With grub2 you can directly boot an (iso9660) ISO using its loopback option. This is great because it provides another nice rescue scenario - for example when using grml (the Debian based Linux Live-CD for sysadmins). You no longer need to extract kernel and initrd from the ISO to be able to boot it using the isofrom bootoption. All you need to do is put a plain grml ISO to your harddisk. I ve tested it with grml-small 2008.11 and grml-small 2009.05-rc1 using grub2 from Debian/unstable (1.96+20090317-1). In the following example the ISO file grml-small_2008.11.iso is available in directory grml on device /dev/sda1. You can boot it from the interactive grub shell using:

loopback loop (hd0,1)/grml/grml-small_2008.11.iso
linux    (loop)/boot/grmlsmall/linux26 isofrom=/dev/sda1/grml/grml-small_2008.11.iso boot=live quiet vga=791 noeject noprompt
initrd   (loop)/boot/grmlsmall/initrd.gz
boot

So if you are using grub2 already consider adding an entry like the following to your grub config (/boot/grub/grub.cfg):

menuentry "grml-rescue system from harddisk (ISO = grml-small_2008.11.iso)"  
  loopback loop (hd0,1)/grml/grml-small_2008.11.iso
  linux    (loop)/boot/grmlsmall/linux26 isofrom=/dev/sda1/grml/grml-small_2008.11.iso boot=live quiet vga=791 noeject noprompt
  initrd   (loop)/boot/grmlsmall/initrd.gz
 

This entry gives you the option to boot grml from your harddisk even if you don t have the possibility to boot via CD/USB/PXE/ . Tip: starting with grml 2009.05(-rc1) you can also use findiso=/path/to/grml.iso instead of isofrom=/dev/sdX/path/to/grml.iso. findiso is a dynamic version of isofrom as it looks for the specified ISO file on all disks where it usually looks for the .squashfs file (so you don t have to know the device name compared to isofrom= ). The above configuration using findiso is even easier to set up and would look like this:

menuentry "grml-rescue system from harddisk (ISO = grml-small_2008.11.iso)"  
  loopback loop (hd0,1)/grml/grml-small_2008.11.iso
  linux    (loop)/boot/grmlsmall/linux26 findiso=/grml/grml-small_2008.11.iso boot=live quiet vga=791 noeject noprompt
  initrd   (loop)/boot/grmlsmall/initrd.gz
 

I'm leaving UDS early due to a loss in my family - I have to travel now to get to the funeral. Folk that I had specific meetings/planned discussiongs lined up with I have tried to contact in person, and this post is intended to act as a catchall for anyone I didn't find.

I m on vacation the 1rst two weeks of June in Manerba del Garda at Lago di Garda. If some dudes are around for beering / chatting / keysigning, feel free to contact me til Friday.
In case of urgent actions (for example #530271), I m without regular internet access there. Feel free to NMU if needed, but try to avoid breaking things. For secuirty related issues please coordinate with team@security.debian.org.
Since I m probably most of the rest of the week busy with organising our camping, please send a short ping, if I m not responding by time, please go ahead.

From my friends around who read my "running" posts, here are some news. Since my first marathon, I had a full week rest, then gradually began running again, first starting with 10 to 15 kilometers runs and then slowly reclimbing up distances to reach 23km 3 weeks after the marathon and 26km on May 3rd. Both these were done at a 5:35 to 5:40 mins/km pace, which seems to be the pace I can keep for a long time at this moment. On later weeks, I diminished efforts slightly, cutting off on distances, to concentrate on speed, so running distances between 7 and 12km, with a faster pace (between 5:15 and 5:30). That culminate in a very sharp 6km at 5:06 on a week day, after work (and that loop includes a very steep slope). The target for this "preparation" was indeed May 19th. I was on holidays all week long and that seemed to be a great occasion to try out something I wanted to do for quite a long time: run a marathon....alone. I completed it, moreover with a very great loop in Rambouillet forest, running the 42.2 kilometers in 4h22. Not that a great time (6:12/km), compared to the 4h10 of the Paris Marathon, but fairly interesting as that was done by running lonely...and also by running in woods, partly on very muddy paths. What's even more interesting is that I ended up nearly without cramps and had only to walk on the steepest slope....at km41 (about 20% slope for 200 meters). Note that I made a stop around km25 in order to eat dry fruits as, contrary to official marathons, in lonely marathons, you need to have your own food and beverage with you. So, well, the full time is around 4h30. Even more interesting: I was not tired at all the day after and, accordinng to my wife, much more "alive" than after Paris marathon..:). That probably explains why I could run again only 4 days after (a small but fast 6km) as well as today, 5 days after, for a 14km loop at 5:25/km despite the heat (my very best time on such a distance). So, Debconf runners, bring on your shoes in C ceres. I'll be there and ready..:-)

