Every month we review the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering. Please find the report for January below. Debian project funding

• In January we saw a new funded project proposed. The project is meant to bring in a number of changes to the Tryton modules and packages in Debian. Tryton, a full featured, entirely open source business software platform, is supported by its own foundation. You can track the current status of all our funded projects at its dedicated web page.
• Folks continue to add to the Grow Your Ideas project page, that s great.
• In January 2550 was put aside to fund Debian projects.

We continue to looking forward to hearing about Debian project proposals from various Debian stakeholders. This month has seen work on a survey that will go out to Debian Developers to gather feedback on what they think should be the priorities for funding in the project. Learn more about the rationale behind this initiative in this article. Debian LTS contributors In January, 13 contributors were paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available below. If you re interested in participating in the LTS or ELTS teams, we welcome participation from the Debian community. Simply get in touch with Jeremiah or Rapha l.

• Abhijith Pa worked 5 hours out of 5 available.
• Anton Gladky worked 12 hours out of 12 available.
• Ben Hutchings worked 16 hours out of 24 available and carried over 8 for February.
• Chris Lamb worked 18 hours out of 18 available.
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort worked 55 hours out of 58.25 available and carried over 3.25 for February
• Jeremiah Foster worked 20 hours out of 20 available on LTS administration and 8.3 hours on funded projects.
• Lee Garrett didn t spend any hours in January and carries over 39.25 hours to February
• Markus Koschany worked 34 hours out of 40 available and carried over 6 for February.
• Ola Lundqvist reported via email that they didn t spend any hours in January and carries over 11 from December for a total of 12 hours for February.
• Roberto C. Sanchez worked 9 hours out of 32 available and carried over 23 for February
• Sylvain Beucler worked 22 hours out of 40 available and carried over 14 for February
• Thorsten Alteholz worked 40 hours out of 40 available.
• Utkarsh Gupta worked 58.25 hours out of 58.25 available.

Evolution of the situation In January we released 34 DLAs. The security tracker currently lists 39 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 20 packages still needing an update. Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
  • TOSHIBA (for 77 months)
  • GitHub (for 68 months)
  • Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 45 months)
• Gold sponsors:
  • Roche Diagnostics International AG (for 88 months)
  • Linode (for 82 months)
  • Babiel GmbH (for 71 months)
  • Plat Home (for 71 months)
  • University of Oxford (for 27 months)
  • Deveryware (for 14 months)
  • VyOS Inc (for 9 months)
• Silver sponsors:
  • The Positive Internet Company (for 93 months)
  • Domeneshop AS (for 92 months)
  • Nantes M tropole (for 86 months)
  • Univention GmbH (for 78 months)
  • Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 78 months)
  • Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 72 months)
  • Exonet B.V. (for 62 months)
  • Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 56 months)
  • CINECA (for 45 months)
  • Minist re de l Europe et des Affaires trang res (for 39 months)
  • Cloudways Ltd (for 29 months)
  • Dinahosting SL (for 27 months)
  • Bauer Xcel Media Deutschland KG (for 21 months)
  • Platform.sh (for 21 months)
  • Moxa Intelligence Co., Ltd. (for 15 months)
  • sipgate GmbH (for 12 months)
  • OVH US LLC (for 10 months)
  • Tilburg University (for 10 months)
  • GSI Helmholtzzentrum f r Schwerionenforschung GmbH
  • Telecats BV
• Bronze sponsors:
  • Evolix (for 93 months)
  • Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 93 months)
  • Intevation GmbH (for 90 months)
  • Linuxhotel GmbH (for 90 months)
  • Daevel SARL (for 88 months)
  • Bitfolk LTD (for 87 months)
  • Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 87 months)
  • Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 86 months)
  • NUMLOG (for 86 months)
  • WinGo AG (for 86 months)
  • Ecole Centrale de Nantes LHEEA (for 82 months)
  • Entr ouvert (for 77 months)
  • Adfinis AG (for 74 months)
  • GNI MEDIA (for 69 months)
  • Laboratoire LEGI UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 69 months)
  • Tesorion (for 69 months)
  • Bearstech (for 60 months)
  • LiHAS (for 60 months)
  • People Doc (for 57 months)
  • Catalyst IT Ltd (for 55 months)
  • Supagro (for 50 months)
  • Demarcq SAS (for 49 months)
  • Universit Grenoble Alpes (for 35 months)
  • TouchWeb SAS (for 27 months)
  • SPiN AG (for 24 months)
  • CoreFiling (for 19 months)
  • Institut des sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod (for 14 months)
  • Observatoire des Sciences de l Univers de Grenoble (for 11 months)
  • Tem Innovations GmbH (for 6 months)
  • WordFinder.pro (for 5 months)
  • CNRS DT INSU R sif (for 4 months)

