I often get requests of persons who would like to contribute to Debian but who don t know where to start. Let s try to answer this question properly so that I can give out this URL the next time that I am asked. The Debian website has a page explaining how to help Debian. While it provides no less than 10 suggestions in a daunting text-only list, it s difficult to know what to do next once you picked up something that you could do. I will try to fix this by providing concrete information for each cases in upcoming articles but in the mean time I propose you another approach to start with. Before answering your question ( what can I do for Debian ), we need to know some information about you. What motivates you? You re a volunteer, you re not doing stuff for Debian because someone told you so. You must have some intrinsic motivation and the ultimate motivation is usually that you re enjoying what you re doing. So what are you enjoying and/or what are your motivations ?

• Is there something that you would like to learn? A new programming language? Packaging? Coding? System administration? A specific software?
• Do you want to interact with smart people?
• Do you like to help users?
• Do you like to fix software just so that it works for you?
• Do you like to build something remarkable and useful for millions of people?

On the opposite, make sure to know what you hate and what you want to stay far away from. Maybe you dislike a programming language so much that you don t want to be involved in a project where you would have to use it, etc. Write down the answers to the questions, you might need them later when you ll ask other Debian contributors how you can help. What are your skills? If you re not interested in learning new skills, then you must obviously select a task where your current skills are sufficient. Again make a list of your skills and in particular of skills that you d like to practice! Here s a non-exhaustive list of skills to consider:

• What languages are you fluent with? Are you confident to write documentation or translate documentation in those languages?
• Are you a programmer? If yes, which languages do you know?
• Can you diagnose problems? Can you debug problems with strace and/or gdb?
• Can you triage bugs?
• Do you know some Debian packaging?
• Are you an artist and/or a web designer?
• Do you know how to work with VCS (subversion, git, bzr, )?

How much time can you spend on Debian? This is the last important information that you need to communicate whenever you re asking someone else what you could do for Debian. There s no point giving you a big task if you can only spend 30 minutes every week. On the opposite if you can work on Debian full time during a week (because you re between 2 contracts or because you re in vacation), it s equally important to know. In general contributing to Debian requires time, you should be ready to spend at least several hours per week and possibly more at the start while you re learning everything. Find something to do At this point you have a generic idea of what you d like to do but you re still missing a concrete objective. Let s try to find one, we ll explore several ways to do this. Scratch your itch The best objectives are those that satisfy your own needs. Here are some examples:

• Did you notice a missing feature? Try to implement it.
• Have you been annoyed by a bug? Try to fix it.
• Did you lose too much time on something because there was no documentation? Write the missing documentation and submit it where appropriate.
• File bug reports for the things that you can t fix yourself. Even wishlist bug reports for new features.
• Do you use software that are not packaged for Debian? Create the package(s) and maintain it/them.
• Do you need a newer version of a package compared to what s in Debian unstable? Contact the maintainer and propose your help to update the package.
• Do you need a newer version of a package compared to what s in Debian stable? Contact the maintainer and propose your help to create a backport.

If you re a good Debian citizen, you have already filed bugs for issues that bugged you. Then you can browse http://bugs.debian.org/from:hertzog@debian.org to find out some ideas of stuff to do (obviously replace hertzog@debian.org by your own email address). Join a team If you don t have a specific itch to scratch, you might want to focus your work on a specific team. Head over to wiki.debian.org/Teams and browse the list of teams. You ll surely find one that works in an area that you like. If you select a packaging team, pick one that works on packages that you re actually using. Some of the teams have instructions for newcomers, follow them when that is the case. Otherwise join the mailing list and the IRC channel, and get a feel of how the team works. See if it suits you, you can follow several teams at the same time and pick the one that you prefer after a few days/weeks. Once you have lurked a bit, if you still don t know how you could help, then just ask on the mailing list. Include all the answers you have collected to the 3 questions on your motivations, your skills and your time available. Focus on a specific package You can concentrate your work on a specific package even if you re in a team, it s often a good idea. But I list it separately because not all packages are team maintained and you might want to help maintain a package where there s a single maintainer currently. I leave it up to you to find a way to select a package that interests you Then head over to the package tracking system: http://packages.qa.debian.org/dpkg (replace dpkg by the name of the package that interests you) Fill in the form in the bottom-left corner with your email and select opts in the drop-down list, then click go . You get a new form where you can select the information that you ll receive, I recommend you to keep everything except upload-binary and to validate the form. From now on, you get the same mails than the maintainer (and a bit more actually), and it s a good idea to inform the maintainer that you subscribed and that you re going to help a bit. Maybe he s willing to grant you commit rights immediately, maybe he will ask you to send patches for a start. The important thing is to create a good relationship. In any case (even if you did not get any answer from the maintainer), you should be free to help triage existing bugs and to help deal with the flow of incoming bugs (including forwarding bugs when appropriate). Help a Debian developer Paul Tagliamonte once blogged Hey, DDs, need help?. He offered his help to overworked Debian developers . His post was missing all the information required (cf motivations/skills/time) but the approach is a good one. The best way to start contributing is to work with existing Debian developers. Even if you just want to be sponsored for your own pet package, you should consider that mentoring is a burden for many Debian developers and that you re more likely to get a sponsor if you have an existing relationship with a Debian developer that you helped. Pick a developer that works in an area that is of interest, and offer him your help. To simplify things even further, I have created a wiki page where you can find out how you can help me and thus build a relationship with me. That s it for now, I hope this article will help you to start contributing. Don t forget to subscribe to my newsletter to not miss future articles for new contributors. Note that you can refer to this article with the following URL: http://raphaelhertzog.com/go/contributing/ (easier to type and remember).

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Today I was made aware of bug #607839, and it makes me sad. I think its a great example about how trademarks and free software do not coexist well together. This bug started out as a question of the copyright license of a file, but quickly turned into a discussion about the GNOME [0] trademark, and the GNOME Foundation Trademark Usage Guidelines for Third Parties I believe that the GNOME project would be standing on solid legal ground if they wanted to actually try to aggressively protect their trademark. It is easy for me to find hundreds of places we use their mark in ways that are expressly forbidden by their trademark license. Here are some examples:

grep -i "gnome's" /var/lib/dpkg/available  # many package descriptions invalidly using a possessive
grep -i "gnome[^ ]" /var/lib/dpkg/availabe # returns nothing, trademark symbol is required

