I ve been asked by the Debconf 10 talks team to coordinate a Debian Enterprise track at the upcoming Debconf 10 conference. I m really excited about this, and I could use your help. From my standpoint, this all started with a BOF proposal looking at better coordination and what is missing in Debian enterprise integration. The track will also include talks and other events on what exciting things are happening with Debian in the enterprise. I need your help in the form of suggestions for talks, panels and the like (especially if you would be willing to give the talk or coordinate an activity). We re under a fairly tight deadline; ideally proposals would be in by May 1, but if they are not, it s still definitely worth discussing with me. From my standpoint, topics include:

• Managing groups of machines together
• Working with Active Directory
• Open source answers to the use cases of Active Directory if you aren t a Windows shop
• Responses especially in the form of working code or ideas for getting there to my concerns about how we re letting Microsoft drive the evolution in the enterprise
• Federated authentication, authorization and personalization
• Integrating with asset tracking, ERP, and other enterprise processes and how Debian fits in.
• Bringing enterprise players into the community as contributors to the project

Obviously, many other things could fit in and I d be interested in your ideas as well.

In the last days I uploaded several (new) packages to backports.org:

• mailscanner 4.79.11-2~bpo50+1
• icinga 1.0.1-3~bpo50+1 (NEW queue)
• nagios3 3.2.0-5~bpo50+1
• php-suhosin 0.9.31-1~bpo50+1 (NEW queue)

A new haproxy 1.4.4-1~bpo50+1 package is in preparation and needs testing before uploading. You can find the package here.

Only one more day until release and a few more until the Kansas City Ubuntu Release Party.

I have updated this page with all the needed details ( even has a section to RSVP if you wish to be counted )

A Huge thanks got out to the great people over at Cowtown Computer Congress Hackerspace for offering to Host the event! Should be a great time.

Getting close now. Sarah had another ultrasound yesterday, just to check things. Unfortunately I couldn't be there due to a self-inflicted scheduling screw up. Apparently you could see hair on the ultrasound, so I'm a bit bummed to have missed it. The baby has "dropped", so that's good. Her head's still down, and she's swallowing, so that's all good too. Weight-wise she's now in the 38th percentile. We're booked in for a C-section on the 14th, unless she comes of her own free will between now and then (which is what we'd prefer), in which case our OB will allow an attempt at a VBAC. Our OB is reluctant to allow the pregnancy to go past 39 weeks, given prior history and Sarah's heart, and they don't induce for VBACs, so it's going to require some planetary alignment to avoid a C-section. The whole heart thing still being an issue was only a fairly recent discovery for us. Sarah's cardiac surgeon had told us we could go forth and have as many kids as we wanted, but it turns out the fine print in that statement is that while the previous aneurysm has been repaired, she has an undiagnosed connective tissue disorder, so there's no telling what might happen with the rest of her aorta in the future. So her OB is just doing what a good high-risk OB should do, and being extra paranoid, on two fronts. So we've got a couple of weeks to try and convince our daughter to come more than a week and 2 days early. I don't think we have statistics on our side, unfortunately (although I had a surprisingly hard time finding concrete statistics on delivery dates relative to due dates for first-time deliveries versus subsequent deliveries).

No sooner do I discover it, and TransLink up and renames itself to Clipper. I wonder how much that exercise is going to cost? I'm also curious as to what they're going to do in terms of a new domain name. Ah, marketing:

Why is the name being changed? Now that the system is fully operational on five transit agencies - Muni, BART, AC Transit, Caltrain and Golden Gate Transit and Ferry - it is available to the majority of Bay Area transit riders. Giving the system a new name and logo helps make it more appealing to potential customers and also takes away any confusion with other local programs such as FasTrak, Fast Pass, as well as several other transportation programs around the world that are also named TransLink.

With Bay Area public transportation being woefully inadequate, I have to wonder if much of any adoption problems (which is what I presume they're trying to solve with this rebranding) are more a function of overall patronage?

