OK, ok, i got a chroot and pbuilder now. So that should, I hope stop any more FTBFS bugs about missing depdendencies.

procps got uploaded that fixes some important bugs, but mainly they were small fiddly things. About the most significant enhancement was pmap now has a real working -x flag. It looks a lot like some of the other pmap programs out there and shows the RSS and Dirty bytes per map. Let me know if its useful or not.

However there still is 48 bugs in the package, so if you're feeling game wander over to procps bug page and have a look around, but here are some more interesting ones, such as why would a process start time be earlier than the boot time? Bug 408879 has this problem

Now, a nice can of worms is in a Linux system, what is free memory? What should the "free" program report? Currently free just reports what it sees in /proc, but in Bug 565518 should the slab count be taken out? I certainly won't be making any Debian-specific changes here as you could get different numbers depending on your distribution, or even worse the age of you Debian system.

procps is also my first attempt at using git-buildpackage which I found very helpful. There was one problem with it and that is how it works with the quilt patch program. If the quilt patches are applied, git doesn't know this and says all the files have changed. I know its how these two programs are supposed to work but its a little annoying.

Now just a link for my donna lee attempt rather than a crap embedded object from flickr.

Now that libdrm-radeon1 is in unstable, I just uploaded a snapshot of the radeon driver to experimental (xserver-xorg-video-radeon package version 1:6.12.99+git20100201.a887818f-1). So you may now get KMS and DRI2 working, assuming you have a recent kernel (I am running 2.6.32-trunk-686 here). This driver even contains some early support for r8xx boards. To check whether KMS is working, look for radeon kernel modesetting in dmesg. To check whether DRI2 is working, look for DRI2 in /var/log/Xorg.0.log. Make sure the radeon kernel module is loaded early (which means: don't let X load it late in the boot, otherwise you may experience this bug). I had to add radeon to /etc/modules and put options radeon modeset=1 in /etc/modprobe.d/. In the past, I also needed agpmode=-1 there but it didn't seem to make any difference with latest packages. Then, actual DRI2 support requires Mesa packages rebuilt against libdrm-radeon1. This is in experimental as well now. Look for libgl1-mesa-dri and other Mesa packages version 7.7-3. Don't forget that these packages are in experimental for a good reason, they may not work. But at least basic things seem to work fine on my Radeon X300 (rv370). And don't forget that the X team needs help, otherwise these packages may never make it to unstable...

• Python 2.6 is now available in unstable and testing . Also, Python 2.6 is now a supported version (while writing these lines only in unstable). It will take at least a couple of weeks until 2.6 is the default version.
• Python 2.7 alpha 2 is available in experimental. It is not expected to be in squeeze.
• Python 3.1.1 also has been uploaded to unstable and it is co-installable with python 2.6. However, Python 3.1 is not a supported version and the Python Policy for handling 3.1 needs to be updated; this means some modules might not be available. You can try Python 3.1 by installing the package python3 and running python3 .

• Interesting software updates:
  • SpamAssassin 3.3.0 (unstable)
  • Sylpheed 3.0.0 betas continue being uploaded to experimental, latest is beta7.
• X.Org 7.5 reached testing some days ago.
• KDE 4.3.5 won t be packaged and KDE 4.4.0 expected next February 9th might take a while.
• Ren Mayorga has announced a mini-DebConf in Panam , during March 19-21, 2010.

Producing udebs How to patch That s actually quite trivial. Most packages from Josselin s 1st and 2nd lists are libraries, and generating udebs for libraries is easy. Basically it boils down to declaring a new binary package:

• Duplicate the libfooN entry in debian/control.
• Add the -udeb suffix to the Package line.
• Add a Package-Type: udeb line.
• Make sure Section is debian-installer.
• (Maybe) make sure Priority is only optional.

