In an attempt to force an exec to totally stall so I could attach gdb to a process that does a setuid transition without freaking it out (i.e. can t launch sudo gdb ), I briefly played with process priority, scheduling, and CPU affinity (pinning a process to a CPU). So far, the best attempt at stalling the process was to set CPU affinity, set its scheduling policy (IDLE), drop the priority value fully (19), and then run a CPU hog with the same CPU affinity with a very high priority (-20). Staller: sudo schedtool -a 0 -N -n -20 -e /tmp/spin-cpu
Stallee: schedtool -a 0 -D -n 19 -e /usr/bin/sudo -s The hope was to then run sudo gdb /usr/bin/sudo $(pidof sudo) , but it seems that this still isn t enough to make the exec of sudo totally stall while the spin-cpu process is running it certainly executes more slowly, but I want it to stop. I have this feeling like I m missing something obvious about how to accomplish this gdb session sanely. I wonder if I can get gdb to switch targets across a child exec, i.e. run gdb as root on a program that fully drops privs, but then execs sudo. Guess it s time to go read the gdb manual some more

The t-prot package might need your help: There is a discussion going on with the upstream developer how to proceed with respect to a hopefully helpful change in its behavior. There are several options how to address this, one of them would involve using the Getopt::Long module instead of Getopt::Mixed. Given that the benchmarks of upstream rather speak for sticking with Getopt::Mixed we would like to ask you for help: Please test this version of t-prot (for your safety: detached gpg signature for the version) and compare it to the packaged version 2.15 that I just upload into unstable (it is installable without anything else also into (old)stable or testing). Your feedback on this is truly appreciated, please send it until the start of next week (Monday evening/Tuesday morning) to "t-prot (AT) tolot.escape.de". Much thanks in advance!

I opened Slashdot's Looking back from the 1980s at computers in education article because I am quite convinced of the point some of the commenters argued before me, (and it's good to know others think as you do ;-) ) When I got close to computers, learning computing for children basically meant learning programming in a fun way. For years, my hobbies included Logo and BASIC. At age 7 (by 1983), typing TeX and using Emacs at the computer of the institute where my father worked, I started walking the path I took for my professional life. When I taught computing to high school students as my first paid job (which didn't last long, only a semester, as for an untrained 20 year old it is very hard to control a group of kids nearly his age), I tried to teach some basic BASIC programming (which was the best I knew then)... But no, both students and the school wanted me to focus on teaching MS Office applications. It seemed stupid for me 14 years ago, and it still seems stupid for me today. Anyway, on Slashdot, I came across this beautiful way to explain what computer education should mean:

"computing is no longer taught in schools (parents look quizzical), they are simply 'trained' (parents look like they vaguely get it). if this was sex instead of computing that was taught in schools, would you prefer that your kids have sex _education_ or sex _training_? (parents finally get it)".

By the way, if you are interested in reading a bit of paleofuturism, to feel the joy and excitement with which computer-aided education was seen 30 years ago, be sure to get the Classroom Computer News issue for September-October 1980, linked from the Slashdot article (and copied over here for your convenience, of course!)

Attachment	Size
Classroom Computer News vol. 1 no. 1, sep-oct 1980	3.54 MB

After some stability problems and an unresolvable PCI IRQ problem with my Debian server at home (Internet gateway, mail, PostgreSQL, LDAP and NFS server and test system), I decided to get a new mainboard and wireless card last week. I did some research to get hardware that is properly supported and where I can use the rest of my current components. I had

• a AM2 socket AMD Athlon64 3500+ CPU
• 2 1GB DDR2/667 DIMMs
• a ATX chassis
• an IDE Transcend 4GB SSD for my root partition
• 2 750GB SATA hard disks (software RAID-1)
• a Intel EtherExpress 100 Server PCI adapter (that I wanted to use to separate the internal and external networks but which did not work due to the above mentioned PCI trouble)

So I had to find a mainboard with at least 2 DDR2 DIMM sockets, an AM2 compatible CPU socket in ATX format with SATA ports at least one IDE Port, a Gigabit ethernet port (serving NFS home directories) and at least 2 PCI slots (one for the wireless card) that is well supported by the current Debian Squeeze Linux kernel. As I had some issues with the previous board's nvidia SATA chipset I wanted to get something else that is AHCI compatible. After some research I decided to buy a Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2H (rev. 3.0) which is available for a good price and fits all my criteria (2 DDR2 DIMM slots, 6 SATA ports, an RTL8169 based Gigabit ethernet ports, 2 PCI slots, ...). The mainboard uses an AMD 740G + SB710 Chipset. It has an integrated graphics chipset which I don't really need because I run the machine as a headless system. As I use the server as a wireless access point I need a wireless network adapter that supports AP mode. There are not many chipsets that are properly supported in AP mode and allow good data rates so I decided to get an Atheros ath9k based card, because I don't need non-free firmware like with broadcom based cards and could find some affordable hardware. The previous was a Netgear WG311 ath5k card that had issues that it lost its connection under more than minimum load and could only be reanimated by a system reboot. I looked at the Linux Wireless pages and found out that D-Link has a matching adapter the DWL-G520. Unfortunatelly they don't tell about the used chipset (as almost all other vendors too) and write about possibly changing hardware at the product sheet. To be sure I looked at their Windows driver's .inf files and found nothing indicating that there are any non Atheros variants of the card. I also ordered two Fantec MR-35 SATA mobile racks for more comfort when one of the RAID1 discs crashes (had 2 crashes last year) and a 12" chassis fan to keep the system cool. Today the package arrived and after unpacking and putting everything together I started the system (with keyboard and a display attached) to see how it works. All hardware was automatically detected by the current Debian Squeeze system and I only had to remove the entries for the old onboard network adapter and the old wireless adapter from /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules and fix the device names for the new network cards. I added a new stanza for the Intel ethernet adapter in /etc/network/interfaces and setup a set of ferm rules to have a working firewall (thanks to Formorer for the suggestion to use ferm). After this was finished everything worked fine so far and I put the machine at its normal place without keyboard and display. To verify that the stability situation had really improved, I copied some huge files over the network (both wired and wireless and in both
directions). Afterwards I did a bonnie++ benchmark to test the SATA and hard drive reliability. Everything went well and I'm happy with my investment.

(maybe) After the two updates in the previous post, I got further and eventually fixed the root of the remaining problems on ARM. It appears I got on the wrong track at the very beginning of the investigation. My first test was to disable the JIT compiler during the tests, and it didn t affect the result. I assumed from there that the JIT compiler was doing fine and wasn t involved. Which led me to believe the alignment of the stack at 32-bits word boundary instead of 64-bits was a standard behaviour. I turns out my first test itself was wrong, because I hadn t disabled the JIT compiler at all. You need to modify the runxpcshelltests.py script to disable the JIT, and not fiddle with the javascript.options.jit.chrome preference. The JIT compiler was misaligning the stack, and disassembling the generated code leading to broken behaviour revealed that it was doing so when setting up arguments on the stack for function calls. While I was afraid this would be difficult to fix without changing a lot of code, and first only disabled the JIT compiler, it turns out the way nanojit works by compiling the last instructions first did make it straightforward to fix. But ARM was not the only RC buggy architecture left after sparc and powerpc were fixed. MIPS remained. Alpha fails, too, but it is not a release architecture. Update: It appears hurd fails too, but like Alpha, it is not a release architecture. So, while I didn t want to wait 50 hours for a build, I managed to execute a failing test with the last xulrunner-1.9.1 packages that got built (before I enabled the test suite) under qemu. And I was able to track down the origin of the bug: the xpcom layer that translate function calls between languages doesn t fill arguments correctly when they are smaller than 32 bits. While the code is adapted to the mipsel case, which is little endian, it doesn t work on mips, which is big endian. I came up with a patch that should work, and which I hope won t break mipsel as a consequence. All that is left to do is to build and test the fix. I hope someone else will be able to do that for me. All in all except a 1.9.1.8 release this week with a lot less red on the buildd status page.