Probably to be in strict compliance, we would need to allow uppercase letters in package names. (I doubt this would happen, especially not for a reason like this). I am sure that a lawyer would tell us that the safest legal place for Debian would be to abandon all use of their marks. This would unfortunately be a herculean effort on Debian's part; we'd have to rename tons of packages, create and maintain tons of patches, create new logos, etc. And, I believe it would have the unfortunate side-effect of having a negative impact on both projects from a publicity standpoint. As with the firefox/iceweasel situation, the company trying to protect its trademark looks like a bully, and Debian looks like out-of-touch zealots. From the tone of the conversation in the bug report, I do not believe that this is something that the GNOME Foundation would force on us, and I certainly don't believe it would be an outcome they would hope for. They could give us written permission to use their marks in the ways we are already using them, however, lots of people would point at DFSG#8, and this would fail the 'tentacles of evil' test. (We are, of course, already under the grasp of these tentacles, as their current trademark license is subject to change) Better for us would be if they modified their trademark license agreement in order to allow our current usages of their mark. I feel that this quite unlikely to happen. It would certainly weaken their hold on the mark. Trying to apply the DFSG in these situations also doesn't work as well as it should. The DFSG is written with copyrights in mind and not patents and trademarks. This feels to me similar to situations we have with patent encumbered software which is under a perfectly free license. We can distribute the software without fear of a claim that we are violating copyrights, but the software is still not perfectly free since as I user, my rights to use and distribute the software might be severely limited from a legal standpoint. Also by Debian choosing to distribute software which has these kinds of potential problems, we might be putting a legal liability on members of the project and people that run mirrors for us. Of course, to add to the conflict I feel, Debian has its own trademarks, which it is poor at enforcing. On one hand, its bad for all the reasons that this situation is bad. On the other hand I sometimes wish that Debian did a better job of protecting its own trademark. It's clear from how many people show up in #debian expecting support for linuxmint or aptosid claiming "linux mint debian edition IS Debian, it says so on linuxmint.org" that we have allowed our mark to be diluted. NOTE: I became aware of this bug because of Zack CCing the FTP team. I serve on this team as an assistant, however, My comments here come from me personally without any discussion with other members of FTP team and should not be taken as any kind of offical word from the FTP team. [0] I suddently feel compelled to mention that The GNOME name is a registered trademark of GNOME Foundation in the United States or other countries.

* Alas. Not going to DebConf 11

While some folk look down on fakeraid (that is BIOS based RAID-until-OS-takes-over) solutions, I think they are pretty neat: they let a user get many of the benefits of dedicated controller cards at a fraction of the cost. The benefits include the usual ones for RAID more spindles to handle IO, tolerance of disk failures. And unlike pure LVM solutions, you can boot from a degraded RAID 1 / 5 / 10 set because the BIOS knows how. In some ways this is better than dedicated cards, because we have the software take over, so we can change the algorithms for IO dispatch all the way down to the individual devices However, these RAID volumes are in a pretty awkward spot for installers and bootloaders: inside a running Linux environment they look like software RAID which cannot be depended on for booting, but at boot time they look like hard disks which cannot be looked under the hood. I recently got a new desktop machine which has one of these motherboards, and fortuitously my old desktop I was replacing had the same size disks so I had 4 disks and the option of using a RAID setup. Apparently I m a sucker for punishment because I went for a RAID 10 (that is two RAID volumes made up of two-disk mirrors (the RAID 1 component), and then those two volumes are combined via striping (the RAID 0 component). This has the potential for pretty nice performance: in principle any read can come from one of 2 disks, and every 64KB (the stripe size) of linear data will switch to the other mirror set, giving a nice boost. Writes need to write to 2 disks always, but every 64KB worth of data will alternate mirror sets, also giving a boost. Sadly we (Ubuntu) aren t ready for this yet: there are two key bugs that make this layout almost impossible to install into. This blog post is for my exo-memory, I want to be able to figure out what I did next time around . Firstly parted_devices, a helper used by Ubiquity and debian-installer to determine which block devices are actually disk drives that one can partition and install onto, has a confused heuristic when dealing with dmraid it looks for devices which are not layered on other dmraid devices. This handily excludes partitions, but has the undesirable effect of excluding that striped device because it is layered on the two mirrored devices. Bug 560748 was filed about that, and I ve added a workaround to it basically disabling the filtering, so its not suitable as a long term fix, but it will let one select the RAID volume correctly. Secondly, grub2, which needs to figure out what the name at boot time of the RAID volume will be currently gets confused. I don t know enough to really explain and be correct in my explanation but I do have a fugly patch which worked for me. Bug 803658 tracks this defect. The basic approach I took was to say that dmraid devices should be an abstraction layer we don t peek under: if it claims to be a disk, well then its a disk. As grub does actually work that way - it talks to INT 13h the BIOS support for booting off of the RAID volume is entirely sufficient. Sadly neither bug is at the point where the patches can be rolled into Ubuntu itself, but the workaround should let folk get up and running. In both cases, build the package locally in the installer, install it, then after than run ubiquity and things should install. After the install, you will need to reapply the patch in the resulting installed environment, or things like update-grub will die on you! (huge thanks to cjwatson and ev for giving me some tips while I investigated this)

After testing Emacs, Eclipse, KDevelop and CodeBlocks for writing C++ code, I decided to stick with Netbeans. It seems to be the most simple to configure and yet full of features and plugins. I was having one problem with it that when I focused out the window, and then focused on it again, it would not really grab the focus, in the sense that I would not be able to type without first clicking with the mouse. At first I thought the problem was with Netbeans, then with the JRE. I tried using sun-java6-jre, I tried upgrading my openjdk-6-jre, and nothing worked. I searched a little bit more and got to a discussion about this problem in ion3, and that made me think that the problem could be related to the window manager I use, XMonad. After searching a bit about it, I found on the XMonad FAQ some work arounds for problems with Java apps, but they didn't solve my problem. Then, I found the solution on this bug report. I got the darcs version of xmonad and XMonadContrib, included takeTopFocus on logHook, and now it's working!

Trying the BitTorrent DHT A month ago, noticing that there was a lack of a good BitTorrent tracker software (good meaning complying with my random requirements ), I considered writing a new tracker. Then someone pointed out that I could try using the dynamic hash table or DHT, a BitTorrent extension that removes the need for a tracker, relying on the swarm or BitTorrent clients to do the tracking work. Indeed, the DHT may be a nice solution to this problem because it has several advantages:

• it relies on the BitTorrent clients themselves, that are far more commonly used that BitTorrent trackers and thus more developed;
• this feature seems to be rather well adopted by the common BitTorrent client software;
• it already exist and seems to work rather well!

So, I went to try distributing trackerless torrents using the DHT. But with BitTorrent, file distribution is initiated using metainfo files, commonly called torrent files or simply torrents , so I needed a tool to generate trackerless metainfo files. Writing a new metainfo generator I did not find such a tool. The generators I found did not implement that extension and they were composed of many lines of C code, which I really did not want to dig into in order to extend them. So here it is, gentorrent, a BitTorrent metainfo generator written in Python 3 and distributed under the license AGPLv3, which proved rather easy. I think it is fast enough, taking about ten seconds to calculate the metainfo for a file of one gibibyte. It implements all the BitTorrent extensions related to metainfo files, such as trackerless torrents, HTTP/FTP seeding or Merkle trees. Do not hesitate to test it and to send me comments, criticism or suggestions for a cooler name. Now that I have a tool to generate trackerless torrents, I shall test the DHT more extensively and document this way of publishing files. If you are interested in this topic, e.g. you are maintaining a distribution system based on the antique BitTornado, stay tuned.

