The old testing release is now Debian 4.0:

The Debian Project is pleased to announce the official release of Debian GNU/Linux version 4.0, codenamed etch, after 21 months of constant development. Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system which supports a total of eleven processor architectures and includes the KDE, GNOME and Xfce desktop environments. It also features cryptographic software and compatibility with the FHS v2.3 and software developed for version 3.1 of the LSB.

That last bit needs to be proven, which I’ll be doing this week.

A little remembered fact is that the Debian Jr. project had a directory in the subversion repository of the CDD project at Alioth. Aside from Andreas Tille’s experimental conversion of Debian Jr. to use cdd-dev¹, there was nothing else there until today. While I was in the process of populating this directory with the junior-* metapackages and adding an external reference to the live CD config, it seemed to me that it would be better to move the whole thing to our own repository at Alioth, which I promptly did. So now you can check it out:

$ svn co svn://svn.debian.org/debianjr

As well, I registered Debian Jr. at http://cia.vc/ and configured svn so that the CIA bot will report on the #debian-jr channel at irc.debian.org for every commit. And finally, I applied for the creation of a debian-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org list. As soon as the list is created, I will hook it up to the repository so you can subscribe to commit emails.

¹ Although this seemed like a good idea at the time, for various reasons I ended up sticking with the single metapackage per category model Debian Jr. uses to this day. But I have retained this experiment in the repository under svn://svn.debian.org/debianjr/branches/EXP-cdd-dev in case we ever reverse that decision.

Today - as many of you have already noticed - is/was a big day for Debian:

• Sam Hocevar won the DPL election


• Debian (old)stable 3.1 released a new version


• Debian Etch 4.0 was released

Well, I could add another topic:

• Debian is no longer Debian for me because not all of my archs are supported anymore

In a more detailed view:
Sam Hocevar won the DPL election
Congrats to Sam! I can agree with most of the points he made in his DPL platform, e.g. a sexier website, sexier distribution, remaing the universal OS, etc.
sexier website: Really, the current design of Debians website is awful. It's really something back from the 90s. Bad look, bad design and stuff you're looking for is difficult to find, because it's badly structured and stuff is spread all over the place. I think, it would be good to have some decent CMS and some good designers/graphic artists - a good package maintainier doesn't make a good webdesigner.
sexier distribution: Many people are using Ubuntu because they're desktop users. The current release cycles are way too long and drive people away from Debian. It's a different matter, of course, for servers or managed systems like Terminal Servers or such. Those are fine with longer release cycles. Splitting up the release in some core and sub releases is a quite common proposal. Yes, this split is difficult, but I think it's the way to go.
remaing the universal OS: As of the release of Etch, Debian became the no-more-universal OS - just because m68k wasn't released for obscure reasons. I'm a great m68k user and now I'm left behind by Debian with the problem that my pet arch is not supported anymore. Running testing/unstable is not an option for m68k IMHO. Because the m68k porters didn't come up with an alternative release plan so far, I think it's the best to shutdown my 3 m68k machines - all of them are m68k buildds - within the next weeks or months. They're producing (well, some little) heat, some disturbing noise and consume a lot of power of course. Currently I accept those drawbacks in order to help the m68k port by donating CPU power running some buildds for about 7 years now. I've spent much more money on this purpose - not only for paying the electricity bills - for phone calls to get crashed remote machines rebooted, sending replacement parts for other buildds or even driving by car to bring machines or other parts to other persons (like crest.debian.org to Michael Schmitz or accel boards to the Netherlands for porting stuff. Anyway, I will happily reactivate the machines when it's up to make a new release for the m68k architecture again! :)

Some other point Sam mentioned in his platform is this:

There are very useful services around, such as http://www.buildd.net/, http://bts.turmzimmer.net/ or http://bjorn.haxx.se/debian/. I cannot understand why they are not Debian services.

