Search Results: "will"

22 March 2009

Neil Williams: multistrap - debootstrap for multiple repositories

debootstrap has only ever been designed to work with a single repository and the current code includes a comment:


# XXX: I can't think how to deal well with dependency resolution and

#      lots of Packages files. -- aj 2005/06/12

The main reason for that, AFAICT, is that debootstrap has a perfectly valid goal of trying to work without needing dpkg or apt themselves, doing everything in the chroot. Theoretically, anything that can run POSIX shell should be able to run debootstrap.

Emdebian has a need for a different script that can assume that both dpkg and apt are fully functional already and behave as normal Debian packages which opens the door to supporting as many repositories as apt itself can handle and, until now, that support was --foreign only. i.e. it was explicitly for cross-debootstrap (armel, etc.) for use with Emdebian Grip and actually used debootstrap for some of the work. That code has been simplified and there is no need for debootstrap now in multistrap. (multistrap itself is written in perl.)

I recognise that native support could be useful so I've been working on a fix for the native support - partially achieved by dropping the need to use debootstrap at all and porting the existing fix for #518719 from the emdebian-rootfs package (shell) into perl.

In effect, multistrap allows you to collapse the following stages into one:

  1. $ sudo debootstrap $suite $dir $mirror

  2. $ sudo chroot $dir

  3. # nano /etc/apt/sources.list

  4. # apt-get update

  5. # apt-get install $package_list

  6. # apt-get clean

  7. $ sudo $my_config_script


That much is architecture-neutral (due to the support for working around #518719 which allows packages to be unpacked without running the configure scripts) - what I've added for native support is that sudo chroot $dir dpkg --configure -a can be automatically run before the config_script. In the typical Emdebian case, the configure stage would happen immediately after unpacking the multistrap filesystem onto the device (certainly before first boot).

That gives you a single method for creating a complete root filesystem with everything you need installed, everything configured and the config_script hook allows you to put in things like kernels and kernel modules etc. too - all ready for tar -czf and unpacking onto your device. Instead of a plain debootstrap, multistrap can give you a complete filesystem with all the packages you'd only install as soon as debootstrap had finished.

In addition, multistrap allows apt to decide which versions to install from the collection of Packages files so you can implement fallbacks and other permutations of mirrors and packages. Emdebian is using this functionality to mix private packages with official packages from Emdebian Grip 1.0 and ensure that not only are all dependencies met but that each dependency has the chance to be the latest version without needing any configuration or manual parsing. Just specify the repositories and which packages you need at the top level from each one. apt does the rest.

So, the question:

Does this deserve to be a separate source package ? For now, it's heading into Emdebian as part of the emdebian-rootfs package, version 1.6.1.

The advantages will be that multistrap itself doesn't need to be tied to the still rapidly developing emdebian-tools source package and doesn't need to carry the quite large changelog from emdebian-tools (which is just going to keep on growing). 
 3014 2009-03-17 20:54 ./usr/share/doc/multistrap/README

 2265 2009-02-18 18:32 ./usr/share/doc/multistrap/TODO

 1536 2008-08-20 14:25 ./usr/share/doc/multistrap/copyright

21067 2009-03-17 21:58 ./usr/share/doc/multistrap/changelog.gz

 1233 2008-10-28 13:13 ./usr/share/doc/multistrap/NEWS.Debian.gz


Disadvantages, it's very small (a lot of the current content is actually POD documentation) and probably doesn't warrant a source package all alone.


 17774 2009-03-22 13:41 ./usr/sbin/multistrap


Details:
 Package: multistrap

 Source: emdebian-tools

 Version: 1.6.1

 Architecture: all

 Maintainer: Neil Williams 

 Installed-Size: 120

 Depends: perl, apt, debhelper (>= 5), 

  libconfig-auto-perl, libparse-debian-packages-perl

 Replaces: emdebian-rootfs (<= 1.6.0)

 Section: admin

 Priority: extra

 Homepage: http://www.emdebian.org/

 Description: multiple repository bootstrap based on apt

  debootstrap replacement with multiple repository support

  using apt to handle all dependency issues and conflicts.

  .

  Includes support for foreign architecture multistraps that need

  only minimal configuration on the final device. Supports cleaning

  up the generated bootstrap filesystem to remove downloaded packages

  and hooks to modify the files in the bootstrap filesystem after

  the packages have been unpacked but before being configured.


Is there a better home? devscripts? Ideas? (It would need to be a package I can join as Uploader: and I'd prefer if that package used subversion.)

David Moreno: Debian on Twitter

Or for those who care about Twitter and Debian :) We've setup a Twitter account for the project to use on Twitter. Go follow it, go now!

twitter.com/debianproject Now, the interesting part about this is that any Debian developer with a GPG key on the Debian keyring can tweet to it. You basically only have to do something like this: $ echo "Squeeze is scheduled for Winter 2014" gpg clearsign lwp-request -m POST http://twitter.debian.net/post or, what it's the same, just send a clearsigned POST data to http://twitter.debian.net/post. If the data is signed by a Debian developer, it'll go through and post it. The Debian uid is appended on the tweet, as found on Debian's LDAP DB, so if joetheplumber@d.o is the one posting, it'll be posted with "(via joetheplumber)" on it. If you are more interested about this, you can go to twitter.debian.net where you will find deeper information and details about this service. I encourage you, Debian user and advocate, to start following the @debianproject account; and I encourage you, Debian developer, to communicate with our users and advocates by using and posting to this service. More news to follow soon. UPDATE: Support for Identi.ca has been added and now both Twitter and Identi.ca accounts are updated at once and sync'ed.

