Last version of Enca has been released more than year ago and now it's time for new release. There are various compatibility fixes which have been committed to the Git repository meanwhile.
If you don't know Enca, it is an Extremely Naive Charset Analyser. It detects character set and
encoding of text files and can also convert them to other encodings using either a built-in converter or external libraries and tools like libiconv, librecode, or cstocs.
Full list of changes for 1.17 release:
Filed under: Enca English 2 comments
We made a good Linux distribution, an excellent Debian derivative, but commercial success did not flow from it. In the succeeding months, Ian and the company tried hard to find a strategy that would stick and make our big break. But that never happened. We had several rounds of layoffs when hoped-for funding never materialized. Ian eventually lost control of the company, and despite a few years of Itanium contract work after I left, closed for good.
Looking back, Progeny was life compressed. During the good times, we had joy, sense of accomplishment, a sense of purpose at doing something well that was worth doing. I had what was my dream job back then: working on Debian as I loved to do, making the world a better place through Free Software, and getting paid to do it. And during the bad times, different people at Progeny experienced anger, cynicism, apathy, sorrow for the loss of our friends or plans, or simply a feeling to soldier on. All of the emotions, good or bad, were warranted in their own way.
Bruce Byfield, one of my co-workers at Progeny, recently wrote a wonderful memoriam of Ian. He wrote, More than anything, he wanted to repeat his accomplishment with Debian, and, naturally he wondered if he could live up to his own expectations of himself. That, I think, was Ian s personal tragedy that he had succeeded early in life, and nothing else he did with his life could quite measure up to his expectations and memories.
Ian was not the only one to have some guilt over Progeny. I, for years, wondered if I should have done more for the company, could have saved things by doing something more, or different. But I always came back to the conclusion I had at the time: that there was nothing I could do a terribly sad realization.
In the years since, I watched Ubuntu take the mantle of easy-to-install Debian derivative. I saw them reprise some of the ideas we had, and even some of our mistakes. But by that time, Progeny was so thoroughly forgotten that I doubt they even realized they were doing it.
I had long looked at our work at Progeny as a failure. Our main goal was never accomplished, our big product never sold many copies, our company eventually shuttered, our rock-the-world plan crumpled and forgotten. And by those traditional measurements, you could say it was a failure.
But I have come to learn in the years since that success is a lot more that those things. Success is also about finding meaning and purpose through our work. As a programmer, success is nailing that algorithm that lets the application scale 10x more than before, or solving that difficult problem. As a manager, success is helping team members thrive, watching pieces come together on projects that no one person could ever do themselves. And as a person, success comes from learning from our experiences, and especially our mistakes. As J. Michael Straczynski wrote in a Babylon 5 episode, loosely paraphrased: Maybe this experience will be a good lesson. Too bad it was so painful, but there ain t no other kind.
The thing about Progeny is this Ian built a group of people that wanted to change the world for the better. We gave it our all. And there s nothing wrong with that.
Progeny did change the world. As us Progeny alumni have scattered around the country, we benefit from the lessons we learned there. And many of us were different , sort of out of place before Progeny, and there we found others that loved C compilers, bootloaders, and GPL licenses just as much as we did. We belonged, not just online but in life, and we went on to pull confidence and skill out of our experience at Progeny and use them in all sorts of ways over the years.
And so did Ian. Who could have imagined the founder of Debian and Progeny would one day lead the cause of an old-guard Unix turning Open Source? I run ZFS on my Debian system today, and Ian is partly responsible for that and his time at Progeny is too.
So I can remember Ian, and Progeny, as a success. And I leave you with a photo of my best memento from the time there: an original unopened boxed copy of Progeny Linux.
What happened in the reproducible
builds effort between December 20th to December 26th:
Toolchain fixes
Mattia Rizzolo rebased our experimental versions of debhelper (twice!) and dpkg on top of the latest releases.
Reiner Herrmann submited a patch for mozilla-devscripts to sort the file list in generated preferences.js files.
