Directed by jd & adn Genre: Action / Adventure / Sci-Fi / Thriller / Horror / Drama / Humor
Runtime: several weeks
Country: A lot
Language: English
Color: Color (Technicolor, QT, GTK and ncurses) Tagline: They stole their project, now they want it back. Plot Outline: In September 2006, a group of developpers from the Debian planet rise against the corruption leading the government.
User Comments: Great action, great suspense, great cultural satire, and a great mind-bender. Awards: Waiting for nomination. Quotes:

• Bah, if you don't want to read me, just don't , Sven Luther
• Oh my. , Clint Adams
• Or maybe I'm withdrawing my support because I'm busy with my chainsaw. , Josselin Mouette
• "I'm withdrawing my support because the developers might agree with AJ rather than me"? Come on. , Matthew Garett
• OH NO YOU DON'T. This thread is _not_ about you, it is _not_ about Frans Pop, and it is _not_ about debian-installer. , Peter Samuelson

Cast overview

	Anthony Towns (aj), as the Debian Project Leader		Denis Barbier (bouz), as The Recaller
	Aurelien Jarno (aurel32), as one Seconder		Clint Adams (schizo), as one Seconder
	MJ Ray (mjr), as one Seconder		Pierre Habouzit (madcoder), as one Seconder
	Martin Schulze (joey), as one Seconder		Marc Dequ nes (duck), as one Seconder

I had a nice discussion recently how we could relaunch DWN. Idea was, that if we would get more contributors for times.debian.net, we could easyly produce a weekly summary out of that. But for that, we need more contributors. So if you think this is a good idea, and are good in writing, feel free to post possible submissions to debian-publicity@lists.debian.org. No Tags

Martin "Joey" Schulze posted what seems to be his last issue of DWN at the end of September. Is this the end of its 8 year run? I founded Debian Weekly News in 1999 with the intent of helping Debian developers keep up with what was going on in Debian as the volume of the project grew beyond what could be easily followed by everyone in the mailing lists. That goal later grew to encompass also keeping users informed of what was going on in Debian. By the time I left VA, I was getting burnt out writing it. Besides, I was no longer able to do it on company time. (Yes, there is a delicious irony here.) So I passed it on to Joey, who's done a great job keeping it going over the years. I've considered taking over writing DWN again. However, it's not clear to me that DWN is still relevant enough to be worth the large amount of work it takes to maintain it. A lot of communication is done on Planet Debian, wikis and in other forms that were not around when DWN was started, and that may be a better way to keep up with what's going on in Debian than DWN. If there is a gap left by DWN, I'd feel more comfortable filling it by blogging something each week about what'd going on in Debian without necessarily trying to cover parts of the project that I'm not deeply involved in. (For example, I'm ignoring everything to do with debian-vote right now.) This approach seems more scalable, modern, and likely to take much less time. We could even have a special aggregator with feeds from other people doing the same.

Last weekend, I went to Zurich for the second leg of my own personal BSP marathon. Martin Krafft organised the BSP at the AI Lab in Zurich, arranging sponsorship and encouraging local DDs and users to turn up. Martin and I started early on Saturday morning, opening up the lab shortly before 9am and making a start on the RC bug list. Over the course of the next few hours, more people turned up and started work too - local DDs and a couple of Debian users from ETH. We worked our way through a fair number of bugs that day; personally I closed #389318 (a grotty FTBFS bug caused by IMHO a design mistake upstream - parsing header files using a simple awk script to create an m4 script to then generate C source) and spent quite some time digging into some other bugs. For our late dinner on Saturday, we headed to a local American-style bar/restaurant in Oerlikon called Cheyenne. Their speciality, it seems, is the "Big Mama", the largest burger I've ever seen! It comes on a huge serving plate, and is enough to feed up to 4 people...

