FIFA sucks. It's so much about commerce... Don't buy their stuff. Buy your soccer balls at e.g. Transfair. These were bought at fair prices and not made by exploiting people in third world regions. Check out the 'Wilde Fu ballkerle' design. Very sweet. Much better than this annoying worldcup logo just about everywhere. But back to my original topic. These annoying 'official' worldcup songs. Dear FIFA, how about letting people decide which songs they like? I hate your choice... It makes me think of Titanic! And actually I hope that this happens to FIFA, that they go down like titanic because of some corruption scandal or so. If you want to compare them, check out Voices from the Fifa World Cup at Amazon (with realplayer samples). My current favourite is 1. FC Sommer, played by the Bananafishbones (last.fm), an indie band. They're cool. They do a festival and support new indie bands. If you want to listen to an excerpt, point your browser to the 1. FC Sommer page, there is a realplayer stream available again, klick that audio button. That song has some great wordplays in there, too bad that you can't translate them in all details into english. The refrain is "Der Sommer geh rt dem, der den Weltmeister schafft" which translates to "The summer belongs to who wins the worldcup"; the world play is "Weltmeister schafft" (becomes the world champion) and "Weltmeisterschaft" (Worldcup). And there is also a nice song by Sportfreunde Stiller, who did a whole CD full of soccer songs. So just ignore FIFA and don't buy their branded stuff.

Note: This article is part of my OS Install Experiences series.

OK, so let's start with something simple: Debian. Simple in the sense that there probably won't be too many surprises for me as a Debian developer (or for most readers of Planet Debian). For other people this might be interesting, though, and some facts are probably interesting to one or the other experienced Debian user/developer, too... Hardware A few words on the hardware I'll be installing all these OSes on. It's a cheapo (200 Euros) x86 PC (Intel Celeron, 2 GHz), 80 GB IDE hard drive, 256 MB RAM, ATI Radeon 9200 SE graphics adapter, Realtek PCI ethernet controller, CDROM, USB, and all the other standard stuff. Nothing fancy, really. Install

1. First, I downloaded a Debian sarge 3.1r2 CD image, burned it on a CD, and booted from that.
2. An installer menu showed up, where you can press F3 for boot options. I chose "expert26", which will ask me more questions and give me a 2.6 Linux kernel instead of 2.4.
3. The installer (newt-based, i.e. not graphical) will now start to boot a base Linux system.
4. Now, you can choose your language (used in the installer), country, region, and keyboard layout.
5. You'll be asked which additional kernel modules you want to load (default: all), and whether you want PCMCIA support. Also, you can choose which extra installer components should be loaded (LVM, PPP, serial, IrDA, ...).
6. Your hardware can be automatically detected (my Realtek card was successfully detected, the "8139too" kernel module was then loaded).
7. The network was successfully auto-configured via DHCP within seconds.
8. Now you can choose a hostname and domain name for the box. I used "hydra" as hostname (guess why), and "local.domain" as domain name.

Partitioning Now the funny part starts: partitioning the disk. As I will be installing >= 10 OSes, this needs a bit of consideration. I have chosen to create a 10 GB (primary) partition for a Redmond OS I'll be installing later (for games, testing, proprietary software I'm forced to use, and similar things). This will be the first partition and I marked it bootable, as Windows might choke otherwise. For the rest, I reserved 5 GB for each OS — that should do. So the next two (primary) partitions are 5 GB each. I'll leave these empty for now, as I might encounter obscure OSes which must be installed on primary partitions. Let's hope it won't be more than two ;-) As you can only have four primary partitions, I then had to create a logical partition, which will "contain" any further partitions. The next three (secondary) partitions are 1 GB each, intended to be used as swap. One of those I marked as swap in order to use it for Debian. Other Linux installations will be able to reuse this one. The other two are reserved in case I encounter OSes which have another form of swap and cannot use Linux swap partitions... The rest is easy: create twelve 5 GB partitions => lots of space for more OSes. Here's the resulting fdisk output:

Disk /dev/hda: 81.9 GB, 81964302336 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9964 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
      Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
   /dev/hda1   *           1        1216     9767488+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda2            1217        1824     4883760   83  Linux
   /dev/hda3            1825        2432     4883760   83  Linux
   /dev/hda4            2433        9964    60500790    5  Extended
   /dev/hda5            2433        2554      979933+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
   /dev/hda6            2555        2676      979933+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda7            2677        2798      979933+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda8            2799        3406     4883728+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda9            3407        4014     4883728+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda10           4015        4622     4883728+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda11           4623        5230     4883728+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda12           5231        5838     4883728+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda13           5839        6446     4883728+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda14           6447        7054     4883728+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda15           7055        7662     4883728+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda16           7663        8270     4883728+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda17           8271        8878     4883728+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda18           8879        9486     4883728+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda19           9487        9964     3839503+  83  Linux

