On Wednesday, I went to a meeting of the Business Initiative for North Somerset for Cooperatives-SW (our regional cooperative cooperative). It was the first time anyone from the cooperative and mutual sector was present.

Conference Bank of England The first speaker was Geoff Harding from the Bank of England, who talked through topics in their agents summary and related news. One interesting graph showed a steep rise in the percentage of household income being saved. Answers to questions suggested that more of that goes to mutuals and building societies, but they find it difficult to be competitive while the banks are keen to increase their balances. There was mention of employment hoarding businesses short-time working, redeploying or shutting down temporarily to keep trained workers under contract, rather than make them redundant and rehire later. People from both the Federation of Small Businesses and the Hoteliers Association made strong comments about the banks claiming to government that they are willing to lend, but still offering deeply unattractive depth-of-recession rates and terms. If the regional agents get details of such cases, they pass them to the central bank. South West Regional Development Agency The second main speaker was Ann O Driscoll, who covers business development for the West of England (what many people call CUBA Councils that Used to Be Avon). She introduced their four strategic priorities:-

1. Low Carbon Economy apparenly our region has good wind, wave and solar experience. However, Vestas were mentioned and I know that when Vestas closed the UK s only wind turbine blade factories in August 2009, the RDAs were criticised for not acting against the subsidy-chasing, socially irresponsible conduct of Vestas and related companies continue to worry workers. If Vestas is one of the praised companies, I wonder whether we re attracting sustainable work to the region. On a related note, North Somerset Council and NS Enterprise Agency are organising a Climate Change forum on 1st April, but it s at Cadbury House Hotel, which is awkward to get to except by car: no footpath to the door, a mile-and-a-half walk along a busy road from a train station, bad roads for biking, wheelbending speedhumps on the drive, I can t remember if there is bicycle parking and its website doesn t say
2. Successful Businesses SWRDA funds our rather poor Business Link service. Does someone in the South West have some good news about Business Link? If so, please leave a comment on this article.
3. Prosperous Places intervention in areas like south Bristol or central Weston.
4. United Approach co-ordinating with other regional groups.

The main activities introduced were:

• Area Action Forces eight of these facilitate the closure of branches by large private-sector employers, gathering the various government departments and agencies together to help find the workers other jobs or fill out social security application forms. It probably helps, but I was surprised there wasn t any example of a regionally-owned phoenix company arising from a branch closure to continue the service was mentioned.
• Talent Retention Project finding new employment for unemployed specialists in their own sector in this region. New startups were mentioned briefly. Not one mention of helping those specialists to co-own existing businesses.

The questions were fascinating, except for mine. The best one was probably about the forthcoming election and the Conservatives pledge to shut down the RDAs and Business Links. The answer was that much of the work will still need to be done somehow, so it s more a question of who will do it, rather than what the name on the door says. So I don t think axing RDAs is going to achieve more than shuffling people between organisations. When allowed to ask a question, I got too excited and ranted a bit about how the Co-operative Group s co-operative enterprise hub is doing work that Business Link should have been funding, but the RDA doesn t understand social enterprise and treats it as a ghetto service. I ll try to take that up in a more coherent form later. Overview I think Cooperatives-SW were invited to the North Somerset Initiative largely because of pressure from software.coop for co-ops to be represented better in the Local Strategic Partnership, which has treated us badly. NSI holds one of the three business places on the partnership board, with the other two being held by NSEA and Bristol International Airport. I think it s a bit off that a private company and an enterprise agency are both represented by other groups and also have their own board seats while co-ops don t even have a collective seat, so that pressure for a representative organisation for co-operatives and mutuals to have a board place (in line with national government guidance) should continue, useful though the NSI meetings seem to be. The other thing which would really help is some funding for co-operative business development specialists to work in North Somerset at strategic tasks like this, instead of it being left to ordinary workers from other sectors. I don t know where that funding will come from and until then, I ll continue to try my best. We need to make sure that local strategy at least does no harm to the sector.

Finally, after almost 6 months of planing, this event is coming and will be start tomorrow, this is really great, There was a first attempt, and an idea to do a local(central-america based) Debian gathering on 2007 IIRC, now it will happen (almost 3 years later and at the same country). There was a lot of things that actually change since the fitst attempt, now Central-america has a more strong FLOSS Community, and now this event is possible, and it will happen this weekend yay! I really need to say thanks to Anto, Mauro Rosero, David, Caro and Gunnar, but I realize that doing all the orga stuffs was hard, I was quite involved since January, and I really say that you need a lot of work and energy to make a small event like this happen, but right now while I still sitting at home trying to finish to prepare my talks I realize that there was a lot of hard work put on this from everyone, and I m really happy to attend this gathering, also I hope that this event do something good on the local FLOSS people, since we have quite nice people here, but they are afraid to contribute, this is the chance to work together and push a bit to get more contributors from central-america.

Earlier today, Google announced the list of accepted mentor organizations for the Google Summer of Code 2010 (GSoC 2010). And we are happy to report that the R Project is once again a participating organization (and now for the third straight year) joining a rather august group of open source projects from around the globe. An R Wiki page had been created and serves as the central point of reference for the R Project and the GSoC 2010. It contains a list of project ideas, currently counting eleven and spanning everything from research-oriented topics (such as spatial statistics or automatic differentiation) to R community-support (regarding CRAN statistics and the CRANtastic site) to extensions (NoSQL, RPy2 data interfaces, Rserve browser integration) and more. I also just created a mailing list gsoc-r@googlegroups.com where prospective students and mentors can exchange ideas and discuss. As for other details, the Google Summer of Code 2010 site has most of the answers, and we will try to keep R-related information on the aforementioned R Wiki page.

