Search Results: "ag"

21 July 2014

Tim Retout: apt-transport-tor 0.2.1

apt-transport-tor 0.2.1 should now be on your preferred unstable Debian mirror. It will let you download Debian packages through Tor. New in this release: support for HTTPS over Tor, to keep up with people.debian.org. :) I haven't mentioned it before on this blog. To get it working, you need to "apt-get install apt-transport-tor", and then use sources.list lines like so: 
deb tor+http://http.debian.net/debian unstable main
Note the use of http.debian.net in order to pick a mirror near to whichever Tor exit node. Throughput is surprisingly good. On the TODO list: reproducible builds? It would be nice to have some mirrors offer Tor hidden services, although I have yet to think about the logistics of this, such as how the load could be balanced (maybe a service like http.debian.net). I also need to look at how cowbuilder etc. can be made to play nicely with Tor. And then Debian installer support!

Francois Marier: Creating a modern tiling desktop environment using i3

Modern desktop environments like GNOME and KDE involving a lot of mousing around and I much prefer using the keyboard where I can. This is why I switched to the Ion tiling window manager back when I interned at Net Integration Technologies and kept using it until I noticed it had been removed from Debian. After experimenting with awesome for 2 years and briefly considering xmonad , I finally found a replacement I like in i3. Here is how I customized it and made it play nice with the GNOME and KDE applications I use every day.

Startup script As soon as I log into my desktop, my startup script starts a few programs, including: Because of a bug in gnome-settings-daemon which makes the mouse cursor disappear as soon as gnome-settings-daemon is started, I had to run the following to disable the offending gnome-settings-daemon plugin: 
dconf write /org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/cursor/active false

Screensaver In addition, gnome-screensaver didn't automatically lock my screen, so I installed xautolock and added it to my startup script: 
xautolock -time 30 -locker "gnome-screensaver-command --lock" &
to lock the screen using gnome-screensaver after 30 minutes of inactivity. I can also trigger it manually using the following shortcut defined in my ~/.i3/config: 
bindsym Ctrl+Mod1+l exec xautolock -locknow

Keyboard shortcuts While keyboard shortcuts can be configured in GNOME, they don't work within i3, so I added a few more bindings to my ~/.i3/config: 
# volume control
bindsym XF86AudioLowerVolume exec /usr/bin/pactl set-sink-volume @DEFAULT_SINK@ -- '-5%'
bindsym XF86AudioRaiseVolume exec /usr/bin/pactl set-sink-volume @DEFAULT_SINK@ -- '+5%'
# brightness control
bindsym XF86MonBrightnessDown exec xbacklight -steps 1 -time 0 -dec 5
bindsym XF86MonBrightnessUp exec xbacklight -steps 1 -time 0 -inc 5
bindsym XF86AudioMute exec /usr/bin/pactl set-sink-mute @DEFAULT_SINK@ toggle
# show battery stats
bindsym XF86Battery exec gnome-power-statistics
to make volume control, screen brightness and battery status buttons work as expected on my laptop. These bindings require the following packages:

Keyboard layout switcher Another thing that used to work with GNOME and had to re-create in i3 is the ability to quickly toggle between two keyboard layouts using the keyboard. To make it work, I wrote a simple shell script and assigned a keyboard shortcut to it in ~/.i3/config: 
bindsym $mod+u exec /home/francois/bin/toggle-xkbmap

Suspend script Since I run lots of things in the background, I have set my laptop to avoid suspending when the lid is closed by putting the following in /etc/systemd/login.conf: 
HandleLidSwitch=lock
Instead, when I want to suspend to ram, I use the following keyboard shortcut: 
bindsym Ctrl+Mod1+s exec /home/francois/bin/s2ram
which executes a custom suspend script to clear the clipboards (using xsel), flush writes to disk and lock the screen before going to sleep. To avoid having to type my sudo password every time pm-suspend is invoked, I added the following line to /etc/sudoers: 
francois  ALL=(ALL)  NOPASSWD:  /usr/sbin/pm-suspend

Window and workspace placement hacks While tiling window managers promise to manage windows for you so that you can focus on more important things, you will most likely want to customize window placement to fit your needs better.

Working around misbehaving applications A few applications make too many assumptions about window placement and are just plain broken in tiling mode. Here's how to automatically switch them to floating mode: 
for_window [class="VidyoDesktop"] floating enable
You can get the Xorg class of the offending application by running this command: 
xprop   grep WM_CLASS
before clicking on the window.

Keeping IM windows on the first workspace I run Pidgin on my first workspace and I have the following rule to keep any new window that pops up (e.g. in response to a new incoming message) on the same workspace: 
assign [class="Pidgin"] 1

Automatically moving workspaces when docking Here's a neat configuration blurb which automatically moves my workspaces (and their contents) from the laptop screen (eDP1) to the external monitor (DP2) when I dock my laptop: 
# bind workspaces to the right monitors
workspace 1 output DP2
workspace 2 output DP2
workspace 3 output DP2
workspace 4 output DP2
workspace 5 output DP2
workspace 6 output eDP1
You can get these output names by running: 
xrandr --display :0   grep " connected"
Finally, because X sometimes fail to detect my external monitor when docking/undocking, I also wrote a script to set the displays properly and bound it to the appropriate key on my laptop: 
bindsym XF86Display exec /home/francois/bin/external-monitor

DebConf team: Talks review and selection process. (Posted by Ren Mayorga)

Today we finished the talk selection process. We are very grateful to everyone who decided to submit talks and events for DebConf14. If you have submitted an event, please check your email :). If you have not received any confirmation regarding your talk status, please contact us on talks@debconf.org During the selection process, we bore in mind the number of talk slots during the conference, as well as maintaining a balance among the different submitted topics. We are pleased to announce that we have received a total of 115 events, of which 80 have been approved (69%). Approval means your event will be scheduled during the conference and you will have video coverage. The list of approved talks can be found on the following link: https://summit.debconf.org/debconf14/all/ If you got an email telling your talk have being approved, and your talk is not listed, don t panic. Check the status on summit, and make sure to select a track, if you have some track suggestions please mail us and tell us about it. This year, we expect to also have a sort of unconference schedule. This will take place during the designated hacking time . During that time the talks rooms will be empty, and ad hoc meetings can be scheduled on-site while we are in the Conference. The method for booking a room for your ad hoc meeting will be decided and announced later, but is expected to be flexible (i.e: open scheduling board / 1 day or less in advance booking), Please don t abuse the system: bear in mind the space will be limited, and only book your event if you gather enough people to work on your idea. Please make sure to read the email regarding your talk. :) and prepare yourself. Time is ticking and we will be happy to meet you in Portland.