John Grisham The King of Torts Lots of things have been happening and I have been unable to be on top of things. There are so many things that happen and keep on happening and a lot of it is just not in control. For those who are watching Brexit, India is going through the same/similar phenomena just without Brexit. I would not like to delve much into Indian happenings as there is no sweet story to tell. Mum is in hospital (diabetic foot) so a lot of time to read books. So I have been making use of the time and at the same time learning or making connections from what I know of the history of the world which goes on enriching what I read all the time. For e.g. in this book, opens up with people who are on Crack. Now while the book is set in 2003, it is still relevant today for a lot of things. There have been rumors and whatnot that the President of the United States, Ronald Reagan supplied a lot of cocaine to black folks in the early 1980s. While that has never been proved, it has been proved somewhat that the CIA and even people in the state department were part of providing crack cocaine to African Americans (as they refer to blacks) in those days. Whether this was because of black power rising or non-profits like ACLU or other organizations is beyond me. I had also read that the GOP (Republicans/Grand Old Party) in the 1970s itself when computers became fast and could do a lot of processing, came to know if education would be as it is, then soon they would no voters. hence they decided to defund education in America, the end result being massive education loans to prospective students and perhaps partly the reason why China produces more than enough STEM graduates than the total number of Americans who become graduates. It is a shame nonetheless, that education in the U.S. is never top . This is somewhat from a Republican perspective. That is also the reason they are much anti-science.

Tort Cases India doesn t have either class-action suits or tort cases. But before we go headlong, this is what tort means. The book however is not about general tort cases but medical tort cases. The idea is that medical companies often produce medicines claiming they solve x or y issues but more often than not they take short-cuts to get approval from FDA and other regulators. And sooner or later those medicines can and do have harmful effects on the body, sometimes resulting in death. One of the more interesting articles that I read and probably also shared is the work done by Mr. Rob Bilott. While it is a typical David and Goliath story once you read the book, you realize that there are and were many difficulties in Mr. Rob s path that are never fully appreciated or even worked out. The biggest issue is the 8 years that he paid out of his own pocket to get the hundreds and thousands of people tested. How many of us would do that? And this is before proving causation of any disease, illness or anything to a particular environment, pollution etc. is hard even then and even now. Whatever money the victims receive afterward and whatever went to Mr. Rob Bilott would never compensate for the stress faced by him. And lawyers have to be careful, if they ask too little, they are not hurting the company and there is no change in its behavior. If they ask too much, the company can declare Chapter 11, bankruptcy so they have to keep the balance. There is also a lot of greed shown by the tort lawyer and while at the end he does tell about a company s nefarious activities that he suspects he could share his opinion only after giving up his law career. There is and was talk of tort-reform in the book but as can be seen if you reform tort there is just no way to punish such companies but that is in the U.S. There is also some observations that I have shared over the years, for e.g. Europe bans far more drugs than the U.S. does. A major part of it is perhaps due to the fact that Europe has 26/27 independent medical regulators and one country bans medicine for one or the other reason, the rest of Europe also bans the same. In the U.S. it is only the FDA. I have read they have had both funding and staffing issues for years and this is from before the pandemic. The Indian regulators are much worse. One could follow Priyanka Pulla s articles in Mint and others where she has shared how the regulator is corrupt and lazy and a combo of both. And all of this is besides how doctors are corrupted in India by marketing executives of pharma companies. That would be a whole article in itself. In short, when you read this book, there are so many thoughts that come alive when you are reading the book. The sad part is the book doesn t offer any solutions at all. John Grisham s books are usually legal thrillers and courtroom exchanges, this one though is and was very different. This one sadly doesn t take one to any conclusion apart from the fact that we live in an imperfect world and there don t seem to be any solutions. This was even shared by Rep. Katie Porter in her pinned tweet. The Abbvie s of the world will continue to take common people like you and me for a ride.