It always happen that I get lots and lots of comment spam via Planet Debian everytime I post something here. It's always the same sort of spam: trackbacks/pingbacks to some strange sites:



Is there anything that can be done? I'm quite sure I'm not the only one with that problem.

Alex released another set of Radeon power management patches over the weekend, and I've been adding my own code on top of that (Alex's patches go on top of drm-next, mine go on top of there). I've left it stress-testing for a couple of hours without it falling over, which tells me that it's stable enough that I can feel smug. This is a pleasing counterpoint to the previous experiences I've been having, which have been rife with a heady mixture of chip lockups or kernel deadlocks. It turns out that gpus are hard.

There's a few things you need to know about gpus. The first is that if they're discrete devices they typically have their own memory controller and video memory. The second is that there's an impressive number of ways that you can end up touching that memory. The third is that they tend to get upset if something tries to touch that memory and the memory controller is in the middle of reclocking at the time.

The first and most obvious use of video memory is by the gpu itself. Accelerated operations on radeon are carried out by sending a command packet to the command processor. This is achieved by sharing a ring buffer between the cpu and the gpu, with the gpu reading packets out of that ring buffer and performing the operations contained within them. Many of these operations will touch video memory (that being the nature of most things you want a gpu to do), and if that happens bad things occur. Like the card locking up and potentially taking your PCI bus with it.

So, obviously, we don't want that to happen. The first thing we do is take a mutex that blocks any further accelerated operations from being submitted by userspace. Then we wait until we get an interrupt from the gpu telling us that the display engine has gone idle. The problem here is that we don't have a terribly good idea of how many more operations there are to complete and we don't know how long each of those operations is going to take, but this is less bad than some of the alternatives[1]. Jerome Glisse has some ideas on how to improve this to require less waiting, but the effects should still be pretty much invisible to the average user.

So we've stopped the command processor touching ram. Everything's good, right?

Well, not really. The obvious problem is that users typically want to display something, so there's a separate chunk of chip that's repeatedly copying video memory over to your monitor. That's got to go too. Thankfully, there's a convenient bit in the crtc registers that lets us turn that off, but the pretty unsurprising downside is that your screen goes blank while that's happening. So we don't want to do that. Instead, we try to perform the reclock while there's nothing being displayed on the screen - that is, while we're in the screen region where a crt's electron gun would be scanning back from the bottom of the screen to the top. It turns out that rather a lot of display assumptions depend on this happening even if there's no crt, no electron gun and no thick sheet of glass with a decent approximation of vacuum behind it, so we get to do this even if we're displaying to an LVDS. And we have about 400-500 microseconds to do it - an almost generous amount of time.

So we ask the hardware to generate an interrupt when we enter vblank and then we reclock. Except the hardware has an irritating habit of lying - sometimes we get the interrupt a line or two before vblank, sometimes we get it after we've already gone out the other side. Vexing, and not entirely solved yet - so sometimes you'll still get a single blank frame during reclock. But there are plans, and they'll probably even work.

At this point the acceleration hardware isn't touching the memory and the scanout hardware isn't touching the memory. Except it still crashes under some workloads. This one took me longer to track down, but the answer turned out to be pretty straightforward. Not all operations are accelerated. When they're not accelerated they have to be done in software. That means that the CPU has to write to the video memory itself. I'm sure you can see where this is going. This was fixed without too much trouble once I'd finished picking through the driver to work out every location where objects might be mapped into the CPU's address space, at which point it's a simple matter of unmapping them and blocking the fault handler from remapping them until the reclock is finished. Linux, thankfully, has lots of synchronisation primitives. And now everything works.

Except when it doesn't. This took a final period of head scratching, followed by the discovery that ttm (the memory allocator used by radeon) has a background thread that would occasionally fire to clean up objects. And by clean up objects, I mean change their mapping - which means updating their status in the gart, which means touching video memory. So, let's block that. And that tripped me off to the fact that even if it couldn't submit new commands, the CPU could still create or destroy objects - with the same consequences.