Some people want Debian 6.0 (codename "squeeze") to be released sometime this year. Personally I think there is some kitsch value in releasing it during DebCamp or DebConf, and there is something to be said for doing it just beforehand so that everyone can break unstable into insanity while rolling around on the quad under the hot August sun. Some people want it to happen sooner, possibly as soon as possible. Irrespective of your preferences, or if you care at all, we will repeat the time-honored mantra: it will be released when it's ready. Readiness is somewhat of a subjective measure, but we typically do not consider a potential release ready when the RC bug count is high. There are a lot of RC bugs right now. Typically these are fixed at some point by their maintainers. There are also some self-motivated individuals who enjoy fixing these bugs themselves, and this practice predates the RCBW initiative, though perhaps not to the same level of combined intensity and endurance. Then there are bug-squashing parties, or BSPs. A BSP can be held virtually which means that a bunch of people get together online and say that they are having a party, or it can be at a designated physical space. I attended one of the latter type not too long ago. This BSP was targeted specifically to newbies or people who might feel that they are unqualified to help squash bugs, but wished to learn how to contribute. Some group and one-on-one mentoring occurred, in areas of how packages are put together, how to patch things, how to submit patches to the BTS, how to reproduce bugs, and other more problem-specific topics. I really don't know how successful this endeavor was since getting metrics on the effectiveness of teaching has been a historically difficult problem. On the other hand, we did spend a fair amount of time actually squashing bugs, which is a bit easier to assess. One problem we had was that some people liked to be loud and distracting and demand unreasonable amounts of attention for topics that had nothing to do with bugs, Debian, or free software, but we made progress regardless. Marc Brockschmidt thinks we need more BSPs and more focus on bug triage. Bug triage can be very demotivating and many people dislike doing it. BSPs seem to have powers of motivation through group camaraderie or friendly competition, so I would agree that it's worth experimenting with.

I often find myself running /sbin/route to get the IP address of the current gateway, especially when using a wireless LAN while traveling. For example, if the Internet does not work I usually ping the local gateway to see where the connectivity problem lies. I also need the IP if I want to access the routers configuration web interface. This is somewhat tedious, so I wrote libnss-gw-name, and now:

$ sudo apt-get install libnss-gw-name
[...]
$ ping gateway.current
PING gateway.current (172.20.239.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from hhicalvin.stud.uni-karlsruhe.de (172.20.239.1): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=2.16 ms
64 bytes from hhicalvin.stud.uni-karlsruhe.de (172.20.239.1): icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=1.48 ms
64 bytes from hhicalvin.stud.uni-karlsruhe.de (172.20.239.1): icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=2.73 ms
^C
--- gateway.current ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2003ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 1.482/2.129/2.739/0.513 ms

Once libnss-gw-name is installed, it hooks into the system s Name Service Switch, which is, among other things, responsible for resolving hostnames to ip addresses. It will only react on the name gateway.current , checking the system s routing table and returning the IP address of the current default gateway. It s a pretty simple and small tool, but it could well prove very handy to the power user. I uploaded libnss-gw-name to Debian sid, you can download the source code or access the git repository. Update: Changed the name to gateway.localhost, as that is within a reserved top-level-domain.

We had a visitor on #ironruby today asking for help getting IR running on his mac. I gave him the following directions, and they seemed to work aside from one glitch. I tested them on my wife s mac, and it worked for me, too. Install Mono You can grab the Mono .dmg from go-mono.com. This will install the framework and put the required programs (mono, xbuild) in your PATH. Fetch the IronRuby source Since Jim Deville likes macs, I m sure more recent versions will work, but this is the one we ve recently packaged up for Debian and tested on Ubuntu. If you want to be certain that the IronRuby code you write on Debian works on OS X, then you should probably build from the same version of the source. You should probably also install version 2.4.3 of Mono, but that may be more effort than it s worth ;) http://github.com/mletterle/ironruby/tarball/20090805+git.e6b28d27 Unpack the tarball Open up a terminal and unpack the thing you just downloaded:

$ mkdir ~/src/
$ cd ~/src/
$ tar xfz ~/Desktop/mletterle-ironruby-e6b28d2.tar.gz
$ cd mletterle-ironruby-e6b28d2/

Build IronRuby At this point, you should be able to build the IronRuby assemblies using xbuild. I don t recommend using rake, as it has some dependencies, and I m not a fan of dependencies.

$ xbuild /p:TreatWarningsAsErrors=false Merlin/Main/Languages/Ruby/Ruby.sln
<snip/>
Build succeeded.
	 2817 Warning(s)
	 0 Error(s)
Time Elapsed 00:00:28.8378230

Run the IronRuby interactive interpreter Our guest mentioned that he was using a terminal with a white background. Do note that the font color of the interactive interpreter (aka Read-Eval-Print Loop or REPL) is white, so if you re using a white background, you might want to change it. IIRC, there is a way to change the font color using a configuration setting. Figuring it out is left as an exercise for the reader.

$ mono Merlin/Main/Bin/Debug/ir.exe
IronRuby 0.9.0.0 on 2.6.3 (tarball Wed Mar 10 18:18:12 MST 2010)
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
>>> 1+2
=> 3
>>> exit()

Extra credit: IronPython The tarball you downloaded also included the source to IronPython. The procedure to build/run IronPython is pretty similar to IronRuby. Build IronPython Unlike IronRuby s .sln, this version of IronPython s .sln does not have a default configuration parameter, so we need to specify it with the /p:Configuration=Debug argument.

