Search Results: "luk"

22 January 2010

Stefano Zacchiroli: RC bugs of the week - issue 18

RCBW - #18 ... and RCBW is back! Here is this week squashes: Most of the actually fixed missing include bugs above have benefited from patches by Martin Michlmayr, thanks! Also, this week squashing has benefited from a huge list of bugs which Luk has given me, some of the not-yet-fixed bugs there are a bit trickier than usual (e.g. missing #include bugs which got intertwined over time with const char * conversions bugs, which in turn require some far reaching code changes due to the propagation of function prototypes in unexpected code parts). Since I'll be leaving tomorrow morning for the BSP in M nchengladbach, I'll have a bit of time there to dive a bit more into the issues. Actually, what I fear most now is buying train tickets from Cologne to Moenchengladbach and back, since I'm totally unable to pronounce the name of the latter city (my German sucks, actually there is no such "my German" at all). Luckily, I've been told they've wonderful ticket-selling machines in Cologne :-) See you there, and happy RC squashing!

7 January 2010

Adnan Hodzic: Lone developer

I ve been around Debian for some time, however am not a official Debian Developer and I can t become overnight because country I live in (Bosnia) and I have no one to sign my key. I doubt I could easily do it in Croatia or Serbia my neighboring countries. This is definitely another reason why I m pursuing to have DebConf11 in Balkans (read: Bosnia). I didn t get my key signed on DebConf9 since I hesitated whether to keep my old DSA 768 bit key or not. However by the end of this month I m planning to visit some friends on TUWIEN and planing to meet up with some DD from Vienna and get my key signed. Btw I d like to use this opportunity to call all DD residing in Vienna (Rhonda?) to contact me Smile So what am talking about after all? Thunderbird 3.0 was released 29 ago, Icedove 3.0 is in experimental but only arm and i386 arch. and I m using amd64. After I kept bothering nice people at #debian-buildd they told me to make my own, and once I built my own I don t have permissions to upload it to ftp-mater there s no sense I upload it through mentors
So I m making my Icedove amd64 packages available if you want them: http://foolcontrol.org/deb/icedove-3.0_3.0~rc2-2_amd64.deb
http://foolcontrol.org/deb/icedove-3.0-gnome-support_3.0~rc2-2_amd64.deb
http://foolcontrol.org/deb/icedove-3.0-dbg_3.0~rc2-2_amd64.deb I didn t even change the maintainer name, I kept it all as original package, except it s now available for amd64 architecture, hopefully we ll see these on Debian servers as well Smile

5 January 2010

Adnan Hodzic: DebConf11; Banja Luka gets wiki

Bosnian bid for DebConf11 is Banja Luka, we had wiki page that wasn t changed since DebConf9 in C ceres this year. Reason we didn t have it changed for so long is that we didn t want to post anything before we had official/first hand answers to all our questions. Therefor we present you with wiki page for Banja Luka! http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf11/BanjaLuka Our team was working (still is) incredibly hard in order to get it all sorted. Slowly but surely we are taking our bid process to the final stage, where we are planing to finalize the actual funds needed for the DebConf11 to take place and that would be from us Smile If you have any questions about something that wasn t mentioned on the wiki please do let me know.