Keith Packard: Glamorous Intel

Reworking Intel Glamor The original Intel driver Glamor support was based on the notion that it would be better to have the Intel driver capture any fall backs and try to make them faster than Glamor could do internally. Now that Glamor has reasonably complete acceleration, and its fall backs aren t terrible, this isn t as useful as it once was, and because this uses Glamor in a weird way, we re making the Glamor code harder to maintain. Fixing the Intel driver to not use Glamor in this way took a bit of effort; the UXA support is all tied into the overall operation of the driver. Separating out UXA functions The first task was to just identify which functions were UXA-specific by adding _uxa to their names. A couple dozen sed runs and now a bunch of the driver is looking better. Next, a pile of UXA-specific functions were actually inside the non-UXA parts of the code. Those got moved out, and a new intel_uxa.h file was created to hold all of the definitions. Finally, a few non UXA-specific functions were actually in the uxa files; those got moved over to the generic code. Removing the Glamor paths in UXA Each one of the UXA functions had a little piece of code at the top like: 
if (uxa_screen->info->flags & UXA_USE_GLAMOR)  
    int ok = 0;
    if (uxa_prepare_access(pDrawable, UXA_GLAMOR_ACCESS_RW))  
        ok = glamor_fill_spans_nf(pDrawable,
                      pGC, n, ppt, pwidth, fSorted);
        uxa_finish_access(pDrawable, UXA_GLAMOR_ACCESS_RW);
     
