The basic Debian debootstrap system is 180Mb or so. Embedded systems need a full GUI installation in 64Mb or less and a basic debootstrap-equivalent system of 10Mb or less.
Such radical reductions in size mean radical changes to the structure of the the system itself. The question is, at what point does a modified Debian system become no longer Debian?
Main changes:

• Remove perl and reverse dependencies. There is simply no room for perl, let alone python or any other interpreted languages.


• Drop "Essential" - perl is classed as "Essential" for Debian so dropping perl means modifying "Essential", certainly. However, to give full flexibility for embedded systems, Emdebian is removing "Essential" completely. This means that all dependencies need to be specified in full but it also means that any workable package set can be used. (I'd like to have a configurable "Essential" that can be machine-specific so that a desktop can have a different "Essential" set to an iPAQ. If not, the iPAQ will simply have to do without "Essential" because the level of changes are not likely to be acceptable for the rest of Debian - and frankly, I'd be surprised if it was to be acceptable.)


• Modifying dependencies - cross building allows each package to be modified during the build, changing the options to ./configure to disable components that Debian enables. This can cause a few problems trying to mix-and-match Emdebian and Debian but customised Emdebian packages could help with that.

Main similarities:

• All packages are exclusively from Debian


• All packages buildable from source using packages in Debian Lenny.


• The majority of the Debian package set are available, within the constraints of the embedded device.
  

So the question is, lazyweb, how far do we go before you would regard Emdebian as no longer Debian?
I now have image tarballs for such a system - 18mb compressed with a full GPE GUI included, 48Mb installed. The scripts could, potentially, work with any debootstrap tarball.
Although based on debootstrap, the Emdebian set can be unpacked separately from debootstrap so that as much of the workload can be done on the build machine as possible. This allows the "installer" to simply copy the decompressed filesystem onto the device, run /sbin/ldconfig and dpkg --configure -a and it's ready to go.
I have a few issues to resolve within the packages themselves and within the available kernel for my test machine but the result is a full GUI installation that will fit on a 64Mb SD card (32Mb is a tad too small) with enough room to spare to add a Linux kernel zImage, modules.tgz, Windows executable/autorun runes and a bootloader. i.e. a possible method of installing Emdebian onto a handheld running Windows CE or Windows Mobile. The only issue is getting the right kernel and modules for the device.
These are important benefits, the cost is whether such an installation still qualifies as "Debian".
At what point does Debian cease to be Debian?

A few days ago, I asked how to fork a debian package privately. I got some repsonses by comments, e-Mail and other blog posts, and I want to summarize the tools that were suggested. I have not really tried them, just looked at the webpages, the documentation or the sourcecode. I m only including Debian-specific solutions, as using Gentoo might be nice, but is out of scope here :-)I also deleted half the text before saving it, and I hate rewriting stuff, so it might be a bit terse.debtooEddy Petri or tells me about his three year old project debtoo, which wants to bring a Gentoo-like experience to Debian. While it probably provides what I need, it feels too big in that it has a more general aim than what I m looking for. It is not in Debian and not actively developed in the last two years.srcinstEddy also tells me about srcinst, which is a small haskell program written by jgoerzen in 2005. This is more a proof-of-concept that builds a package and all necessariy build-dependencies without using a binary package, but does not allow for patches to be applied. It is in Debian, actively maintained, but not developed, and barely documented (just an IRC log).apt-buildA similar tool and also in Debian is apt-build. This package is created to compile packages for optimization (as it asks half a dozend compiler-flag-questions with DebConf during the installation). It allows the user to apply a patch to the source, but it has to be passed as a command line option, and patches seem not to be tracked. Not much development in the last year, and not much documentation.debpatchNot to be confused with the program in the debdelta package is the debpatch tool by Victor Hsieh which Carsten Hey told me about. Also written in 2005, this comes closest to what I want. For every package you want to modify, you can configure it to apply patches to the source, to add patches to the debian/patches directory or to statically replace files in the generated binary and puts it in a local apt repository. No code yet to track new versions of the packages and no support for pbuilder though. This perl script is not yet in Debian, but is available as a Debian package and seems to have seen some development in the last years. Quick Googleing does not return any user reports; has any already tried this?customdebSomewhat in this direction goes the script that I wrote two weeks ago for a totally different project, customdeb, but it is aimed at binary debian files exclusively, and debpatch already supports replacing files in the binary package.Summary I found a few projects that go in a similar direction, and one that seems to fit my needs quite well. All of them are not widely used and in a very early state of development. I m actually surprised that this is not a itch more people had to scratch! I will have a closer look at debpatch when I find the time and maybe, if found useful, see if it can be included in Debian probably after a name change, since we already have a debpatch binary.