I took the chance over dinner to chat with the small group of locals, especially Axel Beckert who had some interesting stories about Fedora, Opera and other groups. On Sunday, we started slightly later but probably had a more productive day in terms of the number of bugs closed. I fixed some silly FTBFS issues in ser: #384772 and #390008 were both caused by the build system assuming i386/amd64 compiler options. I adapted patches suggested by Julien Blache from his own work on openser (thanks!) and tested on my sparc and hppa systems at home. Job done... For the rest of the day, I used the time to work on remaining bugs in my own packages. Both CVS and debian-cd needed new uploads to be ready for the Etch freeze. CVS had a bucket-load of new translations following Christian Perrier's call, and debian-cd had a large number of bugs that had already been fixed in svn for a long time. Between those 2 uploads (and some other old bugs in debian-cd that needed reviewing) that made another 17 bugs fixed, although none of them were RC. Once those uploads were done, I continued on with my debian-cd multi-arch development work. On Sunday evening, we went into the middle of the old city centre in Zurich to a more traditional Swiss restaurant. Several of Martin's colleagues from the lab joined us, and we had some widely varying conversation, ranging from Debian (of course! *grin*) to gossip in the lab via lots of other topics. Due to my ridiculously early flight home on Monday morning we couldn't stay out too late nattering, but nonetheless all the people seemed to enjoy themselves. The Swiss group were a fair bit quieter then the Dutch the previous weekend, but seemed just as committed to getting work done and getting Etch out on time. It was lovely to meet and spend time with them, and I've promised to go back and visit again soon. Until then, I've put my small selection of photos online.

I have had, ever since I got my current desktop, been frustrated with ALSA support for it. The machine is an Shuttle SN25P (with ice1724 onboard 7.1 sound card); it's otherwise very nice. I've had it for a bit over a year. When I got it, I lost several long weekends to hacking on ALSA and peering through asoundrc files, gstreamer and gnome-control-center source code, and other such things. There were two basic problems. One was that no matter what I did, I couldn't get the back speakers to play independent channels. Generally they mirrored the front speakers. The other was they adjusted volume based on the headphone mixer, rather than the master mixer - especially aggravating because muting the master mixer left my music still pouring out of the rear speakers! I filed a bug in the ALSA tracker, but didn't get much feedback, and eventually gave up. Last week, someone else seconded the bug. A helpful fellow responded and pointed us to a couple of basics, like the ALSA datasheet archive (very handy, since as far as I can tell a lot of them aren't available elsewhere, at least without NDAs). We spent some time poring over those. One of the interesting things I learned this weekend: there's a bunch of independent chips involved in onboard sound, in my case three. One seems to do communication between the computer and the analog-digital convertor, another handles the actual conversion (AC97 compatible in this case), and a third (I think...) handles the remaining two channels for 7.1 support since the second one only seems to do six. Digression time. Unfortunately one of the things he asked us to check was physical connections between the chips, and whether there was an onboard EEPROM... and somehow, in lightly applying enough compressed air to dislodge the dust, I got something wedged into the fan of my video card. Which began making a horrible rattling noise. And then when I attempted to clean it, I made it even worse. So at this point in my Saturday afternoon I had to go out and buy another one. The new one is marginally crappier than the old one, which was also pretty cheap, but the new one has the advantage of not needing a fan at all. Digression part two. While I was at the store, I picked up a Slug. I haven't unboxed it yet or gotten a drive for it, but I think I will in a week or two, and see if I can pick up some of Martin's excellent work in running Debian on one. I see that the IXP ethernet driver isn't working at the moment, maybe I can give Lennert a hand... At this point it was clear ALSA had eaten my weekend. So I came back to finish the job. The other reporter of the bug noticed a very interesting bit in the manual for the VT1617A (Via-manufactured AC97 codec) - which affected volume control and routing for the rear surround channels. I poked around in the kernel driver for a while, and discovered that the similar VT1616 chip exposed that bit as an ALSA mixer control (boolean switch)! So, wiring the two together was the next logical step. And suddenly I'd made a world of progress. I could hear things out the back speakers. Apparently - as far as I can tell anyway - no one has good solutions to this problem. I fumbled around with it for a while, wrote two more ALSA patches, and got manual configuration to use a software volume control (the "softvol" plugin) and mute switch which govern all channels. But I'm taking a break from that while I fish around for how this works on other chipsets. It's so immensely awkward that I can't believe there's no standard solution. I mean, is wanting your volume control to affect all your speakers such a rare thing? Anyway, this paragraph summarizes about six hours of beating my head on the wall. Most of this was at the asoundrc format, which is immensely picky, underdocumented, and seems like it really oughtn't to be needed at all. But apparently it is. During the course of this I got to learn how different applications decide which volume control to use, which was exciting in an exasperating and insanity inducing sort of way. You see, ALSA exports basically everything on the card as a "mixer control". There's some things which recognize volume controls by name, and some basic sorting by usefulness. xmms allows you to select any one control to use for its volume slider, which is nice. The GNOME mixer applet allows you to select any arbitrary _set_ of volume controls for the panel applet, which is even nicer. But it's at this point that, both last time and this time, I gave up in general rage. You see, the mixer applet is completely disconnected from the other and more useful way I deal with volume - the hotkeys on my keyboard, which GNOME also handles. But those go to gnome-settings-daemon, and a bunch of code labelled "acme". And this just adjusts the volume on the track which gstreamer (the GNOME audio management libraries) have marked as "MASTER", and that's done based on the order ALSA supplies the controls, which is done by a name-based sorting deep within the bowels of the ALSA library (it's in mixer/simple_none.c). And if you have two with similar enough names, it slaves them together. And nothing has a higher priority than the hardware supplied "Master Playback" controls. The best I could manage was to get the software volume control listed right after the master (in which case it wouldn't get adjusted at all), or adjusted in lockstep with the real master channel (which causes the front speakers to drop at a different rate from the rear speakers, messing up depth). Like last time, this was the point at which I gave up for the weekend. But this time I've learned a lot more and made a whole lot more progress! And written more of it down, so hopefully I have to rediscover less of it next time. I really was going to do a bunch of other things this weekend... but it just didn't happen.

