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

In Total:	1869
Affecting Wheezy:	1211
Wheezy only:	155
Remaining to be fixed in Wheezy:	1056

Of these 1056 bugs, the following tags are set:

Pending in Wheezy:	54
Patched in Wheezy:	197
Duplicates in Wheezy:	48
Can be fixed in a security Update:	33
Contrib or non-free in Wheezy:	12
Claimed in Wheezy:	0
Delayed in Wheezy:	10
Otherwise fixed in Wheezy:	87

Ignoring all the above (multiple tags possible) 684 bugs need to be fixed by Debian Contributors to get Debian 7.0 Wheezy released. However, with the view of the Release Managers, 1105 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.

After over five years, I've decided to retire from the Debian Games Team. The games team has been a fun group to work within Debian: packaging doom-related programs was my route into Debian and I've really enjoyed it. Spare time is very tight at the moment, and I'm not dedicating much at all to Debian work. Within that, I'd quite like to try and focus on some other areas. Good luck to the team going forward!

Today I was removing KDE from my laptop, when I realized that kde-window-manager would not go away (even when it was automatically installed) since it provides x-window-manager, which is needed by gdm. I manually removed it, but that got me thinking that maybe I had other packages that were in this situation. So I picked aptitude and tried to build some search-fu. Here is the resulting query:

aptitude search '?for x:

 ?x:installed

 ?x:automatic

 ?x:provides(?virtual ?reverse-depends(?installed))

 ?not(?x:reverse-depends(?installed(?depends(?=x))))'

Now, lets go over the query. The first part ?for x: allows us to refer to the package currently being matched. See the documentation for details. We'll see later why we need this. Basically we are saying: give me all packages x that match the following pattern. The second and third parts are trivial: we only want automatically installed packages.
The fourth part, ?x:provides(?virtual ?reverse-depends(?installed)) was easy: find all packages that provide a virtual package that is depended upon by some other installed package.
The fifth and final part, ?not(?x:reverse-depends(?installed(?depends(?=x)))) is why we needed the bound variable x. We want to filter out (hence the ?not) the packages that have some reverse dependency that depends directly on the package x. That way, in my case, metacity won't show up since gnome-core directly depends on it and is installed.

Unfortunately, this query doesn't grok alternative dependencies. For example, if gnome-core depended on metacity x-window-manager then this query wouldn't show metacity, since it is depended upon by a package. If someone can make this query understand that so that it only eliminates packages directly depended upon with no alternatives dependencies, please let me know!Tags: aptitude, cleaning, tip, tips

This blog post isn t only directed to ThinkPad owners as most notebook Linux users with Intel Core Duo 1/2 and i3/i5/i7 processors have been affected by this bug if not all. And yes, this problem is present on latest Debian Unstable and Ubuntu 11.10. Prelude I m owner of Thinkpad X300, great machine except the fact that just recently I replaced its 3rd cooling fan! Yea, I do a lot of compiling and it s on all the time, but still this kind of things shouldn t happen. I first linked this problem to the fact that Thinkpad fan on Linux (as of 2.6.22) always works at what s its basically maximum RPM, thus the reason there are numerous fan control scripts. My favorite one is Thinkfan, but controlling fan doesn t really help if you have a overheating problem. For matter of a fact it working on its maximum speed might only help, with its own toll. As of kernel 2.6.38 up until 3.1 (still present) there has been a problem of power regression but besides this I had slight problem with overheating. Regarding overheating in beginning I tried reporting bugs, tried different Thinkfan configurations, blamed proprietary software such as Adobe Flash for spiking up CPU temperature, however this problem was somewhat solved. After numerous battery calibrations and as these didn t work in the end for battery life getting poorer with each day, I just blamed the factor that notebook was getting pretty old (~3 years). Then the consumer woke up inside of me and I thought it was time to get new notebook. I laid my eyes upon ThinkPad X1 thing of beauty except one mayor drawback, its price. I did some reading on X1 and interesting enough, X300 comes with Core Duo 2 L7100 but overheating + power regression was still present even on latest Intel Core I* series. Reading this killed the consumer and woke up the hacker side. Solution Initial workaround to the problems of power regression is to add pcie_aspm=force besides existing GRUB boot arguments, this did help to some point but what really helped in both cases was also adding i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 or at least I thought so since this line only applies to Sandy Bridge (i3/i5/i7) and latter. In the end my /etc/default/grub looks like:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash pcie_aspm=force i915.i915_enable_rc6=1"

