Search Results: "ron"

29 November 2006

Adrian von Bidder: Harddisk Password Security

I set a harddisk password on my laptop, because if my Laptop is stolen, I care more about the data than about the laptop as such. But I'm wondering if this gives me real security (as in: only people like data recovery labs who actually disassemble the disk and run the platters against another disk's electronics can access my data) or if it gives me absolutely no security (as in short two clearly labeled pins to reset.) Anybody got some good resources on this?

Wouter Verhelst: Grep.be (and related)

Yes, my domain has been off the net for quite a few days now. This was related to the Internet connection that's in front of most of that domain being down. I'm quite very extremely unhappy about that. It's not as if that connection is a cheap one, and I would've expected a slightly better service for the price I'm paying. As it turned out, it wasn't my ISP's fault, but then still. Of course, it's all working again now, and I'm a bit happier. I will start thinking about making sure this connection is no longer an SPOF, however. That should help...

28 November 2006

Enrico Zini: live-cd-on-removable-disk2

Live CD on a removable disk, the Debian way In [live-cd-on-removable-disk] at some point I wrote:
Enrico's note: do we have anything in Debian that we can install and just does that?
Here are the answers: Sven Mueller writes:
Well, Enrico, a tool I really grew fond of, which auto-configures X on Debian systems is xdebconfigurator, it lacks being auto-run on each system start, which I consider a feature on normal systems, but for your proposed usage (i.e. a portable USB-storage based Debian system), it would certainly be the right thing. Essentially, it never failed on me. Except for VMware virtual machines, where all it did wrong was that it proposed too high resolutions which resulted from my dual-screen Windows setup I ran VMware on. You might want to give it a try.
Tollef Fog Heen writes:
I added the support in casper for doing this almost a year ago and it has saved me lots of debugging time. Booting the live CD that way is almost as fast as booting an installed system. If you couple this with using the persistent storage support in casper, you can get the configure-on-boot support together with persistency. In a later update, slh is quited saying that xresprobe doesn't work on AMD64. This is wrong, I wrote that support based on code by Matthew Garret a little more than nine months ago. I wouldn't recommend incorporating it in new-written code, but rather use libx86
And finally, Marco Amadori writes:
Without needing to look for tools external to Debian, there is already the Debian Live software in sid: live-package, that creates a live system, and casper, that generates an initramfs that can configure a Debian system on the fly. So far there is no hard disk target for live-package, but the "Iso" target can already do the job quite well. At boot time, Casper's initramfs scans all the block devices, so it works also for USB keys and hard drives. To obtain a hard drive image, you just need to invoke "make-live" with the options to have the required software, then copy the content of the iso (or of the directory ./debian-live/binary) on a partition and install the boot loader. This is what the future "HD" target of live-package will do; so far it can only build ISO and Netboot images.

Simon Richter: Open house on the weekend from December 8th to 10th

As previously announced, I plan to have an open house on these days. If you happen to be in Munich at the time and, as Matthew puts it so well, if I haven't wished you dead in the last three months, you are invited. There is going to be infrastructure as can be found in a typical home, such as space, electricity, network, a shower and a kitchen. I have a few mattresses as well, but the usual sleeping gear is probably a good thing to bring anyway. I plan on stocking up on noodles and tomato sauce before the event, and there is a Chinese restaurant with an all-you-can-eat offer just downstairs, so I believe food is not going to be an issue either. I expect the entire event to be mostly geeky in nature, given the people who are invited. I think some might see it as an opportunity for another bug-squashing party, while others see it as an excuse to devote a full day to their pet project. If you're planning on not bringing a computer and just generally hanging out and socialising, that's fine with me, too. My personal plan for the weekend revolves around a bunch of software and hardware projects, most of which being related to cool hardware. I have a soldering iron here (25W only, but it works), so you are welcome to bring a hardware project as well. If you plan to come, it would be nice if you could drop me a short message so I won't be off to the video rental store when you arrive, plus I can tell you more details then, like where exactly. Also please tell me whether you prefer sitting on the floor/some mattress or on a seat with a chair, as it allows me to allocate the space accordingly in advance so that we don't have to move people around. The fine print: this is a non-smoking flat (and the wind conditions do not allow smoking out of the windows), we're on the 6th floor and it's the beginning of winter. While it is certainly possible to smoke outside, it might be something to consider.