So, once all of these are blocked, video memory is quiescent and we can do what we want. And we do, at least once I'd sorted out the bits where I was taking locks in the wrong order and deadlocking. Depending on the powerplay tables available on your card we'll chose different rates and so your power savings will vary heavily depending on the values that your vendor provided, but the card I'm testing on sees a handy 30W drop at idle. Right now we're only changing clocks and not dropping voltage so there's potentially a little more to come.

While getting this stable was pretty miserable, the documented entry points for clock changing made a lot of this easier than it would otherwise have been. It's also probably worth noting that Intel's clock configuration registers are entirely missing from any public documentation and the dirver Intel submitted to make them work in their latest chips appeared to have been deliberately obfuscated, so thanks to AMD for making all of this possible.

[1] It's possible to insert various command packets that either indicate when they've passed or stall until a register value gets updated, but these either cause awkward problems with the cp locking or mean that the gui idle functionality never goes idle, so they're not ideal either.

... or as some fellow DD said, one year ago: "j'ai 1000 ans". So what happened during last year, the DVCS way:

$> cd "Sylvain Le Gall"
$> darcs whatsnew
hunk life.txt 0
+ Yvain, my son, talks and walks, this is quite amazing to see your
+ child growing up.  My wife is pregnant, release expected in July
+ ;-)
+ 
+ I traveled quite a lot this year: Spain, Tunisia, Belgium,
+ Roscoff and Huelgoat (Brittany) 
hunk debian.txt 0
+ I went to Debconf 9 and attended Debcamp before. I met a lot of
+ very interesting people there. I spent the Debcamp time to
+ implement Zack proposal to compute OCaml package dependencies
+ using dh-ocaml. It WORKS ;-) It was a pleasure to work with Mehdi
+ Dogguy and Stephane Glondu on this subject.
+ 
+ The dh-ocaml work allowed me to be the co-author, with Stephane
+ and Mehdi, of Zack's article on the subject. 
+ My first publication!
+ 
+ I went to FOSDEM 2010 and helped attend the Debian booth. Quite a
+ nice experience I was there with my good old Open Brick NG (need
+ to blog about it one day).
+ 
+ Found some time to enable the LLVM OCaml bindings in LLVM Debian
+ package.
+ 
+ Voted for the first  OCaml-aware DPL! (NB: this was not the
+ reason for my vote)
hunk work.txt 0
+ I worked on extending a tool that I delivered before. OCaml is
+ quite a good language when it comes to do maintenance. You can
+ extend something and have dozens of compiler errors where your
+ changes propagate. Once every error has been corrected, your
+ changes are OK. Of course, this requires to use OCaml types,
+ pattern matching and a bit of unit testing.
+ 
+ I was delighted when Jun Furuse ask me if he can organize 
+ OCaml Meeting 2010 in Japan. The first OCaml Meeting spin-off. 
+ 
+ OASIS has been growing quite a lot since the year before and got
+ enough importance. Thus I decided to give a talk about it at CAML
+ Consortium in December and then at OCaml Meeting 2010. 
+ 
+ I decided to have some English training. I was missing some oral
+ fluency.
+ 
+ I organized the OCaml Meeting 2010 in April. It was quite a lot
+ of work, especially to prepare my own presentation, but the
+ meeting was a success and probably my best birthday gift with the
+ OCaml Hacking Day organized just after.
$> darcs record -a
What is the patch name? "32 year old"

Unfortunately, this release is late. My birthday was on April 16th, but it was OCaml Meeting this day, which was my top level priority at this time. See you next year!

For many activists in net-politics it is apparent that the fight against child pornography is just an excuse for establishing a EU-wide content filtering infrastructure. This infrastructure for content filtering can be used to filter other content than child pornography as well. For example politicians in Germany already requested blocking gambling sites, Nazi sites, left extremistic political sites and others, when we had that kind of discussion last year over here. The proposal of a law putting up stop pages in front of child pronography sites by former minister for family Ursula "Zensursula" von der Leyen passed the parliament, but shortly after last years parliament elecetion all political parties didn't want that law anymore.
EU commissioner Cecilia "Censilia" Malmstr m introduced a similar proposal for a EU-wide blocking iinitiative a short while ago, as you might now. Christian Engstr m, member of the EU parliament of the swedish Pirate Party, wrote today on his blog that content right industry welcomes child pornography as a way to introduce content filter and blocking infrastructure:

Child pornography is great, the speaker at the podium declared enthusiastically. It is great because politicians understand child pornography. By playing that card, we can get them to act, and start blocking sites. And once they have done that, we can get them to start blocking file sharing sites .