$ xbuild /p:TreatWarningsAsErrors=false /p:Configuration=Debug Merlin/Main/Languages/IronPython/IronPython.sln
<snip/>
	 69 Warning(s)
	 0 Error(s)
Time Elapsed 00:00:38.8057450

Run the IronPython interactive interpreter IronPython has a REPL interface like IronRuby s. Or is it the other way around? Anyway, here s an example.

$ mono .//Merlin/Main/Bin/Debug/ipy.exe
IronPython 2.6 Beta 2 DEBUG (2.6.0.20) on .NET 2.0.50727.1433
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> 1+2
3
>>> ^D

In my post about getting started with KVM I noted the fact that I had problems keeping screen output after the program exits [1]. The following snippet of shell code demonstrates the solution I ve discovered for this problem. It determines whether SCREEN is the parent process of the shell script and if so it sleeps for 60 seconds before exiting so I can see the KVM error messages. The other option is for the script to call exec bash to give me a new shell in the same window. Note that if I start a screen session and then run my KVM script I don t want it to do anything special on exit as I will return to the command-line in the same window. If I run exec kvm-unstable or have a system boot script run start-stop-daemon -S -c USER --exec /usr/bin/screen -- -S kvm-unstable -d -m /usr/local/bin/kvm-unstable then on exit I will be able to see what happened. #!/bin/bash
set -e
kvm ETC echo KVM gave an error return code
COUNT=$(ps aux grep $PPID grep SCREEN wc -l)
if [ "$COUNT" = "1" ]; then
echo "screen is the parent"
sleep 60
else
echo no screen
fi Update: Thanks to John for the Slee for suggesting the following:
#!/bin/bash
set -e
kvm ETC echo KVM gave an error return code
if grep -q SCREEN /proc/$PPID/cmdline ; then
echo "screen is the parent"
sleep 60
else
echo no screen
fi

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/03/17/starting-with-kvm/

Crush 2.0 was abandoned last year when the freeze for Debian Squeeze was still scheduled to start at the end of 2009. Even with the expected delays in the timetable for the Debian release, there never was going to be enough time to get Crush 2.0 released with the resources available. Subsequent Crush releases have always been planned, only the release of Crush 2.0 alongside Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) was abandoned.

However, Emdebian Grip has developed nicely and Grip 2.0 is going to be a significant advance over Grip 1.0 - lots more packages, lots of bugs fixed for smoother installations, multistrap support, etc.

The success of Grip has led to a slim chance of working out something for Emdebian Crush. The current state of cross-building / multiarch in Debian means that cross-building more than a handful of packages is simply unrealistic with the resources available within Emdebian. Instead, Crush will be based on Grip for 2.0 and subsequent releases, until things settle out.

Packages that are in Grip and which are designed upstream for embedded situations will simply be made accessible in Crush without further changes. Cross-building packages like this results in binaries that are all but identical to the Grip equivalent. (There is a massive difference between adapting a package for Crush and designing the package from scratch for embedded use. Emdebian is not taking on that task.)

The changes that Crush will make are being calculated, using a shortlist of packages that are (typically) not designed for embedded use but which support a long, long string of --enable-foo options in the build system - most of which Crush can change into --disable-foo. This results in fewer dependencies for the resulting binary packages so that things like LDAP can be removed. The packages themselves are being selected on the basis of what was released in Crush 1.0 for compatibility reasons. The source packages and the resulting binary packages will be renamed (busybox-crush etc.) and suitable Provides: Replaces: and Conflicts: deployed, allowing mixing of Grip and Crush packages on one device.

Other changes are then based around replacing coreutils with a reconfigured busybox and removing perl completely. Wrapper scripts, helpers and other changes will try to stitch the gaps.

It's a chance, a bit slim but a chance nonetheless. The plan offers a possibility, a worthwhile experiment. If it works, Emdebian Crush 2.0 could be a reality on seven architectures and with 2,000 packages available, released alongside Debian 6.0 (Squeeze). If it fails, people will just have to wait for multiarch to settle out and Crush 3.0, due for release alongside Debian 7.0 (Squeeze+1). In the meantime, there's always Emdebian Grip.

Max Attems uploaded a new version of the Linux kernel package (linux-2.6) today. This includes the last major changes to the package before Debian 6.0 'squeeze', which led me to label it the 'Big Bang' release:

• The Xen (dom0 and enhanced domU) flavour is back. It should probably be considered experimental at the moment.
• The OpenVZ flavour is back. This should also be considered experimental.
• The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) system and drivers were updated to the versions in Linux 2.6.33. This brings some bug fixes and extra features for the i915 driver, and working Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) for the radeon driver. It also includes the kernel-mode part of the nouveau driver for Nvidia GPUs, but this will not yet be loaded automatically as the user-mode parts of nouveau have not been packaged.
• The libata transition for PATA (IDE) controller drivers. After some review we realised that this only affects PC hardware at the moment, so only users of the i386 or amd64 architectures will see the upgrade prompts. Thanks to everyone who tested and reported bugs in the experimental packages.

