. I am (so so so) fortunate enough to have a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study and am going to try my darnest to take advantage of the fact I am not teaching (Hell Yes!) and hide away and accomplish all that I have set out to do.

Been playing with that thought for a while now, finally got to rebuilding it for lenny, now I m using it tmux is the new screen. To have fun already I read a few short introductions and got myself a few suggestions for a proper .tmux.conf. So, for root I have this one now: # Copy mode
unbind [
bind Escape copy-mode
# Use Vi mode
setw -g mode-keys vi
# Make mouse useful in copy mode
setw -g mode-mouse on
# More straight forward key bindings for splitting
unbind %
bind split-window -h
bind h split-window -h
unbind '"'
bind - split-window -v
bind v split-window -v
# History
set -g history-limit 4000
# Terminal emulator window title
set -g set-titles on
set -g set-titles-string '#S:#I.#P #W'
# Status Bar
set -g status-bg black
set -g status-fg white
set -g status-interval 1
set -g status-left '#[fg=green]#H#[default]'
# no line break here, it's just to long for my blog layout!
set -g status-right '#[fg=yellow]#(cut -d " " -f 1-4 /proc/loadavg)#[default] #[fg=cyan,bold]%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S#[default]'
# Notifying if other windows has activities
setw -g monitor-activity on
set -g visual-activity on
# Highlighting the active window in status bar
setw -g window-status-current-bg red
# Clock
setw -g clock-mode-colour green
setw -g clock-mode-style 24
# Create a default session
new -n htop -d htop
setw -t htop monitor-activity off
neww -n aptitude -d aptitude
neww -d Then I added a new alias to my user s zsh config: alias root='su -c "tmux attach"' Why tmux attach ? Because tmux would start a new session which I don t want it to. The config already starts a session which we can immediately attach to. Also, when such session was started I can attach to it as a user with the very same command over and over again. That makes it pretty handy as I always have htop, aptitude and a free shell available in a nice tmux session. Great. How did I live until now? ;-)

More than seven years after I initially started the backports.org project, it finally happened: backports.org moved to backports.debian.org! Alexander wrote an announcement including some technical details, the most important point from a users perspective is to update your sources.list entry to:

deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports/ lenny-backports main contrib non-free

Thanks a lot to all people who made it happen, especially Alexander Wirt and J rg Jaspert!

More than seven years after I initially started the backports.org project together with Team(ix), my employer at that time, it finally happened: backports.org became official last weekend, and moved to backports.debian.org! Alexander Wirt wrote a blog entry including some technical details, and there is also an official announcement on the debian-announce mailinglist. The most important point from a users perspective is to update your sources.list entry to:

deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports/ lenny-backports main contrib non-free

Thanks a lot to all people who made it happen, especially Alexander Wirt and J rg Jaspert!

Two updates for Debian today.

I'm the upstream for psmisc and 22.13 finally got released, which also meant 22.13-1 Debian package got released too. There was some delay to it (see below why) but it is now out. Unless you run a mips or superH architecture, there is not really any exciting changes, but should make it compile for those two architectures and then at least get the mips buildd underway so the versions all line up.

Secondly, gjay had two minor bug fixes and was updated. If the analysis daemon kept playing music instead of looking at it or the vorbis files were not being recognised, then this new version will help there. The mpg123 command line patch will be rolled into the upstream too.

I'm also working on getting gjay to work with the Exaile player. If you want it to work with your player the easiest thing is to send me patches or code snippets that do the following:

• Detect your player is running
• Can give me the currently played song, preferably the filename of it. Exaile doesn't so I'll put it a kludge to guess it from title and artist
• Remotely send a playlist to your player and get the player to start

Last of all, my second son was born last week. It's back to those night feeds again and is probably why I've not written as much code as I normally would; but I wouldn't change that either.

* It is same old life, apart from: + Guitar is going good. Learning first thing apart from computer in life + Learning C++ and openFrameworks for helping friend for project. More details later.. * Packages: + I ve uploaded Gwibber 2 after waiting for ages to experimental now. Now, OAuth sucked life from all previous version of Gwibber stable version will not have twitter working. I m thinking what can be best solution for that. + Code::Blocks is with me now. I m talking to upstream to do better things with license issues. It will not make to stable, but backport version is planned. * Kavin: + Arr. He can reach to my any books, gadgets and even laptop.

