Marc Fleury, JBoss founder joins the ranks of Tonnerre, me, and other people requesting that MySQL (and MariaDB!) please finally die. Everyone, don't even fork it. Use a real database instead. Or, at least, SQLite. Really. We're going to FOSDEM 2010 (of course I've been at every FOSDEM that was not just an OSDEM, Benny and gecko2 are regular attendees as well, as are other projects of mine such as FreeWRT and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, by proxy). There will be a recent MirBSD snapshot I've yet got to build, with the new floppy format ustarfs (idea, but no single line of their stinking ridiculously huge code, stolen from NetBSD ) and other improvements (albeit less than I wanted to get done by then). The days before, I'll attend the first FusionForge meeting to break up the French Cabal, with my work hat on. That is also my first time in France (outside of the Elsa ). People, make a good impression on me to overcome the classic prejudices ;-) This weekend I'm going to meet my Debian Application Manager zack, have some good beer (ugh... first this, then Paris, then good belgian beer...) and fix some bugs, all while learning even more. Sounds like fun, but I almost feel overwhelmed, in contrast to the years of much less travelling from my past. I've also started sort-of mentoring Simon, one of our apprentices at work, into the Debian processes. (On an unrelated side note, formorer recently said bpo will become bp.d.o soon. Great!) Please don't laugh at this excuse for a webpage, as I've yet to fill it in, but my CLI for the KDE Wallet is hereby deemed ready for public consumption, with a bug-fix release 2.01 (bugs actually found during preparation of a port to Debian sid and KDE 4, which is much much worse than KDE 3, plus it looks so absolutely disgusting I'm not even sure Windows Mistda is worse). I hope the package will end up in NEW soon (and once progressed to testing I may be able to make the KDE 3 variant official via lenny backports; my WTF *.deb repo will hold them until then.

There are more webpages I need to fill in... mksh's TaC, arc4random (which needs some major redesign as well) and BSD::arc4random, the RANDEX protocol (entropy exchange over IRC) and its plugins and patches, ... Not just Mac OSX (and, I hope, iPhoneOS) will soon come with mksh(1), but also Android (I prepared patches to make it /bin/sh, which works quite well although I need to find out how to make a hardlink so that #!/bin/mksh scripts will run) and Maemo, for which I wrote an mksh package in a garage project, which also needs some love w.r.t. testing on actual devices, menu integration, etc. (Please contact me if you can help with either of the three.) We also have lewellyn:#ksh making a package for the new OpenSolaris system (thanks again). People persuading Apple to put it on the jesusPhone are also welcome. (This does not mean I endorse any of these right now, I'd probably get the most of a WinCE PDA with built-in GPSr, WLAN and maybe GSM/GPRS.) English and French native speakers, please review, and Dutch native speakers may contribute a translation of, our flyers. (Source code for these is not available, sorry. Benny makes them in Quark on System 7 in Basilisk II, used to be Classic until Apple yanked it. But still, they use only free fonts, free imagery or such the MirOS Project is allowed to use, and beat every single other FOSS project flyer I've ever seen by far!) There's probably more I could write, I bet I forgot half of it anyway, but I'll leave it at that for now. Get yourself a nice cup of hot chocolate, pour an Espresso into it, and enjoy the mix with a piece of cake (I'd say strawberry or mousse-pear but all they had was cassis-cr me) and pity me for not knowing any French next month.

After the coffee machine, would you have expected to be able to login on a guitar ? Well, now, you can, on the Misa digital. It is not only a digital guitar, but it runs (Gentoo) Linux, and an ssh server.

1. My Orange 3G mobile broadband USB modem won't operate properly with gnome-ppp because it doesn't use a real username or password and needs more customised chatscript support than gnome-ppp appears to be able to support.


2. I stopped using network-manager-gnome and started using wicd instead due to problems with nm-applet at that time, which doesn't see the USB modem (and doesn't drop wlan0 for it either). I'm not sure if nm-applet would now work with the USB modem.


3. I've got the modem working with sudo pon orange but I wanted a GUI.

Instead - and, frankly, just as an experiment to get used to auto-detecting things - I decided to write a little program that puts a status icon in place if HAL reports no modem capability, then raises a simple window to manage the connection when the modem becomes available. (I had a shell script using zenity that was almost good enough but without automated launch.)

The window is trivially simple, it just lists the available connections in /etc/ppp/peers and has a toggle button to connect or disconnect the selected connection. Almost no error checking, no configuration support for the pon scripts themselves. I might add a default connection using gconf later. Yes, I know it's HAL but PolicyKit/DeviceKit just seemed too complicated when it was simpler to use libhal's own dbus support.

