My main bank is Cahoot. I'm reasonably happy with them - they pay a good rate of interest on a current account which is what drew me to them, but I like the fact I can do basically everything I need in their web interface at any time. However they seem to frequently announce periods of unavailability for card use or simliar. The latest announcement is:

Important update regarding use of your cahoot card: On Wednesday the 11th April between 21:00 and 22:00 there will be no service for cahoot card holders at Abbey, Link, and VISA ATM's. All point of sale transactions will be subject to a limit of 500 during this period. We apologise for any inconvenience caused by this essential maintenance.

This isn't the first time they've said I'd been unable to use my card for a certain period. They also seem to do (pre-announced) work on their website that causes it to be unavailable. While none of this has ever caused me a problem (yet), I do find it quite surprising. I never have any such announcements from other banks that I use. Are Cahoot just more honest about when they're doing potentially service affecting work? Or do other banks just have systems that don't result in any downtime during upgrades? Does anyone elses bank do announcements in the same fashion?

The etch release is imminent, so I thought I'd run sloccount on an unpacked Debian source tree. I wrote a little script that downloads and unpacks all Debian source packages. It does dpkg-source -x only, no debian/rules unpack or such, since that isn't standardized. The result is a source tree that is 46 gigabytes. Unfortunately, there is something in that tree that makes sloccount fail. It reports a mere 45 million lines of code, which is about 1022 lines per kilobyte. (Later, I'll narrow it down and report an actual bug. For now, the best I have is "something in Debian breaks sloccount".) Sloccount would give fairly good results, and it would exclude, say, JPEGs, of which there are 455. However, in this situation the best I can easily come up with is a sum of running a plain wc -l on each file, and that sum is 1005505921. That's just over one billion lines of code, in 2868448 files, or 350.54 lines per file, on average. Disclaimer: that sum includes many non-source files, such as the JPEGs, and a number of packages don't actually unpack properly with dpkg-source, you have to run some variant of debian/rules unpack. However, I'd be willing to bet the number is in the correct ball park. We can get better results once sloccount gets fixed.

Sam is our new DPL. The margin with the second (Steve McIntyre again!) is very slim, 8 votes. And Steve only has 25 votes more than me. That’s not much either. What we can learn from this election:

• the principle of a DPL board makes its way, I have been ranked well above NOTA and I have been mainly advocating this proposal (and this despite some votes anti-dunc-tank that I probably suffered from)
• my selection of board members was pretty good, the 4 candidates that I selected for the board are the top-4 of the election
• Debian developers are fed up by the various problems in some core teams (overwhelmed, not recruiting new members, not communicating enough, etc.). I’ll try to help Sam fix those issues, but it’s going to be a big challenge for us.

In the end, I really hope that sam is going to find a way to cooperate closely with the various candidates that are still highly motivated to work on improving Debian. I doubt that he will choose a board structure (although I would be glad to be proven wrong!), but I really hope that he will expand the 2IC principle (or something similar). I once told sam that he would have my full support if he got elected, and I intend to stand up to this promise. I said that because I share many of his ideas. The few fears that I have are mainly on how he is going to try to address these issues. But I have no reason to believe that he’s not going to listen to what we (and I) have to say. That’s why he got ranked just after me on my ballot. Good luck Sam, do not disappoint us!

As I've posted before, I recently read Lawrence Rosen's Open Source Licensing Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law. And I'm sure many of you will recognize the enormous constructive value of early-morning cavilations. Well, today I woke up thinking about strengths and weaknesses in th different Free Software licenses, and I decided to add my grain to the world of license proliferation. So, here goes version 3.14 of the CoPL. I wonder how long will it take before it reaches /usr/share/common-licenses on Debian systems ;-)

