People are using computers, everywhere, really! ;)
As you might guess correctly, so do I.Basically, I am using three computers: my laptop (ThinkPad X201s, awesome machine, but pabs told me not to post any more adverts for ThinkPads on
Planet Debian *g*), my smartphone (Motorola Milestone, yes, that counts as a computer) and random_pc (for random as in my girlfriends or some other trusted (!!!) friends computer).
My laptop is running Debian GNU/Linux unstable with Xfce4.6, my smartphone is running Android 2.2.1 Froyo, my girlfriend has Ubuntu with GNOME, a friend runs Debian unstable with GNOME, another one Arch Linux with KDE4 and so on. And on all these machines I want be able to work, which means I have to read mail and rss, chat via IRC,
JabberXMPP and ICQ, have a look at my to-do list, ssh into different machines, write some code, tweet and dent etc.In the following series of posts I will describe how I can handle about 90% of my work on every (trusted) computer out there, using ssh, screen, mutt, irssi, BitlBee, newsbeuter etc.As I am describing the setup as a Desktop in a shell , let s start with a login- and desktop/window-manager: ssh+screen.sshObviously, you need a machine to ssh into it, where the Desktop will live on. For me, that s my home router/fileserver/vm-server
dorei, running Debian GNU/Linux
LennySqueeze with OpenSSH as a kind of login manager ;)Yes, my user is allowed to login with a password instead of a public key. And well, that s all for the login-manager, no extra configuration needed.screenAfter logging in, I start my window-manager with
screen -rd,
-r for reattach a running screen session,
-d for detach it if it is already attached somewhere else. Or I can start a new session by just typing
screen. Inside the screen I have multiple windows (one can create new ones with
^A c) with all the needed software running. I can switch windows by pressing
^A N, N being the number of the window,
^A n for the next window,
^A p for the previous one or
^A ^a for the last one. Or I can get a window-list with
^A w. If needed, I can rename windows with
^A A, followed by the new name. That should be enough for almost everyone. Let s just add a window-list to the bottom (as you might have seen on GNOME, Xfce, KDE and even Windows ;) by adding the following to the
~/.screenrc:
caption always " " # clear line before hardstatus
hardstatus alwayslastline "% = kb [ % B %H:$USER % b ][ %=% w %?%-Lw%?% b (% W %n*%f %t%?(%u)%?% b )% w %?%+Lw%?%?%= % b ][% B %l % B % W %d.%0m % b ]"
You get the current host- and username, the machine load and the date for free ;)Even if it is possible, I do not have any autostart like stuff in my
.screenrc as the machine is running stable and I start the screen and the apps inside maybe once a year after a reboot.screenrcMy
.screenrc looks like this:
# detach on hangup
autodetach on
# don't display the copyright page
startup_message off
# set scrollback to 2000 lines, default 100
defscrollback 2000
# set silencewait to 15 seconds, default 30
silencewait 15
# new shells should be started as login-shells
shell -$SHELL
# make a fancy statusline
caption always " " # clear line before hardstatus
hardstatus alwayslastline "% = kb [ % B %H:$USER % b ][ %=% w %?%-Lw%?% b (% W %n*%f %t%?(%u)%?% b )% w %?%+Lw%?%?%= % b ][% B %l % B % W %d.%0m % b ]"
# make higlighting bold, black on blue background
sorendition +b bk
# some fixes, no I do not know where they come from :)
termcap xterm hs@:cs=\E[%i%d;%dr:im=\E[4h:ei=\E[4l
terminfo xterm hs@:cs=\E[%i%p1%d;%p2%dr:im=\E[4h:ei=\E[4l
termcapinfo xterm Z0=\E[?3h:Z1=\E[?3l:is=\E[r\E[m\E[2J\E[H\E[?7h\E[?1;4;6l
termcapinfo xterm* OL=100
termcapinfo xterm 'VR=\E[?5h:VN=\E[?5l'
termcapinfo xterm 'k1=\E[11~:k2=\E[12~:k3=\E[13~:k4=\E[14~'
termcapinfo xterm 'kh=\EOH:kI=\E[2~:kD=\E[3~:kH=\EOF:kP=\E[5~:kN=\E[6~'
termcapinfo xterm 'hs:ts=\E]2;:fs=\007:ds=\E]2;screen\007'