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 205. This version includes the following changes: You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

The RcppSimdJson package was updated to release 0.1.7 today. CRAN had sent a note overnight that it triggered LENGTH_1 error (where boolean comparisons happen with longer vectors). That may be debatable in the two cases flagged if one looks at the commit but life being too short to debate this so we just fixed it. The email came in at 04:50h-ish when I was sound asleep, but four hours later the fixed version was on CRAN thanks to the automated processing: RcppSimdJson wraps the fantastic and genuinely impressive simdjson library by Daniel Lemire and collaborators. Via very clever algorithmic engineering to obtain largely branch-free code, coupled with modern C++ and newer compiler instructions, it results in parsing gigabytes of JSON parsed per second which is quite mindboggling. The best-case performance is faster than CPU speed as use of parallel SIMD instructions and careful branch avoidance can lead to less than one cpu cycle per byte parsed; see the video of the talk by Daniel Lemire at QCon (also voted best talk). The very short NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in version 0.1.7 (2022-02-18)

• Two URLs were updated in 'README.md', and Travis artifacts and badges have been removed (Dirk).
• One unit test file was updated to not trigger a 'LENGTH_1' warning (Dirk closing #76).

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. For questions, suggestions, or issues please use the issue tracker at the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

As of 2022-02-16, Launchpad supports a couple of features on its SSH endpoints (git.launchpad.net, bazaar.launchpad.net, ppa.launchpad.net, and upload.ubuntu.com) that it previously didn t: Ed25519 public keys (a well-regarded format, supported by OpenSSH since 6.5 in 2014) and signatures with existing RSA public keys using SHA-2 rather than SHA-1 (supported by OpenSSH since 7.2 in 2016). I m hesitant to call these features new , since they ve been around for a long time elsewhere, and people might quite reasonably ask why it s taken us so long. The problem has always been that Launchpad can t really use a normal SSH server such as OpenSSH because it needs features that aren t practical to implement that way, such as virtual filesystems and dynamic user key authorization against the Launchpad database. Instead, we use Twisted Conch, which is a very extensible Python SSH implementation that has generally served us well. The downside is that, because it s an independent implementation and one that occupies a relatively small niche, it often lags behind in terms of newer protocol features. Catching up to this point has been something we ve been working on for around five years, although it s taken a painfully long time for a variety of reasons which I thought some people might find interesting to go into, at least people who have the patience for details of the SSH protocol. Many of the delays were my own responsibility, although realistically we probably couldn t have added Ed25519 support before OpenSSL/cryptography work that landed in 2019.

