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18 March 2011

DebConf team: DebConf11: Short insiders summary of recent developments in DC11 organization (Posted by Vedran Omeragic)

Recently there has been some major developments in DebConf11 organization. In short, I will list some of the most important.

Website

Official DC11 website has finally been completed and now contains a great deal of information for those interested in attending this years conference. Some of the most notable changes include:

Navigation

Frontpage now contains a small menu with links to most important parts of website, like About, Registration, Contact Sidebar menu is now divided in 3 categories:

  • The Conference Links to pages which are directly connected with the Conference like About DC, Debian Day, Registration, Call for Papers, Talk Schedules, Payments Most of these links are hidden at the moment, and will be until the registration is open, to avoid any unnecessary confusion.
  • More Information Basic information for attendees like Important Dates, Accommodations, Venue, Visa Everything you need to know about your stay in Banja Luka.
  • Practical While these pages have almost nothing to do with the Conference itself, they do provide a vast information about city, getting to Bosnia, some practical information, as well as the Map of the whole city made my me :)

New Pages added
  • How Can I Help This page contains some basic information for anyone who wants to help out. Weather by volunteering, sponsoring, or just by adding a banner on their website
    DC11: How Can I Help?
  • Contact Instead of just sending visitors to mailto, we replaced it by a page which contains ALL contact information, emails AND phone numbers (which will be added just before DebCamp starts).
    DC11: Contact
  • Sponsorship Just like with the contact page, we made a page to be more user friendly to any interested parties or individuals, and contains most important info, such as sponsorship levels and contact address.
    DC11: Sponsorship
  • About DebConf11 Actually it s just a page with a content copied from frontpage (which is now used for something else).
    DC11: About DebConf11

New features:
  • Documentation Is now used to store all important documents and records for public use and sharing, like brochures, official government documents, important public mails, as well as the recordings of all IRC meeting logs. Can be found at:
    DC11: Documentation
  • Frontpage: Navigation To ensure the main goal of website, information availability, frontpage has been redesigned to provide maximum accessibility as well as easy access to any part of the website. DC11: Frontpage
  • Frontpage: Latest News To keep the public and attendees well informed of any important events and developments, we decided to add latest news section. Note however, that if you want to stay completely informed of any changes and updates, we still recommend subscribing to our mailing list, which can be found under contact page.
    DC11: Frontpage
  • Map of Banja Luka Because of lack of data on Google Maps and Open Street Map, as well as some other minor local maps, we made a small map of almost whole city and added around 60 or 70 locations which we consider to be of importance for our attendees. Such locations include hotels, parking spots, restaurants, bars, clubs, petrol stations, taxi stations, etc. This page uses simple JavaScript and is not dragable . Therefore we added Index Location to auto-locate the needed locations, as well as the legend to clarify the category of locations. Pointing your mouse over a certain location will open a small bubble with some info on that location/object. We should also point out that some of this data may not be 100% correct (ie working hours may be off ). Map is available at:
    DC11: Banja Luka City Map
Bosnian language

Site is now available on Bosnian language for native speaking attendees, should they have problems with English version. Every page is available on both languages, which can be changed by clicking on ba/en flag in upper left corner, or DC11: Bosnian Version.

Design

As you may have noticed, the official page received a small face lift. New header with the Government building, a small token of appreciation for all the help the Government is providing; as well as some minor changes in CSS and color scheme. While talking about design, we d like to thank Leandro G mez for his help with the header.

Sponsorship Sponsorship Levels

As agreed on the meeting, which took place on 22. of February, [Meeting logs], following sponsorship levels will be used for this years conference:

  • Steel < 1.000
  • Bronze > 1.000
  • Silver > 5.000
  • Gold > 10.000
  • Platinum > 20.000

Main reason for lowering amounts is due to last years results of high increase in the same. As for the benefits of these levels, the only thing changed is t-shirts / bags places; we believe t-shirts are much more noticeable than bags, and have therefore been promoted to Silver, while bags have been downgraded to Bronze. For a full list of requirements and benefits, please visit: DC11: Sponsorship Sponsorship Brochure

Sponsorship brochures have finally been completed and are available for a public distribution. The brochures are available in 3 qualities: low, high and original. Low and high quality brochures, ~6Mb and ~8Mb respectively, are for normal distribution to our sponsors, while original quality, at around 240Mb, is intended for maximum quality printing. Just as with the website, each quality is available in both Bosnian and English. Current version of the brochure is 1.1 and is most likely the final one. These brochures are available at Documentation page: DC11: Documentation >> Documents made by Local Team Or download them directly:

Also, I d like to thank Mirosal Remetic for making a great template and Pablo Duboue for some very valuable suggestions regarding the structure of the brochure.