I already had a conversation with Sam about this in which I expressed my general intention to develop at least Buildd.Net beyond its current state - it's quite frustrating for me to see Buildd.Net being stuck in development just because I've no more time and skill to develop Buildd.Net further. Sadly, my call for help wasn't as successful as I wanted. Only two persons wanted to help: faw and joey - and both are quite busy with other stuff.
Apparently, Buildd.Net will most likely suffer from shutting down my m68ks due to the missing m68k Etch release as well, because it was always a frontend to my m68k buildds in my eyes. All other stuff on Buildd.Net is just a nice addition to that. And when I don't operate m68k buildds on a daily basis, it's obvious that I won't invest much more time into the development of Buildd.Net. This is already true for the past year where I haven't found the time to fix some serious problems in the backend scripts and database of Buildd.Net, which basically breaks store_packages2.py (source and therefor ptracker.cgi(example) as well. I even haven't found the time to setup trac and svn again after the move to the new server during last autumn.
Erm, anyway.. back to the topic: I wish Sam the best for his period - but I don't think that he can make a big change. I doubt in general that any DPL is able to push big changes in Debian. One reason for this is the short period of just one year. Another reason is that many DDs won't let big changes to be made.

I recently had a nice discussion on a mailinglist about #!/bin/bash vs #!/bin/sh as the shebang line in shell scripts.
In general I support to use #!/bin/sh, maybe there are some corner-cases in which it makes sense to use #!/bin/bash, I am not a shell programmer.
But since the guy from shellscripts.org (btw why shellscripts and not bashscripts?) told me that I have to use a bashism to
alter a variable outside the scope of a loop because of the created subshell and in my opinion this is a common misunderstanding I blog this.



results in 123 because the loop has its own subshell and no access to foo outside of its scope.



is the proposed bashism to solve this issue, it will result in 456.



Also results in 456 and is sh-compliant (or at-least runs in ksh93 which is the reference implementation for the POSIX standard.
What also surprised me is that this is not running in bash, dash but in zsh
I reported this as a bug in bash and dash for Debian, please correct me if I am wrong.

I recently had a nice discussion on a mailinglist about #!/bin/bash vs #!/bin/sh as the shebang line in shell scripts.
In general I support to use #!/bin/sh, maybe there are some corner-cases in which it makes sense to use #!/bin/bash, I am not a shell programmer.
But since the guy from shellscripts.org (btw why shellscripts and not bashscripts?) told me that I have to use a bashism to
alter a variable outside the scope of a loop because of the created subshell and in my opinion this is a common misunderstanding I blog this.



results in 123 because the loop has its own subshell and no access to foo outside of its scope.



is the proposed bashism to solve this issue, it will result in 456.



Also results in 456 and is sh-compliant (or at-least runs in ksh93 which is the reference implementation for the POSIX standard.
What also surprised me is that this is not running in bash, dash but in zsh
I reported this as a bug in bash and dash for Debian, please correct me if I am wrong.

Hmmm... maybe I'm doing something wrong, but somehow I can't get s9y to use a multi-site config as described on this page (by Garvin Hicking).

Of course, symlinking and such went fine and I get the config screen (serendipity_admin.php), but I miss the place where to change the database setup, which is done in the Debian package via db-config and lies in /etc/serendpity/database.inc.php.

This is my multisite setup so far (a mixed setup with copied/symlinked files):

lrwxrwxrwx archives -> /usr/share/serendipity/www/archives
lrwxrwxrwx bundled-libs -> /usr/share/serendipity/www/bundled-libs
lrwxrwxrwx comment.php -> /usr/share/serendipity/www/comment.php
lrwxrwxrwx exit.php -> /usr/share/serendipity/www/exit.php
drwxrwxr-x htdocs
lrwxrwxrwx include -> /usr/share/serendipity/www/include
lrwxrwxrwx index.php -> /usr/share/serendipity/www/index.php
lrwxrwxrwx lang -> /usr/share/serendipity/www/lang
drwxr-xr-x pics
lrwxrwxrwx plugins -> /usr/share/serendipity/www/plugins
lrwxrwxrwx rss.php -> /usr/share/serendipity/www/rss.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 serendipity_admin_image_selector.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 serendipity_admin.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 serendipity_config.inc.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 serendipity_config_local.inc.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 serendipity.css.php
drwxrwxrwx templates
drwxrwxr-x templates_c
drwxrwxr-x uploads
lrwxrwxrwx wfwcomment.php -> /usr/share/serendipity/www/wfwcomment.php