Many people have moaned about SF and the hassle of making a release - if you're in that category and haven't checked with the current file release system at SF, you could be in for a pleasant surprise.

SF has added lots more ways to upload files and has a nice simple interface - I'm just using:
$ scp foo-ver.tar.gz sf-release:uploads

Copy and paste the NEWS and Changelog content into the release announcement and I'm done. It's no harder than Alioth (which was my strong preference before this change at SF).

(This also serves as an announcement that gpe-expenses and pilot-qof have been updated with upstream releases as well as supporting the recent QOF transition.)

I've successfully upgraded my primary web/mail/misc host from Debian Etch to Debian Lenny. There were a few minor problems, but on the whole the upgrade was as painless as I've come to expect. In the past I'd edited my Exim4 configuration to add quite a few ACL checks, for example rejecting mails based upon spoofed/bogus HELO identifiers, and rejecting messages that didn't contain "Subject" or "Date" headers. The Debian Exim4 configuration may be split into multiple files (which is how I prefer it on the whole). The idea that you just add new files into the existing hierarchy and they'll magically appear in the correct location when a real configuration file is generated. On the whole this works well, but sometimes editing files in-place is required, and it was these local edits that caused me pain. Fixing things up was mostly not a challenge, primarily it was a matter of removing ACLs until exim4 started without errors - all my spam checking is handled ahead of exim4 these days, except for the last-ditch spam filtering with a combination of procmail-fu and the crm114 classifier package. Taking a hint from Bubulle's weblog I decided to nuke my CRM114 spam database to avoid any possible version-mismatch issues so now I'm having to classify a lot of "unsure" messages. Happily my memory of doing this last time round is that the initial training of spam/ham takes a day or so to complete. Anyway now I can start looking to advantage of the things new to Lenny. But probably not until I'm sure things have calmed down and upgraded correctly.

steve@skx:~$ uptime
 05:00:31 up 260 days, 14:23,  2 users,  load average: 0.95, 0.51, 0.31
steve@skx:~$ cat /etc/issue
Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 \n \l

ObFilm: Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure

When starting with Python or just when you haven t read PEP 8 you usually fall into some frequent mistakes. Mostly because you take your experience in other languages to Python and your mind gets confused with the new conventions (or something like that). Some of these errors and their explanation:

• if a == None:
  Really common. None is a singleton, so you can (well, actually, have) to compare to it like if a is None or if a is not None .
• if (condition):
  This is not really pythonic, if doesn t take () around the condition in python, () purpose is grouping, you can use them in an if but only to clarify a really complex condition or similar stuff. Please don t clutter code with unneeded characters.
• if len(list):
  This is a misunderstanding of Python way of things, any empty sequence (string, list, tuple) is False. So if you want to make sure a list is empty, just check if it s False. Same for tuples, and in some ocassions for strings.
• if type(obj) is type(1):
  This is killing kittens, there s a builtin function for this purpose, it s called -surprise- isinstance(object, type). For example isinstance(123, int)

Read more about this and other conventions in PEP 8.