    if (!ok)
        goto fallback;
    return;
Pulling those out shrank the UXA code by quite a bit. Selecting Acceleration (or not) The intel driver only supported UXA before; Glamor was really just a slightly different mode for UXA. I switched the driver from using a bit in the UXA flags to having an accel variable which could be one of three options: I added ACCEL_NONE to give us a dumb frame buffer mode. That actually supports DRI3 so that we can bring up Mesa and run it under X before we have any acceleration code ready; avoiding a dependency loop when doing new hardware. All that it requires is a kernel that offers mode setting and buffer allocation. Initializing Glamor With UXA no longer supporting Glamor, it was time to plug the Glamor support into the top of the driver. That meant changing a bunch of the entry points to select appropriate Glamor or UXA functionality, instead of just calling into UXA. So, now we ve got lots of places that look like: 
        switch (intel->accel)  
#if USE_GLAMOR
        case ACCEL_GLAMOR:
                if (!intel_glamor_create_screen_resources(screen))
                        return FALSE;
                break;
#endif
#if USE_UXA
        case ACCEL_UXA:
                if (!intel_uxa_create_screen_resources(screen))
                        return FALSE;
        break;
#endif
        case ACCEL_NONE:
                if (!intel_none_create_screen_resources(screen))
                        return FALSE;
                break;
Using a switch means that we can easily elide code that isn t wanted in a particular build. Of course accel is an enum, so places which are missing one of the required paths will cause a compiler warning. It s not all perfectly clean yet; there are piles of UXA-only paths still. Making It Build Without UXA The final trick was to make the driver build without UXA turned on; that took several iterations before I had the symbols sorted out appropriately. I built the driver with various acceleration options and then tried to count the lines of source code. What I did was just list the source files named in the driver binary itself. This skips all of the header files and the render program source code, and ignores the fact that there are a bunch of #ifdef s in the uxa directory selecting between uxa, glamor and none. 
    Accel                    Lines          Size(B)
    -----------             ------          -------
    none                      7143            73039
    glamor                    7397            76540
    uxa                      25979           283777
    sna                     118832          1303904
    none legacy              14449           152480
    glamor legacy            14703           156125
    uxa legacy               33285           350685
    sna legacy              126138          1395231
The legacy addition supports i810-class hardware, which is needed for a complete driver. Along The Way, Enable Tiling for the Front Buffer While hacking the code, I discovered that the initial frame buffer allocated for the screen was created without tiling (!) because a few parameters that depend on the GTT size were not initialized until after that frame buffer was allocated. I haven t analyzed what effect this has on performance. Page Flipping and Resize Page flipping (or just flipping) means switching the entire display from one frame buffer to another. It s generally the fastest way of updating the screen as you don t have to copy any bits. The trick with flipping is that a client hands you a random pixmap and you need to stuff that into the KMS API. With UXA, that s pretty easy as all pixmaps are managed through the UXA API which knows which underlying kernel BO is tied with each pixmap. Using Glamor, only the underlying GL driver knows the mapping. Fortunately (?), we have the EGL Image extension, which lets us take a random GL texture and turn it into a file descriptor for a DMA-BUF kernel object. So, we have this cute little dance: 
fd = glamor_fd_from_pixmap(screen,
                               pixmap,
                               &stride,
                               &size);
bo = drm_intel_bo_gem_create_from_prime(intel->bufmgr, fd, size);
    close(fd);
    intel_glamor_get_pixmap(pixmap)->bo = bo;
That last bit remembers the bo in some local memory so we don t have to do this more than once for each pixmap. glamorfdfrompixmap ends up calling eglCreateImageKHR followed by gbmbo_import and then a kernel ioctl to convert a prime handle into an fd. It s all quite round-about, but it does seem to work just fine. After I d gotten Glamor mostly working, I tried a few OpenGL applications and discovered flipping wasn t working. That turned out to have an unexpected consequence all full-screen applications would run flat-out, and not be limited to frame rate. Present recovers from a failed flip queue operation by immediately performing a CopyArea; not waiting for vblank. This needs to get fixed in Present by having it re-queued the CopyArea for the right time. What I did in the intel driver was to add a bunch more checks for tiling mode, pixmap stride and other things to catch pixmaps that were going to fail before the operation was queued and forcing them to fall back to CopyArea at the right time. The second adventure was with XRandR. Glamor has an API to fix up the screen pixmap for a new frame buffer, but that pulls the size of the frame buffer out of the pixmap instead of out of the screen. XRandR leaves the pixmap size set to the old screen size during this call; fixing that just meant getting the pixmap size set correctly before calling into glamor. I think glamor should get fixed to use the screen size rather than the pixmap size. Painting Root before Mode set The X server has generally done initialization in one order:
  1. Create root pixmap
  2. Set video modes
  3. Paint root window
Recently, we ve added a -background none option to the X server which causes it to set the root window background to none and have the driver fill in that pixmap with whatever contents were on the screen before the X server started. In a pre-Glamor world, that was done by hacking the video driver to copy the frame buffer console contents to the root pixmap as it was created. The trouble here is that the root pixmap is created long before the upper layers of the X server are ready for drawing, so you can t use the core rendering paths. Instead, UXA had kludges to call directly into the acceleration functions. What we really want though is to change the order of operations:
  1. Create root pixmap
  2. Paint root window
  3. Set video mode
That way, the normal root window painting operation will take care of getting the image ready before that pixmap is ever used for scanout. I can use regular core X rendering to get the original frame buffer contents into the root window, and even if we re not using -background none and are instead painting the root with some other pattern (like the root weave), I get that presented without an intervening black flash. That turned out to be really easy just delay the call to I830EnterVT (which sets the modes) until the server is actually running. That required one additional kludge I needed to tell the DIX level RandR functions about the new modes; the mode setting operation used during server init doesn t call up into RandR as RandR lists the current configuration after the screen has been initialized, which is when the modes used to be set. Calling xf86RandR12CreateScreenResources does the trick nicely. Getting the root window bits from fbcon, setting video modes and updating the RandR/Xinerama DIX info is now all done from the BlockHandler the first time it is called. Performance I ran the current glamor version of the intel driver with the master branch of the X server and there were not any huge differences since my last Glamor performance evaluation aside from GetImage. The reason is that UXA/Glamor never called Glamor s image functions, and the UXA GetImage is pretty slow. Using Mesa s image download turns out to have a huge performance benefit: 
1. UXA/Glamor from April
2. Glamor from today
       1                 2                 Operation
------------   -------------------------   -------------------------
     50700.0        56300.0 (     1.110)   ShmGetImage 10x10 square 
     12600.0        26200.0 (     2.079)   ShmGetImage 100x100 square 
      1840.0         4250.0 (     2.310)   ShmGetImage 500x500 square 
      3290.0          202.0 (     0.061)   ShmGetImage XY 10x10 square 
        36.5          170.0 (     4.658)   ShmGetImage XY 100x100 square 
         1.5           56.4 (    37.600)   ShmGetImage XY 500x500 square 
     49800.0        50200.0 (     1.008)   GetImage 10x10 square 
      5690.0        19300.0 (     3.392)   GetImage 100x100 square 
       609.0         1360.0 (     2.233)   GetImage 500x500 square 
      3100.0          206.0 (     0.066)   GetImage XY 10x10 square 
        36.4          183.0 (     5.027)   GetImage XY 100x100 square 
         1.5           55.4 (    36.933)   GetImage XY 500x500 square
Running UXA from today the situation is even more dire; I suspect that enabling tiling has made CPU reads through the GTT even worse than before? 
1: UXA today
2: Glamor today
       1                 2                 Operation
------------   -------------------------   -------------------------
     43200.0        56300.0 (     1.303)   ShmGetImage 10x10 square 
      2600.0        26200.0 (    10.077)   ShmGetImage 100x100 square 
       130.0         4250.0 (    32.692)   ShmGetImage 500x500 square 
      3260.0          202.0 (     0.062)   ShmGetImage XY 10x10 square 
        36.7          170.0 (     4.632)   ShmGetImage XY 100x100 square 
         1.5           56.4 (    37.600)   ShmGetImage XY 500x500 square 
     41700.0        50200.0 (     1.204)   GetImage 10x10 square 
      2520.0        19300.0 (     7.659)   GetImage 100x100 square 
       125.0         1360.0 (    10.880)   GetImage 500x500 square 
      3150.0          206.0 (     0.065)   GetImage XY 10x10 square 
        36.1          183.0 (     5.069)   GetImage XY 100x100 square 
         1.5           55.4 (    36.933)   GetImage XY 500x500 square
Of course, this is all just x11perf, which doesn t represent real applications at all well. However, there are applications which end up doing more GetImage than would seem reasonable, and it s nice to have this kind of speed up. Status I m running this on my crash box to get some performance numbers and continue testing it. I ll switch my desktop over when I feel a bit more comfortable with how it s working. But, I think it s feature complete at this point. Where s the Code As usual, the code is in my personal repository. It s on the glamor branch. 
git://people.freedesktop.org/~keithp/xf86-video-intel  glamor

Andrew Pollock: [debian] Day 173: Investigation for bug #749410 and fixing my VMs

I have a couple of virt-manager virtual machines for doing DHCP-related work. I have one for the DHCP server and one for the DHCP client, and I have a private network between the two so I can simulate DHCP requests without messing up anything else. It works nicely. I got a bit carried away, and I use LVM to snapshots for the work I do, so that when I'm done I can throw away the virtual machine's disks and work with a new snapshot next time I want to do something. I have a cron job, that on a good day, fires up the virtual machines using the master logical volumes and does a dist-upgrade on a weekly basis. It seems to have varying degrees of success though. So I fired up my VMs to do some investigation of the problem for #749410 and discovered that they weren't booting, because the initramfs couldn't find the root filesystem. Upon investigation, the problem seemed to be that the logical volumes weren't getting activated. I didn't get to the bottom of why, but a manual activation of the logical volumes allowed the instances to continue booting successfully, and after doing manual dist-upgrades and kernel upgrades, they booted cleanly again. I'm not sure if I got hit by a passing bug in unstable, or what the problem was. I did burn about 2.5 hours just fixing everything up though. Then I realised that there'd been more activity on the bug since I'd last read it while I was on vacation, and half the investigation I needed to do wasn't necessary any more. Lesson learned. I haven't got to the bottom of the bug yet, but I had a fun day anyway.