MJ Ray: Business: Cooperatives SW

I attended the Cooperatives SW annual meeting in Taunton on Monday 27 November because it covers the new home of Turo Technology. Sadly, headline speaker Dame Pauline Green was unable to attend, but someone else from Cooperatives UK (I think it was John Goodman, but I can't find a name in my notes) gave the keynote presentation about the current state of the cooperatives and current trends. Among the figures, there was the pretty astonishing Global 300 which lists the biggest 300 cooperatives and mutuals in the world. The list contains some names I didn't expect and also some names in different positions than I expected. Some things are less surprising: almost every country has agricultural cooperatives and the UK (with mutual insurers, building societies and credit unions) and France are particularly strong in financial cooperatives. Apparently, the Global 300 will be updated as and when results are published, so watch that space. More items from the Cooperatives SW meeting soon.

Gunnar Wolf: Are Debian people real Free Software zealots?

Wow... The amount of press/coverage inside the FS community (not necessarily good press) the Ubuntu people are receiving lately is huge. I smell the possibility where Canonical might face what many people call the ugly side of Debian - But what we, the insiders, call it the most important part of it: Our people's devotion to the Free Software ideals. Of course, even inside Debian there are all kind of opinions (to the point that Debian's main activity seems at times to be debating rather than coding), but the general perception is that we are the fundamentalist zealots.
It's only funny to imagine what lies ahead. No, I'm not talking (for people not following planet.debian.org) about Ubuntu's latest big media scandal, although it might share some connections. Apparently, Canonical wants to grow and bring more people in. And, of course, being a commercial desktop-oriented distribution, being flashy (or in their words, going for the bling) is needed to keep up with the Joneses.
This time, it starts (for me) with Scott's interesting and worthy posting regarding the future of binary blobs and clearly non-free drivers inside Ubuntu. In short: Scott explains why Ubuntu will apparently sacrifice some of its ideals for (what I read as) some extra popularity, and states he is not too happy with it. This, of course, has triggered a load of postings - not necessarily in chronological order, but: Mako, also an Ubuntite, asks people (users, developers) to tell their opinions on this - But he is not at all happy with the direction this might take. Many Ubuntu enthusiasts are voicing their opinions in Wiki form. I guess that Joey's peace of mind comes also because of this discussion (although I'm only stretching my views).
...There is always the debate of whether Ubuntu is good or bad for Debian, as Norbert points out. I've tried to stay away from it, quoting one of Luis Echeverr a's famous it's neither good nor bad, it's just the opposite. I do think the two systems will eventually diverge too much - But I'm not at all involved in Ubuntu, and I refuse to back my claims ;-)
The point of this posting is: When forming Canonical, obviously Mark wanted to gather the best of the best, people who knew their way developing and coordinating an eminently Free and high-quality distribution, but without the distraction of 1000+ developers trying to pull the whole distribution their way. By being the boss, he can ensure a single vision (and not a multitude of egos) drives the excellent work of talented hackers. However, there might be a subtle mistake: Maybe his team are too Debianites? Maybe they will show they are as strongly Free Software (and not Opensource) oriented as they were when they joined Debian? Maybe, even with the unlimited powers that being a SABDFL gives, Mark and the Ubuntu technical committee/community council will have to concede on not having the latest and flashiest, just to keep his elite team happily working?
I'm not, of course, blaming them for selling their principles - Of all the commercially-oriented Linux distributions, Ubuntu is clearly the one that stays closer to what I'd like. And it's not by mere chance that it derives and keeps in constant sync (at least until now) with Debian. Still... This has the potential to make a big dent on their structure and vision.

