Back in 2007, Harpers Magazine published The Ecstasy of Influence: a beautiful article by Jonathan Lethem on reuse in art and literature. Like Lewis Hyde in The Gift (quite like Hyde, as readers discover) Lethem blurs the line between plagiarism, remix, and influence and points to his subject at the center of artistic production. Lethem's gimmick, which most readers only discover at the end, is that the article is constructed entirely out of "reused" (i.e., plagiarized) quotations and paraphrases. A couple months ago, I suggested to my friend Andr s Monroy-Hern ndez a very similar project: a literature review on academic work on remixing and remixing communities constructed entirely of text lifted from existing research. After some searching around, Andr s pointed out that Lethem had essentially beaten us to the punch and linked me to his article. Only after I visited the link did I remember that I had read Lethem's article when it was published and loved the idea then. Over time, I'd forgotten I read ever it. Without knowing it, I had read, loved, forgotten, and then -- influenced, if unconsciously -- copied and reproduced the idea myself in slightly modified form. And I suppose that was the point.

I've released version 0.24 of Obnam, my backup application. USER VISIBLE CHANGES

• The way file timestamps (modification and access times) have changed, to fix inaccuracies introduced by the old way. Times are now stored as two integers giving full seconds and nanoseconds past the full second, instead of the weird earlier system that was imposed by Python's use of floating point for the timestamps. This causes the repository format version to be bumped, resulting in a need to start over with an empty repository.
• Extended file attributes are now backed up from and restored to local filesystems. They are neither backed up, nor restored for live data accessed over SFTP.
• If the --exclude regular expression is wrong, Obnam now gives an error message and then ignores the regexp, rather than crashing.
• There is now a compression plugin, enabled with --compress-with=gzip.
• De-duplication mode can now be chosen by the user: the new --deduplicate setting can be one of never (fast, but uses more space); verify (slow, but handles hash collisions gracefully); and fatalist (fast, but lossy, if there is a hash collision). fatalist is the default mode.
• Restores now obey the --dry-run option. Thanks to Peter Palfreder for the bug report.
• New option --verify-randomly allows you to check only a part of the backup, instead of everything.
• Verify now has some progress reporting.
• Forget is now much faster.
• Forget now has progress reporting. It is not fast enough to do without, sorry.
• Backup now removes any checkpoint generations it created during a backup run, if it succeeds without errors.

BUG FIXES:

• Now works with a repository on sshfs. Thanks to Dafydd Harries for reporting the problem.
• Now depends on a newer version of the larch library, fixing a problem when the Obnam default node size changes and an existing repository has a different size.
• User and group names for sftp live data are no longer queried from the local system. Instead, they're marked as unknown.

here's my RCBW report for this week. again, nothing spectacular, mostly uploading packages where patches were already in the BTS. thanks to all the patch creators and forwarders!

• #553968 src:blktrace: "FTBFS with binutils-gold"
  add patch from Ubuntu / Ilya Barygin, upload to DELAYED/2
• #554408 src:fuse-umfuse-iso9660: "FTBFS with binutils-gold"
  add patch from Luk Claes, upload to DELAYED/2
• #554755 src:gtodo: "FTBFS with binutils-gold"
  add patch from Bart Martens, upload to DELAYED/2
• #625319 chiark-tcl: "chiark-tcl: ftbfs with gcc-4.6 -Werror"
  add patch from peter green, upload to DELAYED/2
• #625327 filtergen: "filtergen: ftbfs with gcc-4.6 -Werror"
  add patch from peter green, upload to DELAYED/2
• #625343 gltron: "gltron: ftbfs with gcc-4.6 -Werror"
  add patch from peter green, upload to DELAYED/2
• #642709 src:ctsim: "ctsim: FTBFS: /bin/sh: 0: Can't open ./config.status"
  fix debian/rules (config. guess,sub handling and duplicate make clean), upload to DELAYED/2
• #643403 src:gtodo: "gtodo: FTBFS: callback.c:133:4: error: format not a string literal and no format arguments [-Werror=format-security]"
  add patch from Bart Martens, upload to DELAYED/2