termcapinfo xterm 'vi=\E[?25l:ve=\E[34h\E[?25h:vs=\E[34l'
termcapinfo xterm 'XC=K%,%\E(B,[\304,\\\\\326,]\334, \344, \366, \374,~\337'
termcapinfo xterm* be
termcapinfo xterm xterms xs ti@:te=\E[2J
termcapinfo wy75-42 xo:hs@
termcapinfo wy* CS=\E[?1h:CE=\E[?1l:vi=\E[?25l:ve=\E[?25h:VR=\E[?5h:VN=\E[?5l:cb=\E[1K:CD=\E[1J
termcapinfo hp700 'Z0=\E[?3h:Z1=\E[?3l:hs:ts=\E[62"p\E[0$~\E[2$~\E[1$ :fs=\E[0 \E[61"p:ds=\E[62"p\E[1$~\E[61"p:ic@'
termcap vt100* ms:AL=\E[%dL:DL=\E[%dM:UP=\E[%dA:DO=\E[%dB:LE=\E[%dD:RI=\E[%dC
terminfo vt100* ms:AL=\E[%p1%dL:DL=\E[%p1%dM:UP=\E[%p1%dA:DO=\E[%p1%dB:LE=\E[%p1%dD:RI=\E[%p1%dC
termcapinfo linux C8
# some bindings
bind k
bind ^k
bind .
bind ^\
bind \\
bind ^h
bind h
bind 'w' windowlist -b
bind 'W' windows
bind 'K' kill
bind 'I' login on
bind 'O' login off
bind ' ' history
bind = resize =
bind + resize +3
bind - resize -3
# Mutt demands this
# http://wiki.mutt.org/?MuttFaq/Appearance
defbce on
term screen-bce
That s all for my screen setup. The obvious, boring screenshot follows:
See you next time, when I will present my mutt setup here.
We have many orphaned packages in Debian. Those are packages that no longer have a maintainer willing to care for them. They are a problem for several reasons. Often, there have better alternatives (that s often why the maintainer gave up maintenance), but users keep installing them because they show up in apt-cache search. Or, they might be broken, without anybody noticing because they only have a few users. Also, developers need to take them into account. They might slow down transitions, have RC bugs that need fixing, etc.
So, there are good reasons to remove some of the orphaned packages from the Debian archive. Not all of them. But those that have been orphaned for a long time without anybody stepping up to take over the maintenance, have very few users according to popcon, etc. Removing some of them also makes it easier to expose the ones that should really find an adopter.
Also, that removal is not final. The good reason to do this now is that we are at the beginning of a release cycle, and that it will be easy to reintroduce packages that are really needed during the next two years. Also, packages (both source and binaries) are still available on snapshot.debian.org, so users can still install them from there, and re-uploading them to Debian is very easy if someone wants to adopt them.
So, how do I proceed? I use bapase, and go through specific sets of packages (using a custom version of bapase to restrict the list to those packages). For example, orphaned packages that have a popcon lower than 50, have been orphaned for more than 500 days, and whose orphaning bugs have not been modified in the last 100 days. Then, I read the bug log, and decide if there s a reason to keep the package. If there s not, I request the removal.
As of today, there are 471 orphaned packages in Debian. The goal is not to get down to zero, but it s certainly possible to get down to 200 or 250.
How can you help? Start from the list, and find some easy targets. You can take a look at bug #483252 if you want to re-use my template. Also, one thing that is currently missing in the process is that orphaned packages that have reverse-dependencies should not be removed without removing their dependencies (if appropriate). An easy and efficient way to know if a given package has reverse (build-)?dependencies would be great, so I could integrate this info into bapase and exclude those packages from the list, or mark them somehow.
Packaging updates
Debian patch tracker
Finally got around to fixing a couple post-release (and older) issues
in the 
Enough news to release another Debian XSF News issue, after less
than a week.
squeeze is released but this doesn't mean the end of the ordinary RC bug;
old ones are still around, & new ones keep floating in.