21 March 2009

Jeff Bailey: Jaunty pre-beta

As an Ubuntu core-dev (although a lazy one. I really should hack on something again. I blame having a toddler), I try to at least do a run of testing around beta time on my machines. So far I'm really impressed. For the first time wifi, suspend, sound, 3d, and youtube all work out of the box. Usually at beta time, I expect that none of those will. Playing a DVD kills X, though. (Well, if I do it twice. The first time it'll kill the app, the second time it'll kill X) Tried with totem-gstreamer, xine and mplayer so I'm pretty certain that it's X. Luckily it's an Intel card, so hopefully it's early enough to file bugs and get them fixed in time for release.

Nice work!

Mike Hommey: Orphaning packages

Since I am expected to spend more than half my packaging time updating the debian/copyright file, I am hereby orphaning nspr, nss, iceape and xulrunner. I am also stopping work on webkit and iceweasel, but they don t end up in the orphan state since they are comaintained. Good luck to my fellow developpers. (And sorry, sincerely) Update: As I do realize writing while being pissed doesn t help making the motives right, and apparently, some people have seen this as an extortion, let me make things clearer: I was starting to work on xulrunner 1.9.1 when the discussion about the copyright files came up. It will require a significant amount of time, and while Noah Slater s opinion alone wouldn t really have carried me that far, despite me saying so because I got pissed by his words, 2 messages from J rg Jaspert (the only ones he posted so far in the thread, by the way) did make it clear that my work on xulrunner 1.9.1 was going to be a waste of time, which I already lack to properly handle the bugs in my maintained packages, let alone keeping the copyright file up-to-date. As I am obviously unable to handle the amount of work required to maintain big packages, as drawing new blood in the mozilla team has always failed so far, I just prefer to stop than to over-overflow. Call it extortion to get people in the mozilla team if you want, I m fine with the notion. I ve been thinking to stop working on big packages for nearly a year already, but never mentionned it but to a few people in a few occasions. I couldn t resolve myself to do it, though I did reduce the amount of time I spend on these packages (I was overflown, a year ago). I just found an excuse to actually do it. I must say I feel awkward now, and I still don t know if I will be able to keep this resolution. As for the new copyright file format, with full licensing information and copyright holders list, I *did* try, on a significantly smaller piece of software than the mozilla packages, namely on Webkit, which is not really small either but still 6 times less files than xulrunner. I must say I hate to have to list copyright holders and file names with a passion, and the amount of time it takes. It is the main reason why there wasn t more uploads of WebKit svn snapshots in the archive Last but not least, thanks for the nice comments.

Russell Coker: Feeds and Banning from Planets

Stewart Smith has written about the removal of a blog from Planet Linux Australia [1] due to publishing a list of URLs that the Australian government wants to censor. The first point I want to make is that even if you had a list with thousands of entries that are not likely to offend anyone or incur any legal liability then it s still not suitable for syndication on most Planet feeds. The correct thing to do is to have a paragraph describing the list and why people would want to read it and then use the MORE feature of your blog so that the rest isn t in the RSS feed. If you use Wordpress which seems to have the MORE function broken then that would mean hosting the list somewhere else. In regard to the specific post, in a comment on Stewart s post Matt suggests that the Planet software somehow filter out certain blog posts. I am not aware of any way of doing that apart from through code changes, Matt could submit some patches to allow that sort of thing. One thing that would be really good would be to have an exclusion tag or category in a blog feed. So you for example you could have feed URLs such as /feed/lca which would be configured to list all posts without the tag not-lca. Another way for a blogger to do this would be to use Yahoo pipes [2]. The people who run a Planet should be prepared to take any feed URL. It would not be difficult for a blogger to create a pipe that excludes all items that have NSFW in the title (or any other possible way of listing them). A final option is to have multiple blogs. I have a blog for documents that I regularly update [3]. Many of those documents had been plain HTML files edited with vi for years before I started blogging. But Wordpress is a reasonable CMS and as I use it for blogging it made sense to use it for other documents too. Wordpress has no good option for managing two types of documents, ones that are date-based (regular blog posts with the date in the URL) and non-date based (which change periodically and have different date stamps). There are Wordpress pages, but the support for having moderate numbers of pages is not great. Also on my document blog I will often have articles appear new regularly as I change the date when updating them. Anyone is welcome to subscribe to the feed for my document blog if they are interested in seeing new versions of the documents, but I expect that most people don t want to. The Debian Wordpress package (as of last time I used it) and my fork of the Debian Wordpress package have great support for multiple blogs. There is Wordpress-MU for bulk blog hosting, but that is only designed for people who want to run something like LiveJournal or Blogger. If you just want a few blogs for friends and relatives then the regular Debian Wordpress package will do the job well. Some bloggers maintain two blogs, one for public things and another for close friends and relatives (people who ARE interested in what they ate for breakfast). Having one blog for the NSFW material would be a reasonable thing to do for certain bloggers. Finally while I doubt that someone who runs a Planet installation faces any legal liability, there is also the issue of a PR liability. From a PR perspective I think it s best for the reputation of Linux users in Australia for certain things to not appear on Planet Linux Australia. That said it would be good if there was a process for removing and reinstating blogs that was publicly documented. There will obviously be many differences of opinion as to what is too risky to allow on the Planet so we should expect that from time to time feeds will be temporarily removed. When that happens what does a blogger have to do to be done to be syndicated again? Update: A comment has revealed a way of filtering out RSS feeds via the feed URLs used by wordpress. A URL such as /feed/cat=-X will give a feed of all articles that don t contain category number X. Multiple categories can be specified when separated by commas. So this allows Wordpress users to exclude their NSFW category from Planet Linux Australia.

Michal &#268;iha&#345;: Summer of Code with phpMyAdmin

Do you have free time in summer? Are you student? It's great chance to improve some free software through Google Summer of Code! This year (same as year ago), phpMyAdmin is not direct participant, however nice folks at MySQL offered us cooperation. That means that you can submit our ideas to a MySQL project and we will pick up few of them. So go ahead and submit your applications, you have time till 3rd April!