Now, populating it might depend on the considered source package, but thankfully, pkg-x11 packages are quite sane, using debhelper s dh_install. So duplicating debian/libfooN.install into debian/libfooN-udeb.install is usually sufficient. It s a bit trickier when dh_movefiles is used, but calling install and cp -r after the dh_movefiles call should be sufficient. Next step, tweak shlibs for libfooN. Without that step, a libbarM package built against libfooN would get libfooN in Depends, which is not appropriate. The idea is to get libfooN-udeb instead. Trivial: add --add-udeb=libfooN-udeb to the dh_makeshlibs call. Possible issues at that step:

• debian/shlibs or debian/libfooN.shlibs is used instead of dh_makeshlibs. Trivial fix: feed its contents to dh_makeshlibs through its -V argument, and delete that file. Caveat: when it comes to applying a patch removing that file, make sure it s actually removed, and not just empty. I m going to file a bug about that, the default behaviour with empty files seems a bit buggy.
• Several libraries are shipped: one can t pass several --add-udeb arguments. Solution: use several dh_makeshlibs -p$pkg -V$depends --add-udeb=$pkg-udeb call. (I thought it was needed for libx11 but I can t read, actually: libxcb1 libx11-xcb1.)

Various checks to perform:

• Make sure debian/libfooN/DEBIAN/shlibs is correct: it should have a udeb line. Example:

  libfoo N libfooN (>= some-version)
  udeb: libfoo N libfooN (>= some-version)
  

• Make sure the generated udebs have no non-udeb packages mentioned in Depends. Since I m still at the proof-of-concept stage, I ve iterated when I encountered such additional packages, without checking what was actually needed. The idea is to get rid of extra stuff once the final needs figured out. Of course, one has to track down the dependencies to get the packages incrementally built and installed (for the updated shlibs files).

Results (These files might be moved around during the following steps, but this post shall be kept up-to-date and point to them at all time.) Legend:

• Red box: package needing a patch.
• Green box: package already udeb-aware.
• Label with [n]: package patched at step N.
• Label with a *: warning when patching, shlibs file to be removed.

Graphs are scaled down to 75%, click for full size. Step 1:

• Patches: udebs-1/diffs/
• Udebs: udebs-1/udebs/
• Notes: as explained above, libx11-xcb1 is probably not needed.
• Dependency graph:
  

Step 2:

• Patches: udebs-2/diffs/
• Udebs: udebs-2/udebs/
• Dependency graph:
  

Adding udebs to a d-i image Basic d-i image General guidelines (see d-i documentation for detailed installation, needed packages, etc.):

svn co svn://svn.debian.org/svn/d-i/trunk/ debian-installer-trunk
cd debian-installer-trunk/installer/build
make build_netboot

If that breaks (e.g. due to missing packages), make sure there s a similar entry in sources.list.udeb:

deb http://yourmirror/debian squeeze main/debian-installer

If everything goes well, the generated image should be available as dest/netboot/mini.iso, and tmp/netboot/udeb.list should contain the list of embedded udebs. To give it a try:

qemu-system-x86_64 -cdrom dest/netboot/mini.iso

Actually adding udebs Drop all additional udebs under localudebs/. Needed Packages and Packages.gz should be generated on the fly (but beware, secure apt is then disabled, even for non-local udebs). Now, tell d-i we want some more packages. If all of them are wanted, one can do that:

for i in localudebs/*.udeb; do \
  dpkg-deb --showformat='$ Package \n' -W $i; \
done > pkg-lists/local

(Update: Thanks to Guillem for pointing out a better and cleaner way than dpkg --info $i grep Package: awk ' print $2 ') Generate a new image (note the rebuild part of the target):

make rebuild_netboot

Make sure they got added by looking in tmp/netboot/udeb.list and profit! What s next Future steps include:

• Making sure those udebs are actually usable.
• Reworking Pango/Cairo/Gtk udebs.
• Taking a look into X itself.

Stay tuned.

Yesterday, and about nine days after release 0.7.3 of Rcpp (a set of R / C++ interface classes), Romain and I released version 0.7.4. It has been uploaded to CRAN and Debian, and mirrors should already have new versions. As before, my local page is also available for downloads and some more details. The release once again combines a number of necessary fixes with numerous new features:

• Building on OS X did not support multi-arch, and we are grateful for Simon who once again came to the rescue. Things should be fine now. The big take-away is that under no circumstances, include either a file configure or src/Makefile if you want multi-arch builds for free. As Rcpp is effectively a library to be used by other packages, this mattered.
• We added a file NEWS from which I include the relevant section below.
• Much more code re-organisation and enhancement making passage of various C++ types even easier -- see the NEWS entry below.
• More unit tests, now including ones for the 'old Rcpp API'.