Benjamin Mako Hill: An Association Game

Here's an association or riddle game that Mika and I created last night that I found interesting.
  • Give a player a list of three random, dissimilar objects (e.g., pancakes, manhole covers, and condominiums). Tell them that you are thinking of some quality or feature shared by all three and ask them to tell you what it might be.
  • After letting them think for some time, or even after supplying answers, tell the player that you lied and that you didn't have an answer in mind. In fact, the goal of the game is to come up with any and all associations.
Most people I've talked feel that the problem becomes easier after one realizes that there isn't a correct answer. Of course, the strategy that the second stage invites (thinking of anything without the idea that the answer might be right or wrong) is exactly what the player should have been doing from the beginning. Why don't we? In what situations might we be more creative problem solvers if we pretended that there isn't a correct answer?

Lars Wirzenius: Random thought: Usability design for hungry users

As I write this, I'm very hungry, not having eaten anything for 16 hours or so. I just clicked on the wrong button in Xchat, changing user modes the wrong way. No biggie, it was easy to fix. It still prompted me to realize that user interfaces need an automatically triggered mode to handle users that are hungry, tired, drunk, or otherwise less than accurate with their mice.

Uwe Hermann: German people: do you care about democracy and your right to vote?

If yes, please consider signing this online petition which asks the government to completely prohibit the usage of voting machines in Germany. Actually, you should sign this replacement petition, as the first one was getting "too big", a.k.a the software or server they use couldn't handle the sheer numbers of recorded votes anymore (ironic, isn't it?)... Note: the deadline for the petition is today, i.e., November 28, 2006! Ca. 45.000 people have signed already. If 50.000 signers are reached, there's sort of a guarantee that the government has to formally put this issue on their agenda (or something in that direction, I don't remember the exact details right now). If you haven't followed the latest news regarding the voting machine issues, I urge you to get informed by reading the recent blog entries of Frank Rieger and Tim Pritlove (for example). The Chaos Computer Club (CCC) has a very good collection of information and further readings. Take a look.

MJ Ray: TPM/DRM and Creative Commons (2)

Rob Myers commented:
"Since all CC licences allow NC copying and distribution, any DRM that limits copying in any way is a breach. Or any DRM as it is also known. And since the CC licenses all support fair use and DreAm (an oxymoronic idea that I thought had died of lack of interest) restricts it, that's another problem. Not to mention how harmful electronic enforcement of CC licenses would be."
That's an argument I've heard from several CC supporters, but I don't accept it: fair use is inconsistent globally. What is fair use in the USA might not be fair dealing in England, or the other way around. As to whether any DRM is possible under CC licences, there's the small matter of Lessig's "praise for better DRM" which seems to acknowledge the existance of TPMs that restrict in a CC-OK way. Rob continues:
"Mako's arguments are a rehash of ones that were considered in depth when the debate was happening. Terry covered most of them [in an article on a magazine web site]"
Maybe the points Mako presents were considered, maybe they weren't, but it's very hard to tell from the limited transparency of CC. I think the points are clear, direct and difficult to argue against - that may be why it's so hard to get a good debate with CC about this. What's more, Terry Hancock's article is a rehash of his old list posts. I think Terry's points were all covered in mailing list discussions and they don't even try to make a case for the TPM-ban in CC-BY. I like recycling, but it's disappointing to see people use the press to recycle old threads. Also, I don't find it particularly surprising if someone writing for a magazine web site isn't entirely comfortable with some forms of redistribution. Rob finishes with:
"And I would add that, as someone who has installed GNU/Linux on my iPod, who has recently read the Yellow Dog Linux announcement for the PS3, who uses their PS2 as a CD and DVD player, and whose son seems to get MP3s, images and movies onto his PSP OK, I do not understand the argument that the best way of "helping" users is to help third parties trap them under DRM regimes rather than assisting users in installing and using free software."
Maybe that's not understandable because it's not an argument that's used, except as a straw man by pro-format-discriminators? Personally, I think it's a pretty poor show that you have an iPod, PSP and so on - weren't Apple's and Sony's DRM-mania well-known when they were bought? Which brings me on to why I feel locked-media distribution is worthwhile: educating people to make better device choices next time. I bought an Ogg player this time - hearing Cory Doctorow's talks as MP3 was partly why. If CC 2.0 had had an aggressive-patent ban similar to CC 3.0's TPM ban, maybe that wouldn't have happened.