Visas and Customs Rules

Many questions have been raised regarding Bosnian visa regime. We got in contact with the embassy and they clarified who can enter our country with(out) Visa. The list can be found on DC11 Wiki: Visa regime. It also states, which countries have a privilidge of ID-only entrance. If your country is not listed, that means you will need visa. If you want to know what exactly you need to get one, please visit the this official Government page and chose your country from a drop-down menu. As for the visa itself, as well as the list of Customs Rules, please read DC11: Visa.

Also, thanks to Darjan Prtic for getting the list from the Government officials.

So, what s next?

If you think, that is it for now, you are dead wrong. At this very moment following is being organized and developed:

  • Registration Registration Team is currently hacking penta and modifying it for this years needs and conditions. We expect to have registrations open by the end of March / beginning of April.
  • Travel and getting to Banja Luka Being one of the greatest obstacle, Travel Team is working hard on finding best routes for attendees and mapping the city
  • Sponsorship With final decision and agreement for sponsorship levels and brochures ready for public distribution, Sponsorship Team is now actively looking for new sponsors, global and local, preparing various promotional material, as well as planning our advertising strategy.

Final word

Well, these are pretty much the highlights of some recent and some future developments of DebConf11 organizational team. Mind you, there s a lot more going on, but I tried to give a small summary from the inside. Should you be interested in attending, helping out, sponsoring or just have some questions, feel free to ask them on our mailing list at: debconf11-localteam@lists.debconf.org. I should inform you that this is a public mailing list and its archives are available for a broader public. If you do not wish for your mail to be made public, please direct any enquiry directly to me trough the Contact Form or any other member of Core Local Team, Adnan Hodzic or Velimir Iveljic.

Russell Coker: Some Postfix Scripts for dealing with Outbound Spamming

I ve just written some small scripts to help me manage spam emergencies on a mail server. I ve been doing this thing with a bit of manual effort for a while, but after having done it once from a phone I want to optimise it a bit to reduce painful typing.My observation is that when a system I run is used as an outbound mail relay for spamming I will notice this reasonably quickly by the queues getting big. Some portion of mail that is queued is delayed due to general network issues and anti-spam measures that neither accept nor reject mail cause a typical spam message to be more likely to be queued than a typical non-spam message. So I look for accounts that send large amounts of mail.The biggest mail server I run (and the only one to have an outbound spam problem) is configured to not allow users to fake their sender address (IE use an address from gmail.com or another server) unless they pay extra. So the spam I deal with tends to have a valid origin email address that I can use.Queue CountingThe following command provides a sorted list of the accounts that have the most mail in the queue. This usually means a maximum of 2 or 3 spammers at the end of the list:mailq grep ^[A-F0-9] cut -c 42-80 sort uniq -c sort -n tailThe following function declaration makes the command get-top-sender find the sender with the largest number of queue entries (which has been a spammer every time I ve checked such things) and assign their email address to the environment variable $TOP_SENDER. It has to be a shell function so that the environment variable will be set in the context of the shell and available to child processes.function get-top-sender() TOP_SENDER_LINE=$(mailq grep ^[A-F0-9] cut -c 42-80 sort uniq -c sort -n tail -1) ; export TOP_SENDER=$(echo $TOP_SENDER_LINE cut -f2 -d\ ) ; TOP_COUNT=$(echo $TOP_SENDER_LINE cut -f1 -d\ ); echo "Top Sender is $TOP_SENDER with $TOP_COUNT messages" ; Viewing the QueueThe following script uses the first parameter or the environment variable $TOP_SENDER to specify the user who s mail should be read. In the normal course of events user email won t be read by the sysadmin, but if we are to determine whether a slew of email is spam or not there s no other way. So far I haven t seen a large number of queued messages not be spam, but I expect it ll happen eventually and the user will be happy that I checked it instead of locking their account and deleting all the queued mail. For readers who don t do sysadmin work, this is why we always have entries in the Terms of Service about the possibility of your email being read to fix technical problems or to investigate possible breaches of the ToS from your end.#!/bin/bash
set -e
mkdir -p ~/tmp/$$
cd ~/tmp/$$
if [ "$1" != "" ]; then
TOP_SENDER="$1"
fi
if [ "$TOP_SENDER" = "" ]; then
echo "Specify the sender on the command-line or in \$TOP_SENDER"
exit 1
fi
for n in $(mailq grep ^[A-F0-9].*$TOP_SENDER cut -c 1-10) ; do
FILE=$(echo $n sed -e "s/^\(.\)/\/var\/spool\/postfix\/deferred\/\1\/\1/" -e "s/ .*$//")
if [ -f "$FILE" ]; then
postcat "$FILE" > $n
else
echo "File $FILE missing, probably active"
fi
done
less *
rm -rf ~/tmp/$$Note that this needs to be done with a single less command so that I can terminate it by pressing q and easily go to the next file with :n . It does waste some server resources by running postcat on all queue files relating to the user in question, but that doesn t matter, servers are supposed to be powerful enough to cope with some inefficiency in processing uncommon operations.The Final CommandAfter that I have a script that connects by ssh to all outbound mail relays and deletes bad messages from the queues and then connects to the database server to lock the account that was used for sending the mail. I m not publishing it because it s specific to the servers I run.So when NAGIOS reports that the queue is too large I have one script to find the most likely culprit, one script to view the queued email from that account, and a final script to lock the account and purge the spam.I ve also added a reminder of the command names to /etc/motd as I don t want to be running ls and set on a phone to discover command names that I ve forgotten.Any suggestions for improvements to this will be welcome.