Since post about lost n900 was on the top of this blog for almost a year, I should probably write a few words about what was next. Since I do need mobile phone every day, I had to get some replacement quickly. Given Maemo was dead and Meego device not available, I decided to go Android. Since after n900 hardware keyboard became a must for me, I decided to try HTC Desire Z. That device made me angry every day, both because of hardware (what a silly idea to place volume buttons such that they are below hardware keyboard when it s opened? they got pressed almost every time when I used keyboard!) and Android itself. I think quite a few things are broken in Android, but most annoying is broken multitasking. I can t live with dialog elements content get lost when I switch to other app and back. Please don t tell me that it s app fault: maybe technically it is, however too many apps have it so I have to generalize. I will likely write more about this later. At the same time, exciting things have been happening in Maemo community. It was the time when Community SSU raised, also several mapping applications went out of dark, and more. I was still subscribed to Maemo resources so I read about all that and got more and more frustrated with my new Android device. And on one sunday evening, after reading more exciting news from Maemo side, I decided that enough is enough. And ordered a new n900. Few days later, I ve sold HTC for about 80% of it s original price. That was an emotional solution, and of course it could not play well in the long term. Despite of individual exciting news, Maemo community was becoming weaker. Device itself had major usability issues (e.g. it could occasionally unlock while being in my pocket, and call a random number from address book and I have quite a few addresses abroad so such calls not only bother people, but also are expensive). There was not many applications, and those available had problems. There was a visible difference between my friends who could just take a phone and quickly do something, and myself who had to struggle with incomplete and buggy software. Also skype quality was very bad. Also when I was planning a 2-week trip to location without mobile network, I tried to preload map of planned route, but it preloaded only part and I was unable to make it preload the rest. Also many similar issues. So it became clear that if I want usability, I have to go to a standard platform. And as such, Android still is the only option. I searched for a device that runs more or less modern Android version, has hardware keyboard, and is not HTC Desire Z. There was not much to choose from. I ordered SonyEricsson sk17i. I m already using it for about 4 months. For common use cases, such as locating a business nearby, or routing to a given address, or quickly browsing a web page, it works. However, all Android flaws including broken multitasking and no-undo-in-text-fields are here, causing everyday frustration. My conclusion is that no smartphone-like devices without major usability issues are available today. What is available probably could be used to somehow satisfy immediate communication needs, but nothing above that. Bells and whistles are there, but I m not interested in those. I want a linux-based pocket-sized mobile computer that will handle both my communication needs and other interests. That could be hacked when I want to, but just works at the rest of time. Something like my Debian desktop. Openmoko was a big hope but it failed. Maemo was a big hope but incompetence of Nokia killed it. Meego was dead before it was born. There is still some life around several mobile linux projects (GTA04, Maemo, Meego, some others), but hopes for it to grow into something that could be used without huge hacking are little.

This year is in its last throes and a few things, that don't really warrant their own blog post, have piled up here. To get them out of the door before 2012 starts, I'd like to go over them in the next few lines. First: there seem to be a group of rather cheap people who want to have the Humble Indie Bundle #4, but don't like to give at least 0.01 USD. Really guys, you seem to have enough money for a fast-enough computer and a (broadband) internet connection (otherwise downloading the circa 2.8 GB of games won't be a lot of fun), but you don't have the 0.01 USD to spare? If you don't like closed-source games (a sentiment I can truly understand, in fact, that was something I really pondered before buying) then just don't play them. But searching for a torrent for the HIB#4 while it is still being sold to just avoid paying the minimal fee, I can't understand. Now, some might wonder how I know this. The easy answer is, I blogged about buying the HIB#4 and mentioned, that I downloaded the games through a torrent (you can choose between direct downloads and torrents on your "login page") and a lot of people started hitting the blog entry with a referrer from a search engine, showing they'd searched for "humble indie bundle 4 torrent". Please make a decision: don't play the games or if you wish to, then pay something. The people behind those games make it easy and, in comparison to many other game studios, a fair offer. That should be worth something. For those of you who loved Josephine, there is a new awesome piece of art, Creative Commons licensed, by An-U (German homepage). The title (and the drawing) are derived from the equally awesome Katzenjammer song "On the Devil's Back" (in case you're still looking for a present, you might want to consider one of their CDs or a ticket to their next concert near you). Then, I wanted to thank all those people, who donated something over the course of 2011! Thanks a lot, especially for showing me, that you liked my services/work enough to even consider a donation! It means a lot to me, to know this. At year's end everybody is doing statistics and while I won't bore you with long in-depth analysis, I thought I throw out, what the top posts/things where (so far). Maybe you find yourself represented in there or maybe you find something new. In no particular order:

