I've taught my laptop to wake up at 7:30 in the morning. When it does, it will run whatever's in my ~/bin/goodmorning script. Then, if the lid is still closed, it will go back to sleep again. So, it's a programmable alarm clock that doesn't need the laptop to be left turned on to work. But it doesn't have to make noise and wake me up (I rarely want to be woken up by an alarm; the sun coming in the window is a much nicer method). It can handle other tasks like downloading my email, before I wake up. When I'm at home and on dialup, this tends to take an hour in the morning, so it's nice to let it happen before I get up. This took some time to figure out, but it's surprisingly simple. Besides ~/bin/goodmorning, which can be any program/script, I needed just two files to configure systemd to do this. /etc/systemd/system/goodmorning.timer

[Unit]
Description=good morning
[Timer]
Unit=goodmorning.service
OnCalendar=*-*-* 7:30
WakeSystem=true
Persistent=false
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

/etc/systemd/system/goodmorning.service

[Unit]
Description=good morning
RefuseManualStart=true
RefuseManualStop=true
ConditionACPower=true
[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/bin/systemd-inhibit --what=handle-lid-switch --why=goodmorning /bin/su joey -c "/usr/bin/timeout 45m /home/joey/bin/goodmorning"

installation After installing those files, run (as root): systemctl enable goodmorning.timer; systemctl start goodmorning.timer Then, you'll also need to edit /etc/systemd/logind.conf, and set LidSwitchIgnoreInhibited=no -- this overrides the default, which is not to let systemd-inhibit block sleep on lid close. almost too easy I don't think this would be anywhere near as easy to do without systemd, logind, etc. Especially the handling of waking the system at the right time, and the behavior around lid sleep inhibiting. The WakeSystem=true relies on some hardware support for waking from sleep; my laptop supported it with no trouble but I don't know how broadly available that is. Also, notice the ConditionACPower=true, which I added once I realized I don't want the job to run if I forgot to leave the laptop plugged in overnight. Technically, it will still wake up when on battery power, but then it should go right back to sleep. Quite a lot of nice peices of systemd all working together here! xfce workaround If using xfce, xfce4-power-manager takes over handling of lid close from systemd, and currently prevents the system from going back to sleep if the lid is still closed when goodmorning finishes. Happily, there is an easy workaround; this configures xfce to not override the lid switch behavior: xfconf-query -c xfce4-power-manager -n -p /xfce4-power-manager/logind-handle-lid-switch -t bool -s true Other desktop environments may have similar issues. why not a per-user unit? It would perhaps be better to use the per-user systemd, not the system wide one. Then I could change the time the alarm runs without using root. What's prevented me from doing this is that systemd-inhibit uses policykit, and policykit prevents it from being used in this situation. It's a lot easier to run it as root and use su, than it is to reconfigure policykit.

The Ubuntu Code of Conduct says:

Step down considerately: When somebody leaves or disengages from the project, we ask that they do so in a way that minimises disruption to the project. They should tell people they are leaving and take the proper steps to ensure that others can pick up where they left off.