(Non-Debian readers can stop reading now, I'm talking about so-called
"orphaned packages" and not anything of real-world importance.)
In 2008 I stopped maintaining non-native packages in Debian. At the time
I maintained a fair amount of stuff. It's interesting to see what happened
to it after I gave it up, partly because some of the results seem so
random and partly because some of what has happened seems to point
at weaknesses in Debian.
First, the success stories. More than half of my packages are now being
maintained by others: xaos, longrun, fbreader, liblinebreak,
analog, xgalaga, znc, sysnews, metastore, bsdgames, uqm, oneko, kobodeluxe,
archivemail, unclutter I still use much of this stuff, some only
occasionally, and other daily, and am glad it's being kept alive.
(It's surprising that someone still care about longrun.)
I was unhappy to have to NMU procmeter3 just before the release
of Debian 6.0 to fix a trivial to debug RC bug that almost got it removed
from the release. I hope that was just a bump in its road.
Also, splitvt is now maintained again after being orphaned a long
time. I'm not sure if it makes sense to keep it in Debian, since screen can
do the same thing, and it has a security history, but someone wants
to, so that's fine.
Two packages are left on life support. I'm surprised nobody wants
to maintain grepmail, unless we're all using notmuch or mairix
now? And dgen is the best Sega emulator I know of.
Several games were not picked up by the games team, despite
them showing some interest originally, and were removed: xtris, xjewel,
xemeraldia, xbl Of those, xemeraldia in particular is a lot of fun,
I'm surprised nobody cared to keep it. Also, the nestra Nintendo
emulator was shipped with squeeze, but now is removed as it never got
a maintainer. I don't know if there is a better NES emulator in Debian.
The intercal programming language was removed. Surprising. Debian
does at least still have clc-intercal for all our pressing Intercal
needs.
Finally, sparkline-php was removed today despite never having
had any bugs, needing no maintenance, and being a suggests of ikiwiki,
which is now more buggy (broken relationships, outdated docs) and
less featureful in Debian.
There are many ways to run some commands simultaneously on multiple
hosts like 
When 
Eh. Why does 
Yesterday Conrad Sanderson released version 1.1.4 of his
In Ubuntu, the use of 
Some projects have historically sucked; they've been incomplete, they've been hard to use, they've had poor documentation, or they've had regular security issues.
Over time projects that started off a little poorly can, and often do, improve. But their reputation is usually a long time in improving.
For me? Personally? PHPMyAdmin is a security nightmare. So while it is nice to read about it gaining the ability to be themed, and even receiving submissiosn from users (a rare thing for projects to receive such external contributions) I just find it hard to care.
I see PHPMyAdmin written in a blog, in a news article, or on a users machine and I just think :
I recently ended up acquiring a Windows 7 Professional license. While I rarely have a need for Windows, that one rare instance is important. Many of the bank's web interfaces are tightly dependent on IE. I do have a copy of CrossOver but that doesn't help much. Most times, IE crashes when trying to render pages. Must be having some OLE dependency.
So I convinced myself to install Windows7. For my banking needs and also to catch-up on how that platform has been doing. From my limited usage, my current impression has been that Windows 7 is a great revive. [passwordless] sudo is conceptually implemented into Windows 7. I'm not sure how good that would be given that most users would have the tendency to just click on 'Yes' without paying attention to the pop-up. Anyways.....I installed Windows 7 onto one of my spare partitions to get the full experience (than doing it in a VM image).
Dear lazyweb,
I m using Gnome for quite some time now and I m always satisfied with the interfaces I have to whatever I need. There is one thing, though, that I miss: a calendar. I don t like evolution, I don t need another mail client. What I want is a simple, yet sophisticated application that I can put appointments in and which reminds me of them (recurring issues should be possible, too). It may but doesn t have to be somehow attached to the Gnome clock or whatever. Though I expect it to look Gnome-like and be accessible from the panel. Do you know such? And is there even a Debian package for it?
Thanks.
There seems to be nice increase in interest in creating themes for phpMyAdmin. Unfortunately today submitted theme came too late for 
It's now also available on the