To be able to lift the restriction that packages must be built in the same path, translation support for the __FILE__ C pre-processor macro would also be required. Joerg Sonnenberger submitted a patch back in 2010 that would still be useful today.
Chris Lamb started work on providing a deterministic mode for debootstrap.
Packages fixed
The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their
build dependencies:
bouncycastle,
cairo-dock-plug-ins,
darktable,
gshare,
libgpod,
pafy,
ruby-redis-namespace,
ruby-rouge,
sparkleshare.
The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:
SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in the documentation generator.Makefile.tmpfs. (h01ger)
200 GiB have been added to jenkins.debian.net (thanks to ProfitBricks!) to make room for new jobs. The current count is at 962 and growing!
diffoscope development
Aside from some minor bugs that have been fixed, a one-line change made huge memory (and time) savings as the output of transformation tool is now streamed line by line instead of loaded entirely in memory at once.
disorderfs development
Andrew Ayer released disorderfs version 0.4.2-1 on December 22th. It fixes a memory corruption error when processing command line arguments that could cause command line options to be ignored.
Documentation update
Many small improvements for the documentation on reproducible-builds.org sent by Georg Koppen were merged.
Package reviews
666 (!) reviews have been removed, 189 added and 162 updated in the previous week.
151 new fail to build from source reports have been made by Chris West, Chris Lamb, Mattia Rizzolo, and Niko Tyni.
New issues identified: unsorted_filelist_in_xul_ext_preferences, nondeterminstic_output_generated_by_moarvm.
Misc.
Steven Chamberlain drew our attention to one analysis of the Juniper ScreenOS Authentication Backdoor: Whilst this may have been added in source code, it was well-disguised in the disassembly and just 7 instructions long. I thought this was a good example of the current state-of-the-art, and why we'd like our binaries and eventually, installer and VM images reproducible IMHO.
Joanna Rutkowska has mentioned possible ways for Qubes to become reproducible on their development mailing-list.
The ferry stops at Orcas (is it a town or just the terminal), and the
next stop is Eastsound town. I pre-planned here a stop to get a second
mini-breakfast: however, I misjudged what the portion sizes are and
got myself a maxi-cinnamon roll at Caffe Olga:
At least I knew I wasn't going to be hungry for a while 
Driving on, briefly stopping at Cascade Lake (I also stopped on the
way back, the view is nice), then reaching the parking at the Twin
Lakes trail on the shore of Mountain Lake. Good think I arrived
somewhat early the parking was quite full already. I also got a bit
confused on which way the hike starts, since it's not well marked, but
after that I started the hike. It's also possible to drive up to Mount
Constitution, but that's just lame; hiking from the base it's quite
easy, if you find how to start the hike. Anyway:
At one point, one meets this particular sign:
Beware the Little Summit is not to be missed! After ~40 minutes of
hiking, with some parts a tiny bit strenuous, the view is really
breathtaking. It's definitely worth stopping by, as the view is (IMHO)
nicer than the view from the top of Mt. Constitution:
The reason I say this is better is because you look towards ocean,
whereas later the view is back towards the continent. And looking
towards the big ocean is just perfect! Plus, the many small island,
fully covered with forest are also nice.
Onwards then towards the peak of Mount Constitution. You cross the
"ridge" of the island, and your view shifts to the other side. Which
means you see back to the Mountain Lake where the hike starts:
Here the path is more exposed, not through tall forest like at the
beginning:
Right before reaching the peak, you pass through an interesting
forest:
And then you're finally reaching the peak. Compared to Switzerland,
it's very much not impressive (730m), but nevertheless, being so close
to the ocean results in some very nice views:
You can go into the small tower, and read through the history of the
location, including the personal life of
Robert Moran (shipbuilder), who retired in 1905 to
Orcas island to live what (his doctors said to be) his last months,
and who instead ended living until 1943. Not bad! To be filled under
"too much stress is bad, nature is good" heading, I think.