and make sure you run update-grub after making these changes. Besides the arguments I used there are other ones you can use and for more info please head to Tweaks To Extend The Battery Life Of Intel Linux Notebooks . Results I ended up with such simple tweak are more then satisfactory as I got some ~45 extra minutes of battery life besides the fact that it lowered temperature by some ~10 C. Guess this also gives me extra time until I get a chance to lay my hands on X1 P.S: After I posted this some argued that this is a workaround rather then a fix and folks at [Phoronix] just posted what they call a proper solution to this problem. Also please note although Sandy Bridge users that enable this might sometimes get a video corruption bug, i915_enable_rc6 is still supposed to get enabled by default in 3.2. So logical conclusion you can come up with is unless you re troubled by this problem, you might not want to use this work around/fix at this point. And hope it ll be fixed in future releases of your favorite Linux distribution.

http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20111110.144615.333c5288.en.html Date: 2011-11-10 16:46 +200
To: DebConf Team
CC: debconf-discuss
Subject: [Debconf-team] Debconf13 in Riga, Latvia bid
Hello all, I will be concise and to the point. This email is a formal bid to organize Debconf13 in Riga, Latvia. You can find all the relevant information on the appropriate wiki page: http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf13/Latvia All the plans have been solidified over the last few months and the backup options are there only for unforeseen disaster scenarios (like a big fire burning down the primary venue or something like that). The only details that are not nailed down are the final location for the day trip and formal dinner as the vendors did not want to give us such quotes and tentative reservations so far in advance, but even there we have primary and backup options planned already. We are trying to keep everything about this bid simple and predictable, so we hope you ll enjoy it.
Best regards,
Aigars Mahinovs

First event of my trip was somewhat a gimmick: Give a 30 minutes talk on FreedomBox to an audience of 1 person, in the transit area of Heathrow airport, London. A guy from India now living in London helped preparing my visit to India, an was eager to participate - so much that he was willing to drive out to the airport to meet me. The meeting failed, unfortunately: My flight got delayed, and my one-man "audience" got caught in other duties. Fun to try nevertheless. Also looking back, that crazy attempt to squeeze in a meeting during a 1 hour stop-over was an indicator of the general pace of the India trip This text is part of my Asia 2011 scriblings.

phpMyAdmin demo server got some updates recently. First of all I've updated MySQL and MariaDB version it uses (MySQL is now on 5.5.7 and MariaDB on 5.3.2). Later I've finally found time to make mentions of demo server less intrusive and fit more in existing interface. I've used jQuery to inject information about demo server to main page as one of standard boxes. It fits there nicely and puts information on main page where most users land anyway (you can see it for example here). With most important information on main page, the other pages could be reduced and now only mentions demo server and Git revision it is using. This brings user experience closer to real phpMyAdmin without intrusive information shown on top of every page. I hope you will like it :-).

Filed under: English Phpmyadmin 0 comments Flattr this!

In the past few weeks I ve been preparing the Debian packages of FileTea and its companion EventDance. They re finally available. FileTea is a free, web-based file sharing system that just works. It only requires a browser, and no user registration is needed. If you want to know more about it, you can read my previous blog post. For a more detailed description, read Nathan Willis s excellent article on LWN.net. There have been a few changes since that article (HTTPS support in particular) but it s still the best one you can find on the net. Igalia still provides a FileTea server at http://filetea.me/, that you can use to share your files and see how it works. We plan to keep offering this service, but you don t need to trust it/depend on it anymore: now you can apt-get install filetea and have your own.

I've been unable to solve this problem for a few weeks now, so i'll try posting it to my blog maybe someone out there knows the answer. Would very much appreciate a clue on this one. I've got a VM on a citrix xenserver 5.0.0 machine that won't start. it was running fine until it was rebooted on a Fri afternoon, a few weeks ago. Starting it from the (windows-only) xencenter GUI results in:

   "This VM cannot be started, as its network interfaces could not be
   connected. One of the NICs is in use elsewhere."