We re coming close to GNOME 2.30 release date, and we are getting ready to branch a stable release off of WebKit s svn trunk in preparation for that. The idea of the stable branch is to try to maintain, and improve stability, with no additional features going in. Speaking of features, though, if you ve been paying attention you will have noticed WebKitGTK+ has come a long way, now. We came from not having basic features such as download support or openning links in new tabs, a more-or-less working HTML5 media implementation, and very few or missing in action developers to a thriving project, that gets more, and more attention, and contributors every day, with advanced features available, and rocking HTML5 media support that leaves little to be desired. It s been just over one year since we started rolling mostly bi-weekly releases, each adding more awesome features. There are still many issues, and we are not always equipped as a team to handle all the specifics of the engine ourselves, but I am really happy with the progress we ve made, and really thankful for the support my employer Collabora has given all the way for this to happen, including the early work on plugins, and many other things before my time as a contributor. When I switched to using Epiphany with the WebKit backend as my default browser back in January 2009, that meant having to deal with a whole lot of misbehaviour, and work-around a lot of painful brokeness. These days I enjoy a snappy, functional browser that makes me happy. If you haven t done so yet, go download, and test the newest Epiphany, with the latest WebKitGTK+, and help us make the GNOME 2.30 s web browser rock even more!

Several months ago, around the Central American Free Software Encounter (ECSL) in Estel , Nicaragua, I started stirring the waters The Central American regions have vibrant, beautiful Free Software communities, but have mostly (with some very notable examples, of course) shied away from being active participants in major development projects. What was I to do about it? Of course, try to get them to become Debian contributors! During the following weeks, I talked about it with several friends from the region, and the result was an announcement and lots of arguments that followed it. Panam was decided as the host country, and many people have put a lot of work into making the MiniDebConf happen. Mauro Rosero and Anto Recio came up with what appears to be a wonderful local venue and a set of sponsored amenities, and the Debian project is sponsoring what is needed in terms of transportation for people from the whole region (spanning from Mexico to Ecuador and Venezuela IIRC). I am very sorry, however, that I cannot attend this meeting. This very same weekend, I will fly three hours, but in the opposite direction: I will go to Tijuana, where fate decided I will present my first round of CENEVAL equivalence exams (Acuerdo 286 Licenciatura). I expect that to be the topic of another post, to come soon. So, while my friends will be having a good time and talking about Debian and group work, I will sit through three periods of four hours, answering an exam for the first time in a very long time. Fun, hah? Anyway, I will meet Guillermo Amaral (thanks for hosting me! ;-) ), which ensures I will not miss all of the fun ;-)

Every once in a while someone asks how they can use the Debian installer to access their system on disk to run commands, for example to write the kernel and ramdisk to flash again. This is particularly useful on headless NAS devices. So here's how to do it:

1. Start the Debian installer.
2. Remove the SSH key from ~/.known_hosts because the installer will always generate a new key.
3. Connect to the installer with SSH: ssh installer@...
4. Follow the installer until you reach the partitioner, then choose "go back".
5. Open a shell (look for Execute a shell towards the end of the menu).
6. Run the commands below (the example assumes that /boot is /dev/sda1 and / is /dev/sda2.

I have just sent the following email to my MP, David Lepper MP, outlining my concerns about the Digital Economy Bill. I urge you to write to your MP with a similar letter. Open Rights Group's guide to writing to your MP

From: David Pashley <david@davidpashley.com>
To: David Lepper
Cc: 
Bcc: 
Subject: Digital Economy Bill
Reply-To: 
Dear Mr Lepper, 
I'm writing to you so express my concern at the Digital Economy Bill
which is currently working its way through the House of Commons. I
believe that the bill as it stands will have a negative effect on
the digital economy that the UK and in particular Brighton have
worked so hard to foster. 
Section 4-17 deals with disconnecting people reported as infringing
copyright. As it stands, this section will result in the possibility
that my internet connection could be disconnected as a result of the
actions of my flatmate. My freelance web development business is
inherently linked to my access of the Internet. I currently allow my
landlady to share my internet access with her holiday flat above me.
I will have to stop this arrangement for fear of a tourist's actions
jeopardising my business. 
This section will also result in the many pubs and cafes, much
favoured by Brighton's freelancers, from removing their free wifi. I
have often used my local pub's wifi when I needed a change of
scenery. I know a great many freelancers use Cafe Delice in the
North Laine as a place to meet other freelancers and discuss
projects while drinking coffee and working.
Section 18 deals with ISPs being required to prevent access to sites
hosting copyrighted material. The ISPs can insist on a court
injunction forcing them to prevent access. Unfortunately, a great
many ISPs will not want to deal with the costs of any court
proceedings and will just block the site in question. A similar law
in the Unitied States, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA)
has been abused time and time again by spurious copyright claims to
silence critics or embarrassments.  A recent case is Microsoft
shutting down the entire Cryptome.org website because they were
embarrassed by a document they had hosted.  There are many more
examples of abuse at http://www.chillingeffects.org/
A concern is that there's no requirement for the accuser to prove
infringement has occured, nor is there a valid defense that a user
has done everything possible to prevent infringement. 
There are several ways to reduce copyright infringement of music and
movies without introducing new legislation. The promotion of legal
services like iTunes and spotify, easier access to legal media, like
Digital Rights Management free music. Many of the record labels and
movie studios are failing to promote competing legal services which
many people would use if they were aware of them. A fairer
alternative to disconnection is a fine through the courts. 
You can find further information on the effects of the Digital
Economy Bill at http://www.openrightsgroup.org/ and
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8544935.stm
The bill has currently passed the House of Lords and its first
reading in the Commons. There is a danger that without MPs demanding
to scrutinise this bill, this damaging piece of legislation will be
rushed through Parliament before the general election.
I ask you to demand your right to debate this bill and to amend the
bill to remove sections 4-18. I would also appreciate a response to
this email. If you would like to discuss the issues I've raised
further, I can be contacted on 01273 xxxxxx or 07966 xxx xxx or via
email at this address.
Thank you for your time.
-- 
David Pashley
david@davidpashley.com

Russell Coker writes:

I had also hoped that it would be really reliable and work with the latest kernels (unlike Xen) but it is giving me problems with 2.6.32 on Opteron.