		       CONFUSING PUBLIC LICENSE
		       ========================
	This is version 3.14 of the Confusing Public License (referred to from
now on as "CoPL"). Copyright (c) 2007 Transnational
Republic. Additional copies of this license can be purchased at no
cost from any Transnational Republic citizen at any of its recognized
outposts, or freely copied. 
	Any legal claims regarding Original works or any of their Standard
versions licensed under the CoPL Should not abide by and be carried
out according to the current law of the Transnational Republic. The
Original author to pay for any attorney and other legal fees of any
dispute regarding said Original author.
	This license text is designed to protect all the Technology covered
under it under a thick layer of incomprehension. No technical,
professional or social measures might be used to subvert the intent of
this license. This license Must be carefully or professionally
reviewed by a lawyer or attorney, under any jurisdiction. Any serious
attempt to understand this license will immediatly terminate your
rights to keep reading this license. Original works licensed under the CoPL
will not be affected by this provision, you will still have permission
to use them.
	Redistributions of source code Should not retain the above copyright notice,
this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. 
	0. This License applies to any program or other work which contains a
   notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed
   under the terms of this Confusing Public License. The Original work
   below refers to any such program or work or Standard version.
	1. You desire to license the Technology to a
   large community to facilitate research, innovation and product
   development while maintaining compatibility of such products with
   the Technology as delivered by You
	2. Original author desires to license the Technology from You on
   the terms and conditions specified in this License.
	3. Redistributions in binary form Should not reproduce the above copyright
   notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
   documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
	4. The names "Joe", "Curly", "Moe" and "The Three Stooges Foundation"
   May be used to endorse or promote products derived from this
   Original work without prior written permission, as they are in no way
   related. 
	5. There is no number 5. Seriously. In all Original works licensed under the
   CoPL, all necessary technical and social steps May be taken not
   to include, in any explicit way, the number 5.
	6. Original author Must make and give away verbatim copies of the
   source form of this Package
   without restriction, provided that Original Author duplicates all of
   the original copyright notices and associated disclaimers.
	7. Original author Must apply bug fixes, portability fixes and other
   modifications derived from the Public Domain or from
   the Copyright Holder. A Package modified in such a
   way shall still be considered the Standard Version.
	8. No Standard versions of the Original work Must be protected by this
   license. Original authors Should not choose a different, saner
   licensing model for the distribution of any modifications they
   make. The CoPL should be taken as a retroviral license.
	THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS," WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL YOU BE
LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION
OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION
WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
				     Definitions
	"You" means the original author of the work covered under the CoPL.
	"Original author" means you.
	"Thou" means God almighty.
	"May" means "Should not, no matter what".
	"Must" means "May".
	"Should not" means "Must".
	"Reasonable copying fee" means nothing.
	"Standard version" means a modified version of the Original work.
				      DISCLAIMER
	The CoPL text, from the words "This is version" and up to and
including this paragraph, is to be taken as a preamble, and will not
be effective under any circumstances. 
	All work licensed under the CoPL should be considered as licensed
under the GNU General Public License version 2 or (at your option) any
later version. It is not the task of this license to point you on
where to get hold of said license.

I have seen buses used for tours that contain bunk beds. If one or more such buses were hired then a group of Linux people could go on a moving Linux conference. This would have to take place in an area with many reasonable size cities in a close area and where there is a good number of Linux people in such cities. Probably the EU is the only area.

A bus (or several buses depending on demand) would then take a group of Linux people through the major cities and have a conference in each one.

Currently there are conferences such as the Debian conference DebConf which receive sufficient sponsorship money to pay for many speakers to attend. Having a similar conference traveling around Europe shouldn't cost any more money and will give plenty of time for the people in the bus to do some coding along the way.

We already have the Geek Cruises, my idea is to do a similar thing but on the road. Also it isn't practical to transport an entire conference, so it would probably just be speakers on buses and the audiences would vary from city to city.

With man-db entering p-u-new now, the package list for the last update of Sarge as “stable” distribution is frozen now. All further updates to Sarge will happen, as soon as Sarge is declared “oldstable”. This seems to become a busy weekend. release

As usual, Ed Felten offers a well-conceived analysis of the Cablevision decision from a technologist’s perspective (for a lawyer’s perspective, see William Patry). The money quote:

The question, in other words, was who was recording the programming. Was Cablevision doing the recording, or were its customers doing the recording? The customers, by using their remote controls to navigate through on-screen menus, directed the technology to record certain programs, and controlled the playback. But the equipment that carried out those commands was owned by Cablevision and (mostly) located in Cablevision buildings. So who was doing the recording? The question doesn t have a simple answer that I can see. This general issue of who is responsible for the actions of complex computer systems crops up surprisingly often in law and policy disputes. There doesn t seem to be a coherent theory about it, which is too bad, because it will only become more important as systems get more complicated and more tightly intereconnected.