20 March 2009

Russell Coker: Choosing a Server for CPU Intensive work

A client is considering some options for serious deployment of some CPU intensive work. The options that are being considered include cloud computing (Amazon EC2 [1]), virtual machines (Slicehost [2] and Linode [3]), and purchasing servers to install in racks at various locations. I can t disclose the criteria that will determine when each of those three options will be used (I expect that we will end up using all of them). But my research on the prices of various servers will hopefully be useful to someone. For the server vendor I chose Dell. I believe that HP offers slightly better quality hardware than Dell, but they cost more and are more difficult to deal with (I can t even get a price online). For this project I will be using a bunch of redundant servers (in a similar concept to the Google server array) so I m not going to be overly bothered about losing a server occasionally - therefore the slight benefit that HP offers for reliability does not make up for the expense. Dell has some 1RU servers that have two CPU sockets and allow eight CPU cores. It seems that the best value that Dell offers for a server without RAID (the entire server is redundant) is a PowerEdge SC1435 that has two Opteron 2352 quad-core CPUs running at 2.1GHz, 4G of RAM, a 1TB SATA disk, and a Broadcom PCIe Gig-e card for $3,816.50. That machine gives an option of 2.3GHz CPUs for an extra $621.50, I am not sure that increasing the clock speed by almost 10% for a 16% increase in system price is a good idea. The second best option was a PowerEdge 1950 III that has two Xeon E5420 2.5GHz quad-core CPUs with 12M of cache, 4G of RAM and a 1TB SATA disk for $4,302.30. The Intel option has 3 years of support included while the AMD option included 1 year of support and needed at least an extra $990 for 3 years of support. So it seems that if 3 years of support is desired then the Intel based server becomes significantly cheaper and is probably a better option. Dell s 2RU and 4RU servers are of no interest if you want CPU performance. The 2RU servers only support two processors and the 4RU servers only support four processors. So it s a ratio of 2 processors per RU for 1RU servers vs one processor per RU for 2RU and 4RU servers, and the 2RU and 4RU servers are a lot more expensive too. I am investigating the Dell blade server. Blade servers are great for CPU density and good for management. The Dell blade enclosure M1000e takes 10RU of space and supports 16 half-height blades or 8 full-height blades. The Dell M905 blade supports four AMD quad-core processors for a total of 128 cores in 10RU, there are also half-height blades that support two quad-core processors for the same CPU density. So in terms of CPU density it s an average of 12.8 cores per RU for the blade server vs 8 cores per RU for 1RU servers. While I haven t got a complete price yet, it seems that four CPUs suitable for the M905 will cost about as much as four 1RU servers. So the 1RU systems are definitely better value for money than the blade server. The difference is the management cost. N servers that have two CPUs will be more work than N/2 servers that have four CPUs, but on the other hand blade servers require some specialised skills to run them (which I don t have) and that might also cause problems. I don t think that blades will be part of this project.

Russell Coker: Dear Magazines - Please Publish Your Adverts Online

When reading a magazine I often see an advert for a product that I want to buy (or recommend that a client buy). This is of course expected as the advertisers put a lot of effort into targeting their adverts to the people who read such magazines. However I often decide that I want to buy the product some weeks after reading the magazine. Linux Journal [1] usually has adverts for good server hardware that supports Linux. Their web site is quite nice in many ways, it allows subscribers to read articles online and has an index to all back-issues. But it has no link that I could find for reading the adverts! I would like to see an index of all advertising that has ever been published so that I can read the adverts online. The ancient adverts are good for historical reference and the new ones are good for purchasing decisions. Right now I would like to be suggesting that a client consider buying a number of servers from a company that advertises in Linux Journal, but I m not because they don t publish their adverts online! To make matters worse the Linux Journal web site doesn t include a suitable contact address for issues unrelated to subscriptions. I believe that a magazine needs to publish an email address for copyright infringement reports (I often notify magazines when someone rips off their content so that they can issue a DMCA take-down notice), an email address for technical problems (I often notice rendering errors and broken links in web pages and like to report them), and an email address for random stuff. I m even happy to use a web-based form to submit my suggestions if that s what makes them happy, but having no published way of notifying them is simply a mistake. NB I do have some email addresses of LJ employees in my addressbook somewhere, I will send them email if no-one responds to this blog post. But I m publishing this because it s probably a mistake that other magazines make, and because any response from them is going to be too late for the report on hardware prices that I m writing. Update: Linux Journal does allow you to download a sample copy, that is a PDF of one complete issue that includes adverts. So I can see adverts from August 2008.

19 March 2009

Obey Arthur Liu: Google Summer of Code 2009 - we re in!

Copy of debian-devel-announce. We re happy to announce that Debian has been accepted again as one of the mentoring organizations for this year s Google Summer of Code. According to the timeline for this year s program, we will only have a few days to get set up and ready. Student applications will be accepted between the 23rd of March and 4th of April, but we re already being contacted by students interested in working with us. That means that if you want to get involved as a mentor or a student, you don t have very long. We re also still actively looking for more project ideas - what would you like somebody to work on? You don t need to be able to mentor a project to propose it. Both students and mentors will have to register on the new Melange application. Once you ve edited your profile, you will have a linkid . Always keep it at hand. We will need it to process registrations and applications to match it with who you are. If you d like to mentor, you will need to apply to become a mentor and click on Debian in the list of orgs. Also please add yourself to the Debian wiki page and keep in touch with us (see below). Once you ve done that, the admins will be able to approve you so you can be added into the official Debian mentors list. Please add any specific ideas that you may have, or if you have nothing specific then list the areas where you think you could mentor a student. Existing Debian developers are preferred as mentors, as that will make things easier on some fronts (e.g. sponsored package uploads, data setup on Debian-hosted machines). But that s not a hard and fast rule. If you re a student hoping to work on Debian this summer in SoC, please get in contact with us (see below) to talk about project ideas, either what we already have listed or your own. It s in everybody s interests to work on applications as much as possible before the deadline closes to improve their chances of acceptance. Ideally we want to encourage new blood to join in and contribute, but we ll be happy to accept high quality applications from anybody that meets Google s eligibility requirements. We can be contacted at: Good luck to all involved; may all your code be merged in squeeze!