When traveling I usually try local brands of beer. This became some sort of hobby, and usually gives me a good possibility to get in contact with the locals. For DebConf11 so far I have been suggested to try Tuzlanski (Tuzla) and Nektar (Banja Luka). Any other suggestions what should be tried?

I'm coming as well! Really looking forward to meet the people from Debconf9 again. Also people from the Games Team and the buildd and kfreebsd folks. And ideally there will be some more people interested in (Common) Lisp as well, we'll see

... is now working. It isn't finished yet; there are still some loose ends. But at least it works; if you combine this kernel with this debian-installer image, you'll be able to install to an NBD target. Known bugs:

• if you install your root device on an NBD device, the installer will attempt to install a boot loader to the local hard disk. Make sure to bring it into expert mode before the tasksel part to avoid overwriting your MBR -- or do what I did, and install to a (virtual) diskless computer.
• Also, due to an issue with the initscripts package, halt will make the kernel panic rather than power down the system but at that point it's safe to switch off the power, anyway.
• The installer currently fails to add a nbdroot= parameter to the kernel command line when installing root to NBD. When you're rebooting into the installed system, you should add something like nbdroot=<server>,<port> to your kernel command line, otherwise the installed system will not find the root device.

Other than that, it should work fine; testing is welcome (but note standard development code caveats apply).

I am involved in developing something coined as the FreedomBox. Explaining it to my mum the other day, she wisely asks if it, albeit clearly an exciting challenge we've picked, really is doable? Surely the World has gone sour, but is such radical change even possible? Annoying question! And clever For some years, tech media has tried predict when Linux have reached momentum for ordinary users. That current or next year was to become the Year of the Linux Desktop. Funny thing, seen in restrospect, is how "the year" kept being postponed, and when finally OLPC paved the way for the boom of Netbooks and arguably we got there, the World had moved on: Now Free Sofware is as common and as usable on desktops as commercially driven systems. It is taken for granted, not praised, and we look forward for the Next Big Challenge (as geeks) or Next Big Excitement (as users). Perhaps a similar fate is to be expected for FreedomBox: Initially when sparking our interest, and repeatedly since although we still today have nothing concrete to show - indeed even before we started hacking on it or knew the name of our dreams - our Prophet declared the Year of the FreedomBox. Not explicitly, but the cleverly phrased "right now." I am excited and proud to be working on FreedomBox, and foolishly hope it will be ready for worldwide consumption in a very recent "right now" - well aware that most likely it won't happen like that. Thing is, I don't really care how it happens, if only something does. This is due to the way we work: Hacking may appear from outside as larger projects, but really is juggling piles of small pieces for an eternal jigsaw puzzle, with each piece usable in multiple ways and across projects. I do not work only on FreedomBox, just as I did not work only on Sugar before that, or only with Debian as my platform: I work on Freedom-enabling technologies and ways to frame them for the Real World to use them with a vengeance. I sure hope you take the results for granted. That's true success!

Debian/Society at DebConf11 For DebConf11 which, needless to say, I'll be attending I've accepted to coordinate the Debian/Society track, together with dkg. As it's Daniel who has done most of the work up to now, let me pretend I'm catching up with a brief but very important call for papers. The idea of the Debian/Society track is to collect talks and other events that explore two society-related aspects of Debian:

1. Debian is a society in itself. It is a society formed by a group of people that are connected by relationships, share a (virtual) territory, and are subject to various kinds of self-imposed rules (technical, political, etc.)
2. Debian relates with larger human societies and has an impact on them, mainly but not only through the Free Software artifacts that Debian produces and distributes.

Several talks and events that have already been submitted to DebConf11 do a very good job at presenting one or both of the above aspects. But we are looking for a few more. In particular, we would like to receive submissions of events about:

• Governance models of other FOSS projects, possibly in a compare and contrast way with respect to how we do things in Debian. Are you a member of some FOSS project other than Debian and have given some thought about how well its governance mechanisms work in comparison to Debian's? Are you a geek about FOSS project management and have spent time thinking about how to improve Debian governance, transparency, or the like? We would like to hear from you!
• Impact of Debian activities on the "real" (non-geek) world. Do you have a good story to tell about how Debian has changed your world, or even a small part of it? Are you involved in some Debian (sub-)project which has the ambition of making the world a better place? We would like to hear from you!

If you think you can host the event we are looking for, just head to penta and submit your event providing all associated information (event kind, title, abstract, etc.). Please e-mail me or dkg when you've done so. We're way past the general event submission deadline, but if your proposal is just what we need to fill out the track, we can lobby the Talks Team for its acceptance (we can't guarantee acceptance, though). Daniel Kahn Gillmor
Stefano Zacchiroli

I have bought a Samsung Galaxy S Android phone some time ago. One of the first thing that you try to do with such a phone is to switch to some alternate firmware (the coined term is ROM ), like CyanogenMod. Flashing a firmware is a whole new universe. You are told about a lot of proprietary tools, you need to download a lot of things from MegaUpload and friends and nobody really explains what s going on under the hood. I was a bit lost at first. I will not provide a step-by-step guide since I cannot afford to stay up-to-date. Such a guide is usually posted on some forum. It assumes you are running Windows and provides appropriate download links. You must follow it (and check that it is recent enough). I will just provide you some background to understand those guides.

Android firmwares There are several Android firmwares. Most of them are specific to a given phone (or its close variations). They can be sorted in three categories:

1. Official firmwares from the phone manufacturer include a kernel with appropriate drivers and, usually, a customized interface (HTC Sense for HTC, TouchWiz for Samsung). Some manufacturers will lag a lot behind Android schedule and you may not get all the new shiny features.
2. Modified firmwares are built from the official firmwares. They usually add a lot of hacks on top of the original firmware, remove some cruft but are still closely related to the official firmware.
3. Firmwares built from Android Open Source Project (the open source version of Android) do not share nothing with the official firmware except some bits related to the kernel (drivers, hacks).

Darky ROM Darky ROM is a modified firmware. It takes the original firmware from Samsung, adds a custom kernel (based on the source of the official kernel), adds a lot of hacks, some additional applications and removes some unwanted cruft. This is a very nice firmware which is quite snappy. This is a drop-in replacement for the default firmware: you will only get improvements. The latest version is 10.1 and there is a neat guide on how to install it.