Peter Van Eynde: misrouted: goto 1

I've had a little setback with misrouted: it turns out that my original idea of how the universe of CP objects work (ie we have item and containers) turns out to be deeply wrong.

While parsing some complex rulebase with the old implementation it turns out that the objects are divided in 3 classes: items, containers and container-of-listable-items (ideas on naming are welcome). This is because you can have a network, which is a collection, that can contain a group, also previously a collection, in a different way then that the group contains the network: all members of the group are in the network versus a custom method looking if all possible ip's in the network are in the group. Also the trivial method I used the last method kind of broke down when it tried to expand a /8 network into ip's. :-S

So this means surgery at a pretty deep level in the class hierarchy and the old program could just about handle it, but the scars run deep. So misrouted is being rewritten to use the new setup. The good news it that I've thought of a more complex, but not O((N_rules**4)**N_firewalls**2) method of simulating the effects of a rulebase on traffic.

Matthew Palmer: VLAN adventures

Have you ever had a need for a large number of "real" network interfaces on a Linux box? For security reasons, you don't just want to hook everyone up to a single switch and use virtual interfaces (because it's too easy for one of the connected devices to play silly buggers with his neighbours). Up to a certain point, you can stuff more NICs into a box, and when it fills up you can switch to those outrageously expensive 2- and 4-port NICs. But eventually you're going to run out of space[1] or money. At that point, you need something more interesting. For me, this week, that "more interesting" has been Ethernet VLANs. Linux Journal has a good intro to the technical aspects of how to setup VLANs and Linux. VLANs are some crazy stuff. They're implemented by wrapping a little number around every Ethernet frame indicating which VLAN the packet is "on", and the switch (you need a higher-end device, appropriately configured) makes sure that packets don't roam onto ports they're not meant to be on. For a single switch, this isn't very interesting, and you don't really need an IEEE standard to make it work -- just a lot of little jumpers. However, VLANs are mostly useful on larger networks, which tend to use more than one switch. So you need a way for your VLANs to roam amongst your switches -- hence the packet tagging. You stick the tag onto the packets and fling them off to another switch, and packets coming in with the tag are corraled into their VLAN. Naturally, you don't want end-user devices whacking their own VLAN tags onto packets (untrusted data, and all that), so you define most of your ports as being "untagged". Packets that come in on these ports are treated as regular ethernet frames and tagged with the appropriate VLAN ID, and packets that go out have their VLAN IDs stripped before being sent. (This implies that you can tunnel VLANs in VLANs, and I'm pretty sure that is doable in most switches, modulo some nasty problems that can, and probably will, occur). The ports that aren't designated "untagged" spit out tagged packets -- and this is where my interest lies. Like most every other computer-related standard, Linux can decipher and work with VLAN tags (the 8021q module is what you're looking for). You just load up the module, hook your NIC into the appropriate port on your very expensive switch, define your VLAN tags with vconfig, and suddenly you've got vlanN interfaces, which map to real RJ-45 ports, and you can hang network devices off these and get lots and lots of "real" network interfaces on your Linux router. It's all so simple, right? Nothing ever is, of course. The trials and tribulations I've had over the past two days have included: Thankfully, once all those dramas were done, the whole thing just kind of fell into place, and now I've got a machine which has up to 2048(ish) network interfaces (with huge, glaring caveats on that upper bound, of course). With a bit of luck, the live installation in a couple of days will go smoothly. You can stop sniggering now.
1. In this case, there wasn't a lot of space to begin with, as it's a 1RU box I'm working on, and the 4-port NIC didn't want to place nice with me for some reason anyway.