Granted, during the last days I haven't found that much time (Easter holidays) yet to have a deeper look into the topic, but I got the impression that it's not that easy to use s9y on Debian with a shared installation setup as described on Garvins page. A sql scheme for the psql database is also missing in /usr/share/doc/serendipity.

Maybe you, dear lazyweb, have already a nice setup script for this purpose for Debian? Would be nice... :-)

Sam is our new DPL. The margin with the second (Steve McIntyre again!) is very slim, 8 votes. And Steve only has 25 votes more than me. That’s not much either. What we can learn from this election:

• the principle of a DPL board makes its way, I have been ranked well above NOTA and I have been mainly advocating this proposal (and this despite some votes anti-dunc-tank that I probably suffered from)
• my selection of board members was pretty good, the 4 candidates that I selected for the board are the top-4 of the election
• Debian developers are fed up by the various problems in some core teams (overwhelmed, not recruiting new members, not communicating enough, etc.). I’ll try to help Sam fix those issues, but it’s going to be a big challenge for us.

In the end, I really hope that sam is going to find a way to cooperate closely with the various candidates that are still highly motivated to work on improving Debian. I doubt that he will choose a board structure (although I would be glad to be proven wrong!), but I really hope that he will expand the 2IC principle (or something similar). I once told sam that he would have my full support if he got elected, and I intend to stand up to this promise. I said that because I share many of his ideas. The few fears that I have are mainly on how he is going to try to address these issues. But I have no reason to believe that he’s not going to listen to what we (and I) have to say. That’s why he got ranked just after me on my ballot. Good luck Sam, do not disappoint us!

I've upgraded an old woody box to etch these days. Live - I've been telling people they need to find a replacement for this machine for years now, but it's still around and playing an important role. And with 'woody' I mean 'a woody heavily played around with, with a couple of backports and exotic stuff like XFS, a custom 2.4.25 kernel with grsecurity'. Especially the latter was why I was afraid of doing the upgrade. In a first step, I incrementally upgraded everything to sarge (well, at least where the backports weren't already newer than sarge). I installed the stock sarge kernel, and prepared a reboot. The reboot was then done out of schedule, because the machine died on it's own - it has been crashing about 1-2 times a year, and it hadn't happened for some time. Judging from the logs, it was that old problem again. At second try it came up with the new kernel: I always forget to enable init ramdisks in the bootloader when switching from a custom kernel with every needed module built-in. I then continued upgrading to etch, pretty much one service at a time. Some things (I didn't do a full list; the box was running to many modified versions of packages of this being useful as upgrade reports to the release team, and it's a bit late in the schedule, too) where upgrading didn't work out of the box:

• Incompatible configuration file changes: amavis, courier, monit
• OpenLDAP refusing to load one of the third-party schemas
• Newer Courier POP/IMAP is incompatible to drac, breaking SMTP-after-POP
• Configuration changes of saslauthd breaking SMTP-AUTH
• IMP3, a webmail interface, doesn't work with PHP5. It has been replaced by IMP4 in sarge, however I'd like my users to be able to keep on using it for some while (and I need to find a way to migrate e.g. the address book over). I consider this a major upgrade annoyance with PHP5, that it no longer allows "return false;" in some situations (if you want to return by reference, you need to use a named variable). The behaviour of "get_class" also has changed in an incompatible way.