So, we wanted to move a Hudson CI server at Canonical from using chroots to VM s (for better isolation and security), and there is this great product Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC basically Eucalyptus). To do this I needed to make some changes to the Hudson EC2 plugin and thats where the fun starts. While I focus on getting Hudson up and running with UEC in this post, folk generally interested in the differences between UEC and EC2, or getting a single-machine UEC instance up for testing should also find this useful. Firstly, getting a test UEC instance installed was a little tricky I only had one machine to deploy it on, and this is an unusual configuration. Nicely though, it all worked, once a few initial bugs and misconfiguration items got fixed up. I wrote up the crux of the outcome on the Ubuntu community help wiki. See 1 Physical system . The particular trap to watch out for seems to be that this configuration is not well tested, so the installation scripts have a hard time getting it right. I haven t tried to make it play nice with Network Manager in the loop, but I m pretty sure that that can be done via interface aliasing or something similar. Secondly I needed to find out what was different between EC2 and UEC (Note that I was running on Karmic (Ubuntu 9.10) so things could be different in Lucid). I couldn t find a simple description of this, so this list may be incomplete:

1. UEC runs an old version of the EC2 API. This is because it hasn t implemented everything in the new API versions yet.
2. UEC defaults to port 8773, not port 80 (for both the EC2 and S3 API s)
3. The EC2 and S3 API s are rooted differently: at AWS they are at /, for UEC they are at /services/Eucalyptus and /services/Walrus
4. UEC doesn t supply a SSL API port as far as I can tell.
5. DescribeImages has something wonky with it.

So the next step then is to modify the Hudson EC2 plugin to support these differences. Fortunately it is in Java, and the Java community has already updated the various libraries (jets3t and typica) to support UEC I just needed to write a UI for the differences and pass the info down the various code paths. Kohsuke has let me land this now even though it has an average UI (in rev 27366), and I m going to make the UI better now by consolidating all the little aspects into a couple of URL s. Folk comfortable with building their own .hpi can get this now by svn updating and rebuilding the ec2 plugin. We ve also filed another bug asking for a single API call to establish the endpoints, so that its even easier for users to set this up. Finally, and this isn t a UEC difference, I needed to modify the Hudson EC2 plugin to work with the ubuntu user rather than root, as Ubuntu AMI s ship with root disabled (as all Ubuntu installs do). I chose to have Hudson reenable root, rather than making everything work without root, because the current code paths assume they can scp things as root, so this was less disruptive. With all that done, its now possible to configure up a Hudson instance testing via UEC nodes. Here s how:

1. Install UEC and make sure you can run up instances using euca-run-instances, ssh into them and that networking works for you. Make sure you have installed at least one image (EMI aka AMI) to run tests on. I used the vanilla in-store UEC Karmic images.
2. Install Hudson and the EC2 plugin (you ll need to build your own until a new release (1.6) is made).
3. Go to /configure and near the bottom click on Add a new cloud and choose Amazon EC2.
4. Look in ~/.euca/eucarc, or in the zip file that the UEC admin web page lets you download, to get at your credentials. Fill in the Access Key and Secret Access key fields accordingly. You can put in the private key (UEC holds onto the public half) that you want to use, or (once the connection is fully setup) use the Generate Key button to have a dedicated Hudson key created. I like to use one that I can ssh into to look at a live node YMMV. (Or you could add a user and as many keys as you want in the init script more on that in a second).
5. Click on Advanced, this will give you a bunch of details like EC2 Endpoint hostname . Fill these out.
6. Sensible values for a default UEC install are: 8773 for both ports, /services/Eucalyptus and /services/Walrus for the base URLs, and SSL turned off. (Note that the online help tells you this as well).
7. Set an instance cap, unless you truely have unlimited machines. E.g. 5, to run 5 VMs at a time.
8. Click on Test Connection it should pretty much instantly say Success .
9. Thats the Cloud itself configured, now we configure VM s that Hudson is willing to start. Click on Add right above the List of AMIs to be launched as slaves text.
10. Fill out the AMI with your EMI e.g. emi-E027107D is the Ubuntu 9.10 image I used.
11. for remote FS root, just put /hudson or something, unless you have a preseeded area (e.g. with a shared bzr repo or something) inside your image.
12. For description describe the intent of the image e.g. DB test environment
13. For the labels put one or more tags that you will use to tell test jobs they should run on this instance. They can be the same as labels on physical machines it will act as an overflow buffer. If no physical machines exist, a VM will be spawned when needed. For testing I put euca
14. For the init script, its a little more complex. You need to configure up java so that hudson itself can run:

    cat >> /etc/apt/sources.list << EOF
    deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic multiverse
    deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic-updates multiverse
    deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic-security multiverse
    EOF
    export http_proxy=http://192.168.1.1:8080/
    export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
    apt-get update
    echo "buildd shared/accepted-sun-dlj-v1-1 boolean true"   debconf-set-selections
    apt-get install -y -f sun-java6-jre
    

    Note that I have included my local HTTP proxy there just remove that line if you don t have one.
15. Click on Advanced, to get at the less-common options.
16. For remote user, put ubuntu , and for root command prefix put sudo .
17. For number of executors, you are essentially choosing the number of CPU s that the instance will request. E.g. putting 20 will ask for an extra-large high-cpu model machine when it deploys. This will then show up as 20 workers on the same machine.
18. Click save
19. Now, when you add a job a new option in the job configuration will appear tie this job to a node . Select one of the label(s) you put in for the AMI, and running the job will cause that instance to start up if its not already available.

Note that Hudson will try to use java from s3 if you don t install it, but that won t work right for a few reasons I ll be filing an issue in the Hudson tracker about it, as thats a bit of unusual structure in the existing code that I m happier leaving well enough alone .

Working on some document today, it occurred to me, once again, that OpenOffice's method for designing and applying documents styling totally sucks! Granted, this was not the first time that I cam to this conclusion but, today, I've come to realize that OpenOffice's paradigms constantly make me waste time trying to form a mental image of how every style element is suppose to relate to the other one, yet without having the full picture available within a single, easy-to-read document. Also, there is a complete lack of consistency in how style elements work. Some want to be defined in millimeters, while others want to be defined in points, while other still in number of lines. What a mess! In short: to become remotely usable, OpenOffice needs to approach document styling via the "HTML document with a separate CSS style sheet" paradigm. In other words, I need to be able to edit styles globally, as a group and separately from the document content itself, rather than having to click my way through a multitude of dialogs, for each and every type of text elements. To compare this with web design, there, I can focus on the actual content, formatted around semantic text elements (headers, paragraphs, block quotes, etc.) and then decide on the presentation styling as a separate global process by attaching a CSS style sheet, in which the relation between each type of text element and how it will be displayed is crystal clear, because it's handled as a unified style editing process. I think that this is one area in which Free Software could innovate in a positive way, by distancing itself from the Redmondesque practices of Microsoft Word, from which OpenOffice borrows too much. How about having a proper Style Editor application (similar to a CSS editor), within the OpenOffice suite, while Open Writer itself would only be allowed to load the style sheets produced by it and to apply them to semantic text text elements?