• My unofficial wine-unstable packages generated a lot of traffic and back links.
• The mini-tips series had many hits.
• My two posts (1, 2) about the Linux graphics stack garnered a lot of attention.
• The note about removing Sun's Java implementation was the first post to be mentioned in a Debian Project News issue.
• Right after my wine-unstable packages, my post about OSM and OpenLayers generated the most e-mails.
• The YouTube playlist fetcher is also pretty popular, though the Greasemonkey script collection has been picking up speed recently.

I hope your 2011 was a good year and I wish you all the best for 2012! I'm pretty sure Debian will continue to grow, but there is also a lot of work ahead, maybe you can join the effort and make Debian that much more awesome!

GnuTLS 3.0.x is finally available in unstable (and squeeze). Please consider upgrading. (Development package: libgnutls28-dev)

In 1977 Tal Brody said after winning the Euroleague Basketball cup with Maccabi Tel Aviv as sentence which became quite famous in Israel:

We are on the map! And we are staying on the map not only in sports, but in everything.

I found out through Invar Hovav that there s a regression in the Ubuntu installation doesn t believe this is true anymore, as according to lp#905754, you can t select Israel or its major cities, and instead get suggestions for Gaza and Hebron. This is a regression from past installers when you could at least choose Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Gaza. It used to be hard to pin point each location, but was still possible. This might be part of a bigger problem of selecting close/adjacent cities, but the default behavior in the past was different. From the technical point of view, the Gaza and Hebron TZ files are weird (tzdata version 2011n-1). Both don t have info for 2012 daylight saving time (usually start in late March or early April). Hebron switches twice a year to DST, hopefully nothing critical uses this time zone.

$ zdump -v Asia/Hebron grep 2011
Asia/Hebron Fri Apr 1 10:00:59 2011 UTC = Fri Apr 1 12:00:59 2011 EET isdst=0 gmtoff=7200
Asia/Hebron Fri Apr 1 10:01:00 2011 UTC = Fri Apr 1 13:01:00 2011 EEST isdst=1 gmtoff=10800
Asia/Hebron Sun Jul 31 20:59:59 2011 UTC = Sun Jul 31 23:59:59 2011 EEST isdst=1 gmtoff=10800
Asia/Hebron Sun Jul 31 21:00:00 2011 UTC = Sun Jul 31 23:00:00 2011 EET isdst=0 gmtoff=7200
Asia/Hebron Mon Aug 29 21:59:59 2011 UTC = Mon Aug 29 23:59:59 2011 EET isdst=0 gmtoff=7200
Asia/Hebron Mon Aug 29 22:00:00 2011 UTC = Tue Aug 30 01:00:00 2011 EEST isdst=1 gmtoff=10800
Asia/Hebron Thu Sep 29 23:59:59 2011 UTC = Fri Sep 30 02:59:59 2011 EEST isdst=1 gmtoff=10800
Asia/Hebron Fri Sep 30 00:00:00 2011 UTC = Fri Sep 30 02:00:00 2011 EET isdst=0 gmtoff=7200

And Gaza only have a 3 months daylight saving time, while Israel has 6 and European eastern time has 7 months (all are UTC+2 region).