Install, continued

1. The Debian partitioning tool allowed me to do all of the above via a friendly menu. As it does not modify the partition table until you say "done", I could revert many changes, and play around with different layout ideas until I was satisfied.
2. Next thing you can choose is the Kernel flavor (386, 686, smp).
3. You may now configure and install GRUB, the bootloader. I installed it at "(hd0)", the master boot record of the hard disk.
4. Soon the CD ejects, and you have to reboot.
5. After a restart (which also shows whether GRUB works fine), you can now choose your timezone, and decide whether you want shadow passwords (say yes!).
6. Now enter the root password, and decide whether you want to create an additional user account (say yes, and enter a different password here).
7. You can now configure apt, e.g. tell it which sources you'd like to use (CDROM, FTP, HTTP, ...). You'll be asked whether you want to install software from Debian's "non-free" archive. After choosing a mirror (and proxy settings, if you like), you can (should!) also say yes to the question whether you want security updates...
8. Finally, you may now choose "tasks" (desktop, web server, file server, ...) your machine should be able to perform; this will influence which packages will be installed. You may choose "manual package selection", of course, if you want more control. I used "desktop".
9. That's about it. You'll see a few more application-specific questions (configuration of MTA, ssh, fonts, X11, gdm, and others), and after that you'll be left with a GNOME login window.

Security I collected some (partly) security-relevant information after that.

• Portscan from another box:
  

  PORT    STATE SERVICE
  22/tcp  open  ssh
  111/tcp open  rpcbind
  113/tcp open  auth
  785/tcp open  unknown
  

  Not good. A default install should not have any ports open, IMHO. There are more daemons running: exim (port 25), and famd (port 771) for example. Those are fine however, as they only listen to the loopback interface and are not exposed to the Internet (eth0).
• Some permissions:
  

  drwxrwsr-x   3 root staff  4096 2006-05-17 22:48 /home
  drwxr-xr-x  11 uwe uwe     4096 2006-05-18 23:19 /home/uwe
  drwxr-xr-x  10 root root   4096 2006-05-17 23:43 /root
  drwxrwxrwt   8 root root   4096 2006-05-17 23:41 /tmp
  /dev:
  crw-rw----  1 root video    10, 175 2006-05-17 23:13 agpgart
  crw-------  1 root root      5,   1 2006-05-17 23:13 console
  crw-rw----  1 root audio    14,   3 2006-05-17 23:13 dsp
  brw-rw----  1 root floppy    2,   0 2006-05-17 23:13 fd0
  crw-rw-rw-  1 root root      1,   7 2006-05-17 23:13 full
  brw-rw----  1 root disk      3,   0 2006-05-17 23:13 hda*
  brw-rw----  1 root cdrom    22,  64 2006-05-17 23:13 hdd
  crw-r-----  1 root kmem      1,   2 2006-05-17 23:13 kmem
  crw-rw----  1 root root      1,  11 2006-05-17 23:13 kmsg
  crw-r-----  1 root kmem      1,   1 2006-05-17 23:13 mem
  crw-rw-rw-  1 root root      1,   3 2006-05-17 23:13 null
  crw-rw-rw-  1 root root      5,   0 2006-05-17 23:13 tty
  crw-rw----  1 root root      4,   0 2006-05-17 23:13 tty0
  crw-------  1 root root      4,   1 2006-05-17 23:24 tty1
  crw-------  1 root tty       4,   2 2006-05-17 23:13 tty[2-6]
  crw-rw----  1 root root      4,   7 2006-05-17 23:13 tty7
  [...]
  crw-rw----  1 root root      4,  63 2006-05-17 23:13 tty63
  crw-rw----  1 root dialout   4,  64 2006-05-17 23:13 ttyS*
  crw-rw-rw-  1 root root      1,   8 2006-05-17 23:13 random
  cr--r--r--  1 root root      1,   9 2006-05-17 23:13 urandom
  crw-rw----  1 root root      7,   1 2006-05-17 23:13 vcs*
  crw-rw-rw-  1 root root      1,   5 2006-05-17 23:13 zero
  

  Most of that looks sane to me (a "chmod 700 /home/uwe /root" would be nice, though), but maybe it can be tightened/secured a bit more? Ideas?
• Default users and shells:
  I installed some more popular applications (apache, mysql) to have more data.

  root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash
  daemon:x:1:1:daemon:/usr/sbin:/bin/sh
  bin:x:2:2:bin:/bin:/bin/sh
  sys:x:3:3:sys:/dev:/bin/sh
  sync:x:4:65534:sync:/bin:/bin/sync
  games:x:5:60:games:/usr/games:/bin/sh
  man:x:6:12:man:/var/cache/man:/bin/sh
  lp:x:7:7:lp:/var/spool/lpd:/bin/sh
  mail:x:8:8:mail:/var/mail:/bin/sh
  news:x:9:9:news:/var/spool/news:/bin/sh
  uucp:x:10:10:uucp:/var/spool/uucp:/bin/sh
  proxy:x:13:13:proxy:/bin:/bin/sh
  www-data:x:33:33:www-data:/var/www:/bin/sh
  backup:x:34:34:backup:/var/backups:/bin/sh
  list:x:38:38:Mailing List Manager:/var/list:/bin/sh
  irc:x:39:39:ircd:/var/run/ircd:/bin/sh
  gnats:x:41:41:Gnats Bug-Reporting System (admin):/var/lib/gnats:/bin/sh
  nobody:x:65534:65534:nobody:/nonexistent:/bin/sh
  Debian-exim:x:102:102::/var/spool/exim4:/bin/false
  uwe:x:1000:1000:,,,:/home/uwe:/bin/bash
  identd:x:100:65534::/var/run/identd:/bin/false
  sshd:x:101:65534::/var/run/sshd:/bin/false
  messagebus:x:103:104::/var/run/dbus:/bin/false
  hal:x:106:106:Hardware abstraction layer,,,:/var/run/hal:/bin/false
  saned:x:109:109::/home/saned:/bin/false
  gdm:x:104:110:Gnome Display Manager:/var/lib/gdm:/bin/false
  mysql:x:105:111:MySQL Server,,,:/var/lib/mysql:/bin/false
  