In November 2007, we bought two of the first Eee PC netbooks available in North America: the model 4G in pearl white, one for me, and one for my wife. My plan was to start the Debian Eee PC project and get Debian working on them both which, thanks to the work of everyone on the team, has been a great success. Fast forward to February 2010, and they are still serving us well. Here is a list of hardware enhancements and issues over the past two years of continuous use: Battery life Asus claims 3.5hrs for the model 4G, though I don t think we ever experienced anything better than 2.5 hrs with wifi in operation. Today, I m down to something short of 2 hrs. If you consider the Lithium ion battery article on Wikipedia to be accurate, it is typical to permanently lose 20% capacity per year, so this sounds about right for the age of the battery. Touchpad The touchpad itself is fine. The buttons are not. They are hard to push and prone to become less responsive after a while, or to fail entirely. I now really have to bear down hard on my left button to make it work. Because the buttons are soldered to the motherboard, they would be hard to replace. Configuring the synaptics driver for tap-to-click is an acceptable workaround. Also, one of the first purchases we made was the Logitech VX Nano, one for each Eee, so most of the time now, we use our mice, falling back to the touchpad only when using a mouse is inconvenient due to space constraints (e.g. on the bus). Keyboard After two years of continuous use, both of our keyboards needed replacing. Some of the keys had been pounded flat and needed surgery (rubber springs sliced out of a scavenged Acer netbook keyboard and grafted on) to make them usable again. And aesthetically, the keyboards have really suffered, with a good percentage of the markings on the keycaps partially or completely eroded off. Fortunately, for $3 plus $10 shipping each, new keyboards can be ordered from a Chinese e-Bay seller. But with the new keyboards, there is still the problem with excessive flex in the keyboard making some keys less responsive than others. I m considering trying this hack to solve the problem. Display I have no complaints about the matte finish displays of either Eee. Both have stood up well. People tell me they don t care for a 7 display, but I find it bright, crisp and easy to get along with, so long as you maximize windows and increase font size as needed (e.g. for reading PDF books and magazines). When I really need the extra real estate, I just hook up an external monitor. Fan Some people complain about the noise of the fan, from the otherwise silent 4G (due to the lack of a hard drive) and seek ways to limit the amount of time the fan runs. We ve never had that problem. However, if any plastic bits break off inside the Eee, they will eventually find their way to your fan and get wedged. This has happened twice: once in my wife s Eee, and once in mine. Disassembly of the Eee to clear the blockage and get the fan running again was relatively painless both times. Plastic bits About those plastic bits: In my wife s case, I think the bit was some extruded plastic from the molding that had broken off. In my case, it was a deteriorating plastic post which was holding the hinge in place. More about this later. Sound Unfortunately, the integrated sound seems to be particularly sensitive to heat. During both fan failures, sound cut out. On my wife s system, it never fully recovered, and now only works on alternate Tuesdays, whereas on mine, after I unwedged the fan and brought the heat down, sound has functioned properly ever since. (Update: see my comments below on power adapters for an alternate theory about what killed sound.) We are waiting now for the delivery of a cheap ($1.42 including shipping, again from China) 3D Sound USB device which is reported to work on Linux. While some users complain about hum with this device, we re cautiously optimistic that on the Eee it won t be an issue. If it is, oh well, a buck and a half is a small gamble. Display hinge The plastic posts that hold the anchors for the machine screws for the hinge are fragile. Three out of four of these posts in my Eee have shattered, leaving the left hinge to float freely. For the past two days I was distressed about how I could fix this. Based on some helpful suggestions from #eeepc @ irc.freenode.net, I had worked out a plan to rebuild one of the posts with two-part epoxy, sand it and the fractured stub of the post, and use cyanoacrylate glue to affix it to the case. It sounded like fiddly work for which I didn t hold much hope of success. But this morning, I realized that the plastic in the bottom of the case was still sound, and that I could drop a screw into that hole, and with pliers, line up the anchor on the other side. This appears to work! I ll handle that hinge with care, but it should do me until I eventually repurpose the machine to some daily use that is less stressful on the hinge than daily travel on the bus. SSD and SDHC Some people were initially worried that the limited write life an SSD meant that you needed to take special measures to avoid its premature death, which I have always regarded as a myth. Our 4G SSDs each have no swap space, and ext3 filesystems. At the two year point, there are no problems. I expect our SSDs to outlast the other components. We did, however, eventually find the 4G to be a bit on the small side. We now each have Kingston 4G micro-SDHC cards for a bit of extra capacity for large media files and for some extra space for the apt cache. I recently priced the Lexan version of this card at $19 for a two-pack at Wal-mart, and these seem to work in the model 4G just as well (which seems to be an issue with this model not all SDHC cards work). Memory We found the 512M that came with the 4G somewhat constraining. Without any swap space (so we could maximize the space available on the small SSD) we decided our systems really needed a memory upgrade. At the time, 2G didn t seem overly expensive (though I no longer remember the exact price) so we splurged on 2G for each system, even though that was probably more than we needed. Power adapter When I first wrote this article, I forgot to mention the power adapter. The model 4G uses an unusual 9.5V power adapter for which it is hard to find a generic replacement. This unit is prone to fail in two places: in rare cases, (one out of 6 units that I have in some way assisted with: 3 of them mine, 3 belonging to others,) it will break at the wall plug end. The plug swivels into the unit for easy storage, but this adds a point of failure. More commonly, (in 3 out of six of the units,) the wires at the netbook plug end will fray due to stress on the non-angled cord, leading either to no connect, or to a short. In fact, since in the case of my wife s adapter, the netbook end of the cable shorted, making the cable heat up and the system spontaneously shut down after a little while, we can t say for sure whether the overheating of the Eee took out integrated sound, or whether this short did. On the one hand, I know for certain my own system, which never suffered a short, has responded to overheating by making the sound flaky, but it has never taken out sound completely. On the other hand, shorting the power cable can t be very good for the Eee, so who knows, maybe that s what ultimately killed my wife s Eee s sound. This is where it helps to have soldering skills, or a friend who can do the repair for you. In my case, it was the latter. While I was waiting for a replacement adapter I had ordered, we also found on eeeuser.com part#s for replacement plugs and sleeves from Digikey, total cost $20 including shipping, 10 pieces each. Cutting off the bad plugs on three units and attaching the new was a quick, straightforward operation, and succeeded in two out of three cases. Having carefully checked the failed repair, we deduced that the failure in that unit was at the wall end, and we judged there was nothing further we could do to try to save it. Even the unit that had previously shorted was returned to perfect health and has been in operation trouble-free ever since. Conclusion After over two years of continuous use, the model 4G has held up well for a $400 system. We definitely feel we have received our money s worth of value over that time. All of the problems we ve experienced so far have been fixable at very little expense, and we expect them to last at least another year before we seriously consider replacing them. In the next several months, I plan to order a high capacity 8-cell 10400mAh battery for my own system so that I can enjoy a 5-6 hr run time. The purchase will be roughly $55 including shipping, the most expensive purchase for my system to date, but still well worth it to extend the 4G s lifespan for another year or more.

