As kpreid on #svn kindly points out, if you need to make a patch for a subversion project that includes files you have created, you need to add the files:

svn add tests/fixtures/empty.rb

Then you can run svn diff > my_patch.diff, and everything will be included. Anyone can add files to their working copy, it's just that they can't necessarily commit them. This ought to be in their FAQ.

If you are coming to DebConf from an EU member country, Iceland, Norway, Liechtenstein, or Switzerland, you are entitled to free healthcare in the UK (not including elective treatment or non-urgent pre-existing conditions). To prove that you are entitled to this, you need a free European Health Insurance Card. The arrangements for getting one will depend on your country, but if you don’t yet have one you should apply as soon as possible, to get one in time for DebConf. Residents and citizens of many other countries are entitled to a more limited level of free healthcare, as listed on the DebConf7 website.

I think everyone knows about the issues between Sven Luther and the d-i team. This is going on for about a year now and although I'm usually a supporter of Svenl here, I have to admit that I can't hear/read it anymore.
So, please stop it now. Everyone!

Svenl, you did a great job for the PPC port in Debian, but there's so much in life beside Debian! Enjoy it! You're wasting your time and life if you insist in being right. Maybe you're right, but I don't that this does matter. Take a time off from the project and have a nice time with our stuff! Been there, done that and found it worthwhile! :-)

All others: I think it would be better to not respond to every mail by Svenl, especially when you're opposing him. This will make it even worse for him and for everybody else, too, because the impression of being insulted will grow with every mail that tells him to shut up.

Every party involved in this dilemma does have valid points. For example I would like to see some sort of Code of Conduct or a Social Commitee or anything else that will prevent such incidents over and over again.
I think it's highly unprofessional how Sven was pushed out of the d-i team. Sure, everyone can disagree with anyone else, but I expect DDs to be professional enough to work together despite their personal dislikenings. OTOH, Svenl didn't earn glory insisting every now and then of being mistreated and being right.

So, can we now stop that neverending story, please?

If you're coming to LinuxTag 2007 in Berlin (May 30 - June 2), you might want to also visit the LinuxBIOS booth (Hall 12, Stand 80). We will be showing a couple of different systems all using LinuxBIOS to boot. There is a boot time competition in the booth (nice T-shirts to win!). On Saturday there's a hands-on LinuxBIOS workshop by Peter Stuge titled "Bring your EPIA, EPIA-M or EPIA-MII board and make it run LinuxBIOS!". Please register in advance at LinuxBIOS booth (Hall 12, Stand 80). If you always wanted to know what this LinuxBIOS stuff is all about — here's your chance to find out!

Below is a sample script to configure the ssh STONITH agent for the Heartbeat system. STONITH will reboot nodes when things go wrong to restore the integrity of the cluster. The STONITH test program supports the -n option to list parameters and the -l option to list nodes. The following is an example of using it with the ssh agent:

# stonith -t ssh -n

hostlist

# stonith -t ssh hostlist="node-0 node-1" -l

node-0

node-1

The hostlist tuple is the only configuration option for ssh. It is assumed that you have passwordless ssh logins allowed between root on all the nodes in the cluster so the host name list is all that’s needed. The important thing to note about the constraint is that you are constraining the parent of the clones (which in this example has an ID of “DoFencing“) not a clone instance. ssh is the simplest and in many ways least useful method of STONITH, but it’s good for an example as everyone knows it. Once you get ssh going it’ll be trivial to get the other methods working. See below for the script to insert the XML in the CIB.
(more…)

The start has finally arrived, today is officially the first day of coding for the 2007 Google Summer of Code. To commemorate this occasion, I have prepared the next release (the second so far) of the software package I am writing for it, DebTorrent. You can download it from the Alioth project. Some of the changes in this release are:

• Added ability to parse dpkg status for priorities of files to download
• Fixed a bug in bittornado that prevented using priorities with pre-allocation
• Directories are no longer pre-allocated when they will contain no files

You can read detailed instructions for how to download using it in the README file, but the basic idea for using DebTorrent as part of an update is to:

• Update your Packages files with apt-get update
• Download packages using DebTorrent and the new "statustodownload" option:
  • set it to 1 to download all packages currently installed
  • set it to 2 to download only new versions of installed packages
• Point Apt to the location of your downloads
• apt-get update again, and then install

This is still an alpha release, but at least it has some more functionality than the previous one. Feel free to test it, but keep in mind that at this early stage most of the torrents will be unseeded.