A few days ago, I asked how to fork a debian package privately. I got some repsonses by comments, e-Mail and other blog posts, and I want to summarize the tools that were suggested. I have not really tried them, just looked at the webpages, the documentation or the sourcecode. I m only including Debian-specific solutions, as using Gentoo might be nice, but is out of scope here :-)I also deleted half the text before saving it, and I hate rewriting stuff, so it might be a bit terse.debtooEddy Petri or tells me about his three year old project debtoo, which wants to bring a Gentoo-like experience to Debian. While it probably provides what I need, it feels too big in that it has a more general aim than what I m looking for. It is not in Debian and not actively developed in the last two years.srcinstEddy also tells me about srcinst, which is a small haskell program written by jgoerzen in 2005. This is more a proof-of-concept that builds a package and all necessariy build-dependencies without using a binary package, but does not allow for patches to be applied. It is in Debian, actively maintained, but not developed, and barely documented (just an IRC log).apt-buildA similar tool and also in Debian is apt-build. This package is created to compile packages for optimization (as it asks half a dozend compiler-flag-questions with DebConf during the installation). It allows the user to apply a patch to the source, but it has to be passed as a command line option, and patches seem not to be tracked. Not much development in the last year, and not much documentation.debpatchNot to be confused with the program in the debdelta package is the debpatch tool by Victor Hsieh which Carsten Hey told me about. Also written in 2005, this comes closest to what I want. For every package you want to modify, you can configure it to apply patches to the source, to add patches to the debian/patches directory or to statically replace files in the generated binary and puts it in a local apt repository. No code yet to track new versions of the packages and no support for pbuilder though. This perl script is not yet in Debian, but is available as a Debian package and seems to have seen some development in the last years. Quick Googleing does not return any user reports; has any already tried this?customdebSomewhat in this direction goes the script that I wrote two weeks ago for a totally different project, customdeb, but it is aimed at binary debian files exclusively, and debpatch already supports replacing files in the binary package.apt-srcAlso a related tool Carsten Hey told me about is apt-src. This tool wants to provide apt-like features for source packages. It allows you to install sources somewhere, upgrade the source and build binary packages from them. It does not really hide the sources from the user and seems to be created for people who want to work with the source somehow. If you have local changes to the sources, it can try to merge them with the new version, but these changes are not kept as a separate patch but only as implicit changes. If that were different, it would seem be a very nice tool. It s written by Joey Hess he abondonned it in 2004. Since then, not much development has happened.debnestYet another approach is taken by debnest, which Peter Makholm took over. Here, you create a full debian source package with a debian/ directory containing a control and rule file etc., but besides the debian/ directory, it contains just the packed sources (.dsc et al) from another package. In your debian/rules, you can specify your changes. I can see no support for tracking new versions of the inner package, but at least this project is maintained and in Debian.Summary I found a few projects that go in a similar direction, and one that seems to fit my needs quite well. All of them are not widely used and in a very early state of development, and it seems to be something people start to work on and quickly lose interest. I m actually surprised that this is not a itch more people had to scratch! I will have a closer look at debpatch when I find the time and maybe, if found useful, see if it can be included in Debian probably after a name change, since we already have a debpatch binary. Or maybe I should try to add support for what I need to apt-src, which seems to be the most advanced of all these programs, although it s unmaintained longer than the others exist.Update: Added apt-src.Update 2: Added debnest;