Starting it from the command line results in:

# xe vm-start uuid=88915b63-d794-e021-4f78-b03f46e352b0
Cannot plug VIF
VIF: 5dfd3886-8b48-20e5-4231-30284d7b185d

anyone seen this before? know how to fix? I've tried deleting and re-creating the network interface for the VM. I've also tried booting the VM without any network interface at all. I've tried "xe vif-unplug force uuid=5dfd3886-8b48-20e5-4231-30284d7b185d" (doesn't work, expects the VM to be running, not halted). In fact, I've lost track of all the things i've tried doing that haven't worked. I haven't rebooted the xen server and *really* don't want to have to do that. I'd rather create a new VM and copy the OS (debian, fortunately so relatively easy to do) than reboot the server (NOTE: Tried that, didn't work). Since the initial problem, I now have a total of three VMs that won't restart (with the same error message), and I can't even create a new VM. So it looks like a problem with the host rather than the guest. I think i'm going to have to migrate all the VMs off this machine to another box, then rebuild this server. maybe with a newer Xen (on debian, rather than proprietary citrix junk), or maybe as a KVM box. The (absence of) this kind of crap is one of the main reasons why i prefer KVM to Xen .and if i have to rebuild the server anyway, I may as well rebuild it as a KVM server Xen VMs won t start: Cannot plug VIF is a post from: Errata

I recently started getting mails from no-reply@joindiaspora.com. Usually, a mail from no-reply@whatever is enough to make me believe that the admins of said whatever are clueless regarding what e-mail means and how should it work. And in this case, it really amazes me If I get an invite to Diaspora*, right, I should not pester a hypothetical sysadmin@joindiaspora.com to get me off his list, but I should be able to reply to the person mailing me Maybe requesting extra details on what he is inviting me to, or allowing me to tell him why I'm not interested. But yes, Diaspora* has fallen to the ease of requiring me to join their network to be able to communicate back with the "friend" who invited me. Some of the (three?) readers of this site might not be familiar with the Diaspora* project. It is a free reimplementation (as far as I know) of something similar to Facebook Free not only in the sense that it runs free software, but also because it is federated Your data will not belong to a specific company (that is, you are not the value object they sell and make money with), but you can choose and switch (or become) the provider for your information. A very interesting proposal, socially and technically. I find that a gross violation of netiquette. I should be able to reply to the mail - Even if in this case it were to (and sorry As you are spreading my name/mail, you will excuse me if I spread your name ;-) ) fernando.estrada.invite1501335@joindiaspora.com. Such an (fictional FWIW) address would allow for mail to reach back the submitter by the same medium it was sent, without allowing open spamming into the network. Now, what prompted me to write this mail (just before adding no-reply@joindiaspora.com to my blacklist) is the message I got (in an ugly HTML-only mail which erroneously promised to be text/plain, sigh...) is that Fernando sent me as the inviting message, So, at least are you going to give Diaspora a chance? The answer is: No.. But not because of being a fundamentalist. Right, I am among what many people qualify as Free Software zealots, but many of my choices (as this one is) is in no way related to the software's freeness. I use non-free Web services, as much as many of you do. Yes, I tend to use them less, rather than more (as the tendency goes). But the main reason I don't use Twitter is the same reason I don't use Identi.ca, its free counterpart And the reason I'm not interested in Facebook is the same reason I will not join Diaspora* Because I lack time for yet another stream of activity, of information, of things to do and think about. Yes, even if I care about you and I want to follow what's going on in your life: The best way to do it is to sit over a cup of coffee, or have some dinner, or to meet once a year in the most amazing conference ever. Or we can be part of distributed projects together, and we will really interact lots. Or you can write a blog! I do follow the blogs of many of my friends (plus several planets), even if they have fallen out of fashion A blog post pulls me to read it as it is a unit of information, not too much depending on context (a problem when I read somebody's Twitter/Identica lines: You have to hunt a lot of conversations to understand what's going on), gives a true dump of (at least one aspect of) your state of (mind life work), and is a referenceable unit I can forward to other people, or quote if needed. So, yes, I might look old-fashioned, clinging to the tools of the last-decade for my Social Web presence. I will never be a Social Media Expert. I accept it But please, don't think it is a Stallmanesque posture from me. It is just that of a person who can lose too much time, and needs to get some work done in the meantime. (oh, of course: Blog posts also don't have to make much sense or be logically complete. But at least they allow me to post a full argument!)