20 July 2014

Paul Tagliamonte: Plymouth Bootsplashes

Why oh why are they so hard to write? Even using the built in modules it is insanely hard to debug. Playing a bootsplash in X sucks and my machine boots too fast to test it on reboot. Basically, euch. All I wanted was a hackers zebra on boot :(

Laura Arjona: Upgrading my laptop to Debian Jessie

Some days ago I decided to upgrade my laptop from stable to testing. I had tried Jessie since several months, in my husband s laptop, but that was a fresh install, and a not-so-old laptop, and we have not much software installed there. In my netbook (Compaq Mini 110c), with stable, I already had installed Pumpa, Dianara and how-can-i-help from testing, and since the freeze is coming, I thought that I could full-upgrade and use Jessie from now on, and report my issues and help to diagnose or fix them, if possible, before the freeze. I keep Debian stable at work for my desktop and servers (well, some of them are still in oldstable, thanks LTS team!!), and I have testing in a laptop that I use as clonezilla/drbl server (but I had issues, next week I ll put some time on them and I ll write here my findings, and report bugs, if any). So! let s go. Here I write my experience and the issues that I found (very few! and not sure if they are bugs or configuration problems or what, I ll keep an eye on them). The upgrade I pointed my /etc/apt/sources.list to jessie, then apt-get update, then apt-get dist-upgrade. (With the servers I am much more careful, read the release notes, upgrade guides and so, or directly I go for a fresh install, but with my laptop, I am too lazy). I went to bed (wow, risky LArjona!) and when I got up for going to work, the laptop was waiting for me to accept to block root from ssh access, or restart some services, and so. Ok! the upgrade resumed but I have to go to work and I wanted my laptop! Since all the packages were already downloaded, I closed the lid (double risky LArjona!) unplugged it, put everything in my bag, and catched the bus in time :) At the bus, I opened again the lid of my laptop (crossing fingers!) and perfect, the laptop had suspended and returned back to life, and the upgrade just resumed with no problem. Wow! I love you Debian! After 15 minutes, I had to suspend again, since the bus arrived and I had to take the metro. In the metro, the upgrade resumed, and finished. I shutdown my laptop and arrive to work. Testing testing :) In a break for lunch, I opened my brand new laptop (the hardware is the same, but the software totally renewed, so it s brand new for me). I have to say that use xfce, with some GNOME/GTK apps installed (gedit, cheese, evince, XChat ) and some others that use Qt or are part of the KDE project (Okular, Kile, QtLinguist, Pumpa, Dianara). I don t know/care too much about desktops and tweaking my desktop: I just put the terminal and gedit in black background, Debian wallpaper is enough dark for me so ok, put the font size a bit smaller to better use my low-vertical-resolution, and that s all, I only go to configure something else if there s something that really annoys me. My laptop booted correctly and a nice, more modern LightDM was greeting me. I logged in and everything worked ok, except some issues that follow. Network Manager and WPA2-enterprise wireless connections I had to reconfigure some wireless connections in Network Manager. At the University we use WPA2-enterprise, TTLS + PAP. I had stored my username and password in the connection, and network manager seemed to remember the username but not the password. No problem, I said, and I wrote it when it asked, but the Save or OK button was greyed out. I could not click it. Then I went to edit the connections, and more or less the same, it seems that I could edit, but not save the (new) configuration. Finally, I removed the wireless connection and created it again, and everything worked as a charm. This, I had to do it with the two wireless in my University (both of them are WPA2-enterprise TTLS + PAP). At home, I have WPA2 personal, and I had no issues, everything worked ok. This problem is not appearing in a fresh install, since there are no old configs to keep. Adblock Plus not working any more I opened Iceweasel and I began to see ads in the webpages that I visited. What? I checked and Adblock plus was installed and activated I reinstalled the package xul-ext-adblock-plus and it worked again. Strange display in programs based on Qt When I opened Pumpa I noticed that the edges of the windows where too rough, as if it was not using a desktop theme. I asked to a friend that uses Plasma and he suggested to install qt4-qtconfig, and then, select a theme for my Qt apps. It worked like a charm, but I find strange that I didn t need it before in stable. Maybe the default xfce configuration from stable is setting a theme, and the new one is not setting it, and so, the Qt apps are left barefoot .
With qtconfig I chose a GTK+ Style GUI for my Qt apps and then, they looked similar to what I had in stable (frankly, I cannot say if it was similar or exactly the same , but I didn t find them strange as before, so I m fine). Strange display in programs from GNOME Well, this is not a Jessie problem, it s just that some programs adopted the new GNOME appearance, and since I m on xfce, not on GNOME, they look a bit strange (no menus integration, and so). I am not sure that I can run GNOME (fallback, classic?) in my 1 GB RAM laptop, I have to investigate if I can tweak it to use less memory, or what. I m not very tied to xfce, and in fact it does not look so light (well, on top of it, I don t run light programs, I run Iceweasel, Icedove, Libreoffice, and some others). At work I use GNOME in my desktop, but with GNOME shell, not the fallback or classic modes, so I m thinking about giving a chance to MATE or second chance to LXDE. We ll see. Issues when opening the lid (waking up from suspend) This is the most strange thing I found in the migration, and the most dangerous one, I think. As I said before, I don t tweak too much my desktop, if it works with the default configuration. I m not sure that I know the differences between suspend, hibernate, hard disks disconnections and so. When I was in stable, and I closed the lid of my laptop, it just shutdown the screen, then I heard something like the system going to suspend or whatever, and after some seconds, the harddisk and fans stop, the wireless led turns off, and the power led begins to blink. Ok. When I open the lid, then it was waking up itself (the power led stayed on, the wireless led turns on, and when I tap the touchpad or type anything, the screen was coming, with the xscreensaver asking for my password). Just sometimes, when the screen was turning on, I could see my desktop for less than a second, before xscreensaver turns the background black and asks for the password. Now since I migrated to Jessie, I m experiencing a different behavior. When I close the lid, the laptop behaves the same. When I open the lid, the laptop behaves the same, but when I type or tap the touchpad and xscreensaver comes to ask the password, before than I can type it, the laptop just suspends again (or hibernates, I m not sure), and I have to press the power button in order to bring it back to life (then I see the xscreensaver again asking for the password, I type it, and my desktop is there, the same as I left it when I closed the lid). Strange, isn t it? I have tried to suspend my laptop directly from the menu, and it comes to the same state in which I have to press the power button in order to bring it back to life, but then, no xscreensaver password is required (which is double strange, IMHO). Things I miss in Jessie Well, until now, the only thing I miss in Jessie is the software center. I rarely use it (I love apt) but I think it makes a good job in easing the installation of programs in Debian for people coming from other operative systems (specially after smartphones and their copied software stores became popular). I hope the maintainer can upload a new version before the freeze, and so, it enters in the release. I ll try to contact him. Update 2014/07/20: Julian Andres Klode, maintainer of software-center, just replied (see his comment below) and pointed to GNOME Software (gnome-packagekit) as alternative. I just installed and it looks neat and nice. I m very happy! TODO I have a Debian stable laptop at work (this one with xfce + GNOME), I ll try to upgrade it and see if I see the same problems that I notice in mine. Then, I ll check the corresponding packages to see if there are open bugs about them, and if not, report them to their maintainers. I have to review the wiki pages related to the Jessie Desktop theme selection, I think they wanted the wallpaper to be inside before the freeze. Maybe I can help in publicity about that, handle the votings and so. I like Joy, but it s time to change a bit, new fresh air into the room!
Filed under: My experiences and opinion Tagged: Contributing to libre software, Debian, English, Free Software, Moving into free software