With the necessary bugs now filed, there is a real chance that Lenny can be a usable cross-building platform.
The next task is to upload emdebian-tools 0.8.1 (which includes the scripts I used to prepare the patches for those bugs) and start on improvements to emsandbox.
I plan to follow the method used by balloonboard.org to improve debootstrap so that the tarball created by emsandbox contains a real filesystem, without .deb files, with all packages unpacked and then simply copy the files across and run dpkg --configure -a. (in theory).
So far, only done this in a "manual and hard-to-do-again" way and I haven't been able to get X running yet (kernel issues). I'm looking to write the scripts to create the new installation tarball first - I'll fix the packages themselves later. Emdebian won't be making these tarballs available for download (each is too specialized) so the scripts will create each tarball when needed.
That's the plan anyway . . .

(Oh, BTW, most of the patches for those bugs were created on this HP laptop which I so recently criticized. The wireless still isn't working and the power adaptor gets damned hot but apart from that, I'm happy-ish with it.)

One of my favorite radio stations, KEXP, based in Seattle is coming to NYC by parenting with a local station. Not much will change except that we will have the incredible John in the Morning for some of his time and he will, according to their website, scout out local talent:

Does this mean that John in the Morning is leaving Seattle?
No. Starting in June 2008, John will split time between Seattle and New York, broadcasting his show live from both locations throughout the year. While he s in New York, he ll be searching for new bands and discovering new music that The Morning Show listeners will be the first to hear.

The politics and language of judging code. And speaking of peer review, Scott and Samir of Decoding Liberation have posted a blog post about the problems of peer review in the sciences, making some good points and opening what I hope will be an on-going discussion. I have a lot to add from the perspective of the social sciences and humanities, but that will have to wait for another day.

Long story short: I'm busy. These days are quite busy. I'm working (you know, I need to eat so I've a job), to the point that I have many vacation days to take. So I'll be in holidays and offline from friday for 10 days. I'm still working on awesome developement. Code base is quite good now, so I don't do 30 commits/day anymore, and update are less frequent. It's very nice that the users base is increasing every day, without polluting the mailing list and the BTS with bug reports and request for documentation. That means we at least achieve to do a not-so-bad code with a not-so-bad documentation. The feature requests list is still a bit long, but I think it will decrease in the next weeks. On a human side, that's the biggest project I ever managed and it's very pleasant to have so many users and contributors. I've some more project I'd like to work too. I plan to write a small git stats generator in Python when I'll have some more spare time. I'd also like to do some developement work around LDAP and Python for my servers, but I did not find the courage to do it neither the good library to handle LDAP object correctly (a DB_Object way would be good). I'm always following Debian developement with one eye, so I'm not totally out. I really hope I could to some bug squashing like I did with several Debian buddies 2 years ago for the etch release. Stay tuned.

The problem with the Internet is that it never goes to sleep. And if you study the Internet as I do, that means spending a lot of time starting at the screen tagging, copying, pasting, downloading, watching, and assessing. I have taken a step or two back away as I have moved from life as a postdoc to working full time but ever since Anonymous declared war on Scientology last month, I have been spending more time online again (more than I want to at least), tracking and following some of their developments, including spending time on some of their IRC channels, downloading lots and lots of videos as well as all sorts of great flyers. Well today there was an IRL action loosely coordinated by Anonymous to protest the CoS and I have to say, I am simultaneously surprised and unsurprised at what I think was a pretty vigorous response and turnout. I was not too surprised as the attack against and criticism of Scientology is one of the older wars spurred on in part by the net and net ethics and it always seems to crop of from time to time. But I think the depth of smack talking I witnessed on IRC, (often clearly youthful in nature as this example reveals—>, [mizzanon] I will have my full license in approx. 3-4 weeks, as soon as I do, i will be driving around my entire region with tons of
anti-propaganda) led me to believe that they could not pull of this global day of action. But they did and perhaps with the exception of New Zealand (where there are probably better things to do anyway), they seemed to garner a fair bit of participants. It will be interesting to see how long they will continue to generate this type of support. The next day of action will be around the middle of March.