Steve Kemp: nodejs is fun

A while back I was working on a mod_rewrite compatible proxy server written in C. The reason for this is that my current webhost uses Apache2 in front ofa number of thttpd processes, and I'd like to remove apache and use something smaller/faster/neater. Dividing things up I'm running about ten domains, and only around half of them use mod_rewrite rules - small enough perhaps to port the rules, large enough to make it annoying. Upon reflection I think the thing to do is to replace apache with javascript - via node.js. Writing proxies with node.js is almost ridiculously simple - in fact doing anything HTTP-like is very very simple thanks to the bundled libraries. Time will tell whether this is a waste of time or not, but I'm confident I could listen upon *:80 and route requests to localhost:N for a few domains. As a trivial toy I wrote a simple transforming proxy last night which performed simple rewrites as it passed traffic about. Another fun, and possibly useful, thing I put together was a node.js port of the simple httpstat.us website. That server would have been easy to write in any number of languages, but in node it was almost too easy. Update - here is my rewriting node.js-based reverse-proxy. ObQuote: "I just need you to stop being nice to me unless you're gonna marry me. " - He's just not that into you.

17 March 2011

DebConf team: DebConf10: you can has videos (Posted by DebConf10 Videoteam)

Just (on) a very short notice: the streams are up! See the DebConf10 webpage for URLs and schedule. Enjoy! (We are using GeoIP and you might want to try different browsers )

16 March 2011

John Goerzen: A Proud Dad

I saw this on my computer screen the other day, and I ve got to say it really warmed my heart. I ll explain below if it doesn t provoke that reaction for you. Evidence a 4-year-old has been using my computer So here s why that made me happy. Well for one, it was the first time Jacob had left stuff on my computer that I found later. And of course he left his name there. But moreover, he s learning a bit about the Unix shell. sl is a command that displays an animated steam locomotive. I taught him how to use the semicolon to combine commands. So he has realized that he can combine calls to sl with the semicolon to get a series of a LOT of steam trains all at once. And was very excited about this discovery. Also he likes how error messages start with the word bash .

Lars Wirzenius: QR codes for backup?

This is probably an idea obvious to everyone, and probably someone's already implemented this, but just in case they haven't, I'll throw this idea out there for someone to hack on. QR codes are two-dimensional bar codes. You can take arbitrary data and encode it into a barcode, which you can then print out. Later, you can scan it in and decode the barcode, and get the original data back. barcode-1.png Given that printed paper is fairly durable and unlikely to go suddenly bad, like hard disks do, this can be used for backups. I did a quick experiment. I put 2000 bytes per barcode and printed it out in various sizes: 10, 20, 30, and 70 mm squares. Then I scanned them in. The 70 mm one was the only one that could be decoded, the others were too small and smudged. It should be possible to fit 12 squares of just under 70 mm on an A4 sized page. That's 24000 bytes of raw data. What could you fit in that space? Or several pages of that? It's not dense enough for storing large amounts of data (images, audio, video), but there's a number of important things that are not so large. Perhaps secret keys, or your Revelation keyring file? For ease of use, it would be good to have a tool to take arbitrary binary data, compress it if possible, divide it into chunks of suitable size, number each chunk, and output a PDF with all the QR codes laid out optimally, ready for printing.

Matt Zimmerman: DEX: Debian and its derivatives, getting things done together

Since I resumed active status in Debian, I ve been thinking about how to bridge the gap between Debian and its derivatives*. I ve spoken at length with Zack, the attendees of the Derivatives BoF at DebConf 10, and the fine folks at the Derivatives Front Desk about the technical and social issues affecting derivative projects, and could probably write a very thorough series of blog posts on the subject. Instead, Zack and I decided to try doing something about it: we have begun a project to test out a new approach to the problem. Introducing DEX DEX is all about action: merging patches, fixing bugs, crunching data, whatever is necessary to get changes from derivatives into Debian proper. DEX doesn t try to change the way any existing project works, but adds a fast path for getting code from one place to another. DEX is a joint task force where developers from Debian and its derivatives work together on this common goal. As a pilot project, we ve established an Ubuntu DEX Team focused on merging code from Ubuntu into Debian. With members from both projects, we hope to be able to resolve blockage anywhere in the pipeline. Whatever needs to get done in order to merge an Ubuntu patch, someone in the Ubuntu DEX team will know what to do. If we get good results with Ubuntu, we hope that other derivatives will follow. With thanks to David Paleino, we re excited that the Utnubu project is merging into DEX as it aligns well with their goals. I m very grateful to have Colin Watson and James Westby signed up to contribute as well. Our first project is simple: turn this list green. This is an archive of quite old patches from Ubuntu, most of which have probably been merged already or made obsolete, but they pre-date any kind of tracking system so they need to be verified. Once that s done, we ll move on to a new project with a new todo list. If you want to see Debian benefit from technical work done in derivatives, DEX is a chance for you to act together to make it happen. If you work on a derivative and want to carry a smaller delta, come and join us. I m sure we ll learn a lot from this experience. * There are many instances of great cooperation between Debian and derivative distributions, including joint package maintenance teams, and some derivatives are even part of the Debian project. Nonetheless, there are areas were most people I ve spoken to agree that we need to do better. This is what I ve referred to as the gap .