But other than that, the upgrade was mostly a job for apt-get, not for me. The bad news: there is still something wrong with the machine. It doesn't crash, but spits e.g. the following to dmesg:

amavisd-new: page allocation failure. order:5, mode:0xd0
 [] __alloc_pages+0x2f8/0x370
 [] __get_free_pages+0x25/0x40
 [] kmem_getpages+0x22/0xc0
 [] cache_grow+0xba/0x180
 [] xfs_bmap_read_extents+0x36e/0x540 [xfs]
 [] cache_alloc_refill+0x16a/0x220
 [] xfs_bmap_alloc+0xe0d/0x1c60 [xfs]
 [] __kmalloc+0x74/0x80
 [] kmem_alloc+0x59/0xc0 [xfs]
...

So there is something wrong with the XFS malloc handling. This has happened twice now since the reboot. I've been suspecting XFS of being related to the servers' crashes before (which tend to occur during load; the crash which 'allowed' me to switch to 2.6 actually showed the OOM killer of that old kernel killing some inappropriate processes). After the easter holidays, I'll reboot the machine with the etch kernel, maybe this is gone then.

I've been added to Planet GNOME (thanks jdub!), and this post is just to say hello! I havn't been a large GNOME contributor so far (I was the Debian maintainer for Galeon some years ago, thats about it), but I recently started a small DBus related project (for exploring the DBus APIs of programs), dbus-inspector, which is now hosted in the GNOME subversion repository. Other GNOME-related projects I'm thinking of:

• DBus hook, an application that allows you to easily setup ECA rules (event-condition-action) for DBus signals. E.g. to start your music synchronization tool when you plug in your mp3 player, whatever, in a rather generic way. Mount your network file server when you connect to your home wireless network, etc. - preferrably in an easy to understand way
• MP3val GUI, right now a tiny PyGTK wrapper around the MP3 validation and repair tool mp3val (you can't imagine how many MP3's are broken in one way or another, fortunately most errors are ignored by most players or only affect e.g. seeking) could use some extended functionality.
• Pyroman, a firewall configuration tool with some nice capabilities (rollback on error, debugging, very fast and efficient, Python or XML configuration files) could use an easy to use UI. It doesn't expose you to all the complexity of iptables, but instead lets you work in a "client, server, service" way of configuring the firewall, generating a somewhat sane layout of tables automatically.
• Flow analysis and visualization of iptables rules

I'd like to say thank you for all the great work you did. Having been a Galeon power user, I'm by now quite convinced of the "keep it simple" approach, and I have the impression that not having so many options means that I get more work done (since I don't waste time playing around with infinite options). Thanks for that. And for providing me with a pretty and unobtrusive work environment for the last 8 years or so.

Yesterday night, Elisabeth planned a surprise for me (birthday time) and had tickets for the concert of Gotan Project at Le Grand Rex, Paris. It was indeed the fFirst time I ever went in that concert hall, which is indeed a huge old-style movie theater with comfortable seats, room for legs, nice art-deco decoration. Great after a normal work day..:-) The music of Gotan Project is a nice and elegant mix of electronic music and argentinian tango influence, featuring French, Swiss, Argentinian and Franco-Argentinian artists. Something I enjoy since it was started by Philippe Cohen-Solal a few years ago. The "band" made it well for a music that is mostly a studio music. Ten arsists on stage and the proeminent and warn voice of Cristina Villalonga. The artists were "home" mostly as the band born very close to the Grands Boulevards and, therefore, the atmosphere was friendly, with artists clearly being happy to be there. And, as a surprise, the closure featured Saian Supa Crew as guest artists for a great mix of French rap and the GP electrotango. Overall amazing experience and I hope this won't be the one and only concert we attend for 2007. After all, Peter Gabriel should be touring over Europe and I always try not missing his concerts since 1977. For those interested, the Lunatico tour dates for Gotan Project are available here.