Agency, intent/scienter, and responsibility are indeed tricky issues with software and the law. I’ve experienced the problem in my own practice. Although it arises particularly frequently in copyright disputes, it is also common in patent and trademark cases (and of course contract disputes inasmuch as clickwrap-type agreements are implicated). I don’t have any coherent theory to propose, but a more uniform framework would certainly introduce some predictability into these sorts of cases (and thus perhaps avoid litigation). Update: Mike Madison also has some interesting comments on the case.

Since Spring is well underway, I wanted to post a sort of schedule summary of my activities in the following three months. First of all, I have registered and booked the flight for Debconf 7, yay! I can stay with friends of mine that I know from the time I worked in Edinburgh. I want to thank Krzysztof for this offer, it saves a lot of money and it will be nice to catch up. Besides Debconf, there are also several nice parties and events this spring, and of course the completion of my master project.

• 2007-04-19: Finish my Master Project paper
• 2007-05-16: Finish my Master thesis
• 2007-05-17: A State of Trance 300 celebration outdoor
• 2007-06-01: Master Project presentation (date not definite)
• 2007-06-12— 2007-06-26: Attend Debconf7, holiday in Edinburgh
• 2007-07-19: Official graduation date (ceremony postponed till 2007-08-28)
• 2007-07-07: Intuition Summer event!

And after that,... who knows? It probably should involve some work in the summer and maybe an ad-hoc holiday. I’m looking at several options: maybe do a PhD, maybe working for Google or maybe something completely different. More about that later.

These days I picked up the Debtags AI topic again (so yes, development is alive, not the AI). Some people will remember this topic, it was a Google Summer of Code project. The project didn't really complete back then. Since my thesis isn't coming along too well (I don't know how to explain to my professor what I'm trying to achieve...), I've been playing around with different stuff. So I've picked up the Debtags AI again. Back at the end of the GSoC or sometime later last summer, I had started a rewrite of the Debtags AI stuff in C++ for performance reasons. I also had some ideas on how to make it scale better and on how to improve the results. I think I've reached an interesting state now; training time of the AI is down to a few minutes (remember it was a few days when the GSoC started?), so I managed to cut off another order of magnitude. Evaluation of a text against the database (i.e. for every tag) happens in the fraction of a second. This AI is turning out quite well now. I have one more idea for a trick that could improve the results from an algorithm side, and one from the data side. Enrico is already looking at how to integrate it with the web apps. :-) And I also want to scale it up further. How about using it to classify web pages by their text content? I already have an idea on how to get some good training data... maybe I should consider writing a business plan instead of a diploma thesis...

For a few months I have been spending a lot of time using a Mac running OS/X for 40 hours a week. Recently a discussion started at a client site as to whether Macs or PCs should be used for future desktop machines.

The Apple hardware is very slick, everything fits together nicely and works well. For example my Apple monitor connects to my Mac via a single cable that supplies power, USB, and the video signal. My USB keyboard and mouse connect to my monitor. So my Mac has only three cables connected to it, power, Ethernet, and the monitor cable. The same thing on a PC would require an additional USB cable going to the PC and an additional power cable going to the monitor.

That is just one trivial example of how Macs are slick.

The advantage of a PC is that installing Linux is much easier and better supported (the vast majority of Linux users have PCs). The benefits of slick hardware are greatly diminished if it's only partly supported in terms of drivers and/or getting answers to technical questions on the net.

Another issue is that of software compatibility. When doing Linux work having a desktop machine that runs X is a significant benefit - even if all your work is text based. The Apple X server that I have installed never worked properly and it's a hack like the various Windows X servers. To make things worse the current versions of OpenOffice for Mac use X and therefore don't work for me - I've been told that the next version of OpenOffice will fix this.

Then there's the issue of price. For a Mac you would want to have a machine with an Intel CPU which means a recent and expensive machine. For a PC the benefits of a 64bit machine over an old P3 or P4 are very small. For all the work I do a refurbished IBM or Compaq P3 machine would provide all the performance I require, have better software compatability than a Mac, and cost only $120 for a machine.

Also I imagine that some common and cheap PC expansions (such as KVM switches) would cost a lot more for a Mac.

You can run Linux on a Mac, but what's the point? You lose some of the hardware features so the Mac becomes an expensive PC that's not entirely compatible. I'd rather have a P3 PC on my desktop than the latest Mac.