Post-release, I also reworked the doxygen setup slightly so that all examples are now browseable, and the whole documentation is now searchable as well. Lastly, we had a remaining Windows build issue. Also, Brian Ripley and Uwe Ligges kindly sent us a small patch supporting the new Windows 64-bit builds using the new MinGW 64-bit compiler for Windows -- so release 0.7.5 may follow in due course. The NEWS file entry for release 0.7.4 is as follows:

0.7.4	2010-01-30
    o	matrix matrix-like indexing using operator() for all vector 
    	types : IntegerVector, NumericVector, RawVector, CharacterVector
    	LogicalVector, GenericVector and ExpressionVector. 
    o	new class Rcpp::Dimension to support creation of vectors with 
    	dimensions. All vector classes gain a constructor taking a 
    	Dimension reference.
    o	an intermediate template class "SimpleVector" has been added. All
    	simple vector classes are now generated from the SimpleVector 
    	template : IntegerVector, NumericVector, RawVector, CharacterVector
    	LogicalVector.
    o	an intermediate template class "SEXP_Vector" has been added to 
    	generate GenericVector and ExpressionVector.
    o	the clone template function was introduced to explicitely
    	clone an RObject by duplicating the SEXP it encapsulates.
    o	even smarter wrap programming using traits and template
        meta-programming using a private header to be include only
        RcppCommon.h
    o 	the as template is now smarter. The template now attempts to 
    	build an object of the requested template parameter T by using the
    	constructor for the type taking a SEXP. This allows third party code
    	to create a class Foo with a constructor Foo(SEXP) to have 
    	as<foo> for free.
    o	wrap becomes a template. For an object of type T, wrap<t> uses
    	implicit conversion to SEXP to first convert the object to a SEXP
    	and then uses the wrap(SEXP) function. This allows third party 
    	code creating a class Bar with an operator SEXP() to have 
    	wrap for free.
    o	all specializations of wrap :  wrap<double>, wrap< vector<double> >
    	use coercion to deal with missing values (NA) appropriately.
    o	configure has been withdrawn. C++0x features can now be activated
    	by setting the RCPP_CXX0X environment variable to "yes".
    o	new template r_cast<int> to facilitate conversion of one SEXP
    	type to another. This is mostly intended for internal use and 
    	is used on all vector classes
    o	Environment now takes advantage of the augmented smartness
    	of as and wrap templates. If as<foo> makes sense, one can 
    	directly extract a Foo from the environment. If wrap<bar> makes
    	sense then one can insert a Bar directly into the environment. 
    	Foo foo = env["x"] ;  /* as<foo> is used */
	Bar bar ;
	env["y"] = bar ;      /* wrap<foo> is used */    	
    o	Environment::assign becomes a template and also uses wrap to 
    	create a suitable SEXP
    o	Many more unit tests for the new features; also added unit tests
        for older API

As always, even fuller details are in the ChangeLog on the Rcpp page which also leads to the downloads, the browseable doxygen docs and zip files of doxygen output for the standard formats. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page

Well, I'd not call it a Mashup - it's actually backed by a custom database, a Xapian index for full text search and so on. To me, a true mashup would work without own server side code.Anyway, what it does is this:

• It gathers data from two dozen Google Calendars for the next few weeks
• Geocodes them and does full-text indexing (including the Geo information, so you can search for that, too.)
• Applies some magic formatting to the calendar data (making links clickable, allowing some basic styling)
• Pushes them as KML feed to a Google Maps application
• Markers on the map are aggregated and "clustered" (which is a simple proximity merging, which I wouldn't call clustering)
• The map is pre-centered and panned using Google geo-location information on the visitor to show the best region with hits. So if you are in a city I have data for, it show you your city. If you are in the US, it should try the whole US next, then fall back to the whole world.

It's using the Maps V3 API, currently in public testing, which seems to give quite some extra speed compared to earlier versions. I've also added two extra controls, a search box at the top center, and a "Go to" menu on the left, which uses the visitor position from Google.The data is coming from swing dancing calendars, so it's real world data, and you should get different results every day. Most of the data is from Germany, so that is where you can see the marker aggregation and these things in effect.Here's the prototype.There is still lots of things to do, but this is just my free time project, when I'm not at work, dancing or with my friends.