  Not too good, IMHO. Almost all system accounts have a valid shell instead of /bin/false or /usr/sbin/nologin. Most of those should not need one, and security-wise it's a lot better to not give them a valid shell. The good news is that many daemons (ssh, mysql, etc.) don't have a valid shell. Uh, why is "Debian-exim" capitalized? Update: That's why.
• Setuid/setgid files:
  

  # find / -type f \( -perm -4000 -o -perm -2000 \) -exec ls -ld ' ' \;
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root tty 9784 2005-09-18 09:04 /usr/bin/wall
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 22872 2005-05-18 08:33 /usr/bin/newgrp
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root shadow 34488 2005-05-18 08:33 /usr/bin/chage
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 28056 2005-05-18 08:33 /usr/bin/chfn
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 28088 2005-05-18 08:33 /usr/bin/chsh
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root shadow 16696 2005-05-18 08:33 /usr/bin/expiry
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 34904 2005-05-18 08:33 /usr/bin/gpasswd
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 26616 2005-05-18 08:33 /usr/bin/passwd
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 34488 2002-01-18 09:13 /usr/bin/at
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root tty 7992 2004-11-01 20:29 /usr/bin/bsd-write
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root crontab 26872 2004-07-28 22:44 /usr/bin/crontab
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root mail 9860 2004-06-04 17:21 /usr/bin/dotlockfile
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 18136 2004-12-01 08:29 /usr/bin/traceroute.lbl
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 809836 2006-03-10 12:19 /usr/bin/gpg
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root mail 7764 2006-01-31 01:48 /usr/bin/mutt_dotlock
  -rwsr-sr-x  1 root lp 24184 2004-07-27 23:48 /usr/bin/lpq
  -rwsr-sr-x  1 root lp 22232 2004-07-27 23:48 /usr/bin/lprm
  -rwsr-sr-x  1 root lp 24440 2004-07-27 23:48 /usr/bin/lpr
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 44024 2004-12-12 20:35 /usr/bin/mtr
  -rwsr-sr-x  1 root mail 71640 2005-03-01 16:37 /usr/bin/procmail
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root mail 12712 2005-03-01 16:37 /usr/bin/lockfile
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root ssh 57304 2004-11-28 16:33 /usr/bin/ssh-agent
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 10894 2004-06-04 12:02 /usr/bin/fileshareset
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 5144 2006-01-15 14:37 /usr/bin/kgrantpty
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 5588 2006-01-15 14:37 /usr/bin/kpac_dhcp_helper
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 98488 2006-03-20 23:03 /usr/bin/sudo
  -rwsr-xr--  1 root plugdev 19096 2005-05-18 15:47 /usr/bin/pumount
  -rwsr-xr--  1 root plugdev 26680 2005-05-18 15:47 /usr/bin/pmount
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root nogroup 45600 2005-09-08 07:32 /usr/bin/kdesud
  -rwsr-xr--  1 root dip 575192 2005-05-24 09:18 /usr/bin/kppp
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 544332 2005-04-08 15:53 /usr/bin/gpg2
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root games 34872 2005-03-02 19:20 /usr/games/same-gnome
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root games 57152 2005-03-02 19:20 /usr/games/gnomine
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root games 65752 2005-03-02 19:20 /usr/games/gnome-stones
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root games 70296 2005-03-02 19:20 /usr/games/mahjongg
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root games 48952 2005-03-02 19:20 /usr/games/gtali
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root games 36652 2005-03-02 19:20 /usr/games/gnotravex
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root games 94200 2005-03-02 19:20 /usr/games/gnobots2
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root games 28776 2005-03-02 19:20 /usr/games/gnotski
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root games 42584 2005-03-02 19:20 /usr/games/glines
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root games 61944 2005-03-02 19:20 /usr/games/gnibbles
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root games 78096 2005-03-02 19:20 /usr/games/gnometris
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 5668 2006-04-02 15:32 /usr/lib/pt_chown
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root mail 10940 2006-03-13 14:30 /usr/lib/evolution/2.0/camel/camel-lock-helper
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root utmp 9144 2005-03-09 18:21 /usr/lib/libvte4/gnome-pty-helper
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 13304 2005-09-06 15:13 /usr/lib/apache/suexec.disabled
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 668568 2006-04-11 14:33 /usr/sbin/exim4
  -rwsr-xr--  1 root dip 265880 2005-05-05 19:32 /usr/sbin/pppd
  -rwsr-xr--  1 root dip 29420 2004-09-30 04:13 /usr/sbin/pppoe
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root lp 32248 2004-07-27 23:48 /usr/sbin/lpc
  -rwsr-sr-x  1 root root 7860 2005-09-02 00:44 /usr/X11R6/bin/X
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 35512 2005-05-18 08:33 /bin/login
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 23416 2005-05-18 08:33 /bin/su
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 68440 2005-09-18 09:04 /bin/mount
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 40920 2005-09-18 09:04 /bin/umount
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 30764 2003-12-22 23:18 /bin/ping
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 26604 2003-12-22 23:18 /bin/ping6
  -r-sr-xr-x  1 root root 15000 2004-06-28 20:39 /sbin/unix_chkpwd
  

  Quite a bunch, I'd say. The games are "only" "setgid games", but I'd really, really remove them on any production machine which should be halfway secure. Some of those binaries probably need the setuid/setgid bit (su, passwd, ...), but others probably don't. Maybe we should ship more of that non-setuid per default and add a note to the READMEs which tells the admin how he can make the apps setuid if he should want that?