John Goerzen: Beautiful Earth

Sometimes you see something that takes your breath away, maybe even makes your eyes moist. That happened when I saw this photo one morning: Sunrise on the Prairie Photography has been one of my hobbies since I was a child, and I ve enjoyed it all these years. Recently I was inspired by the growing ease of aerial photography using model aircraft, and now can fly two short-range RC quadcopters. That photo came from the first one, and despite being a low-res 1280 720 camera, tha image of our home in the yellow glow of sunrise brought a deep feeling a beauty and peace. DJI00196 Somehow seeing our home surrounded by the beauty of the immense wheat fields and green pastures drives home how small we all are in comparison to the vastness of the earth, and how lucky we are to inhabit this beautiful planet. DJI00204 As the sun starts to come up over the pasture, the only way you can tell the height of the grass at 300ft is to see the shadow it makes on the mowed pathway Laura and I use to get down to the creek. DJI00149 This is a view of our church in a small town nearby the church itself is right in the center of the photo. Off to the right, you see the grain elevators that can be seen for miles across the Kansas prairie, and of course the fields are never all that far off in the background. Here you can see the quadcopter taking off from the driveway: And here it is flying over my home church out in the country: DJI00120 That s the country church, at the corner of two gravel roads with its lighted cross facing east that can be seen from a mile away at night. To the right is the church park, and the green area along the road farther back is the church cemetery. DJI00063 Sometimes we get in debates about environmental regulations, politics, religion, whatever. We hear stories of missiles, guns, and destruction. It is sad, this damage we humans inflict on ourselves and our earth. Our earth our home is worth saving. Its stunning beauty from all its continents is evidence enough of that. To me, this photo of a small corner of flat Kansas is proof enough that the home we all share deserves to be treated well, and saved so that generations to come can also get damp eyes viewing its beauty from a new perspective. DJI00183

Thomas Goirand: sysvinit not sending output to all consoles

I spent many, many hours trying to understand why I couldn t have both nova console-log showing me the output of the log, AND have the OpenStack dashboard (eg: horizon) console to work at the same time. Normally, this is done very easily, by passing multiple times the console= parameter to the Linux kernel as follow: 
console=tty0 console=ttyS0,115200
But it never worked. Always, it s the last console= thing that was taken into account by sysvinit (or, shall I say, bootlogd). Spending hours trying to figure out what would be the correct kernel command to pass didn t help. Then this week-end, by the magic pure chance of being subscribed to the sysvinit bug reports, I have finally found out. We ve had this bug in Debian for more than 10 years: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=181756 And it has the patch! It just feels so lame that the issue has been pending since 2003, and with a patch since 2006, and nobody even tried to have it enter Debian. I tried the Wheezy patch in the above bug report, and then tadaaaaaa! I finally had both the nova console-log (eg: ttyS0) console output, and the interactive tty0 to work on my Debian cloud image. I have produced a fixed version of the sysvinit package for Wheezy, if anyone wants to try it: http://archive.gplhost.com/debian/pool/juno-backports/main/s/sysvinit/ This doesn t only affect only the cloud images use case. Let s say you have a server. If it s a modern server, probably you have IPMI 2.0 on it. While having access through the integrated KVM over IP may be nice, seeing the boot process through the serial console redirection is often a lot more snappy than the (often VNC based) video output, plus it wouldn t require Java. Too often, Java a requirement for these nasty IPMI web interface (that s the case for at least: Dell DRAC, Supermicro IMPI, and HP iLO). Well, it should now be possible to just use ipmitools to debug the server boot process or to go fix stuff in the single user interactive shell, AND keep the normal video output! :) But keeping this fix private doesn t help much. I would really love to get this fixed within Debian. So I have sent the patch (which needed a very small rebase) in the Git repository of sysvinit (see http://deb.li/3YxUD). I of course tested it in Sid too. Though I tested only under a Xen virtual machine, I see no reason why it would work there and not elsewhere. That being said, I would welcome more testing, given the high profile of sysvinit (everyone uses/needs it, and I wouldn t like to carry alone the unhappiness of having no boot log). Please do test it from the sysvinit git, before it s even uploaded to Sid. Also, these days, sysvinit gets often uploaded to Experimental first. It will probably also be the case for version 2.88dsf-56. If it works well and nobody complains about the patch, maybe it d be worth adding it to Wheezy as well (though that decision is of course left to the release team once the fix reaches Jessie).

19 July 2014

Steve Kemp: Did you know xine will download and execute scripts?

Today I was poking around the source of Xine, the well-known media player. During the course of this poking I spotted that Xine has skin support - something I've been blissfully ignorant of for many years. How do these skins work? You bring up the skin-browser, by default this is achieved by pressing "Ctrl-d". The browser will show you previews of the skins available, and allow you to install them. How does Xine know what skins are available? It downloads the contents of: NOTE: This is an insecure URL. The downloaded file is a simple XML thing, containing references to both preview-images and download locations. For example the theme "Sunset" has the following details: if you choose to install the skin the Sunset.tar.gz file is downloaded, via HTTP, extracted, and the shell-script doinst.sh is executed, if present. So if you control DNS on your LAN you can execute arbitrary commands if you persuade a victim to download your "corporate xine theme". Probably a low-risk attack, but still a surprise.