• In 2015, we did some similar work on SHA-2 key exchange and MAC algorithms.
• In 2016, various other contributors were working on ECDSA and Ed25519 support (e.g. #533 and #644). At the time, it seemed best to keep an eye on this but mainly leave them to it. I m very glad that some people worked on this before me - studying their PRs helped a lot, even parts that didn t end up being merged directly.
• In 2017, it became clear that this was likely to need some more attention, but before we could do anything else we had to revamp Launchpad s build system to use pip rather than buildout, since without that we couldn t upgrade to any newer versions of Twisted. That proved to be a substantial piece of yak-shaving: first we had to upgrade Launchpad off Ubuntu 12.04, and then the actual build system rewrite was a complicated project of its own.
• In 2018, I fixed an authentication hang that happened if a client even tried to offer ECDSA or Ed25519 public keys to Launchpad, and we got ECDSA support fully working in Launchpad. We also discovered as a result of automated interoperability tests run as part of the Debian OpenSSH packaging that Twisted needed to gain support for the new openssh-key-v1 private key format, which became a prerequisite for Ed25519 support since OpenSSH only ever writes those keys in the new format, and so I fixed that.
• In 2019, Python s cryptography package gained support for X25519 (the Diffie-Hellman key exchange function based on Curve25519) and Ed25519, and it became somewhat practical to add support to Twisted on top of that. However, it required OpenSSL 1.1.1b, and it seemed unlikely that we would be in a position to upgrade all the relevant bits of Launchpad s infrastructure to use that in the near term. I at least managed to add curve25519-sha256 key exchange support to Twisted based on some previous work by another contributor, and I prepared support for Ed25519 keys in Twisted even though I knew we weren t going to be able to use it yet.
• 2020 was well, everyone knows what 2020 was like, plus we had a new baby. I did some experimentation in spare moments, but I didn t really have the focus to be able to move this sort of complex problem forward.
• In 2021, I bit the bullet and started seriously working on fallback mechanisms to allow us to use Ed25519 even on systems lacking a sufficient version of OpenSSL, though found myself blocked on figuring out type-checking issues following a code review. It then became clear on the release of OpenSSH 8.8 that we were going to have to deal with RSA SHA-2 signatures as well, since otherwise OpenSSH in Ubuntu soon wouldn t be able to authenticate to Launchpad by default (which also caused me to delay uploading 8.8 to Debian unstable for a while). To deal with that, I first had to add SSH extension negotiation to Twisted.
• Finally, in 2022, I added RSA SHA-2 signature support to Twisted, finally unblocked myself on the type-checking issue with the Ed25519 fallback mechanism, quickly put together a similar fallback mechanism for X25519, backported the whole mess to Twisted 20.3.0 since we currently can t use anything newer due to the somewhat old version of Python 3 that we re running, promptly ran into and fixed a regression that affected SFTP uploads to ppa.launchpad.net and upload.ubuntu.com, and finally added Ed25519 as a permissible key type in Launchpad s authserver.

Phew! Thanks to everyone who works on Twisted, cryptography, and OpenSSL - it s been really useful to be able to build on solid lower-level cryptographic primitives - and to those who helped with code review.

Hi everyone! In today s blog post I will be talking about the progress i have made , the hurdles I encountered and how my current progress differs from my original expectations. I applied to Debian community with a particular timeline and expected it to go that way, but after starting out i realized i had alot to learn in Ruby and the codebase. So far i have worked on issues i am proud of and when i use Debci i see some of the changes i added for example the self-service form remembering values that was filled after an error message / it reloads. Another milestone for me is writing test cases, I learnt about test driven development which is an awesome process is developing software. Looking back at the beginning before the internship started I can see how much experience i have gained and also improvement I made.

Road block Some tasks took longer than expected for example writing the test cases as i was new to this way of building and also i had to refactor some code, I was very careful doing this as i wanted to make sure i do it the right way.

The journey continues I had to modify my initial expectations and my mentors have been so supportive. I hope to add more features to Debci and also write more tests. So far, it has been a great experience. Till next time!

Munin plugin and it s CPU usage (and a rewrite in rust) With my last blog on the Munin plugins CPU usage I complained about Oracle Linux doing something really weird, driving up CPU usage when running a fairly simple Shell script with a loop in. Turns out, I was wrong. It is not OL7 that makes this problem show up. It appears to be something from the Oracle Enterprise Database installed on the system, that makes it go this crazy. I ve now had this show up on RedHat7 systems too, and the only thing that singles them out is that overpriced index card system on it. I still don t know what the actual reason for this is, and honestly, don t have enough time to dig deep into it. It is not something that a bit of debugging/tracing finds - especially as it does start out all nice, and accumulates more CPU usage over time. Which would suggest some kind of leak leading to more processing needed, or so - but then it is only CPU affected, not memory, and ONLY on systems with that database on. Meh. Well, I recently (December vacation) got me to look deeper into learning Rust. My first project with that was a multi-threaded milter to do some TLS checks on outgoing mails (kind of fun customer requirements there), and heck, Rust did make that a surprisingly easy task in the end. (Comparing the old, single-threaded C code with my multi-threaded Rust version, a third of the code length doing more, and being way easier to extend with wanted new features is nice). So my second project was Replace this shell script with a Rust binary doing the same . Hell yeah. Didn t take that long and looks good (well, the result. Not sure about the code. People knowing rust may possibly scratch out eyes when looking at it). Not yet running for that long, but even compared to the shell on systems that did not show the above mentioned bugs (read: Debian, without Oracle foo), uses WAY less CPU (again, mentioned by highly accurate outputs of the top command). So longer term I hope this version won t run into the same problems as the shell one. Time will tell. If you are interested in the code, go find it here, and if you happen to know rust and not run away screaming, I m happy for tips and code fixes, I m sure this can be improved lots. (At least cargo clippy is happy, so basics are done ) Update: According to munin, the rust version creates 14 forks/second less than the shell one. And the fork rate change is same on machines with/without the database. That 14 is more than I would have guessed. CPU usage as expected: only on the problem hosts with Oracle Database installed you can see a huge difference, otherwise it is not an easily noticable difference. That is, on an otherwise idle host (munin graph shows average use of low one-digit numbers), one can see a drop of around 1% in the CPU usage graph from munin. Ohwell, poor Shell.