But I wouldn't rule out recommending a Mac to other people. People who have no-one to help them run Linux are best advised to use a Mac. Of course Windows isn't viable due to security problems.

Wow!
I got a mail from the YAPC::Europe organizers telling me I won a book for registering early and sending in a submission (as I have previously told you). I was even more surprised to find out I am one out of two lucky winners! So my new book is Es lebe der Zentralfriedhof.
No news yet on whether my talk (Integrating Perl in a wider distribution: The Debian pkg-perl group) will be accepted... But this kind of incentive does push me towards attending even if I am not accepted - Of course, it depends on the University sending me there. But anyway, I'm a step closer to Vienna. Somebody wants to join over there?
Oh, and by the way: On my previous posting on this topic I linked to my conference proposal URL. Little did I know that this URL is private, accessible only to the Academic Committee and me. Yes, different from what I'm used to... but that's the way it works there.

Russell blogs about his new 22" cheap TFT monitor. You lucky bastard.
I use a 17" Dell LCD monitor at work (sorry, cannot recall the model), and I've been quite pleased with it. Granted, 1280x1024 isn't what I had gotten used to (1400x1050 on my previous laptop and previous work machine), but it does the trick - And for my current laptop, I went for a smaller machine, with a 12" wide-screen 1280x800 monitor. I still find the monitor somewhat small, and the missing 224 pixels _are_ noticeable - but the size is well worth it.
But what I've been playing at work with is changing the monitor orientation - This 17" Dell monitor can be set up vertically (1024x1280), and xrandr will merrily change the orientation. So far, I'm happy with this setup. I still feel there are some video-related quirks, and maybe the pixels are a bit off (i.e. black letters in a white background have a bit of a shadow), maybe it was visible as well in the regular configuration, but not as noticeable. But well, I feel it easier to work with for most of my work cases - For having a full-screen browser, each row is smaller and more rows fit on screen - It's quite pleasant. For doing Web development, having a horizontally split screen (one above of the other) between Emacs and the browser is quite natural. And when I use more than two frames (i.e. for following logfiles or debugging multi-factored breakages on servers ;-) ), well, they are small enough that it's similar to having the ol' regular layout.
I'd still like to get a second video card and monitor. I remember working that way in the job I left four years ago, and it was very comfortable.
BTW, Russell, for your needs I suggest you to try Ion. After all, who really needs to have a root window/background after all? :-)

Just got some cheerful news from Ryan Finnie. Apparently the new version of Finnix has an amd64 kernel on the x86 disk. Per his blog post about Finnix 89: using an AMD64 kernel on a supported platform yields several advantages: ... You can chroot into native 64-bit AMD64 filesystems. Considering that's just what I needed to do yesterday (see Journal/14 Germinal CCXV), it's pretty sad that I only had a Finnix 88 CD. It was pretty dumb of me to not check the latest version, and it was wrong to say that Finnix doesn't support amd64. But it's good to know that it will work in the future. tags: amd64 finnix rescue livecd recovery

RoCoCoCamp We had another organisational meeting for RoCoCoCamp at the Bande-Passante this evening. It was really good -- we had quite a few people, and made some of the down-to-the-wire plans for the event. RoCoCoCamp is the RecentChangesCamp in Montreal the 18-20th of April, 2007. It's an "unconference" -- a community-organized conference that, we hope, will let a lot of people connect in a new way. The great thing about RoCoCoCamp -- and RecentChangesCamp in general -- is that it's hosted by the wiki community -- people who love and use wikis. But we try to reach beyond wikis, to other associated communities, organizations and individual activists. I like to think of it like this: "wiki" is a concept associated loosely with other concepts -- tied to them in some concept-space. If we just bring together people who know and understand wiki, and have them talk together, we'll achieve very little. But if we bring together people who work, think and live in those closely-associated concept circles, we've got the opportunity for fascinating cross-cultural mixing -- passionate, creative accidents. I'm really looking forward to see what kind of creative accidents we engender at RoCoCoCamp 2007. I think it's going to be really fun. tags: wiki rocococamp concept map montreal