$ zdump -v Asia/Gaza grep 2011
Asia/Gaza Sat Apr 2 10:00:59 2011 UTC = Sat Apr 2 12:00:59 2011 EET isdst=0 gmtoff=7200
Asia/Gaza Sat Apr 2 10:01:00 2011 UTC = Sat Apr 2 13:01:00 2011 EEST isdst=1 gmtoff=10800
Asia/Gaza Sun Jul 31 20:59:59 2011 UTC = Sun Jul 31 23:59:59 2011 EEST isdst=1 gmtoff=10800
Asia/Gaza Sun Jul 31 21:00:00 2011 UTC = Sun Jul 31 23:00:00 2011 EET isdst=0 gmtoff=7200

p.s.
This isn t a political post, don t make it into one.
Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux, Ubuntu

There are probably many ways. But this one looks pretty simple and takes seconds.

git add . && git commit -m "backup-$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M)" && git reset HEAD^
After this command, nothing is changed in working tree or in branch history. But reflog gets a reference to the current tree content, which could be extracted (git help reflog) if you suddenly realize that you ve messed things up. Con s: depends on proper .gitignore to avoid garbage in repository; can t be used if there is something valuable in the staging area; reflog has limited lifetime, decreased even more by large rebases

DRBD is a system for replicating a block device across multiple systems. It s most commonly used for having one system write to the DRBD block device such that all writes are written to a local disk and a remote disk. In the default configuration a write is not complete until it s committed to disk locally and remotely. There is support for having multiple systems write to disk at the same time, but naturally that only works if the filesystem drivers are aware of this. I m installing DRBD on some Debian/Squeeze servers for the purpose of mirroring a mail store across multiple systems. For the virtual machines which run mail queues I m not using DRBD because the failure conditions that I m planning for don t include two disks entirely failing. I m planning for a system having an outage for a while so it s OK to have some inbound and outbound mail delayed but it s not OK for the mail store to be unavailable. Global changes I ve made in /etc/drbd.d/global_common.conf In the common section I changed the protocol from C to B , this means that a write() system call returns after data is committed locally and sent to the other node. This means that if the primary node goes permanently offline AND if the secondary node has a transient power failure or kernel crash causing the buffer contents to be lost then writes can be lost. I don t think that this scenario is likely enough to make it worth choosing protocol C and requiring that all writes go to disk on both nodes before they are considered to be complete. In the net section I added the following: sndbuf-size 512k;
data-integrity-alg sha1; This uses a larger network sending buffer (apparently good for fast local networks although I d have expected that the low delay on a local Gig-E would give a low bandwidth delay product) and to use sha1 hashes on all packets (why does it default to no data integrity). Reserved Numbers The default port number that is used is 7789. I think it s best to use ports below 1024 for system services so I ve setup some systems starting with port 100 and going up from there. I use a different port for every DRBD instance, so if I have two clustered resources on a LAN then I ll use different ports even if they aren t configured to ever run on the same system. You never know when the cluster assignment will change and DRBD port numbers seems like something that could potentially cause real problems if there was a port conflict. Most of the documentation assumes that the DRBD device nodes on a system will start at /dev/drbd0 and increment, but this is not a requirement. I am configuring things such that there will only ever be one /dev/drbd0 on a network. This means that there is no possibility of a cut/paste error in a /etc/fstab file or a Xen configuration file causing data loss. As an aside I recently discovered that a Xen Dom0 can do a read-write mount of a block device that is being used read-write by a Xen DomU, there is some degree of protection against a DomU using a block device that is already being used in the Dom0 but no protection against the Dom0 messing with the DomU s resources. It would be nice if there was an option of using some device name other than /dev/drbdX where X is a number. Using meaningful names would reduce the incidence of doing things to the wrong device. As an aside it would be nice if there was some sort of mount helper for determining which devices shouldn t be mounted locally and which mount options are permitted it MIGHT be OK to do a read-only mount of a DomU s filesystem in the Dom0 but probably all mounting should be prevented. Also a mount helper for such things would ideally be able to change the default mount options, for example it could make the defaults be nosuid,nodev (or even noexec,nodev) when mounting filesystems from removable devices. Initial Synchronisation After a few trials it seems to me that things generally work if you create DRBD on two nodes at the same time and then immediately make one of them primary. If you don t then it will probably refuse to accept one copy of the data as primary as it can t seem to realise that both are inconsistent. I can t understand why it does this in the case where there are two nodes with inconsistent data, you know for sure that there is no good data so there should be an operation to zero both devices and make them equal. Instead there The solution sometimes seems to be to run drbdsetup /dev/drbd0 primary - (where drbd0 is replaced with the appropriate device). This seems to work well and allowed me to create a DRBD installation before I had installed the second server. If the servers have been connected in Inconsistent/Inconsistent state then the solution seems to involve running drbdadm -- --overwrite-data-of-peer primary db0-mysql (for the case of a resource named db0-mysql defined in /etc/drbd.d/db0-mysql.res). Also it seems that some commands can only be run from one node. So if you have a primary node that s in service and another node in Secondary/Unknown state (IE disconnected) with data state Inconsistent/DUnknown then while you would expect to be able to connect from the secondary node is appears that nothing other than a drbdadm connect command run from the primary node will get things going.