I'm happy to just use this for me but if anyone else is interested in this kind of app, I might be persuaded to put the source code somewhere public and continue development with a view to uploading to Debian. Naturally, if gnome-ppp or wicd could be adapted to replace it, that would be good too. (I'll file wishlist bugs if it isn't just me who wants this - I only need this functionality for a few months and a quick and dirty version is enough just for me. By the time the bugs are fixed, I probably won't be using mobile broadband any more.)

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

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

Funnily, I just discovered while digging in a user issue of my pet package geneweb, that "start-stop-daemon" has a "--umask" switch, designed exactly for doing what I currently do with a wrapper script in the package..:-) After all, it's only 3.5 years that it's sitting here waiting for me..:-) Looks like I'll have to do an upload for geneweb which I'll do happily as it will drop what I consider a quite bad hack.

Among the many columns and lesser sections of my favorite national newspaper I enjoy reading the Centenaria column Notes published one hundred years ago in Mexico City local newspapers. A couple of decades ago, we started having policletos on the streets "Polic as bicicletos". Cops on bikes. I don't know if we had policletos as a continuous presence before that, but I do remember it being somewhat controversial in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Anyway, this snippet (and sadly I cannot capture the 1910 writing style in English) was a joy to read:

January 18, 1910 Good results of using bicycles for surveillance As we have come to know, the service the first-class policemen are doing on bike, mainly during night time, has yielded great results, as the street policemen often fell asleep and woke up upon hearing a horse approaching, which does not happen anymore because the first-class policemen make much quicker rounds, and before the street policemen even think of it, their superior is standing in front of them. It also seems that robberies, so frequent during the nights, have ceased because the burglars, hastily breaking the locks, are caught by the bike-riding policemen, given the machines barely make any noise, and besides, they cannot run away because they are chased with no effort.

While I was under snow last week, the world saw a flurry of Koha company news. We found out that PTFS is to acquire LibLime and ByWater Solutions and BibLibre are partnering for the U.S. With the past ByWater Solutions and PTFS, Inc. partnering, it seems like four of the younger Koha companies (established 2005, 2007, 2008 and PTFS started with Koha in 2008 I think) are now linked together, so it s not entirely surprising that ByWater congratulates PTFS on the purchase of LibLime. What did surprise me is the impressed with PTFS s resources quote from Liblime owner Josh. Some librarians are asking What will the acquistion of Liblime mean to Koha libraries? but I m wondering what does this mean for the Koha project? Well, there s still our co-op (established 2002) and the other older private Koha companies (Calyx, Katipo and so on), as well as the rest of the younger ones, so I think there s still the motivation for a vendor-neutral non-profit group to host the project. Recent history has shown that it s too painful if any one private company hosts it. It ll be interesting to see how the recent private company deals help that work. If all goes well, a bright new day for Koha, as wizzyrea hopes. On another level, I m a bit disappointed that a theoretical Free and Open Source Software player (even if things like LibLime Enterprise Koha had muddied the water) has been sold to a mixed FOSS+proprietary player. I m almost cross with Liblime s owners for selling up, but I don t know if that s fair. Selling up is a fairly common exit move in private companies, so shouldn t I expect it? Do librarians expect it? Is this why some seem reluctant to buy from start-ups which are still independent? As you may know, TTLLP software.coop is in common ownership, so we can t really be bought. This is a self-defence or legacy-guaranteeing mechanism for our cooperative, where our assets are pledged to other common ownership cooperatives if our corporation dies. I think it also has the fringe benefit that we re a fairly safe home for things like trademarks. This unbuyability means that I feel I m watching the sales and cross-linking of our competitors from the sidelines, from a viewpoint more like Koha users than the other vendors, waiting for the dust to settle and the chips to fall where they may. Whatever happens there, software.coop will still be here. Unsurprisingly, there have been a couple of new entrants into Koha support, although the Liblime-controlled Koha project website doesn t show them yet and reportedly its new support company submission form has been broken for weeks, which is irritating. Interesting co-op-y things are happening in the wider library systems world, too, with Karen Coombs going to work for the OCLC library cooperative and Polaris Library Systems workers buying the company although I m not sure yet if they re becoming a worker co-op or merely employee-owned. I suspect many of these announcements are timed for #alamw10 which is a big US library conference. Has anyone seen more co-op or Koha announcements which I haven t spotted in the conference PR flood?