Thorsten Glaser: HOWTO OpenID Delegate with Launchpad Login Service

Rhonda suggested I document how to use the LLS (Launchpad Login Service their implementation of an OpenID provider) as Delegate, which basically means, you can put something up on your webpage, which can be a simple static (X)HTML page like mine (a /index.htm is especially nice, a /~user/index.htm works too), and use its URI and not https://launchpad.net/~me to login. For example, this often hides the LLS from view e.g. in blog comments, such as those where Canonical is being criticised but it s also yours, easier to type and to change if you switch service providers. The basic idea is to go to your Launchpad user page and view its page source. Look for openid relation links in the header on Rhonda s the value we re looking for is cyLQbcp , and you see it several times.

Now you put this on your web page:

	<!-- begin: OpenID delegation to LP -->
	 <link rel="openid.server" href="https://login.launchpad.net/+openid" />
	 <link rel="openid.delegate" href="https://login.launchpad.net/+id/cyLQbcp" />
	 <link rel="openid2.provider" href="https://login.launchpad.net/+openid" />
	 <link rel="openid2.local_id" href="https://login.launchpad.net/+id/cyLQbcp" />
	<!-- end: OpenID delegation -->

Of course, insert your, not Rhonda s, ID. Do note that we don t copy the X-XRDS-Location tag (that breaks things for some unknown reason), but otherwise, what we insert on our page is pretty much a copy of the info on the user page (maybe it s a Delegate page, too?). As usual, try at your own risk, bug Canonical if it breaks. It works with AO3, Gerrit Code Review, and others though (interestingly enough, better in Lynx than GUI browsers because I stay logged in across Lynx sessions (and just have to confirm sending my information to the accessing site), whereas I have to re-login to the LLS in every GUI browser session). As with the LLS generally, to access a site which is not recognised is expected and worked on with low urgency (mostly cosmetical, I think).

Gerfried Fuchs: Games Team IRC Meeting

As Paul Wise already blogged, there is going to be a IRC meeting of the Debian/Ubuntu Games Team on the upcoming friday night. It will be held at 18th of March at 21:00 UTC in #debian-games on irc.oftc.net, so if you are interested in bringing the Games Team up to pace again, want to join and wonder how you could help, please attend. The agenda isn't final yet, the doodle poll about it is still open, if you want to put your preferences in.