It seems that my idea caught Javier's attention and he is already asking to use the scripts for Spanish.

As I have said before, those scripts will work for all languages in due time. Currently, as a test, they are running (or they should starting from tomorrow morning) only for the po material for the languages fr, de, ro and vi.

I intent to make compendiums for po-debconf material, po material[*] separately and another one made from all of them.

Stay tuned. Of course, a proper annoucement on debian-i18n@l.d.o will be done when I'll have something pretty ok.

Meanwhile, unpatient souls can take a peak at the current results

(I just enabled es, just for fun; es is broken, too?!? - or maybe the scripts are doing something wrong :-P - curious people can check, the logs are available.)


[*] which is more tricky since there is a need to merge fr_FR with fr/fr_CA with fr, de_DE with de, de_AT with de... and so on, but zh_TW does not have a zh to be merged with. Also the ll_CC strings should have higher precedence than ll strings.

Summer of Code officially started today, and as such it was time to start hacking out some code for it. For the past couple of weeks I've been casually looking over an upgrade testing suite for Ubuntu (website, bzr repo). It's fairly sophisticated and does a lot of things that I'd like to bring to Debian. However, after considering it for awhile, I decided that I would prefer to start on the Debian version from scratch. This decision came about for a few reasons:

• The Ubuntu version focuses on upgrading between releases, whereas I would like to possibly upgrade between entirely separate repositories. While this could fairly easily be added as a configuration parameter, it was still a point of consideration.
• I would like to write the scripts for building the image as a seperate module. This would aid in the future goal of snapshotting and rebuilding systems based on a list of installed packages, versions, and config files.
• Until recently the Ubuntu upgrade tester used chroot and had no virtualization option. In addition to having this, the aforementioned process of building the initial image independent of backend should make the resulting scripts easily pluggable into any virtualization option.

At any rate, I will probably end up reusing many pieces of the code from that tester.

Updates posted here as progress continues.

Via Jamie, this hilarious This American Life parody (direct link to MP3 if the embedding doesn’t work for you). This guy obviously has listened to a lot of episodes of the show. (I expect this parody will be funny only if you have, as well.)

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Even though Iceweasel has been a reality since November, it seems that there is still some backlash about the rename. Thanks very much to Andrew for jumping to my defense (and also for organizing dinner the last time I was in Mountain View, it was a fun evening). Nothing he said was fundamentally incorrect, but it doesn't paint the full picture.

Once upon a time (somewhere around Firefox 0.9) we happily shipped the fox hugging the globe icon. Then it was pointed out the copyright license on that piece of artwork wasn't DFSG free (and probably wouldn't be free under any reasonable free software or even open content license), so we removed it and used the plain globe icon they shipped in the tarball instead. Eventually the Mozilla Foundation asked us to remove mozilla- from the package name (it was mozilla-firefox at the time) which we did, and the issue of the icon and trademark came up. After explaining why we couldn't ship the icon they gave us permission to continue to use the name. They said they would periodically check up to make sure we weren't shipping crap that would harm the brand. This seemed a fairly good compromise and we accepted.

This situation persisted for a year or so, in both Debian and Ubuntu, but then the Mozilla Corporation (who was now in possession of the trademarks) insisted we couldn't use the name without the non-free logo. They also wanted to approve any changes made before they were uploaded. They are certainly within their rights to do this, but to hear Mr. Fowler tell it we were on a crusade to purge the name from the distro. We were not, we were content with the status quo. I also must take exception with Mr. Fowler stating: "They've persisted, despite the best efforts of the Mozilla project team to engage with the Debian packagers to resolve the situation." I think from the discussion we were trying our best to reach some sort of compromise and the Mozilla side seemed firmly entrenched in their position, not offering us a lot of alternatives. The non-free nature of the logo and the unprecedented "control-freak" review process didn't leave us with a lot of alternatives.

Ubuntu does ship the officially branded version of the Firefox, but they have a weaker set of freedom guidelines than Debian. Whether you think that is good or bad is personal choice, but one of the reasons I like Debian so much is its commitment to free software, even if that means not everything is as easy or expedient as one would like.