The venue was a seminar organized by the American Chamber of Commerce in Stockholm on May 27, 2007, under the title Sweden A Safe Haven for Pirates? . The speaker was Johan Schl ter from the Danish Anti-Piracy Group, a lobby organization for the music and film industry associations, like IFPI and others.

[...]

Start with child porn, which everybody agrees is revolting, and find some politicians who want to appear like they are doing something. Never mind that the blocking as such is ridiculously easy to circumvent in less than 10 seconds. The purpose at this stage is only to get the politicians and the general public to accept the principle that censorship in the form of filters is okay. Once that principle has been established, it is easy to extend it to other areas, such as illegal file sharing. And once censorship of the Internet has been accepted in principle, they can start looking at ways to make it more technically difficult to circumvent.

If you already have not, then please act now and contact your local EU representive and kindly ask to refuse this directive of Malmstr m and enlighten them by supplying arguments such those MOGIS (MissbrauchsOpfer Gegen InternetSperren, abuse survivors against internet blocking) put up on their webpage (English and other languages).

The abuse of childs and the documentation of such abuse (child pornography is a bad term anyway) needs to be stopped! But access blocking is the wrong direction. Better take care of a more effective criminal prosecution. Documentation of child abuse needs to get removed from the web and the producers needs to get arrested.

So, please act now!

P.S.: there's a nice video on http://cleanternet.org/

I've asked the weavers to start doing their job today, so with luck the tailors will still have time to make kilts ready to wear for DebConf10.If you've been wondering if you'd like some Debian Tartan, now's your chance. We've ordered a little over 16 yards more than we need, which will be enough to make about 2 extra kilts and a few ties (depending on exact details), so order early to avoid disappointment.Of course, kilts are not the only thing one can make out of tartan. The tailors make other things, but there's nothing stopping you from buying some cloth by the yard and being inventive (it costs about 25.00 GBP per yard). We'll also be making ties, so if you're interested in one of those, please add yourself to the relevant table on the wiki, and I'll get in touch with prices etc.Full details of this silliness are available on the wiki page -- send any questions to phil at hands dot comUpdate 16:00 UTC 27th: one 8-yard kilt snapped up already (numbers above updated)

First, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that TeleMetrum is now the subject of a post on the Make magazine site. Very cool! As reported last week, I've been waiting for better GPS antennas to arrive, but heavy snow here in Colorado last Friday delayed delivery. They finally arrived, and as I hoped, they appear to completely solve our signal strength problem! So... [drum roll, please!]... I am very happy to announce that the first production build of TeleMetrum boards and starter kits are now "in stock" at the Garbee and Garbee web store, along with other products designed by the Altus Metrum community! Keith and I are still working on the new Java-based ground station software and user documentation for the system. Watch this space for updates. I hope we'll have both ready for download by the time customers actually receive hardware...

Over the last few months I ve been working for Igalia, as an intern, fixing regressions in Epiphany, which extends to WebKitGTK+ sometimes. Surely a dream job: working on my favourite projects, on a great company, surrounded by great teammates and friends. I m happy about it, really really happy. I love this job, totally, completely!. I ve had the chance to learn a lot. Here I d like to share some things I have learned so far, I look forward to post again with more ideas, but meanwhile here you have two. Different timezones are hard The time when I find most of the Igalia crew online is between 2am and 12pm. Of course this doesn t mean you can t find them past 12pm, but it s already 7pm or 8pm in Europe then. I m on UTC-5 and Spain is on UTC+1 or (now) UTC+2. You probably agree that asking anyone to wake up at 7am in summer is unrealistic. Luckily, Igalia doesn t make me pass a turing test everyday at a fixed time. This rocks.