After eating a small packed lunch, I started back. At the beginning
the forest is similar to the one back at the beginning of the hike,
but then, as you reach the level of lakes, it is slightly
different. More tall (old?) trees, more moss and ferns:
I passed briefly by the Twin Lakes, which were interesting (lots of
submerged trunks), and then finally on the Twin Lakes trail back to
the start. The views of Mountain Lake from here are also nice,
especially in the less harsh afternoon sun:
And then the hike was over. I still had some time to spend before the
ferry I had a ticket on was scheduled, so I drove down to Olga town,
as I was curious what was at the end of "Olga Road". Not much, but
again nice views, and this very picturesque pier:
And then it was back to the ferry, waiting in line, getting on the
ferry, and crossing back:
Overall, it was a day well spent, part different, part similar to last
year's mostly road trip. Definitely recommended
if you're in the area, and there are a couple of other hikes on Orcas
Island, plus all the other islands which make up the San Juans.
However, traffic on the way back was not that awesome 
Small price
though!
| Series: | October Daye #5 |
| Publisher: | DAW |
| Copyright: | September 2011 |
| ISBN: | 1-101-54760-X |
| Format: | Kindle |
| Pages: | 368 |
I gave a presentation at 32C3 this week. One of the things I said was "If any of you are doing seriously confidential work on Apple laptops, stop. For the love of god, please stop." I didn't really have time to go into the details of that at the time, but right now I'm sitting on a plane with a ridiculous sinus headache and the pseudoephedrine hasn't kicked in yet so here we go.
Here is my monthly update covering a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world (previously):
My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donators (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me.
Debian LTS
This month I have been paid to work 21.25 hours on Debian LTS. During this time I worked on the following things:
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Amb el cor compungit, Debian lamenta la p rdua d'Ian Murdock, ferm
partidari del programari lliure i de codi obert, pare, fill i l'"ian"
a Debian.
L'Ian va comen ar el projecte Debian l'agost de 1993, i va publicar les
primeres versions m s tard el mateix any. Debian es convertiria en el
sistema operatiu universal pel m n, que funciona en tot tipus de
dispositius, des de sistemes encastats fins a l'estaci especial.
L'Ian es va centrar en crear una distribuci i una cultura de comunitat
que fessin el correcte, ticament o t cnica. Publicar quan estigui a
punt i la ferma posici sobre la llibertat de programari s n les regles
d'or en el m n del programari lliure i de codi obert.
La seva devoci per fer el correcte va guiar la seva feina, tant a
Debian com els seg ents anys, sempre treball per assolir el millor
futur possible.
El somni de l'Ian est viu, la comunitat de Debian continua
incre blement activa, amb milers de desenvolupadors que treballen
innumerables hores per proporcionar un sistema operatiu segur i fiable.
Els pensaments de la comunitat de Debian s n amb la fam lia de l'Ian en
aquests moments tant durs.
La seva fam lia ens ha demanat privacitat en aquests moments dif cils i
volem respectar-ho. Des de Debian i des de la comunitat de Linux en
general podem enviar mostres de condol a in-memoriam-ian@debian.org;
seran guardades i arxivades.
[xcb] Unknown sequence number while processing queue [xcb] Most likely this is a multi-threaded client and XInitThreads has not been called [xcb] Aborting, sorry about that. forktest: ../../src/xcb_io.c:274: poll_for_event: Assertion !xcb_xlib_threads_sequence_lost' failed.OK, so part of my init sequence was unhappy. The odd thing was it only appeared when I added the gtk options. I narrowed it down with some test code which displayed the error but stripped all the other parts out.
#include <gtk/gtk.h>int main(int argc, char *argv[])
GOptionContext *context;
GError *error;
pid_t pid;GtkWidget *win;
context = g_option_context_new("My test");
g_option_context_add_group (context, gtk_get_option_group (TRUE));
error = NULL;
if (!g_option_context_parse(context, &argc, &argv, &error))
return 1;
pid = fork();
if (pid < 0)
return 1;
if (pid == 0) //child
GMainLoop *loop;
loop = g_main_new(FALSE);
g_main_run(loop);
return 0;
else // parent
if (gtk_init_check(&argc, &argv) == FALSE)
return 1;
win = gtk_window_new(GTK_WINDOW_TOPLEVEL);
gtk_widget_show(win);
gtk_main();
return 0;
24 Dec. 63
Dear Uncle Ron and Aunt Helen,
It has been quite awhile since I have written you folks. I am not too much of one for writing,
and when I do write, I keep putting it off, and putting it off; and the next thing you know,
the weeks turn into months and then the months into years.