I finally finished an article I've had in one form or another for years about on the use of proprietary tools in the creation of free software. From BitKeeper to SourceForge to Google Code to GitHub, non-free tools and services have played an important role in free software development over the past decade and, I argue, continue to create a number of important, if sometimes subtle, problems for our community. The article was published in the Spring 2010 FSF Bulletin which was mailed to all FSF associate members. I've also posted the article on my website and in PDF form as well.

Really, I should have known better than to buy myself a rather 'bleeding-edge' laptop. I suppose I've been lucky with my last couple of laptops and was thinking that pretty much everything works on Linux. Or maybe I'm being picky, because in fact pretty much everything does work on my new Dell Studio. I bought this laptop mainly because it has a 1920x1080 screen, without being a 17" monster. I had such a monster about four laptops ago (an enormous Sony Vaio weighing in at around 5kg and with a 1hr battery life) and it was an disaster: lots of weird proprietary stuff that never worked, like the external speakers in the docking station. But I loved that screen right up until the day Fraser threw a pair of scissors into it. With the advent of mass-market 1920x1080 screens I've been waiting for them to arrive in laptops at a reasonable price, and the availability of this screen in a few possible laptops seemed to me to be that point. It's a Dell Studio 15, and as well as the nice screen, it comes with a new Intel i7 Quad Core CPU, 6G RAM, 640G hard drive and a Blu-ray drive. While there are a few similar models around this one seemed to have the best mix of features-for-weight-and-price, so I bought my first Dell. I built a USB key with the latest Debian Installer from Squeeze and installed that and everything came up pretty well. I had to use the broadcom-sta driver for the wireless, since the BCM 43224 is not (yet) supported by the free b43 driver (though from looking the mailing list people seem to be working on it, and it looks like it might not be too far away). Everything seemed good. X came up on the (georgeous) screen. I don't care too much about 3D performance, but it was nice to note that the ATI 5000 series is expected to have full support as soon as it's integrated into the right places - it seems the code is written, and public, it just isn't incorporated into the 'radeon' driver quite yet. The fact that ATI is nowadays a free-software friendly company was one of the reasons for choosing this, in preference to an NVidia-based laptop. But it seems that it isn't all roses. The fan in the laptop seems permanently on, and not on, in a quiet-just-barely-audible way, but ON, in an 'IN UR LAPTOPZ KOOLIN UR P0RCESSAZ' kind of a way. Too damn noisy for me to concentrate in a quiet room. I've investigated what's going on, and it seems likely there are some ACPI misunderstandings happening. Some googling and some pecking around in /sys makes me wonder if the laptop expects some kind of configuration choice between favouring Active cooling and Passive cooling, and it's defaulted to the first one. Perhaps you get better benchmarks that way. Linux ACPI also seems to only half understand it, it has two thermal zones, and one of them always appears with 0 temperature. I can see set points for the fans, but have no control over them. In particular this got me out reading the ACPI 4.0 specification, and it explicitly mentions this choice of favouring 'Active' vs 'Passive' as being done by configuring the passive trip point setting to a higher value than the low & high active trip points. In the ACPI 4 spec (page 409) it says:

To implement a preference towards performance or energy conservation,
OSPM can request that the platform change the priority of active cooling
(performance) versus passive cooling (energy conservation/silence) by evaluating
the _SCP (Set Cooling Policy) object for the thermal zone or a corresponding
OS-specific interface to individual devices within a thermal zone.

This laptop is showing 'passive' at 95000 millidegrees celsius, and 'active' at 55000 / 75000 so right in line with the suggestion. However I don't see any way in Linux to change these trip point values, and in any case I'm not convinced the laptop is actually obeying them at all. It should be that if I do nothing on the laptop for a while the temperature would surely drop below 55 degrees celsius. Surely a modern laptop will sit at under 40 degrees when it's quiescent, and the temperature sensor that does show me something sits at around 30 degrees in this too, 26.8, to be overprecise. That one doesn't budge either. Looking in /sys/ I can't for the life of me find a way to set that cooling policy, and when I disassemble the DSDT it looks like a noop... Thinking that perhaps there was a newer BIOS, I looked at the Dell site and found there was one. Great! Investigating even further, it seems Dell hardware has some interesting capability via libsmbios and some utilities which will let me install my BIOS from a Linux system... even better! Linux is a second-class citizen though, and when I look for the Dell BIOS Hdr file I need there is no version of the file for this laptop - let alone the current BIOS version. And when I download the BIOS from Dell's website and unzip the first layer of packaging I find that both of the files inside will only run on Windows. I added a FreeDOS boot stanza to Grub 2 in order to discover this, also discovering in the process that this is not well explained, and I could not find how to do it on the FreeDOS or Grub2 websites, so in passing, here is what I added into /etc/grub/40_custom :