I've been working on Ubuntu for over ten years now, almost right from the very start; I'm Canonical's employee #17 due to working out a notice period in my previous job, but I was one of the founding group of developers. I occasionally tell the story that Mark originally hired me mainly to work on what later became Launchpad Bugs due to my experience maintaining the Debian bug tracking system, but then not long afterwards Jeff Waugh got in touch and said "hey Colin, would you mind just sorting out some installable CD images for us?". This is where you imagine one of those movie time-lapse clocks ... At some point it became fairly clear that I was working on Ubuntu, and the bug system work fell to other people. Then, when Matt Zimmerman could no longer manage the entire Ubuntu team in Canonical by himself, Scott James Remnant and I stepped up to help him out. I did that for a couple of years, starting the Foundations team in the process. As the team grew I found that my interests really lay in hands-on development rather than in management, so I switched over to being the technical lead for Foundations, and have made my home there ever since. Over the years this has given me the opportunity to do all sorts of things, particularly working on our installers and on the GRUB boot loader, leading the development work on many of our archive maintenance tools, instituting the +1 maintenance effort and proposed-migration, and developing the Click package manager, and I've had the great pleasure of working with many exceptionally talented people. However. In recent months I've been feeling a general sense of malaise and what I've come to recognise with hindsight as the symptoms of approaching burnout. I've been working long hours for a long time, and while I can draw on a lot of experience by now, it's been getting harder to summon the enthusiasm and creativity to go with that. I have a wonderful wife, amazing children, and lovely friends, and I want to be able to spend a bit more time with them. After ten years doing the same kinds of things, I've accreted history with and responsibility for a lot of projects. One of the things I always loved about Foundations was that it's a broad church, covering a wide range of software and with a correspondingly wide range of opportunities; but, over time, this has made it difficult for me to focus on things that are important because there are so many areas where I might be called upon to help. I thought about simply stepping down from the technical lead position and remaining in the same team, but I decided that that wouldn't make enough of a difference to what matters to me. I need a clean break and an opportunity to reset my habits before I burn out for real. One of the things that has consistently held my interest through all of this has been making sure that the infrastructure for Ubuntu keeps running reliably and that other developers can work efficiently. As part of this, I've been able to do a lot of work over the years on Launchpad where it was a good fit with my remit: this has included significant performance improvements to archive publishing, moving most archive administration operations from excessively-privileged command-line operations to the webservice, making build cancellation reliable across the board, and moving live filesystem building from an unscalable ad-hoc collection of machines into the Launchpad build farm. The Launchpad development team has generally welcomed help with open arms, and in fact I joined the ~launchpad team last year. So, the logical next step for me is to make this informal involvement permanent. As such, at the end of this year I will be moving from Ubuntu Foundations to the Launchpad engineering team. This doesn't mean me leaving Ubuntu. Within Canonical, Launchpad development is currently organised under the Continuous Integration team, which is part of Ubuntu Engineering. I'll still be around in more or less the usual places and available for people to ask me questions. But I will in general be trying to reduce my involvement in Ubuntu proper to things that are closely related to the operation of Launchpad, and a small number of low-effort things that I'm interested enough in to find free time for them. I still need to sort out a lot of details, but it'll very likely involve me handing over project leadership of Click, drastically reducing my involvement in the installer, and looking for at least some help with boot loader work, among others. I don't expect my Debian involvement to change, and I may well find myself more motivated there now that it won't be so closely linked with my day job, although it's possible that I will pare some things back that I was mostly doing on Ubuntu's behalf. If you ask me for help with something over the next few months, expect me to be more likely to direct you to other people or suggest ways you can help yourself out, so that I can start disentangling myself from my current web of projects. Please contact me sooner or later if you're interested in helping out with any of the things I'm visible in right now, and we can see what makes sense. I'm looking forward to this!

Probably only of interest to California residents. Time again for the general election voting. This is probably too late to be helpful for a lot of people voting permanent absentee, but may as well write this down anyway. (Hm, I apparently didn't do this in 2012.) Propositions: Proposition 1: YES. Now is one of the best times in history to borrow money for infrastructure improvements, and our water infrastructure in the state can certainly use it. Proposition 2: YES. I have somewhat mixed feelings about this, since I hate passing complex legislation like this via proposition, but this already went through the legislature. It would be dumb for the federal government, which can more easily borrow money, but given how the finances of state governments work in the US, this sort of rainy day fund is probably prudent. This one seems reasonably well-designed, and the opposition is panic about a secondary effect on how school reserves are managed that can be changed with later legislative action and which is rather unconvincing. Proposition 45: YES. I can't get very enthused about yet more bandaids on top of our completely broken health care system, but forcing insurance companies to justify rate increases results in some public pressure against profit-taking by insurance companies. Single payer is what we actually need, but this might be mildly helpful. Plus, the argument against is more incoherent nonsense. So, I'm voting yes, but I don't think it's important and I won't mind if it loses. Proposition 46: NO. There are a lot of things that we should do about preventable medical errors, starting with funding our health care system properly, testing drugs properly, and investing in proper inspections and medical licensing investigations. Drug testing doctors is not among those things. This is a well-meaning but horrible idea pushed by a victim's advocacy group that won't do anything to improve our health care system. The fear-mongering of the opponents about malpractice lawsuits is a bit much, but there are essentially no positive benefits here. Proposition 47: YES. Requires that misdemeanor crimes actually be misdemeanors, rather than giving prosecutors discretion to charge them as felonies if the person charged happens to be black-- er, I mean, if the prosecutor doesn't like them for some reason. Obviously a good idea on all fronts: stop over-charging crimes, stop giving prosecutors discretion to choose the impact of laws on particular people (since they rarely use it appropriately), and further try to decriminalize our completely worthless "war on drugs." Proposition 48: YES. I'm opposed to the Indian gaming system in general, but this proposition appears to be a rather cynical attempt to block new casino development by tribes that already have casinos. My general feeling is that if we're going to have casinos, they should generally be legal; the bizarre system where each casino is subject to public approval seems designed to create political cronyism. State offices: I'm not going to comment on the partisan offices, since no one interesting survived the primaries. Across the board, it's basically the Democratic incumbants against various Republicans. The state Republican party in California is dominated by science denialists, Randian objectivists, and people who think the solution to all problems is ensuring rich people don't pay taxes, so it takes rather a lot to get me to vote for any of them. At the moment, the Democrats are doing a reasonably good job running the state, so while I'd vote for challengers from the left against several of them, given the boring candidate slate, I'm just voting Democrat down the line. California has a system that requires voter approval for various state judicial offices. In general, I don't agree with voter approval for judges, since voters are rarely in a position to make reasonable choices about justices. Since there's a Democratic administration in power at the moment, these are probably the best judges that we're going to get (the few I've heard of are good choices), and I don't think the yes/no approval voting is useful anyway. So I'm voting to approve across the board. Superintendent of Public Instruction: Tom Torlakson. I'm not a huge fan of Torlakson, but Tuck is a Harvard MBA who ran charter schools and then a school privatization initiative. Everyone always claims that they want to reduce bureaucracy and empower teachers, but Tuck has a past track record of trying to do so by taking public education private, something that I am passionately opposed to. So Torlakson it is. Local measures: Measure B: YES. Increases the local hotel tax and uses it for local infrastructure. I'm generally in favor of raising taxes, and the amount certainly won't be significant in the ridiculous Palo Alto hotel market. The arguments against feature one of my favorite stupid right-wing talking points: the tax is unfair because it isn't earmarked to benefit the people paying it. Measure C: YES. Reasonable, small reform of the local utility tax, opposed by the Libertarian Party and "taxpayer associations" using an "all taxation is theft" argument. What's not to like? Measure D: NO. Reduces the size of the city council for no clear reason. The stated reasons are saving money (not credible given how little money is involved) and making city meetings not take as long. I'm going to need something better than that to vote for this. Local offices: Judge of the Superior Court, Office #24: Matthew S. Harris. I'm making one exception for my normal rule against voting for former prosecutors for judges because the incumbant, Diane Ritchie, is apparently a train wreck. All it takes is a quick Google search to reveal multiple news stories about strange behavior, clear conflicts of interest, and other serious problems, including a rebuke by the local bar association. Even if not all of that information is true, judges should be above reproach, or at least farther above reproach than this. Palo Alto City Council: I have an agenda here: I think housing density is about the best thing that the local community could support. Housing density enables better mass transit options, makes housing more affordable and brings more housing under possible rent control, and simply makes more sense given the cost of housing in the area. A lot of the city council members run on low-density or anti-growth platforms; I vote against those and for people who support development. And, of course, I'll filter out candidates who believe stupid things, like claiming a minimum wage is un-American (Seelam-Sea Reddy). The best seem to be Greg Scharff, A.C. Johnston, Nancy Shepherd, Cory Wolbach, and Wayne Douglass. Palo Alto Unified School District: The Democratic party has endorsed four out of the five candidates, so it probably doesn't matter too much. Gina Dalma and Ken Dauber sound like the best of the candidates to me, so I will probably vote for them. Santa Clara Valley Water District #7: I voted for Brian Schmidt last time, and I don't see a reason to change my mind. His opponent is a Silicon Valley millionaire who is spending a surprisingly large amount of money on this race and is involved with a business that sells software to water boards, which raises some eyebrows.