Ok, so that's it for Debian stable. Unstable is 99% the same, except that you do a "vi /etc/apt/sources.list; apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade". I'll do that later maybe, compare the findings, and report notable differences here, but it shouldn't be too many (I guess). Not today, though, I need some sleep now. Comments, suggestions, flames? Update 2006-05-19: Updated "why is Debian-exim capitalized?" info as per comments, thanks!

The Internet connectivity here is not so great, which is why I'm posting journal entries in batch mode. The fact that we have Internet here is fairly impressive, because of all the awesome people who have climbed up on roofs and things. Now, the resort does not supply Internet so people had to figure something out. There's an ISP and Internet caf in town, but no physical link between them. So they've set up two antennas, one on the roof of the ISP, and we've got a wireless link. Then, they've strung switches and access points along the roofs of walkways to cover large parts of the resort with Internet connectivity. Sadly, there's a lot of latency associated with this. I went to talks for most of the day and was wandering around the HackLab at dinner time. I convinced ze_dinosaur, and then Agnieszka and David, to go out to a steakhouse in town. We walked out of the complex and back into Rinc n del Viejo, where we all decided to order beef. My filet mignon was huge and tender and juicy and flavourful. The vegetables on the side were insipid, but the beef was just marvellous. Other people had other steaks, which were equally as tasty. We stuffed ourselves silly and then waddled out of the restaurant. There was some beer shopping done after dinner and I picked up of tuna. My companions thought I was crazy, but I thought it was brilliant. After returning to the HackLab, we discovered that the Internet connectivity was being rejiggered to work better. So people were holding an impromptu dancing BOF, which looked quite fun. I found the wine and cheese BOF nearby and found a bit of room to eat some fancy cheeses. Some of them were very creamy, others very sharp, and still more which were deliciously pungent. Eric and I left for our room, where I put some tuna in a bowl. We then took them out to a walkway where we had some kitten sightings. After a bit of hesitation, some little furballs realized that the bowl was full of delicious food. I managed to get quite close to them and took as many photographs as I could. Their mother sat nearby, guarding them from predators, and keeping a watchful eye on me. There are four kittens in that litter and they are all so adorable. At one point, the orange kitten had his entire body in the bowl, to prevent everyone else from eating. After they had stuffed themselves, they started playing happily. They chased each other around, bounced about, and climbed trees. Then, the two big ones decided to play wrestle all over the grass. We basically suffered from cute overload and spent a long time going, "Awww."

I woke up early Monday morning, showered and got dressed. You know there are now six people in our hotel room. Simon, Eric, Blars, M ritz, Jimmy, and I have to share one shower which makes the process a bit slow. And this shower is a push-button shower that you have to hold in order to keep the water running. And the water never really gets hot. I was typing on IRC and found Matt Zimmerman on-line. We started chatting and noticed that we were in the same room. I tried looking for someone wearing a grey hat, but couldn't find him until I looked beside me. There he was, having sat down right next to ze_dinosaur. Since Mark Shuttleworth is my boss, I paid attention to his talk, and noticed that bug 35051 popped up during the presentation. You know you've been staring at too many bugs when you know which ones they are in the bug tracking system. I talked to Matt a bit about work, because Debconf is a good time to talk about QA, right? We finished up our discussion, typed a bit on our laptops, and decided that food would be a good idea. We found some people from Intel, who introduced themselves as Mike, Mark, and Denise. I thought that Denise's name sounded familiar and then I realised that she's Denise Cooper, who worked on opening up Sun's source code. I was so happy to finally meet her, since we had talked years ago. We walked towards town to get some better food and picked up Blars. Then we saw xtat, whom I knew only from LiveJournal, and his girlfriend. I invited them to join us and we walked around town for a while. We went to this Argentinian restaurant, called Rinc n del Viejo, that had napkins on the table. I didn't want to get my hopes up, so I expected something plain, but everything was incredibly delicious. We started with some wonderful empanadas, a delicious tomato salad, and guacamole y totopos. Then I ate queso con chorizo. By the time we finished, we were all completely stuffed. We picked up some pesos and then decided to walk off this big meal. We went exploring the town and wandered about a bit. We hiked up a hill and found a street full of vibrant colours. I realized that we were in the construction district, with stores selling paint, lumber, sinks, pools, and even hand-painted tiles. A little bit further on, past some clothing stores, we found a very cute hotel that looks like it would be really fun to stay in. We found a daycare with an awesome wall, with little figures dancing about. There was a little kid who was standing inside a florists, drumming on the counter and looking very bored. Another child ducked into a used television shop. After about an hour or so, we were hot and thirsty so we decided to head back. But before we returned to the resort, we stopped at a fruit store and picked up some fruit for breakfast. Boy, oh boy, is that fruit every good. Mangos were fragrant and sweet and juicy. Bananas are just heavenly. The plantains were just wonderful. If only we could get fruit like this in Canada. And I don't even like eating fruit.