/debian permanent link Comments: 0 Flattr this

Daniel Kahn Gillmor: CryptLib and the OpenSSL License

I spent part of today looking at packaging Peter Gutmann's CryptLib for debian. My conclusion: it may not be worth my time. One of the main reasons i wanted to package it for debian is because i would like to see more OpenPGP-compliant free software available to debian users and developers, particularly if the code is GPL-compatible. Cryptlib makes it quite clear that it intends to be GPL-compatible:
cryptlib is distributed under a dual license that allows free, open-source use under a GPL-compatible license and closed-source use under a standard commercial license.
However, a significant portion of the cryptlib codebase (particularly within the bn/ and crypt/ directories) appears to derive directly from OpenSSL, and it retains Eric Young's copyright and licensing. This licensing retains the so-called "advertising clause" that is generally acknowledged to be deliberately incompatible with the GPL. (A common counterargument for this incompatibility is that OpenSSL should be considered a "System Library" for GPL'ed tools that link against it; whether or not you believe this for tools linked against OpenSSL, this counterargument clearly does not hold for a project that embeds and ships OpenSSL code directly, as CryptLib does) This does not mean that CryptLib is not free software (it is!), nor does it mean that you cannot link it against GPL'ed code (you can!). However, you probably can't distribute the results of linking CryptLib against any GPL'ed code, because the GPL is incompatible with the OpenSSL license. The un-distributability of derived GPL-covered works makes the CryptLib package much less appealing to me, since i want to be able to write distributable code that links against useful libraries, and many of the libaries i care about happen to be under the GPL. I also note that Peter Gutmann and CryptLib Security Software (apparently some sort of company set up to distribute CryptLib) may be in violation of Eric Young's License, which states: 
 * 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software
 *    must display the following acknowledgement:
 *    "This product includes cryptographic software written by
 *     Eric Young (eay@cryptsoft.com)"
 *    The word 'cryptographic' can be left out if the rouines from the library
 *    being used are not cryptographic related :-).
A Google search for Eric Young's name on cryptlib.com yields no hits. I do find his name on page 340 of the Cryptlib manual, but that hardly seems like it covers "All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software". I suppose it's also possible that CryptLib has negotiated an alternate license with Eric Young that I simply don't know about. In summary: i think CryptLib could go into debian, but its incorporation of OpenSSL-licensed code makes it less useful than i was hoping it would be. I have a few other concerns about the package after looking it over in more detail. I suspect these are fixable one way or another, but i haven't sorted them out yet. I'm not sure i'll spend the time to do so based on the licensing issues i sorted out above. But in case anyone feels inspired, the other concerns i see are:
embedded code copies
In addition to embedded (and slightly-modified) copies of bn/ and crypt/ from OpenSSL, CryptLib contains an embedded copy of zlib. Debian has good reasons for wanting to avoid embedded code copies. I've got it CryptLib building against the system copy of zlib, but the bits copied from OpenSSL seem to be more heavily patched, which might complicate relying on the system version.
executable stack
lintian reports shlib-with-executable-stack for the library after it is built. I don't fully understand what this means or how to fix it, but i suspect it derives from the following set of object files that also have an executable stack: 
0 dkg@pip:~/src/cryptlib/cryptlib$ for foo in $(find . -iname '*.o'); do
>  if ! readelf -S "$foo"   grep -q .note.GNU-stack ; then
>   echo "$foo"
>  fi
> done
./shared-obj/desenc.o
./shared-obj/rc5enc.o
./shared-obj/md5asm.o
./shared-obj/castenc.o
./shared-obj/bfenc.o
./shared-obj/rmdasm.o
./shared-obj/sha1asm.o
./shared-obj/bn_asm.o
./shared-obj/rc4enc.o
0 dkg@pip:~/src/cryptlib/cryptlib$
They probably all need to be fixed, unless there's a good reason for them to be that way (in which case they need to be documented).
non-PIC code
lintian reports shlib-with-non-pic-code on the library after it is built. I don't fully understand what this means, or how to resolve it cleanly, but i imagine this is just a question of sorting out the details.
Anyone interested in using my packaging attempts as a jumping off point can start with: 
git clone git://lair.fifthhorseman.net/~dkg/cryptlib
Oh, and please correct me about anything in this post; I'd be especially happy to hear that my analysis of the licensing issues above is wrong :) Tags: cryptlib, gpl, licensing, openssl

Paul Wise: Debian/Ubuntu games team meeting

The Debian/Ubuntu games team has been less active over the past few years, so we are having an IRC meeting at the end of the week as part of an attempt to revive the team a bit. Some of you might have seen the announcement in the Debian Misc Developer News issue 26. So if you have an interest in gaming and Debian/Ubuntu, please join us on the IRC channel. Gamers and lurkers welcome, come one come all! The agenda for the meeting is not yet finalised so if you would like to influence it please take a look at the poll. The primary focus of the meeting looks like it will be reviving the team and looking forward to our goals for Debian wheezy.

15 March 2011

David Welton: Coming Soon: Easy Kindle Publishing with LiberWriter.com

The Kindle isn't the most beautiful device out there - it's not "beautiful", the keyboard takes away some elegance, but I'm absolutely smitten with mine. I like to read, a lot, and being able to instantly beam books to my house is just fantastic. Kindles and other devices like them are also changing the world of publishing, going from the known world of physical books that can't be easily copied to another information good like movies or songs with something of an uncertain future. Yet they're also opening up many possibilities: thanks to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing program, it just got very easy to publish books to a platform that a lot of people regularly search for good things to read. Once upon a time, "vanity publishing" was something done by those who simply wanted to see their names in print, but couldn't actually find a publisher, and thus carried some stigma. Now, though, why not publish something you've always wanted to? Granted, without an editor, and publisher to promote your work, you probably won't become rich or famous, but many people write for the enjoyment of doing so. And who knows... there are already several cases of people publishing directly to the Kindle and making a decent income at it. Indeed, I have several things I'm thinking of writing about that clicked when I found the Kindle publishing program. Maybe now it's time to dust off some ideas I've had and start working on them a little bit at a time. Then, of course, my geeky side took over and I started wondering how the mechanics of it actually work. Messily, it turns out: the preferred format for Kindle authoring is variant of HTML that's not at all what we're used to in these days of ever more potent CSS. The good side of it is that books mostly come out looking the same on the Kindle, and the end user can control how they want to visualize them. The bad side of the system utilized is that there are a lot of tips and tricks and little things to know about the whole process that can be annoying even for someone who knows HTML pretty well. For someone who just wants to write stuff and not worry about it, and who perhaps is not very familiar with HTML, the whole thing can be a huge mess and very frustrating. Which of course looks like an interesting challenge. I set out to work on LiberWriter.com several weeks ago, and it should be ready within the next week or two. In short, it's a system that lets you concentrate on writing and, as much as possible, tries to get out of your way in order to let you concentrate on your content. It is also targeted very specifically at the Kindle (for the time being at least), so as to really focus on making things work on that platform. For instance, it can automatically generate a table of contents, a noted pain point in writing for the Kindle. I have a number of other ideas up my sleeve too, that I'm excited to work on. I'm also definitely abandoning the "let's release it for free, for fun, and see if I can find a way to make money later" model of many past projects, and treating it like a business. I think the price I have in mind is very competitive, if you look at, for instance, conversion services that take word and spit out Kindle-specific HTML. Anyway, have a look at the site and sign up if you're interested: as soon as it's ready, I'll email and let you know. There'll be a somewhat limited trial version so that you can play around with it and see if you like it before buying the full version.