Jose Carlos Garcia Sogo: Is ext4 unsafe?

There has been a lot of hype about ext4 lately, following an Ubuntu bug which rose a lot of concerns about ext4 security. I know these are no news, and I know also that I am not a kernel guru, but let s resume some important concepts.
Ext4 implements something called allocate-on-flush. This means that kernel will decide how to write to disk in an efficient way by batching allocations together in larger runs. It increases performance and reduces fragmentation. But if a system crash happens between metadata and data is actually written to disk a 0-size length file can be found in the filesystem. With ext3 journal had a default timeout of 5 seconds and then was flushed to disk. With ext4 this time is unknown, so appplications that want to ensure everything is on disk have to call fsync() on file and directory after every operation. To avoid this, a series of patches have been queued for 2.6.30 so when a file is going to be replaced, it is written to disk with no delay.
Another concern raised is the need for atomicity and durability of files. For achieving this applications have first to write a temporary file and then rename() it over the old file. This will ensure that new or old file will be found in the filesystem after a crash, instead of a corrupted file that can be found when it is opened with O_TRUNC.
Anyway, my opinion is that when choosing a filesystem, one have to know what the computer is going to be used for. Using binary propietary drivers is an option, which can lead your Linux installation to behave most like Vista and filesystem cannot be blamed for losing files if it is making its job as designed. Perhaps, it s better to use ext3 in this situation, but at the cost of missing performance.
If you want to learn more about this issues I recommend you to read both articles by Theodore Tso, Delayed allocation and the zero-length file problem and Don t fear the fsync! and also AlessanderAlexander Larsson s one ext4 vs fsync, my take as well as comment in all of them.

Julian Andres Klode: March updates


(This is a more or less a TODO list for my Debian packages and other stuff I m working on) Already done New package: metatheme-gilouche Today I uploaded the new package metatheme-gilouche, which builds the binary package gnome-theme-gilouche. The Gilouche theme has been created by openSUSE and is used there as the default theme in GNOME. For users of gnome-app-install, this theme provides a better style for your main menu. It contains icons (replacing industrial-icon-theme), GTK+, and Metacity themes. The package is currently NEW, once it is in the archive, I will request removal of industrial-icon-theme. And once this package reaches Ubuntu, Ubuntu s Bug#96042 is closed. python-apt Two weeks ago, Sunday (on 2009-03-08), I coded a bit in python-apt, and introduced a new class apt.package.Version, which contains information about a specific version of a package; and an interface to fetch the source package for that version. You can now simply call something like package.candidate.get_source() to fetch it. The Package class now provides three new properties: Package.candidate, Package.installed and Package.version. The first two return a Version() object for the candidate/installed version or None, if no one is available (which only happens for installed; because there should always be a candidate [because Package() objects are only created for packages where at least one source is available]). These properties replace those like Package.candidateOrigin, which now is Package.candidate.origins [which also fixes the naming]. The old ones are still available, but accessing them results in a DeprecationWarning. The whole thing should be hitting unstable soon as 0.7.9. Other stuff Less interesting, but also true - I have uploaded a new version of ndiswrapper (1.54), and the last snapshot of aufs1 (0+20090302-1). I have also renamed the method debimg.core.resolver.Resolver.add_task() to debimg.core.resolver.Resolver.add_tasks(), but this is a really boring change. Planned changes Planned changes in aufs packaging: switching to aufs2 This is a bit complicated, as aufs2 seems to require a large amount of new exports in the kernel. But we need to switch, because the old version of aufs is not developed anymore upstream. With the switch to aufs2, we will loose functionality like exporting the filesystem via NFS and other ones. The code will be split into two source packages, aufs-utils and aufs. Planned changes in gnome-app-install First of all, I need to merge the new version of gnome-app-install from Ubuntu. Afterwards, I will start working on various packaging related issues. I will switch the package from CDBS to debhelper 7; install the modules to /usr/share/gnome-app-install/, not systemwide; and also try to create a single package which works on Debian and Ubuntu, so we can have a shared package in future. Planned changes in command-not-found First of all, I need to merge the new version from Ubuntu. The version of command-not-found in Debian has various differences from the one shipped by Ubuntu. It uses the files from apt-file to create our command list, it is installed in /usr/share/command-not-found, not /usr/lib/command-not-found, and more. My plans for the next upload include the inclusion of a pre-generated command-list, for those who do not want to use the apt-file based method; and because it will be available out of the box. Planned changes in python-apt First of all, I am still working on improving the documentation. While everything should be listed already, there are still some problems with their descriptions, and some are missing them. I intent to fix this in python-apt 0.7.10 (or whatever version it will be). Everyone can help, for example by sending new documentation texts or more examples (see http://apt.alioth.debian.org/python-apt-doc/coding.html for further information). Secondly, I will work on a QT4 progress module, in order to equally support GTK+ and QT4 toolkits. This is not really an important task, and if someone else wants to do this, I would be happy too. Thirdly, I will work on the complete deprecation of mixedCase naming conventions, and switch everything to lowercase_with_underscores; while still providing backward compatibility. Fourthly, I will complete my work on restructuring the progress module (now a package), to introduce a generic naming scheme, and modules like apt.progress.text who will implement them. That s all If you are a developing for Python, be sure to checkout python2.6 in experimental and thank doko for uploading it. I really hope that python3.1 leaves NEW soon, so I can play with it . If you know something else I did or will do in near future, please leave a comment. ;-) Posted in Debian

