Common licenses for software include the term worldwide . Now, what does worldwide mean? The problem with the term worldwide is that it is ambigous and depending on it s interpretation, violates against DFSG 6 which states: No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor . The reason: Space travel. If we take the term worldwide to mean everywhere on earth , the license becomes non-free, as it prohibits the use outside of this planet. Affected by this problem are the patent section of GPL-3, the Apache 2.0 license, the CC licenses, the GFDL, and probably also others. Now what should be used instead? Universal? No, that wouldn t work in case there are multiple ones (while travelling between them (if they exist) could be impossible, it would still be a restriction). The correct team would probably be omniversal meaning everywhere in the omniverse . But really, avoiding locations is probably the best way. In any case, if you have received software from me under a license that uses the term worldwide , you can treat worldwide as everywhere, and are thus free to use it outside of earth (and other planets).
Filed under: General

Using a very customizable email user agent (namely, Mutt), I am able to use several signatures depending on almost whatever criterion I want. So I spent some time drawing several thematic ones in ASCII Art, sometimes taking inspiration on existing models, sometimes entirely by myself (in bold). Hoping that it may be useful, here are some of them:

Bee (a logo of my engineering school, Centrale Paris)	___ (___\ ,- <(((((>0 Tanguy Ortolo (___/ -
Fishes (for April 1st)	(\_ _/) )\/__( > Tanguy < )__\/( )/ '
Angel (for Christmas)	(\ _ ( \o /\/ Tanguy _)>
Cyclist	__o _<_\,_ Tanguy (_) '(_)
Fencer	< o /--)---- Tanguy / >
Cypherpunk	____ Tanguy Ortolo /_ \______________ ((_) _ .--^---^^-^-' \____/ ' urn:pgp:240BBA15B694DD00E38030D8D6EFA6AC4B10D847:
Hacker	. o . . . o Tanguy Ortolo o o o
Debianist	,--. : / ) Tanguy Ortolo -' Debian Maintainer \_

If you like them, do not hesitate to copy them. I am not sure whether or not this can seriously be an object of copyright, so in case it would be necessary: I put them, at least those that are of my own (those labelled in bold), under CC0 (unfortunately my country law do not allow me to put my works under public domain): Copying is an act of love. Please copy.

---

PS: Sorry, but my blog does not allow comments with fixed-width fonts

This wouldn't certainly have happened if we held DebConf11 elsewhere. So, welcome to Yet Another l10n mailing list. Thanks to listmasters, and particularly Alexander "formerer" Wirt, for the list creation. We have plenty of very motivated people over there....and already some "technical" minor problems to solve out..:-)

git add -p is one of my favourite git features. It lets you selectively add the local changes hunk by hunk to the staging area. This is especially nice if you want to commit one change in a file, but not a second one, you also already did. Recently I noticed that you can also selectively revert changes already in the staging area using git reset -p HEAD. The user interface is exactly the same as for git add -p. Today I discovered another selective undo in git by just trying it out of curiosity if that works, too: Undoing local changes selectively using git checkout -p. Maybe less useful than those mentioned above, but nevertheless most times quicker than firing up your favourite editor and undoing the changes manually. Another nice git feature which I discovered by accidentially using it (this time even unwittingly) is git checkout - which behaves like cd -, just for branches instead of directories, i.e. it switches back to the previously checked out branch. Very useful for quickly changing between two branches again and again.

The SPI election results have been declared. Jimmy Kaplowitz, Clint Adams and Robert Brockway were elected to the SPI board. There were 75 voters, which is 16% turnout, up from the 13% in the last contested election, in 2009. The next meeting is this evening at 20:30 UTC (21:30 UK) in #spi on irc.spi-inc.org and there are a couple of resolutions, inviting the Drizzle database and Arch Linux distribution projects to associate, so that SPI can collect and process funds for them. Please, pop in and see how the new board members perform.