Lenny well supported We re pleased that Lenny released with good support for the Eee PC and are now turning our efforts to make Squeeze even better, while continuing to provide support for our Lenny user base. The standard Lenny installer can install Debian on all models of Eee and our custom installer provides the ability to install over wireless for almost every model (more about this later) from a very small image. The latter continues to be our recommended install method, since in addition to being wireless-ready, the custom installer also handles a few other small eee-specific configuration chores to make as much as possible just work right after the install. Solid mainstream support We ve made good on our promise to make Debian work on the Eee PC, not a derivative, many of which use a custom kernel instead of the stock kernel as we do and use a special desktop instead of our users favourites. While we agree that some intriguing things can be done in these areas, it is no substitute for mainstream support. Our users are better served by a solid foundation than specialised modifications that limit their choices. We want them to be able to enjoy the freedom to mold Debian, the universal OS, into whatever suits them best. Squeeze support started Work is well underway on supporting all Eee models in Squeeze. For months, several team members have been experimenting with new kernels, producing support for them in eeepc-acpi-scripts. The current release of this key package (version 1.1.0) supports Linux 2.6.29 and contains enhancements for wifi, sound hotkeys, bluetooth, external displays and OSD. Squeeze will support wired & wifi on all current models With the appearance of 2.6.29 in Sid, all ethernet and wifi cards used in all models of Eee today are supportable without the need for out-of-kernel or non-free drivers. Madwifi is replaced by the free ath5k driver, the non-free rt2860 package is replaced by mainstream kernel support, (though it still requires non-free firmware provided separately,) rtl8187se is included, making it possible now for us to support the model 701SD, and ath9k is included, making full support for newer models such as the 1000HE possible. Lenny backports and live demo All of these changes can be enjoyed today by Lenny users. Just add Daniel Baumann s Lenny kernel backport repository and then install the 2.6.29 kernel and an updated acpid. See our upgrade howto for details. You can try a small (less than 256M) demo of this configuration by downloading beta 2 of our Live USB image. Accessibility Late last year, we discussed how to make it easier for the blind to install Debian unassisted on their Eee PCs. As it was a simple change, we now include brltty in the custom installer, but we understand that some users also need software synthesized text-to-speech, something for which there is no support yet in the standard Debian-installer. We understand this isn t an easy thing to fix, but hope someone will rise to the challenge. Growing team of developers We welcome Darren Salt and Raphael Geissert to the team this year. Both have been actively making contributions to the eeepc-acpi-scripts package over the past months, fixing some outstanding bugs and readying it to handle changes in more recent kernel releases. Moved eeepc.debian.net to new hosting Nico Golde, who hosted eeepc.debian.net for the first year development, has turned his focus to other areas of Debian. Glenn Saberton has stepped in to provide a new home for it. We thank them both for their efforts and for a smooth, uneventful transition from one host to the other. Size of user community Speaking of the move, earlier this year, Glenn shared with us some interesting archive traffic statistics that give us a rough idea how many users we have. For the months of December and January, after factoring out bot hits, we were seeing about 300,000 hits from 15,000 unique users per month. The site handles roughly 60G of traffic per month, most of that from thousands of downloads of our custom installer image. It s hard to draw any firm conclusions about the size of our user base from these stats, as many users may be on dynamic IP numbers, inflating the numbers, but we can conservatively say we have at least 5000 users. Other interesting statistics are that we have anywhere up to 80 users at any given time on our irc channel and over 250 users on the mailing list. Help wanted The Asus Eee PC line continues to expand, with 24 models listed so far. It is a challenge to keep up support for all of them. We re encouraged to see Asus choose a new b/g/n wifi chipset for their 1002HA that is supported by a DFSG free driver ath9k in this case. It appears that the new Atom N280-based 1000HE uses the same chipset as well (though be careful: I know of at least one user who bought a 1000HE in Argentina expecting it to have this chipset and was disappointed to find it had the Ralink chipset instead, we guess because of availability). If this trend continues, we ll be that much closer to our goal of full support for Squeeze main. As it stands, we re already as close as we can get given the state of rt2860 and no prospect on the horizon for replacing the non-free firmware. If you would like to help us out in any way, whether by testing, debugging, patching, or improving our documentation, get in touch with our team. We rely on your feedback to keep Lenny in good shape and work towards making Squeeze even better for all users of Debian on the Eee PC.

A few dud universes can really clutter up your basement. - Neal Stephenson, In The Beginning. . . was the Command Line