Benjamin Mako Hill: Bring the Bling?

I'm been perplexed by the recent fracas around the possibility of Ubuntu shipping non-free drivers by default as part of the feisty release goal to bring the bling. The issue has been discussed by many people, most recently and eloquently in a blog post by Scott James Remnant. I have never been 100% comfortable with our (Ubuntu's) decision to ship proprietary drivers. The Ubuntu philosophy document -- which Mark Shuttleworth and I drafted originally -- says quite unambiguously:
Every computer user should have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, share, change and improve their software for any purpose, without paying licensing fees.
I believe this deeply. Consequently, I feel that binary drivers in Ubuntu are, and always have been, a failure to live up to our principles. If our philosophy document is still representative, most people in our community should be a little uncomfortable with them -- even if they think, as most of us do, that shipping them is the correct thing to do. Early on Ubuntu decided that binary firmware and hardware drivers would be distributed and quasi-supported in restricted. While not completely comfortable with the move, I could understand and defend it for three reasons:
  1. The drivers were easily removable and not enabled by default unless necessary to achieve functioning hardware.
  2. As part of this process, we promised to work with vendors to accelerate the freeing/open-sourcing of their drivers.
  3. Perhaps most importantly, I couldn't imagine not using them if it were the choice between non-free drivers or inoperable hardware.
The proposal to include proprietary nVidia driver in place of the existing free nVidia driver is important because it changes, or eliminates, the first and third justifications. Since the first issue has been discussed in depth, it seem appropriate to focus on the third and final point. The point is perhaps best introduced with an observation:
While I have met many people who research and buy hardware to avoid the need for non-free drivers, something I do myself, I have never met anyone who voluntarily chooses inoperable hardware on a computer they use over working hardware through a non-free driver.
While not airtight, this observation is precisely why the old policy of using non-free drivers only when no free drivers exist works so well. By effectively synonymizing use of the non-free driver with use of the hardware, the crisis created by non-free drivers is rendered paradoxical: anybody using a piece of hardware that only works with non-free drivers is, by definition, either using non-free drivers or not using the hardware. The only way to not use non-free drivers in situations where no free drivers exist is to not use hardware that requires them. If you use different hardware, you will not need to use non-free drivers. This important justification is completely inapplicable to the proposal to include non-free drivers in place of free (but not perfect) alternatives. Second, while shipping non-free drivers is wrong because we lose our freedom and violate our philosophy, the desire for basic hardware support is universal and important enough that it's defensible. One reason that the "binary by default for bling" situation alarms me is that I don't believe that the desire for desktop bling is as universal, or as strong, as the desire for working hardware. An analogy might be stealing food to feed your family and stealing a CD from the record store. Both are wrong because stealing is wrong, but I have a lot more sympathy for the hungry thief in the first example because CDs are not as necessary as food and because many people would rather go without a new CD than steal. We can ask: "Which is worse: selling your soul for a decent job or selling your soul for a PS3?" In an absolute sense, neither is worse; but it's easier to support the former than the latter. I'm very impressed with Beryl -- but I have trouble empathizing strongly with the need for a spinning desktop cube. New users may be impressed and attracted to an Ubuntu desktop powered by proprietary drivers. They might also be impressed by proprietary applications. However, it is self-defeating to attract new users to our free platform and principles by compromising our core values. Many users already make the decision to use non-free video drivers and Ubuntu makes it very easy to do so once they have made that choice. Installing binary drivers by default is choosing for the large number of users who will stick with any default. It may be a conservative stance but as long as we believe that a non-insignificant number of users would choose to live without bling before compromising Ubuntu's philosophy and goals, we should make the difficult decision to side with freedom by default. When discussing this issue, many people say, it's not my decision or it isn't my call. Regardless of whether anyone agrees with me and regardless of who the final decision is up to -- and it's not clear to me now -- I believe that the Ubuntu community has the power to inform and shape the development of their distribution. As the Ubuntu community, we can make our position heard. The best place to do that right now seems to be the Accelerated X specification comments page. One can also email the the Technical Board (for technical comments) and the Community Council (for principle or philosophy related issues).