Two days ago, I posted about looking for a new netbook or notebook, and asked for people s advice. Since then, I ve done some investigation based on these suggestions. Rejected Candidates First, I ve outright rejected several options. The Thinkpad X100e was out, mainly because it doesn t compare favorably to the Acer 1810TZ. The X100e s battery life is worse than the 1810TZ, it is heaver, and has a single-core CPU. Secondly, the EeePC 1201N was ruled out. Again, its battery life was quite a bit worse than the 1801TZ, and also worse than my existing Eee 901. Finally, the EeePC was out because of its extremely slow performance. Remaining Candidates I took information from notebookcheck for models I was interested in, and those suggested in the comments at the earlier post. After reviewing them, I made a comparison chart showing issues that matter most to me. Candidates: Battery Life Let s start with battery life. The X200s presents an interesting picture here. In the 9-cell battery, we can expect over 15 hours of life in idle mode, and 7 hours when surfing the Internet over wifi. This was best in class performance for the idle and surf tests, but when under load it drops to one of the worst ad only 2.57 hours. This could correlate with what Lars Wirzenius commented, saying the X200s battery life is poor: obviously it is doing a lot of power management in software to achieve its runtimes, and if a default Linux installation isn t doing that power management, battery life could be poor. The other standard in terms of battery life was the Acer 1810TZ, with 12 hours runtime in idle usage and almost 6 when surfing the net with wifi: that s an hour longer than my Eee 901. It was also the best performer under full load of anything on my chart. Disappointing results were turned in by the HP 2530p. Even with a 9-cell battery, it couldn t match the 1810TZ s battery life. The Dell E4200, with its 6-cell battery, fared even worse though I should note notebookcheck hasn t tested the E4200, so those figures come from elsewhere. Candidates: Size and Weight Looking at weight, the X200s and E6200 turn in amazing weights at under 3 pounds for a 12 notebook. HP s 2530p is the heaviest in the group at 3.84 pounds with the 6-cell battery (the 9-cell will be heavier but I couldn t find specs on it). The 1810TZ checks in at 3.1 pounds, a bit more than half a pound heavier than my Eee 901. Considering size, the E4200 is the thinnest in the group at just 0.79 inches thick. The 2530p is also thin, but is one of the deepest. The Eee 901 is smallest in terms of length and depth, but it is the thickest of all. Candidates: Performance Here you can really see why I complain about the Eee 901 being slow. On the PCMark 05 test, it had a third of the performance of the 1810TZ. The best performer was the X200s, followed by HP s 2530p. In terms of hard disk speed, the E4200 was fastest due to its SSD (though I suspect these tests are not fully evaluating write performance). The SSD on the EeePC 901 didn t help it; it finished with less than half the speed of the E4200. Conclusions From this chart, it looks like there are only three really interesting models: the X200s with its top-of-the-line performance and display, the HP 2530p, and the 1810TZ with its stellar battery life. The disappointing battery life on the E4200 rules it out for me. The battery life on the HP 2530p is modiocre, but it has a touchpad. For the 1810TZ, my main concerns are size of screen and the fact that the screen is glossy. I am not at all a fan of glossy screens. For the HP 2530p, we ve had an HP 2510p in at work. Its size is virtually identical to the 2530p, and felt a bit bigger than I d like. It was also lighter than the 2530p, but still a bit heaver that I d like to see. But the 12 screen might be worth it. The X200s lacks a touchpad, which is a major annoyance in my book. I have reports of 7-hour battery life on it with the L9400 CPU under Ubuntu. Another person has reported 12 hours on Arch Linux using a power saving guide (which looks helpful in general as well). Considering size and weight, the X200s is lighter than the 1810TZ, though only by a little if using the 9-cell battery. It s very slightly bigger in every dimension than the 1810TZ, but perhaps not enough to influence the decision. What are your thoughts?

One thing everyone forgot to talk about the WebKitGTK+ hackfest was that master Dan Winship added basic Content-Encoding support to libsoup, and patched WebKitGTK+ to use it. If you are using a recent enough version of those you will finally be able to visit web sites that send gzipped content despite the browser saying it could not handle it, like the Internet Archive. This was one of those cases in which the web shows all of its potential to behave weirdly. The HTTP/1.1 RFC says that if an Accept-Encoding header is not present, the server MAY assume the client accepts any encoding, so we were having many sites send us gzip content even though we did not support it. We then started sending a header saying we support identity, and nothing else! . It turns out the web sucks, so many servers were not happy with a full header, and started giving us angry looks (slashdot, for instance, would not render correctly because it started sending encoded CSS files!). We then simplified the header we were sending, which made those servers happy again. Some sites, though, completely ignored our saying we didn t support anything except identity, and sent us gzipped content anyway. Most of these were misbehaving caches (this was the case for Wikipedia), so would work after you asked for a forced reload, which would ignore the cache, but some servers, such as the Internet Archive s didn t really want to talk about encodings - they only wanted to send gzip-encoded content. So, in the end, our only way out was implementing the damn encoding support, which finally happened during the hackfest. Take that, web!