A picture is worth a thousand words: A slightly longer story follows, resuming from the previous episode, where Gtk seemed to be working. Making sure Gtk actually works Since the udebs are quite fat already, I decided to put the contents of the gtk2.0-examples package into a new revision of the new libgtk-x11-udeb package. gtk-demo was running fine (if one forgets that this demo application is really easier to deal with if one uses a window manager), although image handling was broken. Julien and I spent quite some time double-checking that the libpixbufloader-png.so plugin was present; that both previous DirectFB-based udeb and new x11-based udeb were very similar; that configuration was generated properly; we went so far as to include strace in the netboot image, and to check the configuration file was open() d, but the plugin was never to be even looked for. All this resulting in a Unrecognized file format message every time. Josselin, our Messiah, enlightened us: although Gtk was previously using some configuration files to determine which pixbufloader plugin to use, it still continues to access those files but relies on a MIME database in the end. Installing the host s /usr/share/mime/mime.cache database did the trick (we have a proper fix pending), and all of a sudden, we got image support (which is needed for the logo_installer.png displayed on top of every screen, as well as for some icons during the installation, like the final one). Tweaking d-i itself Julien took care of rootskel-gtk. It was mostly about:

• Dropping some DirectFB start-up scripts.
• Dropping a related configuration file.
• Adding a start-up script doing trivial things:

  Xorg -retro -noreset &
  export DISPLAY=:0
  

Another easy step was cdebconf. Mostly: search and destroy on the few bits using DirectFB. An interesting issue we had was that even though a proper cursor theme was installed and made the default, we only had a black cross as X pointer. That s where we learnt it s needed to manually set a cursor for the root window, which can be done this way:

GdkCursor *cursor = gdk_cursor_new(GDK_LEFT_PTR);
gdk_window_set_cursor(gdk_get_default_root_window(), cursor);
gdk_cursor_unref(cursor);

Tweaking gtk2-engines was trivial, just a matter of building against the x11 flavour of Gtk instead of the directfb one. Some substitutions in debian/control and debian/rules, and that was done. Julien also took care of tweaking console-setup so that keyboard-configuration s and console-setup-udeb s postinst scripts call setxkbmap when $DISPLAY is set. Meaning we were able to replace kbd-chooser with console-setup-udeb, leading to a correct setting within X right after having selected the layout! Reverting d-i s r61645 (which disabled Gtk-based d-i images) was trivial (although while looking back, it was probably unnecessary), and after having messed around with the packages lists (there s a lot of local udebs at this point), especially to add some fonts, we managed to get an image which seems to work fine (at least in my VirtualBox environment). I tried Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and French installations, and all of them seem to work fine (installed systems were bootable after an installation in the selected language) while issues were limited to some rendering or translation glitches, which didn t seem critical at all. Next steps Since there were some iterations, and since the trial-and-error approach was chosen, the first goal is to generate clean patches against all modified packages, and make sure a single walk through all packages in a clean chroot is sufficient to generate a working d-i image again. Once that done, which should probably considered (at least, I hope!) quite a good base already, the idea is to look into the various udebs to see whether there are some parts that could be disabled (maybe introducing a trimmed-down flavour especially for the udeb in some non-flavoured-yet libraries), so as to reduce the size of the resulting image. In the meanwhile, one can fetch the current hand-built netboot image by browsing http://people.debian.org/~kibi/di-x11/. It s only available for amd64, and weights 23MB. There s a sha256sum as well as a detached GPG signature in the same directory.

So I finally got off my lazy butt and started the paperwork to get a formal recognition of studies equivalence for a undergraduate studies (Licenciatura en ingenier a de software) via CENEVAL's Acuerdo 286 (licenciatura). Part of the paperwork involves filling the form I photographed and attached to this node. This is the utmost example of ber-redundant paperwork... Where it requires my personal data, some of the fields are:

CURP

Clave nica de Registro Poblacional, Unique Populational Registration Key. This is a string composed by:

• WOIG: First letter and first vowel after the first letter of my first family name, first letter of my second family name, first letter of my given name
• 760427: birth date, yymmdd
• H: Sex (H = male, M = female, I guess)
• DF: State or federative entity I was born in
• LSN: First consonant after the first letter of the first and second family name and of the given name
• 03: Deambiguation digits

So far, so good.

Age

Well, cannot it be deduced from the CURP? It has my full birth date!

Sex

Well, cannot it be deduced from the CURP? It is a specific field in it

Birth date

Man, you already have it literally on top of the field!

Nationality

This tramit is only for Mexicans, so... what's the point?

Birth place

The CURP states already the state or federative entity I was born... But I'll accept this one, as not all states have only one city as DF does

Quite a nice catalog of redundancies. As a cherry on top of the cake, the phone number states I should write my long distance phone code (LADA historically, Larga Distancia Autom tica, Automatic Long Distance) only if I am in any of the states. I can only ask myself why... Anyway... Lets continue filling paperwork. Grah. Hopefully I will be able to get my papers... somewhen in the next half century.

Bruce Everiss who is famous for being threatened with legal action by Evony has been writing about the supposed losses from game piracy, in his latest missive he copies the text from a number of blog comments without citing the original authors [1]. He copied my text without citing me as the author (which is at best shoddy journalism and by a fundamentalist attitude such as his could be considered as piracy). He also copied my text in with a bunch of other comments which he attributes to The thieves . It s unfortunate that Bruce doesn t seem capable of understanding irony, he wrote There is no doubt whatsoever that downloading and playing a game that should have been paid for is theft and then copied part of the text of my comment where I provided a dictionary definition of theft that directly contradicts his claim. If he was at all interested in quality writing he would cite his references and then when a dictionary is cited which disagrees with his opinion he would at least try to find a dictionary with a more agreeable definition. It shouldn t be THAT difficult to find a dictionary that has multiple definitions of theft of which one is agreeable to the MAFIAA [2]. Now if Bruce had properly read my comment he would have seen I ve started watching content from sites such as blip.tv (in the little time I have for such things) and I only play games that are part of the Debian distribution of Linux (free software) which makes it very clear to any reasonable interpretation that I am not a game pirate and probably not even a movie pirate. I did mention in a comment on Bruce s blog that the DVD experience of being forced to sit through a whinge about piracy was a factor that made buying a DVD a worse experience than downloading it, a concept that I expanded into a blog post on the relative technical merits of DVDs and pirate MP4 files [3]. That post received a number of interesting comments including one from Josselin Mouette which had some useful technical detail about subtitles and audio track storage. I had believed that there were some real technical advantages of DVDs but Josselin corrected me on this matter. Also one thing that is noteworthy is that Bruce seems to use a copyright picture in almost every post but he doesn t attribute any of them. It does seem unusual for someone to use commercial artwork without any copyright or trademark notices attached. This usually isn t a big deal for a blogger, a liberal interpretation of copyright and trademark law is usually expected in terms of blogging corporations will tend to be hesitant to invoke the Streisand effect by suing a blogger (EG Bruce blog came to fame when he was sued by Evony). But when a blogger is writing about the importance of not pirating anything it would seem sensible to go to the effort of citing trademark and copyright references and also mentioning the licence agreements under which the IP was used. I believe that any loss of customers and revenue by the MAFIAA and the gaming industry is due to the actions of the companies involved. They should just try to make their customers happy, otherwise they lose the customers. The same goes for bloggers. I read blogs written by people who disagree with me, and sometimes by people who offend me on occasion. But Bruce is making baseless claims while deliberately ignoring evidence. He is calling for strong anti-piracy measures while doing what could be considered as pirating my work. He uses words in ways that conflict with dictionary definitions, and he calls for an end to our current legal system by demanding punishment based on three accusations rather than any legal process. I even pointed out to Bruce that if there was a three strikes law regarding accusations of copyright infringement then his blog would be offline after three accusations by Evony. Sorry Bruce, if I was looking for irrational rants about copyright then I would look at what the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) are doing [4]. The SFWA people demonstrate as much knowledge of computers and the Internet as Bruce does, but they are at least really good writers. If it was just me unsubscribing from Bruce s RSS feed then it wouldn t matter (I m one of tens of thousands of readers). But I expect that a large portion of the new readers Bruce acquired after being attacked by Evony will disappear when they see Bruce as the attacker and everyone who uses the Internet as a potential victim of the Three Strikes law.