What a fun read. It s about technology, sure, but more about culture. Neal takes a good look at operating systems, why we get emotionally involved with them, and why Windows is still so popular. He does this with a grand detour to Disneyland, and a hefty dose of humor. The above quote was from near the end of the book, where he imagines hackers creating big bangs from the command line. He starts out the book from some anecdotes from the early 1970s, when he had his first computer class in high school. His school didn t have a computer, but they did have a teletype (the physical kind that used paper) with a modem link to some university s system. But time on that system was so expensive that they couldn t just dial in and run things interactively. The teletype had a paper tape device. You d type your commands in advance, and it would punch them out on the tape. Then when you dial in, it would replay the tape at high speed . Neal liked this because the stuff punched out of the tape were, actually, bits in both the literal and the mathematical sense. This, of course, led to a scene at the end of the schoolyear where a classmate dumped the bin of bits on the teacher, and Neal witnessed megabytes falling to the floor. Although the book was written in 1999, and needs an update in some ways, it still speaks with a strong voice today and is now also an interesting look at what computing was like 10 years ago. He had an analogy of car dealerships to operating systems. Microsoft had the big shiny dealership selling station wagons. Their image was all wrapped up in people feeling good about their purchase like they got something for their money. And he said that the Linux folks were selling tanks, illustrated with this exchange:

Hacker with bullhorn: Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon! Prospective station wagon buyer: I know what you say is true but er I don t know how to maintain a tank! Bullhorn: You don t know how to maintain a station wagon either! Buyer: But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music. Bullhorn: But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep! Buyer: Stay away from my house, you freak! Bullhorn: But Buyer: Can t you see that everyone is buying station wagons?

That doesn t mean that Stephenson is just a Linux apologetic. He points out that the CLI has its place, and has a true love-hate relationship with the text-based config files (remember XF86Config before the days of automatic modelines? Back when you had to get out a calculator and work some things out with pencil and paper, or else risk burning out your monitor?) He points out that some people want to just have the thing work reasonably well. They don t want control in fact, would gladly give it up if offered something reasonably pretty and reasonably functional. He speaks to running Linux at times:

Sometimes when you finish working with a program and shut it down, you find that it has left behind a series of mild warnings and low-grade error messages in the command-line interface window from which you launched it. As if the software were chatting to you about how it was doing the whole time you were working with it.

Even if the application is imploding like a damaged submarine, it can still usually eke out a little S.O.S. message.

Or about booting Linux the first time, and noticing all sorts of cryptic messages on the console:

This is slightly alarming the first time you see it, but completely harmless.

I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. . . Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. If you are a professional writer i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish. For page layout and printing you can use TeX: a vast corpus of typesetting lore written in C and also available on the Net for free.

I love these vivid descriptions: programs secretly chatting with us, TeX being a corpus of typesetting lore rather than a program. Or how about this one: Unix. . . is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic. Yes, my operating system is an oral history project, thankyouverymuch. The book feels like a weird (but well-executed and well-written) cross between Douglas Adams and Cory Doctorow. Which makes is so indescribably awesome that I can t help but ending this review with a few more quotes.

Because Linux is not commercial because it is, in fact, free, as well as rather difficult to obtain, install, and operate it does not have to maintain any pretensions as to its reliability. Consequently, it is much more reliable.

what really sold me on it [Debian] was its phenomenal bug database (http://www.debian.org/Bugs), which is a sort of interactive Doomsday Book of error, fallibility, and redemption. It is simplicity itself. When had a problem with Debian in early January of 1997, I sent in a message describing the problem to submit@bugs.debian.org. My problem was promptly assigned a bug report number (#6518) and a severity level (the available choices being critical, grave, important, normal, fixed, and wishlist) and forwarded to mailing lists where Debian people hang out.

That should be our new slogan for bugs.debian.org: Debian s interactive Doomsday Book of error, fallibility, and redemption.

Unix is hard to learn. The process of learning it is one of multiple small epiphanies. Typically you are just on the verge of inventing some necessary tool or utility when you realize that someone else has already invented it, and built it in, and this explains some odd file or directory or command that you have noticed but never really understood before.

I ve been THERE countless times.

Note the obsessive use of abbreviations and avoidance of capital letters; this is a system invented by people to whom repetitive stress disorder is what black lung is to miners. Long names get worn down to three-letter nubbins, like stones smoothed by a river.

It is obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords, multiculturalism and diversity, are false fronts that are being used (in many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences. The basic tenet of multiculturalism (or honoring diversity or whatever you want to call it) is that people need to stop judging each other-to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing ) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful, that God exists and has this or that set of qualities.

The stone tablets bearing the Ten Commandments carved in immutable stone the original command-line interface

Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it s explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence.

Unix has always lurked provocatively in the background of the operating system wars, like the Russian Army.

Available for free online, or as a 160-page book from Amazon.