You're on a small island in the middle of a vast ocean. There's nothing but dirt, stone and grass on the your island, which is part of a tiny archipelago. One of the nearby islands features a dark cave, with what looks like a coal seam near the entrance. You can glimps two small trees on another island nearby. All around your little clutch of islands is what appears to be vast, unending ocean in all directions. It's midday and you need to make yourself safe for the night. You can use the wood from the trees to craft a pickaxe. With this, you can fetch some coal from the seam. With the coal, you can create some torches, to see in the dark. You might have enough wood left over to make a door, if you're lucky. Or perhaps you should save it to craft a boat, or a sword. Groans from something unknown emanate worryingly closely from the darkness of the cave. You're lucky: one of your two trees has dropped a sapling. You eagerly plant it. In a few days time, you might be able to harvest some more wood. You've been granted a temporary reprieve, but the law of diminishing returns means at some point, and soon, you'll run out of wood. Swimming is time-consuming. By the time you have assembled a meagre supply of wood and coal, it's almost sunset. You nervously dig a burrow in the mud of your original island, light it with a torch and block the entrance back up. Night passes slowly as you listen to things crawling around in the darkness outside. I first learned about Minecraft from this blog post by Mike Watson last year. Mike did a great job of demonstrating the narrative power of the game and his post left a lasting impression on me. Every now and then I dip in to Minecraft to see what's new since the last time I played it. In the last few months version 1.8 was released and so I started a new map to check it out. I ended up with a corker of a randomly-generated map. Inspired by Mike's post, I thought I'd write a bit about it. In a follow-up post I will provide the map itself.

During summer, I somehow managed to collect huge backlog on Gammu. This consisted on few hundredths of emails to reply, bug reports, not reviewed records in phone database and so on. Today I can finally say this is mostly over and I should be able to react more quickly. Though this does not change anything on previous statements about limiting my involvement there. Processing emails went quite smoothly, luckily some of them resolved themselves or others have helped on mailing list. With bug reports it is more troublesome, because there are topic which I don't want to touch and thus looking for volunteers to work on that. Maintaining Gammu packages in Ubuntu PPA so that users would be able to install latest version easily is one of such tasks, which are waiting for somebody. Anyway I feel much better without those unread emails and I hope not to collect so huge pile of them again :-).

Filed under: English Gammu 0 comments Flattr this!

Sinhala and Slovak reach 100% for level 1. Full stats are here Status for D-I level 1 (core D-I files):

• 21 languages 100% for all sublevels: bg cs de eo es fa fr gu it ja ko nl pl pt ru si sk ta te th zh_CN
• 1 language 98%: sv
• 1 language 97%: eu
• 2 languages 96%: hi tr
• 6 languages 95%: be bn bs dz kk uk
• 3 langauges 94%: ast ga ro
• 5 languages 93%: el hu km lo nb
• 2 languages 92%: id sl
• 5 languages 91%: et mr pa vi zh_TW
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 2 (packages that have localized material that may appear during default installs, such as iso-codes, tasksel, etc.):

• 8 languages 100%: de es fa fr pt ru si zh_CN
• 14 languages 99%: be cs da eo id it ja kk nl sk sl sv th uk
• 5 languages 98%: bg ca eu pt_BR ro
• 4 langauges 95%: el fi he nb
• 7 languages 94%: ar ast dz gl hr vi zh_TW
• 1 language 93%: is
• 7 languages 92%: bn bs hu ko ne pl tr
• 10 languages 91%: ga gu ka km lt mk mr sr ta te
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 3 (packages that have localized material that may appear during non-default installs, such as win32-loader)

• 8 languages 100%: cs de fa fr nl pt ru sv
• 17 languages 99%: be bg bs ca el eo es fi ga gl he is ja sk th tr zh_CN
• 2 languages 97%: hu uk
• others are 90% or below

So, full 100% completeness (hall of fame) for: German (de), Persian (fa), French (fr), Portuguese (pt, Russian (ru)

Since there have been a few blog posts about GNOME 3 already, I m sure you don t mind me adding one. I m one of those who don t do any work, just lurk around and wait for stuff to be fixed or working in the first place. I also don t like compiling GNOME myself. I barely touched the already packaged stuff in the repository of our Debian GNOME packaging team. But I run unstable plus stuff from experimental. I ll thus have a bit of a different experience with GNOME 3 than current testing users who at least in parts don t seem to like what they re getting. That being said I love it. No, I don t mind running network manager on my systems, I even have it on my netbook (Atom processor). I used wicd for a long time because network manager really got nothing done back in the days (half a year ago or what :)). Nowadays, since version 0.9, it works fine for me. No fiddling around with config files, perfect integration in the desktop, and LAN and WLAN Just Work [tm]. No, I don t like if some weird dependencies dictate what tools to use. I usually used pidgin for messaging, for instance. Now I m using empathy, simply because it s best integrated in GNOME. And no, I won t switch from mutt to evolution. :-P And there are more such cases. Also, these weird accessibility tools that are stuck in the gnome-shell top panel , I don t need them. Still there. (There s an extension to remove it, by the way.) Also, I must say, GNOME 3.2 is a lot better than 3.0 already. And I think 3.4 might do the final trick for me. Fact is, with GNOME 3 I have a much cleaner desktop, there is more room for windows (which is nice on a netbook display), there are web apps which I already use a lot, and it has a professional, not too playful look (i.e. a few effects, clear and consistent theming, no bubbling windows). And the new notification stuff is just awesome, especially with the empathy integration. Oh, and too many mouse click to access an application? 1) Put your most used apps in the favorites bar (or whatever it is called); it s just one click then. 2) Press your meta-key (that way our name for the windows key, or was that the ESC key? Whatever, press your windows key), type in the first two or three letters of your application, and hit enter; you don t need a mouse at all. There. It had to be said. :)