With respect to the new name and icon, this is again a matter of personal taste. I do tend to think "Iceweasel" doesn't have that much sex appeal but it was a popular choice and had the benefit of having already been used to refer to a potential name fork of Firefox. And BTW this is really only a name fork, the amount of changes we've actually put in to the tree (beyond renaming ones) are minimal. In fact the last time it was checked, our patches were a strict subset of the patches Ubuntu uses in their Firefox package. So Iceweasel is in fact functionally identical to Firefox with what I like to think are some minor improvements from upstream.

As to your other points, I will admit to being poorly-socialized, but I think most who have met me wouldn't call me self-obsessed, egotistical or a moron.

I think Debian is developing a bit of a bias against it where we're assumed to be a bunch of crazy Free software nuts, and the presumption is anytime we act against the grain we're the ones being unreasonable despite any evidence to the contrary. I don't know how we can fight this perception, but I think we should.

To also announce it here, I've moved to M nchengladbach to work at credativ, along with several other DDs, Postgresql, and other open source folks. So far work has been pretty cool, and I'm fairly sure it will stay that way. I've been mostly inactive lately because I didn't have internet access at home yet. In fact, I officially still don't, but my provider is so "nice" to let me connect to the DSL line, login in, and then tell me via http that username/password were wrong. But, at this point, port 53/udp is open :) Ganneff was so kind to set up an openvpn gateway for me and forward 22/tcp to my server, so I can ssh, and tunnel everything else I like via that. Sorry to my NMs for any delays lately, I hope to catch up this week. On a different note, I'm playing with ikiwiki and converting my blog, so please excuse if that causes flooding on planet.debian.org (which I of course hope to avoid by keeping the old timestamps, mmmv).

Frets on Fire is, according to the Wikipedia, a music video game, a clone of the Guitar Hero video games, in which the player emulates playing a guitar with the keyboard of their computer. The keyboard is also meant to be picked up like a guitar in order to play, with one hand pressing the fret buttons and another pressing the pick buttons. There is support for joysticks however, meaning that the Guitar Hero controllers can be used as well. The game also includes a tutorial and a built-in song editor. The source code written for the game is written in Python, and released under the GNU General Public License. The game included some non-DFSG-free song files and some internal fonts which needed to be replaced in order for the game to enter Debian repositories. There’s a pack of new songs made by Carlos Viola Iborra and released under a free license. Thanks Carlos! This package of songs has entered the repositories too and is called fretsonfire-songs-sectoid. The original songs that were included in the game, made by Tommi Inkil , will probably be included in the non-free repositories soon, as a package called fretsonfire-songs-inkila. I’d like to thank the developers of FoF, Sami Ky stil , Joonas Kerttula and Tommi Inkil , for their full cooperation during all this process. You’re great, guys!

After reading advice from ProBlogger I have become convinced that I should create separate blogs for some of the content that is currently on my blog. The first such blog that I will create will be about computer security. Naturally it will cover SE Linux to some degree, but the exact focus is something I have not yet determined. Here are the options I’m considering:

• The exact topic to be covered, computer security is a broad area, choosing which sub-topics to focus on and which users to present it to is a difficult task.


• The length of the articles, this will to some degree depend on the posting frequency. If I am going to post 4+ times per week then most of the posts would be small. But for one or two posts per week I could make them 1000+ word posts.
  


• The mix of news, educational material, and background information. I think that all of these areas are important, and to some extent the mix will depend on what news happens and what technologies I am involved in developing, testing, and using. But I will have a plan as to what to present and on days when there is little news and I have not worked on anything exciting I will find new material to write about based on the plan.
  


• 
  The use of code snippets in a blog? It’s easy to split the post and have the feed not include the source code, would that be of interest or would you rather have the complete post in the feed for offline reading?
  

Also if you have any other suggestions for blogs that you would read if I was to write them then plese send them in via a blog comment or email.