I haven't sent any Christmas cards, so at this time I'll offer my best wishes for the season
to you.
It is Christmas Eve and I am working tonight. I will also work New Year's eve and day. It
really doesn't seem like Christmas here, and there isn't that much to do in the evening's;
So I'm just as well off working.
As I had mentioned, I had intended to send you some coins from Korea but I believe that I
put them in with a package that I had sent to Mom and told her to give them to you. In any
event, here are some in this box.
The Korean coin with the 10 on it is 10 Won, and worth about $.0769. The large copper coin
is Japanese ( 10 Yen) and about 2.8
Wait! I was wrong on the Korean coins.They are 10 Hwan which is the old money. When they
Changed to Won, they made 10 Hwan equal to 1 Won. (Sounds confusing and tongue-tying,
doesn't it?) So these 10 copper pieces with the 10 on them altogether are only worth 7 /
The Viet Namese coins with the former president Diem picture on them are soon being
taken out of circulation. ( Since he was overthrown and killed, they are going to
replace the money also.) The small pieces marked 1 dong are 1 piastre; also called one
Viet Namese dollar. 1 piastre is about .7 .
I also recall sending some coins home in my hold baggage. I'll tell Mom to look for
them and give them to you.
Now that I look back on it, the year I spent in Korea wasn't bad. It was difficult at
first having to work for an arrogant Jew boss, but after a few months I got out of his
office and was on my own working directly for the army people ( U.S.) The country of
Korea isn't too bad. As you can see on the coins they were in the year 4294 last year.
It is surprising for a civilization to be that far along in years and still live under
very primitive conditions. Going from Korea to Japan is like going from the dark ages
into the future science fiction world. Those people are really progressing in Japan.
I spent several days in Japan after I left Korea. Then I went to Honolulu for almost
a month. Then I went back to Japan for Leave for 3 weeks and then down here to Viet
Nam in October. They were building like crazy in Japan to get ready for the Olympics.
Working 4 hours a day, 7 days a week on construction. You could drive into Tokyo
early in the evening and return late in the night and find the road you had gone in
on was now completely torn away. And downtown Tokyo is vey nice. Lots of modern
building and just about any modern gadget you can think of.
I really like their cooking also. Their Kobe Beef is excellent. In this beef, the
cattle are pampered from the time they are born until they are slaughtered. They
massage them, feed them beer, and let them live a lazy life. I would really like
to work a year or two in Japan. The hot baths and big tubs are also great. Only
it is almost impossible to stand the hot temperatures that they can. Westerners
always have to add quite a lot of cold water before they can get in the tub.
The Viet Namese people are much dirtier than the Japanese or Koreans. They don't
have any hot baths here in Viet Nam. In fact, the majority of hotels ( built by
the French) don't even have hot water in them. The Korean houses don't look like
much from the outside, but inside they are spotlessly clean. The older Japanese
buildings look nic efrom the outside and are also clean inside.
I am here in the town of Nha Trang. It is a small town on the coast of the
China Sea. I like it here. My hotel is less than a hundred yards from the
beach. We are now in the winter season also, but it just got a little cooler
from having winds the past few weeks. This afternoon as we came to work there
were all sorts of people in swimming.
Lobster is also plentiful here and I eat quite a bit of it. Most of the
restaurant make a creamed corn soup with lots of chunks of crab meat in it.
This is very good.
Being out here in Nha Trang, we missed the coup d'etat. Things were quiet
here and the only way we knew what was happening was to listen to the radio
and talk to our co-workers of our radio system in Saigon. When they lifted
martial law and the curfew in Saigon, it took them several days later to
follow suit here.