OSLC-CM V1 is a proposed standard for REST APIs of bugtrackers, and in our seek for more interoperability in the bugtracker space, we ve been very interested in it. OSLC-CM is quite young and only so far implemented in proprietary tools (although elaborated in an open way) on the server side, and as we believe in FLOSS, we ve started trying to implement basics of server side plugins for a few bugtrackers.
In addition to a demo server that s simulating the behaviour of a bugtracker, we have started implementing a Mantis plugin and FusionForge and Codendi trackers add-ons (all PHP and based on Zend framework, see this project on picoforge). All are very basic, but we hope they will be the basis for future OSLC-CM compatible servers in these tools. At the same time we ve been experimenting with the code already published in Mylyn to support OSLC-CM on the client side. Not everything is public yet in Mylyn, as the elements that have been developped for some connectors of Tasktop to the proprietary tools are being ported to the open source code of Mylyn.
We have thus been able to use the Junit tests classes of Mylyn and tweak them in a way to connect to an instance of the demo server for Mantis (including handling some Basic auth), and be able to retrieve the first bugs descriptions Now that this works, we ll try and add some Java code (maybe reusing Mylyn client libs) to doc4 (being developped as part of Helios) in order to start linking doc4 and Mantis so that this can be used in the Helios platform. This may involve mixing code of XWiki and Mylyn hmmm well, we ll see. Next steps may be also to try and implement a connector in Python that might be used in tools like bts-link. Then whichever Python or Java client libraries we have, will allow us to use them inside FetchBugs4.me to connect and harvest bugs of OSLC-CM compliant bugtrackers eventually. Lots of interesting developments ahead. Stay tuned.

For the first time in a long while I took a vacation in New Zealand where I am for LCA. I decided to also take a break (mostly) from the Internet but I decided to it was worth to come back to write a brief response to Clay Shirky s rant about women, which I find pretty unsettling. So the basic upshot of his entry is that for women to get ahead in this world, they need to not only behave more like men but in specific, like all the effing blow-hard jerky self-promoting men like, well Clay Shirky (I guess, right? and he in fact might be proud, I a woman, made this accusation). What I appreciate about the post is the fact that he does not pigeon hole women as caring, maternal, and meek. I have always resented the idea that women can t be assertive and confident. However, confidence and self-esteem, which I agree are vital for getting noted, does not inherently entail jerky behavior.I think Shirky s perspective might be skewed because of his home field, which is filled with just the type of guys he is describing. I call them pundit-entrepreneurs (though to be sure some are pretty darn nice). If you take the field of anthropology, for example, it has traditionally and for a long time been known for grand slam female scholars from Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead in the past to the ones of the present like Nancy Scheper Hughes and Jean Comaroff. During grad school, I was surrounded by strong, smart, witty, confident ladies and always felt I had role models to follow and emulate. They were not, however, low-life jerks clawing their way to the top of the academic mountain leaving a trail of destruction behind their path. Then when I started to go to the tech and media academic conferences, I was soon swimming in a sea of mostly white men and the vibe was different. I was ignored and talked over a handful of times, which had never happened to me before. There was a lot more self-promotion than I had seen in other fields, in part, it seemed because the media pays more attention to this field so folks are trying to get the media light focused on them. While I don t disagree that many fields from medicine to law promote and reward blow-hards and massive unrestrained arrogance, I would rather not create a false binary between meek/low self-esteem/female and total-jerky/arrogance/confidence. Why not instead promote and highlight behavior that rewards confidence sans the arrogance? Here are some thoughtful related posts.