Valpara so, Chile I love it when people understand that a happy hacker working at midnight is better than an unhappy hacker working on a set in stone schedule. Kudos to Igalia for that. Your code should explain and defend itself My written expression teacher says Your text should be good enough to explain and defend itself . This applies to code too. I confirmed this at the expense of Xan s patience. It s a common situation: when the maintainer reviews your patch you are not around to explain it, or present the rationale you put into the change. The solution? well, simple, your patch and commit log should explain by themselves.

Don t just post a patch and do this.
Review it yourself. I saw, after realising how much ping-pong Xan and I had to play to get a patch in, that my patches lacked a harder review by myself before being posted. You have to be your first reviewer. Be a severe judge of your patch, ask yourself if you would accept such a patch, if you would like a commit message like that, if that variable name is really good, if someone could quickly grasp what s it all about, etc. Get into the flippy flops of the maintainer, don t assume everything is obvious to everyone.

A few hours ago, I sent the following to both the R development list and the informal R / GSoC list:

Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2010 15:27:29 -0500
To: R Development List <r-devel>
CC: gsoc-r <gsoc-r>
Subject: R and the Google Summer of Code 2010 -- Please welcome our new students!
From: Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd>
Earlier today Google finalised student / mentor pairings and allocations for
the Google Summer of Code 2010 (GSoC 2010).  The R Project is happy to
announce that the following students have been accepted:
   Colin Rundel, "rgeos - an R wrapper for GEOS", mentored by Roger Bivand of
      the Norges Handelshoyskole, Norway
   Ian Fellows, "A GUI for Graphics using ggplot2 and Deducer", mentored by
      Hadley Wickham of Rice University, USA
   Chidambaram Annamalai, "rdx - Automatic Differentiation in R", mentored by
      John Nash of University of Ottawa, Canada
   Yasuhisa Yoshida, "NoSQL interface for R", mentored by Dirk Eddelbuettel,
      Chicago, USA
   Felix Schoenbrodt, "Social Relations Analyses in R", mentored by Stefan
      Schmukle, Universitaet Muenster, Germany
   Details about all proposals are on the R Wiki page for the GSoC 2010 at
   http://rwiki.sciviews.org/doku.php?id=developers:projects:gsoc2010
The R Project is honoured to have received its highest number of student
allocations yet, and looks forward to an exciting Summer of Code.  Please
join me in welcoming our new students.
At this time, I would also like to thank all the other students who have
applied for working with R in this Summer of Code. With a limited number of
available slots, not all proposals can be accepted -- but I hope that those
not lucky enough to have been granted a slot will continue to work with R and
towards making contributions within the R world. 
I would also like to express my thanks to all other mentors who provided for
a record number of proposals.  Without mentors and their project ideas we
would not have a Summer of Code -- so hopefully we will see you again next
year. 
Regards,  
Dirk (acting as R/GSoC 2010 admin)

Earlier this month, I applied to the Mono Project (and the University of Washington, and Ubuntu, and Debian, and The Perl Foundation) requesting a mentor to get Perl6 hosted on the DLR. Last Tuesday, Miguel contacted me and asked that I chat with Michael Hutchinson about possibly taking up a different project. It seems that the group did not have any mentors who felt comfortable mentoring the Perl6 project. After a bit of consideration, I agreed to modify my application and take up a project to revive the regular expression compiler from 2.2. Today, the project was officially accepted, and I met with my mentor for the first time (hi Rodrigo!). I will also be working with Matthew Wilson (aka @diakopter), since he has purportedly implemented a number of regex-to-IL compilers ;) He also offered to mentor me if The Perl Foundation had accepted my application, and since he has already implemented a perl6 compiler in javascript, I have been looking forward to poking some code with him. Although the GSoC doesn t officially get started until 5/24, I m making a git-svn checkout now. I ve always committed the code directly to svn, but I ve enjoyed working with git, and it seems about time to start contributing via git-svn. It will be easier to have local branches this way, too. Anyway, I m looking forward to it ;)