You should probably ignore this post. I'm just venting. I'll be better after a nice cup of tea. Things that are causing me to fume about the fact Gnome Shell just hit Debian/Testing:

• Spacefun came back. Even on GDM3. Just fucking die already.
• I had to reboot to get bluetooth working again.
• /desktop/gnome/shell/windows/workspaces_only_on_primary set by default? SRSLY?
• It failed to carry over my previous monitor settings.
• I'm pretty sure I don't have a latent desire for a machine running OS X, whatever the GNOME devs might think.
• How many mouse clicks to get to the list of applications?
• Er, why have you changed my default apps? (Why is clicking a link in a terminal opening Epiphany rather than a new tab in Iceweasel?)

I update my testing boxes (work + home laptops) almost every day. It rarely breaks, and certainly when it does I accept that's what I get for doing rolling upgrades. I can't remember the last time I did an upgrade that actually made me angry. Also I suspect this thing is going to have a complete fit on my binary nVidia/hacked up DisplayLink configuration at work (the DisplayLink side refuses to do 3D for starters). Perhaps better not to upgrade there until I have a sufficient block of free time. Maybe it's time to go back to evilwm. I only stopped because I wanted a dock for wifi/bluetooth etc applets on my laptop that didn't get hidden when I fullscreened things. Implementing _NET_WM_STRUT might make that doable... (I'm sure some of this is just dealing with the change but it's a bit bloody difficult to deal with a complete change in user interface that hasn't even managed to carry across settings from the old one.)

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

In Total:	1893
Affecting Wheezy:	1250
Wheezy only:	180
Remaining to be fixed in Wheezy:	1070

Of these 1070 bugs, the following tags are set:

Pending in Wheezy:	47
Patched in Wheezy:	190
Duplicates in Wheezy:	51
Can be fixed in a security Update:	33
Contrib or non-free in Wheezy:	10
Claimed in Wheezy:	0
Delayed in Wheezy:	3
Otherwise fixed in Wheezy:	87

Ignoring all the above (multiple tags possible) 709 bugs need to be fixed by Debian Contributors to get Debian 7.0 Wheezy released. However, with the view of the Release Managers, 1144 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.

So a few days ago, there was this:

21:24 < wouter> hum.
21:24 < wouter> Anyone know of a tool to manage scanned documents?
21:25 < wouter> the idea being that I can tell this tool "here's a bunch of newly-scanned documents", and it will upload them to a server
21:25 < wouter> and it should allow me to easily find a specific file later on
21:25 < wouter> and I'd also like version control there
21:26 < wouter> and I do _not_ want to download the entire repository of scanned documents on my laptop (that's why I have a server)
21:26 < wouter> and perhaps I'd also like a pony to go with that.
21:29 < wouter> oh, yes, and I do _not_ want a webbrowser as the primary interface (that might be okay to look things up, but not to store stuff)

The answer, as it turned out, was git-annex: a tool to manage files with git, without checking them into git. What, I hear you say? Yes, that sounds a little weird, doesn't it? Perhaps it's easiest to explain with a little example.