During Debconf 11, I got access to a fast s390 machine, and I have started to work on a Debian s390x port, the 64-bit version of the s390 port. One of my goal was to help the SPARC64 port, as some of the issues are the same: both are 64-bit big-endian, don t support unaligned access and behave differently between -fpic and -fPIC. Why such a port? When talking about 64-bit ports, we usually hear: 4GB is enough, handling 64-bit takes more memory . This really sounds like 640K ought to be enough for anybody . The s390 port is actually 31-bit from the address point of view (one bit is reserved for address space extension from 24 to 31 bits), so each process is limited to 2GB only. Nowadays applications which need more than 2GB are not that uncommon, especially on mainframes. Actually the 2GB limit already causes some problem in Debian: in some cases it s not possible to build haskell applications or even C applications using GCC. On the other hand, we already require a 64-bit kernel on the s390 port (only the userland is 32-bit), and applications are handling more and more 64-bit or greater values (files offset, time counters, uid, etc.). What is the status? Bootstrapping the architecture was not really easy (as for any other new architectures), due to a huge amount of dependencies and build-dependencies loops, as explained by Wookey during Debconf11. Now that this part is mostly done, an autobuilder has been started and currently more than 65% of the packages are built. The s390x port is hosted on debian-ports.org. Unfortunately it is not yet deboostrapable, though that should happen in the next few days (only a few packages are missing). The main issues are currently packages which fail to build from source due to linker, gcc-4.6 and curl changes, or due to the libjpeg and multiarch transitions, and thus are not directly related to s390x. If your package is in this case, it would be a good idea to fix it. Otherwise if it has a lot of reverse dependencies and the bug is opened for a while, just expect an NMU (as allowed by the 0-day NMU policy). Of course for a few packages s390x specific fixes are needed, some of them are already in the BTS. How you can help? The list of bugs blocking the s390x port is available through the s390x usertag, fixing these bugs (a lot of them are general FTBFS) would help a lot. Alternatively if you have access to an s390x machine you can take a look at the packages failing to build. Update: Fixed the explanation about the 32th bit, thanks to Bastian Blank for the comment.

If you still want to grab documents that used to be on gobby.debian.net:

• A Gobby server is back at that address. However its SSL certificate is issued on the name of gobby.0x539.de, which is upstream's public Gobby server. So you can just accept the certificate and then access the documents in the "debconf11" folder.
• I put up a tarball of all resulting plain-text documents. If you miss some content in one of them, please don't hesitate to contact me. I might be able to restore it from the records that dkg sent me before shredding the server.

Thanks to the tremendous growth of social applications over the past five years, we have our pick of services for collecting, saving and sharing our experiences online. We each have collections of photos, contacts, messages and more, spread across multiple popular services like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, as well as many less popular services which address particular needs or preferences. We re also producing a wealth of exhaust data through our browsing history, mobile sensors, transactions and other activity streams that we rarely if ever examine directly. This ecosystem is becoming so complex that it s easy to lose track of what you ve created, shared or seen. We need new tools to manage this complexity, to make the most of the wealth of information and connections available to us through various services. John Battelle calls these metaservices , and points to growth in the number of connections between the services we use. I expect that this next age of information tools will center around data rather than services. Data is a common denominator for these online experiences, a bridge across disparate services, technologies, social graphs, and life cycles. Personal data, in particular, has this property: the only thing that links together your photos on Flickr, Facebook, Picasa and Twitpic is you. So where s your data center ? I don t anticipate the emergence of a single service where you do everything. There will continue to be innovation in the form of new and specialized services which meet a particular need very well. There won t be a single service which is everything to everybody. Instead, I foresee us wanting to track, save, use and control all of our stuff across the web. That s why my new colleagues and I are working to make that possible. There s open source code available on github, a vibrant IRC channel (#lockerproject on Freeenode), and lots more I d like to write about it. But it s time to get back to work for now

The trek from Andromeda is getting shorter every time. Hopefully the galaxies won't collide. I've just released version 0.20 of Obnam (although the armel binary is still building). The important bits: BUG FIXES:

• Non-ASCII filenames over SFTP root now work. (Thanks, Tapani Tarvainen, for the reproducible bug report.)
• The count of files while making a backup now counts all files found, not just those backed up. The old behavior was confusing people.

USER VISIBLE CHANGES:

• The output of obnam ls now formats the columns a little prettier, so that wide values do not cause misalignment.
• The error message when trying to use an encrypted repository without encryption is now better (and suggests missing encryption being the reason). Thanks, chrysn.
• Obnam now supports backing up of Unix sockets.