3 January 2010

Thorsten Glaser: new MirBSD-current snapshot; more TODO done

The MirBSD Midi-ISO (bi-arch manifold boot) and NetInstall for both i386 and sparc have been upgraded to the 20091226 snapshot (sorry for the delay). A separate news announcement will be done when a full ISO (MirBSD + MirGRML) is done. Other than that, I have fixed a couple of things all over the place, jupp for example. The planned release of mksh R39b is still not done though, as I m only human as well, and too much hacking isn t something one can do without relaxing some in between. On the Debian front, my RCBD #1 was continued, here s #1 results: Explanations: I did go overboard during the first patching session, but I suppose this is what the NM learning period is for too. The autossh maintainer said thanks and will probably integrate my patches, so I don t need to NMU. I could close the dietlibc bug. The other two didn t look as good, I had to separate the fix for the RC bug (and other required fixes, such as ftp-master rejects there were none though) and my other fixes; I submit the former as NMU diffs again and pointed Zack to the .dsc files, and opened the aforementioned two new bugs with the rest of the diffs, so the proper maintainers can take and apply them. There s questioning if gidentd should be removed (see the PR for more); the acorn-fdisk upstream (arm-fdisk it s called there) is not actively developing but will receive patches; the autossh maintainer said thanks but I didn t yet hear back from upstream. The binutils as intel_mode bug was fixed upstream and in experimental for my case, but I had to reopen things because the variant documented in binutils-current still doesn t work, so others (who use the new, more intel-like, syntax) don t run into it. Luk sent me a request to do more mipsel-FTBFS-due-to-toolchain-bugs workarounds. Will do (but can t promise to do so before the upcoming BSP. Robert Millan incorporated something like manifold-boot into GRUB 2, after I described it to him (the debian-bsd@ people are currently sorting out some heisenbugs with it, though). Now there s three variants (but then, this helps spotting bugs that don t appear in all implementations). sendmail 8.13.4 is out, I wonder when OgreBSD will upgrade I could do it myself again, but this time it s not that urgent. Still waiting for the TLS extension, though

26 December 2009

Stefano Zacchiroli: RC bugs of the week - week 16

RCBW - week #16 ... and here are christmas (for those who care) RC squashes, by yours truly (for those who care too): and here are the usual notes: Hint/request of the week: please add +pending when you do DELAYED/ NMUs, that way filtering out already taken care of bugs gets easier and refreshing a bug log page in the browser will immediately show the new tag at the top.
(Yes, I agree that nmudiff should offer that when passed --delay, I intend to propose a patch for that, but feel free to beat me at it :-P) In other news, christmas vacations are awesome to catch up with books you planned to finish reading months ago ... Update: the patch for nmudiff I've mentioned has been kindly provided by gregor hermann, thanks!

21 December 2009

Daniel Kahn Gillmor: dd, netcat, and disk throughput

I was trying to dump a large Logical Volume (LV) over ethernet from one machine to another. I found some behavior which surprised me.fun constraints(how do i get myself into these messes?)This entry has been truncated read the full entry.Tags: lvm, netcat

20 December 2009

Stefano Zacchiroli: RC bugs of the week - week 15

RCBW - week #15 Here are last weektoday squashes, by yours truly: Some highlights:

14 December 2009

Stefano Zacchiroli: RC bugs of the week - week 14

RCBW - week #14 Here are thislast week squashes, by yours truly: Some highlights:

10 December 2009

Biella Coleman: Postdoc Hall of Shame (please spread the shame)

Postdoc Hall of Shame So a few years ago I got stuck with no health insurance as I had a fellowship that had for its history accepted professors (with health insurance) not fresh off the boat PhDs as was the case with me. Since I was at a Large State school it was nearly impossible for me to get insurance and finally I ended up paying 400 a month and getting a whole lot of headache. In many ways my ordeal was a fluke following a change of policy and this fellowship now provides insurance to its postdocs. Increasingly, however, it seems like a number of postdoctoral fellowships shirk from their duties and don t provide a drop of health insurance. Given the academic job market, many academics don t have any choice but to accept these positions and if they don t come with insurance, well then these folks are shelling out thousands upon thousands of dollars for basic, really lousy, coverage. Given that universities for the most part have decent, even in some cases kick ass insurance, with a large pool of people, shutting postdocs out of their pool is.. gross and just plain wrong. One of my fellow friends, currently on the market and currently screwed by her last postdoc wrote up a short document (aka Academic Labor Hall of Shame) and I thought I would post it here as it gets to the heart of the issues and starts shaming some of these shameful universities. If you know of other postdoctoral positions that don t offer insurance, please please leave a comment. We will include it in the hall of shame. Academic Labor Hall of Shame Universities like to promote themselves as bastions of enlightenment, but their treatment of temporary and hidden employees is often anything but enlightened. Or progressive. Or fair. 1. Postdoctoral fellows and researchers: There is a growing trend towards classing postdocs as not employees . I learned this recently when I was laid off from postdoctoral position at the University of Pennsylvania. I planned to extend my health insurance through COBRA, which is currently federally subsidized for workers who lost their jobs during the financial crisis. I was shocked when Penn initially claimed that I was not eligible for the subsidy (made available through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the so-called stimulus act ). Their reason was that postdocs were not classed by Penn as employees. I appealed this with the Office of General Counsel and after a few weeks was told that I was indeed eligible, as Penn had found an inconsistency in [their] policy for certain categories of post docs between tax treatment and the availability of COBRA/ARRA . This means that while I am in fact eligible for this subsidy, postdocs paid through many other classes of grants are still not. If you want to see an example of this process of sorting some postdocs into not employee status, here is another one:
Postdocs on training grants or on individual fellowships (roughly 25% of VUMC postdocs) receive a stipend and are specifically excluded from the employee classification. They do not pay FICA and do not receive employee benefits. Their health insurance is provided and purchased separately. [by whom?] Even if Vanderbilt does in this case make provisions for these postdocs to receive health insurance, there is abundant evidence that some postdocs are outright excluded, as in this example at Stanford:
Stanford makes no provision for fellows to purchase health insurance, and the Institute will not provide medical insurance or other benefits. External fellows must bring their own medical coverage with them or purchase an individual plan during their stay in California. This is also quite apparent when you look into the outfits that profit from selling health insurance to postdocs (because their universities don t provide them any):
http://www.garnett-powers.com/npa/ Also, take a look at the policy they and you ll note that it stinks: it excludes such luxuries as preventive care, birth control, and chemotherapy. I m not making this up:
http://www.garnett-powers.com/npa/summary.pdf