Sven Mueller: Steve Kemp s weblog Blame it on rock and roll

Steve Kemp wrote an irssi script and accompanying utility to show facelets corresponding to IRC users, following an idea earlier mentioned by Lars Wizenius ,less than 5 hours earlier. Wow, that certainly is a neat thing. There is one problem for me though: My Debian login is “sven”, while my usual IRC nick (oh well, since I’m actually rarely on IRC, speaking of “usual” is perhaps wrong) is “incase”, since the “sven” nick was already taken on both freenode and oftc. Any idea how to work around that?

27 November 2006

Biella Coleman: Thomas Szasz

I just finished a pretty good article The Myth of Thomas Szasz, about the man who most famously attacked the psychiatric profession in part by claiming mental illness was manufactured, a myth. In a nutshell here is the point of the article:
“It is hard to doubt the reality of mental illness, especially when the suffering of affected individuals is so complete and the impairment so extreme, when psyche and identity are crippled almost beyond repair. But it is also remarkable how much of modern psychiatry is still theoretical rather than empirical, and how many of the supposed mental illnesses that appear (and multiply) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders have no known biological underpinnings or explanations. Although Szasz s critique often became a caricature, his intuition about the limits and deformations of modern psychiatry cannot be ignored. Many sick people have surely benefited from psychiatric treatment, both talk therapy and pharmacotherapy. But psychiatry s long history of error from snake pits to ice baths to spinning chairs to electroshock to lobotomy should give us pause. Skepticism is not backwardness, even if Szasz often took his skepticism to rhetorical extreme”
The part I found most interesting (and now I must read it):
A piece in The New York Times Magazine[by Szasz] titled Mental Illness Is a Myth reportedly induced more reader response than any article in the magazine s history. If he had preached from the pulpit with The Myth of Mental Illness, he had now nailed his thesis to the church s front door.
I must must check out the reader response! For those who know little about what came to be known as anti-psychiatry, this article is worth reading. It is written well and presents the virtue of skepticism, even if extreme, which is what Thomas Szasz, was all about. My only complaint is that if you know nothing of anti-psychiatry or the visible and patient-led challenge to psychiatry that followed in the 1970s, you would think that Thomas Szasz was entirely in a class of his own. While he may be the most famous figure, and may have certainly led the charge in many resepcts, there were others (that is critical psychiatrists like him (and not just in the US) not to mention wide spread critique from various social quarters. But a great great article otherwise.

Russell Coker: when you can't get along with other developers

Many years ago I was involved in a free software development project with write access to the source tree. For reasons that are not relevant to this post (and which I hope all the participants would regard as trivial after so much time has passed) I had a disagreement with one of the more senior developers. This disagreement continued to the stage where I was threatened with expulsion from the project.

At that time I was faced with a decision, I could have tried to fight the process, and I might have succeeded and kept my position in that project. But doing so would have wasted a lot of time from many people, and might have caused enough productivity loss for enough people to outweigh my contributions to the project for the immediate future. But this didn't seem very productive.

So I requested that my write access to the source tree be removed as I was going to leave the project and unused accounts are a security risk.

I never looked back, I worked on a number of other projects after that time (of which SE Linux is one) and the results of those projects were good for everyone. If I had stayed in the project where things weren't working out then it would have involved many flames, distraction from productive work for everyone, and generally not much good.

The reason I mention this now (after many years have passed) is because in another project I see someone else faced with the same choice I made who is making the wrong decision. The people who are on the same private mailing list as me will all know who I am referring to. The individual in question is appearently suffering health problems as a result of stress caused by their inability to deal with the situation where they can't get along with other people.