• Timezones need to be handled right. So I don't give you any guarantee that any event has the correct time shown. I believe it only works right for events in CET and visitors in CET right now. It's okay: I havn't though of how to handle time zone differences yet, and the JavaScript Date API is worthless anyway, so that requires quite some effort.
• Events in info windows aren't sorted by time yet
• Info window UI is bad, need to do pages there
• There is no way of choosing a different time query window except the next week. The backend does this already, it's just not in the UI.
• There is no "temporal navigation" tool
• No list view (well, actually there is one, but that is the old version)

I don't know yet if this will remain online, it's more of a toy project for me. Still it's cool to see where there are swing dancing events, and it's cool to be able to just zoom to another city and see where you could "hop by" for a dancing event while you're there. But there are just a lot of UI issues to solve to get this really usable, and I'm not much of an UI guy...P.S. if it doesn't work, that probably means I'm currently working on it. There is no staging, and no "production system".

I have been playing a bit around with Maemo and writing Qt apps for n900. I ended up needing a rotation aware QMainWindow a couple of times, so I ended up abstracting it away in my own MaemoMainWindow, which I just wanted to share. It has enough ifdefs to also build against normal Qt, outside Maemo. Have fun. Available under any license. maemomainwindow.h:

#ifndef MAEMOMAINWINDOW_H
#define MAEMOMAINWINDOW_H                                          
#include <QMainWindow>
class MaemoMainWindow : public QMainWindow
 
  Q_OBJECT
  public:
    MaemoMainWindow (QWidget* parent = 0, Qt::WindowFlags flags = 0);
    virtual ~MaemoMainWindow();
  protected:
    virtual bool event (QEvent* event);
  Q_SIGNALS:
    void orientationChanged(Qt::Orientation newOrientation);
  private Q_SLOTS:
    void orientationChangedSlot(const QString& newOrientation);
  private:
    Qt::Orientation m_orientation;
 ;                                                                   
#endif // MAEMOMAINWINDOW_H

maemomainwindow.cpp:

#include "maemomainwindow.h"                                         
#ifdef Q_WS_MAEMO_5
#include <mce/mode-names.h>
#include <mce/dbus-names.h>
#endif                     
#ifdef Q_WS_MAEMO_5
#include <QDBusConnection>
#include <QDBusMessage>
#include <QEvent>
#endif
MaemoMainWindow::MaemoMainWindow (QWidget* parent, Qt::WindowFlags flags) : QMainWindow (parent, flags)  
#ifdef Q_WS_MAEMO_5
  QDBusConnection::systemBus().connect(QString(), MCE_SIGNAL_PATH, MCE_SIGNAL_IF,
                                       MCE_DEVICE_ORIENTATION_SIG,
                                       this,
                                       SLOT(orientationChangedSlot(QString)));
#endif
 
MaemoMainWindow::~MaemoMainWindow()  
 
void MaemoMainWindow::orientationChangedSlot (const QString& newOrientation)  
#ifdef Q_WS_MAEMO_5
  if (newOrientation == QLatin1String(MCE_ORIENTATION_PORTRAIT))  
    setAttribute(Qt::WA_Maemo5ForcePortraitOrientation, true);
    emit orientationChanged(Qt::Vertical);
    else  
    setAttribute(Qt::WA_Maemo5ForceLandscapeOrientation, true);
    emit orientationChanged(Qt::Horizontal);
   
#else
Q_UNUSED(newOrientation);
#endif
 
bool MaemoMainWindow::event (QEvent* event)  
#ifdef Q_WS_MAEMO_5
  switch (event->type())  
    case QEvent::WindowActivate:
      QDBusConnection::systemBus().call(
           QDBusMessage::createMethodCall(MCE_SERVICE, MCE_REQUEST_PATH,
                                          MCE_REQUEST_IF,
                                          MCE_ACCELEROMETER_ENABLE_REQ));
      break;
    case QEvent::WindowDeactivate:
      QDBusConnection::systemBus().call(
           QDBusMessage::createMethodCall(MCE_SERVICE, MCE_REQUEST_PATH,
                                          MCE_REQUEST_IF,
                                          MCE_ACCELEROMETER_DISABLE_REQ));
      break;
    default:
      break;
   