Uwe Hermann: Using Debian GNU/Linux on the Lenovo IdeaPad S9e netbook

TuxMobil - Linux on Laptops, Notebooks, PDAs and Mobile Phones Lenovo Ideapad S9e netbook I recently got my hands on a Lenovo IdeaPad S9e netbook for a short amount of time (I don't own it), so I did a few tests with Debian unstable (more or less Lenny right now) and a Linux 2.6.28 kernel on it, see results below. The machine type is 4187-42G, and it features an Intel Atom N270 CPU (with HyperThreading) at 1.6 GHz, 1 GB of DDR2 RAM, an 80 GB SATA drive, an 8.9" WSVGA 1024x600 (glossy) screen, VGA port, LAN, wifi, bluetooth, 2xUSB, SD card slot, PCI ExpressCard slot, built-in microphone, and a webcam. BIOS You can enter the BIOS by pressing F2, the boot menu by pressing F12 during boot. Booting from USB works fine on this netbook. There's a Splashtop installation on the netbook (called "Lenovo Quickstart" here) which you can disable in the BIOS. Installation There's no CD-ROM drive, so the simplest way is to use a USB thumb drive for installation. Here's how you can prepare one containing a Lenny installer (assuming your USB thumb drive is /dev/sda): 
  $ wget http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/5.0.0/i386/iso-cd/debian-500-i386-netinst.iso
  $ wget http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/dists/lenny/main/installer-i386/current/images/hd-media/boot.img.gz
  $ gunzip boot.img.gz
  $ dd if=boot.img of=/dev/sda1
  $ mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt
  $ cp debian-500-i386-netinst.iso /mnt
  $ umount /mnt
If the above USB thumb drive doesn't boot correctly (which it did not in my case: GRUB error 17) it's probably because of a messed-up MBR. This is how you can fix it: 
  $ apt-get install mbr
  $ install-mbr /dev/sda
Lenovo Ideapad S9e Debian installation Then insert the USB thumb drive in the Lenovo IdeaPad S9e, choose USB boot in the BIOS, and start the installer. Most of the process works as usual, the only small difference is that you might want to load the "parted" installer module in order to resize the Windows-partition on the disk (if you want to keep it) to make space for Linux. The second (fat32) partition seems to keep a restore image and/or the Splashtop stuff, not sure. Audio Works out of the box using the snd_hda_intel driver. The hardware is onboard audio in the southbridge (82801G / ICH7) and uses the Realtek ALC269 codec. If some programs don't have working audio, try modprobe snd-pcm-oss. Built-in microphone Untested so far. Bluetooth Works out of the box using the bluetooth and btusb driver. The laptop's Bluetooth device is USB-attached internally and shows up in lsusb as: 
  $ lsusb
  Bus 003 Device 002: ID 0a5c:2150 Broadcom Corp.
  $ dmesg
  usb 3-2: Product: BCM2046 Bluetooth Device
After modprobe btusb you can use hcitool / hciconfig etc. as usual, and/or enable more related stuff with /etc/init.d/bluetooth start. Sensors The lm-sensors script detects the lm75, eeprom, i2c-dev, and i2c_i801 modules. The following is the 'sensors' output: 
  $ sensors
  acpitz-virtual-0
  Adapter: Virtual device
  temp1:       +36.0  C  (crit = +95.0  C)
The hard drive temperature can be viewed with: 
  $ hddtemp /dev/sda
  /dev/sda: FUJITSU MHZ2080BH G1: 44  C
HPET The Intel ICH7 southbridge in this laptop supports High Performance Event Timers (HPET) which allows for more power savings and thus improved battery life. 
  $ dmesg   grep -i hpet
  ACPI: HPET 3F6E1E41, 0038 (r1 INTEL  CALISTGA  6040000 LOHR       5A)
  ACPI: HPET id: 0x8086a201 base: 0xfed00000
  hpet clockevent registered
  HPET: 3 timers in total, 0 timers will be used for per-cpu timer
  hpet0: at MMIO 0xfed00000, IRQs 2, 8, 0
  hpet0: 3 comparators, 64-bit 14.318180 MHz counter
You can check the wakeups-per-second with powertop. SD card slot Works out of the box. It seems to be attached via USB internally (usb-storage driver). 
  $ lsusb
  Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0bda:0158 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. Mass Stroage Device
PCI ExpressCard slot Untested so far. ACPI Works fine, see comments for "acpitool" output. Network card Works out of the box using the tg3 driver. 
  $ modprobe tg3
  tg3.c:v3.94 (August 14, 2008)
  tg3 0000:02:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16
  tg3 0000:02:00.0: setting latency timer to 64
  eth0: Tigon3 [partno(BCM95906) rev c002 PHY(5906)] (PCI Express) 10/100Base-TX Ethernet 00:11:22:33:44:55
  eth0: RXcsums[1] LinkChgREG[0] MIirq[0] ASF[0] WireSpeed[0] TSOcap[0]
  eth0: dma_rwctrl[76180000] dma_mask[64-bit]
Touchpad Works out of the box, both in X as well as in the console using gpm. 
  $ dmesg
  Synaptics Touchpad, model: 1, fw: 7.2, id: 0x1c0b1, caps: 0xd04731/0xa40000
Suspend-to-disk and suspend-to-RAM I'm using the hibernate Debian package. You can explicitly force the usage of either method in /etc/hibernate/hibernate.conf by uncommenting the respective lines. 
  TryMethod disk.conf
  # TryMethod ram.conf
Suspend does not yet work out of the box, however, as the machine is unknown: 
  $ s2ram -n
  Machine unknown
  This machine can be identified by:
      sys_vendor   = "LENOVO                          "
      sys_product  = "418742G         "
      sys_version  = "Lenovo                  "
      bios_version = "14CN51WW  "
  See http://suspend.sf.net/s2ram-support.html for details.
After a few test I found that s2ram -f -a 3 works fine (tested from console only so far). Now this needs to be integrated upstream and in the Debian package (I'll file a bug report). Update: Submitted bug #520848, and an email to the upstream mailing list. Wireless There doesn't seem to be a mainline driver for the Broadcom BCM4312 wifi card in the laptop, yet: 
  $ lspci -nn
  05:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g [14e4:4315] (rev 01)