My advice to that person was to leave gracefully and find something else to work on. If you don't get along with people and make a big fuss about it then they will only be more glad when they finally get rid of you. Running flame-wars over a period of 6 months to try and get accepted by a team that you don't get along with will not do any good, but it will convince observers that removing you is a good idea.

Ben Armstrong: Home video hub on a shoestring

In our family, we have centralized all our best entertainment technology in a single system, a white box amd64 with PVR, 3D graphics, 1G, a 21” monitor, DVD burner and VCR. A number of older, far less capable systems have always surrounded this “hub”. A K6-2/400 with a less-than wonderful ATI Rage IIc graphics card presently serves as my wife’s system, and my PII/300 laptop roams the house on wireless B. This has always been the model for our home network, dating back to the late 90’s when the hub in our cramped apartment was a P/100 delivering sound through a $30 pawn-shop stereo to two main rooms, and the satellite node in the family room was a DEC VT-420 on a long serial cable. So, house-wide delivery of sound has always been possible. But doing the same for video remained unsolved until just this weekend. Kudos to the Videolan team for making it possible. A number of years ago, I recognized their vlc player was ideal for playing DVDs on my K6-2, handling the job with less CPU and less frame drop than other alternatives at the time. Not too long afterwards, though, we upgraded our hardware so saving CPU cycles was no longer an issue, and switched to other players to take advantage of features they offered over vlc. But a recent email from a friend brought me back. This friend asked if I had seen a certain Linux documentary video he had found. I hadn’t, and was intrigued. But since the hub was tied up by the kids at that moment, I figured I’d try watching on the old PII laptop. I didn’t really think it would work, but remembering how well vlc did on my other old hardware, I gave it a try. It worked! No frame drop at all. Buoyed by that victory, I recalled that I had downloaded the Debconf 6 DVD ISOs some days ago, but had not yet been able to watch them. You probably can guess why … yup, the single hub system, the only one really capable of doing a good job displaying video, was pretty much always tied up by various other family members. Now, I knew there was no way I could get those DVDs onto the laptop, as it has no drive and only a 4G hdd. Nor was I willing to go to the bother of ripping individual tracks to transcode and send over one at a time. But I then recalled that vlc, as well as being an excellent standalone player, is primarily the client for a streaming video system. So I set out to learn how to stream video. Back when I was first introduced to Videolan, I knew there was a server program, vls. I had a quick look at that and was overwhelmed by the wide variety of possible MRLs and codecs, and a bit mystified as to which magic spells were needed to make it stream to the laptop. It then occurred to me I had probably plunged in too quickly, and should back off and go look for more docs than just the man pages. Sure enough, they have plenty of excellent docs, leading to the discovery that the vlc gui itself has easy to use Wizard and Open dialogs to set up streaming. With that sorted out, I was streaming in no time. At this point, I was delighted to discover that I could successfully stream a 1024 kbps mp4 stream across wireless B form the basement to any other room of our two-story semi. And ever since then, I’ve been having great fun with the family, trying a wide variety of other video sources lying around: music videos, home videos made by friends, TV shows recorded from the PVR, DVDs direct from disc, and yes, finally, those Debconf 6 ISOs. I tell you, it’s like Christmas come early! Thanks, Videolan. You’ve made my week.