Biella Coleman: Postdoc Hall of Shame (please spread the shame)

Postdoc Hall of Shame So a few years ago I got stuck with no health insurance as I had a fellowship that had for its history accepted professors (with health insurance) not fresh off the boat PhDs as was the case with me. Since I was at a Large State school it was nearly impossible for me to get insurance and finally I ended up paying 400 a month and getting a whole lot of headache. In many ways my ordeal was a fluke following a change of policy and this fellowship now provides insurance to its postdocs. Increasingly, however, it seems like a number of postdoctoral fellowships shirk from their duties and don t provide a drop of health insurance. Given the academic job market, many academics don t have any choice but to accept these positions and if they don t come with insurance, well then these folks are shelling out thousands upon thousands of dollars for basic, really lousy, coverage. Given that universities for the most part have decent, even in some cases kick ass insurance, with a large pool of people, shutting postdocs out of their pool is.. gross and just plain wrong. One of my fellow friends, currently on the market and currently screwed by her last postdoc wrote up a short document (aka Academic Labor Hall of Shame) and I thought I would post it here as it gets to the heart of the issues and starts shaming some of these shameful universities. If you know of other postdoctoral positions that don t offer insurance, please please leave a comment. We will include it in the hall of shame. Academic Labor Hall of Shame Universities like to promote themselves as bastions of enlightenment, but their treatment of temporary and hidden employees is often anything but enlightened. Or progressive. Or fair. 1. Postdoctoral fellows and researchers: There is a growing trend towards classing postdocs as not employees . I learned this recently when I was laid off from postdoctoral position at the University of Pennsylvania. I planned to extend my health insurance through COBRA, which is currently federally subsidized for workers who lost their jobs during the financial crisis. I was shocked when Penn initially claimed that I was not eligible for the subsidy (made available through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the so-called stimulus act ). Their reason was that postdocs were not classed by Penn as employees. I appealed this with the Office of General Counsel and after a few weeks was told that I was indeed eligible, as Penn had found an inconsistency in [their] policy for certain categories of post docs between tax treatment and the availability of COBRA/ARRA . This means that while I am in fact eligible for this subsidy, postdocs paid through many other classes of grants are still not. If you want to see an example of this process of sorting some postdocs into not employee status, here is another one:
Postdocs on training grants or on individual fellowships (roughly 25% of VUMC postdocs) receive a stipend and are specifically excluded from the employee classification. They do not pay FICA and do not receive employee benefits. Their health insurance is provided and purchased separately. [by whom?] Even if Vanderbilt does in this case make provisions for these postdocs to receive health insurance, there is abundant evidence that some postdocs are outright excluded, as in this example at Stanford:
Stanford makes no provision for fellows to purchase health insurance, and the Institute will not provide medical insurance or other benefits. External fellows must bring their own medical coverage with them or purchase an individual plan during their stay in California. This is also quite apparent when you look into the outfits that profit from selling health insurance to postdocs (because their universities don t provide them any):
http://www.garnett-powers.com/npa/ Also, take a look at the policy they and you ll note that it stinks: it excludes such luxuries as preventive care, birth control, and chemotherapy. I m not making this up:
http://www.garnett-powers.com/npa/summary.pdf