Neither the b43 nor the b43legacy drivers work as of 2.6.28. For now, one of two possible options is to build a (partly non-free) driver provided by Broadcom from source (option 2 would be to use ndiswrapper, I guess, but that's untested): 
  $ wget http://people.debian.org/~adamm/kernel/linux-kbuild-2.6.28_2.6.28-0.1_i386.deb
  $ dpkg -i linux-kbuild-2.6.28_2.6.28-0.1_i386.deb (currently needed in unstable due to bug #518115)
  $ apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-2.6.28-1-686
  $ mkdir temp; cd temp
  $ wget http://www.broadcom.com/docs/linux_sta/hybrid-portsrc-x86_32-v5_10_79_10.tar.gz
  $ tar xfvz hybrid-portsrc-x86_32-v5_10_79_10.tar.gz
  $ make -C /lib/modules/ uname -r /build M= pwd  clean
  $ make -C /lib/modules/ uname -r /build M= pwd  modules
If that worked, you can load the driver via: 
  $ rmmod bcm43xx; rmmod b43; rmmod b43legacy (you could also permanently blacklist these modules)
  $ modprobe ieee80211_crypt_tkip
  $ insmod ./wl.ko
  $ dmesg
  wl: module license '' taints kernel.
  wl 0000:05:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 18
  wl 0000:05:00.0: setting latency timer to 64
  eth1: Broadcom BCM4315 802.11 Wireless Controller 5.10.79.10
You can now run iwconfig, iwlist, etc. from the command line, or use some GUIs such as kwifimanager. In order to disable wireless, run: 
  $ rmmod wl
So far, I only tested WEP (but not WPA). CPU frequency scaling Works out of the box using the acpi_cpufreq driver. Use cpufreq-set -c 0 -g performance if you need full CPU power, cpufreq-set -c 0 -g powersave otherwise. Use -c 1 to do the same with the other CPU/core. PC speaker Works fine out of the box using the pcspkr module, tested with beep. Graphics card Works out of the box using the intel X.org driver. 
  $ xrandr
  Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1024 x 600, maximum 1024 x 1024
  VGA disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
  LVDS connected 1024x600+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 195mm x 113mm
     1024x600      60.0*+
     800x600        60.3  
     640x480        59.9  
  TV disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DRI works out of the box with the (mainline, open-source) driver: 
  $ glxinfo   grep direct
  direct rendering: Yes
If you attach an external monitor or projector, you can enable it using xrandr as usual: 
  $ xrandr --output VGA --auto
You can also use a dual-head setup by adding this to your "Screen" section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf: 
  SubSection "Display"
    Virtual 2048 2048
  EndSubSection
After restarting the X server, you can play with xrandr and move the external screen (VGA) "below" the laptop's LCD screen (LVDS) for a simple dual-head setup. The GUI tools arandr or grandr are probably a bit simpler to use than plain command line xrandr. USB Works fine, of course. The only small problem is that there are only two USB ports, more would have been better. Disk drive Works fine, it's an 80 GB SATA drive. Webcam Works out of the box using the uvcvideo driver. 
  $ lsusb
  Bus 001 Device 005: ID 5986:0141 Acer, Inc
  $ modprobe uvcvideo
  uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device Lenovo EasyCamera (5986:0141)
  input: Lenovo EasyCamera as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb1/1-3/1-3:1.0/input/input9
  usb 1-3: New USB device found, idVendor=5986, idProduct=0141
  usb 1-3: New USB device strings: Mfr=3, Product=1, SerialNumber=0
  usb 1-3: Product: Lenovo EasyCamera
  usb 1-3: Manufacturer: BISON Corporation
You can use luvcvideo for webcam viewing. Battery Lasts for ca. 3.5 hours, probably less if the system is under high load. Special keys Fn+CursorUp / Fn+CursorDown (brightness), Fn+ESC (enable/disable webcam), Fn+F1 (sleep mode), Fn+F2 (enable/disable TFT backlight), Fn+F6 (enable/disable thouchpad), Fn+F7 (Num lock), Fn+F8 (scroll lock), and Fn+F11 (F12 key) all work fine. Fn+F3, Fn+F5, Fn+F9, Fn+F10, and all other special keys are untested. LEDs The power, disk activity, CAPS lock, Num lock, and battery charging LEDs all work fine out of the box. lspci -tvnn 
  -[0000:00]-+-00.0  Intel Corporation Mobile 945GME Express Memory Controller Hub [8086:27ac]
           +-02.0  Intel Corporation Mobile 945GME Express Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:27ae]
           +-02.1  Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/GME, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:27a6]
           +-1b.0  Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller [8086:27d8]
           +-1c.0-[0000:02]----00.0  Broadcom Corporation NetLink BCM5906M Fast Ethernet PCI Express [14e4:1713]
           +-1c.1-[0000:03-04]--
           +-1c.2-[0000:05]----00.0  Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g [14e4:4315]
           +-1d.0  Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 [8086:27c8]
           +-1d.1  Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 [8086:27c9]
           +-1d.2  Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 [8086:27ca]
           +-1d.3  Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 [8086:27cb]
           +-1d.7  Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller [8086:27cc]
           +-1e.0-[0000:06]--
           +-1f.0  Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge [8086:27b9]
           +-1f.1  Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) IDE Controller [8086:27df]
           +-1f.2  Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) SATA IDE Controller [8086:27c4]
           \-1f.3  Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller [8086:27da]
cat /proc/cpuinfo See comments. Resources All in all it's a really nice hardware, and it works (more or less) flawlessly without much hassle with recent distros/kernels. Update 2009-03-22: Updated various sections, added more info. Added resources section.