Today is a sad day for me; since 1995 the Government of the Valencian Community has been in the hands of the PP (Partido Popular) and it seems that it we will have the same until 2011. With this results Valencia will host a Formula One Grand Prix and probably tons of new paper-couch buildings like the Ciutat de les Arts i les Ci ncies. The saddest part is that more than 35% of the population stayed at home; I've always have had the feeling that most of them are more on the left than the right side of the political spectrum; probably the big problem is that the current PSPV (Partit Socialista del Pa s Valenci -PSOE) candidate for the Generalitat is a joke (I would never vote for him) and CPV (Comprom s pel Pa s Valenci ) has been unable to mobilize enough people. On days like this I think about changing my living place, luckily on the two villages where I spend most of my free time, Burjassot and Godella, the left parties have won, something specially important in Godella, where the PP was going to expropriate part of the village to bury the metro station and later pay the bill selling the freed space to put buildings of 4 or 5 floors (the current houses are one or two floors high and have been there for ages). On the other side what I'm seriously considering is moving to another work again, the current job is much better than the previous one, but I've been so unlucky that I'm again working for the local government on two of the biggest projects I'm involved in and it seems that both of them will last for a long time; without a political change I'm sure that it is going to be the same old story, and life is too short to be hitting the same walls for years. Let's see what happens, probably the main problem is that I need to take a break, maybe a four years one would be a good idea... ;)

The good thing about having kept a blog these last few years, is I have a searchable record of hardware changes. Recently, I noticed a few disk errors on caesar, and I was wondering how old that disk was. I disk some searching, and found via this post that the disk in it was a hand-me-down from when I decommissioned daedalus Mk I. One of the reasons I decommissioned it when I did, was the RAID-1 was exhibiting some strange errors during resynchronisation, and I didn't want to leave the country leaving behind an ageing problematic server with my stuff on it. I'd previously been unable to fault either 120 Gb disk under some light testing with badblocks, so I just reused them, and so around October 2005, I put the larger disk in caesar. So this disk has seen a fair bit of use, originally in daedalus, and then in caesar for another 20 months. It's allowed to fail, it's served me well. Anyway, so I bought a 750 Gb drive a couple of weeks ago, because one thing that I've wanted to do with caesar was do remote backups of daedalus, and there just wasn't enough space to do that, so I went for as big as I could find, and essentially repeated the same trick as last time, to upsize:

1. Power down, attach new disk as a slave
2. Boot into single user mode
3. Unmount everything, remount root read-only
4. sfdisk -d /dev/hda sfdisk /dev/hdb to copy the partition table (I use a root, swap, LVM, three partition layout)
5. dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hdb1 bs=1M to copy the root filesystem to the new disk
6. mkswap /dev/hdb2 to put the swap signature on what will become the new swap device
7. cfdisk /dev/hdb and blow away the third partition and recreate it using all of the available space (there's probably a programmatic way of doing this, but hey, it's not exactly hard to do in cfdisk either)
8. pvcreate /dev/hdb3 to put an LVM signature on the new LVM physical volume
9. vgextend base /dev/hdb3 to tell LVM there's two disks in the volume group for the time being
10. Remount the root filesystem read-write
11. rm /boot/grub/device.map and run /usr/sbin/grub-install /dev/hdb to install GRUB in the MBR of what will become the new boot disk
12. Power down, swap the disks around so that the new disk is now primary and the old disk is now the slave
13. Boot into single user mode again, unmount everything except root
14. pvmove /dev/hdb3 /dev/hda3 to relocate all of the allocated physical extents off the old disk onto the new one
15. Twiddle thumbs for a couple of hours. Admire artwork on computer's motherboard (did you know Compaq EVO's have a picture of a car on their motherboards? A map of Texas?)
16. vgreduce base /dev/hdb3 to take the old disk out of the volume group
17. pvremove /dev/hdb3 to remove the LVM signature from the old disk
18. Power down and remove the old disk
19. Reboot into multi-user mode and profit from all the additional free physical extents

I absolutely love how I can do this with LVM, with a minimum of fuss. Last time I did this, I had a kernel panic during the pvmove, but that didn't even stop it, I just rebooted and reran the pvmove and it carried on from the last checkpoint. No such excitement this time. I'm sure Solaris' ZFS does all of this with substantially less manual steps, but hey, I like my Linux :-)

Ben Fowler has a bit of rant about the Iceweasel situation in Debian. Take a chill pill, Ben. As I understand it, from when I recently had dinner with Eric Dorland, the problem is no longer the name Firefox(tm), but the fact that the logo is non-free. I think we're required to ship the logo with the product if we call it Firefox. I believe that Ubuntu is glossing over the non-freeness of the logo. Heck, they're free to not be bound by the Debian Free Software Guidelines, they're not Debian. I think the Mozilla Corporation granted permission to Debian to redistribute the logo, but that permission wouldn't flow on to derivatives, so didn't really cut the mustard. I'm sure Eric will correct me if I've said anything fundamentally incorrect. In summary, sure, the whole Iceweasel situation is suboptimal, but I don't believe it exists for the reasons you feel it does.