Yesterday I begun using Debian GNU/kFreeBSD squeeze in thorin, my main workstation. During the last few weeks I had to work through some of the limitations that were holding me back, such automated driver load and FUSE. I was lucky enough that other people filled the missing pieces I wanted, such as NFS client support and a GRUB bugfix that broke booting from Mirrored pools. I have to say that I m very satisfied. Barring a pair of small nuissances here and there, the result is quite impressive:

• System responsiveness has noticeably improved, specially on disk-intensive operations such as loading my browser. I believe lightweight ZFS compression (the default algorithm is fast enough that it saves time rather than spending it) has a big influence on this.
• Partition management became a lot simpler. Instead of using a fixed size like legacy file systems, with ZFS the storage is shared. This allows me to add, remove or resize file systems or swap volumes from my running system without having to worry about where they will be allocated (I have two pools, one that is mirrored and one that isn t, and I can add or remove things from either. That s as far as I m concerned with allocation).
• I no longer have to go through long wait periods when adding a new physical disk, or replacing a broken one. I have a lot of old used disks at my disposal due to various reasons, and they tend to break easily, so I used to run badblocks to them before I begun using them, to be sure they were safe (reliability is very important to me). Now I simply plug them in and trust ZFS checksuming to do the right thing.
• No more waiting for long fsck. Specially annoying when I m in a hurry and chance wanted that this was the 30th time I boot my system without fsck.

That s basically my personal experience as newbie Debian GNU/kFreeBSD user. Of course my perspective is very limited because I just started and yes, I am biased. Anyway, what about yours? If you have installed Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, was it meant for production or just a toy machine ? If you considered using it on production, did it succeed at satisfying your needs, or did something hold you back? Leave your comment!

Today I released bpo Debian-Installer with using Linux kernel 2.6.39. You know, you can download it.

• uses Linux kernel 2.6.39 (bpo.2)
• updates disk controller drivers such as hpsa. (by updating kernel-wedge)
• updates firmware packages (such as bnx2x)

Enjoy!

This is a direct followup on my blog posting Finding packages for deinstallation on the commandline with aptitude. In the meanwhile on more alias for finding obosolete packages made it into my zsh configuration. It s an alias to find installed libraries, -data, -common and other usually only automatically installed packages, which are not marked as being installed automatically nevertheless:

alias aptitude-review-unmarkauto-libraries='aptitude -o "Aptitude::Pkg-Display-Limit=( ^lib !-dev$ !-dbg$ !-utils$ !-tools$ !-bin$ !-doc$ !^libreoffice   -data$   -common$   -base$ !^r-base ) !~M"'

And yes, this pattern is slightly larger than those from the previous posting, so here s the used filter in a little bit more readable way:

(
  ^lib
    !-dev$
    !-dbg$
    !-utils$
    !-tools$
    !-bin$
    !-doc$
    !^libreoffice   
  -data$   
  -common$   
  -base$
    !^r-base
)
!~M

It matches all non-automatically installed packages whose name starts with lib , but is neither a debug symbols package, a development header package, a documentation package, a package containing supplied commands, nor a libreoffice package. Additionally it matches all non-automatically installed packages ending in -data, -common, or -base, but excludes r-base packages. Of course you can then mark any erroneously unmarked library by pressing M (Shift-m). If you press g for Go afterwards and wonder why nothing to remove shows up, be reminded that the filter limit is active in this view, too. So press l for Limit and then Ctrl-u to erase the current filter limit of this view and press enter to set the new (now empty) filter, et voil Hope this is of help for some others, too.

Documentation! That is what the next version of Lintian will have. In 2.5.1, Lintian
had support for adding options in the lintianrc. Unfortunately, the
user had to guess the syntax, which makes the feature less useful.
With the next release, the manpage and the example config file[1]
will contain documentation and examples. The User Manual[2] also saw some improvements. Particularly, it will
mention that lintian can process a .changes file and that it does
cross-package checks. Of course, it also documents the format of the
new Vendor Profiles. Though even with these improvements, the current
documentation still leaves much to be wanted. The last unpack script (unpack-srcpkg-l1) was finally removed and
was replaced by a smarter version of index collection. This means
that Lintian can now schedule index in parallel with a few other
collections (namely unpacked, which is the current bottleneck). The speed improvement is probably not noticeable, but it was also a
good time to upgrade our index collection to properly handle
multi-tarball source packages. Previously Lintian only extracted the
index from the base tarball. The fields collection also saw some attention. Previously it
extracted fields from the control file (in the .deb, etc.) into a
directory. Each field became a file and the value of the field would
be written in the field. Today, the collection basically looks like
this:

[...]
if (-d 'fields') 
    system('rm', '-rf', 'fields') == 0
        or die 'Could not remove old fields directory';
 
[...]