#endif
  return QMainWindow::event (event);
 

Update: reformatted code. Thought wordpres and <code> was smart. Thanks Ken.

again, I focussed on the RC bugs in the perl group. & again, carnil++ was very active both in finding & in fixing them :)

• #560616 src:pip: "pip: FTBFS: tests failed"
  add a trivial patch and upload (pkg-perl)
• #560643 src:libbsd-resource-perl: "libbsd-resource-perl: FTBFS: tests failed"
  change debian/rules to stop running "icky" tests and upload (pkg-perl)
• #561712 live-magic: "live-magic: helpers now installed in /usr/share/live-helper/helpers and not /usr/bin"
  use patch from BTS and upload to DELAYED/2
• #562347 src:libnet-google-code-perl: "libnet-google-code-perl: FTBFS: test failed"
  upload package prepared by carnil (pkg-perl)
• #566502 liborlite-mirror-perl: "FTBFS: tests fail"
  upload new upstream version (pkg-perl)
• #566585 libtest-www-mechanize-perl: "FTBFS: tests fail"
  add a patch to work with newer Test::LongString and upload (pkg-perl)
• #566590 libxml-stream-perl: "FTBFS: tests fail"
  forwarded upstream (pkg-perl)

As you might have read, we do have automated rejections of packages uploaded to the Debian archive, based on lintian, for some time now. Today, triggered by some other thing, I got some numbers out of that. Pretty much waste of time, but fun to look at, so here it goes:

• November 2009 had us rejecting 36 packages, the winner triggered 425 tags on which we would reject. Place 2 went to a package that triggered 128 tags, place 3 had 26.
• December 2009 saw 24 packages not going through, with the winner triggering 50 tags, place 2 followed with 23 and the third place actually went to two packages, both triggering 5 tags.
• January 2010 said goodbye to 20 packages. The winner here leads with 2055 tags triggered, place 2 goes to a package triggering 46, place 3 is held by one having 16 tags.

(Of course for tags that can appear multiple times like binary-or-shlibs-defines-rpath they are counted multiple times). (And for a grin: October 2009 had 10 rejects, 7 of which false positives while testing the code, one a test package made especially to get rejected and 2 real hits, with one tag each.)

On Wednesday I got DAM approval and since Saturday late evening I m officially a Debian Developer. Yay! :-) My thanks go to

• Christoph Berg (Myon) whom I know for more than a decade since we studied together, and who s career in Debian was way faster than mine, but who on the other hand probably knows me better than nobody else in Debian which made him the perfect advocate;
• Bernd Zeimetz (bzed) whom I know from my times at DaLUG and who was the friendliest Application Manager I could imagine he s probably also one of the fastest (8 days from application to AM report :-);
• Luca Capello (gismo), who was the most demanding but also most inspiring sponsor I ever had and who became a very good friend after we found each other over my package conkeror.
• Arne Wichmann (Y_Plentyn) for being my first drop-in center for Debian questions (like can I directly dist-upgrade from 2.0 to 3.0? :-);
• Martin Zobel-Helas (zobel) who was always encouraging me to continue exploring new sides of Debian;
• Gerfried Fuchs (Rhonda) just for being there (and for being a package maintainer with good relations to upstream ;-);
• my coworkers at the IT Services Group of the Department of Physics at ETH Zurich, who always found new challenges in Debian for me to solve;
• and all those others who offered to also advocate me (e.g. Otavio Salvador) or sponsored my packages so far (or at least offered to do so), e.g. Alexander Wirt (formorer), Martin F. Krafft (madduck), Robert J rdens (jordens),