So, the first thing I do when I boot up my laptop is to dist-upgrade it, and I was getting a little tired of staring at the (Reading database ... message you get when dpkg is busy reading its file database (laptop disk + dm-crypt + cold cache = slow). To preserve my sanity, I contributed a minimal patch to add a progress report, which Guillem turned into a generic facility in libdpkg and is now in the new dpkg in unstable (1.15.1).

It doesn't make dpkg any faster, but at least now I know how slowly it's really going. :)

Thanks to Thomas Vander Stichele I've found out that when ripping an audio CD you get a different file depending on the CD drive you use because they don't all start reading at the same position and that for most drives this is a constant offset. So if you know what offset your drive has, you can compare rips done with a different drive. I was under the impression that this offset was always a multiple of the sector size, because audio CDs do not have a reliable way to detect the position. But it seems this offset can in the middle of a sector too. It looks like they agreed on some standard to compare the drive offsets. You can find a list of drives here and here. Cdparanoia has an option you can use to correct for that offset. But I started wondering where this error comes from. There is no real reason why all CD drives shouldn't be able to return the same thing. There is very little real info about it out there, and I basically get the impression that someone just decided to use something as base value. It isn't really a problem, since this is about very small time. To fully understand this, I think it's important to understand the basic layout of an audio CD. A sector (frame) of a CD contains 2352 bytes (588 samples) main data and 96 byte of sub-channel data. You have 75 such sectors per second, giving you a total of 44100 samples per second. A sector is made up of 98 sub-frames. Each such sub-frame has 24 bytes (6 samples) of main data, 4 bytes of C1 error correction and 4 bytes of C2 error correction, and 1 "byte" of sub-channel data. The first 2 sub-frames are used to mark the beginning of the sector. It contains a special pattern at the location of the sub-channel data. The first sub-frame contains S0 and the second S1. So you are left with 96 byte of sub-channel data. The highest bit of the sub-channel byte is used for the P sub-channel, bit 6 for the Q sub-channel, and so on until the W sub-channel. So the sub-channel has 96 bits (12 byte) per sector and each bit is in a different sub-frame. If you go look at the offsets, you'll notice there are a lot of drives that have an offset that's a multiple of 6 samples, but there are also a lot that aren't a multiple of 6. In the P and Q sub-channels you can see at what place you're reading. The P channel is a "pause" flag. At least 2 seconds before the track starts the P flag is turned on and the second sector of the track it's turned off again. All bits of P sub-channel should be the same for the whole sector, it can only change after an S0/S1. In the Q channel you can have different information depending on what is in the first byte. The most useful one is "mode 1", which contain things like the track number, index in the track, and time indication for both the current track and the whole disc, and a CRC. Mode 1 should be in at least 9 out of 10 sectors. So you known perfectly at which location you are. There is just 1 small problem, the sub-channels do not have any error correction, but does have a CRC. And there are lots of sectors with the information in it. So I wondered if the drives just didn't look at S0/S1 and that the sub channel data was shifted too. So I changed cdparanoia to log the sub-channel data and dumped it. I've tried this with a total of 6 drives, and also look at what the drive offset is. This are the drives I've used and the offsets they have:

Drive	offset
SONY DVD RW DRU-700A VY03	+12
PLEXTOR CD-R PX-W4012A 1.00	+98
PLEXTOR CD-R PX-R412C 1.06	+355
TSSTcorp CD/DVDW TS-L532A TI5a1	+116
HL-DT-ST DVD-ROM GDR-H30N 1.00i	+6
ASUS CD-S520/A 1.7L	+1858

Some notes:

• They all start exactly at the sector boundary, sub-channel data is not shifted. So they all perfectly know where a sector starts.
• Except for the ASUS, they all start at the correct sector. The ASUS starts 2 sectors too fast, which is probably why it has that 1858 samples offset, which is more than 3 sectors.
• Both plextors add 588 to the offset when reading the main data + the sub-channel data. So they start reading 1 sector earlier if you request the sub-channel data.
• The PLEXTOR CD-R PX-R412C sometimes also has an offset of +354

I can perfectly understand that it might be off by 1 or more sector, like the ASUS. I could also understand that it might be off by 1 or more sub-frames, but then I wouldn't expect to get proper values for the sub-channel data. Having an offset not be a multiple of the sub-frame makes no sense to me. So I can only come to the conclusion that this are all firmware issues.