Jon Dowland: Thecus

Yesterday I installed debian on my thecus n2100. Thanks to Martin Michlmayr for putting up with my neurotic questions during this process. Normally, this would take about 2 hours. Unfortunately I hit a bug in the r8169 network driver (or the hardware) which made the process excruciatingly slow: over 8 hours. I did delay the process somewhat by going for a stable installation first time through. You need to go for etch, for anyone following along at home. I have two hard discs in this box and I wanted to use RAID-1 for the root filesystem. Actually, the two discs were already in a linux RAID-1 set, with superblocks, an ext3 filesystem and some files, from when I was using the default thecus firmware. The following approach lets you setup RAID in the installer and preserve any existing data. You will need to have at least one connection to the installer running a shell, in addition to the one running the installer. When you enter the disc partitioner stage, you will need to fetch the udeb which gives you the md module. For the current thecus installer image, that's md-modules-2.6.18-3-iop32x-di_1.5_arm.udeb. wget it from a mirror (path pool/main/l/linux-kernel-di-arm-2.6) and udpkg -i it. Then restart the partitioner. To preserve the contents of the RAID-1, you might be able to select "don't wipe this partition", and just make sure nothing on it would clash with the directories that Debian will create. I didn't take this approach. Instead, you can drop one of the discs from the mirror, continue with the installation as normal, copy the data back across after, and re-add the disc to the mirror set. Before you select your filesystems in the partitioner: Now feel free to let the installer stick a new filesystem on the RAID set, and install the base system etc. Once the thing has booted: Periodically check on the rebuild status with mdadm -D /dev/md0. One other thing I would strongly advise is getting the installer's debconf priority to medium or lower before you get the base system installed, so you can skip the bootloader / flashing stage. Update: I've clarified the following paragraphs. At present, the default etch kernel is 2.6.17. The network device in the Thecus is not supported by this kernel, so you have to manually install a particular 2.6.18 kernel prior to rebooting, or you will not be able to communicate with the machine once it boots. Martin makes this very clear in his instructions. However, if you have no experience using a d-i which flashes the kernel (as appose to say, the bootloader prompts you get when doing an x86 install, for example) you may not be aware that by default, the flash stage proceeds without prompts. That means that if you do not prevent it from doing so, there will be a window between the installer flashing 2.6.17, and you manually installing 2.6.18, where the thecus will be in an unbootable state, should you suffer a power cut or similar problem. In my case, I left the base system being unpacked overnight (due to the fact the network was so slow). So, that window was several hours wide. This is only a temporary situation, as the release team plan to have 2.6.18 available for Etch, and the patches for the Thecus hardware are steadily working their way into the mainline kernel.

26 November 2006

Josselin Mouette: OpenSuSE developers' reactions to Mark Shuttleworth's troll

Last Friday, Mark Shuttleworth posted a big troll he also sent to the OpenSuSE mailing list. While the Novell/Microsoft deal has raised many legitimate concerns, I really think the Canonical leader should take the mote (in France, that would be a beam) out of his own eye first. As expected, the reactions from OpenSuSE developers were strong. But I was really shocked by two of them. According to JP Rosevear, Mark Shuttleworth is, among other things, preventing the Debian GNOME maintainer from updating GNOME packages until after Ubuntu LSO had shipped because [he has] hired him, and trying to simultaneously supplant Debian's community with "Ubuntu" while relying heavily on the Debian community to be successful. According to David Canar, Ubuntu's anti-community practices are well-known. Yes, I was shocked to see these reactions. Not because of their strength, as they are perfectly justified. I was shocked to see that developers in the OpenSuSE community seem to be better informed than Debian developers about Canonical's dealings. When talking with random fellow developers, I see many of them who truly believe Mark Shuttleworth when he says he's just doing the best for Debian, despite everyday's proof of the opposite in Canonical's employees actions. Shouldn't we be concerned at all about Ubuntu sucking the blood out of the Debian project? It strikes me that OpenSuSE developers care more about it than ourselves.

Tollef Fog Heen: Live CD on disk

Enrico writes about putting a live CD on a removable disk. I added the support in casper for doing this almost a year ago and it has saved me lots of debugging time. Booting the live CD that way is almost as fast as booting an installed system. If you couple this with using the persistent storage support in casper, you can get the configure-on-boot support together with persistency. In a later update, slh is quited saying that xresprobe doesn't work on AMD64. This is wrong, I wrote that support based on code by Matthew Garret a little more than nine months ago. I wouldn't recommend incorporating it in new-written code, but rather use libx86.

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