Biella Coleman: MIT approves open access

The more stuff like this happens, the harder it will be to pass this stuff.

Biella Coleman: MIT approves open access

The more stuff like this happens, the harder it will be to pass this stuff.

Michael Banck: 19 Mar 2009

My experience with LapStore's used-ThinkPad warranty repair service My ThinkPad T40 arrived back from warranty repair today (well, actually yesterday, but I had to run off to the Gnome-2.26 release get-together in Munich so I did not have time to open the box then). I bought it used roughly two years ago at LapStore when my R51 had died. I had bought the R51 new with a one year IBM warranty but unfortunately within two years the graphics chip with got damaged and would freeze the notebook after a couple of minutes. I then decided that I do not really need a new notebook anymore, and opted for a used T4x series (there were no used X40s available at that time). I chose LapStore because they offered a one-year "Garantie" (guarantee? warranty?), which was rather unusual for used notebooks - at best, you would get a one-year "Gewaehrleistung" which is the promise to fix things which were supposedly broken already by delivery. Even better, one could optionally extend the warranty to two years, which I did. The notebook they sent was in pretty good condition (apparently a business out-of-warranty return) and I put in my R51's hard disk, the ipw2100 WLAN card and the RAM (unfortunately, I realized too late that the keyboard and the CDRW/DVD drive do not fit). I was pretty happy with it (and LapStore in general, I recommended it to a couple of friends since, and e.g. my current flatmate bought a T42 there a while ago as well) until the fan started dropping out and making weird noises by the end of 2008. So just before the end of warranty, I sent it (after removing hard disk, optical drive and battery) in to LapStore to see how their service is. I also mentioned a clear bright spot on the display (apparently some fatigue, you see it often mentioned in ThinkPad eBay descriptions) and a crack in the palmrest between the cursor-right key and the hard disk slot. When they sent a mail that the ThinkPad had arrived at their site, I also followed-up via mail that the "indestructible" keyboard caps stickers they used to mod a Scandinavian(?) keyboard into a German one were pretty much destroyed by now and would also need servicing. I assumed that they would service the fan (which looked like a clear-cut warranty issue to me) without arguing, but probably not the display and palmrest (and did not know whether they got the mail about the keyboard stickers), so when they sent another mail two days ago that they sent the notebook back without asking further questions, I became worried about what happened at all. So, long story short, I was totally positively surprised when I opened the box today and read: "Aktion: L fter, Display, Palmrest und Tastatur getauscht" (action: fan, display, palmrest and keyboard replaced) The replacements are still used parts (and the keyboard is still not a real German one, but one with new stickers on it), but they basically changed my almost-totally-broken-will-fall-apart T40 back into a almost-as-good-as-new T40. (not sure whether that is positive or negative, but they also forgot to remove the service-hard disk they put in to test things, I guess I will send it back to them) So all in all, I am very much impressed by their service. I would have expected this kind of service from IBM/Lenovo if I had a manufacturer warranty, but not from some random sell-used-ThinkPads shops on the net. I can now even more strongly recommend LapStore as the place to buy good notebooks. Certainly you can get cheaper prices at some eBay stores, but you do not get real warranty then and what about the service? I recommend geting a T42 - I believe the T43 is inferior to it and the T40s and T41s don't have "LapStore Garantie" anymore. You can get them without operating system and can customize the hard disk, memory and optical drives - unfortunately you cannot downgrade those, which is my only gripe with them.

Martin F. Krafft: Release promises

Hey Meike, a new edition is planned, but first I need to finish my research and submit my thesis. Then I will immediately turn to the book, which I will update for lenny , and to which I will add a lot of content. My goal is to provide enough of a reason for everyone to buy the new edition, I do not want to disappoint those who have bought the first edition. Stay tuned over at the book s website or the book s announcement list. NP: The Penguin Cafe Orchestra: The Penguin Cafe Orchestra

Wouter Verhelst: Dealing with apt's GPG signing stuff -- the right way.