$ git annex add 2011-11-07-belgacom.pdf
$ ls -l 2011-11-07-belgacom.pdf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 wouter wouter 191 nov  7 14:46 2011-11-07-belgacom.pdf ->
../.git/annex/objects/xx/3F/SHA256-s1537334--c44e1a057e247bfe7c196ac146c8a0ca32096c0b10df6c18fd3f1c2e99ecddbf/SHA256-s1537334--c44e1a057e247bfe7c196ac146c8a0ca32096c0b10df6c18fd3f1c2e99ecddbf

The file is now known to git-annex, and I can have it do all kinds of useful things with it now:

$ git annex drop 2011-11-07-belgacom.pdf
drop 2011-11-07-belgacom.pdf (unsafe)
  Could only verify the existence of 0 out of 1 necessary copies
  No other repository is known to contain the file.
  (Use --force to override this check, or adjust annex.numcopies.)
failed
git-annex: drop: 1 failed

Oops, we hadn't copied it to anywhere else yet. We don't want to lose our data!

$ git annex move --to server 2011-11-07-belgacom.pdf
move 2011-11-07-belgacom.pdf (checking server...) (to server...)
SHA256-s1537334--c44e1a057e247bfe7c196ac146c8a0ca32096c0b10df6c18fd3f1c2e99ecddbf
     1537334 100%    9.22MB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#1, to-check=0/1)
sent 30 bytes  received 1537668 bytes  1025132.00 bytes/sec
total size is 1537334  speedup is 1.00
ok
$

What just happened? git-annex copied the file to a git remote called "server", and then dropped it from my local copy. It's no longer here! The symlink in my local directory is now a dead link; I can not open it anymore. But, no worries! If we ever need it again, it's just a single command away.

$ git annex get 2011-11-07-belgacom.pdf
get 2011-11-07-belgacom.pdf (from server...) 
SHA256-s1537334--c44e1a057e247bfe7c196ac146c8a0ca32096c0b10df6c18fd3f1c2e99ecddbf
     1537334 100%    9.58MB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#1, to-check=0/1)
sent 30 bytes  received 1537668 bytes  3075396.00 bytes/sec
total size is 1537334  speedup is 1.00
ok

This allows me to save space on my local laptop while not having to care where the files are -- they're just there. And it gets more awesome if you know that git-annex can store multiple copies of each file (so you have automatic distributed backups, as with regular git), where you can enforce the minimum number of copies. Also, git-annex supports multiple backends -- you can store your data in Amazon S3, or on an encrypted USB drive, or whatever, and have git-annex manage it transparently for you. I said this already on IRC, but: Joey, I owe you beer.

It s seeming increasingly likely that reports regarding the future of Banshee, Tomboy, and the rest of the Mono stack in the default Ubuntu desktop install are accurate. Ubuntu 12.04 will likely be the first Ubuntu release since 5.10 not to ship with any Mono apps in the default install ending a run of 12 releases over 6 years. The decision seems to have come about during the default apps session at the Ubuntu Developer Summit just ended in Orlando, Florida. Prior to heavy vandalism, the only reasons cited for the change in the UDS session log are Banshee not well maintained and porting music store to GTK3 is blocked on banshee ported to GTK3 . Other reasons mentioned but not in the session logs are complaints that it doesn t work on ARM. I m using a lot of conjecture in this first paragraph because the news about the decision appeared on the blogosphere before anywhere else. The first many Banshee or Tomboy developers read about it was reading a flurry of activity on the Tweetosphere from the anti-Mono activists declaring victory. So first, a word on the cited reasoning. Banshee works fine on ARM, since Mono works fine on ARM. Xamarin, the company behind most upstream Mono work, earns their income almost entirely from ARM versions of Mono, running on the varied ARM implementations found in smartphones. Every major Banshee release is personally tested on my Genesi EfikaMX, an ARM system with a Freescale i.mx51 processor. I ve also demonstrated Banshee running in an Ubuntu chroot on my HP Touchpad, an ARM-based tablet. What is known is that Banshee has some problems running on Texas Instruments OMAP4 processors the target ARM platform for Canonical s ARM work. None of the Banshee upstream developers, Mono upstream developers, or Mono Ubuntu team has ever been able to reproduce the cited problems, since problems specific to an exact ARM chip are impossible to reproduce without the requisite hardware and none of us owns an ARM system matching Canonical s target. That Banshee is still a GTK+2 app is true. A port to GTK+3 is almost complete, but blocking on a single technical bug deep within GTK# s guts, which could be fixed by someone with sufficient knowledge of GTK+ semantics. Nobody with the required GTK+ knowledge has stepped forward with a fix at this point in time. As for the final point, that Banshee is not well maintained, this seems like a directed personal insult against the active and responsive Banshee maintainer, Chow Loong Jin, and upstream bug triager David Nielsen, in addition to the immeasurable hours contributed free of charge for the benefit of Ubuntu users by various other members of related Mono app and library teams, including myself. I need to stress at this point that my annoyance with this decision has nothing to do with the actual app changes. Keeping Tomboy and gbrainy, at a cost of about 25 meg of unsquashed disk space, is a hard argument to make compared with those two plus Banshee for 40 meg. Dropping gbrainy and Tomboy, and switching to Rhythmbox, will save about 30 meg of unsquashed space, all told.I m unconvinced that Rhythmbox is a technically superior app to Banshee several features which were gained by the first app swap will be lost again but that s another long tedious argument to be had. No, what has me deeply angered is the shambolic way the changes were made and announced. Significant accommodations were made by Banshee upstream in order to make life easier for Canonical to integrate Banshee into their OS. For one thing, that s why the Ubuntu One Music Store support is a core Banshee feature, not part of the third-party community extensions package. If Banshee was being considered for replacement due to unresolved technical issues, then perhaps it would have been polite to, I don t know, inform upstream that it was on the cards? Or, if Canonical felt that problems specific to their own itches required scratching, then is it completely beyond the realm of possibility to imagine they might have spent developer resources on bug fixing their OS and sending those fixes upstream? Or even and call me crazy providing access for upstream to specialized hardware such as a $174 Pandaboard to empower upstream to isolate and fix unreproducible bugs specific to Canonical s target hardware? And here s where it gets more astonishing for me Canonical paid money to ship one of the community-based packagers responsible for the stack, Iain Lane, to Orlando for UDS, and didn t think it was worth bothering to perhaps inform him hey, the stuff you work on is in danger of being axed from the default install, maybe you should go to this session . So I m not cross that the stuff I work on has been removed from the default install. I intend to continue working on it as I have for the last 4 years, through my work in Debian. No, why I m cross that I heard about it from fucking Boycott Novell. Regardless of your opinions regarding Banshee or its stack, if you read the above and don t see it as an abysmal failure of community engagement by a company whose community manager wrote a book on the damn topic, then there s something seriously wrong with your understanding of how community labour should be seen as a resource. Maybe someone at Canonical should try reading Jono s book. It s not a first-time offence, and this mail from a PiTiVi developer regarding changes in 11.10 makes for useful further reading. [edit] There is some worthwhile discussion going on on the ubuntu-desktop mailing list covering the technical issues surrounding the decision, I would suggest it s a good place for ongoing technical discussion.