6 December 2009

Stefano Zacchiroli: RC bugs of the week - week 13

RCBW - week #13 Here are this week squashes, by yours truly: And here are the usual highlights:

27 November 2009

Stefano Zacchiroli: RC bugs of the week - week 12

RCBW - week #12 Here is this week squashes, by yours truly: The funniest part of this RCBW issue is probably that Luk has started handing over RC bugs to me: from time to time I just get a /query from him with bug numbers :-) In fact, this is more useful than one can imagine, because a considerable amount of time in periodic RC squashing is taken by triaging the RC bug list to choose your targets. Of course there is no guarantee that I'll be willing/able to fix handed-over bugs but, as a RM, Luk has evidently well-trained feelings about how hard would be to fix a given bug. All in all, for this week it worked well: 4 of the above 7 came from SchindlerLuk's list. ... and of course, let's welcome Simon on board! He is definitely doing a better job at spotting packages that should be removed from the archive rather than resurrected (potential negative effect that a NMU can indeed have on a package, de facto "saving" it from testing/release exclusion). In fact, the dilemma of "NMU vs Request Removal" raises various tricky questions. For instance, while we currently have pretty clear guidelines on how and, more importantly, when doing NMUs, we are more stringent on "Non-Maintainer Removals". Quoting from the Package Removal Requests wiki page: 
    In all cases, if there is a maintainer and it's not you, mention the
    maintainer's opinion or, if you don't know it, mention how and when you
    tried to contact him.
It is of course reasonable to be more stringent on a measure that is way more invasive than a "simple" NMU. But if we start to rely on NMU-time as an important trigger for removal requests, then we could probably use a more aggressive and more distributed process for removals.

18 November 2009

Robert Millan: GRUB news


This is being a busy month for GRUB. Quick catch-up of GRUB news:

Josselin Mouette: Getting rid of HAL, second attempt

Some time ago, I made an attempt at a gvfs package with disabled HAL support. The latest upstream version allows to use DeviceKit-Disks instead, through the gnome-disk-utility library. This change was supposed to bring a lot of improvement, among which: Unfortunately, it turned out as a real fiasco, since there is no support for IDE CDs using ide_mod in DeviceKit-Disks. Upstream only uses libata, and Fedora has no requirements for compatibility with kernels shipped more than 2 months ago. The change had to be backed out. What you don t know yet is that Michael Biebl is awesome. Not only did he find some ways to comply with Bastian s requirements, but he implemented IDE CD support in DeviceKit. Which was not really easy. So, I d appreciate if some adventurous people could test the experimental gvfs packages in which there is still DeviceKit support. Please look for any regressions in them, especially with regard to removable media handling.

15 November 2009

Stefano Zacchiroli: RC bugs of the week - week 10

RCBW - week #10 Here is this week squashes, by yours truly (also truly amazed by the simple fact of having reached the 10th RCBW week, my DDPO NMU section probably hates me now): This week I've made (once more) a friday/saturdary rush to keep up, mostly because during the week I've been traveling (again) back to Italy and also because on mon/tue we invited Luk in Paris to discuss some Mancoosi-powered Britney (potential) improvements (and yes, have some fun also. BTW, Yves, Ralf was not visiting, he has been teaching in Paris for quite a while now :-) ). More on this as soon as the advantages will turn potentiality into reality. To conclude ... drum roll ... please join me in cherishing this week new RCBW participant, welcome on board Tim!

12 November 2009

Cyril Brulebois: Haste

Recipe for a smile:
  1. Notice digikam's FTBFS on GNU/kFreeBSD.
  2. Work on a patch, send it to the BTS.
  3. Receive the ACK from the BTS.
  4. Receive the upstream commit notification a dozen of minutes later.
Denightening lights or enlightening nights or nightening delights Kudos, Luka.