• [1] http://www.bruceongames.com/2010/01/22/what-game-thieves-have-to-say-for-themselves/
• [2] http://mafiaa.org/
• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/01/06/which-is-better-original-dvd-or-pirate-mp4/
• [4] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/09/23/dmca-and-sci-fi/

So, as I'm not always sitting directly in front of machines that I'm working on I've been using various tools to get temporary network connections between completely seperate network blocks, for example, sitting on wireless outside of my home, connecting back in to the desktop at home, and then connecting to the virtual machines on that desktop - the virtual machines are on their own private network, which is bridged and then routed through the desktop. The desktop machine has an ipv6 tunnel setup using tinc to my main VPS. That in turn has a tunnel setup to he.net's ipv6 network... I then have my laptop configured to also use tinc to connect to my VPS, so lots of ipv6 over ipv4, really. From that I can then get a 'direct' ssh connection between my laptop and my desktop (OK, so it's actually going over 2 ipv6 over ipv4 tunnels to get there, but it "looks" direct), so, that gets me as far as the external network on that box. From here, we can run a vde_switch which is connected to a tun/tap interface that's part of the internal bridge, once we've got that running, I bring up another vde_switch on my laptop attached to another tun/tap interface purely for that network with a static ip configure on that interface... using the magic of dpipe I then connect the two vde_switches together using vde_plug, and as if by magic, I then have access to the internal networking of my virtual machines, meaning that I can now ssh directly in to the virtual machines without having to do anymore interesting ssh bouncing and port forwarding. It's a little sick, but it really does make remote working a lot easier to do, it's a vpn of sorts, I suppose, as all traffic is being thrown over ssh pipes or tinc (which in turn is encrypted using x509 certificates)... probably not the quickest of networks, but very very nice all the same.

I ve been having some cooling problems with my Thinkpad recently. It s an old model T41p which is outside the service period so IBM/Lenovo won t help me (at least not unless I give them more money). If I run it for a few minutes at maximum CPU when the ambient temperature is about 20C then it gets to 90C, apparently 93C is the temperature at which it turns itself off, so obviously I need to do something to keep it cool. On the really hot days of summer my air-conditioners can t keep any part of my house below 30C, so on such days I can t do any compiles on my Thinkpad or watch videos. My Thinkpad seems to idle at a temperature that is about 35C higher than the ambient temperature. At this rate the system could get close to it s maximum temperature on a 45C day by just idling! Not that I plan to have a warm Thinkpad on my lap if I ever happen to be outside on such a hot day. I suspect that a large part of the problem is the dust that has accumulated inside the machine. I asked about this on the LUV mailing list and Andrew Chalmers suggested The Chaos Manor review of taking a Thinkpad T41p apart [1]. The Chaos Manor guy wanted to replace his CPU with a faster one so he had to get access to all the same bits. I followed the instructions until I got to the stage of prying the heatsink off the video chip. I figured that I will never be able to attach it as well as it is currently attached so I will get different cooling problems if I go any further. Taking it apart to that degree was a moderate amount of work, getting the keyboard bezel off was the most difficult part, and taking the palm-rest off required removing bits of plastic that were stuck in place to cover screw holes which will probably fall off in a week or two. Probably everyone who owns a T41p that they regularly use has a similar problem to me as all such machines have been out of support long enough to have accumulated a lot of dust. So I recommend that other T41p owners not disassemble their machine as much as I did, but instead go for my plan B which is to blow compressed air through the CPU cooling system. Doing this merely requires removing the keyboard. One tip that I have heard is that you should hold the fan in place when blowing compressed air as the pressure of the air may spin the fan fast enough to generate enough electricity to damage the motherboard or damage it s bearings. But you might want to wait until I ve got my Thinkpad done before you blow compressed air through yours, it could very well be destroyed. The other option is to try and use software to control the temperature. Patricia Fraser suggested controlling the fan speed [2]. I did some experiments and found that increasing the fan speed dramatically slowed the increase in the temperature. A 10 minute build is almost certain to bring the temperature to dangerous levels in a default configuration, but it seems that if I set the fan to maximum speed before starting the build then I can mitigate this problem. Most programs that I work on will compile in significantly less than 10 minutes. Another possibility that occurred to me is that of limiting the speed of the system. It seems that ACPI has support for reducing the CPU frequency when the temperature rises too much, but Matthew Garrett has pointed out that this effectively increases the amount of energy used (and heat dissipated) for any given quantity of work [3]. So what I want to do is to cause the CPU to idle periodically when it gets too hot. I ve been idly considering writing a program that uses SIGSTOP and SIGCONT to control the operation of programs such as make, or writing a program that creates a new pty (like script) and pauses the output whenever the CPU gets too hot. Of course the easy option would be to figure out how to set the threshold temperature where the CPU speed is limited. Which is made slightly more complicated by my choice of kernel 2.6.30 for Ext4 support. Now the kernel doesn t work with my acpid and I m starting to get forced into an upgrade to Debian/Testing. Does anyone have any ideas?

• [1] http://www.chaosmanorreviews.com/open_archives/sl_20070205.php
• [2] http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_control_fan_speed
• [3] http://mjg59.livejournal.com/88608.html

So. I m trying to get familiar with libvirt and friends. To this end, I ve set up a Lucid virtual machine booting from PXE into an initrd environment which does a pivot_root to an AoE block device. The #virt channel on irc.oftc.net told me that in order to have libvirt provide PXE capability, I would have to install a recent version of libvirt. I built version 0.7.5-3 from sid on my karmic laptop and it seems to be working okay. I decided to set up the pxe root directoy in /var/lib/tftproot just because that s what the example code had in it. I had to manually configure a virtual network. Here is the XML config file:

$ sudo virsh net-dumpxml netboot
<network>
  <name>netboot</name>
  <uuid>81ff0d90-c91e-6742-64da-4a736edb9a9b</uuid>
  <forward mode='nat'/>
  <bridge name='virbr1' stp='off' delay='1' />
  <domain name='example.com'/>
  <ip address='192.168.123.1' netmask='255.255.255.0'>
    <tftp root='/var/lib/tftproot' />
    <dhcp>
      <range start='192.168.123.2' end='192.168.123.254' />
      <bootp file='pxelinux.0' />
    </dhcp>
  </ip>
</network>

This, of course, depends on the pxelinux.0 file. Luckily, this is packaged up in syslinux and can be installed with a simple
$ sudo apt-get install syslinux
$ sudo mkdir /var/lib/tftproot
$ sudo cp /usr/lib/syslinux/pxelinux.0 /var/lib/tftproot
I had to create a pxelinux config file for the virtual machine (indexed by mac address). Note that I put a console=ttyS0,115200 argument on the kernel command line so that I can attach to the serial port from the host system for copy/paste debugging. Also of importance is the root=/dev/etherd/e0.1p1 argument, specifying which block device we ll be doing the pivot_root to eventually.
$ mkdir /var/lib/tftproot/pxelinux.cfg/
$ cat /var/lib/tftproot/pxelinux.cfg/01-52-54-00-44-34-67
DEFAULT linux
LABEL linux
SAY Now booting the kernel from PXELINUX...
KERNEL vmlinuz-lucid0
APPEND ro root=/dev/etherd/e0.1p1 console=ttyS0,115200 initrd=initrd.img-lucid0
I decided to use the karmic kernel for lucid initially. I ll eventually switch over to the lucid kernel ;)
$ sudo cp /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-17-generic /var/lib/tftproot/vmlinuz-lucid0
I copied /etc/initramfs-tools to ~/tmp/lucid so that I didn t mess up the system initrd scripts:
$ mkdir -p ~/tmp/lucid && cp -r /etc/initramfs-tools ~/tmp/lucid/
Since mkinitramfs doesn t currently have a system for AoE root, I had to do a bit of fiddling. I copied the NFS root boot script and made a couple of modifications.