Jo Shields: Transition tracker

Friday was my last day at Collabora, the awesome Open Source consultancy in Cambridge. I d been there more than three years, and it was time for a change. As luck would have it, that change came in the form of a job offer 3 months ago from my long-time friend in Open Source, Miguel de Icaza. Monday morning, I fly out to Xamarin s main office in Boston, for just over a week of induction and face time with my new co workers, as I take on the title of Release Engineer. My job is to make sure Mono on Linux is a first-class citizen, rather than the best-effort it s been since Xamarin was formed from the ashes of the Attachmate/Novell deal. I m thrilled to work full-time on what I do already as community work including making Mono great on Debian/Ubuntu and hope to form new links with the packer communities in other major distributions. And I m delighted that Xamarin has chosen to put its money where its mouth is and fund continued Open Source development surrounding Mono. If you re in the Boston area next week or the week after, ping me via the usual methods! IMG_20140719_203043

Vasudev Kamath: Stop messing with my settings Network Manager

I use a laptop with Atheros wifi card with ath9k driver. I use hostapd to convert my laptop wifi into AP (Access point) so I can share network with my Nexus 7 and Kindle. This has been working fine for quite some time till my recent update. After recent system update (I use Debian Sid), I couldn't for some reason convert my wifi into AP so my device can connect. I can't find anything in log nor in hostapd debug messages which is useful to trouble shoot the issue. Every time I start the laptop my wifi card will be blocked by RF-KILL and I have manually unblock (both hard and soft). The script which I use to convert my Wifi into AP is below 
#Initial wifi interface configuration
ifconfig "$1" up 192.168.2.1 netmask 255.255.255.0
sleep 2
# start dhcp
sudo systemctl restart dnsmasq.service
iptables --flush
iptables --table nat --flush
iptables --delete-chain
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o "$2" -j MASQUERADE
iptables -A FORWARD -i "$1" -j ACCEPT
sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
#start hostapd
hostapd /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf  &> /dev/null &
I tried rebooting the laptop and for some time I managed to convert my wifi into AP, I noticed at same time that Network Manager is not started once laptop is booted, yeah this also started happening after recent upgrade which I guess is the black magic of systemd. After some time I noticed wifi has went down and now I can't bring it up because its blocked by RF-KILL. After checking the syslog I noticed following lines. 
Jul 18 23:09:30 rudra kernel: [ 1754.891060] IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): wlan0: link becomes ready
Jul 18 23:09:30 rudra NetworkManager[5485]: <info> (mon.wlan0): using nl80211 for WiFi device control
Jul 18 23:09:30 rudra NetworkManager[5485]: <info> (mon.wlan0): driver supports Access Point (AP) mode
Jul 18 23:09:30 rudra NetworkManager[5485]: <info> (mon.wlan0): new 802.11 WiFi device (driver: 'ath9k' ifindex: 10)
Jul 18 23:09:30 rudra NetworkManager[5485]: <info> (mon.wlan0): exported as /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/Devices/8
Jul 18 23:09:30 rudra NetworkManager[5485]: <info> (mon.wlan0): device state change: unmanaged -> unavailable (reason 'managed') [10 20 2]
Jul 18 23:09:30 rudra NetworkManager[5485]: <info> (mon.wlan0): preparing device
Jul 18 23:09:30 rudra NetworkManager[5485]: <info> devices added (path: /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1c.1/0000:04:00.0/net/mon.wlan0, iface: mon.wlan0)
Jul 18 23:09:30 rudra NetworkManager[5485]: <info> device added (path: /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1c.1/0000:04:00.0/net/mon.wlan0, iface: mon.wlan0): no ifupdown configuration found.
Jul 18 23:09:33 rudra ModemManager[891]: <warn>  Couldn't find support for device at '/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1c.1/0000:04:00.0': not supported by any plugin
Well I couldn't figure out much but it looks like NetworkManager has come up and after seeing interface mon.wlan0, a monitoring interface created by hostapd to monitor the AP goes mad and tries to do something with it. I've no clue what it is doing and don't have enough patience to debug that. Probably some expert can give me hints on this. So as a last resort I purged the NetworkManager completely from the system and settled back to good old wicd and rebooted the system. After reboot wifi card is happy and is not blocked by RF-KILL and now I can convert it AP and use it as long as I wish without any problems. Wicd is not a great tool but its good enough to get the job done and does only what is asked to it unlike the NetworkManager. So in short
NetworkManager please stop f***ing with my settings and stop acting oversmart.

18 July 2014

Dominique Dumont: Looking for help to package Perl6, moar and others for Debian

Let s face reality: I cannot find the time to properly maintain Perl6 related packages for Debian. Given the recent surge of popularity of rakudo, it would be a shame to let these packages rot. Instead of throwing the towel, I d rather call for help to maintain these packages. You don t need to be a Debian Developer or Maintainer: I will gladly review and upload packages. The following packages are looking for maintainer: Next step to help Perl6 on Debian is to join: All the best
Tagged: debian, package, Perl6

Osamu Aoki: Debian does not boot ...Crucial/Micron RealSSD m4/C400/P400

Today, my PC did not boot as usual to Debian. BIOS could not find my /dev/sda and was looking for the netboot image. I restarted my PC and got into the BIOS boot setting menu. Hmmm.... my first SDD (/dev/sda) was missing. My second HDD (/dev/sdb) was there. But I did not put the Grub boot-loader there. No wonder it did not boot.

I have a 32GB USB3 stick with the full Debian system. It is not a live CD image USB stick but a HDD formatted and encrypted system. Though it is not the fastest system, it is very light and usable. I plugged it in and powered it up. It booted OK but /dev/sda was still missing. While it booted, I saw "ata1: COMRESET failed (errorno=-16)" . So this ata1 SSD cannot be accessed from BIOS nor Linux. Sigh ...

Looking around the web under the USB stick system, I saw some people were talking that the loose serial ATA cable sometimes causes this message. Since my PC is a laptop, It has no flexible cable but has an on-board connector inside for the SSD.