The Salon is on in ON! I just finished putting up the Toronto Salon page on the Creative Commons wiki, and the blog entry ("CC Salon in Toronto, Tuesday May 16th") is up on the Creative Commons Canada site.

If our release managers don't start their session about releasing in time not in time...

Day trip today. So all Debconfers are dressed as tourists (except Sam) and I of course used my SpongeBob SquarePants t-shirt (it's becoming kind of a tradition). Two hours bus ride in "interesting" buses and enjoying all the "topes" of the road. I already fear the 4000km drive I plan in this country in August. Xochicalco place is really impressive and the site is well preserved with a museum and all logistics stuff preserving the site as much as possible. Kudos to the Morelos state. Our guide, Claudia, was really interesting and friendly. I think that most of us enjoyed the visit. Of course, sun burns have happened and I was very glad I bringed my tropical sun protection which was suited for the Reunion Island. I however less enjoyed the lunch, but mostly because I was indeed *not* hungry and I was stupid enough to eat anyway. This made me feel really "heavy" and I haven't been a much friendly table companion for Jesus, Andrew, Annabelle, Joey, Ana...sorry, pals. The trip back to Cuernavaca was quiet: I slept most of the time. We didn't really visit the place, but were more wandering around and playing tourists. This made me find a nice t-shirt for my son (yet another tradition I have: bringing him back a t-shirt from every place I've been) with "Emiliano Zapata" featured. Neat. The trip back to Oaxtepec was even more long and again, I slept most of the time. Back to Oaxtepec, I went to marga's pancake party (which was unfortunately too far from the hacklab to bring enough people). Had a good improvised talk with Frans and Joey about the installer (and *not* about Sven)....and I finished the day by releasing yet another shadow version. Very small participation to the hot liquor tastign BOF but I was too tired to be really stupid and get drunk.

Dan Savage writes in his column this week,

The American Taliban doesn't think married heterosexual couples should be able to use birth control. If you care about your own freedom - not just your right to have premarital sex, but your right to decide whether, when, and how many children you're going to have you need to read "The War On Contraception."

I have trouble imagining what people are thinking. A world where couples don't have sex? Can you imagine how much fighting there would be?

Okay, okay, so that's not the point. But with articles like Chicago economist links abortion to falling crime rates, it's incredibly distressing to see another attempt at taking away freedoms. While things like birth control and abortion are not in immediate risk here in Canada, it's hard to predict how long it would take for our our current Conservative leadership to start entertaining those thoughts.

I'm all for a principled discussion on sex and sexuality. But why don't people ever consider the concept that providing more tools to people is better than providing fewer?

I've been managing servers professionally for some years now. Support is one of the most important things when you are managing computers for work. You don't need support to help you out with a printing problem or an e-mail problem. You need support because every minute the machine fails to power up, your company may lose twice the value of the entire machine. Or even more.

My first day job managing servers involved Dell hardware. What a nightmare. I've never had a good experience with Dell support, ever.

First off, Dell support never puts me straight through to an intelligent support rep. I don't care whether I get to the Indian call center or someone in Texas. The first support person I speak to at Dell has less computer aptitude than my grandmother. One conversation I will always remember went like this:

Me: We have a disk in our array that went bad on our Linux server. The red light on the disk itself is on. Please send us a replacement.

Dell: Have you tried rebooting?

Me: No. This is a production server. The reason the disks are redundant is so I don't HAVE to. Besides, the light ON THE MACHINE ITSELF is on.

Dell: Ah, OK. Have you run scandisk?

Me: No. This is a Linux server, as I told you, and scandisk wouldn't see a problem anyway since this disk is in an array and the array is still up.

Dell: OK, great. How about you download the diagnostics .exe from our website...

Me: Can't. We don't have Windows on this machine. You did say you support Linux when we bought it.

Dell: Ah. Can you right-click on My Computer...

Me: NO. This runs Linux, and the BAD DISK LIGHT ON THE MACHINE IS ON.

Dell: Ah, OK. I wonder if the problem really is that you have a bad disk.

Me: Could be!

Our first HP server purchase happened to be at a time when HP had undercut Dell by several thousand dollars. I liked the hardware, but it wasn't anything that much more special than Dell.

But what I really like is the support. I haven't had to call HP support often, but when I do, I am almost always speaking to a live, experienced person within 5 minutes.

With only one exception, all the HP support people I've talked to have been very experienced. They all sound like they've been working with HP hardware since the late punched card era. They know what is going on and assume that I do too. The HP people don't make small talk (it *really* ticks me off when someone obviously in Calcutta or something asks me about the weather in Kansas, because you *know* they are reading it off a screen and don't care). But that's fine. I'm not calling them to talk about the weather, I'm calling them because my server is down.

We had a bad disk in an array on a HP server once. That conversation went more like this.

HP: Server support. Serial number please?

Me: [gives it to them]

HP: OK. What's the problem?

Me: The array dropped a disk. The failed disk light is on and the controller logged a disk error.

HP: OK. That's a 146GB SCSI, right? 15KRPM or 10K?

Me: 15K.