CyanogenMod CyanogenMod is a firmware built from AOSP. It supports several devices and provide an unified firmware on all of them. Support for the Samsung Galaxy S is recent and is not present in the stable build. However, some RC build is now available. Be sure to read the FAQ (most notably the part saying that you need to install from Froyo 2.2 because the bootloader provided by Samsung with Gingerbread 2.3 is not compatible). You can also grab some information from the wiki. The major drawback of using this firmware instead of going for a modified firmware like Darky ROM is that the battery life may suck. I now need to charge my phone every day instead of once every two days. On the plus side, you get a very clean firmware with a lot of features and almost no cruft. For example, the notification bar can be customized and OpenVPN is available out of the box. Moreover, almost everything is open source (if you don t install Google apps). You can see this firmware as an open source distribution for your phone. There is no need to download random files linked from a random forum to make it work. There is no package manager, though. Despite the bad battery life, I prefer this firmware.

Prerequisites Before trying to flash a new firmware, there are some tools that you need to have. Note that you don t need root access to flash a new firmware.

Download & recovery mode Before trying to install any firmware, you must check that your phone can access download and recovery modes. The download mode allows to flash any new firmware, even if the current firmware does not boot at all. As long as this mode is available, there is very little chance that you brick your phone. To access those modes, you need to use the three-button combo . Here are the steps (your phone should not be plugged):

1. Power off the phone (wait for the phone to vibrate).
2. Hold the Volume down button for download mode. Hold the Volume up button for recovery mode.
3. Hold the Home button.
4. Hold the Power button. The phone will start.
5. Once you have the Samsung logo displayed on the screen, release the Power button.
6. Only release the two other buttons when you enter the recovery mode or download mode. The recovery mode displays a menu. The download mode displays a big yellow Android logo.

If after ten tries, you are unable to access those modes, maybe they have been disabled. Keep reading, there is a solution.

Heimdall Heimdall is a tool to flash a new firmware to your phone. This is not a mandatory tool but you will have to use it if something goes wrong. Most guides will tell you to use Odin. It is a leaked Samsung tool running on Windows only. You can use Heimdall instead.

$ git clone https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/Heimdall.git
Cloning into Heimdall...
remote: Counting objects: 423, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (271/271), done.
remote: Total 423 (delta 220), reused 332 (delta 138)
Receiving objects: 100% (423/423), 5.91 MiB   962 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (220/220), done.
$ cd Heimdall/heimdall
$ sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0-dev
$ ./configure && make
[...]
$ sudo cp 60-heimdall-galaxy-s.rules /etc/udev/rules.d
$ sudo /etc/init.d/udev reload

You need to use this tool while in download mode. You can test it, while in download mode, with:

$ ./heimdall print-pit

This will display the partition table of your phone. This is enlightening to know what it contains:

• IBL+PBL is the boot loader, be extra careful with it;
• PIT is the partition table;
• EFS contains some important data like IEMEI, be extra careful with it;
• SBL is the second boot loader;
• SBL2 is the backup of the second boot loader;
• PARAM contains some images used as various stage of the boot process;
• KERNEL is the kernel;
• RECOVERY is the backup of the kernel;
• FACTORYFS contains /system file system which is some kind of root file system;
• DBDATA contains /data file system which is the database to store application parameters;
• CACHE contains /cache file system which contains the Dalvik cache;
• MODEM contains the firmware for the modem.

As we will see, Heimdall is able to flash any of those partitions with flash subcommand.

adb adb stands for Android Debug Bridge. Among other things, this tool allow you to drive your phone through the USB connection. You can get a shell, reboot into download or recovery mode, push files to your Android device, etc. To get this tool, you need to download the full Android SDK.

$ tar zxvf ~/download/android-sdk_r11-linux_x86.tgz
$ cd android-sdk-linux_x86
$ tools/android update sdk
[select Android SDK Platform-tools]
$ platform-tools/adb shell
# uname -a
Linux localhost 2.6.35.7-I9000XWJVH-CL184813 #Dark_Core_2.4 PREEMPT Mon May 16 15:02:38 EEST 2011 armv7l GNU/Linux

The important commands are:

• shell to get a shell on the device;
• reboot recovery to reboot in recovery mode;
• reboot download to reboot in download mode;
• push to put a file on the phone;
• pull to retrieve a file;
• install to install an application from its APK;
• logcat to see the logs and what happens, very useful!

Restore download mode If your phone is missing download mode, you can recover it with the help of adb and heimdall. You need to grab some official firmware and extract boot.bin and Sbl.bin from it.

$ adb reboot download
$ heimdall flash --primary-boot ~/download/boot.bin --secondary-boot ~/download/Sbl.bin

Be extra careful here. You may brick your phone. Double check that you grab the correct files and that they are really for your phone (there exists some variants). It worked for me.

Installing a new firmware While you can switch from one firmware to another without losing your data, it is better to wipe your system and your data before switching firmware. This means that you will lose all your applications and the data inside them (list of contacts, SMS, preferences). However, nothing will ever modify your data in the internal SD card or in the external SD card (which are both inside the phone). They usually contains your music and your photos. There are two ways to install a firmware:

1. via Heimdall, or
2. using the recovery.

Heimdall When a guide tells you to use Odin, you can use Heimdall instead. Odin takes a TAR file. You should untar it and uses its content with Heimdall. For example:

$ ./heimdall flash --repartition --pit s1_odin_20100512.pit \
>                  --factoryfs factoryfs.rfs \
>                  --cache cache.rfs --dbdata dbdata.rfs \
>                  --param param.lfs --modem modem.bin \
>                  --kernel zImage --secondary-boot Sbl.bin 
Claiming interface again...   Success
Setting up interface...   Success
Beginning session...
Handshaking with Loke...   Success
Uploading PIT
PIT upload successful
Uploading SBL
100%
SBL upload successful
Uploading KERNEL
100%
KERNEL upload successful
Uploading MODEM
100%
MODEM upload successful
Uploading PARAM
100%
PARAM upload successful
Uploading FACTORYFS
100%
FACTORYFS upload successful
Uploading DBDATAFS
100%
DBDATAFS upload successful
Uploading CACHE
100%
CACHE upload successful
Ending session...
Rebooting device...

You may be interested to update your modem using Heimdall. This is usually independent of the firmware you want to use. Also, no need to provide a PIT file if you don t want to repartition. Heimdall can read the current one and flash only one of the partitions.