Avoid Evil Social Networks This is a test of a patch for the public atom feed from Diaspora*. If all is going well, the title in the web page should be h4 and a link, but plain text in the atom feed. And there should be links in the text. Well, the atom feed looked fine in vim for me. I recommend looking at Charlie Stross's latest post. Its about the evils of Klout, and how it is almost certainly illegal in Europe due to its very flagrant abuses of "clients" privacy.

I recently purchased a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 1 TB hard drive. It is a 2.5" compact disk that you connect over USB. It draws its power from the USB controller. My previous Extern HDDs were all 2.5" laptop drives, for which I bought a USB enclosure. Those devices always worked perfect, as in:

• They were automatically detected
• Partitions/File Systems understood
• Desktop systems would prompt for actions

The typical kernel messages I got for these devices were:

[56063.268107] usb 1-1: new high speed USB device number 13 using ehci_hcd

[56063.401635] usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=14cd, idProduct=6116

[56063.401645] usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=3, SerialNumber=2

[56063.401652] usb 1-1: Product: USB 2.0 SATA BRIDGE

[56063.401658] usb 1-1: Manufacturer: Super Top

[56063.401663] usb 1-1: SerialNumber: M6116018VF16

[56063.402857] scsi8 : usb-storage 1-1:1.0

[56064.400896] scsi 8:0:0:0: Direct-Access WDC WD50 00BEVT-24A0RT0 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0

[56064.401576] sd 8:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0

[56064.402102] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] 976773168 512-byte logical blocks: (500 GB/465 GiB)

[56064.402615] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off

[56064.402618] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00

[56064.403101] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present

[56064.403105] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through

[56064.404861] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present

[56064.404864] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through

[56064.419657] sdb: sdb1

[56064.421850] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present

[56064.421854] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through

[56064.421857] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk

But for my Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex HDD, things were different. The kernel would detect but then it would not mount. The error reported is that the device is busy. My FreeAgent's kernel messages look similar to what the regular one has:

[ 168.520140] usb 1-1: new high speed USB device number 5 using ehci_hcd

[ 168.657424] usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=0bc2, idProduct=5021