It has been deprecated the minute Lintian::Collect API saw a little
upgrade to fetch these fields itself. This change should remove some
unnecessary file I/O in a normal run[3]. If you have a friend with his/her own little home-grown Lintian check
(or collection)[4], they will have to update it to A) not depend on
fields, B) use the Lintian::Collect API for accessing fields and C)
depend on index for source packages if it uses the index information.
For the latter, Lintian::Collect has grown support for source package
index. Lintian has also seen a lot of decrufting in the 2.5.2 development
cycle. The new test suite now features skeletons ( standard base
environments ) and template support for all package test suites[5]. This means it takes a lot less of writing (or copy/waste) to generate
a simple specialized test in the low-level test suites. As a part
of cleaning up the test-suites, I got to run:

$ git rm t/ source,debs /*/copyright

without breaking a single test. I have to admit that commit 8584996
is among my favorite ones in the 2.5.2 development cycle. Finally, if you are one of the few that have ever used the
--packages-file option, then I am pleased to inform you that it will
be deprecated in 2.5.2 and replaced by --packages-from-file. The
old option had some specialized format, whereas the new option parses
the file (or stdin) as one package per line . The latter being far
more "find -name '*.deb' "-friendly. In case you are wondering why --packages-file is deprecated, here is
the packages-file parser from lintian 2.5.1:

    while (my $line = <$pkgin>)  
	chomp($line);
	my (undef, undef, undef, $file) = split(/\s+/, $line, 4);
	$pool->add_file($file);
     

- [1] Installed as /etc/lintianrc [2] Installed as /usr/share/doc/lintian/lintian. html/,txt.gz [3] Namely, 2 opens + 2 closes + 1 read and one write for each field
in every package (the fields were cached, once they were read). Not
to mention a directory listing and having to remove the files again
later. [4] Of course, you do not have such a thing Because we all know
that no one (except this not too close friend of yours) messes with
Internal APIs of other projects [5] The exception being that the changes suite does not have a
standard base environment, since it would be completely unused.

Here is one more photo from Debconf11 that has been missed in all the excitement t-shirts from all Debconfs so far: from Debconf3 up to Debconf11. I was a bit late in stitching it together, so it appeared in the middle of the photo stream and people missed it. P.S. I also took a bit of time to add some labels to the photos so the people that were not there would know what is happening in the image. P.P.S. Talking to few key people (housing, venue, catering, networking) to prepare Latvia bid for Debconf13 is in full swing now.

To format URLs in LaTeX, one usually uses the url package (either directly, or indirectly via hyperref). By default, it typesets the URL in a mono-spaced font. Maybe this was a good idea some years ago, when URL were not ubiquitous. Today, I do not think they need neither the emphasis nor the explictit technical association that is caused by changing the font. And last but not least, mono-spaced fonts are very wide. So url offers the command \urlstyle. I prefer to set it to sf, because URLs tend to look better without serif. In the picture above (also available as PDF), that is the second line. But this still has issues: The double slash at the beginning is spaced out more than it should, given that, at least to most readers, http:// is a single entitiy. In addition, the underscore is far to wide (this only happens if you use the T1 font encoding). Hence I modified the typesetting of both the slash and the underscore to achieve the appearance in the third line. The code is derived from the one given on this blog post by Nei, with slightly less kerning of the slashes and with extending instead of redefining \UrlSpecials and the underscore handling added. Here is the full code for the picture given above, to use it you need to copy the part between and including \makeatletter and \makeatother into the preamble of your document:

\documentclass article 
\usepackage url 
\usepackage[T1] fontenc 
\usepackage[top=3pt, bottom=3pt, left=3pt, right=3pt, paperwidth=6.7cm, paperheight=1.6cm] geometry 
\begin document 
\noindent
\url http://example.com/with_underscore/ \\
\urlstyle sf 
\url http://example.com/with_underscore/ \\
\makeatletter
% Inspired by http://anti.teamidiot.de/nei/2009/09/latex_url_slash_spacingkerning/
% but slightly less kern and shorter underscore
\let\UrlSpecialsOld\UrlSpecials
\def\UrlSpecials \UrlSpecialsOld\do\/ \Url@slash \do\_ \Url@underscore %
\def\Url@slash \@ifnextchar/ \kern-.11em\mathchar47\kern-.2em %
     \kern-.0em\mathchar47\kern-.08em\penalty\UrlBigBreakPenalty 
\def\Url@underscore \nfss@text \leavevmode \kern.06em\vbox \hrule\@width.3em 
\makeatother
\url http://example.com/with_underscore/ 
\end document 