Recovery mode The base recovery shipped with the Samsung Galaxy S does not have a lot of options. Moreover, it may be locked and will accept to install only signed firmwares. Most firmwares come with ClockWorkMod, a more advanced recovery. Once you get it, you will be able to use any ZIP file to install a new firmware. My advice is to try to get ClockWorkMod as soon as possible. If you are root, you can install ROM Manager that will install it for you. If you are not root, most custom firmwares will provide ClockWorkMod. Therefore, you can just install a custom firmware with Heimdall. There exists special firmwares just for this, like EZbase. If you want to install CyanogenMod, be sure to download a Froyo firmware, not a Gingerbread one. Keep in mind that the recovery is located inside the kernel. It is not self-contained in the bootloader (unlike download mode). If you don t want to flash a whole firmware (and lose everything on your phone) just to get the recovery, you can just flash the kernel. The ClockWorkMod recovery comes with an utility to backup your whole phone. This way, you can easily restore your previous firmware if you don t like the current one. This is what is called a Nandroid backup.

Lagfix A lot of guides will tell you to enable or disable lagfix. Samsung shipped the Galaxy S with some crappy filesystem called RFS (which is some kind of enhanced FAT). It is slow and seems responsible for some lags that may happen on the interface. A lagfix is a way to replace this filesystem by something better, like EXT4 or YAFFS2. The process is pretty straighforward and consist to backup all the partition to the SD card, reformat it with another filesystem and restore the backup. The lagfix may be applied automatically with some firmware (like CyanogenMod) or you may request it in the recovery mode (most modified firmwares work this way). In this case, it will be applied automatically on the next boot. You should disable it before installing another firmware with the recovery mode (no need if you install it with Heimdall).

Applications You can find many free (as in free speech) applications for Android. Unfortunately, Android Market does not allow to use this criteria as a filter. F-Droid is an alternate market featuring only FOSS applications. Here is a short selection of free applications:

• ADW.Launcher is a home replacement app. It is very configurable and themable.
• K-9 Mail is a very nice email client.
• Xabber is a XMPP/Jabber client.
• ConnectBot is an SSH client (as well as a terminal).
• DroidWall is an application firewall (using Netfilter). It lets you select which application can access to Internet depending on your connection (wifi or 3G).
• Barcode Scanner decodes 1D/2D barcode including QR codes.
• OsmAnd is a replacement for Google Maps using OpenStreetMap. The free version on Android Market is out-dated. Buy the plus version or download it throught F-Droid.

Another must-have application is Titanium Backup which allows to backup any application with data. Unfortunately, this is not a free (as in free speech) application.

I have bought a Samsung Galaxy S Android phone some time ago. One of the first thing that you try to do with such a phone is to switch to some alternate firmware (the coined term is ROM ), like CyanogenMod. Flashing a firmware is a whole new universe. You are told about a lot of proprietary tools, you need to download a lot of things from MegaUpload and friends and nobody really explains what s going on under the hood. I was a bit lost at first. I will not provide a step-by-step guide since I cannot afford to stay up-to-date. Such a guide is usually posted on some forum. It assumes you are running Windows and provides appropriate download links. You must follow it (and check that it is recent enough). I will just provide you some background to understand those guides.

Android firmwares There are several Android firmwares. Most of them are specific to a given phone (or its close variations). They can be sorted in three categories:

1. Official firmwares from the phone manufacturer include a kernel with appropriate drivers and, usually, a customized interface (HTC Sense for HTC, TouchWiz for Samsung). Some manufacturers will lag a lot behind Android schedule and you may not get all the new shiny features.
2. Modified firmwares are built from the official firmwares. They usually add a lot of hacks on top of the original firmware, remove some cruft but are still closely related to the official firmware.
3. Firmwares built from Android Open Source Project (the open source version of Android) do not share nothing with the official firmware except some bits related to the kernel (drivers, hacks).

Darky ROM Darky ROM is a modified firmware. It takes the original firmware from Samsung, adds a custom kernel (based on the source of the official kernel), adds a lot of hacks, some additional applications and removes some unwanted cruft. This is a very nice firmware which is quite snappy. This is a drop-in replacement for the default firmware: you will only get improvements. The latest version is 10.1 and there is a neat guide on how to install it.

CyanogenMod CyanogenMod is a firmware built from AOSP. It supports several devices and provide an unified firmware on all of them. Support for the Samsung Galaxy S is recent and is not present in the stable build. However, some RC build is now available. Be sure to read the FAQ (most notably the part saying that you need to install from Froyo 2.2 because the bootloader provided by Samsung with Gingerbread 2.3 is not compatible). You can also grab some information from the wiki. The major drawback of using this firmware instead of going for a modified firmware like Darky ROM is that the battery life may suck. I now need to charge my phone every day instead of once every two days. On the plus side, you get a very clean firmware with a lot of features and almost no cruft. For example, the notification bar can be customized and OpenVPN is available out of the box. Moreover, almost everything is open source (if you don t install Google apps). You can see this firmware as an open source distribution for your phone. There is no need to download random files linked from a random forum to make it work. There is no package manager, though. Despite the bad battery life, I prefer this firmware.

Prerequisites Before trying to flash a new firmware, there are some tools that you need to have. Note that you don t need root access to flash a new firmware.

Download & recovery mode Before trying to install any firmware, you must check that your phone can access download and recovery modes. The download mode allows to flash any new firmware, even if the current firmware does not boot at all. As long as this mode is available, there is very little chance that you brick your phone. To access those modes, you need to use the three-button combo . Here are the steps (your phone should not be plugged):

1. Power off the phone (wait for the phone to vibrate).
2. Hold the Volume down button for download mode. Hold the Volume up button for recovery mode.
3. Hold the Home button.
4. Hold the Power button. The phone will start.
5. Once you have the Samsung logo displayed on the screen, release the Power button.
6. Only release the two other buttons when you enter the recovery mode or download mode. The recovery mode displays a menu. The download mode displays a big yellow Android logo.

If after ten tries, you are unable to access those modes, maybe they have been disabled. Keep reading, there is a solution.

Heimdall Heimdall is a tool to flash a new firmware to your phone. This is not a mandatory tool but you will have to use it if something goes wrong. Most guides will tell you to use Odin. It is a leaked Samsung tool running on Windows only. You can use Heimdall instead.

$ git clone https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/Heimdall.git
Cloning into Heimdall...
remote: Counting objects: 423, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (271/271), done.
remote: Total 423 (delta 220), reused 332 (delta 138)
Receiving objects: 100% (423/423), 5.91 MiB   962 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (220/220), done.
$ cd Heimdall/heimdall
$ sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0-dev
$ ./configure && make
[...]
$ sudo cp 60-heimdall-galaxy-s.rules /etc/udev/rules.d
$ sudo /etc/init.d/udev reload

You need to use this tool while in download mode. You can test it, while in download mode, with:

$ ./heimdall print-pit

This will display the partition table of your phone. This is enlightening to know what it contains:

• IBL+PBL is the boot loader, be extra careful with it;
• PIT is the partition table;
• EFS contains some important data like IEMEI, be extra careful with it;
• SBL is the second boot loader;
• SBL2 is the backup of the second boot loader;
• PARAM contains some images used as various stage of the boot process;
• KERNEL is the kernel;
• RECOVERY is the backup of the kernel;
• FACTORYFS contains /system file system which is some kind of root file system;
• DBDATA contains /data file system which is the database to store application parameters;
• CACHE contains /cache file system which contains the Dalvik cache;
• MODEM contains the firmware for the modem.