Philippe blogs about how one can import a GPG key into apt's GPG keyring so that it will stop complaining about unknown keys. While his method will work, it has a major flaw: Importing random keys without checking them first makes secure apt totally useless, since it allows an attacker to replace an apt repository with another one that he signed with his own key and you won't even notice because you blindly import keys anyway. So what's the right way? Depends:
  • If you have a GPG key yourself, and you have built a local web of trust (with gpg's --update-trustdb command beware, this is an interactive process that can take a long time if you have a lot of keys in your local gpg keystore), you can verify that the key really is what it claims to be: 
    wouter@celtic:~$ gpg --edit-key 6070D3A1
gpg (GnuPG) 1.4.9; Copyright (C) 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
pub  1024D/6070D3A1  created: 2006-11-20  expires: 2009-07-01  usage: SC  
                     trust: never         validity: full
[  full  ] (1). Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key (4.0/etch) <ftpmaster@debian.org>
Command> quit
    Why --edit-key? Because --list-keys, --list-sigs, or even --check-sigs does not show you the validity information. The --list-sigs --with-colons output does, but that is meant for computer consumption, and isn't very useful for human beings. But --edit-key contains the information too, so that works. What you need to look at is the information that immediately follows 'validity:'. In my case, it says 'validity: full', meaning, "enough" people who I have indicated (using --update-trustdb) to trust that they can sign keys the proper way have signed this particular key. "Enough" is configurable, but for now, let's ignore that (there's plenty of data about that on the web if you want it). If your output says 'validity: full', then go ahead and add it to apt's trusted keyring: 
    gpg --export 6070D3A1   apt-key add -
    Note: go ahead and ignore the 'trust: never' data in the output. This represents the fact that I told gpg not to trust the key when doing gpg --update-trustdb. This doesn't mean I won't trust data that's signed with this particular key; however, it does mean I won't trust key signatures signed with this particular key. Since this is not a personal key, but a key only used to sign data with, this is the right thing to do for this particular key.
  • Alternatively, if you don't have a keyring, don't want to maintain your local web of trust, don't understand what I just said, or any combination of the preceding, just check what the maintainers of the particular repository to which this key corresponds tell you. If they're good maintainers, they should've given you a fingerprint right beside the information that contained the apt repository. Copy-and-paste that information on two command lines: 
    gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv-key <fingerprint>
gpg --export <fingerprint>   apt-key add -
    If they didn't give you that information, then send a giant cluebat mail to them. They really should've done that.
  • Finally, if you don't care about all this gpg stuff and don't think anyone would be interested to break into your system, you'd be wrong scriptkiddies don't look at who's using a particular system, they just like to be stupid. If you insist, however, you should note that you can actually disable secure apt, by adding the following to a file under /etc/apt/apt.conf.d: 
    APT::Get::AllowUnauthenticated "yes";
    Not that I'd recommend it, but if you insist...

Russell Coker: The Cost of Car Crashes

An article from 1999 suggested that car crashes caused a financial loss in OECD countries equivalent of 2% of their entire economies [1]. An article from the Sydney Morning Herald in 2001 gave a conservative estimate of the cost of a road fatality at $1.5 million [2], it also notes that due to different analysis methods American transport economists derived a figure of $5.5 million. $1.5 million in 2001 adjusted for CPI would be close to $2 million now. Currently that $2M cost is an externality of the car industry. Most of it is paid by the government, IE we all pay for it through our taxes. This means that there is little financial incentive for drivers and car companies to make the roads safer. Many of the attempts to legislate road safety fail due to the legal system being unable to manage the rapidly changing range of vehicles on the market. The insurance companies have very detailed analysis of the relative safety of vehicles, so it seems that the only sensible way of enforcing safe driving is through economic measures implemented via insurance. I believe that for every person who is killed or seriously injured on the road a fine of $2M should be levied. Every driver should be compelled to have insurance to cover such fines (driving without insurance should be illegal). Then the government could cease being involved in regulating what types of car someone can drive. If someone who is less than 25 years old can get insurance for a turbo-charged car then it probably means that a statistical analysis suggests that the combination of driver and vehicle is likely to be reasonably safe (EG there are many turbo-charged cars on the market that are not particularly fast). Now this will increase the car insurance costs for everyone, but it will decrease the amount of general tax money that is spent on issues related to road fatalities, which would allow the income tax rates to be decreased. This means that any tax-payer who has a good driving record and who drives a type of car that tends not to be crashed could expect to save money overall. Any tax-payer who doesn t drive a car would save even more money. But the main point of this idea is to increase road safety by forcing bad cars and drivers off the road. Currently defective cars are only removed from the road if police notice something unsafe about them and cite them for being unroadworthy - this only happens if it s a problem which can be observed from outside the vehicle (EG worn tires or broken lights). In some states elderly drivers have no requirement for periodic health checks to determine their ability to drive, I know of one case of a woman who was certified as legally blind, ordered a white cane, and then drove home afterwards! I m sure that insurance companies would implement whatever tests are necessary to reduce the risk of being hit by multiple $2M fines from a single crash.

18 March 2009

Matthew Garrett: ext4 and spinups

As a followup to my discussion of ext4, I did some trivial testing today. This consisted of generating a file, writing to it, closing it, opening another file, writing to it, closing it and then renaming the second file over the first. Then repeating about 10,000 times. fsync() wasn't called at any point. I used the /proc/sys/vm/block_dump knob to get an idea of when stuff was actually hitting disk. This was using the current rawhide kernel, which has the various workarounds for avoiding data corruption merged. The good news is that I was unable to get into an inconsistent state - the files always contained either the original or the new data, and the absolute worst case was having a zero length temporary file. The bad news is that while ext3 only touched disk when it reached the commit interval, ext4 touched disk for every single rename() call.

There appears to be a plan for dealing with this, but the current state of affairs is that ext4 will (under an obviously incredibly synthetic and unrealistic set of conditions) reduce the amount of time a drive can spend spun down. The next step is to attempt to measure this in a real world setup and see whether it's compensated for by the other new features.

MJ Ray: SPI March 2009

The monthly board meeting of SPI will take place on irc.oftc.net #spi tonight (Wed 18 March) at 20:00 UTC. Members may have seen that the meeting announcement was posted, but a bit late and with a misleading subject line. This month, the record-keeping looks like it will catch up to present-day, with a small hole still from Neil McGovern s time as secretary. The current treasurer and secretary have also posted their reports before the meeting only the president is missing this month. There s some bank house-keeping and another new associated project under discussion: OpenWRT. There seemed to be a little confusion about whether it had been waiting for a legal opinion or not and some controversy about whether SPI recognises a liaison or a decision-maker. Once again, I may still be travelling and without a stable network connection during the meeting, or I might have made it home by then. Either way, watch the comments below this article for a link to the summary when posted.

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