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Wondering what is going on with the port of Debian to the Minix 3 microkernal? Here's an update. dpkg Ported Well, the big news as I mentioned in my last post is that dpkg has been successfully ported. I haven't sent the patches to the maintainers just yet as they need review and clean up but I will do that ASAP. The architecture name is defined as minix_i386. (There is no k because I am using the Minix libc as well as the kernel.) I am currently targetting squeeze. A Maze of Twisty Dependencies All Different Armed with my new dpkg, I have begun building packages which has been an interesting experience. The Debian packaging systems greatest asset dependencies is also its most frustrating during initial bootstrapping. Take debhelper for instance; nowadays most packages depend on it and I personally wouldn't think of creating a .deb without it but it build-depends e.g. po4a which build-depends on...debhelper. Also some programs which are assumed to be present on linux such as ldconfig are simply not available on Minix. So currently theres a lot of dpkg --force-depends and even --force-all going on. Of course this is only a temporary problem until I get a full set of base packages built. The equivs package is coming in handy too. In lieu of working .debs, I have been using Minix native packages to fill in the gaps. They use NetBSD pkgsrc which is a new experience for me. I can't say I'm that impressed but they work and, being uptodate, are a good source of patches. Works in Progress The two big packages I need to work on next are perl 5.10.1 and gcc 4.4.5. I haven't touched the latter yet. Perl is failing in its second-stage bootstrap for reasons I haven't gotten to the bottom of just yet. I suspect it has more to do with deficiencies in my build environment than a problem in perl itself. libc Deficiencies As I mentioned last time, the situation has improved tremendously since Minix switched over to using the NetBSD libc but I am still running into problems with unimplemented APIs. Take getpwent(3) and getpwuid(3) for instance. Being able to map between user ids and names is kind of important you know? Even worse instead of being completely absent some of these exist as stubs. So they compile and link without warning but always return ENOFILE and so on. I was surprised to find that there is no standardized API for getting information on mounted filesystems. (Which e.g. df(1) needs.) Linux uses getmnt(3) similar but incompatible with System V. The BSDs use getmntinfo so probably this is what Minix will implement. GNU programs are good about portability but a lot of Free software is unfortunately Linux-centric. Hopefully the Debian FreeBSD port already has patches for these cases. There are several annoyances like this but I suppose I shouldn't complain too much. I am using an unreleased version of Minix which is under heavy development and I must say the upstream developers have been good about responding to my concerns. Looking forward: fakeroot, grub2, ext2 fakeroot is a very handy development tool that frees a developer from having to create .debs as root. Alas it won't work under Minix as it depends on LD_PRELOAD and Minix doesn't even support shared libraries. fakeroot-ng sounds a bit more promising as it uses the ptrace(2) system call which is implemented in the Minix kernel though I don't know how well. Minix is now multiboot compliant so it is possible to use grub2 instead of the Minix boot loader. Definitely something I'm going to look at soon. Minix now supports ext2 (though not ext3 or ext4) in addition to its native file system. For compatability this should become the default in the Debian port. While the kernel support is part of the standard Minix system, the userland support (e2fsprogs) is not for some reason. So I'll have to see about porting that. Can I Help the Porting Effort? Sorry not yet. Though if you are determined I'll try and help you get set up. Hopefully in a month or less I will be able to distribute a pre-alpha version so I suggest waiting for that. I am definitely going to be looking for outside help.

NOTE: This post uses MathML. You will need a modern browser to view things correctly. I just had a fairly annoying experience with pocketronics and have left negative feedback for the first time. Basically they expected the customer (my mother in this case), to contact them when Australia Post failed to deliver. And, rather than sending out another item as they had to anyway they wanted to wait until Australia Post reported back. Which takes 10 working days. So for about ~AUD$30 they decided it was worth throwing away their reputation. Obviously a company with a different view of the life time value of a customer and the earning of goodwill than most. With eBay generally almost never leave 'positive' feedback because, frankly, that should be the default case. Anyway. But some feedback about eBay's feedback system. Limiting to 80 characters is pointless. I could have put in a bit.ly link to a twitter status as my feedback for pocketronics. Or a blog post (like this), linking to their site (as above). If I want to write an article, then let me. And just as I can respond as many times as like via other media, I ought to be able to do the same via the internal ones. The score calculation is weighted towards positive feedback. As explained scores are: $\frac{\mathrm{positive}}{\mathrm{positive}+\mathrm{negative}}$ Which for pocketronics comes to: $\mathrm{99.7}=\frac{\mathrm{5071}}{\mathrm{5071}+\mathrm{16}}\mathrm{100}$ If the calculcation instead took into account neutral feedback too, then things change - not by much, but enough. To wit: $\frac{\mathrm{positive}}{\mathrm{positive}+\mathrm{negative}+\mathrm{neutral}}$ And it becomes: $\mathrm{99.0}=\frac{\mathrm{5071}}{\mathrm{5071}+\mathrm{16}+\mathrm{36}}\mathrm{100}$ I think that also by default feedback to be neutral by default, it would reduce the gaming of feedback. To have a positive score you would need to be exceptional. Not just run of the mill. Which is what the current system encourages.