This is a regression caused by a recent security fix (CVE-2010-0298, "KVM: x86 emulator: fix memory access during x86 emulation"). It appears to affect only recent Linux kernels running as guests on AMD systems, and it will probably be fixed soon.

It has been some time since I blogged about something. I wanted to write this post for a while, but never got around. Since beginning of february 2010, I have a new job and got a new work notebook: A shiny Dell Latitude E6400. Interestingly, the company usually relies on getting Lenovo Notebooks due to good Linux support, but we were unable to find a notebook without integrated camera and decent specs. We also researched some HP Notebooks. We ended up with a Dell since the website makes it really easy to find a system that fits your requirements. There is still room for improvement though you still have to select between Vostro, Latitude, Precision Mobile and XPS before you are allowed to configure the system. There is a filter on the left side of the shop, but filtering for a Core 2 Duo and 4 GB RAM won t show you the notebook I got. Instead there is some overpriced Latitude (~ 3000) and an XPS system. I just tried the XPS, but was unable to find a Core 2 Duo processor in the options. Anyway, somehow I made it through and got the following configuration:

Processor	Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU P8700 @ 2.53GHz
RAM	4 GB 800MHz DDR2
Graphics	Mobile Intel Integrated Graphics Media Accelerator X4500HD
Display	14.1 Widescreen WXGA+ (1440X900), LED backlight, non-glare
Hard Drive	Seagate ST9250410ASG 250GB
Webcam	None, but microphone fitted
Battery	9-cell 85 Wh
WLAN	Intel Wireless WiFi Link 5100 (according to lspci, I did not care too much)
LAN	Intel 82567LM Gigabit Network Connection

I installed Ubuntu karmic (amd64) the day it arrived and I am impressed. I have yet to find a serious problem with hardware support. Everything just worked out of the box, installation was done after half an hour (I needed 10 minutes to find a network cable since the installer did not support the wireless). I wanted to install Debian on it but so far I did not get around to actually do it. But I expect sid to perform just as well with lenny probably lacking some of the needed drivers. So why am I writing this? The main point is that you can buy a notebook today and have it fully supported wrt. Linux. Open Source has come a long way! Second: If I replace my personal notebook (a Sony Vaio), I will probably buy Dell as well. Definitely nothing from Sony, because I did not find any way to change the display brightness for the 3 years old system, which makes it usable only next to a power outlet.

I've been too busy (work, family, and fighting a nasty cold!) to write much text lately, other than the comments I put on launch photos uploaded to my Flickr stream, but the remainder of our testing of the prototype TeleMetrum v0.2 boards went really well! The only significant change we decided to make before going to production was to change the 3.3 volt regulator from a 100mA to a 150mA part. This will ensure adequate power for the companion boards we have planned, even when the GPS chip is in maximum power mode searching for satellites during a cold start. So... [drum roll, please] Keith and I just placed the orders for our first production lot of TeleMetrum v1.0 boards! With any luck, in 3-4 weeks we should have a pile of altimeters to sell, along with the associated TeleDongle ground stations already in stock. Stay tuned!

I ve just bought a new Thinkpad that has hardware virtualisation support and I ve got KVM running. HugePages The Linux-KVM site has some information on using hugetlbfs to allow the use of 2MB pages for KVM [1]. I put vm.nr_hugepages = 1024 in /etc/sysctl.conf to reserve 2G of RAM for KVM use. The web page notes that it may be impossible to allocate enough pages if you set it some time after boot (the kernel can allocate memory that can t be paged and it s possible for RAM to become too fragmented to allow allocation). As a test I reduced my allocation to 296 pages and then increased it again to 1024, I was surprised to note that my system ran extremely slow while reserving the pages it seems that allocating such pages is efficient when done at boot time but not so efficient when done later. hugetlbfs /hugepages hugetlbfs mode=1770,gid=121 0 0 I put the above line in /etc/fstab to mount the hugetlbfs filesystem. The mode of 1770 allows anyone in the group to create files but not unlink or rename each other s files. The gid of 121 is for the kvm group. I m not sure how hugepages are used, they aren t used in the most obvious way. I expected that allocating 1024 huge pages would allow allocating 2G of RAM to the virtual machine, that s not the case as -m 2048 caused kvm to fail. I also expected that the number of HugePages free according to /proc/meminfo would reliably drop by an amount that approximately matches the size of the virtual machine which doesn t seem to be the case. I have no idea why KVM with Hugepages would be significantly slower for user and system CPU time but still slightly faster for the overall build time (see the performance section below). I ve been unable to find any documents explaining in which situations huge pages provide advantages and disadvantages or how they work with KVM virtualisation the virtual machine allocates memory in 4K pages so how does that work with 2M pages provided to it by the OS? But Hugepages does provide a slight benefit in performance and if you have plenty of RAM (I have 5G and can afford to buy more if I need it) you should just install it as soon as you start. I have filed Debian bug report #574073 about KVM displaying an error you normally can t see when it can t access the hugepages filesystem [6]. Permissions open /dev/kvm: Permission denied
Could not initialize KVM, will disable KVM support One thing that annoyed me about KVM is that the Debian/Lenny version will run QEMU instead if it can t run KVM. I discovered this when a routine rebuild of the SE Linux Policy packages in a Debian/Unstable virtual machine took an unreasonable amount of time. When I halted the virtual machine I noticed that it had displayed the above message on stderr before changing into curses mode (I m not sure the correct term for this) such that the message was obscured until the xterm was returned to the non-curses mode at program exit. I had to add the user in question to the kvm group. I ve filed Debian bug report #574063 about this [2]. Performance Below is a table showing the time taken for building the SE Linux reference policy on Debian/Unstable. It compares running QEMU emulation (using the kvm command but without permission to access /dev/kvm), KVM with and without hugepages, Xen, and a chroot. Xen is run on an Opteron 1212 Dell server system with 2*1TB SATA disks in a RAID-1 while the KVM/QEMU tests are on an Intel T7500 CPU in a Thinkpad T61 with a 100G SATA disk [4]. All virtual machines had 512M of RAM and 2 CPU cores. The Opteron 1212 system is running Debian/Lenny and the Thinkpad is running Debian/Lenny with a 2.6.32 kernel from Testing.