There seems to be a noticed improvement since the coup. The people in
general seem much happier and there appears to be much more general activity
going on.
Well, I guess that's about it for now. I think I may have some Korean Won
notes back in my room and I'll check and enclose them if I can find them.
Say hello to Ira & family when you see them, and also to Aunt Marie if she
is still there with you.
'Bye for now
Your nephew
PS The Viet Namese coins with 50 XU on them are piastres.
LXQt is a Qt lightweight desktop the Qt port of LXDE. Packages exist in Debian albeit without a top level metapackage or task package to make installing it easier. So I wrote up a simple-ish vmdebootstrap call:
$ sudo vmdebootstrap --image lxqt.img --size=5G --package=lxqt-panel --package=libqt5xcbqpa5 --package=qterminal --package=openbox --package=xdm --package=lxqt-session --package=lxqt-about --package=lxqt-policykit --package=lxqt-globalkeys --package=lxqt-notificationd --package=lxqt-sudo --package=dbus-x11 --package=lxqt-admin --package=lxqt-runner --package=lxqt-config --package=task-desktop --package=locales --package=xserver-xorg-core --package=oxygen-icon-theme --grub --distribution=unstable --mirror=http://mirror.bytemark.co.uk/debian --configure-apt --enable-dhcp --serial-console --sudo --verbose --owner=neil --user='neil/neil'
lxdm does give a nicer experience at the cost of needing GTK+. YMMV.
Note the explicit additions:--package=libqt5xcbqpa5 --package=dbus-x11 as debootstrap does not follow Recommends, libqt5xcbqpa5 needs to be specified explicitly or the desktop will fail to start. dbus-x11 is also needed to get things working. task-desktop adds the Debian artwork and needs to be in the list of packages passed to debootstrap so that the Recommends of the task packages are not selected. (Note that I have so far failed to get LXQt to use the Debian artwork as a desktop background.)
So, what is it like? Well alpha is how I might describe it. Not in terms of stability, more in terms of functionality. I do have a second install using lxdm which has been tweaked but it depends on your objective. If your aim is to not have GTK+ but not have KDE, then LXQt is a beginning only. In particular, if you really are intent on not having GTK+ at all, your choice of web browser is somewhat limited, to lynx. (There s no bare Qt file manager in Debian pcmanfm-qt depends on libfm-modules which uses GTK+ nor a bare text editor despite this being one of the simplest examples of a QApplication). There is a large gap in the software availability which is Qt but not KDE, despite the power and flexibility of Qt itself. (I ve written applications using Qt directly before, it is much more flexible and configurable than GTK+). So there would seem to be a reason why a metapackage and a task package do not yet exist, there is a lot more to do. I m happy to mix GTK+ applications, so my test environment can use iceweasel, chromium, leafpad and thunar.
Overall, this was an interesting diversion prompted by a separate discussion about the merits and controversies of GTK+, GNOME etc.
I failed to work out why the icon theme works if lxdm was installed but not with xdm (so there s a missing package but I m not yet sure exactly which), so the screenshot is more bare than I expected.
With iceweasel installed and various other tweaks:
Finally, note #809339 I have local changes which are being tested to use systemd-networkd but currently the masking of PredictableInterfaceNames as documented does not work, so some editing of /etc/network/interfaces.d/setup (or enable systemd-networkd yourself and add a suitable file to /etc/systemd/network/) will be needed to get a working network connection in the VM.
2015-03-19-boston-libreplanet label in the financial
reports below), where I've given the talk
Distributions and the Free "Cloud", and FSFE's LLW
2015 (2015-04-15-barcelona-fsfe-legal) workshop.
Furthermore I've used the grant to reimburse otherwise not
reimbursed out of pocket expenses in a trip to San Francisco
(2015-11-06-san-francisco-gsoc+osi) that have been
otherwise sponsored by Google (to attend the Summer of Code Mentor
Summit) and OSI (to attend a F2F meeting of the Board of
Directors). Finally, I've used grant money to offer lunch to
invited lecturers in my master-level Free Software class at the
university (label 2015-foss-class).