This afternoon Jacob: These pancakes have sprinkles in them! Parties have sprinkles. I think we are having a party! Right, mom? Terah: Sure, this could be a pancake party. Jacob: And all parties also have ICE CREAM! So we should have some ice cream. Terah: Uh, Jacob, I m not so Jacob: Oliver, we are having ice cream! Oliver: YAY! It s amazing how fast sprinkles can get out of hand. Later that day I had gone downstairs, pulled out one of the wonderful old hymnbooks I have in my collection but have rarely looked at, and sat down at the piano to play a bit. Oliver came in, sat down next to me, played a few notes, and promptly got down. Jacob came in, sat down next to me, and took over our digital piano. He set it to provide some automatic accompaniment, selected a salsa beat, then hopped down as I continued to play a 4-part Mennonite hymn in my best imitation salsa style (not so good, in case you re wondering). Jacob happily announced, IT S DANCING TIME! He then picked up a large blanket and ran around the house, reminding us every minute or so that it s dancing time at the top of his voice, while Oliver ran around randomly yelling AAAAAA! , and I went for maximum dissonance by attempting to play Praise the Lord, Sing Hallelujah to a salsa beat. Meanwhile Terah was sitting on the couch looking, well, a bit stunned. Just another quiet evening at home.

It has been a long time I want to prepare a pure Debian virtual image for the Amazon elastic computer cloud, that would contain the bioinformatics tools that we package in Debian Med. Most methods discussed in the ec2debian group use debootstrap, and finish the preparation with external scripts. Now that Amazon Machine Images can boot on their original kernel, I am exploring the use of the debian installer to setup a pristine system on a elastic block storage volume. The Debian installer can be booted with GRUB and preseeded through a file downloaded early after starting. In the Amazon cloud, this file can be put at http://169.254.169.254/latest/user-data with the other instance metadata. Since I am not much experienced in this field, I progress slowly on automating the procedure. For the moment, preseeding is not comprehensive, but at least the installer's SSH console is started. Ideally, one should connect using a key, but for the moment I go with a password. Currently, I am stuck with the partitioning of the hard drive: No root file system is defined . Here are a couple of technical details. I use the cheapest instances, t1.micro (32 bits) for the tests. I downloaded debian-installer on an elastic volume of 1 Gb, that I formatted in ext2. Not knowing if the device name will stay stable (/dev/sda1 or /dev/xvda1), I flagged the partition, as I have seen in Ubuntu virtual machines.

ARCH=i386
DIST=squeeze
DI_VERSION=20110106+squeeze3
MIRROR=jp
BASEURL=http://ftp.$MIRROR.debian.org/debian/dists/$DIST/main/installer-$ARCH/$DI_VERSION/images/netboot/xen
mke2fs -L debian-installer /dev/sdb -F
mount LABEL=debian-installer /mnt/ && cd /mnt/
wget $BASEURL/initrd.gz $BASEURL/vmlinuz
mkdir -p boot/grub
cat > boot/grub/menu.lst <<__END__
default 0
timeout 3
title  Debian Installer ($DI_VERSION $ARCH)
root   (hd0)
kernel /vmlinuz root=LABEL=debian-installer ro console=hvc0 auto=true priority=critical url=http://169.254.169.254/latest/user-data
initrd /initrd.gz
__END__

A snapshot of this volume can then be registered as an image machine. The kernel to use will depend on whether the system has been installed in the whole volume or a partition. Debian distributes tools for all these operations, such as euca2ools.

Three things I learned about Debian s390 today:

• The kernel expects hexadecimal channel numbers in lower case. Trying uppercase digits is futile.
• To get a getty in the HMC's Operating System Messages window of an LPAR, just uncomment the dumb console entry in /etc/inittab.
• For the integrated ASCII console to work on LPAR, you need to put up a getty onto ttysclp0. You can reuse the same parameters as for ttyS0 (the device that just works with z/VM). Unlike the 3270 interface of z/VM the integrated ASCII console is actually pretty nice and usable. You can even run vim in it without getting completely crazy.