I promised last week that I would be telling more on October 1st, about the mysterious Project X that I had been sporadically blogging about over the last few months. Better late than never, so here's the story: Casablanca I met Morocco-based French entrepreneur Laurent Bervas via his blog in January 2006, while looking for countries nearby EU with a promising ICT market, because of growing obstacles in getting work in my field, due to my not being an EU national. By the time the situation had reached the ridiculous extreme that friends were continuously loosing juicy recruitment bonuses, simply because their employer's HR department had issues with hiring non-EU nationals despite EU policies that clearly favor foreigners married to an EU national I figured that I ought to do something creative and see which of the countries bordering with EU might offer interesting opportunities. Laurent was blogging about all the exciting opportunities he kept on seeing, since he relocated to Morocco to conquer the high-end Real Estate market. One day, he wrote about Morocco becoming a rising figure in the outsourcing business for the Francophone market, which prompted me to contact him. After a couple of weeks of discussion, he cautiously dropped his idea for a niche market he had spotted: a simple Linux-based set top box to surf the Internet. He then asked if I would be interested in developing it and in launching a startup with him to promote it. I gladly accepted. Startup That's when Laurent decided to introduce me to an old friend of his, Fr d ric Baille, who spent several years at Compaq, culminating with a role in the team that launched the iPaq. Fred's help was instrumental in defining the market positioning of our product. Laurent and I discussed the product features at length over IM and immediately agreed that the OS would be based on Free Software. That left the hardware part unresolved... or so did Laurent think. Years ago, I briefly worked in the management team of an Estonian data security startup. This gave me the opportunity to network with several movers and shakers of the Estonian ICT. Among them was a promising ASIC and industrial design startup that produced really cool Thin Client hardware. The answer to our hardware needs, I figured, could easily be fulfilled by them. My idea of contracting the hardware to Estonia was initially received with skepticism, so I made a simple proposal: why don't we hold the inception meeting in Tallinn and meet with the potential hardware supplier at the same time? Fred and Laurent accepted, so we spent part of April 2006 there, with me acting both as their friendly tourist guide and as the middleman for the introductions. Fred and Laurent immediately fell in love with Tallinn's designer bars, omnipresent WiFi network and blond-a-plenty. Most of all, their visit at our potential hardware supplier gave them the answers they needed: Estonia is IT. Overview The hardware we selected is built around the AMD Geode LX, a nifty Pentium-compatible single-chip computer. It comes equipped with VGA output and four USB 2.0 ports, along with high-quality audio via 1/8" input and output jacks, plus a built-in encryption engine. We added 100baseT Ethernet connectivity (with provision for other networking options) to that, to complete the platform. For the software part, we used ingredients from Debian's Etch release, focusing on a configuration that would enable easy access to the most popular applications for home and small business use: Instant Messenger (Gaim), Multimedia player (Totem), PDF reader (Evince), Web browser (Firefox), word processor (AbiWord). The result is this: Press Coverage The editorial team at IT-Neeger (an A-level Estonian ICT blog) immediately scooped the story [in Estonian] and it produced such a strong response that the traditional Estonian media contacted the IT-Neeger team to write a feature article (stay tuned for details). The local Slashdot, Minut.EE, also reported [in Estonian] on the IT-Neeger article. Thus, myself and Laurent Bervas spent the better part of this week being blogged, interviewed and podcasted by a variety of Estonian and French publications, which is how I only got around blogging this bit tonight. Marketing Contrary to our competitors, we fully intend on keeping this platform open, so our initial market will actually be Free Software developers with a penchant for innovation. As such, our first 50 units are exclusively intended for interested developers who want to improve upon our initial idea and participate in defining the final product. Inquiries are welcome!