Just got some cheerful news from Ryan Finnie. Apparently the new version of Finnix has an amd64 kernel on the x86 disk. Per his blog post about Finnix 89: using an AMD64 kernel on a supported platform yields several advantages: ... You can chroot into native 64-bit AMD64 filesystems. Considering that's just what I needed to do yesterday (see Journal/14 Germinal CCXV), it's pretty sad that I only had a Finnix 88 CD. It was pretty dumb of me to not check the latest version, and it was wrong to say that Finnix doesn't support amd64. But it's good to know that it will work in the future. tags: amd64 finnix rescue livecd recovery

RoCoCoCamp We had another organisational meeting for RoCoCoCamp at the Bande-Passante this evening. It was really good -- we had quite a few people, and made some of the down-to-the-wire plans for the event. RoCoCoCamp is the RecentChangesCamp in Montreal the 18-20th of April, 2007. It's an "unconference" -- a community-organized conference that, we hope, will let a lot of people connect in a new way. The great thing about RoCoCoCamp -- and RecentChangesCamp in general -- is that it's hosted by the wiki community -- people who love and use wikis. But we try to reach beyond wikis, to other associated communities, organizations and individual activists. I like to think of it like this: "wiki" is a concept associated loosely with other concepts -- tied to them in some concept-space. If we just bring together people who know and understand wiki, and have them talk together, we'll achieve very little. But if we bring together people who work, think and live in those closely-associated concept circles, we've got the opportunity for fascinating cross-cultural mixing -- passionate, creative accidents. I'm really looking forward to see what kind of creative accidents we engender at RoCoCoCamp 2007. I think it's going to be really fun. tags: wiki rocococamp concept map montreal

Hellas Spectrum I did an interview tonight on Hellas Spectrum, the local Greek-language television show here in Montreal. The host, Toula Drimonis, had seen the article about me in the Gazette, had recognized my name as Greek, and wrote to ask if I'd like to be on the show. The interview was really fun, and it was great to be around Greek-speaking people for a while. Montreal has a very strong Greek community, with which I've entirely failed to connect in the 5 years (!!!!) that I've lived here. But Maj and I have talked about sending Amita June to one of the very good tri-lingual Greek-English-French private schools here in Montreal, and we'd all like to make more connections in the Greek community. Hopefully this helps! I've always felt a little cut off from the more intense Greeks here and elsewhere because... welllll... I just don't speak Greek that well. So it was great doing Hellas Spectrum -- Toula's job at the show is to include those Greek-Canadians and Greek-Americans who maybe don't speak the language and live in the neighborhood, but need to be included in the greater Greek culture. I had a great time at the interview, and on the way from the green room to the studio, we ran into the show's producer. He asked me something incomprehensible (in Greek), and when I looked confused, he said, "You don't speak Greek? That's OK. Are you Greek, though? Are you Greek here?" He touched his chest. "Are you Greek in your heart?" Yes, I am. And it was cool to feel Greek in my heart tonight. Thanks to Toula for the invitation and the HS crew for making such a great show. tags: hellas spectrum greek montreal canada

I used to be a hardcore daily bike commuter. (By “hardcore,” I mean I commuted 20-30 miles roundtrip every day in Chicago in January.) Lately, I’ve gotten lazy, especially since I now live about thirty seconds by foot from a train station that takes me to a spot about thirty seconds by foot from my job. Also, since I’m now supporting two people (including my nearly two-year-old daughter), I’m a little more reluctant to get myself killed. I was reminded of the perils of biking in Boston this afternoon when a 22-year old bicyclist was killed by a dump truck in an area where I used to ride daily:

The bicyclist, a 22-year-old man from Halifax, was riding between two lanes of traffic on Huntington Avenue when he was clipped by a taxicab near Northeastern University at about 2:30 p.m., police said. After being clipped by the cab, the bicyclist was run over by a McCauley and Sons Co. dump truck, police said.