Hoping my problem is just a bad connection problem, I crack opened the back panel of my PC. The SSD looked fine. I unplugged it from the connector and reinserted back into the connector. After repeating this several times to be sure, I closed the back panel and booted.

It boots as expected into Debian. Looks like everything is fine.
SMART Error Log Version: 1
No Errors Logged
Good.

If you have any boot problem like mine, please reinsert your SSD to the connector like I did before you panic.

Good luck.

Osamu

PS: This Crucial/Micron RealSSD m4/C400/P400 M4-CT256M4SSD2 previously had a problem. A firmware bug made it read-only. The firmware updates fixed my Debian system on this SSD. I could fix this without Win*** OS since the firmware update was on a bootable disk image file.

Mario Lang: Croudsourced accessibility: Self-made digital menus

Something straight out from the real world: Menu cards in restaurants are not nice to deal with if you are blind. It is an old problem we grow used to ignoring over time, but still something that can be quite nagging. There are a lot of psychological issues involved in this one. Of course, you can ask for the menu to be read out to you by the staff. While they usually do their best, you end up missing out on some things most of the time. First of all, depending on the current workload in the restaurant, the staff will usually try to cut some time and not read everything to you. What they usually do is to try to understand what type of meal you are interested in, and just read the choices from that category to you. While this can be considered a service in some situations (human preprocessing), there are situations were you will definitely miss a highlight on the menu that you would have liked to choose if you knew that it was there. And even if the staff decides to read the complete menu to you (which is rare), you are confronted with the 7-things-in-my-head-at-once problem. It is usually rather hard to decide amongst a list of more then 7 items, because our short-term memory is sort of limited. What the sighted restaurant goers do, is to skip back and forth between the available options, until they hit a decisive moment. True, that can take a while, but it is definitely a lot easier if you can perform "random access reads" to the list of choices yourself. However, if someone presents a substantial number of choices to you in a row, as sequential speech, you loose the random access ability. You either remember every choice from the beginning and do your choosing mentaully (if you do have extraordinary mental abilities), or you end up asking the staff to read previous items aloud again. This can work, but usually it doesn't. At some point, you do not want to bother the staff anymore, and you even start to feel stupid for asking again and again, while this is something totally normal to every sighted person, just that "they" do their "random access browsing" on their own, so "they" have no need to feel bad about how long it takes them to decide, minus the typical social pressure that arises after a a certain time for everyone, at least if you are dining in a group. In very rare cases, you happen to meet staff that is truly "awake", doing their best to not let you feel that they might be pressed on time, and really taking as much time as necessary to help you make the perfect decision. This is rare, but if it happens, it is almost a magical moment. One of these moments, where there are no "artificial" barriers between humans doing communcation. Anyway, I am drifting away. The perfect solution to this problem is to provide random access browsing of a restaurant menu with the help of digital devices. Trying to make braille menus available in all restaurants is a goal which is not realistically reachable. Menus go out of date, and need changing. And getting a physical braille copy updated and reprinted is considerably more involved as with digital media. Restaurant owners will also likely not see the benefit to rpvide a braille card for a very small circle of customers. With a digital online menu, that is a completely different story. These days, almost every blind person in at least my social circles owns an iOS (or similar) device. These devices have speech synthesis and web browsers. Of course, some restaurants especially in urban areas do already have a menu online. I have found them manually with google and friends sometimes in the past, which has already given me the ability to actually sit back, and really comfortably choose amongst the available offerings myself, without having to bother a human, and without having to feel bad about (ab)using their time. However, the case where a restaurant really has their menu online is rather rare still in the area where I am. And, it can be tedious to google for a restaurant website. Sometimes, the website itself is just marginally accessible, which makes it even more frustrating to get a relaxed dinner-experience. I have discovered a location-based solution for the restaurant-menu problem recently. Foursquare offers the ability to provide a direct link to the menu in a restaurant-entry. I figured, since all you need to do is write a single webpage where the (common) menu items are listed per restaurant, that I could begin to create restaurant menus for my favourite locations, on my own. Well, not quite, but almost. I will sometimes need help from others to get the menu digitized, but that's just a one-time piece of work I hopefully can outsource :-). Once the actual content is in my INBUX, I create a nice HTML page listing the menu in a rather speech-based browser friendly way. I have begun to do this today, with the menu of a restaurant just about 500 meters away from my apartment. Unterm goldenen Dachl now has a menu online, and the foursquare change request to publish the corresponsing URL is already pending. I don't fully understand how the Foursquare change review process works yet, but I hope the URL should be published in the upcoming days/weeks. I am using Foursquare because it is the backend of a rather popular mobile navigation App for blind people, called Blindsquare. Blindsquare lets you comfortably use Open Street Map and Foursquare data to get an overview of your surroundingds. If a food place has a menu entry listed in Foursquare, Blindsquare conveniently shows it to you and opens a browser if you tap it. So there is no need to actually search for the restaurant, you can just use the location based search of Blindsquare to discover the restaurant entry and its menu link directly from within Blindsquare. Actually, you could even find a restaurant by accident, and with a little luck, find the menu for it by location, without even knowing how the restaurant is called. Isn't that neat? Yeah, that's how it is supposed to work, that's as much independence as you can get. And, it is, as the title suggests, croudsourced accessibility. Becuase while it is nice if a restaurant owner cares to publish their menu themselves, if they haven't, you can do it yourself. Either as a user of assistive technologies, to scratch your own itch. Or as a friend of a person with a need for assistive technologies. Next time you go to lunch with your blind friend, consider making available the menu to them digitally in advance, instead of reading it. Other people will likely thank you for that, and you have actually achieved something today. And if you happne to put a menu online, make sure to submit a change request to Foursquare. Many blind people are using blindsquare these days, which makes it super-easy for them to discover the menu.

