Since the release of xf86-video-intel 2.99.912 a month ago several enhancements and fixes in xf86-video-intel git piled up. Again testing is very much appreciated: xserver-xorg-video-intel packages.
In short: I love my MacBook Air. It is the best (laptop) hardware
I ever owned. I have seen hardware which was much more flaky
in the past. I can set the display backlight to zero via software,
which saves me a lot of battery life and also offers a bit
of anti-spy-acroos-my-shoulder support. WLAN and bluetooth work nicely.
And I just love the form-factor and the touch-feeling of the hardware.
I even had the bag I use to carry my braille display
modified so that the Air just fits in.
I can't say how it behaves with X11. Given how flaky accessibility
with graphical desktops on Linux is, I have still not made
the switch. My MacBookAir is my perfect mobile terminal, I LOVE it.
I am sort of surprised about the recent rant of Paul about MacBook Hardware.
It is rather funny that we perceive the same technology so radically different.
And after reading the second part of his rant I am wondering
if I am no longer allowed to consider myself part of the
"hardcore F/OSS world", because I don't consider Apple as evil
as apparently most others. Why? Well, first of all, I actually like
the hardware. Secondly, you have to show me a vendor
first that builds usable accessibility into their products, and I mean
all their products, without any extra price-tag attached. Once the others
start to consider people with disabilities, we can talk about apple-bashing
again. But until then, sorry, you don't see the picture as I do.
Apple was the first big company on the market to take accessibility seriously.
And they are still unbeaten, at least when it comes to bells and whistles included.
I can unbox and configure any Apple product sold currently completely
without assisstance. With some products, you just need to know
a signle keypress (tripple-press the home button for touch devices and Cmd+F5 for
Mac OS/X), and with others, during initial bootup, a speech synthesizer even tells
you how to enable accessibility in case you need it.
And after that is enabled, I can perform the setup of the device
completely on my own. I don't need help from anyone else. And after the setup
is complete, I can use 95% of the functionality provided by the operating system.
And I am blind, part of a very small margin group so to speak.
In Debian circles, I have even heard the sentiment that we supposedly have to
accept that small margin groups are ignored sometimes. Well, as long
as we think that way, as long as we strictly think economically, we will never
be able to go there, fully. And we will never be the universal operating system,
actually. Sorry to say that, but I think there is some truth to it.
So, who is evil? Scratch your own itch doesn't always work to cover everything.
How do we motivate contributors to work on things they don't personally
need (yet)? How can we ensure that complicated but seldomly used
features stay stable and do not fall to dust just because some upstream
decides to rewrite an essential subcomponent of the dependency tree?
I don't know. All I know is that these issues need to be solved in
an universal operating system.
The view from up there is pretty nice:
And, of course, Jacob and Oliver wanted to explore the grounds.
As exciting as the castle was, simple rocks and sand seemed to be just as entertaining.
After Coronado Heights, we went to a nearby lake for a picnic. After that, Jacob and Oliver wanted to play at the edge of the water. They loved to throw rocks in and observe the splash. Of course, it pretty soon descended (or, if you are a boy, ascended ) into a game of splash your brother. And then to splash Dad and Laura .
Fun was had by all. What a wonderful day! Writing the story reminds me of a little while before that the first time all four of us enjoyed dinner and smores at a fire by our creek.
Jacob and Oliver insisted on sitting or, well, flopping on Laura s lap to eat. It made me smile.
(And yes, she is wearing a Debian hat.)
The security model on the Google Nexus devices is pretty straightforward. The OS is (nominally) secure and prevents anything from accessing the raw MTD devices. The bootloader will only allow the user to write to partitions if it's unlocked. The recovery image will only permit you to install images that are signed with a trusted key. In combination, these facts mean that it's impossible for an attacker to modify the OS image without unlocking the bootloader[1], and unlocking the bootloader wipes all your data. You'll probably notice that.
A few interesting things happened after I got a macbook air.
This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (168.17 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects.
Debian LTS
After having put in place the infrastructure to allow companies to contribute financially to Debian LTS, I spent quite some time to draft the announce of the launch of Debian LTS (on a suggestion of Moritz M hlenhoff who pointed out to me that there was no such announce yet).
I m pretty happy about the result because we managed to mention a commercial offer without generating any pushback from the community. The offer is (in my necessarily biased opinion) clearly in the interest of Debian but still the money doesn t go to Debian so we took extra precautions. When I got in touch with the press officers, I included the Debian leader in the discussion and his feedback has been very helpful to improve the announce. He also officially acked the press release to give some confidence to the press officers that they were doing the right thing.
Lucas also pushed me to seek public review of the draft press release, which I did. The discussion was constructive and the draft got further improved.
The news got widely relayed, but on the flip side, the part with the call for help got almost no attention from the press. Even Linux Weekly News skipped it!
On the Freexian side, we just crossed 10% of a full-time position (funded by 6 companies) and we are in contact with a few other companies in discussion. But we re far from our goal yet so we will have to actively reach out to more companies. Do you know companies who are still running Debian 6 servers ? If yes, please send me the details (name + url + contact info if possible) to deblts@freexian.com so that I can get in touch and invite them to contribute to the project.