Serious business involving the vmsplice() exploit: The kernel is fixed, hopefully Debian security team will have a fix for production use soon. In the meantime, waldi has provided unofficial fixed images. Thanks! They are confirmed to be working. These images are for etch. Lenny and sid are still vulnerable, but I suspect this will be fixed soon. If you are using these images in virtual machines, be aware that you will need to install the modules into each one or they may have problems later. GNOME is broken on Debian/kFreeBSD: All of this exploit nonsense made me consider installing Debian/kFreeBSD on one of my machines to see if it was worth using as a desktop system. Sadly, it doesn’t work for me right now. I guess I’ll try back in a couple of months. Also, it’d be nice if a new install CD was released with the proper /etc/apt/sources.list (ftp.gnuab.org -> ftp-debian-ports.org).

Another half dozen or so bugs have been prepared in the long term mass bug filing for cross build support. (See http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2007/11/msg00116.html.)

• aptitude #465076


• cron #465077


• curl #465089


• esound #465092


• libmimedir #465150


• newt #465105


• util-linux #465123


• xdemineur #465117

Some of the other ones filed today have already been closed - thanks to Clint and Daniel for their quick work.
I've got another dozen to finalise before Fosdem and if #448615, #450483, #453267 and #439979 can be fixed before the soft freeze, Lenny could well release as a usable crossbuilding platform, at least for the core set of packages that people tend to want to cross build.
Most of these bugs are wishlist but I do take significant amounts of time to prepare and test patches before filing so there is no need to setup a crossbuilding toolchain on your own systems to fix the bugs. (I'm also adding some of my scripting to emdebian-tools to help others in the future. One tip: 'meld' is all but essential for this kind of work.)
Some of the older bugs from the mass filing will likely become delayed NMU's if I see no response before Fosdem. (Some are v.old, even one or two pre-dating Etch.)
Full list (with ages and links to the Emdebian patches) are available via the Emdebian website via SOAP.

Today I've been mostly unwell. Although I have managed to write some minor new code, and watch a little bit of Doctor Who on DVD. Recently several people have been ranting about Ruby on Rails. I like it, but I wouldn't use it for personal development in a hurry. Deployment is fiddly, and upgrades are annoying. But one thing that I utterly condemn Rails for is helping to spread bad paging throughout the online world. So, what is "bad paging" and why is it important? Well cool URLs don't change, right? "Bad paging" is any user-interface which presents you with a limited view upon a changing list of items which is non-bookmarkable. Consider the following "list". Assume it represents your view of a collection of items numbering 100+. You may only view ten items at a time; clicking "next", or "previous", to navigate your viewport:

1.  first item
2.  second item
..
10. tenth item
[see next: /start/1] [see prev]

Whats wrong with this picture? It is subtle, but this list is broken. The issue is that when the list grows new items are prepended to the front, yet the navigation is linked to the starting page number. If that description wasn't clear consider what happens if you want to bookmark the page containing item 11. How can you? Right now it is at /start/1. If a ten new items are appended to the head of the list then it will instead become /start/2 - as items that are currently numbered 1-10 will be shifted forward to become items 11-20, and and they will be on page /start/1 instead. The solution is simple enough once you consider what you want to happen:

• Either append items to the end of the list.
  • Such that /start/1 always gives the items 11-20.
• Number the links in the reverse order.