As a past member of the listmaster team, this is a goal I have to support. I did some work myself a few years ago to clean out at least the most offensive images from the archive. And I can tell you there were a number of really gross ones. This was mostly manual work, replacing the spams by placeholder messages. Since then the listmaster team has implemented an excellent toolset for nominating messages as spam, reviewing the nominations and removing confirmed spam from the archive. My current contribution is twofold: Plug-in that allows reporting new list spam from KMail It's not actually a plug-in, but just uses the filter functionality of KMail. I've documented two alternative filters developed for KMail 1.9.9 (from KDE 3.5). Possibly they can also be (adapted to be) used with KMail from KDE 4, but that has not been tested. There are plug-ins available for several Mail User Agents (MUAs), with a few still to be developed. Spam cleaning campaign for the debian-boot list A few weeks ago I sent out a request for help to clean "our" archive. The response has been great. The work is [tracked on a Wiki page[(http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/SpamClean) and has already resulted in the removal of 676 spams. By the end of this week I expect that number to be doubled. If you'd like to start a similar project for your own favorite list, I'd suggest you start by reading through the thread linked above.

---

Update: I was wrong, the number was almost tripled: from 676 to 1801!

Here are a few hints if you want your reports to be treated more promptly. When testing fails, try unstable If you are running testing, not all bug reports are interesting. More specifically, the relevant ones are about insufficient dependencies that let slip into testing a non-working combination of packages. Think of the I upgraded foo, then bar broke category. Otherwise, the reason why reportbug looks for newer versions of a package in unstable is that, in most cases, the bug is fixed in unstable. If you can, always try the unstable version before reporting the bug. Report bugs against the failing package This is related to printing in a GNOME program, so I report this against libgnomeprint. Always file reports against the failing program. If there is a library involved, reportbug will include the necessary information so that the maintainer can easily reassign. If you re not sure of the affected package, use a metapackage (for example, gnome for GNOME-related packages). Do not second-guess the origin of the bug After upgrading libfoo, bar starts crashing, so I m reporting it against libfoo. Unless you can tell which function is at fault and how this is ABI breakage, you should report the bug against the program that crashes. The program s maintainer will reassign if needed, and will hit the library s maintainer with a hammer if needed. Don t forget to explain what s wrong The frobniz in libfrob is broken, you should change /usr/share/libfrob/blah line 13 to something else. I don t know what libfrob is about, but I have some problems that look frobniz-related. Do not second-guess, always start explaining what bug you are seeing first. Your attempts at investigating it can be interesting, but don t forget to explain what bug lead you on investigating. What is the use case we should cover? I m trying to do that with your package and it looks extremely complicated/doesn t work as expected/fails miserably. Your package is clearly broken! If your attempts to do something that should be trivial, given the purpose of the package, fail, then you are probably looking at the problem at the wrong angle. There may be a much simpler, though radically different, way to do what you are trying to achieve. In these situations, always include in your report what you are trying to do and why you want to do it. strace is not a general-purpose debugging tool Whether you observe a crash, a deadlock or a livelock, strace is not the tool that will give us information. The only thing you do by adding a strace log to the bug report is making it unreadable with its thousands of lines of output. For the specific cases that require strace for debugging, these traces are welcome but if you re not sure, don t attach them. The developers will ask them for you. Otherwise, the general-purpose debugging tool is gdb. Use reportbug There is a good reason why some packages include bug control files and scripts. Use a reporting tool that takes them into account. Unless you are requesting an enhancement, always use reportbug. Please avoid reportbug-ng since it only provides parts of the required information.

Ever since I bought this laptop I was quite content with it running Debian GNU/Linux (Lenny) and, except the sleep functionality not working (bug reported, but I have no answer for any new approaches) I have no other major issues.


Actually, the problems are partially solved since I am in a "pick your favourite bug" situation:

• with the 2.6.26 kernel from Debian the information about the power source is incorrect (kernel bug which goes away for me right since 2.6.27)
  
• while with a newer (>=2.6.27) pristine kernel, power information is accurate, but the entire bluetooth stack (init.d scripts and apps) needs a restart after a hibernate/resume cycle to work again; I added my info in the corresponding upstream bug and I hope it gets fixed

Still, I am really curious, since the Debian Kernel Team policy is to accept only patches accepted upstream, theorecally that would mean newer upstream kernels should work wrt that bluettoth issue, assuming this isn't a regression (it doesn't look like one from my experience).