	Elapsed	User	System
QEMU on Opteron 1212 with Xen installed	126m54	39m36	8m1
QEMU on T7500	95m42	42m57	8m29
KVM on Opteron 1212	7m54	4m47	2m26
Xen on Opteron 1212	6m54	3m5	1m5
KVM on T7500	6m3	2m3	1m9
KVM Hugepages on T7500 with NCurses console	5m58	3m32	2m16
KVM Hugepages on T7500	5m50	3m31	1m54
KVM Hugepages on T7500 with 1800M of RAM	5m39	3m30	1m48
KVM Hugepages on T7500 with 1800M and file output	5m7	3m28	1m38
Chroot on T7500	3m43	3m11	29

I was surprised to see how inefficient it is when compared with a chroot on the same hardware. It seems that the system time is the issue. Most of the tests were done with 512M of RAM for the virtual machine, I tried 1800M which improved performance slightly (less IO means less context switches to access the real block device) and redirecting the output of dpkg-buildpackage to /tmp/out and /tmp/err reduced the built time by 32 seconds it seems that the context switches for networking or console output really hurt performance. But for the default build it seems that it will take about 50% longer in a virtual machine than in a chroot, this is bearable for the things I do (of which building the SE Linux policy is the most time consuming), but if I was to start compiling KDE then I would be compelled to use a chroot. I was also surprised to see how slow it was when compared to Xen, for the tests on the Opteron 1212 system I used a later version of KVM (qemu-kvm 0.11.0+dfsg-1~bpo50+1 from Debian/Unstable) but could only use 2.6.26 as the virtualised kernel (the Debian 2.6.32 kernels gave a kernel Oops on boot). I doubt that the lower kernel version is responsible for any significant portion of the extra minute of build time. Storage One way of managing storage for a virtual machine is to use files on a large filesystem for it s block devices, this can work OK if you use a filesystem that is well designed for large files (such as XKS). I prefer to use LVM, one thing I have not yet discovered is how to make udev assign the KVM group to all devices that match /dev/V0/kvm-*. Startup KVM seems to be basically designed to run from a session, unlike Xen which can be started with xm create and then run in the background until you feel like running xm console to gain access to the console. One way of dealing with this is to use screen. The command screen -S kvm-foo -d -m kvm WHATEVER will start a screen session named kvm-foo that will be detached and will start by running kvm with WHATEVER as the command-line options. When screen is used for managing virtual machines you can use the command screen -ls to list the running sessions and then commands such as screen -r kvm-unstable to reattach to screen sessions. To detach from a running screen session you type ^A^D. The problem with this is that screen will exit when the process ends and that loses the shutdown messages from the virtual machine. To solve this you can put exec bash or sleep 200 at the end of the script that runs kvm. start-stop-daemon -S -c USERNAME --exec /usr/bin/screen -- -S kvm-unstable -d -m /usr/local/sbin/kvm-unstable On a Debian system the above command in a system boot script (maybe /etc/rc.local) could be used to start a KVM virtual machine on boot. In this example USERNAME would be replaced by the name of the account used to run kvm, and /usr/local/sbin/kvm-unstable is a shell script to run kvm with the correct parameters. Then as user USERNAME you can attach to the session later with the command screen -x kvm-unstable . Thanks to Jason White for the tip on using screen. I ve filed Debian bug report #574069 [3] requesting that kvm change it s argv[0] so that top(1) and similar programs can be used to distinguish different virtual machines. Currently when you have a few entries named kvm in top s output it is annoying to match the CPU hogging process to the virtual machine it s running. It is possible to use KVM with X or VNC for a graphical display by the virtual machine. I don t like these options, I believe that Xephyr provides better isolation, I ve previously documented how to use Xephyr [5]. kvm -kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-2-amd64 -initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-2-amd64 -hda /dev/V0/unstable -hdb /dev/V0/unstable-swap -m 512 -mem-path /hugepages -append "selinux=1 audit=1 root=/dev/hda ro rootfstype=ext4" -smp 2 -curses -redir tcp:2022::22 The above is the current kvm command-line that I m using for my Debian/Unstable test environment. Networking I m using KVM options such as -redir tcp:2022::22 to redirect unprivileged ports (in this case 2022) to the ssh port. This works for a basic test virtual machine but is not suitable for production use. I want to run virtual machines with minimal access to the environment, this means not starting them as root. One thing I haven t yet investigated is the vde2 networking system which allows a private virtual network over multiple physical hosts and which should allow kvm to be run without root privs. It seems that all the other networking options for kvm which have appealing feature sets require that the kvm process be started with root privs. Is KVM worth using? It seems that KVM is significantly slower than a chroot, so for a basic build environment a secure chroot environment would probably be a better option. I had hoped that KVM would be more reliable than Xen which would offset the performance loss however as KVM and Debian kernel 2.6.32 don t work together on my Opteron system it seems that I will have some reliability issues with KVM that compare with the Xen issues. There are currently no Xen kernels in Debian/Testing so KVM is usable now with the latest bleeding edge stuff (on my Thinkpad at least) while Xen isn t. Qemu is really slow, so Xen is the only option for 32bit hardware. Therefore all my 32bit Xen servers need to keep running Xen. I don t plan to switch my 64bit production servers to KVM any time soon. When Debian/Squeeze is released I will consider whether to use KVM or Xen after upgrading my 64bit Debian server. I probably won t upgrade my 64bit RHEL-5 server any time soon maybe when RHEL-7 is released. My 64bit Debian test and development server will probably end up running KVM very soon, I need to upgrade the kernel for Ext4 support and that makes KVM more desirable. So it seems that for me KVM is only going to be seriously used on my laptop for a while. Generally I am disappointed with KVM. I had hoped that it would give almost the performance of Xen (admittedly it was only 14.5% slower). I had also hoped that it would be really reliable and work with the latest kernels (unlike Xen) but it is giving me problems with 2.6.32 on Opteron. Also it has some new issues such as deciding to quietly do something I don t want when it s unable to do what I want it to do.