Damn those unshaven yaks I m trying to write a Nagios plugin for work that will comprehensively monitor network interfaces and make sure they re up, passing traffic, all those sorts of things. Of course, I m doing it all in Ruby, because that s how I roll. So, I need to Know Things about the interface. Everyone does that with ethtool. Right? Sure, if your eyeballs are parsing it. But have you ever tried to machine parse it? To put it as eloquently as possible:

# ethtool eth0
Settings for eth0:
 Supported ports: [ TP MII ]
 Supported link modes:   10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 
                         100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 
                         1000baseT/Half 1000baseT/Full 
 Supports auto-negotiation: Yes
 Advertised link modes:  10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 
                         100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 
                         1000baseT/Half 1000baseT/Full 
 Advertised pause frame use: No
 Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes
 Link partner advertised link modes:  10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 
                                      100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 
                                      1000baseT/Half 1000baseT/Full 
 Link partner advertised pause frame use: No
 Link partner advertised auto-negotiation: Yes
 Speed: 1000Mb/s
 Duplex: Full
 Port: MII
 PHYAD: 0
 Transceiver: internal
 Auto-negotiation: on
 Supports Wake-on: pumbg
 Wake-on: g
 Current message level: 0x00000033 (51)
 Link detected: yes

Parse that, bitch!

Or perhaps not. At any rate, I decided that it would be most advantageous if I went straight to the source and twiddle the ioctl until it did my bidding. And thus, about 5 hours later, was Rethtool born. Once I worked out a less-than-entirely-crackful way of dealing with C structs in Ruby (after a bit of digging around, I went with the appallingly-undocumented-but-sufficiently-featureful CStruct), and after I finally worked out I was passing the wrong damned struct to ioctl(SIOCETHTOOL) (speaking of appallingly-undocumented: fuck you, ioctl, and all your twisty-passages children), it was smooth sailing. So, if you re one of the eight or so people on earth who will ever need to get at the grubby internals of your network interfaces using Ruby (and can t do it via some sysfs magic), Rethtool is for you.

Like I already wrote here last week, I've been heavily working on OpenStack for the last weeks. My first assignment was to package OpenStack for Debian. The packages already present in unstable were mainly done by Thomas Goirand, who based its work on the one done in Ubuntu. Therefore, the packages where not in a very good shape for Debian. Today Ghe Rivero and I (members of the OpenStack Debian packaging team) managed to push the OpenStack Essex 2 milestone into unstable with great success. You can now test and deploy OpenStack Essex 2 very easily! Packaging OpenStack made me write several patches, mainly related to packaging, patches which were all accepted and merged by upstream. This is nice because most of the OpenStack Debian packages lost their debian/patches directories now! Finally, I've finished to implement one blueprint I really missed: the ability to boot from an ISO image using libvirt. The code still needs a review, but it should be included in the Essex 3 milestone if everything's right.

What are the biggest security threats to my laptop? Almost all the software I install is vetted and signed by a member of the Debian team. I run reliable virus software on our mail server. My disk is encrypted and xscreensaver locks my screen after a few minutes of inactivity. What else? The two biggest threats I've recently considered are: web browsing and non-free software or software that doesn't come from Debian (I regularly have to use skype and zimbra, for example). To mitigate these risks, I've configured these programs to run as their own users, thus adding a layer of separation between the programs and my primary user account, which has access to my gpg/ssh keys and email. With a program like zimbra it's fairly easy. I created a zimbra user, added my primary account's public ssh key to /home/zimbra/.ssh/authorized_keys, and add the following stanza to ~/.ssh/config:

Host zimbra 
Hostname localhost 
User zimbra 
ForwardX11 yes

Now I can start zimbra with:

ssh zimbra ./zdesktop-launch

Skype was a little harder, since the skype client has to access the audio system. With pulseaudio, though, it's a snap. I copied /etc/pulse/default.pa to ~/.pulse/ and added the line:

load-module module-native-protocol-tcp auth-ip-acl=127.0.0.1

Then, I added /home/skype/.pulse/client.conf with the contents:

default-server = 127.0.0.1

[Note: Jamie Rollins and dkg have pointed out that this arrangement allows any user on my laptop to send arbitrary data to pulseaudio, running as my primay account. They suggested configuring pulseaudio to listen on a unix-domain socket, and then configuring pulseaudio to only permit access to users in a particular group.] iceweasel is the most complicated. In addition to the pulseaudio trick, I had to make two other allowances. First, there are a lot of processes that launch a web browser in a number of different ways (sometimes asking for a new session, other times adding a tab to an existing one, sometimes passing an URL as an argument, etc). The one that I got the most stuck on was mutt. Sometimes I want to see how an HTML message looks in iceweasel. Via mailcap, mutt creates a temp file with the html content and then launches a web browser to view the file. As can be reasonably expected, this temp file is owned by my primary user, and only read-able by the owner. That means my iceweasel user can't read it. Eventually, I decided the easiest way to deal with these various scenarios was to write a simple bash script to launch my web browser (see below). I registered it via update-alternatives, so most reasonable programs that want to launch a web browser will use it. The second issue is that I use the monkeysphere xul plugin to verify TLS certificates, which requires iceweasel to communicate with my monkeysphere validation agent. My agent runs as my primary user and by default only responds to queries from my primary user. Fortunately, monkeysphere is well-designed and can handle this situation. As you can see from my web launcher script, I pass MONKEYSPHEREVALIDATIONAGENTSOCKET=$MONKEYSPHEREVALIDATIONAGENTSOCKET when calling iceweasel. In addition, I added the following before I exec monkeysphere-validation-agent:

export MSVA_ALLOWED_USERS="iceweasel jamie"

With this simple infrastructure setup, it's possible to easily isolate future programs as well. Lastly... here's the script for launching iceweasel.

#!/bin/bash
stdin=
new_session=no
url=
for arg in "$@"; do
  if <span class="createlink"> &#34;&#36;arg&#34; &#61;&#126; &#94;-- </span>; then 
    if [ "$arg" = "--new-session" ]; then
      new_session=yes
    elif [ "$arg" = "--from-stdin" ]; then
      stdin=yes
    fi
  else
    url="$1"
  fi
done
if [ "$stdin" = "yes" ]; then
  temp=$(mktemp)
  while read line; do
    echo "$line" >> "$temp"
  done
  # it must be readable by the iceweasel user
  chmod 755 "$temp"
  url="file:///$temp"
fi
args=
if [ "$new_session" = "yes" ]; then
  args="--no-remote -ProfileManager"
fi
if [ -n "$url" ]; then
  args="$args '$url'"
fi
ssh iceweasel "MONKEYSPHERE_VALIDATION_AGENT_SOCKET=$MONKEYSPHERE_VALIDATION_AGENT_SOCKET iceweasel $args" &
[ -f "$temp" ] && sleep 5 && rm "$temp"

Comments by email... Hi, http://current.workingdirectory.net/posts/2011/privilege-separation/ has good intentions but afaik it does not improve security much. X applications can sniff your passwords and inject commands to your terminal emulators. I personally use xpra to get a similar solution without the hazards of X. I've been using it for two months now both at work and home. There are still bugs but svn version is getting better all the time. See for example my reply to https://grepular.com/ProtectingaLaptopfromSimpleandSophisticated_Attacks Timo

The bug webinterface of the Ultimate Debian Database currently knows about the following release critical bugs:

In Total:	1680
Affecting Wheezy:	1038
Wheezy only:	139
Remaining to be fixed in Wheezy:	899

Of these 899 bugs, the following tags are set:

Pending in Wheezy:	56
Patched in Wheezy:	154
Duplicates in Wheezy:	52
Can be fixed in a security Update:	34
Contrib or non-free in Wheezy:	10
Claimed in Wheezy:	0
Delayed in Wheezy:	5
Otherwise fixed in Wheezy:	68

Ignoring all the above (multiple tags possible) 595 bugs need to be fixed by Debian Contributors to get Debian 7.0 Wheezy released. However, with the view of the Release Managers, 929 need to be dealt with for the release to happen. Please see Interpreting the release critical bug statistics for an explanation of the different numbers.