As Bernd cited in his AM report, my earliest activity within the Debian community I can remember was organising the Debian booth at LinuxDay.lu 2003, where I installed Debian 3.0 Woody on my Hamilton Hamstation hy (a Sun SparcStation 4 clone). I wrote my first bugreport in November 2004 (#283365), probably during the Sarge BSP in Frankfurt. And my first Debian package was wikipedia2text, starting to package it August 2005 (ITP #325417). My only earlier documented interest in the Debian community is subscribing to the lists debian-apache@l.d.o and debian-emacsen@l.d.o in June 2002. I though remember that I started playing around with Debian 2.0 Hamm, skipping 2.1 (for whatever reasons, I can t remember), using 2.2 quite regularily and started to dive into with Woody which also ran on my first ThinkPad bijou . I installed it over WLAN with just a boot floppy at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage. :-) Anyway, this has led to what it had to lead to a new Debian Developer. :-) The first package I uploaded with my newly granted rights was a new conkeror snapshot. This version should work out of the box on Ubuntu again, so that conkeror in Ubuntu should not lag that much behind Debian Sid anymore. In other News Since Wednesday I own a Nokia N900 and use it as my primary mobile phone now. Although it s not as free as the OpenMoko (see two other recent posts by Lucas Nussbaum and by Tollef Fog Heen on Planet Debian) it s definitely what I hoped the OpenMoko will once become. And even if I can t run Debian natively on the N900 (yet), it at least has a Debian chroot on it. :-) A few weeks ago, I took over the organisation of this year s Debian booth at FOSDEM from Wouter Verhelst who s busy enough with FOSDEM organisation itself. Last Monday the organiser of the BSD DevRoom at FOSDEM asked on #mirbsd for talk suggestions and they somehow talked me into giving a talk about Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. The slides should show up during the next days on my Debian GNU/kFreeBSD talks page. I hope, I ll survive that talk despite giving more or less a talk saying Jehova! . ;-) What a week.

Today, I was glad to attend the biggest demonstration ever in favour of the Cabanyal neighbourhood of Val ncia, a traditional district populated by the sea people of the city. After decades of oblivion, the Valencian right-wing government is trying to execute an old plan to open Valencia to the sea , which means demolishing around 450 traditional houses, many of them under protection for their cultural and architectural value, to extend a big avenue until the beach. Patrimonial loss aside, neighbours would be forced to other areas in the city (sadly, this has been happening for a decade already), making Cabanyal-Canyamelar the new posh neighbourhood for the richer class, destroying its identity and replacing it with a new set of skyscrapers.

The local government of PP, led by the infamous Rita Barber , knows that getting the anti-riot police in the neighbourhood and forcing very old men and women out of the houses where they were born isn't what many people like to see in the evening news. They also know time is their ally; this plan is many decades old, and there's no need to hurry now, so it's better to apply silent mafia tactics on the problem. It's very easy. First, stop investing a single euro in the area and monitor the slow but effective results of the degradation. Have a bit of patience, and after quite a few years, start promoting the illegal occupation of the increasing number of empty houses by marginal collectives which will bring the associated introduction of drug dealing in the area. This will surely make even more people leave or accelerate their decease. Keep repeating this process, until the Cabanyal is really fucked up. Now, start promoting the rehabilitation plan , which unavoidably includes splitting the neighbourhood in two pieces, and destroying a substantial part of it. Hopefully, many of the neighbours not directly affected by the demolitions will back the plan, they can't be blamed for being really fed up after all. Do all you can to confront those in favour to those against. In the meanwhile, start harrassing owners, make them end up selling their property at ridiculous prices and as soon as this happens, demolish it very quickly. Don't even bother with cleaning up the rubble: an increasing number of sites like this all over the place may be what makes a few more families give up and leave. In the end, you either have an empty neighbourhood, or you've managed to demolish all the annoying houses that block your shiny avenue. However, if a Supreme Court argues that the remaining houses still have some cultural value, you might want to consider changing your local law to unprotect those architectural elements. Today, many thousands of Valencians marched around Cabanyal to say enough! . From the street, I saw several old women out on the balconies of their beautiful houses, their eyes wet with tears, while they observed in silence all that many people who were fighting for them. There's still a long way to go in the courts until this is all over, but at least these people have a little more hope today than those in el Carme or La Punta, who ended up losing similar battles, years ago.

Since playing with the IBM Seer augmented reality software [1] I ve been lusting after a new mobile phone which can do such things. While the implementation of Seer that I tried was not of great practical use to me (not being a tennis fan I was only there to learn about computers) it was a demonstration of an exciting concept. It will surely be implemented by IBM in other venues that are of more immediate interest, and we can probably expect other vendors to write similar systems to compete with IBM. So the question is how to get a phone that will run such things well. The answer is probably not to rely on a contract plan for this, currently Vodaphone [2] is currently the only Australian telco that sells a phone that can run Seer, it is offering a HTC Magic (which was released in April 2009) on a $29 per month plan. A phone that is 9 months old isn t necessarily a bad thing, but the has been out for more than 6 months and has some significant benefits (such as a 5MP camera).