• [1] http://www.linux-kvm.com/content/get-performance-boost-backing-your-kvm-guest-hugetlbfs
• [2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=574063
• [3] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=574069
• [4] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/03/16/thinkpad-t61/
• [5] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/01/07/xephyr/
• [6] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=574073

I'm running again. No, not running in a bubulle style; I'm running for DPL. It started as a fairly last-minute decision because I would hate to see an election with only one candidate, but then two other people submitted their candidacy right after me. As I stated in my candidacy email, I had "a concert" this weekend. Actually, there were three two-hour performances; two on saturday, one on sunday. Early on, I also suggested videotaping the performance (using the excellent dvswitch, for which I added a patch to support crossfading transitions) to the organising group within the choir, and they liked that. Apart from dvswitch, we used the theatre's own audio mixing setup (so I wouldn't have to worry about that too much) and the theatre's intercom system. I'd made some tally lights, but in the end we were not entirely able to use them, because there were some issues to be dealt with that meant I couldn't quite get them working properly. So on saturday, I was in the theatre pretty early to get everything set up, did some explanations to the volunteers who would do the actual recording, drove my dad (who'd done the direction for the video parts) home, went home, and found my bed at around midnight. On sunday, I got up fairly early, booted my laptop to update the live images with some fixes for some issues we'd encountered on saturday, left for the theatre fairly early again, set up the extra camera position, found out that one of the laptops was actually running at 100Mbit rather than a gigabit and that therefore the extra camera wasn't going to work, learned that one of the volunteers for sunday had done some other camera work for another performance right before that, for which he'd rented some high-end DV-capable cameras. So we broke down the two low-end set-ups, set up the high-end cameras, connected them to the laptops, recalibrated the whitebalance and the diaphragm setting, and restarted the streams. Then one laptop started failing. Since we had had to remove one camera anyway, I just replaced it. By that time, I had about 15 minutes left before sunday's performance would start, so I went to prepare for that. After the performance had finished, I found out that something had gone wrong with the sound of sunday's performance; rather than music, we only heard crackling all the time. Luckily, the sound had also been separately recorded to a different medium, and that recording is fine, so we only need to resync the audio to the video, which should not be a problem. All in all, I had an extremely busy weekend. The alert reader will note that I didn't mention 'food' anywhere in the above paragraphs, mostly because I hardly ever found the time to eat. But it was also extremely satisfying. We still have some postprocessing to do, but I expect I'll put some videos online once we've done that. They're truly stunning, at times. And then yesterday I still had to spend some time writing my DPL platform, and doing some campaigning work. All in all, I didn't find my bed until approximately 4 AM... oh well. I look forward to the election time, and hope that I will do well. I don't need to win, but I'd hope my result will be at least as good as the last time... Update: we used the theatre's audio setup, not video setup -- oops :-)

So, you have some application where you want the user to specify a remote host/port, and you want to support IPv4 and IPv6. For literal addresses, things are fairly simple. IPv4 addresses are simple, and RFC2732 has things covered by putting the IPv6 address within square brackets. It gets more interesting as to what you should do with hostnames. The problem is that getaddrinfo can return you multiple addresses, but without extra disambiguation from the user it is very difficult to know which one to choose. RFC4472 discusses this, but there does not appear to be any good solution. Possibly you can do something like ping/ping6 and have a separate program name or configuration flag to choose IPv6. This comes at a cost of transparency. The glibc implementation of getaddrinfo() puts considerable effort into deciding if you have an IPv6 interface up and running before it will return an IPv6 address. It will even recognise link-local addresses and sort addresses more likely to work to the front of the returned list as described here. However, there is still a small possibility that the IPv6 interface doesn't actually work, and so the library will sort the IPv6 address as first in the returned list when maybe it shouldn't be. If you are using TCP, you can connect to each address in turn to find one that works. With UDP, however, the connect essentially does nothing. So I believe probably the best way to handle hostnames for UDP connections, at least on Linux/glibc, is to trust getaddrinfo to return the sanest values first, try a connect on the socket anyway just for extra security and then essentially hope it works. Below is some example code to do that (literal address splitter bit stolen from Python's httplib).