Michal &#268;iha&#345;: GPL violation - getting more sources

It has been some time since I updated information about Gammu usage in proprietary software, so here it comes (see other posts tagged with gpl for more information). I still have troubles to explain Anwsoft what they are supposed to release. The good news is that they are still communicating and even providing some updated sources (see git repository), unfortunately they still construct fake projects rather than providing real sources of the application. Anyway if anybody is interested in digging in the sources and finding bits which might be interesting for porting to current Gammu code base, please go ahead, I probably won't have time for that in near future.

Filed under: English Gammu Gpl 3 comments Flattr this!

Mark Brown: ASoC updates in 2.6.38

Linux 2.6.38 was just released, with another big update to ASoC including:

Josselin Mouette: Copyright assignment is killing the free in free software

A few weeks ago, at work, we were looking for a solution to a tricky printing problem: how to manage, in a centralized infrastructure, a large number of locations, worstations and printers? One of the consultants working for us came up with a great idea. With only a 20-line patch to CUPS, workstations would be able to find which printers are on the same location. 20 lines of code, instead of a complex virtualisation solution? This is exactly the kind of reasons why we use free software: when there s something wrong, you can fix it. When you need something more, you can code it. Now, many others could benefit of such an improvement, and we don t want to maintain a forked version of CUPS, so we forwarded it upstream, who looked interested. But upstream now being Apple, they requested a stupid copyright assignment agreement. I will leave to the reader s imagination the complexity of getting such a document signed in a Fortune 500 company with no business with Apple. This will, of course, not happen - and if the decision was mine, the answer would have been a clear No. No, because I want to improve free software, not to contribute to Apple s proprietary version. No, because copyleft is about giving as much as you take. How many contributions are being left out of CUPS because of this stupid copyright assignment? It looks to me that such software is doomed to remain crippled as long as companies like Apple are in charge of their maintenance. There is free software. And there is free software by Apple. And Oracle. And Canonical.

Michal &#268;iha&#345;: phpMyAdmin translation status

Last weekend we've released phpMyAdmin 3.4.0-beta4, hopefully last beta and there are still lot of translations missing. The only new complete translation compared to last week is German, so we now have 13 translations at 100%: There are still lot of translations which would need some love, for example: I'm happy that not only translation status is improving, but some translators also reviewed older translations, so that it is more consistent. The great work in this area was done in Russian. And of course there is still great ongoing effort on Urdu translation. You can help make translation to your language better! If your language is missing just let me know (either in comments or by email).

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Colin Watson: Wubi bug 693671