Earlier this week, Neil McGovern announced that he is due to be stepping down as the Executive Director as the GNOME Foundation later this year. As the President of the board and Neil s effective manager together with the Executive Committee, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on his achievements in the past 5 years and explain a little about what the next steps would be. Since joining in 2017, Neil has overseen a productive period of growth and maturity for the Foundation, increasing our influence both within the GNOME project and the wider Free and Open Source Software community. Here s a few highlights of what he s achieved together with the Foundation team and the community:

• Improved public perception of GNOME as a desktop and GTK as a development platform, helping to align interests between key contributors and wider ecosystem stakeholders and establishing an ongoing collaboration with KDE around the Linux App Summit.
• Worked with the board to improve the maturity of the board itself and allow it to work at a more strategic level, instigating staggered two-year terms for directors providing much-needed stability, and established the Executive and Finance committees to handle specific topics and the Governance committees to take a longer-term look at the board s composition and capabilities.
• Arranged 3 major grants to the Foundation totaling $2M and raised a further $250k through targeted fundraising initiatives.
• Grown the Foundation team to its largest ever size, investing in staff development, and established ongoing direct contributions to GNOME, GTK and Flathub by Foundation staff and contractors.
• Launched and incubated Flathub as an inclusive and sustainable ecosystem for Linux app developers to engage directly with their users, and delivered the Community Engagement Challenge to invest in the sustainability of our contributor base the Foundation s largest and most substantial programs outside of GNOME itself since Outreachy.
• Achieved a fantastic resolution for GNOME and the wider community, by negotiating a settlement which protects FOSS developers from patent enforcement by the Rothschild group of non-practicing entities.
• Stood for a diverse and inclusive Foundation, implementing a code of conduct for GNOME events and online spaces, establishing our first code of conduct committee and updating the bylaws to be gender-neutral.
• Established the GNOME Circle program together with the board, broadening the membership base of the foundation by welcoming app and library developers from the wider ecosystem.

Recognizing and appreciating the amazing progress that GNOME has made with Neil s support, the search for a new Executive Director provides the opportunity for the Foundation board to set the agenda and next high-level goals we d like to achieve together with our new Executive Director. In terms of the desktop, applications, technology, design and development processes, whilst there are always improvements to be made, the board s general feeling is that thanks to the work of our amazing community of contributors, GNOME is doing very well in terms of what we produce and publish. Recent desktop releases have looked great, highly polished and well-received, and the application ecosystem is growing and improving through new developers and applications bringing great energy at the moment. From here, our largest opportunity in terms of growing the community and our user base is being able to articulate the benefits of what we ve produced to a wider public audience, and deliver impact which allows us to secure and grow new and sustainable sources of funding. For individuals, we are able to offer an exceedingly high quality desktop experience and a broad range of powerful applications which are affordable to all, backed by a nonprofit which can be trusted to look after your data, digital security and your best interests as an individual. From the perspective of being a public charity in the US, we also have the opportunity to establish programs that draw upon our community, technology and products to deliver impact such as developing employable skills, incubating new Open Source contributors, learning to program and more. For our next Executive Director, we will be looking for an individual with existing experience in that nonprofit landscape, ideally with prior experience establishing and raising funds for programs that deliver impact through technology, and appreciation for the values that bring people to Free, Open Source and other Open Culture organizations. Working closely with the existing members, contributors, volunteers and whole GNOME community, and managing our relationships with the Advisory Board and other key partners, we hope to find a candidate that can build public awareness and help people learn about, use and benefit from what GNOME has built over the past two decades. Neil has agreed to stay in his position for a 6 month transition period, during which he will support the board in our search for a new Executive Director and support a smooth hand-over. Over the coming weeks we will publish the job description for the new ED, and establish a search committee who will be responsible for sourcing and interviewing candidates to make a recommendation to the board for Neil s successor a hard act to follow! I m confident the community will join me and the board in personally thanking Neil for his 5 years of dedicated service in support of GNOME and the Foundation. Should you have any queries regarding the process, or offers of assistance in the coming hiring process, please don t hesitate to join the discussion or reach out directly to the board.