So why does nobody do that? (As a counter example look at my website: Rather than the 'Show previous' items linking you to the changing link /start/1, it instead links you to /start/569 (for example).

mmap()/vmsplice() root exploit and fun with Xen: Today has been a very busy day. First of all, a new exploit was discovered today that uses vmsplice to gain root access. Of course, there’s an unpleasant side effect to that exploit (so don’t try it on your machines!), it messes up the memory map and applications start crashing until you reboot your machine. When combined with Xen, things get worse: the hypervisor crashes and obviously takes out all of your domUs which is unpleasant. As a result, I upgraded my Xen-using stuff to 3.2, but the bug is still there. There’s a nice “feature” though: When the hypervisor crashes, it reboots so you can’t even get a crash log. Fantastic, except not. Xen 3.2 seems nice so far, I backported it to etch for use on my dom0’s. I haven’t noticed any major problems yet so that’s good. It’d be nice to have linux-image-2.6.23-xen backported to etch, that’ll probably be my next project (at the same time, I plan to patch out the vmsplice syscall so it can’t be exploited by users on my machines). Hopefully the backports.org maintainer will do a backport soon. dsyslog in NEW: dsyslog has been released (I did this yesterday actually), and is now in NEW as of today. For those of you who don’t know what dsyslog is, it’s a syslogging daemon I am writing from scratch for my needs. It has a 100% modular design; the core only provides a generic message processing and routing framework. Thanks to naoliv and dmb for collaborating on the packaging. upse 0.6.0 released: Today I also released upse 0.6.0, which adds the ability to use a PSone ROM instead of emulation so that you can listen to mods that require a replayer which depends random aspects of the ROM itself. Right now, this feature only works with upse123, but I will add support to the audacious plugin in 0.7.0. Please note that upse does not include a PSone ROM image as it’s pretty much guaranteed to be non-free. You can use a gameshark, or some sort of JTAG method to dump the ROM’s contents. (The ‘crash2′ replayer is especially a problem with this one.) Additionally, the new release features reworked modeling of the PSone’s SPU analog filters. srctool: A lot of people commented on my ideas for replacing srcinst with something more modern and powerful (presently called srctool). I’ll be sure to take a look at them over the next few days and comment back. freenode adopts DroneBL as part of their anti-trolling defense: LoRez notified me on freenode today that they are using DroneBL to help keep trolls and proxy abusers off the network. I wish them luck with their use of this, and recommend an additional blacklist as a supplement, dnsbl.anoxs.net. While I disagree with the way they have implemented their DNSBL, they do indeed get results.

I wrote a quick and dirty workaround for the recent CVE-2008-0009 and CVE-2008-0010 local privilege escalation kernel vulnerabilities. Loading this kernel module will disable the vmsplice(2) and vm86old(2) system calls, which are used by the published exploits but by very few regular programs. The code is ugly and does not support amd64 bit systems, any help is welcome.

A Slashdot question today about putting to use all the unused disk space on corporate desktops got me to thinking. Now, before I start, comments there raised valid points about performance, reliability, etc.

But let's say that we have a "cloud filesystem". This filesystem would, at its core, have one configurable parameter: how many copies of each block of data must exist in the cloud. Now, we add servers with disk space to the cloud. As we add servers, the amount of available space on the cloud increases, subject to having enough space for replication according to our parameters.

Then, say we say we want a minimum of 3 copies of each block replicated. Each write to the filesystem will then cause a write to at least 3 different servers. Now, what if one server goes down? If the cloud filesystem is short on space, we may be down to only 2 copies of some blocks until that server comes back up. Otherwise, space permitting, it can rebuild that third copy on other servers.

Now, has this been done before? As far as I can tell, no. Wouldn't it be sweet?

But there are some projects that are close. Most notably, GlusterFS. GlusterFS does all of the above, except the automated bits. You can have this 3 copy redundancy, but you have to manually tell it where each copy goes, manually reconfigure if a server goes offline, etc. Other options such as NBD, OpenAFS, GFS, DRBD, Lustre, GFS, etc. aren't really well-suited for this scenario for various reasons.

So, what does everyone think? Can this work? Has it been done outside of Google?