As we will see, Heimdall is able to flash any of those partitions with flash subcommand.

adb adb stands for Android Debug Bridge. Among other things, this tool allow you to drive your phone through the USB connection. You can get a shell, reboot into download or recovery mode, push files to your Android device, etc. To get this tool, you need to download the full Android SDK.

$ tar zxvf ~/download/android-sdk_r11-linux_x86.tgz
$ cd android-sdk-linux_x86
$ tools/android update sdk
[select Android SDK Platform-tools]
$ platform-tools/adb shell
# uname -a
Linux localhost 2.6.35.7-I9000XWJVH-CL184813 #Dark_Core_2.4 PREEMPT Mon May 16 15:02:38 EEST 2011 armv7l GNU/Linux

The important commands are:

• shell to get a shell on the device;
• reboot recovery to reboot in recovery mode;
• reboot download to reboot in download mode;
• push to put a file on the phone;
• pull to retrieve a file;
• install to install an application from its APK;
• logcat to see the logs and what happens, very useful!

Restore download mode If your phone is missing download mode, you can recover it with the help of adb and heimdall. You need to grab some official firmware and extract boot.bin and Sbl.bin from it.

$ adb reboot download
$ heimdall flash --primary-boot ~/download/boot.bin --secondary-boot ~/download/Sbl.bin

Be extra careful here. You may brick your phone. Double check that you grab the correct files and that they are really for your phone (there exists some variants). It worked for me.

Installing a new firmware While you can switch from one firmware to another without losing your data, it is better to wipe your system and your data before switching firmware. This means that you will lose all your applications and the data inside them (list of contacts, SMS, preferences). However, nothing will ever modify your data in the internal SD card or in the external SD card (which are both inside the phone). They usually contains your music and your photos. There are two ways to install a firmware:

1. via Heimdall, or
2. using the recovery.

Heimdall When a guide tells you to use Odin, you can use Heimdall instead. Odin takes a TAR file. You should untar it and uses its content with Heimdall. For example:

$ ./heimdall flash --repartition --pit s1_odin_20100512.pit \
>                  --factoryfs factoryfs.rfs \
>                  --cache cache.rfs --dbdata dbdata.rfs \
>                  --param param.lfs --modem modem.bin \
>                  --kernel zImage --secondary-boot Sbl.bin 
Claiming interface again...   Success
Setting up interface...   Success
Beginning session...
Handshaking with Loke...   Success
Uploading PIT
PIT upload successful
Uploading SBL
100%
SBL upload successful
Uploading KERNEL
100%
KERNEL upload successful
Uploading MODEM
100%
MODEM upload successful
Uploading PARAM
100%
PARAM upload successful
Uploading FACTORYFS
100%
FACTORYFS upload successful
Uploading DBDATAFS
100%
DBDATAFS upload successful
Uploading CACHE
100%
CACHE upload successful
Ending session...
Rebooting device...

You may be interested to update your modem using Heimdall. This is usually independent of the firmware you want to use. Also, no need to provide a PIT file if you don t want to repartition. Heimdall can read the current one and flash only one of the partitions.

Recovery mode The base recovery shipped with the Samsung Galaxy S does not have a lot of options. Moreover, it may be locked and will accept to install only signed firmwares. Most firmwares come with ClockWorkMod, a more advanced recovery. Once you get it, you will be able to use any ZIP file to install a new firmware. My advice is to try to get ClockWorkMod as soon as possible. If you are root, you can install ROM Manager that will install it for you. If you are not root, most custom firmwares will provide ClockWorkMod. Therefore, you can just install a custom firmware with Heimdall. There exists special firmwares just for this, like EZbase. If you want to install CyanogenMod, be sure to download a Froyo firmware, not a Gingerbread one. Keep in mind that the recovery is located inside the kernel. It is not self-contained in the bootloader (unlike download mode). If you don t want to flash a whole firmware (and lose everything on your phone) just to get the recovery, you can just flash the kernel. The ClockWorkMod recovery comes with an utility to backup your whole phone. This way, you can easily restore your previous firmware if you don t like the current one. This is what is called a Nandroid backup.

Lagfix A lot of guides will tell you to enable or disable lagfix. Samsung shipped the Galaxy S with some crappy filesystem called RFS (which is some kind of enhanced FAT). It is slow and seems responsible for some lags that may happen on the interface. A lagfix is a way to replace this filesystem by something better, like EXT4 or YAFFS2. The process is pretty straighforward and consist to backup all the partition to the SD card, reformat it with another filesystem and restore the backup. The lagfix may be applied automatically with some firmware (like CyanogenMod) or you may request it in the recovery mode (most modified firmwares work this way). In this case, it will be applied automatically on the next boot. You should disable it before installing another firmware with the recovery mode (no need if you install it with Heimdall).

Applications You can find many free (as in free speech) applications for Android. Unfortunately, Android Market does not allow to use this criteria as a filter. F-Droid is an alternate market featuring only FOSS applications. Here is a short selection of free applications:

• ADW.Launcher is a home replacement app. It is very configurable and themable.
• K-9 Mail is a very nice email client.
• Xabber is a XMPP/Jabber client.
• ConnectBot is an SSH client (as well as a terminal).
• DroidWall is an application firewall (using Netfilter). It lets you select which application can access to Internet depending on your connection (wifi or 3G).
• Barcode Scanner decodes 1D/2D barcode including QR codes.
• OsmAnd is a replacement for Google Maps using OpenStreetMap. The free version on Android Market is out-dated. Buy the plus version or download it throught F-Droid.

Another must-have application is Titanium Backup which allows to backup any application with data. Unfortunately, this is not a free (as in free speech) application.

I've been in Europe for the last couple weeks but pretty occupied with things like attending my brother wedding and a series of outdoor excursions in Spain. Today Mika and I arrived in Berlin where I am going to attending and giving a talk at the Open Knowledge Conference on When Free Software Isn't Better. I'll also participate in a session on Wikipedia research facilitated by Mayo Fuster Morrell. On July 2nd, I'll be taking an overnight train to Vienna where I'll be attending the Open and User Innovation Workshop -- an academic conference where I'll presenting some of my research. From there I'll be hitching a ride to Munich with Marcell Mars on July 6th and, after that, a flight back to Boston with a weekend long layover in Reykjavik. Details on the trip are on page on my wiki and I encourage anyone to contact me if you're in Berlin, Vienna, Munich, or Reykjavik and want to meet up for a drink or a chat.