• My current provider is Three [3] and their cheapest plan is $29 per month (with or without a phone) which allows 200 minutes ($160) of free calls to other Three phones every month as well as up to $150 of other calls per month and 1GB of data. Calls cost 40c per 30 seconds plus 35c connection fee. Currently I m on a plan that gives me the same thing for the same price without data transfer but which includes a free phone. So it seems that the 1GB of data per month has an equal cost to a mobile handset (such as an LG Viewty).
• Virgin [6] has a $25 per month plan that gives $60 worth of calls and 300MB of Internet data with unlimited talk and text between members with the added bonus of unused talk and text credit being rolled over to the next month. The cost for calls is 90c per minute plus 40c connection fee, video calls are the same cost as voice calls!
• Vodaphone [2] has a $20 per month phone plan that allows up to $150 of calls per month with the option of either free calls to a single specified Vodaphone number or free calls in the evenings and weekends. They have a $4.95 special offer for 200MB of Internet data per month. Calls cost 44c per 30 seconds plus 35c connection fee.
• Telstra [4] has a $20 per month plan that only includes $20 worth of calls and which has call fees of 47c per 30 seconds plus 27c connection fee. They clearly don t compete on price, I think that there is no reason for using Telstra unless you live in some of the rural regions where they are the only provider to offer good service.
• Savvytel [7] charges $3.07 for GPRS Internet data so they can t be considered for an Internet enabled phone. But they do seem very economical for basic phone service.
• Optus [5] has a hopelessly broken web site that wouldn t give me any information on mobile phone pricing. My previous experience with Optus Internet makes me unlikely to do business with them again anyway.

So it seems that Three (my current provider) is probably the best option at this time. Virgin would save my $4 per month, but would only give me 300M of Internet data per month, and the Virgin limit of $60 per month of calls might not be enough for me. Vodaphone offers a deal for $25 that only includes 200MB of data, that might be enough for just phone use, but wouldn t be enough for tethering for laptop net access. I wonder how well tethering works on an Android phone, can you make a phone call while transmitting data from a tethered laptop? I find that with my Viewty when I receive an SMS or phone call it stops the net access. That makes a tethered Viewty impractical for some support tasks as it s fairly common that I need to talk to someone while logging in to their server I m sure that most people who use mobile Internet services regularly need to phone someone while using them. My current Three bill is $29 per month for the phone plan and $15 per month for Internet access. If I m going to buy phones outright instead of getting them with the plan then I want to reduce the overall amount of money I spend on phone plans and using tethering instead of a 3G USB dongle would allow this. I think that I can get something that comes close to my ideal mobile phone [8] (apart from being able to connect a keyboard, mouse, and monitor) if I import it from overseas. We really need more competition in the Australian mobile phone market. We have only two phone companies offering Android phones, Three is sold out of the obsolete model that they offer while Vodaphone has stock of an obsolete model.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/01/27/australian-open-android-seer/
• [2] http://www.vodafone.com.au/
• [3] http://www.three.com.au/
• [4] http://www.telstra.com.au/
• [5] http://www.optus.com.au/
• [6] http://www.virginmobile.com.au/
• [7] https://www.savvytel.com.au/
• [8] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/01/31/my-ideal-mobile-phone/

The following developers got their Debian accounts in the last month:

• Jakub Wilk (jwilk)
• Axel Beckert (abe)
• Vagrant Cascadian (vagrant)
• Albert Huang (ash)
• Iustin Pop (iustin)
• Thorvald Natvig (thorvald)
• Marco Silva (marcot)
• Marcelo Vieira (metal)
• Thorsten Glaser (tg)

Congratulations!