I ve now had my new Thinkpad T61 [1] for almost a month. The letters on the keyboard are not even starting to wear off which is unusual, either this Thinkpad is built with harder plastic than the older ones or I m typing more softly. Memory The first thing I did after receiving it was to arrange a RAM upgrade. It shipped with two 1GB DDR2 666MHz PC2-5300 SODIMM modules and as I want to run KVM I obviously need a lot more than that. The Intel Chipset page on Wikipedia is one of the resources that documents the Intel GM965 chipset as supporting up to 8G of RAM. Getting 4G in two 2G modules seemed like a bad idea as that would limit future expansion options and also result in two spare modules. So I decided to get a 4G module for a total of 5G of RAM. I ve updated my RAM speed page with the test results of this system [2], I get 2,823MB/s with a matched pair of DIMMs and 2,023MB/s with a single DIMM. But strangely with a pair of unmatched DIMMs Memtest86+ reported 2,823MB/s I wonder whether the first 2G of address space is interleaved for best performance and the last 3G runs at 2,023MB/s. In any case I think that losing 29% of the maximum RAM speed would be an acceptable trade-off for saving some money and I can always buy another 4G DIMM later. I had to order a DDR2-800MHz PC2-6400 module because they are cheaper than the PC2-5300 modules and my Thinkpad works equally well with either speed. I have used the spare 1G SODIMM in my EeePC701 which takes the same RAM presumably because the EeePC designers found PC2-5300 modules to be cheaper than slower modules (I think that the 701 was at the time it was released the slowest PC compatible system that was selling in quantity). The EeePC gets only 798MB/s out of the same memory. My document about Memtest86+ results has these results and more [2]. I noticed that if I run Memtest86+ booted from a USB flash device then inserting or removing a USB device can cause memory errors, but if I boot memtest86+ from a CD it seems to work correctly. So it seems that Memtest86+ doesn t disable some aspect of USB hardware, this might be considered a bug or it might just be a don t do that issue. Misc To get the hardware virtualisation working (needed to load the kvm_intel kernel module) I had to enable it in the BIOS and then do a hard reset (power off). Telling the BIOS to save and reboot was not adequate. This would be a BIOS bug, it knew that I had changed the virtualisation setting so it should have either triggered a hard reset or instructed me to do so. The default configuration of Debian/Lenny results in sound not working, I had to run alsaconf as suggested on the Debian Etch on Thinkpad T61 howto [3] which solved it. Generally I m happy with this system, the screen resolution is 1680*1050 which has 20% more pixels than the 1400*1050 screen on my Thinkpad T41p, it s a lot faster for CPU operations and should be a lot faster for video when I get the drivers sorted out (currently it s a lot slower), and I have virtualisation working again. But when you buy a system that s much like the last one but 6 years newer you expect it to be better. Generally the amount of effort involved in the process of buying a new system, upgrading the RAM to the desired specs, installing Linux and tweaking all the options is enough to make me want to wait at least another 6 years before buying another. Part of the reason for this difficulty is that I want to get so much functionality from the machine, a machine with more modest goals (such as a Netbook) takes a lot less time to configure. Problems There is Bluetooth hardware which is apparently enabled by default. But a quick search didn t turn up any information on how to do the basic functions, I would like to just transfer files from my mobile phone in the same way that I transfer files between phones. The video card is a nVidia Corporation Quadro NVS 140M (rev a1). 3D games seem slow but glxgears reports 300fps. It doesn t have Xvideo support which appears to be the reason why mplayer won t allow resizing it s display area unless run with the -zoom option, and it s also got performance problems such that switching between virtual desktops will interrupt the sound on a movie that mplayer is playing although when alsaplayer is playing music the sound isn t interrupted. Also when I play a Youtube video at twice the horizontal and vertical resolution it takes half of one CPU core. It s a pity that I didn t get an Intel video controller. It seems that Debian is soon going to get the Nouveau NVidia drivers so hopefully video performance will improve significantly when I get them [4]. The next thing I have to do is to get the sound controls working. The older Thinkpads that I used had hardware controls, the T41p that was my previous system had buttons for increasing and decreasing the volume and a mute button that interacted directly with the hardware. The down-side of this was that there was no way for the standard software to know what the hardware was going to do, the up-side was that I could press the mute button and know that it would be silent regardless of what the software wants. Now I have the same buttons on my T61 but they don t do anything directly, they just provide key-press events. According to showkeys the mute key gives 0 71 0xf1 , the volume down button gives 0 72 0xf2 , and the volume up button gives 0 73 0xf3 . Daniel Pittman has made some suggestions to help me get the keyboard events mapped to actions that can change the sound via software [5] which I haven t yet had time to investigate. I wonder if it will ever be possible to change the volume of the system beep. The system has an SD card slot, but that doesn t seem to work. I m not really worried at the moment but in the future I will probably try and get it going. It has a 100G disk which isn t that big, adding a 32G SD card at some future time might be the easiest way to upgrade the storage copying 100G of data is going to be painful and usually a small increment in storage capacity can keep a system viable for a while. Any advice on getting sound, the SD card, and Bluetooth working would be appreciated. I ll probably upgrade to Debian/Testing in the near future so suggestions that require testing features won t be ruled out.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/02/15/new-thinkpad-lenovo-web-site-sucks/
• [2] http://doc.coker.com.au/computers/ram-speed-memtest86/
• [3] http://www.klabs.be/~fpiat/linux/debian/Etch_on_Thinkpad_T61.html
• [4] http://bgoglin.livejournal.com/19624.html
• [5] http://lists.luv.asn.au/wws/arc/luv-main/2010-03/msg00123.html