menuentry 'BIOS Flash 1558 A09' --class os  
        set root='(hd0,msdos1)'
        linux16 /boot/memdisk
        initrd16  /boot/1558_A09.img
 

Which certainly does boot FreeDOS from Grub2, into the image built from the 8M FreeDOS base image, and which I called '1558_A09.img' because that seems to be one of Dell's reference numbers for this model / BIOS version. So still no BIOS update for Andrew, it seems, and the laptop is probably going to continue to be noisy for some time. Possibly forever. Suspend/Resume works though. Kernel mode-setting for the ATI Radeon Mobility HD 5450 (or whatever it is) seems to work. Building kernels seems to work. The Blu-ray drive seems to work, at least as far as reading CDs - just because I got a laptop with a "Full HD" screen doesn't mean I watch movies on it: those pixels are for programming on! In any case, after reading the literature of pain about playing Blu-ray disks on Linux I'm convinced that we won't be shelling out to buy one any any time soon. After a bit more frustration I did manage to get the BIOS installed, using the hack I found here of running the Windows BIOS update under Wine and copying the BIOS file out of the temp directory while the error message is displayed. I could then download a random DOS-installable Phoenix BIOS to get copy of phlash16.exe and put those two files on the FreeDOS image I created earlier. Finally I was able to put that learning about how to boot FreeDOS from Grub2 to good use! Unfortunately, having jumped through all of those hoops (including the frustration of trying to build and use Dell's firmware-extract tools on a Debian system), the fan continues to grind away at annoying volume, with no way that I have been able to find to control it, and the temperature sensors also seem wrong, since one doesn't budge from 0 and the other doesn't budge from 26800. During boot I get a bunch of error messages, like:

[    1.049936] \_SB_.PCI0:_OSC invalid UUID
[    1.052202] pci 0000:00:1c.0: PME# supported from D0 D3hot D3cold
[    1.052210] pci 0000:00:1c.0: PME# disabled
[    1.065228] pci 0000:07:00.2: PME# supported from D0 D1 D2 D3hot D3cold
[    1.065237] pci 0000:07:00.2: PME# disabled
[    1.079086] Unable to assume PCIe control: Disabling ASPM
[    1.086412] HEST: Table is not found!
[    1.249906] ACPI: Fan [FAN0] (off)
[    1.249959] ACPI: Fan [FAN1] (off)
[    1.250093] [Firmware Bug]: ACPI: ACPI brightness control misses _BQC function
[    1.259118] acpi device:02: registered as cooling_device2
[    1.262132] thermal LNXTHERM:01: registered as thermal_zone0
[    1.262139] ACPI: Thermal Zone [TZ00] (27 C)
[    1.262561] thermal LNXTHERM:02: registered as thermal_zone1
[    1.262571] ACPI: Thermal Zone [TZ01] (0 C)
[    1.262598] ERST: Table is not found!
[    2.769664] i801_smbus 0000:00:1f.3: PCI INT C -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 18
[    2.769670] ACPI: resource 0000:00:1f.3 [io  0x1840-0x185f] conflicts with ACPI
                         region SMBI [bus 1840-184f pref window disabled]
[    2.769672] ACPI: If an ACPI driver is available for this device, you should use it
                         instead of the native driver

I don't yet know what this all means, so I guess I'll be signing up for the linux-acpi mailing list to see if there's anything I can do to get things working better. Any pointers will be gratefully received :-) Right about now I wonder if maybe I should have gone for the HP or the Asus, even if they were a little heavier and a bit more expensive and next time I get a new laptop I must remember not to spend more than $900 (USD$600) on it. [Updated: 2010-09-08... Noise Problems Solved

In case anyone else hasn't found these tweaks:

termcapinfo xterm xterms xs rxvt ti@:te@

In ~/.screenrc gives you Shift-PageUp and Shift-PageDown control again, without resorting to Ctrl-A Esc, inside screen. (Best to do

$ cp /etc/screen.rc ~/.screenrc

as a starting point first, if not done already.)