17 July 2014

Jonathan McDowell: On the state of Free VoIP

Every now and then I decide I'll try and sort out my VoIP setup. And then I give up. Today I tried again. I really didn't think I was aiming that high. I thought I'd start by making my email address work as a SIP address. Seems reasonable, right? I threw in the extra constraints of wanting some security (so TLS, not UDP) and a soft client that would work on my laptop (I have a Grandstream hardphone and would like an Android client as well, but I figure those are the easy cases while the "I have my laptop and I want to remain connected" case is a bit trickier). I had a suitable Internet connected VM, access to control my DNS fully (so I can do SRV records) and time to read whatever HOWTOs required. And oh my ghod the state of the art is appalling. Let's start with getting a SIP server up and running. I went with repro which seemed to be a reasonably well recommended SIP server to register against. And mostly getting it up and running and registering against it is fine. Until you try and make a TLS SIP call through it (to a sip5060.net test address). Problem the first; the StartCom free SSL certs are not suitable because they don't advertise TLS Client. So I switch to CACert. And then I get bitten by the whole question about whether the common name on the cert should be the server name, or the domain name on the SIP address (it's the domain name on the SIP address apparently, though that might make your SIP client complain). That gets the SIP side working. Of course RTP is harder. repro looks like it's doing the right thing. The audio never happens. I capitulate at this point, and install Lumicall on my phone. That registers correctly and I can call the sip:test.time@sip5060.net test number and hear the time. So the server is functioning, it's the client that's a problem. I try the following (Debian/testing): I'm bored at this point. Can I "dial" my debian.org SIP address from Lumicall? Of course not; I get a "Codecs incompatible" (SIP 488 Not Acceptable Here) response. I have no idea what that means. I seem to have all of the options on Lumicall enabled. Is it a NAT thing? A codec thing? Did I sacrifice the wrong colour of goat? At some point during this process I get a Skype call from some friends, which I answer. Up comes a video call with them, their newborn, perfect audio, and no hassle. I have a conversation with them that doesn't involve me cursing technology at all. And then I go back to fighting with SIP. Gunnar makes the comment about Skype creating a VoIP solution 10 years ago when none was to be found. I believe they're still the market leader. It just works. I'm running the Linux client, and they're maintaining it (a little behind the curve, but close enough), and it works for text chat, voice chat and video calls. I've spent half a day trying to get a Free equivalent working and failing. I need something that works behind NAT, because it's highly likely when I'm on the move that's going to be the case. I want something that lets my laptop be the client, because I don't want to rely on my mobile phone. I want my email address to also be my VoIP address. I want some security (hell, I'm not even insisting on SRTP, though I'd like to). And the state of the Open VoIP stack just continues to make me embarrassed. I haven't given up yet, but I'd appreciate some pointers. And Skype, if you're hiring, drop me a line. ;)

Christian Perrier: OpenAmbit now in Debian (for owners of Suunto Ambit sport watches)

I recently bought a Suunto Ambit 2 sport watch for my running activities, replacing my good old Garmin ForeRunner 405 whose battery life wasn't longer in sync with the length of some of my runs... Ambit 2 watches have up to 50 hours autonomy, which is great for long races, as well as a barometric altitude recording, which is way more precise that GPS-based altitude recording. Both these are keys for mountain running, indeed... Sadly, Suunto only provides software for Windows and the software is mandatory to use in order to sync the watch logs and settings with Movescount.com, the Suunto web site. Even more: any change to the watch settings has to be done through Movescount, which means that without software, you can't really use the watch....:-( Thankfully, a few people have worked on an "OpenAmbit" project (www.openambit.org) that's aimed at dealing with this and provide Linux users with a way to sync their watches without requiring a Windows computer. And, as you may imagine, I wanted to package it for Debian. Indeed, some packaging work had already been done for Ubuntu, in a PPA, by Dominik Stadler at https://launchpad.net/~dominik-stadler/+archive/dsta-trusty-ppa. Still, I wanted this to go the preferred way of the official archive for the software to get more visibility. Finally, after a few failures (doh, how picky are our FTPmasters about licenses.....which is a Good Thing!), OpenAmbit landed in unstable one week ago. This is as of now the 0.2 version, that doesn't work with the most recent versions of Suunto firmwares. However, a 0.2+20140606 version is on its way and....it works with my watch..:-) So, Yet Another Success for the pkg-running-devel packaging team in Debian, once again proving that Debian developers are also deeply interested in physical activities..:-) And, also, this is a proof that I'm not yet only running and no longer working for Debian....

Daniel Pocock: MH17 and the elephant in the room

Just last week, air passengers were told of intrusive new checks on their electronic devices when flying. For years, passengers have also suffered bans on basic essentials like drinking water and excesses like the patting down of babies that even Jimmy Saville would find offensive. Of course, all this is being done for public safety. So if western leaders claim the safety and security of their citizens is really their number one priority, just how is it that a passenger aircraft can be flying through a war zone where two other planes were shot down this month? When it comes to aviation security, this really is the elephant in the room. The MH17 tragedy today demonstrates that terror always finds a way. It is almost like the terrorists can have their cake and eat it too: they force "free" countries to give up their freedoms and public decency and then they still knock the occasional plane out of the sky anyway. History in the making? It is 100 years since the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand started World War I and just over 50 years since the Cuban missile crisis. Will this incident also achieve similar notoriety in history? The downing of MH17 may well have been a "mistake" but the casualties are real and very tragic indeed. I've flown with Malaysia Airlines many times, including the same route MH17 and feel a lot of sympathy for these people who have been affected.

Tiago Bortoletto Vaz: HOPE X ical for schedule

As Adirondack (train line MTL-NYC) is not Internet-friendly for RSS feeds I can't profit of my ~11h travelling to check this huge schedule in the way I want to, (= having a timetable view including room, description and speakers). HOPE X has just released a pdf and a xls (wtf??), but these contain only titles and room. So I've coded an ics generator to process their feed. The result file is available at http://acaia.ca/hopex.ics and should be up to date with the original RSS.

Craig Small: No more dspam, now what?

I was surprised at first to see that a long-standing bug in dspam had been fixed. Until that is, I realised it was from the Debian ftp masters and the reason the bug was closing was that dspam was being removed from the Debian archive. Damn! So, now what? What is a good replacement for dspam that is actually maintained? I don t need anti-virus because mutt just ignores those sorts of things and besides youbankdetails.zip.exe doesn t run too well on Debian. dspam basically used tokens to find common patterns of spam and ham, with you bouncing misses so it learnt from its mistakes. Already got postgrey running for greylisting so its really something that does the bayesan filtering. Some intial comments: There really is only me on the mailserver with a pretty light load so no need to worry about efficiencies. Not sure if it matters but my MTA is postfix and I already use procmail for delivery.

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