I spent most of last week working on Ubuntu bug 693671 ("wubi install will not boot - phase 2 stops with: Try (hd0,0): NTFS5"), which was quite a challenge to debug since it involved digging into parts of the Wubi boot process I'd never really touched before. Since I don't think much of this is very well-documented, I'd like to spend a bit of time explaining what was involved, in the hope that it will help other developers in the future. Wubi is a system for installing Ubuntu into a file in a Windows filesystem, so that it doesn't require separate partitions and can be uninstalled like any other Windows application. The purpose of this is to make it easy for Windows users to try out Ubuntu without the need to worry about repartitioning, before they commit to a full installation. Wubi started out as an external project, and initially patched the installer on the fly to do all the rather unconventional things it needed to do; we integrated it into Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, which involved turning these patches into proper installer facilities that could be accessed using preseeding, so that Wubi only needs to handle the Windows user interface and other Windows-specific tasks. Anyone familiar with a GNU/Linux system's boot process will immediately see that this isn't as simple as it sounds. Of course, ntfs-3g is a pretty solid piece of software so we can handle the Windows filesystem without too much trouble, and loopback mounts are well-understood so we can just have the initramfs loop-mount the root filesystem. Where are you going to get the kernel and initramfs from, though? Well, we used to copy them out to the NTFS filesystem so that GRUB could read them, but this was overly complicated and error-prone. When we switched to GRUB 2, we could instead use its built-in loopback facilities, and we were able to simplify this. So all was more or less well, except for the elephant in the room. How are you going to load GRUB? In a Wubi installation, NTLDR (or BOOTMGR in Windows Vista and newer) still owns the boot process. Ubuntu is added as a boot menu option using BCDEdit. You might then think that you can just have the Windows boot loader chain-load GRUB. Unfortunately, NTLDR only loads 16 sectors - 8192 bytes - from disk. GRUB won't fit in that: the smallest core.img you can generate at the moment is over 18 kilobytes. Thus, you need something that is small enough to be loaded by NTLDR, but that is intelligent enough to understand NTFS to the point where it can find a particular file in the root directory of a filesystem, load boot loader code from it, and jump to that. The answer for this was GRUB4DOS. Most of GRUB4DOS is based on GRUB Legacy, which is not of much interest to us any more, but it includes an assembly-language program called GRLDR that supports doing this very thing for FAT, NTFS, and ext2. In Wubi, we build GRLDR as wubildr.mbr, and build a specially-configured GRUB core image as wubildr. Now, the messages shown in the bug report suggested a failure either within GRLDR or very early in GRUB. The first thing I did was to remember that GRLDR has been integrated into the grub-extras ntldr-img module suitable for use with GRUB 2, so I tried building wubildr.mbr from that; no change, but this gave me a modern baseline to work on. OK; now to try QEMU (you can use tricks like qemu -hda /dev/sda if you're very careful not to do anything that might involve writing to the host filesystem from within the guest, such as recursively booting your host OS ... [update: Tollef Fog Heen and Zygmunt Krynicki both point out that you can use the -snapshot option to make this safer]). No go; it hung somewhere in the middle of NTLDR. Still, I could at least insert debug statements, copy the built wubildr.mbr over to my test machine, and reboot for each test, although it would be slow and tedious. Couldn't I? Well, yes, I mostly could, but that 8192-byte limit came back to bite me, along with an internal 2048-byte limit that GRLDR allocates for its NTFS bootstrap code. There were only a few spare bytes. Something like this would more or less fit, to print a single mark character at various points so that I could see how far it was getting: 
	pushal
	xorw	%bx, %bx	/* video page 0 */
	movw	$0x0e4d, %ax	/* print 'M' */
	int	$0x10
	popal
In a few places, if I removed some code I didn't need on my test machine (say, CHS compatibility), I could even fit in cheap and nasty code to print a single register in hex (as long as you didn't mind 'A' to 'F' actually being ':' to '?' in ASCII; and note that this is real-mode code, so the loop counter is %cx not %ecx): 
	/* print %edx in dumbed-down hex */
	pushal
	xorw	%bx, %bx
	movb	$0xe, %ah
	movw	$8, %cx
1:
	roll	$4, %edx
	movb	%dl, %al
	andb	$0xf, %al
	int	$0x10
	loop	1b
	popal
After a considerable amount of work tracking down problems by bisection like this, I also observed that GRLDR's NTFS code bears quite a bit of resemblance in its logical flow to GRUB 2's NTFS module, and indeed the same person wrote much of both. Since I knew that the latter worked, I could use it to relieve my brain of trying to understand assembly code logic directly, and could compare the two to look for discrepancies. I did find a few of these, and corrected a simple one. Testing at this point suggested that the boot process was getting as far as GRUB but still wasn't printing anything. I removed some Ubuntu patches which quieten down GRUB's startup: still nothing - so I switched my attentions to grub-core/kern/i386/pc/startup.S, which contains the first code executed from GRUB's core image. Code before the first call to real_to_prot (which switches the processor into protected mode) succeeded, while code after that point failed. Even more mysteriously, code added to real_to_prot before the actual switch to protected mode failed too. Now I was clearly getting somewhere interesting, but what was going on? What I really wanted was to be able to single-step, or at least see what was at the memory location it was supposed to be jumping to. Around this point I was venting on IRC, and somebody asked if it was reproducible in QEMU. Although I'd tried that already, I went back and tried again. Ubuntu's qemu is actually built from qemu-kvm, and if I used qemu -no-kvm then it worked much better. Excellent! Now I could use GDB: 
(gdb) target remote   qemu -gdb stdio -no-kvm -hda /dev/sda
This let me run until the point when NTLDR was about to hand over control, then interrupt and set a breakpoint at 0x8200 (the entry point of startup.S). This revealed that the address that should have been real_to_prot was in fact garbage. I set a breakpoint at 0x7c00 (GRLDR's entry point) and stepped all the way through to ensure it was doing the right thing. In the process it was helpful to know that GDB and QEMU don't handle real mode very well between them. Useful tricks here were: Single-stepping showed that GRLDR was loading the entirety of wubildr correctly and jumping to it. The first instruction it jumped to wasn't in startup.S, though, and then I remembered that we prefix the core image with grub-core/boot/i386/pc/lnxboot.S. Stepping through this required a clear head since it copies itself around and changes segment registers a few times. The interesting part was at real_code_2, where it copies a sector of the kernel to the target load address, and then checks a known offset to find out whether the "kernel" is in fact GRUB rather than a Linux kernel. I checked that offset by hand, and there was the smoking gun. GRUB recently acquired Reed-Solomon error correction on its core image, to allow it to recover from other software writing over sectors in the boot track. This moved the magic number lnxboot.S was checking somewhat further into the core image, after the first sector. lnxboot.S couldn't find it because it hadn't copied it yet! A bit of adjustment and all was well again. The lesson for me from all of this has been to try hard to get an interactive debugger working. Really hard. It's worth quite a bit of up-front effort if it saves you from killing neurons stepping through pages of code by hand. I think the real-mode debugging tricks I picked up should be useful for working on GRUB in the future.