10 November 2009

Yves-Alexis Perez: Call for help

So yesterday we had a really nice meeting with few french Debian folks. Luk and Ralf were visiting us, so we went at Prosper's for some meat and wine (and Aberlour). We were a bit too much to be able to speak to everybody (so mainly there were two 6-packs of people), but it was fine anyway. Though, the main point of the evening was that some (most?) teams in Debian are really (*really*) understaffed, and it might become problematic in the near future (like now). For example, from what I understood: I don't know the state of other teams, but it doesn't really look fine for the incoming freeze. So if you want to give some help, even if you're not yet technical enough, feel free to offer it to the teams above. Usually, starting with just using the package is enough. If you use it, you want it well-maintained, and there _are_ stuff to do to which don't require large technical knowledge, and the (few) active contributor will be happy to have some help and point you to what you can do. If you want to give some time to Debian, before filing some ITPs (even if you'd really like to have that package you use everyday), check if you can't do something for those above teams (and others which might need help too, like release team or kernel). Oh, and don't be scared, working on Debian is fun. It's time consuming, but it's rewarding. Don't let it become not fun.

18 October 2009

Christian Perrier: 4621 potential "spams" left to review for me

A few of us are working on spam removal from Debian lists archives. The wiki page linked above explains how to report spam on Debian mailing lists. This is in short as easy as bouncing a mail to a specific address, from your favourite MUA. These "reported spams" then need to be reviewed. Once a given message has been identified as "spam" by enough DD's (there are many false positives in the candidates, particularly in non English-speaking mailing lists), it is removed from the archives. Many mails have already been removed and any help is welcomed. Since Frans Pop launched this for debian-boot, back in May, I use 1 or 2 hours every Sunday to this work. After working on debian-boot only, I gradually worked on reported spams in other lists. As of now, I only have 4 lists where I still have work to do: The Chinese and the Spanish ones are tricky because identifying spam there is much less easy (for Chinese, I'm quite conservative and only tag very obvious spam....for Spanish, I read enough of the language to be able to target spam). What about you? Will you be able to help the few of us who work on getting clean archives (noticeably, Sandro Tosi, Giacomo Catenazzi, Cord Beermann, Luk Claes, Frans Pop, Bastian Blank, Luca Falavigna, Michael Koch, Bernd Steinmetz, Thoomas Viehmann, Florian Ernst, Adam D. Barratt, to name thos ewho reviewed more than 1000 mails)? Working on lists in your own language might be a good idea (I'm particularly thinking about lists in German, Spanish, Chinese and French).

7 October 2009

Adnan Hodzic: DebConf11 bid in Banja Luka?

Yesterday was a glorious day for DebConf11 bid in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I had a scheduled meeting with Banja Luka s mayor Dragoljub Davidovic. We met in his cabinet, where I presented him with the paper DebConf11 in Bosnia and Herzegovina in which I tried to explain what it all means. From what Debian is, over what DebConf is, to why is DebConf important. The thing I was most worried about was how am I going to explain all this in simple non-tech words Smile Either way, I was in middle of explaining what Debian is when mayor interrupted me I understand, I m electrical engineer myself you have no idea what relief came from these words! Grin Explaining what DebConf is and what kind of profiles attend one such event went smoothly as well, where mayor made some replicas on my story from the projects he worked on and so on. After my last case he also explained me how it s good that we meet, since Banja Luka was known as electronic city in ex-Yugoslavia.


Mayor and I And this is where things start going just ballistic! He says something along the line this is a great idea and that we have his full support, I think you should talk to the prime minister (Milorad Dodik) about this as well! Shock I find my way to the government building, wait for brief period of time and I get called inside of the prime ministers cabinet. I tell him somewhat different story, in terms of more details, how we are competing with M nchen for this bid, and how I m actually planning if we win the bid, and if the bid is successful we d most likely change the whole city s infrastructure to Debian. He picks up the phone and calls for someone, person comes in and I m introduced to IT Center General Manager (Krsto Grujic). He tells me that they have few RedHat servers while he leads the way to his office where I m introduced to director of Agency for IT (Srdjan Rajcevic) where we even have this informal talk where Srdjan tells me he used GNU/Linux user himself and that he still manages two OpenBSD servers. We talk about various topics, in the end I tell them what we need for the conference, they write it all down and we exchange contact details, since I was called back up by the prime minister. Prime minister, asks me what I need from him to realize this project and I tell him that I d need everything I gave IT guys below, and binding papers that we d have full government and city support by the end of the month, and that I ll consult with people from Debian in case we need anything else. No problem were his words Grin
Prime minister and I I walk out, really asking myself, what just happened, was that a Disney movie or what? Cool I d really like to use this opportunity to invite all Debian members to come and help us realize this bid. Help us put Bosnia and Herzegovina on map of the open source world! Stay tuned Wink