$ diff -u /usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/nfs ~/tmp/lucid/initramfs-tools/scripts/aoe
--- /usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/nfs	2008-06-23 23:10:21.000000000 -0700
+++ /home/cjac/tmp/lucid/initramfs-tools/scripts/aoe	2010-01-15 14:56:28.098298027 -0800
@@ -5,59 +5,25 @@
 retry_nr=0
 # parse nfs bootargs and mount nfs
-do_nfsmount()
+do_aoemount()
  
-
 	configure_networking
-	# get nfs root from dhcp
-	if [ "x$ NFSROOT " = "xauto" ]; then
-		# check if server ip is part of dhcp root-path
-		if [ "$ ROOTPATH#*: " = "$ ROOTPATH " ]; then
-			NFSROOT=$ ROOTSERVER :$ ROOTPATH 
-		else
-			NFSROOT=$ ROOTPATH 
-		fi
-
-	# nfsroot=[<server-ip>:]<root-dir>[,<nfs-options>]
-	elif [ -n "$ NFSROOT " ]; then
-		# nfs options are an optional arg
-		if [ "$ NFSROOT#*, " != "$ NFSROOT " ]; then
-			NFSOPTS="-o $ NFSROOT#*, "
-		fi
-		NFSROOT=$ NFSROOT%%,* 
-		if [ "$ NFSROOT#*: " = "$NFSROOT" ]; then
-			NFSROOT=$ ROOTSERVER :$ NFSROOT 
-		fi
-	fi
+        ip link set up dev eth0
-	if [ -z "$ NFSOPTS " ]; then
-		NFSOPTS="-o retrans=10"
-	fi
+        ls /dev/etherd/
-	[ "$quiet" != "y" ] && log_begin_msg "Running /scripts/nfs-premount"
-	run_scripts /scripts/nfs-premount
-	[ "$quiet" != "y" ] && log_end_msg
+        echo > /dev/etherd/discover
-	if [ $ readonly  = y ]; then
-		roflag="-o ro"
-	else
-		roflag="-o rw"
-	fi
+        ls /dev/etherd/
-	nfsmount -o nolock $ roflag  $ NFSOPTS  $ NFSROOT  $ rootmnt 
+        mount $ ROOT  $ rootmnt 
  
-# NFS root mounting
+# AoE root mounting
 mountroot()
  
-	[ "$quiet" != "y" ] && log_begin_msg "Running /scripts/nfs-top"
-	run_scripts /scripts/nfs-top
-	[ "$quiet" != "y" ] && log_end_msg
-
-	modprobe nfs
-	# For DHCP
-	modprobe af_packet
+	modprobe aoe
 	# Default delay is around 180s
 	# FIXME: add usplash_write info
@@ -67,17 +33,13 @@
 		delay=$ ROOTDELAY 
 	fi
-	# loop until nfsmount succeds
+	# loop until aoemount succeds
 	while [ $ retry_nr  -lt $ delay  ] && [ ! -e $ rootmnt $ init  ]; do
 		[ $ retry_nr  -gt 0 ] && \
-		[ "$quiet" != "y" ] && log_begin_msg "Retrying nfs mount"
-		do_nfsmount
+		[ "$quiet" != "y" ] && log_begin_msg "Retrying AoE mount"
+		do_aoemount
 		retry_nr=$(( $ retry_nr  + 1 ))
 		[ ! -e $ rootmnt $ init  ] && /bin/sleep 1
 		[ $ retry_nr  -gt 0 ] && [ "$quiet" != "y" ] && log_end_msg
 	done
-
-	[ "$quiet" != "y" ] && log_begin_msg "Running /scripts/nfs-bottom"
-	run_scripts /scripts/nfs-bottom
-	[ "$quiet" != "y" ] && log_end_msg
  

(below is the full file in case udiff is less convenient)

$ cat ~/tmp/lucid/initramfs-tools/scripts/aoe
# NFS filesystem mounting			-*- shell-script -*-
# FIXME This needs error checking
retry_nr=0
# parse nfs bootargs and mount nfs
do_aoemount()
 
	configure_networking
        ip link set up dev eth0
        ls /dev/etherd/
        echo > /dev/etherd/discover
        ls /dev/etherd/
        mount $ ROOT  $ rootmnt 
 
# AoE root mounting
mountroot()
 
	modprobe aoe
	# Default delay is around 180s
	# FIXME: add usplash_write info
	if [ -z "$ ROOTDELAY " ]; then
		delay=180
	else
		delay=$ ROOTDELAY 
	fi
	# loop until aoemount succeds
	while [ $ retry_nr  -lt $ delay  ] && [ ! -e $ rootmnt $ init  ]; do
		[ $ retry_nr  -gt 0 ] && \
		[ "$quiet" != "y" ] && log_begin_msg "Retrying AoE mount"
		do_aoemount
		retry_nr=$(( $ retry_nr  + 1 ))
		[ ! -e $ rootmnt $ init  ] && /bin/sleep 1
		[ $ retry_nr  -gt 0 ] && [ "$quiet" != "y" ] && log_end_msg
	done
 

There was also a small modification to the initramfs.conf file:

$ diff -u /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf ~/tmp/lucid/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf
--- /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf	2008-07-08 18:37:42.000000000 -0700
+++ /home/cjac/tmp/lucid/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf	2010-01-15 14:33:38.088295207 -0800
@@ -47,14 +47,16 @@
 #
 #
-# BOOT: [ local   nfs ]
+# BOOT: [ local   nfs   aoe]
 #
 # local - Boot off of local media (harddrive, USB stick).
 #
 # nfs - Boot using an NFS drive as the root of the drive.
 #
+# aoe - Boot using an AoE drive as the root of the drive.
+#
-BOOT=local
+BOOT=aoe
 #
 # DEVICE: ...

I also needed to add aoe to the list of modules included in the initramfs:
$ echo aoe >> ~/tmp/lucid/initramfs-tools/modules
In order to generate the initrd.img file from this new config, I ran the following:
$ sudo mkinitramfs -d ~/tmp/lucid/initramfs-tools/ -o /var/lib/tftproot/initrd.img-lucid0
I created a lucid VM by installing from the desktop install disk. You can grab the ISO here: http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/ I ll leave the creation of the virtual machine and installation as an exercise for the reader. I put the filesystem on an lvm volume group called vg0 in a logical volume called lucid0 (ie, /dev/vg0/lucid0). At this point, I created a new virtual machine called lucid0. Here is the xml for the domain:

$ sudo virsh dumpxml lucid0
<domain type='kvm' id='1'>
  <name>lucid0</name>
  <uuid>96fbad21-4f25-5700-ddd8-1a565c7170ee</uuid>
  <memory>524288</memory>
  <currentMemory>524288</currentMemory>
  <vcpu>1</vcpu>
  <os>
    <type arch='x86_64' machine='pc-0.11'>hvm</type>
    <boot dev='network'/>
  </os>
  <features>
    <pae/>
  </features>
  <clock offset='localtime'/>
  <on_poweroff>destroy</on_poweroff>
  <on_reboot>restart</on_reboot>
  <on_crash>restart</on_crash>
  <devices>
    <emulator>/usr/bin/kvm</emulator>
    <interface type='network'>
      <mac address='52:54:00:44:34:67'/>
      <source network='netboot'/>
      <target dev='vnet0'/>
    </interface>
    <serial type='pty'>
   <source path='/dev/pts/4'/>
      <target port='0'/>
    </serial>
  <console type='pty' tty='/dev/pts/4'>
   <source path='/dev/pts/4'/>
      <target port='0'/>
    </console>
    <input type='tablet' bus='usb'/>
    <input type='mouse' bus='ps2'/>
    <graphics type='vnc' port='5901' autoport='yes' listen='127.0.0.1' keymap='en-us'/>
    <sound model='es1370'/>
    <video>
      <model type='cirrus' vram='9216' heads='1'/>
    </video>
  </devices>
</domain>