For the first time in a long while I took a vacation in New Zealand where I am for LCA. I decided to also take a break (mostly) from the Internet but I decided to it was worth to come back to write a brief response to Clay Shirky s rant about women, which I find pretty unsettling. So the basic upshot of his entry is that for women to get ahead in this world, they need to not only behave more like men but in specific, like all the effing blow-hard jerky self-promoting men like, well Clay Shirky (I guess, right? and he in fact might be proud, I a woman, made this accusation). What I appreciate about the post is the fact that he does not pigeon hole women as caring, maternal, and meek. I have always resented the idea that women can t be assertive and confident. However, confidence and self-esteem, which I agree are vital for getting noted, does not inherently entail jerky behavior.I think Shirky s perspective might be skewed because of his home field, which is filled with just the type of guys he is describing. I call them pundit-entrepreneurs (though to be sure some are pretty darn nice). If you take the field of anthropology, for example, it has traditionally and for a long time been known for grand slam female scholars from Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead in the past to the ones of the present like Nancy Scheper Hughes and Jean Comaroff. During grad school, I was surrounded by strong, smart, witty, confident ladies and always felt I had role models to follow and emulate. They were not, however, low-life jerks clawing their way to the top of the academic mountain leaving a trail of destruction behind their path. Then when I started to go to the tech and media academic conferences, I was soon swimming in a sea of mostly white men and the vibe was different. I was ignored and talked over a handful of times, which had never happened to me before. There was a lot more self-promotion than I had seen in other fields, in part, it seemed because the media pays more attention to this field so folks are trying to get the media light focused on them. While I don t disagree that many fields from medicine to law promote and reward blow-hards and massive unrestrained arrogance, I would rather not create a false binary between meek/low self-esteem/female and total-jerky/arrogance/confidence. Why not instead promote and highlight behavior that rewards confidence sans the arrogance? Here are some thoughtful related posts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two weeks ago I filed #563195, which reads:

the current maintainer welcomed me into the usplash maintainance team, because they are busy with other stuff. Unfortunatly, I'm too busy to give usplash the attention it needs as well.

So I still plan to spend some work on usplash, but I definitly also need help, thus I'm filing this bug.

My basic idea is to upload to experimental based on the upstream version ASAP and frequently, and then upload to unstable once it works ;-)

If you are interested and able to jump in, please reply to this bug.

That's all still the case. The area where help is most welcome atm is to actually make the latest upstream version work without upstart again, as far as I could see on a quick look, upstream has removed support for other initsystems... once we have a working package again, attacking the bugs in the BTS is next.

As Dries Buytaert, the creator and head of development of Drupal, announced on Twitter, the new major (pre-)version of Drupal, namely Drupal 7 alpha 1 has been released! This was on the 9th birthday of Drupal.

This is great news and the release notes are mentioning some aspects why this is so:

Revamped User Interface
An incredible amount of work has gone into improving the user experience and administration interface. The new administration theme "Seven", the overlay module, the dashboard and the configurable shortcut bar, all lead to a much more user-friendly interface. In-place editing is enabled for blocks and nodes by default, so modifying the content of a site becomes much simpler.

Custom Fields
Drupal 7 bundles in the ability to add custom fields, similar in functionality to the Content Construction Kit (CCK) module. However, fields are no longer limited only to content types; they can be added to users, taxonomy terms, and other entities. Fields also have support for translations.

Image Handling
Drupal 7 brings native image handling to core. Image fields may be added to content, and have image styles applied to them, such as scaling, cropping, and other effects.
Update Manager
Building on Drupal 6's Update module, which keeps site administrators informed when new module and theme releases are available, the new Update Manger module can also install and upgrade modules and themes.

Front-end "under-the-hood" improvements
A new render API allows for highly granular theming, core template files have been revamped to provide more semantic markup, Drupal 7 now has built-in RDFa support, includes jQuery UI and a new AJAX framework, and a new core theme "Stark" which exposes Drupal's markup directly for those who want to dive in and start theming.

In addition, Drupal 7 has several major accessibility enhancements, making it the most accessible release of Drupal to date!

Back-end "under-the-hood" improvements
A revamped database layer resolving nearly all limitations in the Drupal 6 database layer, automated testing framework, new PHP stream-based file API that supports private and public files simultaneously, revamped node access system, new hooks for more flexible system interaction, an Entity API, a job queue API, and many, many, many more improvements.

Drupal 7 is also the most scalable release to date, with features such as built-in proxy server support, advanced caching techniques, and Content Delivery Network support for static files.

Alone the inclusion of CCK and Views are great news, whereas all PostgreSQL users will benefit from the new database layer under the hood. I've tested a pre-alpha development version some weeks ago and that Drupal 7 experience was already great. So, it would be nice to see Drupal 7 in Debian soon as well, but I guess a alpha 1 version might be too early to be packaged.