19 September 2009

Paul Wise: Delving into personal software freedom

Over on Planet Ubuntu there is a VRMS meme winding down. Usually I tend to think web log aggregator memes are an abomination, however, this one is a little more interesting, especially if Debian folk pick it up. It seems like many Planet Ubuntu posters require some non-free stuff, examples include; graphics and other drivers/firmware, Flash (Gnash/Swfdec aren't there yet), Sun Java (despite OpenJDK), RAR 3.0 archives, LHZ archives (despite jlha), Microsoft fonts (despite ttf-liberation), icon themes, ICC profiles, mind mapping, support for codec DLLs from Windows, VirtualBox drivers for Windows, the Opera web browser, games and other things. For Debian users, the popcon information pretty much confirms the above issues. Some other stuff Debian users use that isn't in Debian include; patented codecs, skype, acroread, the non-free version of VirtualBox and more. Next, lets get in on the getting your meme on part. On my Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop I have following Debian non-free/contrib stuff installed; firmware-iwlwifi, gcc-doc, gcc-doc-base, gcc-4.3-doc, autoconf-doc, gdb-doc, make-doc. On my OpenMoko FreeRunner phone I have nothing installed from Debian non-free/contrib. My wireless router and ADSL modem don't run Debian. The wireless router is a MIPS-based Netgear WGR614L (that is marketed as supporting DD-WRT, OpenWRT and Tomato) so I could conceivably install OpenWRT etc or Debian on it, but I haven't gotten around to that yet. The ADSL modem is a MIPS-based Siemens SpeedStream 4200, but it looks like that would require a significant amount of effort to get running FLOSS. Lets ponder my laptop freeness a bit more. The docs are all FSF-free, but not DFSG-free. It appears they are not DFSG-free because the FSF will not allow 28 words of FSF/GNU advertising to be removed (I'm not sure if Debian or the FSF is more pedantic). I'm not aware of any DFSG-free alternatives to them and I don't particularly care about the restrictions. My wireless card is an Intel 3945ABG mini PCI card that requires the kernel to upload the iwlwifi firmware before it works. Intel refuse to release firmware source code under a free license, citing FCC requirements. I'm not aware of any free firmware (or firmware reverse engineering efforts) for this device so the only alternative is to use wired Ethernet or buy another wireless card. Ethernet wires everywhere would be very inconvenient, so I've been thinking about trying to replace the card or laptop as soon as I am able. Since Atheros has released GPLv2 firmware for its AR9170 802.11n USB chipset I'll probably get something released by Atheros. I wonder why the FCC didn't prevent Atheros from releasing modifiable firmware, perhaps Intel will change their position too. So, what other software is on my laptop apart from Debian? Lets see, nothing on the HD apart from GRUB 2, /boot containing a Linux image/initrd from Debian and the LUKS partition containing swap and the Debian ext3 rootfs. Coreboot laptop support seems to be in the very early stages so I have no alternative to the supplied Dell BIOS at the moment. There is also the CPU microcode and other firmware installed in the various devices on the system, at least the HD, Ethernet, Bluetooth, GPU, DVD drive etc. have some kind of firmware in them. Some of this firmware is updatable using software from the Dell Linux repositories. Lets ponder my phone freeness a bit more. On it I have two copies of the u-boot bootloader (one in the protected NOR flash), u-boot is free. The NAND flash has an old Qt Extended Improved (QTEI) install that I need to copy stuff off and wipe. I also have a 4GB microSD card containing QTEI, Debian, FDOM and SHR. Now that QtMoko has brought QTEI to Debian packages I can probably ditch the QTEI install. I read that OM2009 is being merged into SHR so I can get rid of FDOM. That leaves SHR and Debian/QtMoko (nothing non-free). IIRC SHR does contain some firmware for devices that the OpenMoko FreeRunner doesn't contain, but that will get removed as Linux upstream moves more and more of that into linux-firmware.git. Nothing more on the main flash or microSD storage, so what else? The OpenMoko contains lots of hardware, but the main problematic devices here are the AR6000 Wi-Fi chip and the TI Calypso GSM device. The AR6000 