Some months ago I wrote about my intention to drop waf from Debian. Some bugs I filed were fixed shortly after they appeared, while I managed to upload three NMUs to fix remaining bits (flowcanvas, patchage and raul), all uploaded to DELAYED/15 to give maintainer time to react. In the meantime, jack-audio-connection-kit was uploaded build-depending on waf, this brings in a little unplanned delay, but I provided a workaround to get rid of it, it just need to be improved. I want to remove waf before Squeeze is released, so please do not upload more packages build-depending on waf, this way you can help its removal. Thank you!

• Christian Perrier have reported about the localization status in the debian-installer, 26 languages are in danger of being deactivated. if you are a native speaker of one of them, you can join and help!
• The old (and no longer updated) archive snapshot http://snapshot.debian.net has been revamped as an official Debian service at http://snapshot.debian.org/.
  More information in the press release.
• You are still on time of submitting your event proposal for DebConf 10. Deadline is May 1st, 2010, 23h59 UTC
  Daniel Kahn Gillmor have blogged about the changes introduced this year.
• If you are a long time Debian contributor who never have attended to DebConf and you are interested, you no longer have an excuse, read about the special funding for DebConf Newbies.
  Joey Hess and Stefano Zacchiroli have blogged about this.
• Guido G nther wrote a summary about the 3rd Debian Groupware Meeting.
• Debian got 9 students accepted for this edition of the Google Summer of Code. Welcome to the project!
  Read a brief summary about their projects.
• And finally, a bit late, but still important, congratulations Stefano!

Dear Gerhard, one week after you have left us after your long fight and we payed one s last respects to you today, you hopefully may find your peace! Thanks for all the things you have done for your family.

When I first started using Free Software yes, that s quite some time ago I found it the right thing to do. It felt like I was first time ever really controlling what my computer does. Took just a bit of time to notice I really never knew anything about it. Well, almost at least. Then when I started contributing to Free Software this obviously changed. One of the freedoms is to learn from the code you re running. And I did it by reading, contributing, doing nonsense with it, reimplementing it you know the deal. Starting to work on Debian was something that just evolved out of it. Doing so gave me the opportunity to give back. I never achieved that actually, though. At least I don t consider my contributions even remotely sufficient to make up for the great deal of software that I use sometimes without noticing it. Still there s lots of stuff that I don t have a clue of and I rely on other developers to do their (volunteer) job. Otherwise my knowledge wouldn t help much. I could never continue kernel development if those kernel hackers all stepped back for instance. I guess, it s getting more and more difficult the closer the piece of code is to hardware. Another thought I had was about Free Software in general. It s more than just the code (although it might be the most important part), it s also a concept that needs to be communicated. Firefox on Windows shows how Free Software can have a big market share in an otherwise closed source environment. Yet I m not sure all users know about it being open source and what that means (hear them talk about Freeware instead). And who is dealing with this conceptual stuff? I decided to do something about all that. Now I don t really have money but a bit I thought I could share. And I could set yet another sign by publicly talking about it, or casually mentioning that I consider Free Software and Linux a good thing. So you will see a mail signature now below all my mails. I always wondered what one might gain with such and now I found a reason to include one. It reads:

Debian Developer                                 www.debian.org
Member of the Linux Foundation                    www.linux.com
Fellow of the Free Software Foundation Europe      www.fsfe.org