Also:

/set scroll_page_count /2

/save

In irssi itself (easier than editing the config) gives you internal PageUp, PageDown control within the irssi window.

In each case, the manpage is so long and impenetrable that these may be obvious to those with a special knowledge of terminals but mere mortals like me can't find it in / understand the docs.

Hey, look, a release! I ve decided to start making tarball releases that make it easier to build forked-daapd, especially on embedded platforms. The tarballs come with the build system already generated (as should any real release) and they also contain pre-generated source files for the ANTLR3-based parsers used in forked-daapd. The pre-generated files will be used if antlr3 is not available for the build. I expect that pretty much everybody will end up using the generated files, given the feedback I ve had about ANTLR3. I hope this will also clear the misconception that forked-daapd depends on Java. I have expanded the installation instructions, making the distinction between building from the git tree and building from the tarballs. A few more fixes made it to this version since my last post, and Kai also put the final piece to the sort headers by adding sort headers to the song listings. Tarballs are available at http://alioth.debian.org/~jblache/forked-daapd/. Tarball integrity can be verified with GPG using the matching GPG signature file and my F5D65169 GPG key from the Debian keyring.

In the Debian popularity-contest numbers, the adobe-flashplugin package the second most popular used package that is missing in Debian. The sixth most popular is flashplayer-mozilla. This is a clear indication that working flash is important for Debian users. Around 10 percent of the users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package installed. In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008 ( Skolelinux i bruk Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs ), one of the most important problems schools experienced with Debian Edu/Skolelinux was the lack of working Flash. A lot of educational web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a good reason to stay with Windows. I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand everything you told him but could work fairly well. This was a comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web pages they want to visit. This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google Video to working out of the box. For Squeeze, Debian have the chance to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in unstable. The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7. The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the release team have not had time to reply to it yet. I hope they agree with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus accept the new package into Squeeze.

The most important moment in a Debian release cycle just happened As an important step of the freeze is choosing the name of the next release (so that ftpmasters and many other parts of the project can prepare the infrastructure), the Debian release team did its duty. Wheezy it is, then. First Debian release named after a character that is *not* in Toy Story 1. Indeed, there was one toy character left that fills in two criteria followed up to now by those who named Debian releases:

• appearing in TS1
• having its name mentioned in the movie itself (Squeeze is already half an exception as they appear in TS1 but their name is mentioned in later movies)

...and that's "Rocky" (Wikipedia names him "Rocky Gibraltar"). That wrestler figure is called for help ("Rocky, the ramp!") to rescue Woody and Buzz at the back of the moving truck, at the end of the film. Guys, you know what to do in 2 years..:-)

I recently decided to use OfflineIMAP to synchronize my mails on my laptop. It's a great piece of software, and allows me to read my mail while I'm offline. I use it with Gnus, of course. But I lacked a proper way to integrate OfflineIMAP with it, so I decided to write a little Emacs extension to run and monitor OfflineIMAP directly from Emacs. Here comes offlineimap.el, an Emacs extension to run OfflineIMAP directly within Emacs. It will display OfflineIMAP output in a buffer, and optionally shows the current OfflineIMAP operation in the mode line. By default the status is in the mode line only if you are in the Gnus group buffer. But that's customizable, of course, since this is Emacs! If you are using el-get, there's already a recipe to install it!