1:00 AM. Val ncia celebrates with big fireworks, and drivers sound their horns along Blasco Ib nez. People are happy; we will have our urban F1 circuit after all. Our city will continue growing and becoming the very best of Europe. Our land will continue to be developed, and finally becoming the new C te d'Azur, for the great benefit of a few. The slow but unstoppable process of degrading a culture to something that can be admired by tourists during Fallas just reached a new milestone. Welcome to my ex-country. The land of golf, sailing and open-wheel racing.

A few days ago, some people in Venezuela were shocked by Mark Shuttleworth’s claims against Hugo Ch vez Government and supporting Mar a Corina Machado, a minor opposition leader in the Country. Today, at 23:59:59, the nationwide open air TV broadcaster RCTV will cease operations. In Venezuela, as in several other countries in the World, the economically profitable portion of the electromagnetic spectrum is State’s property, thus requiring a concession to make use of it. RCTV concession was granted in 1987 for twenty years, and the Government has decided to deny the renewal, which is quite unusual (right-wing governments in the past simply would have shut up the antennas) Of course, RCTV is not a pro-Government channel, accounting between 90 and 100 percent of the airtime with anti Government news and opinions, which is not bad per se, though in Venezuela there’s a law requiring equilibrium in times devoted to political ads. Both situations (Mark’s comments and the Government’s decision) pose the threats of a now common situation in our Country: people taking very valid decisions with somewhat doubtful consequences. In the first case, Mark is using his right to freely write what he likes in his blog but it seems that it has damaged a little bit Ubuntu’s image in Venezuela (not that it’s Mark’s fault, of course) In the second case, the Government is taking a lawful decision, but it has actually raised an important discomfort in the population (polls, which are not always accountable, point out as much as 80% rejection rate), the journalists of other media and most foreign observers, which state that they’re actually closing a TV channel and destroying freedom of speech in the Country. Expressing political POVs is quite critical nowadays in Venezuela. Some famous etiquette bookwriters, such as the one at Emily Post’s, always tend to promote a be honest, be respectful position while listening or expressing your points of views in order to keep a productive attitude. I do think that politics are important: I just think mixing them with practical daily tasks, including FLOSS development and promotion, is becoming obnoxious and dangerous. Cheeseconf On June 15th., I’ll be departing to DC7 in Edimburgh. I’ll stay a night in Frankfurt, probably in a hostel, and then I’ll stay at one of the hostels in EDI. I plan to carry white cheese to the Cheese and Wine BoF, and I’d love any comments on how to transport them without posing a biological threat for Europe. I’ll be carrying a 65 liters backpack. How long will it take for the cheese to become a lifeform? Any special tips and tricks to avoid that? Copying files to embedded devices I’ve been trying to copy some binary files into an Axesstel D800 EvDO modem which runs Linux over a tiny ARM processor on less than 16 MB. of memory. I’m actually trying to get netcat in so I can get more useful stuff such as snmpd in. The modem has telnetd, but it has no zmodem utilities, particularly rz. Neither it has wget, nor ftpd. It has thttpd to serve the administrative webpages, but it can’t process shell CGI programs so I can’t send the file through a CGI form. Any ideas? I would love to read comments from hackers who have already managed their ways into embedded devices such as 802.11 devices with Linux, and any generic ideas on how to provide new firmware images for devices such as this Axesstel modem.

Yesterday, I read a Ben Maurer post about reCAPTCHA. It is a free CAPTCHA system but with a hidden feature: you will be used to decipher words that were not correctly recognized by OCR software in text from digitized books, that will be made accesible in an electronic form. Currently, they helping Internet Archive. The idea is to present a couple of words, distorted as usual in CAPTCHAs, once of them yet correctly recognized by OCR software and the other unrecongnized. The CAPTCHA will be resolved in the known one is entered correctly while the unknown one is guessed to be the word entered. To be sure about what has been entered, the unrecognized word will be presented to more users. A nice idea