HP: OK. Is 1PM tomorrow good to send out the replacement?

Me: Fine.

HP: OK, your case number is xxxxx. Can you give us directions to your location?

Me: Sure...

So recently we got in our MSL4048 tape library. A very nice unit. And faster than most *disks*. 48 Ultrium3 tapes -- 400GB native each -- very nice. And a barcode reader built in.

So anyway, one small problem. When you open up a magazine to put tapes in, you can close the unit back up. It says "scanning", but it doesn't notice that we've changed tapes until we give it a command on the operator panel (yes, this tape drive has a LCD screen built in). This can be worked around, but is annoying and is just waiting to cause confusion. Plus it's not how it should work.

So I call HP support yesterday.

Turns out this MSL4048 is a brand-new unit. Had only been on the market a few weeks. Our support rep has never seen one or taken calls about one, and they haven't even given him all the HP technical docs yet. But no matter, he is willing to try to help us out.

He calls me back twice yesterday with tips and questions after speaking to colleagues. He asks intelligent questions, doesn't bother with the "are you sure you're putting the tapes in the right way around" or the "is the power cord securely plugged in" crap, and generally doesn't waste my time. He called me back about four times more today -- they duplicated our setup in their lab, right down to the exact firmware version, but didn't have the problem. Two of those callbacks were apologizing for taking so long, and explaining that they were learning about this machine as they went along. So a HP rep will be out to our location shortly.

Now THAT'S what I call service. No blaming it on someone else, no trying to make me do stupid troubleshooting things, and returning calls.

My *one* bad experience with HP was one time we put a new internal tape drive in the machine, and it was acting flaky. I got the only not-very-experienced HP rep I ever had spoken to that time, and they tried to blame Debian for what turned out to be a bad SCSI cable. (The symptoms weren't very similar to what I'd expect for a bad SCSI cable, and the cable had been working fine.) Oh HP, you donate to Debian -- why don't you support your hardware under it?

(In fairness, that is the ONLY time they have flinched when I said I run Debian, though it does make them hesitate sometimes)

I haven't posted much here lately. There's just a lot going on.

First there's some news from Terah.

The appraisal on the place we're moving to came in less than we had expected, so we have to do some quick work to try to figure out another way to make the financial situation of all that work.

Then there's all the work of being away from home when it's being shown.

Then, our purchase of an HP MSL4048 tape library at work. And our switch from Amanda to Bacula -- which went wonderfully. And of course my taking over the Bacula package in Debian, which managed to annoy two Spaniards but please most of the rest of the world. But my first NMU did close 22 bugs.

Cliff, great old dogs story.

The plans for World Domination by OpenedHand are going well. So well infact that we need more help: we're hiring an Embedded Linux System Engineer and a Technical Project Manager. For more details, see the OpenedHand Jobs page. NP: Always Beating, L'Onomatopeur

Sunday was the first day of actual talks. The night before, ze_dinosaur had arrived and so we hunted for breakfast together. We walked out and found Jesus who was walking towards town. We opted to follow him to the mercado in the town just outside the side gate of the resort. We walked into the market and down some stairs. There are just little stalls where people were selling hats or CDs or pots or clothes. When we walked a bit further, we found a covered area where sweet-smelling smoke swirled everywhere. We sat down on a bench with a thin counter in front of us and someone came back with menus. I ordered a chorizo quesadilla and a glass of horchata. They were very fresh and very, very tasty. I went to the Torre Parlimentaria where the welcome speeches were happening. Mexico has been very warm and sunny, which means dehydration and sunburns. The tower is air-conditioned, so this was a very welcome environment. We sat through a talk where Simon Phipps from Sun announced work he's done with Sun to get more and more software opened. He seems to be very enthusiastic about Free Software, which he mentioned specifically, so I hope he does well with his persuasions within Sun. I no longer remember what I did after this. I think I might have walked around a bit before having the caterred lunch. I've been eating these sponsored meals for a couple of days and they've been rather substandard. Sure, they're edible and doesn't make anyone sick. But it's insipid, because they're trying to put out European style meals, which the kitchen doesn't know how to do. Since I'm travelling, I'm totally going to eat tasty local food, which I won't be able to get in Canada. At lunchtime, I bumped into Filipe whom I met at OLS last year. He introduced me to his Brazillian friends and we discovered that Tiego and Tassia who are studying in Montr al. I promised them that we'd get some Debian get-together in early June, before they leave. It's rather warm right now. The temperature goes about 30 C every day, but the humidity is always close to 30% so it doesn't get very sticky. But it does make such things like ice cream more important. Interestingly enough, lots of American products are for sale in Mexico, but under completely different brand names. After dinner, we went to the HackLab which is a building set up to encourage people to work with their computers. There are plenty of tables and chairs, with extension cords sprawled everywhere. I sat down for a game of Mao, and then got up several hours later. I wandered outside, where people were hanging out on the veranda, so I sat down on the grass in a circle and chatted with people until the early hours of the morning. Debconf, you're so bad for my health.