I have been using NVEnc a NVIDIA hardware based encoder for quite some time now. Mostly because I was pointed to it by FastFlix, one of the best video en/recoding frontend programs out there. Having switched to Arch Linux lately, I realized there is no package of it perfect time to start contributing and preparing an AUR package for it. Since it is my first package I made for Arch, it took me a bit of reading through the excellent wiki of Arch, and comparing a few other PKGBUILD files. After a few trials (and several errors) finally the package seems ready to me: nvenc @ AUR. More expert Arch packagers, please leave comments or contact me with suggestions for improvements, all of that is more than welcome! That said, now back to some video encoding (just got all the James Bond on BluRay ;-). Enjoy

In 2017, I was attending FOSDEM when GNOME announced that I was to become the new Executive Director of the Foundation. Now, nearly 5 years later, I ve decided the timing is right for me to step back and for GNOME to start looking for its next leader. I ve been working closely with Rob and the rest of the board to ensure that there s an extended and smooth transition, and that GNOME can continue to go from strength to strength. GNOME has changed a lot in the last 5 years, and a lot has happened in that time. As a Foundation, we ve gone from a small team of 3, to employing people to work on marketing, investment in technical frameworks, conference organisation and much more beyond. We ve become the default desktop on all major Linux distributions. We ve launched Flathub to help connect application developers directly to their users. We ve dealt with patent suits, trademarks, and bylaw changes. We ve moved our entire development platform to GitLab. We released 10 new GNOME releases, GTK 4 and GNOME 40. We ve reset our relationships with external community partners and forged our way towards that future we all dream of where everyone is empowered by technology they can trust. For that future, we now need to build on that work. We need to look beyond the traditional role that desktop Linux has held and this is something that GNOME has always been able to do. I ve shown that the Foundation can be more than just a bank account for the project, and I believe that this is vital in our efforts to build a diverse and sustainable free software personal computing ecosystem. For this, we need to establish programs that align not only with the unique community and technology of the project, but also deliver those benefits to the wider world and drive real impact. 5 years has been the longest that the Foundation has had an ED for, and certainly the longest that I ve held a single post for. I remember my first GUADEC as ED. As you may know, like many of you, I m used to giving talks at conferences and yet I have never been so nervous as when I walked out on that stage. However, the welcome and genuine warmth that I received that day, and the continued support throughout the last 5 years makes me proud of what a welcoming and amazing community GNOME is. Thank you all.

I am very happy to report that a new version of the VLC bittorrent plugin was just uploaded into debian. The changes since last time is mostly code clean in the download code. The package is currently in Debian unstable, but should be available in Debian testing son. To test it, simply install it like this:

apt install vlc-plugin-bittorrent

After it is installed, you can try to use it to play a file downloaded live via bittorrent like this:

vlc https://archive.org/download/Glass_201703/Glass_201703_archive.torrent

It can also use magnet links and local .torrent files like the ones provided by the Internet Archive. Another example is the Love Nest Buster Keaton movie, where one can click on the 'Torrent' link to get going. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

I am very happy to report that a new version of the VLC bittorrent plugin was just uploaded into debian. The changes since last time is mostly code clean in the download code. The package is currently in Debian unstable, but should be available in Debian testing son. To test it, simply install it like this:

apt install vlc-plugin-bittorrent

After it is installed, you can try to use it to play a file downloaded live via bittorrent like this:

vlc https://archive.org/download/Glass_201703/Glass_201703_archive.torrent

It can also use magnet links and local .torrent files like the ones provided by the Internet Archive. Another example is the Love Nest Buster Keaton movie, where one can click on the 'Torrent' link to get going. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