[ 168.657433] usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3

[ 168.657439] usb 1-1: Product: FreeAgent GoFlex

[ 168.657444] usb 1-1: Manufacturer: Seagate

[ 168.657449] usb 1-1: SerialNumber: NA0C1BML

[ 168.659079] scsi5 : usb-storage 1-1:1.0

[ 169.657136] scsi 5:0:0:0: Direct-Access Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 0148 PQ: 0 ANSI: 4

[ 169.708786] sd 5:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0

[ 169.709079] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] 1953525167 512-byte logical blocks: (1.00 TB/931 GiB)

[ 169.709954] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is off

[ 169.709963] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Mode Sense: 1c 00 00 00

[ 169.710567] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA

[ 169.759942] sdc: sdc1

[ 169.762050] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI disk

As the Device Mapper Multipath Debian Maintainer, I have multipath-tools installed on my laptop. Turns out, for some reason, the device is consumer by the device mapper multipath stack.

20:12:58 rrs@champaran:~$ ls /dev/mapper/

1Seagate@ 1Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex N 1Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Np1 control LocalDisk-ROOT@ LocalDisk-SWAP@

Also the block device ID listing is enumerated as type SCSI.

19:56:44 rrs@champaran:~$ ls /dev/disk/by-id/

ata-HITACHI_HTS723216L9SA60_091220FC1220NCJASEVG@ scsi-SATA_HITACHI_HTS7232091220FC1220NCJASEVG@

ata-HITACHI_HTS723216L9SA60_091220FC1220NCJASEVG-part1@ scsi-SATA_HITACHI_HTS7232091220FC1220NCJASEVG-part1@

ata-HITACHI_HTS723216L9SA60_091220FC1220NCJASEVG-part2@ scsi-SATA_HITACHI_HTS7232091220FC1220NCJASEVG-part2@

ata-HITACHI_HTS723216L9SA60_091220FC1220NCJASEVG-part3@ scsi-SATA_HITACHI_HTS7232091220FC1220NCJASEVG-part3@

ata-HL-DT-ST_DVDRAM_GU10N_M189CNI1127@ scsi-SSeagate_FreeAgent_GoFle_NA0C1BML@

ata-ST1000LM010-9YH146_W1000ZD8@ usb-WDC_WD12_00BEVE-11UYT0_ST_Killer-0:0@

dm-name-1Seagate@ usb-WDC_WD12_00BEVE-11UYT0_ST_Killer-0:0-part1@

dm-name-LocalDisk-ROOT@ wwn-0x5000c5003d19c8c2@

dm-name-LocalDisk-SWAP@ wwn-0x5000cca586e112bc@

dm-uuid-LVM-buywwzKkpfKG2RegankA2nPkmFBBPFe3D5DepV8w8nLrHfoAjIIQVnakOQJZEqJX@ wwn-0x5000cca586e112bc-part1@

dm-uuid-LVM-buywwzKkpfKG2RegankA2nPkmFBBPFe3k9aJfc9B7wRmVIwfoagffHUZjuN6c4cM@ wwn-0x5000cca586e112bc-part2@

dm-uuid-mpath-1Seagate@ wwn-0x5000cca586e112bc-part3@

raid-1Seagate@

But I'm not sure why the same doesn't happend for my external laptop drive. It gets properly tagged as device type USB. So Laptop or Server, if you have a FreeAgent that you want to connect to your machine, and see the device busy error when accessing the device['s] directly, do the following:First, the ID of the device.

20:17:43 rrs@champaran:~$ /lib/udev/scsi_id --whitelisted --page=0x83 --device=/dev/sdc

1Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex N

Add the ID to /etc/multipath.conf under blacklist section

blacklist

wwid "1Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex*"

wwid "1Seagate FA GoFlex Desk*"

# devnode "^(ram raw loop fd md dm- sr scd st)[0-9]*"

# devnode "^hd[a-z][[0-9]*]"

# device

# vendor DEC.*

# product MSA[15]00

#

Run mulitpath -F to flush the unused maps. Run multipath -v3 to ensure that now the device is blacklisted.

Nov 03 20:19:02 sdc: (Seagate:FreeAgent GoFlex) wwid blacklisted

The front cause for the mis-behavior is:

# Coalesce multipath devices before multipathd is running (initramfs, early

# boot)

ACTION=="add change", SUBSYSTEM=="block", RUN+="/sbin/multipath -v0 /dev/$name"

But something else, maybe the default blacklist table, needs the actual fix.