When I was a bike commuter, I was fairly cavalier about this sort of incident. I realize it’s still fairly rare and biking may not be any more dangerous than driving. But we still see these events in Boston fairly regularly. I don’t think it can be fixed fully by better driver education/behavior (or better bicyclist education/behavior). There are just too many streets that are poorly designed and naturally hazardous. On a related note, Nat mentioned this nasty run-in during a recent Critical Mass in San Francisco (the article is obviously from the driver’s point of view — there may be another angle on this):

Susan Ferrando, her husband, their two children and three preteens had come to San Francisco from Redwood City to celebrate the birthday of Ferrando’s 11-year-old daughter. They went to Japantown, where they enjoyed shopping and taking in the blooming cherry blossoms. Things took a turn for the worse at about 9 p.m., when the family was leaving Japantown — just as the party of about 3,000 bikers was winding down its monthly red-lights-be-damned ride through the city. Suddenly, Ferrando said, her car was surrounded by hundreds of cyclists. Not being from San Francisco, Ferrando thought she might have inadvertently crossed paths with a bicycle race and couldn’t figure out why the police, who she had just passed, hadn’t warned her. Confusion, however, quickly turned to terror, she said, when the swarming cyclists began wildly circling around and then running into the sides of her Toyota van. Filled with panic, Ferrando said, she started inching forward until coming to a stop at Post and Gough streets, where she was surrounded by bikers on all sides. A biker in front blocked her as another biker began pounding on the windshield. Another was pounding on her window. Another pounded the other side. “It seemed like they were using their bikes as weapons,” Ferrando said. One of the bikers then threw his bike — shattering the rear window and terrifying the young girls inside. All the while, Ferrando was screaming, “There are children in this car! There are children in this car!” …

Update 4/5/2007: the 22-year-old bicyclist had a myspace page.

Add to my Netflix Wishlist (that is, the list of features I wish Netflix had, not the list of movies I wish I had): links from IMDB entries to the respective Netflix page (or, better yet, “add to Netflix queue” directly from IMDB). Links back to IMDB from Netflix would also be nice. This seems like something that would be relatively easy to do with a Mozilla plugin. In general, Netflix would be a prime candidate for a developer/hobbyist ecology similar to that which has grown up around Amazon’s API. The only examples I could find were this Perl module and this Moveable-Type plugin. More development along these lines could be a key advantage for Netflix to preserve its now incumbent position in the market. (Does anyone have any local video stores left? Ours closed down about a year ago.) Update: James points to an impressive list of Greasemonkey/Netflix scripts, two of which seem to do the job: Netflix links in IMDB, IMDB links in Netflix. Another featuer I’ve been looking for: Netflix Ratings Granulizer (allows partial stars in ratings). Thanks, Lazyweb! (Note that these sorts of screen-scraping hacks inevitably break when the content provider modifies its presentation; an open API would obviously be preferable).

It seems that the swik.net site is mirroring all my blog posts. The site seems to be doing some good things in terms of spreading information about free software and has a good presentation that makes such information easy to read. Also having a backup of my blog posts also could be handy if blogger ever does the wrong thing.

However it is a little annoying that when I write a blog post that refers to one of my older posts it will get a link back to swik.net. This is an annoyance for readers who want to see posts that link to mine from outside my blog. So I've been deleting those links when I notice them.

Also someone from Brazil has been linking to my posts, which is a good thing. Their blog also causes my blog to list theirs as a link which is also fine. However the problem is that their blog seems to detect me as being from an English speaking country and gives me an English version of the blog (rather than the presumably Portuguese version that has the link to my article). Assuming that someone speaks English because they reside in Australia is a bad idea, and breaking links is a worse one. So I've been deleting those links from my blog as they are of no use to people who are detected as English speakers (which comprises the vast majority of my blog readers). When someone blogs about one of my posts I want to see what they wrote, even if all that I can read are the parts that are quoted from me!

Finally I've been deleting some comments containing URLs. It seems that there are quite a few people trying to advertise their businesses by posting comments that bear some vague relation to a blog post with their company's URL included. You have to try harder than that if you want to promote yourself on my blog.