Periodically Free Software people from other countries visit Melbourne on business trips. Usually when someone is sent any distance on a business trip (IE to Australia from anywhere other than NZ) they will stay in a good hotel (4 star or better), this generally means that they have a pool in their hotel. 5 star hotels and the newer serviced apartment hotels tend to have really good pools (1/4 olympic size isn t uncommon). Hotel pools are very under-utilised, their main purpose AFAIK is to boost the hotel star rating my experience is that it s not common to meet other people in a hotel pool. While food and drinks are often banned in the pool area my observation is that the only rule which matters is no glass . So hotel pools are almost ideal for pool parties, you just need to drink from cans or from drinks in plastic bottles that are poured into plastic cups. If any Free Software person finds themself staying in a hotel in Melbourne Australia with not much to do in the evenings or weekends then one option is to call for a pool party. I ve asked on a local mailing list and it seems that there is enough interest for a small party, the local mailing lists can be used to arrange a party. Also one thing to note is that some hotels have outdoor pools, while Australia is generally a warm place the southern parts of Australia (such as Melbourne) get quite cold in winter, an outdoor pool is not going to be fun for the colder half of the year. So getting a hotel with an indoor pool is very important during the April-September period.

I've taken a tiny step towards getting together a prototype toolset for developing an initial development iteration of the NAS functionality of the FreedomBox. Here's what I am trying to do:

• create a disk image for a system that provides simplistic NAS functionality, with no configuration, including no authentication: just serve whatever disks are available over SMB
• use a TDD approach to developing it

In essence, this means I want to specify the functionality of the system I am building using automated tests. As soon as those tests pass, I will write more tests, and make them pass. When I can't think of new relevant tests, I know I'm done. I'm building a simple tool, systest, that will execute the tests. It is built on top of Python's unittest library, because that makes my implementation simple. I've now developed systest far enough that I can almost automatically do this:

• build a new image, using vmdebootstrap, plus a customization script
• start the image with KVM controlled by libvirt
• run the tests using systest

(The command line would be something like this: ./build-fbxnas && virsh start fbxnas && sleep 30 && ~/systest/systest --target=192.168.122.89 --user=tomjon ~/systest/tests-debian-base-install.py --user-ssh-private-key=tomjon.secret
--log=foo.log --user-password=password1 where build-fbxnas is a wrapper script around vmdebootstrap. But I didn't actually run that command, and it's lacking the virt-install command to actually set up the virtual machine the first time.) systest contains very little code, but to get that far, I had to shave some yaks, and that made writing it rather an unpleasant experience. The tests so far really simple, and don't test NAS stuff at all, just that the basic Debian install works: only the ssh port is open, and basic networking and such things work. However, now that I've gotten this much to work, I can start writing NAS tests. (smbclient may be my next yak. This would be a lot easier if I had ever used Samba for anything real...) systest and vmdebootstrap are on Gitorious. No .debs yet, this stuff is much too raw, but you can run them from the checkouts, no install necessary. PS. If anyone knows how to query KVM or libvirt for the IP address assigned by their internal DHCP server to the virtual machine guest, automatically, without asking the actual virtual machine, please tell.

I m really happy to be able to attend DebConf11. It will be my third DebConf. I hope it will be as productive and enjoyable as past editions I ll arrive on July 20th and stay until the end of DebConf. See you all there soon!

It s Co-operatives Fortnight until 9 July and our co-op is supporting many events:

• This afternoon (Wednesday 29 June), we ll be at Co-operative lending and ethical investment in Bristol;
• Tomorrow, we ll be at a Co-operative Business Breakfast in Glastonbury;
• Next Friday, we re hosting a Co-operative Business Breakfast in Weston-super-Mare;
• and we ll post more events to our co-op s news page as we find out about them.

As you may know, we ve already done two events: First, last Friday, Michael attended the Co-operatives UK Annual Meeting on our behalf. Co-operatives UK is our national co-ordinating co-op and the figurehead for the movement in this country. I didn t see the meeting (the live video link didn t work for me, as before), but Michael reports:

The AGM seemed well organized; it was good to hear about the work they re doing and the concerns regarding the co-operative situation in Poland. I think it s important to exercise one s ability to vote, but would have liked more opportunity to speak with people.

We couldn t send anyone to the Mary Portas session on Friday evening, but Paul Dale Smith summarised the session and RuthRosselson described it as Mary Portas tells Co-op Congress how it is . Then on Saturday, I was in Manchester for The Power of Co-operation, thanks to support from software.coop and The Co-operative Bank. The first session I attended, on mutualisting the Post Office was interesting and pretty full, but I found some later sessions rather frustrating. As well as my usual concerns about surrendering to uncritical use of private-sector software, I got quite annoyed by two sessions on member engagement where the presenters seemed to talk for almost the full time without letting the audience engage! Not good for my blood pressure, that, especially when I feel they re missing something! But the real value of the day was in the fascinating discussions I had with many people in the short breaks in the plenary, or while wandering around the exhibition and the marketplace. For example, it was great to see Revolver still selling the T-shirts I mentioned here in 2009 as well as giving out free samples of their brilliant fairtrade coffee. What comes from the various discussions will probably decide whether we attend similar events in future. Were you in Birmingham? How was it for you? Are you supporting Co-operatives Fortnight? How, where, when and why?

Hello The last version (1.247, available in Debian unstable as libconfig-model-perl) of Config::Model provides a brand new model for /etc/LCDd.conf. With this model, you can edit or validate your lcdproc configuration. To edit this configuration the first time, you will have to run:

config-edit -application lcdproc -force

The -force option is required to load the file the first time. (because the default LCDd.conf file contains configuration options for all drivers, even though only one them if usefull). You will get this screen:
In this screen, you can setup the driver for your adress with a right click on Driver parameter. Once youv e selected the driver and clicked on store , the driver will be listed in the left part of the window so you can tune the parameters of this specific driver: In this screen, I ve turned the backlight off and added a small note to remember why. This small note will be writted in a comment in /etc/LCDd.conf. Once all required modifications are done, it s time to save the configuration file using the menu entry File -> save Now, let s see the resulting file (which is a bit long due to the amount of comments in the original LCDd.conf file):