So, thanks to Wouter Verhelst, I am now syndicated on Planet Debian, a site that aggregates the blogs of various people involved in Debian. To those who don’t know me yet, I am an 18 year old high school student (for a couple more weeks anyway) in the United States. I go by ‘astronut’ on IRC, and have completed my part of NM and am now patiently waiting for FD/DAM approval. I maintain easyh10 (manages the databases on the iRiver H10 music player), dav-text (simple ncurses based text editor), graphmonkey (a somewhat pointless graphing calculator that somehow has at least a few users according to popcon) and recently adopted pork (console AIM client). I also am an active member on the Debian Cyrus Packaging team (Cyrus is a pop/imap/nntp server). Comments are currently enabled, but moderated on the blog. I may have to go to some kind of turing test based system if planet opens me up to a flood of spam. So… Hello, to the word of Debian!

Laundry day. New roommate Thaddeus Black is really on the ball; today is the first laundry day we've had at the conference, and he was prepared for it, and reminded the rest of us when we woke up. I think I'll wait until the Thursday laundry day. To get your laundry done here, you put it in a plastic bag, and mark it somehow. Then the bags go into a pile, and some company hired by the hotel comes and washes them, and returns the bags of clean clothes to you the same or next day. You can even choose between regular drying and sun drying the clothes. Debian. Yesterday someone filed a bug against my expect package; today Alec Berryman sent in a patch that fixed it. Thank you Alec! The fixed package is now uploaded and should be available to everyone tomorrow. Food. Ville Vuorela brought a big bag of candies from Finland for Simon Richter, who shared them with the table here in the hack lab. They were salty and sweet, with mild licorice flavor. They were quite good. My friend Jesus Monroy, a food columnist in the San Francisco Bay Area, had a few comments on my food adventures yesterday, which I will quote here:

Pancita is Spanish for stomach. Most likely you had a type of menudo, or soup dish. This is a very common and popular dish. Usually used for hangovers. Check the chicken vendor's spices when you can. With some hope he did not use MSG. MSG, as you may know, can be toxic in large amounts. It's not unheard of in Mexico, but they don't know that MSG can be toxic. My mother has refused to eat at some friends houses because they use so much the chicken tastes extremely over-salted. MSG toxic effects are lathargy, nausea, headaches, all the way to death (very extreme). Then again too much salt, or just water, can be toxic. As for the church, they have not changed much in 500+ years in Mexico. Most likely what you saw was what was built.

Conference. Today I attended the one presentation that motivated me to attend Debconf; Peter van Eyndes Common Lisp presentation. Common Lisp, of course, is the best programming language ever, in terms of developer time. Haskell is similar, but is designed more for machines to run fast, than for developers to develop fast. The LISP community has almost universally switched to using darcs for their revision control system, which is not only the easiest to use I have ever found, but is also written in Haskell. Nine people attended Peters presentation. He showed us how to drive the Lisp compiler from inside emacs using slime, with its advanced auto-completion features. He demonstrated the common lisp controller which has advanced dramatically in the past five years. It is now simple and intuitive to load libraries into your Lisp program. He showed us how to package lisp libraries using asdf, which has long been an opaque mystery to me. Luca Capello fom Switzeland, the maintainer of the stumpwm window manager was present, and he promised to demonstrate stumpwm later tonight. stumpwm is not yet as advanced as ratpoison, but it could become far more advanced and whiz-bang than ratpoison could ever be. It has potential. I also met Erick Lopez of Mexico, who wants to package cl-wiki, but is looking for a sponsor. As a Lisp developer, he will be an asset to Debian. After the presentation Peter opened the floor, and every question I'd had about Lisp for the past few years was answered very satisfactorily. At the end, Peter showed us a book called Practical Common Lisp, by Peter Seibel, which he praised highly for those who want to use Lisp for "real" things. Such as a streaming MP3 server. I'm sold! But if you are poor (povre), you can read it for free at Gigamonkeys.

Contact Lookup Applet 0.14 is released, especially done for sebuild.

• Translate the .server files (Frederic Crozat)
• Don't set sensitivity ourself (Bastien Nocera)
• Correctly handle contacts with no email (Adam Petaccia)

Translators: Adam Weinberger (en_CA), Clytie Siddall (vi), Daniel Nylander (sv), Francisco Javier F. Serrador (es), Frank Arnold (de), Funda Wang (zh_CN), Gabor Kelemen (hu), Ilkka Tuohela (fi), I aki Larra aga Murgoitio (eu), Jean-Michel Ardantz (fr), Kjartan Maraas (nb), Marcel Telka (sk), Maria Soler (ca), Maxim Dziumanenko (uk), Micha Kastelik (pl), Miloslav Trmac (cs), Takeshi AIHANA (ja), Yavor Doganov (bg), ygimantas Beru ka (lt). You can grab it from the usual place. Debian packages heading towards Sid once I update my pbuilder...