About a month ago, I got tired of waiting for the newest member of the Raspberry product lineup to be sold in Mexico, and I bought it from a Chinese reseller through a big online shopping platform. I paid quite a bit of premium (~US$85 instead of the advertised US$15), and got it delivered ten days later Anyway, it s known this machine does not yet boot mainline Linux. The vast majority of ARM systems require the bootloader to load a Device Tree file, presenting the hardware characteristics map. And while the RPi Zero 2 W (hey what an awful and confusing naming scheme they chose!) is mostly similar to a RPi3B+, it is not quite the same thing. A kernel with RPi3B+ s device tree will refuse to boot. Anyway, I started digging, and found that some days ago Stephan Wahren sent a patch to the linux-arm-kernel mailing list with a matching device tree. Read the patch! It s quite simple to read (what is harder is to know where each declaration should go, if you want to write your own, of course). It basically includes all basic details for the main chip in the RPi3 family (BCM2837), pulls in also the declarations from the BCM2836 present in the RPi2, and adds the necessary bits for the USB OTG connection and the WiFi and Bluetooth declarations. Registers the model name as Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, which you can easily see in the following photo, informs the kernel it has 512MB RAM, and Well, really, it s an easy device tree to read, don t be shy! So, I booted my RPi 3B+ with a freshly downloaded Bookworm image, installed and unpacked linux-source-5.15, applied Stephan s patch, and added the following for the DTB to be generated in the arm64 tree as well: Then, ran a simple make dtbs, and Failed, because bcm283x-rpi-wifi-bt.dtsi is not yet in the kernel . OK, no worries: Getting wireless to work is a later step. I commented out the lines causing conflict (10, 33-35, 134-136), and: Great! Just copied over that generated file to /boot/firmware/, moved the SD over to my RPiZ2W, and behold! It boots! When I bragged about it in #debian-raspberrypi, steev suggested me to pull in the WiFi patch, that has also been submitted (but not yet accepted) for kernel inclusion. I did so, uncommented the lines I modified, and built again. It builds correctly, and again copied the DTB over. It still does not find the WiFi; dmesg still complains about a missing bit of firmware (failed to load brcm/brcmfmac43430b0-sdio.raspberrypi,model-zero-2-w.bin). Steev pointed out it can be downloaded from RPi Distro s GitHub page, but I called it a night and didn t pursue it any further ;-) So I understand this post is still a far cry from saying our images properly boot under a RPi 0 2 W , but we will get there

apt-offline 1.8.4 apt-offline version 1.8.4 has been released. This release includes many bug fixes but the important ones are:

• Better GPG signature handling
• Support for verifying InRelease files

Changelog

apt-offline (1.8.4-1) unstable; urgency=medium
  [ Debian Janitor ]
  * Update standards version to 4.5.0, no changes needed.
  [ Paul Wise ]
  * Clarify file type in unknown file message
  * Fix typos
  * Remove trailing whitespace
  * Update LICENSE file to match official GNU version
  * Complain when there are no valid keyrings instead of missing keyrings
  * Make all syncrhronised files world readable
  * Fix usage of indefinite articles
  * Only show the APT Offline GUI once in the menu
  * Update out of date URLs
  * Fix date and whitespace issues in the manual page
  * Replace stereotyping with an appropriate word
  * Switch more Python shebangs to Python 3
  * Correct usage of the /tmp/ directory
  * Fix YAML files
  * Fix usage of the log API
  * Make the copying of changelog lines less brittle
  * Do not split keyring paths on whitespace
  [ Ritesh Raj Sarraf ]
  * Drop the redundant import of the apt module.
    Thanks to github/dandelionred
  * Fix deprecation of get_bugs() in debianbts
  * Drop the unused IgnoredBugTypes
  * Set encoding for files when opening
  * Better error logging when apt fails
  * Don't mandate a default option
  * Demote metadata errors to verbose
  * Also log an error message for every failed .deb url
  * Check hard for the url type
  * Check for ascii armored signature files.
    Thanks to David Klnischkies
  * Add MIME type for InRelease files
  * Drop patch 0001-Drop-the-redundant-import-of-the-apt-module.patch.
    Now part of the 1.8.4 release
  * Prepare release 1.8.3
  * Prepare release 1.8.4
  * debian packaging
    + Bump debhelper compatibility to 13
    + Update install files
  [ Dean Anderson ]
  * [#143] Added support for verifying InRelease files
 -- Ritesh Raj Sarraf <rrs@debian.org>  Sat, 12 Feb 2022 18:52:58 +0530