The following post is the work of Pablo Duboue, the DebConf10 fundraising team leader.So you want to make DebConf, eh? You will need quite a bit of money then. That's when fundraising comes into play.There are traditionally two sources for funds for DebConf: government and businesses. A third one, micro-donors, has been mentioned, but haven't been explored yet. (Note, in this text I use the terms sponsors and donors interchangeably, as all sponsors are actually doing a donation to the Debian project earmarked for the use at a given DebConf.)Government funding has been key in a number of DebConfs. In DC10, though, by the time fundraising proper started, it was too late to secure it. Extrapolating from two DebConfs that had government funding, I would venture the following two pieces of advice: target a government level as local as possible (city, provincial level) and try to secure the funding at the time of the bid (which, by the way, can help you win the bid). A successful process will include government representatives aware of the bid status and the whole bidding process. This partnership can help unlock extra government resources such as housing or transportation. But to reiterate, if you haven't at least applied for government grants by the time the DebConf previous to yours is happening, then you have to plan to go along without government funding.Business funding for DebConf includes a significant amount of recurring donors. Keeping them happy is even more important than any money they will put forward for a given DebConf. Now, because of the high level of recurrence and the fact that government funding can cover easily one third of our costs, fundraising without government funding really means your projected funds are one third off. If that is the case, make sure to communicate that to the rest of debconf-team and even the larger Debian community (see below "asking for help").This entry has been truncated read the full entry.

As you may not have noticed, I migrated my site to WordPress some time ago as I did not want to maintain the old piece of crap I wrote myself when I was young ;)
Today I want to tell you a story of the development of a plugin for WordPress. As the title says, it s much about joy and pain and I think I should start with the pain :) WordPress is written in PHP, so are the plugins for it. And PHP is REAL pain (but there is no decent blogging software for Django or Zope that would fit all my needs). It is especially pain when you work with Python every day. What the heck are those curly braces and dollar signs and $this-> ? That s just not the way Guido indented it ;)
Additionally my last contacts with PHP were some time back in 2008 when I hacked on SysCP, which today result in commits like this:

-        if (is_int($new_instance['max_items'])) $instance['max_items'] = $new_instance['max_items'];
+        if (ctype_digit($new_instance['max_items'])) $instance['max_items'] = $new_instance['max_items'];

But I have to admit that the WordPress API is pretty good. Not very well documented (the wiki pages at codex.wordpress.org are sometimes outdated), so you have to read the source and google a bit, but when you found the needed sources, it s pretty straight forward.
My plan was to write a simple widget, displaying my Twitter and identi.ca timelines. Yes, both together, not one widget per service. The reason for this is the fact that I mostly post via identi.ca and the messages get synced over to Twitter and only the local replies and retweets/redents differ.
The basic WordPress widget would look like this (source: http://codex.wordpress.org/Widget_API#Developing_Widgets_on_2.8.2B):

class My_Widget extends WP_Widget  
	function My_Widget()  
		// widget actual processes
	 
	function form($instance)  
		// outputs the options form on admin
	 
	function update($new_instance, $old_instance)  
		// processes widget options to be saved
	 
	function widget($args, $instance)  
		// outputs the content of the widget
	 
 
register_widget('My_Widget');

One only has to modify the widget() function and here you go. From some other Twitter plugin I knew that I only had to include rss.php and call fetch_rss(url) for every feed URL to get the timelines as an array via MagPie. But when looking at rss.php, you notice the deprecation message in the header, saying one should use SimplePie now. Some google later I knew that I had to include feed.php and call fetch_feed(url) to get a SimplePie object representing the feed contents. But SimplePie is even cooler: I can call fetch_feed(array(url1, url2)) and get a merged feed, containing both.
Now I added a duplicate filter to elliminate the messages posted to both, twitter AND identi.ca and my widget was ready. You can find the result on http://github.com/evgeni/wp-statusnet-widget and soon on http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/statusnet-widget/ :)

Russel Garlick writes on behalf of the KohaCon10 Organising Committee:

KohaCon10 starts on October 25th in Wellington, New Zealand. We have an exciting line up of speakers on a range of topics related to Koha and [Free and] Open Source and Open Standards in libraries. See our programme for details. KohaCon is an opportunity for the entire Koha community, librarians and developers alike, to come together, meet each other, swap ideas and learn something new. The conference is split into 2 parts. The community conference will be held over 3 days 25-27th of October. This is not just a developer s conference. There will be presentations from librarians and developers alike. The second part of the conference is the Hackfest for Koha developers that will be held from 29th-31st of October. For more information see our website KohaCon10 is a free conference (that is right it will cost nothing for you to attend), but you still need to register to reserve your place. Registrations from the international Koha community have been very strong. Over half of all available spaces are already taken. If you have been holding off on the premise that you will have plenty of time to do this later, then please register now. Please do not rely on there being free spaces on the day. Registration is quick and easy via the website. We look forward to seeing you in Wellington!

Our co-op will be represented there. Will you?