is an issue because the firmware embedded in the chip is non-free and FullMAC so it is hard to add new features like AP mode or improve the connection quality/etc. In addition the firmware currently on the device is a development version of a 2.0 version (1.x was apparently broken) and further development does not seem to be happening yet. Since Atheros GPLed the AR9170 firmware I idly wonder if they could be convinced to release the source and GPL the AR6000 firmware. Perhaps a life-size gold statue of RMS would help there. The GSM device is problematic because of various bugs in the firmware. It apparently is an ARM chip with Nucleos, so perhaps uCLinux or something could be ported to it or written for it. There has been at least one discussion about hacking the GSM firmware (thar be dragons). Searching for some keywords extracted from the end of the first mail in that thread lead to some interesting results indeed. Lets ponder my network freeness a bit more. I should allocate some time to investigate putting Debian on my wireless router and ADSL modem. These generally just work except the ADSL modem reboots itself a lot during the summer. The just-works status of these devices means that messing with them is problematic in case I brick them (luckily I have a spare for the ADSL modem though). I presume OpenWRT and similar have replacements for all the software on my wireless router, drivers may be an issue though. I use gmail for reading email lists, mainly because of intertia, cheapness and because the interface has no GUI FLOSS peers yet (sup-mail exists for console use). TangoGPS, OpenStreetMap and other tools are slowly replacing my use of Google Maps, although I imagine routing will remain an issue for many years yet. One of the tech groups I'm involved in uses Plesk as a hosting control panel, mainly out of intertia, I'm not familiar with any FLOSS replacement though. Some of the upstream FLOSS projects I'm involved with use sourceforge as a hosting platform. There is a certain level of lock-in with SF.net, most of the data is easily exportable though. Lets ponder my software freeness in comparison to Planet Ubuntu posters. I have no freeness issues with drivers at the moment, however firmware seems likely to have freeness issues for a long time to come. I've avoided the need for the Adobe Flash Player by using swfdec and clive for downloading videos for some sites. swfdec works OK for some sites, some that I care about where it doesn't work and clive cannot download video include Vimeo, abc.net.au and sbs.com.au. For Vimeo you can download raw video if you have a login, but I do not, bugmenot is unreliable and Vimeo doesn't seem to be accepting new registrations. SBS I watch on television and ABC I get no reception so I just don't watch it. Java isn't an issue now that OpenJDK exists. I sometimes need to extract RAR 3.0 archives, which I do by copying the files to a friend's Windows machine or using a RAR extractor website. There is no free implementation of a RAR 3.0 extractor yet. I seem to remember that there is source code for a non-free extractor so presumably a clean-room documentation and reimplementation effort could fix this. I don't encounter LHZ files, but jlha-utils is available for if I do. I feel no need to install Microsoft fonts since the Liberation fonts and DejaVu meet my general font needs and Debian contains fonts covering all the scripts of Unicode (except for about half the huge amount of Han characters). In my music collection, only the Voxware audio codec and DigiTrakker MDL files are not supported by Rhythmbox, but I don't really miss those few tracks. I rarely have audio/video codec issues with video from the Internet. I don't have a use for Opera. Thanks in part to the efforts of the Debian games team, games from Debian main (such as warzone2100) satisfy my gaming needs. I just don't use Skype. Overall, I'm generally happy with my level of software freedom. My main strategy for preventing regressions in my software freedom is to just avoid doing things that require non-free software. The most problematic FLOSS issues for me are Flash support (adoption of the HTML5 video tag will resolve this for me), RAR 3.0 support and firmware. Please feel free to contact me with any comments or questions. Happy Software Freedom Day everyone!

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