Photography. My roommate Aigars is quite a photographer, he came with his digital SLR and several lenses, an item I've lusted after for some time. Large apertures and manual controls are what every real photographer demands, and digital SLR's deliver. I told him my idea for a small sky recording station so that people could make movies of the paths that the stars take, and how it changes over the year. Ultimately I want a network of these stations, all uploading their pictures so I can examine them for anamolies. This is a hard problem, because stars are so faint. Aigars said to take a picture of the whole sky, a 1000 millimeter lense and a $50 computer scanner with some modifications should be able to do the job. Programming. Finally made progress in programming, now that I know where everything is in Oaxtepec. My IRC bot didn't handle things gracefully when the server refused to let it log in, but that is fixed now. Tomorrow I hope to add multi-channel support. Reading through the new IRC RFC, I have the information I need to make a proper configuration file for the software. The design is sketched out and feels right, finally. Weekend vs. Weekday. Oaxtepec is much quieter today. Saturday and Sunday there were far more vendors on the street, and they stayed open much later. Today everything closed down around 6pm when the church bell tolled the summons to mass. I couldn't find the coconut man; maybe he only comes on weekends. Half the stalls at the mercado were empty. During the weekend, the resort was full of vacationers swimming, barbecuing, picnicing, playing soccer, or just sunbathing while the kids ran around. Everyone, young and old, but mostly young adult men and women, were running around in bathing trunks and bikinis. The happy noises were great to wake up to. This morning the sounds were quieter, but still present. The swimming pools here get a lot of use. During the weekend, there was a large tent where some ladies were giving body massages for $10. I didn't see them today. Probably they will be here again next weekend. Food. Tried a dish called "pancita" today. I saw people eating noodles and assumed pancita was a noodle dish, like the Filipino pancit. But no. It is a type of tomato soup filled with chopped up beef rind and chunks of fat. For only P31, I bought a small chicken. It was perfectly marinated and roasted, better than Kentucky Fried Chicken. I paid the money, and the shopkeeper brought out a pair of scissors and cut the chicken into all the appropriate pieces for easy eating, just like they do in Korea (viz the use of scissors) Church. Attended mass tonight, since the church was so close. The church is magnificent. It really is a cathedral inside; to see the ceiling you have to crane your neck. And when you do, you see paintings of angels playing instruments. I went into the nave to pray, and saw a giant depiction of the ark of the covenant. It was very realistic, with the cherubim covering it with their wings. And above it, was a painting of the wine and bread offering, which were offered on the altar daily. The priest was a black man from Illinois; after a bit of attempting to speak to each other in Spanish, we realized we both spoke English, and got on famously from then on. The cathedral opens at 10am, closes for lunch from 2pm-4pm, and then is open until mass is finished. This must be what the church was like in the beginning; a place where believers could drop in any time to be with others of their kind, to meet, eat, drink, discuss, and elevate each other to a higher plane. I am sad that we don't have this in Canada. Debian. There were some Debian talks and presentations, but nothing too interesting. Finally met Mark Shuttleworth, Anthony Towns, Manoj Srivastava, and Roblimo Miller. Clifford Beshers of Linspire almost convinced me to look into the Haskell computer language. I couldn't quite tell what Haskell has that LISP doesn't, apart from forcing strong types on you and being very fast and efficient in benchmarks tests. Marga didn't give me meal tickets before, so Graham printed some up for me today. By pure serendipity, I sat at dinner with the only other Canadian developers at the conference; Simon Law and Eric Dorland from Montreal. The drinking started at 11pm and is still going strong; the atmosphere is very convivial right now, but half of us are still tapping away at our keyboards.

Tagging bugs with Amaya, she propose create a new tag: Ma ana

I ask my self, which would be the difference with wontfix? xD

So, day 1 started when I felt asleep in the plane, at some randome place over the ocean near Galicia. We actually had a good sleep as the other place people weren't noisy even though the plane was packed. Woke up at 03:00 (MEX time). After a few listening music, I found myself using the free time to read the huge Report of Findings about Gender in F/LOSS recently mentioned in the Debian-Women mailing list. This is a very deeply interesting document which is a quite complete picture about the "Women in F/LOSS" topic. The people interested in the Debian Women project should definitely have a look at it. We finally landed easily at 06:30 local time. No problem going thru the customs, even though 3 of us were carrying more cheese than needed to be considered a terrorist group trying to invade Mexico. Cab drive to Oaxteprc went fine. The scenery is quite impressive and the pass at 3100m on the highway is....a bit strange for all of us. When arriving the Oaxtepec center we soon met with Enrico who helped us to discover the place, which is good as is is BIG... Found my room, with Damog and Ana sleeping in it (sleeping drunk as I was told later...:-))). So, I gently left my luggage there and we moved to have some breakfast at the market. I ate some really good tasting stuff which names I've no idea of, but thanks to Magic Enrico and his incredible abilities to catch any language in the world, we managed to do it. Back to the Tower for the Introductory talk...it was hard to be there in time with all these people crossing my path and who I need to say "hi" and babble with again. Later in the afternoon, after lunch, I felt more and more tired, so I missed Enrico's talk (Enrico, apologies!) and just isolated self, listening to good old Hot Tuna stuff and working on my business mail (yeah, I know, it's Sunday). More energy retrieved helped to finish the afternoon by hanging around here and there, trying to set up two ad-hoc sessions aimed at gathering all people interested in i18n to have some brainstoriming about what we want for i18n infratructure and all similar topics. Finally, at the end of the day, I attended Meike's training session for speakers. Really interesting moment to share with Aigars Mahinovs, Neil Mc Govern (hope I got it right), Bruno (Barrera), Martin Krafft. OK, we all suck on some aspects of our presentation skills but we less suck now (I'm afraid I will still suck by talk unpreparation as you will all notice for the "State of the art of i18n" I share with Javier on Saturday). And, finally, yes, finally...bed at midnight. Not so bad to recover from jet lag. Now I'm ready for a full Debconf Day, full of energy. Be prepared to a lot of bubulle's babbling, dudes.