Actual financial reports are reported below, in ledger format. It should be noted that,
contrary to the usual expected 6-month duration of flash grants,
I've used only about half the grant amount over a 12-month period;
I do not plan to pocket what remains, but rather keep on using it
over the next year, reporting again publicly at the end of the
period. Also, I did not breakdown further out of pocket expenses,
but they invariably stand for public transport tickets and
meals.
Balance sheet
Overall:
1966,11 EUR Assets:Funds
-4052,52 EUR Equity:Opening balances
2086,41 EUR Expenses
15,90 EUR Bank:Commissions
424,00 EUR Conference:Registration
56,50 EUR Teaching:Speaker-invitation
1590,01 EUR Travel
249,02 EUR Lodgement
562,51 EUR Out-of-pocket
778,48 EUR Plane
--------------------
0
-1265,22 EUR Assets:Funds
1265,22 EUR Expenses
424,00 EUR Conference:Registration
841,22 EUR Travel
213,38 EUR Out-of-pocket
627,84 EUR Plane
--------------------
0
-479,66 EUR Assets:Funds
479,66 EUR Expenses:Travel
249,02 EUR Lodgement
80,00 EUR Out-of-pocket
150,64 EUR Plane
--------------------
0
-269,13 EUR Assets:Funds
269,13 EUR Expenses:Travel:Out-of-pocket
--------------------
0
-56,50 EUR Assets:Funds
56,50 EUR Expenses:Teaching:Speaker-invitation
--------------------
0
2014-12-03 Shuttleworth Foundation flash grant Equity:Opening balances -4052,52 EUR -4052,52 EUR
Assets:Funds 4052,52 EUR 0
2014-12-04 bank commissions on incoming transfer Expenses:Bank:Commissions 15,90 EUR 15,90 EUR
Assets:Funds -15,90 EUR 0
2014-12-24 plane tickets Paris-Boston round trip to attend LibrePlanet 2015 Expenses:Travel:Plane 627,84 EUR 627,84 EUR
Assets:Funds -627,84 EUR 0
2015-01-02 LibrePlanet 2015 registration + travel fund contribution Expenses:Conference:Registration 424,00 EUR 424,00 EUR
Assets:Funds -424,00 EUR 0
2015-03-02 plane tickets Paris-Barcelona round trip to attend LLW 2015 Expenses:Travel:Plane 150,64 EUR 150,64 EUR
Assets:Funds -150,64 EUR 0
2015-03-19 lunch with invited speaker for lecture about FOSS release management Expenses:Teaching:Speaker-invitation 28,00 EUR 28,00 EUR
Assets:Funds -28,00 EUR 0
2015-03-25 lunch with invited speaker for lecture about FOSS business models Expenses:Teaching:Speaker-invitation 28,50 EUR 28,50 EUR
Assets:Funds -28,50 EUR 0
2015-04-03 LibrePlanet 2015 out of pocket expenses Expenses:Travel:Out-of-pocket 213,38 EUR 213,38 EUR
Assets:Funds -213,38 EUR 0
2015-04-15 LLW 2015 out of pocket expenses Expenses:Travel:Out-of-pocket 80,00 EUR 80,00 EUR
Assets:Funds -80,00 EUR 0
2015-05-06 hotel in Barcelona for LLW 2015 (3 nights) Expenses:Travel:Lodgement 249,02 EUR 249,02 EUR
Assets:Funds -249,02 EUR 0
2015-11-29 OSI F2F Fall 2015 out of pocket expenses Expenses:Travel:Out-of-pocket 269,13 EUR 269,13 EUR
Assets:Funds -269,13 EUR 0
An USB3 device of mine stopped working one day. In Windows (its native
environment; Linux is not officially supported), there would be a device
plugged in sound and then nothing. Nothing in the event log, no indication
there was ever a device of any kind in Device Manager.
In Linux, after 20 seconds or so, this would come up:
[ 71.831659] usb usb2-port1: Cannot enable. Maybe the USB cable is bad?I bought a new and shorter cable. The card started working again.
Next.