## This file was written by Config::Model
## You may modify the content of this file. Configuration
## modifications will be preserved. Modifications in
## comments may be mangled.
# LCDd.conf -- configuration file for the LCDproc server daemon LCDd
#
# This file contains the configuration for the LCDd server.
#
# The format is ini-file-like. It is divided into sections that start at
# markers that look like [section]. Comments are all line-based comments,
# and are lines that start with '
#
# The server has a 'central' section named [server]. For the menu there is
# a section called [menu]. Further each driver has a section which
# defines how the driver acts.
#
# The drivers are activated by specifiying them in a driver= line in the
# server section, like:
#
#   Driver=curses
#
# This tells LCDd to use the curses driver.
# The first driver that is loaded and is capable of output defines the
# size of the display. The default driver to use is curses.
# If the driver is specified using the -d  command line option,
# the Driver= options in the config file are ignored.
#
# The drivers read their own options from the respective sections.
[server]
# Where can we find the driver modules ?
# IMPORTANT: Make sure to change this setting to reflect your
#            specific setup! Otherwise LCDd won't be able to find
#            the driver modules and will thus not be able to
#            function properly.
# NOTE: Always place a slash as last character !
DriverPath=/usr/lib/lcdproc/
# Tells the server to load the given drivers. Multiple lines can be given.
# The name of the driver is case sensitive and determines the section
# where to look for further configuration options of the specific driver
# as well as the name of the dynamic driver module to load at runtime.
# The latter one can be changed by giving af File= directive in the
# driver specific section.
#
# The following drivers are supported:
#   bayrad, CFontz, CFontz633, CFontzPacket, curses, CwLnx, ea65,
#   EyeboxOne, g15, glcdlib, glk, hd44780, icp_a106, imon, imonlcd,
#   IOWarrior, irman, joy, lb216, lcdm001, lcterm, lirc, lis, MD8800,
#   mdm166a, ms6931, mtc_s16209x, MtxOrb, mx5000, NoritakeVFD, picolcd,
#   pyramid, sed1330, sed1520, serialPOS, serialVFD, shuttleVFD, sli,
#   stv5730, svga, t6963, text, tyan, ula200, xosd
Driver=imonlcd
# Tells the driver to bind to the given interface
Bind=127.0.0.1
# Listen on this specified port; defaults to 13666.
Port=13666
ReportLevel=3
# Sets the reporting level; defaults to 2 (warnings and errors only).
# ReportLevel=3
# Should we report to syslog instead of stderr ? [default: no; legal: yes, no]
# ReportToSyslog=yes
# User to run as.  LCDd will drop its root priviledges, if any,
# and run as this user instead.
User=nobody
Foreground=no
Hello=    Hello
Hello=    LCDproc!
GoodBye=    GoodBye
GoodBye=    LCDproc!
# The server will stay in the foreground if set to true.
# Foreground=no
# Hello message: each entry represents a display line; default: builtin
# Hello="  Welcome to"
# Hello="   LCDproc!"
# GoodBye message: each entry represents a display line; default: builtin
# GoodBye="Thanks for using"
# GoodBye="   LCDproc!"
# Sets the default time in seconds to displays a screen.
WaitTime=5
# If yes, the the serverscreen will be rotated as a usual info screen. If no,
# it will be a background screen, only visible when no other screens are
# active. The special value 'blank' is similar to no, but only a blank screen
# is displayed. [default: on; legal: on, off, blank]
# ServerScreen=no
# Set master backlight setting. If set to 'open' a client may control the
# backlight for its own screens (only). [default: open; legal: off, open, on]
# Backlight=open
# Set master heartbeat setting. If set to 'open' a client may control the
# heartbeat for its own screens (only). [default: open; legal: off, open, on]
# Heartbeat=open
# set title scrolling speed [default: 10; legal: 0-10]
# TitleSpeed=10
# The "...Key=" lines define what the server does with keypresses that
# don't go to any client.
# These are the defaults:
ToggleRotateKey=Enter
PrevScreenKey=Left
NextScreenKey=Right
ScrollUpKey=Up
ScrollDownKey=Down
# ScrollUpKey=Up
# ScrollDownKey=Down
# If you have only 4 keys, you can choose to use this:
# ToggleRotateKey=Enter
# PrevScreenKey=Up
# NextScreenKey=Down
# If you have only 3 keys, you can choose to use this:
# ToggleRotateKey=Enter
# PrevScreenKey=Up
[menu]
# You can configure what keys the menu should use. Note that the MenuKey
# will be reserved exclusively, the others work in shared mode.
# The following works excellent with 4 keys or more.
MenuKey=Escape
EnterKey=Enter
UpKey=Up
DownKey=Down
LeftKey=Left
RightKey=Right
[imonlcd]
Protocol=0
OnExit=2
Device=/dev/lcd0
# My fishes dont like the glow
Backlight=off
DiscMode=0

You will notice a few things:

• Comments from the original file in section [server] and [menu] were kept
• Unused drivers sections are gone
• The fishy note about backlight was saved as a comment above the backlight parameter

If you need to update the file, you will have to run:

sudo config-edit -application lcdproc

The -force option is no longer needed. If you don t like to click, you can run:

config-edit -application lcdproc -ui none -save

For instance:

config-edit -application lcdproc -ui none -save 'server driver=imonlcd - imonlcd Device="/dev/lcd1" '

Further reading If you want to know more about lcdproc model, you can view:

• LCDd model and all models for the drivers
• LCDd documentation and the drivers documentationgenerated from these models

Under the hood I was too lazy to write myself the models of all drivers (about 3500 lines for them all). All models were generated from the LCDd.conf template file provided by lcdproc project. This blog explains how this was done. But the result is far from perfect. Event though LCDd.conf comments give a lot of semantic information, parameter types could be better adjusted and some of the examples provided in LCDd.conf confuse the model generator.
So the current comments are good, but not enough. In the future, we could decide on better structural conventions for the comments that would give users the information they need and give a model generator enough information to generate better models. This will hopefully be the topic of yet another blog All the best

Two weeks ago, I updated the packages containing the BioPerl modules bioperl and bioperl-run, which allowed to resume the work done on GBrowse, one of the genome browsers available in Debian. As many Perl modules, BioPerl has extensive regression tests. Some of them need access to external services, and are disabled by default as the Internet is not available in our build farm. Nevertheless, they can be triggered through the environment variable DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE when building the package locally. Bioperl successfully passes all off-line tests, and a part of the on-line tests is already corrected its development branch. In contrary, BioPerl-Run fail the tests for Bowtie, DBA, EMBOSS, Genewise, Hmmer, PAML, SABlastPlus, T-Coffee and gmap-run. In some cases, like EMBOSS, it is because a command has been renamed in Debian. In other cases, in particular DBA et Genewise, it is much more difficult to figure out on which side is the problem. Regression tests are essential to determine if a package works or not on ports others than the one used by the packager (amd64 in my case). Even simple ones can be useful. In the case of T-Coffee, that has a rudimentary test that I have activated recently, it showed that the packages distributed on armel are not working at all. Running regression tests when building packages have advantages, in particular to have the results published for each port automatically as part of the build logs. But is also cause problems. First, a package would need to build-depend on every software it can interact with, in order to test it comprehensively. In the example of bioperl-run, it makes it impossible to build on armel as long as t-coffee is broken there. Second, this approach does not help the user to test similarly a program installed on his computer. Maybe the Debian Enhancement Proposal 8, to test binary packages with material provided by their source packages, will solve these two problems.