Distro Tracker
In the continuation of the Debian France game, I continued to work together with Joseph Herlant and Christophe Siraut on multiple improvements to distro tracker in order to prepare for its deployment on tracker.debian.org (which I just announced \o/).
Debian France
Since the Debian France game was over, I shipped the rewards. 5 books have been shipped to:
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Maybe do you remember, last year I mentored a Google Summer of code whose aim was to replace our well known Package Tracking System with something more modern, usable by derivatives and more easily hackable. The result of this project is a new Django-based software called Distro Tracker.
With the help of the Debian System Administrators, it s now setup on tracker.debian.org!
This service is also managed by the Debian QA team, it s deployed in /srv/tracker.debian.org/ (on ticharich.debian.org, a VM) if you want to verify something on the live installation. It runs under the qa user (so members of the qa-core group can administer it).
That said you can reproduce the setup on your workstation quite easily, just by checking out the git repository and applying this change:
--- a/distro_tracker/project/settings/local.py +++ b/distro_tracker/project/settings/local.py @@ -10,6 +10,7 @@ overrides on top of those type-of-installation-specific settings. from .defaults import INSTALLED_APPS from .selected import * +from .debian import * ## Add your custom settings here |
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Some projects tend to like to abstract everything - KDE, I am looking at your developer base, see phonon for a very misguided effort. While abstracting config files like elektra tries to do looks like a laudable goal, it can't cover all of them plus is a maintenance nightmare.
I have a number of USB hard disks. Like, I suppose, mostly everyone who
reads this blog. Unlike many people who do, however, for whatever reason
I decided to create LVM volumes on most of my USB hard disks. The
unfortunate result is that these now contain a lot of data with a
somewhat less than efficient partitioning system.
I don't really care much, but it's somewhat annoying, not in the least
because disconnecting an LVM device isn't as easy as it used to be;
originally you could just run the 
lvm2 init script with the stop
argument, but that isn't the case anymore today. That is, you can run
that, but it won't help you because all that does, effectively, is exit
0.
So what do you do instead? This:
umount -l for a device they're about to
remove from their system which is still in use. It's not. It's a good
way to cause data loss.
Instead, make sure your partitions are really unmounted. Use fuser
-m if you need to figure out which process is still using the
partition.vgchange -a n. This will cause LVM to deactivate any
logical volumes and volume groups that aren't open any more. Note that
this can't work if you haven't done the above. Also note that this
doesn't cause the devices to be gone when you do things like vgs or
so. They're still there, they're just not in use anymore. Skipping
this step isn't recommended, though; it will make LVM unhappy, mostly
because some caches are still in use.nbd-client -d, or do whatever you need to make sure
the PV isn't connected to your system anymore.vgchange --refresh. This will cause the system to
rescan all partitions, notice that the volume groups which you've just
disconnected aren't there anymore, and remove them from configuration.lvm2 init script used to do. I suspect
there's another way which doesn't require the --refresh step. I don't
think it matters all that much, though. This works, and is safe. That being
said, comments are welcome...
1. This weekend I will apply to rejoin the Debian project, as a developer.
2. In the meantime I've been begun releasing some some code which powers the git-based DNS hosting site/service.
3. This is the end of my list.
4. I lied. This is the end of my list. Powers of two, baby.
There are only left 3 days to submit your talk. Submit yours before it s too late.
From the submissions from the last week, we have accepted a second batch of talks:
kdb mount [filepath] [mountpoint] [plugin]
For instance, to mount /etc/hosts to system/hosts (using the hosts plugin):kdb mount /etc/hosts system/hosts hosts
system/hosts/ian-debian
127.0.0.1 ian-debian
kdb set system/hosts/ian-debian 192.168.0.2
192.168.0.2 ian-debian
kdb umount [backend]
kdb umount system_hosts
It should be no news that PayPal have made an habit of opposing to
projects that fight for the respect of freedom and democracy by cutting
their funds. Anyway, they have just provided us another example of such
an abuse, against the ProtonMail project.ProtonMail is a secure email service project, similar
to the defunct Lavabit service, with
characteristics that should allow it a greater resistance to external
pressure: it is based in Switzerland (which has specific privacy laws
and with a strong democratic control) and developed by CERN and MIT
researchers.
Well, it seems that this project was not appreciated by some
organization, for which PayPal is just a puppet. Long story short,
PayPal
cut ProtonMail's funds without prior warning nor real
explanation. When pressed to explain themselves, they eventually asked
them if their email encryption project was approved by the government
(which one, by the way?)!
As I said in introduction, this is not really a surprise, but it
remind us that PayPal's major position is a threat to freedom and
democracy as they still behave as enemies of these values (or as
collaborator to known harmful organization, which is close enough) and
that no project should rely on them. Fortunately, ProtonMail does not.,
Note | I wrote this debmake command because there was no easy command like "python setup.py bdist_deb" to create the Debian binary package. Now "debmake -d -s -b":python" -i debuild" does the job for me. |
$ sudo apt-get install packaging-devHave fun! :-)
$ git clone git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/screenfetch.git
$ cd screenfetch
$ git checkout pristine-tar; git checkout master
$ gbp buildpackage
...
$ sudo dpkg -i ../screenfetch*.deb
Next.