Now we re ready to start the AoE target and launch the virtual machine. If you don t have vblade installed, do so now:
$ sudo apt-get install vblade
Start the target up with the following command:
$ sudo vbladed 0 1 virbr1 /dev/vg0/lucid0
Now, if all goes well, you should be able to watch the virtual machine boot up and do its thing like so:
$ sudo virsh start lucid0 && sudo screen -S lucid0 sudo virsh ttyconsole lucid0 115200
If you get errors about /dev/etherd/e0.1p1 not existing (these might look like this):

Begin: Retrying AoE mount ...
err         discover    interfaces  revalidate  flush
err         discover    interfaces  revalidate  flush
mount: mounting /dev/etherd/e0.1p1 on /root failed: No such file or directory
Done.

then you might want to try restarting vbladed like this:
$ sudo kill -9 ps auwx grep vblade grep -v grep awk ' print $2 ' && sudo vbladed 0 1 virbr1 /dev/vg0/lucid0
So. Now you should have a lucid gdm in your virt-manager console. Any questions? #virt on irc.oftc.net

I have direct knowledge (through observation or first-hand reports) of the following use cases for Netbooks:

1. System administrator s emergency workstation something light to carry when you might get an SMS about a problem.
2. A really small laptop for a serious technical user, can be used for programming and other serious tasks. Only someone who is really dedicated to the hobby of computing would choose a system with a tiny screen for their main computer so that they can take it everywhere.
3. A computer for a child. Children are less demanding about some aspects of their computer experience, no-one wants to buy a really expensive toy for a young child, and children find it difficult to carry full size laptops.

1 and 2 are the options that interest me. But it would be good if the extensive children s toy market could drive economies of scale and reduce the expenses of my hobby and profession. I have found my EeePC 701 to provide adequate CPU performance (Celeron-M 630MHz) for light compiling tasks and I have used it for some Debian development work. The SSD that is built in is very fast and OpenOffice load times compare well to my Thinkpad T41p because of it. The main problems I have with my EeePC for sysadmin and coding tasks are the small keyboard (which can t be fixed the overall size of the machine needs to remain small), the small screen (which could be expanded without changing the case size), the low resolution screen (which has been fixed in newer netbooks), and the fact that my 3G dongle sticks out and is likely to get broken. More recent Netbooks address these issues while having the trade-off of being heavier and larger. There are also some tasks which are generally not performed on a Netbook but that could be if it was properly designed. Here are some examples of things that I think should be done on a Netbook:

1. Basic image editing and blogging something that a lot of people do on smart-phones nowadays. It can be done more effectively and with less effort on a general purpose computer I can t imagine the GIMP or Inkscape running on a smart-phone.
2. Reading electronic books. The number of people who want a Netbook but don t want to read electronic books would be quite small as would the number of people who only want to read electronic books and never want to use a general purpose computer while travelling. No-one really wants to carry both a Netbook and an ebook reader at the same time.
3. Watching movies.
4. Everything that you might want to do on a terminal in an Internet cafe those machines are always 0wned, just say no for security reasons.
5. Games. The Nintendo DS has two ARM CPUs running at 66MHz and 33MHz and a combined screen resolution of 256*384*18bpp [1] and the Sony PSP has a 333MHz MIPS R4000 CPU and a screen resolution of 480*272*24bpp [2]. The original EeePC had more CPU power and more screen resolution than the DS and the PSP so it IS suitable for games even though it won t run the latest 3D games. There are lots of great games like Wesnoth that don t require much video performance.
6. Educational Software. Portable educational devices include the awful V.smile system for young children [3] and the educational software for the DS (I ve seen a demonstration of a training program in rapid completion of basic maths problems for elderly people and presume it s not the only educational software on that platform).

Image editing requires a color screen of high resolution. Effective blogging requires a platform with a resolution that compares to the typical web user according to Hitslink 1024*768 is the most popular resolution of web browsing systems at 28.34% and the most popular resolution that is less than 1024*768 is 800*600 at 3.28% [4]. So even the most casual blogger will have an incentive to get a screen that is of higher resolution than all but the latest Netbooks. The recently released EeePC 1201 has a screen resolution of 1366*768 which should be barely adequate for those tasks. Reading electronic books requires a reasonable resolution. Based on my experience with the 1400*1050 display in my Thinkpad it seems that a resolution of 1366*768 would be barely adequate for reading an academic paper that has two columns in a small font. But as the original Kindle had a resolution of 600*800 and the latest Kindle has a resolution of 824*1200 [5] it seems that perhaps the epaper displays are good enough to allow reading the text at a lower resolution. A display that can draw little or no power when idling (as epaper does) is simply required for an ebook. The Pixel-Qi hybrid displays are claimed to offer the best features of TFT and epaper displays [6] but they haven t been released yet. I think it s reasonable to assume that someone will achieve that Pixel-Qi is attempting and that it will become the standard display for a Netbook. Watching movies and playing games (even games like Wesnoth) requires better video performance than epaper can deliver, we just have to hope that Pixel-Qi release something soon. Watching movies and reading ebooks are both things that are best done without a keyboard in the way. The Always Innovating Touch Book [7] seems like a good solution to this problem. It s a tablet PC that can be connected to a keyboard base if/when you desire. It should also be good for web browsing and reading email while on the move, I find that my EeePC is unreasonably heavy and awkward for typing email while walking. Intel CPUs are not particularly energy efficient. As there are ARM CPUs with clock speeds as high as 2GHz and with as many as four CPU cores it seems that the ARM architecture can provide as much CPU power as is required. Debian currently supports two versions of the ARM CPU, if another one became commonly used it wouldn t be that difficult to run Debian build servers for it. Given a screen resolution equal to the latest Kindle, CPU power greater than the early Netbooks, and the ability to run a free software OS the range of educational and gaming software should be adequate. So it seems that the ideal netbook would have a detachable keyboard and base and a touch-screen in the computer part. It would have a Pixel-Qi display (or equivalent) with a resolution of 1400*1050 or better. It would have USB, Gig-E, Wifi, and Bluetooth connectivity and the ability to have an internally mounted USB dongle (as the Always Innovating Touch Book does). I think that this is not overly difficult to achieve it is basically an Always Innovating system with a better display. Update: Another criteria is the ability to start operating quickly when requested. Even mobile phones are often limited in their utility by the time that is taken to activate them (I can t get my mobile phone to take a photo in much less than 7 seconds after removing it from my pocket). The Always Innovating system is apparently always in suspend to RAM mode when it s not being used so that it can start quickly. That combined with fast application load times and a good menu system could allow turning the system on and launching an application in less than 2 seconds. If I was buying a Netbook right now the only thing that would stop me from buying an Always Innovating device is the shipping delay. But as my EeePC is working quite well I m not going to buy another system unless I am going to get significant benefits such as a high resolution PixelQi display.