So what is present in Debian kernels that isn't in the pristine ones that makes BT work afer resume? If you know the answer, please add it to the bug report.


On the Debian side of the kernel, which are the chances that newer Lenny kernels will include the power fixes necessary for MSI laptops to report power related info correctly? I know, I know, I should probably report a bug, but I want to know first if there will be a lenny-n-half release, otherwise it doesn't make sense.

Martin blogged about Microsoft pushing proprietary extensions instead of using long existing standards for email replies. I think it is worth pointing out that Google s GMail does not respect In-Reply-To for displaying threads, which causes people who are on groups where most use GMail to complain about people who use some other client and create sub-threads with different subjects. This is one of the reasons why I sometimes see GMail as the IE6 of email - the net effect is also in motion here.

In Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi and 2 000 monks and activists are being detained, as the miltary junta in the country presses new, ridiculous charges against Suu Kyi a few days before the end of her house arrest. Suu Kyi, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and proponent of democracy, is leader of the opposition and the greatest threat to the junta s grasp on power. Given the inhumane conditions imposed upon the Burmese, and the ruthless slaughter of those who do not play by the military s rules, it is not hard to imagine that she would win any fair election, as soon as she would get a chance to run. However, if the junta are successful in pushing charges Suu Kyi is accused of breaching the house arrest after an American man sneaked into her house uninvitedly she could be locked up until after the elections in 2010, effectively disarming the threat she poses to the military regime. She is threatened to be kept in the notorious Insein Prison without medical care. As she is suffering from serious illness, this puts her life at risk. I do not usually campaign for political topics, but I ve been to Myanmar and this issue touches me deeply. The people in Myanmar need our support. Even though the 2007 Burmese anti-government protests seriously weakened the military and brought hope to the lives of millions that have been oppressed for years, the events quickly vanished from the media and allowed the junta to regain control. We must not let that happen again. It is of utmost importance to show our support and not look away. One way of doing so is by increasing visibility. If you care, please write to your newspapers, publish on your blog, and do everything else you can to raise awareness. Another way to help the Burmese people is through signing the avaaz.org petition to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Best to do all of the above! Unfortunately, avaaz.org force-subscribes everyone who signs a petition to their newsletter, which may well not be what you want. However, please do not let it stop you from signing the petition. You can later unsubscribe from the (infrequent) newsletter. I have informed the staff members of this concern. If you would like to voice your opinion too, write to info t avaaz dot org and encourage them to make the newsletter subscription optional. But make sure to also sign the petition, please.

I've just set up system for translating documentation using gettext, so you have another great opportunity to bring phpMyAdmin closer to non English speaking audience. The translation is done using po4a and gettext, what makes it more standard and probably also easier than translating phpMyAdmin itself. The easiest way to start translating is to go to https://l10n.cihar.com/projects/pmadoc/, login and translate. If you prefer more control, you can get po file (either by svn co https://phpmyadmin.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/phpmyadmin/trunk/localized_docs/po or by finding it online using ViewVC) and send us updates. I added all languages which have reasonable amount of translation and/or recent activity in phpMyAdmin. If your language is missing feel free to ask me to add one, but consider first translating phpMyAdmin itself.

The monthly board meeting of Software in the Public Interest will take place on irc.oftc.net #spi tonight (Wed 20 May) at 20:00 UTC. The meeting announcement was posted and there are indeed minutes to approve, a financial report, and a report on official correspondence related to DebConf10. For the 27th meeting in succession (feels like it anyway), I may be without a stable network connection during the meeting because I ll be at another event, raising the FOSS banner for TTLLP while speakers tell everyone to proprietarise everything (based on the preview essays). Even so, watch the comments below this article for a link to the summary when posted. In other news, the Koha foundation is still going through its birth pangs. I ve suggested associating with SPI in the meantime, so the project could manage assets better, but it s just not happening. I feel partly it s due to misconceptions about SPI and its activities, but there also seems to be some blind faith in private companies. I heard a quote about the current UK Parliament crisis which seems relevant to the situation: He is behaving as if he is just running this gentlemen s club. What we need to do is ask people to be involved.