Yesterday I bought my copy of the Humble Indie Bundle #4. And while the donation part is a good thing, I directed most of my payment to the developers of the games to allow them to make more games, which run natively on Linux. I haven't played much yet (no time) and just tried out the game for which the Torrent finished first (Bit.Trip.Runner). The nice thing about that game is, it is available as a Debian package, the not-so-nice thing about said package is, that it installs stuff in places where it shouldn't and has tons of wrong file properties like ownership of the files... The Depends line is also more or less pointless, as it just lists the needed packages, but not the minimal versions. Hopefully these things will be fixed in a future package version. Apart from that, the game in its retro look is sort of addictive. Yes, it's "just" simple Jump'n'Run, but it is a lot of fun to play. Partly because you "play" a simple melody, when you clear obstacles and collect the gold and other goodies. Anyway, long story short, if you want a few nice DRM-free games running natively on Linux (in my case with the Mesa3D drivers for my Radeon), I can recommend this bundle. And maybe the games get open-sourced in the future as has been done previously. None of these games are so called AAA titles, but that doesn't mean they can't provide some fun hours. And to top it off you don't need Wine or something else to run them on your Linux system.

Today QApt was accepted into Debian's archives. It took me some time, in fact a lot more than I hoped it'd take, to get the final pieces into place [UPDATE](the inital work was done by Jos , the co-maintainer of QApt)[/UPDATE], but now you're able to use QApt as a simple-to-use wrapper around the whole APT, DPKG and Xapian stack. The target users are C++ programs using the Qt framework. The use cases range from graphical package manager to allowing easy updates of certain packages from within another program. My interest in QApt comes from me being co-maintainer of Kingston, the update notification Plasmoid for KDE. We have a wishlist bug open against Kingston, requesting the addition of a "do update" button. We could have used the update-manager infrastructure, but both Sune and myself weren't too thrilled with that. Luckily there is an alternative in the form of QApt. I'll hope I find some time during the next weeks to implement the update mechanism for Kingston. The next things to come for QApt will be minor cleanups, already waiting in Git, a new upstream bug fix release (no date is set yet) and a multiarchification (already partly done in a local branch).

Hello Following the suggestions provided after my post What name for Config::Model s new command line ? cfg or something else ? , I ve considered cmc and cme as a good candidates. But, cmc is used by a C mol compiler software (don t ask me what it is ). cme is also a very good name. So the winner is cme Next version of Config::Model will provide /usr/bin/cme. The old config-edit command will be provided for a few months to preserve backward compatibility. Thanks to all people who took the time to reply All the best

When I started using Linux, I started with a desktop environment (KDE) and then tried a lot of (standalone) window managers, including but not limited to Enlightenment, Blackbox, Fluxbox and Sawfish. But I was never really satisfied as it felt as if something was missing.
It then came, that I became a user of a desktop environment again. Now I have been a GNOME user for at least five years.

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.session session-name 'gnome-fallback'

This is not about any real or alleged might of (private) rating agencies you know, the ones roughening up the financial markets these days. Given the recent influx of news about downgrades of banks and nations, I simply start to wonder what will happen when the triple-A category empties out (which it will the last few nations will be ejected as a consequence of currency explosions (CHF) and forced bailouts of others (EU). Will the whole circus start anew? And if so, why do we even pay any attention?? Gosh do I wish that people started to form their own opinions again. NP: Fila Brazillia: Power Clown

I'd almost forget... Before: During: After: They finally made it.

Etherpad is an excellent Open Source web application for collaborative text editing. Like Google Docs, it allows you to share documents with others through a secret URL or to set up private documents for which people need a login.