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_DS
• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psp
• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/07/07/awful-computers-for-kids/
• [4] http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=17
• [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindle
• [6] http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/05/pixel-qi/
• [7] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/01/11/always-innovating/

Always Innovating have an interesting netbook that can be detached from it s keyboard [1]. It provides features which are a close match for the tablet PC with optional keyboard that I advocated in my post about the Lenovo U1 [2]. Such devices are deemed to be in a new category of computer called the Smartbook which is regarded as being like a cross between a Netbook and a smart-phone [3]. The AI system is always idling, so there is no boot up required like a mobile phone it will respond immediately to input. It has no fans which will be a good improvement over the EeePC my EeePC 701 is annoyingly loud at times. It is designed to replace Netbooks not desktops, the screen resolution of 1024*600 is reasonable by Netbook standards but is really poor by desktop standards, it also lacks a VGA port. The company has a stated policy of being friendly to free software, so hopefully a community of developers will form around it. Of course this partly depends on how they develop their new systems. If they make new systems vastly incompatible with older systems then it will fracture the community and make things difficult for everyone. There have been problems in this regard in the past with ARM as the instruction set has changed. One interesting thing about the Always Innovating Touch Book is that you can order the keyboard and extra battery part separately from the main computer/display unit. This means that if you break one part you can replace it without replacing the entire system (handy if you break the keyboard (the cheaper part). It s interesting to note that their web site offers to sell me as many as 558 complete systems, as many as 896 tablets, or as many as 992 keyboards. So according to the web site anyone who wanted to buy more than 558 systems would have to order the tablets separately from the keyboards. This wouldn t be a bad thing as the complete unit costs $399, the tablet costs $299, and the keyboard costs $99. So ordering the keyboard and tablet separately would save $1 per unit! Of course anyone who really wanted to buy 600 computers wouldn t use a web site, they would call the sales people and get a discount that is significantly greater than $1 per unit. But these limits for the web sales seem strange enough to be worthy of comment. It s an interesting system, it would be handy for reading documents when on the move and for light sysadmin work (basic login to server and restart crashed daemon stuff). If I was after a new system I would probably buy one.

• [1] http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/01/10/lenovo-u1-hybrid-proprietary-os-suck/
• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartbook

Lenovo have announced their innovative new U1 Hybrid laptop [1]. It consists of a tablet-style device with a resistive touch-screen that runs Linux on a 1GHz ARM processor which attaches to a base computer that has a keyboard and a Core2 processor running Windows 7. They apparently have some special software to synchronise web browsing on both computers so you can maintain your web sessions when you detach the computers. How they manage to use the power of the Core2 CPU for javascript and flash intensive web sites while allowing the active browser sessions to migrate to a different OS must be a neat technical trick. Revision3 have a youtube review of the U1 which shows what it can do in terms of the hardware interface [2] Running two computers requires having two batteries, motherboards, etc which means more weight or means less battery life for the weight, whichever way you think of it the user is losing because of this choice. The idea of having two computers in one is one of these cool technical ideas which just won t provide a benefit for the users. The best thing for the users would be to have a single light-weight computer that provides an adequate amount of performance. A 1GHz ARM processor should give good performance when running Linux for most tasks (web browsing, office applications, and most games). So it seems that a good tablet with some USB ports and a matching USB keyboard would be a better option. Maybe you could have a spare battery integrated with the keyboard as most times when you want a full sized keyboard weight isn t such a big problem. The problem with MS-Windows in regard to such machines is that performance is poor and processors other than i386 and AMD64 have never really been supported (sure you can buy MS-Windows-based PDAs that have ARM and PPC CPUs, but the application support for them is minimal). These problems will never be solved. MS wants to compel users to continually upgrade their software, this requires always adding new features (bloat) while an older or less featureful OS is often a better option for lesser hardware. Vendors of proprietary applications will never support the range of CPU architectures that a free software distribution such as Debian or NetBSD supports (not that NetBSD is an ideal tablet OS but it does demonstrate what can be done if you want a portable OS). These inherent flaws in the proprietary software environment lead to some unusual hardware being designed to work around them such as the Lenovo U1. I don t have any reason to believe that the Lenovo is a bad machine, it sounds like a reasonable work-around for some of the problems that MS-Windows has forced on the industry. But I believe that it would be a much better machine if it was lighter, had a better battery life, and had a choice of keyboards all of which would have been achieved if it was designed as an ARM-only tablet machine that you can connect to an external keyboard. They could even have used a multi-core ARM CPU. But the market for such systems apparently isn t large enough for Lenovo (or anyone else) to ship ARM laptops for serious use. There have been a couple of netbooks released recently with CPUs that don t support the i386 or AMD64 instruction set, but they were aimed at web browsing use not general purpose computing. Almost everything that I do on computers could be done at least as well with a CPU that doesn t run an Intel-based instruction set, the only exception is virtualisation which doesn t seem to be well supported on architectures other than AMD64 nowadays.

• [1] http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=366
• [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5DYuVN6nuY

Just had some time in the last two days, and here's the list of uploaded NMUs. So far, I had only one maintainer complaining (again, sorry!), but I must admit that on Sunday I just didn't follow the correct NMU procedure Anyhow, here's what I have:

1. #504824 [libnids] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: #elif used instead of #else
2. #504864 [omnievents] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
3. #504871 [bookmarkbridge] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
4. #504902 [libofa] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
5. #504943 [libassa] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
6. #504963 [libfcgi] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
7. #504970 [italc] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
8. #504973 [libspiff] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
9. #505021 [passepartout] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
10. #505078 [codeine] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
11. #505333 [gloox] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
12. #505372 [bobot++] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
13. #505420 [esteidutil] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
14. #510759 [log4cxx] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
15. #526151 [openmovieeditor] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
16. #551107 [fusecompress] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
17. #551718 [eboard] eboard: FTBFS with latest eglibc and gcc 4.4

Some highlights Most of these bugs, if not all, already had a patch attached. Thanks to Martin Michlmayr for his work on this! Regarding fusecompress, after my upload to DELAYED/2, the maintainer promptly replied asking for sponsorship of a package he already had. So this does not really count If you want to participate in this great game too, and improve our loved distribution, you can have a look at this list of possibly easy bugs to fix. Have fun!

There are few things I really hate. One of them is regressions. Regressions are bad because they usually take away things we are used to rely on, and leave us with the idea that perhaps the technical improvements didn t really improve our lifes as a user, despite putting less burden on the developers. Software is made for users, after all. As part of my work on WebKitGTK+, I always keep an eye on regressions, both from previous WebKitGTK+ releases, and those imposed on embedding applications on their migration away from Gecko, and try to focus some of my efforts into lowering their numbers, whenever I can. In recent times I have worked on removing a few very user-visible regressions in Epiphany, which I see as the most demanding WebKitGTK+ user in GNOME, such as save page not working, missing
favicon support, failing to
perform server-pushed downloads (such as GMail attachments), and not being able to view source. An example of a regression from a previous version of WebKit also exists: in 1.1.17 we started advertising more than we should as supported by the HTML5 media player, causing download to be almost completely broken. All of these are working if you are using WebKit and Epiphany from trunk/master, so should be on the next development versions of WebKitGTK+ and Epiphany. Other people have also fixed many other regressions; a few examples: Xan has reimplemented the Epiphany customization of the context menu, Frederic Peters provided a work-around for mailto: links while we don t have SoupURILoader yet, and Joanmarie Diggs keeps rocking on the accessibility front! If you find regressions, keep them coming! If you have a patch, even better! =) Next week WebKitGTK+ team gets together to work furiously on improving WebKitGTK+ in a hackfest sponsored by Collabora, and Igalia, and hosted/organized by Igalia. While there I should also get my hands on one of these. Can t wait! =)