Martin 'Joey' Schulze is still aggressively writing against Dunc tank. I don't agree with his posting at all. I don't think dunc-tank is doing any serious damage to the project; so far all the damage comes from a few people (especially you, Joey), that play some "politics" game here I don't really get or like. And just count the number of people who have expressed discomfort with your postings. I remember having seen the word "blackmail" attributed to some of your mails. [Update: and it also sucks that people have to point out that they didn't reduce their Debian involvement because of Dunc tank, but just because they don't use the software anymore, have too little time or are annoyed by your behaviour; otherwise you'd probably cite them as dunc-tank enemies.] I'm also convinced that your assessment - that only the release in december counts - is false. You know, the people working on Debian were NOT replaced by the announcement of the dunc tank experiment. We still want to make Debian the "Universal OS", and are still dedicated to the projects goals. But some of us still remember the bad press debian has been receiving because of the delays with sarge release, and the users we have lost back then because of pushing back the release again and again. You know, many people still act like "yeah, debian releases in december, sure, when hell freezes over". One of Debians strengths was security support. But security support doesn't work as well, when half of the software you're running are unsupported backports. If Debian wants to remain a good base choice (i.e. universal OS), it needs to provide a reliable combination of secure but not too-out-of-date software to become useless again. Therefore I consider frequent-enough, somewhat-on-time releases important for the universal OS idea; this will also cut down on our work (at least for those doing backports, too, since we need to do less of them). It's not a primary goal, but a consequence of the well-established goals. Now why I accept the experiment of 'hiring' the release managers for one month full-time: I've always had the impression that donating to Debian is somewhat pointless, because I don't see any concrete results, or where the money is going. To me it always felt like it ends up in an unused saving account with the SPI treasurer, until someone finds a way to spend it. Here the money is used in a transparent way, on well-respected people and with a very concrete result. And remember, it's an experiment. It's a one time thing so far. Oh, and to actually counter all your blah-blah: I've actually recently increased my Debian efforts again. Because of the dunc-tank thing, and despite your end-of-the-world-claims. Namely because it gave me back the feeling that someone actually cares about making Debian useful to everbody (and not just us freaks running unstable and experimental). That there is some interest in getting the new release out of the door on time, of supporting our users out there such as the city of munich (which is also running backports AFAIK). To me Debian is still mostly about the users, not about the ego of developers. Be a nice guy and do a good job, and you'll get lots of thank yous, a couple of friends, a couple of patches, some free beer or tshirts in return. Does this corrupt as well, getting a free coke? Yes, I got a free Jolt coke four years ago at Systems. Does this make you demotivated, that you didn't get one, too?

Martin "Joey" Schulze is interpreting my decision to spend some less time on Debian as being due to dunc-tank. He's wrong. Joey, you're spreading false rumors. You could easily have checked the facts with me, but you chose not to. That is malicious. Kindly do not ever use my name to further your hate campaigns, thank you. I'm reducing time spent on Debian rather than reducing time spent on other things so I could still do Debian things. One of the reasons for this is that it seems to me that a number of very vocal people in the project have collectively gone insane over the past few months. As an example, proposing a GR as a reaction to dunc-tank was so much out of proportion that I can't understand how those who supported are capable of acting in a constructive manner at all. Either that or they seriously need a life. I have some years ago developed an aversion to conflict. Rather than butting my head with insane people, I'll withdraw from mailing lists and reduce my participation in the project to maintaining the package that I care most about. That's right, Joey, dunc-tank didn't drive me to this. You did. I don't know if dunc-tank is a good thing or not, in the long run. I think it's a worthwhile experiment, and its future should be decided when the experiment has been done. Another reason to reduce time spent on Debian is that I'm looking into starting a business. That can be quite time consuming.