Debian and Emdebian schedule.
I've decided to migrate from OOo Impress to latex-beamer for those two talks. Content is in Emdebian SVN although I expect to make a few changes before the event.

installing Debian on Zonbu mini desktop ... ... it's trivial! Me and godog have bought a Zonbu Mini Desktop to replace our previous noisy caseful server. The supposed duties of such a server are just running some P2P clients and a slimserver for a Squeezebox (so yes, the Zonbu will also need to proxy a very big USB disk). I've discovered the Zonbu mini thanks to a blog post by caesar, and I'm quite happy about the hardware. It's absolutely noiseless, small, eye catching. Though I don't need particular performances, the only aspect that worried my was the I/O on the CF card, which apparently is a non-concern. The only missing bit in the hardware is a video output (only VGA is provided), a must if you want to use the Zonbu as a multimedia station. But this kind of usage wasn't on my plans, so ... FWIW, before buying the Zonbu I've also tried to evaluate the cost of building something similar by myself, but the only cost of the mother board almost dominates the final price of the Zonbu. So apparently it's a good device also price-wise. I haven't even tried the on-board Gentoo-derived installation. Well, in fact I had, but considering that the only monitor I've at home is a B/W 15 years old CRT, my chances to see something vanished at the precise moment the frame buffer started, of course they did not get any better when X started. The minute after that, I've fired up D-I.

---

Debian Installer vs Zonbu mini Installing Debian on the Zonbu mini is actually trivial:

• go for the USB memory stick installation method. The only USB port supporting boot from memory stick is the front one, apparently I was lucky since it is the first one I've tried
• according to another post by caesar at kernel greater than 2.6.22 is needed, so go for the unstable [daily built D-I] (architecture is i386) and install at least Lenny on the target system
• go take a beer, wait a bit, ... your Debian-powered Zonbu Mini Desktop will then be ready

/me happy about the new geeky gadget

---

Sad note: according to godog's tests, the provided wifi (which is optional to buy) works either with ndiswrapper or with a binary kernel module built against Fedora kernel, that sucks.

I don't know why this is appears to be a problem but AFAICT there is no particular impediment in talking to delegates at conferences, no matter what the gender.
Maybe it is just the way that such discussions are begun or the tone being used or maybe it is just that my RealLife(tm) world involves a radically different environment.
Various stats claim that IT is massively dominated by male workers.
Many stats show that pharmacy is massively dominated by female staff.
Maybe it is just an indication that a degree in a course other than IT is more of a benefit than would otherwise appear.
As a single guy, the pharmacy world is little different to IT as far as conversations with colleagues is concerned. To me, that is how it should be.
Maybe I'm just too old to be deemed "a problem".

My Apple Powerbook 5,4 just booted for the first time using GRUB, with no manual intervention, from Apple chime to GDM prompt. This is a great milestone for GRUB2 on powerpc-ieee1275 and OpenFirmware, as until now, multiple problems in the loader would drop you to OF console straight away, although other PowerPC hardware with other firmware implementations did manage to work. Recent fixes by Pavel in the core and some other minor fixes for the userland utils have taken grub2 to the point where it is usable on most PowerPC hardware. On Apple, the only minor issue remaining is grub-probe insisting on (hd) not being a valid device name, so for now I have to trick it into believing it's really (hd1). In parallel, many other GRUB2 improvements haven't stopped hitting CVS in the last months, which have seen how new contributors joined grub-devel and helped GRUB2 get the great momentum it's enjoying right now. Vesa, Robert and Bean have been really active lately, and have fixed long standing issues or written a lot of new code. One of the features GRUB2 acquired recently was image loading for background images. Much more powerful than the implementation in GRUB Legacy, GRUB2 can now read images in multiple formats, can handle up to 24bit colour and render a menu in arbitrary resolutions. The menu can now show UTF-8, and the Debian package will configure a pretty theme that matches the rest of the system if desktop-base is installed:

GRUB2 speaking UTF-8 Catalan Although I'm not sure if GRUB2 is completely up-to-par with GRUB Legacy on i386/amd64, it seems the tricky bits, like video, LVM, RAID and the standard filesystems are supported and working. What GRUB2 needs now, in order to finally replace the aging and upstream-lacking GRUB Legacy you probably have installed, is massive testing. Debian has traditionally been a testbed for GRUB Legacy patches, and is also the platform where GRUB2 is being more widely tested. Having GRUB2 included in lenny's debian-installer would be a great step forward, and by the looks, I think we're well on time to manage this. Replacing GRUB Legacy with GRUB2 is trivial. On PCs, just install the grub-pc package. You'll be offered to keep GRUB Legacy, but with an added menu entry to chainload GRUB2. If you're worried that GRUB2 might fail on your hardware, accept this, and try to load GRUB2 from GRUB. If it works, you then know you can get rid of GRUB Legacy completely and keep GRUB2 in the MBR. On PowerPC-based Macs, you'll have to work around the small issue I mentioned above. Install the grub-ieee1275 package. You also need a very recent powerpc-ibm-utils package, which was just uploaded to unstable. Mount your bootstrap partition, probably /dev/hda2 in /boot/grub, and generate a device.map file with grub-mkdevicemap. Check the contents. If your first device name lacks a drive number such as (hd), it's probably correct, although this will make things fail later. Change it to (hd0) for now. As grub-install relies on grub-probe, you'll have to generate your grub image by hand. Copy all .mod files in /usr/lib/grub/powerpc-ieee1275 to your bootstrap partition, and generate a core.img:

root@powerpc:/boot/grub# grub-mkimage -d . -o /boot/grub/core.img *.mod
root@powerpc:/boot/grub# update-grub
root@powerpc:/boot/grub# nvsetenv boot-device hd:2,core.img

The generated grub.cfg will have references to (hd0,X), which you'll have to correct back to (hd,X) if necessary for your OpenFirmware. After this, you are probably ready to reboot, cross two fingers and get a warm "Welcome to GNU GRUB!" message at boot, which will then be followed by a standard GRUB menu, but on your nice PowerPC box. Unfortunately, the eye candy in the screenshot above isn't available yet in this platform, as it lacks VESA. Does someone in the audience want to contribute a video driver for powerpc? :)

I was reading the Lenovo blog “Inside The Box” post about the TrackPoint Ambassador [1] program. What happened was that a Lenovo sales guy (wearing a shirt with a Lenovo logo) spent a day in airports talking to people who use Thinkpads and telling them about Thinkpad features. He also gave away new button caps for the TrackPoint (the mouse device in the middle of a Thinkpad keyboard). One interesting thing he noted is the reaction of women who seemed to think he was trying to chat them up. Their reaction was so negative that by the end of the day he was only promoting Thinkpads to men. To make this clear, gifts of free hardware and advice on technical issues related to computers were provided only to men because the reaction of women was bad enough that it wasn’t worth the effort! I am certain that this is not an isolated incident. When I am at a conference I am unlikely to start a conversation with a woman who I don’t know because it really offends me when I receive the “I’ve got a boyfriend” type response. I expect that others have had similar experiences and react in a similar way. The Lenovo blog post proves that this is not just a free software community issue but a more widespread IT industry issue. As the majority of experts in the IT industry are male it seems that women will miss opportunities to learn because of this. Recently Waugh Partners [2] performed a survey of the Open Source industry, ZDnet article about the survey notes that “55 percent said they were part of a couple” [3]. Of the 45% who are single it seems reasonable to assume that some are gay and therefore the incidence of a random guy at a Linux event being interested in chatting up women would be less than 45% even if we don’t count the single straight guys who refrain from hitting on women at conferences. I’m not sure how the rest of the IT industry compares in this regard. While this is only a small part of the problem, it seems like something that needs to be improved and which appears not to have had much attention paid to it.

• [1] http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=135


• [2] http://waughpartners.com.au/


• [3] http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Open-source-Aussies-Not-poor-bearded-loners/0,130061733,339285610,00.htm

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