Resources

• Tarball and Zip archive for apt-offline are available here
• Packages should be available in Debian.
• Development for apt-offline is currently hosted here

Since March/April 2000 I was deeply involved in Debian m68k and operated multiple m68k autobuilder for over a decade. In fact my Amiga 3000 named arrakis was the second buildd for m68k in addition to the Debian owned Amiga 3000UX named kullervo . Back in that time there was some small website running on Kullervo to display some information about the Debian autobuilder. After some time we (as m68k porters) moved that webpage away from Kullervo to my root server. Step by step this site evolved to Buildd.Net and extended to other archs and suites beside unstable like backports or non-volatile. The project got more and more complex and beyond my ability to do a complete necessary rewrite. So, in 2016 I asked for adoption of the project and in 2018 I shut it down, because (apparently) there was nobody taking over. From November 2005 until January 2018 I do have entries in my PostgreSQL database for Buildd.Net. I think the data in the database might be interesting for those that want to examine that data. You can use the data to see how build times have increased over time, which e.g. led to the expulsion of m68k as release arch, because the arch couldn t keep up anymore. I could imagine that you could do other interesting analysis with that data. For example how new versions of the toolchain increased the build times, maybe even if a specific version of e.g. binutils or gcc had a positive effect on certain archs, but a negative effect on other archs. If there is interest in this data I could open the database to the public or even upload the dump of the database so that you can download and install it on your own.

Back to the old and new normal: inbox zero So, a long time ago, on the last two days of January 2020 I had reached zero unread mails in my inbox and all mailing lists and then... some stuff kept me distracted for a (too) long time... And then two weeks ago on the 29th of January 2022, I've reached inbox zero again, and again on the 30th and then I had a hardware issue and couldn't really use my computer for two days (one day trying to fix, the other copying data around...) and thus only on February 2nd I've hit zero unread mails again and again and again, every day for the last 9 days up until today. Yay! I'm sure there will be days (and weeks) where I won't manage to deal with all my incoming mail everyday, but I surely hope I'll manage at least once a month. As I did in 2019 when I started tracking this Reaching inbox zero every day is good for several reasons and probably the most important one is peace of mind. Even though the incoming flood of email never really stops, by reaching inbox zero I can achieve the feeling that I've dealt with all my emails for the day and that I can put email off my focus, at least for that day and despite emails coming in... ...and then email is too easy to be used as a todo list. Narf. So I guess I need to improve those workflows eventually as well. And offline days, do you remember those? Fully offline even, and by choice?!!

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 204. This version includes the following changes: You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

As a Debian Developer I have a discount on using Gandi and I ve been using it for quite a long time and have been very happy with it. I ve been using it for registering domains. For example this blog s domain is managed by my Gandi account. Using publicly registered domain in private-only setup In addition to using this DNS registrar for public stuff, like a blog, one can also use it for a domain accessible only within a private network.

I had a problem with my mouse. The slippery plastic bits on the bottom weren t glued on well and came off, which then gave more friction when moving on the desk. After asking advice on a mailing list the best suggestion was Teflon sticky tape. I bought a few meters of such tape (a lifetime supply for mouse repair) and used an 8cm strip on each side of the bottom of my mouse which made it slippery enough. Ebay seems like a good place to buy that, most of the offers are well below $20 for a reel of tape including postage. One thing to note is that they also sell non-adhesive teflon tape. I made the mistake of investigating the capabilities of teflon tape then buying the cheapest one on offer which turned out to be plumber s tape which doesn t have adhesive, fortunately it was well below $10. I now have a lifetime supply of plumber s tape if I can ever find a use for it.

Recently, I've wrote Debian New Cotributor Guide in Japanese. Here is the photo of on-demand printed version.

Debian New Contributor Guide

This book (JIS-B5 128p) was published for online event - Techbookfest 12th. It covers how to package a new software in Debian. techbookfest.org Mostly PDF format is preferred, and a few printed versions were distributed.