Hellas Spectrum I did an interview tonight on Hellas Spectrum, the local Greek-language television show here in Montreal. The host, Toula Drimonis, had seen the article about me in the Gazette, had recognized my name as Greek, and wrote to ask if I'd like to be on the show. The interview was really fun, and it was great to be around Greek-speaking people for a while. Montreal has a very strong Greek community, with which I've entirely failed to connect in the 5 years (!!!!) that I've lived here. But Maj and I have talked about sending Amita June to one of the very good tri-lingual Greek-English-French private schools here in Montreal, and we'd all like to make more connections in the Greek community. Hopefully this helps! I've always felt a little cut off from the more intense Greeks here and elsewhere because... welllll... I just don't speak Greek that well. So it was great doing Hellas Spectrum -- Toula's job at the show is to include those Greek-Canadians and Greek-Americans who maybe don't speak the language and live in the neighborhood, but need to be included in the greater Greek culture. I had a great time at the interview, and on the way from the green room to the studio, we ran into the show's producer. He asked me something incomprehensible (in Greek), and when I looked confused, he said, "You don't speak Greek? That's OK. Are you Greek, though? Are you Greek here?" He touched his chest. "Are you Greek in your heart?" Yes, I am. And it was cool to feel Greek in my heart tonight. Thanks to Toula for the invitation and the HS crew for making such a great show. tags: hellas spectrum greek montreal canada

Some minutes ago I saw the mail of Joerg Jaspert announcing food and accomodation sponsorship for all who applied in time. I applied at the end of december, exactly at the day where pentabarf was installed and announced on debian-devel-announce, so I will attend. Together with Daniel Baumann I already bought the flight (but I paid my one on my own since I earn a bit money), I will attend Debconf7 from 16th to 24th of June. I think you can’t imagine how happy I am right now and so I would like to say THANK YOU to all sponsors and the Debconf team who organizes all that stuff! I’m looking forward to see as many of you as possible in Edi

Snow, beautiful snow! We've got tons of snow coming out of the sky today. It's big and thick, what they call fourrure de li vre (rabbit fur) in Quebec. It's hard to believe we are having snow this late in the season (halfway into Germinal!), but it's kind of nice to have some snow. Especially since the United Nations report saying that Canada will lose its snow cover by 2100. Snow, please snow. tags: snow season climate change

JFS So, I'm one of those idiots who uses the IBM Journaled File System 2 (JFS2) as his root partition. Why? Because I've tried all the different journalling filesystems for Linux (reiserfs, ext3, xfs, jfs) and JFS is the one that works for me. It just seems to be the low-profile, clean, nicely-working FS. Unfortunately, I've been tracking Feisty Fawn for the last couple of weeks, and somewhere in there the JFS utility package, jfsutils, got uninstalled. Who knows why? But when I rebooted my machine today to try out a new kernel, my root partition came up in read-only mode -- because the system couldn't check the partition, because fsck.jfs couldn't be found. The fix, of course, would be to boot a live CD, chroot to the hard disk, and apt-get install the jfsutils. I typically use Finnix for this and other rescue/recovery projects, but in this situation Finnix failed me. My main computer is a honkin' amd64, and the x86 Finnix disk didn't want to let me chroot and run any amd64 binaries (like the stuff I needed to apt-get install jfsutils). So I ended up downloading and burning a Feisty live CD, dicking around with boot parameters for a while (noapic nolapic nosplash nonothing...), and finally got to a nice, friendly Gnome terminal. I mounted the hard drive using the Nautilus tools, and then tried to chroot to it -- D'OH! Permission denied. Took me a while to figure out that Nautilus mounts drives noexec by default. Once I got that working, I got jfsutils installed and was able to boot my machine again. Yay. Moral of the story: figure out a way to make packages that are crucial to you crucial to your package manager, too. Oh, and Finnix needs an amd64 build. tags: jfs feisty fawn ubuntu jfsutils finnix nautilus

YULblog YULblog meetup tonight at the Quincaillerie. YULblog is our local Montreal monthly blogging get-together. It's pretty fun, and has the highest female-to-male ratio of any technology event in Montreal. Which is great. I have a ton of work to do tonight (since I spent the afternoon dicking around with live CDs), but I'm going out anyways. YULblog comes but once a month, after all. tags: yulblog blogs montreal

N hours later Good time, that! I walked down rue Rachel to the Quincaillerie this evening around 9PM through a storm that was like being in a snowfight with Borribles. Thud thud thud! Big chunks of snow. But the Q. was pretty hoppin' for a snowy night in April, and I got to see Robin, Steve, Niko, Patrick and others. It was a fun time; the snow made it all the more special. tags: snow yulblog

It seems that the swik.net site is mirroring all my blog posts. The site seems to be doing some good things in terms of spreading information about free software and has a good presentation that makes such information easy to read. Also having a backup of my blog posts also could be handy if blogger ever does the wrong thing.