14 March 2011

Erich Schubert: GNOME3 in Debian experimental - python and dconf

As GNOME3 slowly enters Debian experimental, things become a bit ... experimental.
The file manager can be set to still draw icons on the desktop, but that doesn't entirely work yet (it will also open folders as desktop then...)
One machine had lost the keyboard settings. I could not set the fonts I wanted...
There is a tool called dconf-editor that will allow you to manually tweak some settings such as the fonts. But it doesn't seem to have support for value lists yet - and the keyboard mappings setting is a string list.
So here's sample python code to modify such a value:
from gi.repository import Gio
s = Gio.Settings.new("org.gnome.libgnomekbd.keyboard")
s.set_strv("layouts", ["de"])
Update: you could also install the optional libglib2.0-bin and use the gsettings command.

Scott Kitterman: DNS and Python

If you ve ever needed to care about DNS and Python, you probably know about pydns (python-dns) and dnspython (python-dnspython). Both have been around a long time (dnspython hit 1.0 in 2003 and the origins of pydns are long enough ago that they are lost to the mists of time I think dnslib.py, from which it is derived was initially developed with Python 1.5). They each have their advantages.
Until recently, if you needed DNS functionality and you re interested in Python 3, you were out of luck. Last month I had some business travel with long airplane rides that I put to good use and I ported pydns to Python 3. Upstream took the changes and released it as py3dns, so now you have a Python 3 DNS option. Packages are available in Debian Wheezy/Unstable and in Ubuntu Natty as python3-dns. It passes all the tests (better than the existing pydns), but I know test coverage is incomplete, so take it for a spin and let me know if there are problems. The code isn t pretty (it s set of minimal changes to get to a working Python 3 port), but it seems to work OK.

Axel Beckert: Planet Commandline officially online

Around the first bunch of postings in my Useful but Unknown Unix Tools, Tobias Klauser of inotail and Symlink fame came up with the idea of making a Planet (i.e. a blog aggregator) of all the comandline blogs and blog categories out there. A first Planet Venus running prototype based on the template and style sheets of Planet Symlink was quickly up and running. I just couldn t decide if I should use an amber or phosphor green style for this new planet. Marius Rieder finally had the right idea to solve this dilemma: Offer both, an amber and a phosphor green style. Christian Herzog pointed me to the right piece of code at A List Apart. So here is it, available in you favourite screen colors:

Planet Commandline For a beginning, the following feeds are included:

Which leads us to the discussion what kind of feeds should be included in Planet Commandline. Of course, all blogs or blog categories which (nearly) solely post neat tips and tricks about the command line in English are welcome. Microblogging feeds containing (only) small but useful command line tips are welcome, too, if they neither permanently contain dozens of posts per day nor have a low signal-to-noise ratio. Unfortunately most identi.ca groups do, so they re not suitable for such a planet. What I m though unsure about are non-English feeds. Yes, there s one in already, but I noticed this only after including Beat s Chr tertee and his FreeBSD command line tips are really good. So if it doesn t go overboard, I think it s ok. If there are too many non-English feeds, I ll probably split Planet Commandline off into at least three Planets: One with all feeds, one with English only and one with all non-English feeds or maybe even one feed per language. But for now that s still a long way off. Another thing I m unsure about are more propgram specific blogs like the impressive Mastering Emacs blog about mastering the world s best text editor . *g* (Yeah, I didn t include that one yet. But as soon someone shows me the vi-equivalent of that blog, I ll include both. Anyone thinks, spf13 s vim category is up to that?) Oh, and sure, any shell-specific (zsh, tcsh, bash, mksh, busybox) tips & tricks blogs don t count as program-specific blogs like some $EDITOR, $BROWSER, or $VCS specific blogs do. :-) Of course I m happy about further suggestions for feeds to include in Planet Commandline. Just remember that the feed should provide (at least nearly) exclusively command line tips, tricks or howtos. Suggestions for links to other commandline related planets are welcome, too.

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