I m using Gnome as my default DE after my KDE4 dissapointment, however what s bothering me for some time now is that I have to live with applications that I don t even use or like for that matter. So why live with those? Well if I try to remove some of those applications it ll want to pull down my whole DE along with them, however I couldn t believe solution was so simple. Applications I don t want to live with are: evolution, epiphany, empathy, ekiga, liferea, gnome-accessibility and couple of others. Step 1 might seem as it wants to remove whole DE, but it all it wants is gnome-desktop-environment which is meta/dummy package so don t worry. Step 1:

sudo apt-get remove epiphany epiphany-browser-data epiphany-data empathy
empathy-doc libempathy30 libempathy-common libempathy-gtk28 liferea
liferea-data evolution ekiga gok dasher orca gnome-accessibility
openoffice.org-evolution evolution-common evolution-data-server
evolution-webcal

Step 2:

sudo aptitude keep-all

Step 3: After you re done, you can use sudo apt-get autoremove or sudo aptitude -f install just so you can see it won t force you later on to remove any other deps. Yea, that was it

Based on my experience testing the IBM Seer software on an Android phone [1] I have been considering what type of mobile phone to get when my current contract expires. Here are the features above what is common in current smart phones that I think most people will sorely miss if they don t have them for the 2011-2012 period:

1. Camera that takes reasonable quality pictures at a 5MP resolution.
2. High resolution screen (VGA or better).
3. GPS (for navigation and augmented reality.
4. Digital compass for augmented reality.
5. An open market for applications which allows free software to be installed such as OpenSSH.

The first two items shouldn t be a problem, there has been a constant trend towards better cameras and higher resolution screens in phones. The difficult ones are GPS and a Digital compass which require phone software to use them. I get the impression that Android and iPhone are going to share the market for fully functional smart phones (because they have the market of applications). So I predict that by 2012 the phone market will have iPhone and Android fully functional smart phones as well as budget phones that don t support running applications (and will probably lack a compass and GPS). Here are the features that while not essential, will greatly increase the experience of using a phone for serious users:

1. At least 2G of storage built in installing a 2G micro-SD card is not adequate.
2. A screen that can be easily read during the day maybe Pixel Qi.
3. The ability to give a good quality of sound for playing video and audio recordings with a regular headphone jack (so I can use my Bose headset).

For my use a hardware keyboard (such as is used in the Motorolla A855 Droid ) is essential. I want to have a pocket sized ssh client for emergencies, and I want to be able to type notes reasonably quickly. I wonder what portion of the smart-phone user base actually needs a keyboard. I ve seen many people who use a smart-phone as just a regular phone that can exchange photos. Even among people who are moderately serious about smart-phone use there are probably many who only want to take high resolution photos and tag them with GPS data. Currently there are no Android phones on sale in Australia that have a hardware keyboard, I m worried that this may be an ongoing trend which will result in people with my requirements being forced to either pay significantly more or compromise on features due to the market meeting the needs of average people. Finally I would like to have a smart-phone that has a regular USB port for plugging in devices (which would of course require an adapter as the size of a phone doesn t permit a regular USB port). That would permit copying files from USB flash devices, driving a digital SLR camera, and printing photos directly to a USB printer. It would also allow connecting a USB video device, keyboard, and mouse to make a mobile phone work as a desktop workstation. Current smart phones have a lot more compute power than the desktop machines I was using in 1998, so there s no reason that one couldn t be used as a workstation with the appropriate peripherals.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/01/27/australian-open-android-seer/

RCBW - #19 Back with the "ordinary track" of RCBW, here is this week squashes by yours truly:

• bug #546492 - djvulibre - provided patch implementing get-orig-source to strip non-free specification docs
• bug #550394 - courier-imap - not affected/responsible by the imap-server virtual package mess
• bug #550397 - kolab-cyrus-imapd - not affected/responsible by the imap-server virtual package mess
• bug #550380 - uw-imapd - provides and conflicts with imap-server, fixing file-overwrite errors
• bug #559698 - rox - drop useless build-dep on libxtrap-dev (which will be gone soon)
• bug #559829 - synfig - disable vulnerable embedded libltdl, fix CVE
• bug #520557 - lemon - proper version tagging, already fixed
• bug #547726 - myspell-el-gr - forcibly orphan the package, "fix" maintainer address

The attentive reader have noticed that there is one more than usual, the reason is the mighty BSP in M nchengladbach, which has powered all above squashes. I've enjoyed the BSP a lot, my first in M nchengladbach, which won't be the last. I recommend checking it out at least once in the future, even only for tasting Formorer's chili The main highlight of the week is my personal award to the best feedback ever from an NMU-ed maintainer, the award goes to Jonas, kudos for your attitude.