I d like to extend a warm welcome to our selected students for the 2010 Debian Google Summer of Code! They should pop up on Debian Planet soon and you re welcome to come talk to them on #debian-soc on irc.debian.org Aptitude Qt by Piotr Galiszewski, mentored by Sune Vuorela Qt GUI for aptitude. Currently, KDE users need to use Aptitude via the console interface, or install the newly developed GTK frontend, which does not fit well into KDE desktop. Making Qt frontend to Aptitude would solve this problem and bring an advanced and fully Debian-compliant graphical package manager to KDE. Content-aware Config Files Upgrading by Krzysztof Tyszecki, mentored by Dominique Dumont When a package deliver configuration files, the problem of merging user data with new configuration instructions will arise during package upgrades on users systems. Sometimes merging can be done with 3 way merge, but this process does not insure that the resulting file is correct or even legal. This project intends to create standards, tools an heuristics to make the scary config file conflict resolution debconf prompt a thing of the past. Debbugs Bug Reporting and Manipulation API by David Wendt Jr., mentored by Bastian Venthur Currently debbugs supports a SOAP interface for querying Debian s Bug Tracking System. Unfortunately this operation is read-only. This project would create an API for debbugs which supports sending and manipulating bug reports, without having to resort to email. This project does not intend to replace email as mean to manipulate the BTS but rather to enhance the BTS to allow other means of bug creation and manipulation. Debian High Performance Computing on Clouds by Dominique Belhachemi, mentored by Steffen Moeller The project paves a way to combine the demands in high performance computing with the dynamics of compute clouds with Debian. Combining the Eucalyptus cloud computing infrastructure with the TORQUE resource manager and preparing the components for dynamically added and removed instances provides the user with a attractive high performance computing environment. Such a system allows users to share resources with large compute centers with minimal changes in their workflow and scripts. Debian-Installer on Neo FreeRunner and Handheld Devices by Thibaut Girka, mentored by Gaudenz Steinlin This project aims to improve the installation experience of Debian on handheld devices by replacing ad-hoc install scripts by a full-blown and adapted Debian-Installer. The Neo FreeRunner is used as it is the most convenient and open device from a development standpoint, but other devices will also be explored. Hurd port and de-Linux-ization of Debian-Installer by J r mie Koenig, mentored by Samuel Thibault The primary means of distributing the Hurd is through Debian GNU/Hurd. However, the installation CDs presently use an ancient, non-native installer. The goal of this project is to port the missing parts of Debian-Installer to Hurd. To achieve this, all problematic Linux-specific code in Debian-Installer will be replaced by less or non-kernel dependent code, paving the way for better support of other non-Linux ports of Debian. Multi-Arch support in APT by David Kalnischkies, mentored by Michael Vogt Hardware like 64bit processors are perfectly able to execute 32bit opcode but until now this potentiality is disregard as the infrastructure tools like dpkg and APT are not able to install and/or solve dependencies across multiple architectures. The project therefore focuses on enabling APT to work out good solutions in a MultiArch aware environments without the need of hacky and partly working biarch packages currently in use. Package Repository Analysis and Migration Automation by Ricardo O Donell, mentored by Neil Williams Emdebian uses a filter to select packages from the main Debian repositories that are considered useful to embedded devices, excluding the majority of packages. The results of processing the filter are automated but maintaining the filter list is manual. This project seeks to automate certain elements of the filtering process to cope with specific conditions. This project will also generalize to more elaborate and intelligent algorithms to improve the transitions of the main Debian archives. Smart Upload Server for FTP Master by Petr Jasek, mentored by Joerg Jaspert Making packages upload smarter, more interactive and painless for uploaders by switching from anonymous FTP and Cron jobs to a robust protocol and modern package checking and processing daemon. This daemon would test early and report early, saving developers time. More details coming soon on http://wiki.debian.org/gsoc Congratulations everyone and have a fruitful summer!

Dear Lazyweb: Can you suggest open source content management software that meets these criteria:

• Cross-platform
• Very easy to install and configure (from the admin side) and use (from the user side) I m thinking as easy from both sides as vqwiki
• Drag-and-drop to upload content ideally, the user could drag a DOC file from desktop into a widget in the browser to upload
• Quick searching and indexing, at least of common file-types (including DOC and PDF)
• Ability to set up arbitrary metadata elements and values that can assist as filters to searching

Generally, content will be located by search, rather than via any particular folder hierarchy. Does it exist? There seem to be a lot of open source CMS options, but at least at first glance they may be overkill with a significant learning curve at least on the admin side.