However it is a little annoying that when I write a blog post that refers to one of my older posts it will get a link back to swik.net. This is an annoyance for readers who want to see posts that link to mine from outside my blog. So I've been deleting those links when I notice them.

Also someone from Brazil has been linking to my posts, which is a good thing. Their blog also causes my blog to list theirs as a link which is also fine. However the problem is that their blog seems to detect me as being from an English speaking country and gives me an English version of the blog (rather than the presumably Portuguese version that has the link to my article). Assuming that someone speaks English because they reside in Australia is a bad idea, and breaking links is a worse one. So I've been deleting those links from my blog as they are of no use to people who are detected as English speakers (which comprises the vast majority of my blog readers). When someone blogs about one of my posts I want to see what they wrote, even if all that I can read are the parts that are quoted from me!

Finally I've been deleting some comments containing URLs. It seems that there are quite a few people trying to advertise their businesses by posting comments that bear some vague relation to a blog post with their company's URL included. You have to try harder than that if you want to promote yourself on my blog.

SomaFM reports that a new royalty system will require them to pay approximately $1 million in fees in 2007, instead of a fixed 12% rate as before; this will probably drive them out of business. They're asking U.S. citizens to write to their local Congress representative. I often listen to their indie channel.

I've uploaded simple-cdd 0.3.0 to experimental some time ago, but now us (Vagrant and I) initiated work on the new Simple-CDD that hopefully will be part of Lenny. We've been organizing the main code splitting it in smaller modules and removing dead code, like pkg-ltsp did with Ltsp during the last debconf, and as a side effect we will also burn the need of a big configuration file.

For now take a look at our experimental branches once simple-cdd 0.3.0 gets into sid and we establish the builds you will see a new upload to experimental with the goodies. Btw, create live-cd images with live-helper will be also a possibility anyime soon, now that we've tools/build instead embedded code with debian-cd related calls. You will be able to derivate from others Debian based distributions that don't use debian-cd to build their images too. Stay tuned!

FISL and Sacix
I am warming up for the next FISL - Porto Alegre, Brazil. Actually working on Sacix next release - a.k.a Sagui. We will have 3 mini community telecenters there where you will see Sacix running. For those who have no idea what i'm talking about - Sacix is a custom Debian distribution for labs and community telecenters that can be used to provide a full GNOME desktop for thin-clients or fat-clients and since Sacix is a profile based CDD, it has a 'desktop' based that is nothing but the Debian Etch Desktop with minor add-ons. Actually our major failures are: lack of human resources, website written in portuguese only. Sacix Sagui will have support for at least english, portuguese and spanish and (hopefully) the website will start being translated soon.

After Etch release, I plan to start a new group dedicated to merge Sacix features back to Debian (for Lenny) and act as a glue between debian-desktop supergroup, pkg-ltsp and related groups/packages e.g: dhcp server, tftp and nfs - there's a lot that needs to be done in terms of preseed friendliness on these. The good news is that the feature merge is already happening, but I'm the only person handling it directly. I'm not sure about the group name yet, but it might be Debian Sacix since "Debian Thin-Client(s)" or something similar don't really fit.

Anyway, I would be glad to see a Lenny user downloading our first ISO being able to choose not only the default desktop environment we've today but being able to select it and also the 'thin/fat client server'. In the end his server should be able to provide Debian Desktop Lenny through the lan for the clients. With Etch you need to install the default desktop environment and after that ltsp-server-standalone package, configure stuff like dhcp, nfs and run ltsp-build-client.

Get involved sending me a message!

See you during debconf! I can't wait to work IRL with some of you to improve Debian as a whole. Don't hesitate to contact me through the IRC for a bug squashing session or write new stuff from scratch. I've some plans for Debian Sacix, Utnubu, Simple-CDD, Debian Live, Ltsp and gnome-tasksel related work.