FISL and Sacix
I am warming up for the next FISL - Porto Alegre, Brazil. Actually working on Sacix next release - a.k.a Sagui. We will have 3 mini community telecenters there where you will see Sacix running. For those who have no idea what i'm talking about - Sacix is a custom Debian distribution for labs and community telecenters that can be used to provide a full GNOME desktop for thin-clients or fat-clients and since Sacix is a profile based CDD, it has a 'desktop' based that is nothing but the Debian Etch Desktop with minor add-ons. Actually our major failures are: lack of human resources, website written in portuguese only. Sacix Sagui will have support for at least english, portuguese and spanish and (hopefully) the website will start being translated soon.

After Etch release, I plan to start a new group dedicated to merge Sacix features back to Debian (for Lenny) and act as a glue between debian-desktop supergroup, pkg-ltsp and related groups/packages e.g: dhcp server, tftp and nfs - there's a lot that needs to be done in terms of preseed friendliness on these. The good news is that the feature merge is already happening, but I'm the only person handling it directly. I'm not sure about the group name yet, but it might be Debian Sacix since "Debian Thin-Client(s)" or something similar don't really fit.

Anyway, I would be glad to see a Lenny user downloading our first ISO being able to choose not only the default desktop environment we've today but being able to select it and also the 'thin/fat client server'. In the end his server should be able to provide Debian Desktop Lenny through the lan for the clients. With Etch you need to install the default desktop environment and after that ltsp-server-standalone package, configure stuff like dhcp, nfs and run ltsp-build-client.

Get involved sending me a message!

See you during debconf! I can't wait to work IRL with some of you to improve Debian as a whole. Don't hesitate to contact me through the IRC for a bug squashing session or write new stuff from scratch. I've some plans for Debian Sacix, Utnubu, Simple-CDD, Debian Live, Ltsp and gnome-tasksel related work.

Wanted: icon for Postr. I'm not sure what sort of design I'd like for a Flickr uploader, maybe a photo frame in front of the "web browser" globe icon would do the job. Thanks to anyone who does a rocking icon! NP: Kaleidoscope, DJ Food

My brain hurts. Cross-building can get very confusing at times. I've been experimenting with debootstrap, trying to make a complete Emdebian cross-building environment that can be compressed to a base.tgz as with pbuilder. Changes to the chroot can be discarded, just as with pbuilder, allowing dependencies to be tested. The main benefit is that packages can be built without having to install long chains of cross dependencies via apt-cross or dpkg-cross on
the main system. To me, it's the only way to cross-build GUI suites like GPE against a background of changing dependencies.

The same code should also be able to create a native chroot so that the cross-built packages can be installed alongside each other for more testing. These chroots have already been tested and instructions exist in the Wiki.

Between that and the ongoing problems with empath: navigating a path from package_set A to package B via a changing set of build-dependencies . . .

Record label EMI announced (according to various sources) that they'd offer both DRM-encumbered versions (at 99) and DRM-free versions (called "Premium" or something, at $1.29) of their stuff on iTunes. I'd be curious to see the sales data on this, but I guess they won't be published.

I have long recognized that to be usable by young kids, xjig really needs a better user interface. So I wrote a launcher, xjig-menu to address the problem. It adds a file open dialog (via zentiy) and support for more file formats (via imagemagick). Update

I have put this script in subversion and added a man page. Check it out:

  $ svn co svn://svn.debian.org/pkg-games/people/synrg/xjig

or browse the repository.

As we all know, unless we find a new energy source soon, the Earth is going to explode. I am pleased to announce that today at lunch I discovered the answer. I call it the Vyas 2000 Mega Expulsor Drive. I jotted down the design on a napkin which I have scanned to show you. 1. The containment unit. Debian developers are placed within it. 2. The control unit. It forms a series of tubes which connect the developers. Soon heat and friction are created which, by some kind of scientific process, gets converted into energy. Every so often, the energy is released and spent items are expulsed into... 3. The expulsion chamber. No one knows how this works. 4. I don't know what these bits are for either but they look awesome don't they? The environmental impact is virtually zero except the unit tends to develop a persistant low-pitched whine which may disturb cats and dogs in the area. No need to thank me. Knowing I have saved humanity is thanks enough.