Debian participation in Italy's CAD68 committee (The initial policy change discussed in this document is a couple of years old now, but it took about the same time to be fully implemented, and AFAIK the role Debian played in it has not been documented yet.) In October 2012 the Italian government, led at the time by Mario Monti, did something rather innovative, at least for a country that is not usually ahead of its time in the area of information technology legislation. They decided to change the main law (the "CAD", for Codice dell'Amministrazione Digitale) that regulates the acquisition of software at all levels of the public administration (PA), giving an explicit preference to the acquisition of Free Software. The new formulation of article 68 of the CAD first lists some macro criteria (e.g., TCO, adherence to open standards, security support, etc.) that public administrations in Italy shall use as ranking criteria in software-related calls for tenders. Then, and this is the most important part, the article affirms that the acquisition of proprietary software solutions is permitted only if it is impossible to choose Free Software solutions instead; or, alternatively, to choose software solutions that have already being acquired (and paid for) by the PA in the past, reusing preexisting software. The combined effect of these two provisions is that all new software acquisitions by PAs in Italy will be Free Software, unless it is motivated in writing, challengable by a judge that it was impossible to do otherwise. Isn't it great? It is, except that such a law is not necessarily easy to adhere to in practice, especially for small public administrations (e.g., municipalities of a few hundred people, not uncommon in Italy) which might have very little clue about software in general, and even less so about Free Software. This is why the government also tasked the relevant Italian agency to provide guidelines on how to choose software in a way that conforms with the new formulation of article 68. The agency decided to form a committee to work on the guidelines (because you always need a committee, right? ). To my surprise, the call for participation to be part of the committee explicitly listed representatives of Free Software communities as privileged software stakeholders that they wanted to have on the committee kudos to the agency for that. (The Italian wording on the call was: Costituir titolo di preferenza rivestire un ruolo di [ ] referenti di community del software a codice sorgente aperto.) Therefore, after various prods by fellow European Free Software activists that were aware of the ongoing change in legislation, I applied to be a volunteer CAD68 committee member, got selected, and ended up working over a period of about 6 months (March-September 2013) to help the agency writing the new software acquisition guidelines. Logistically, it hasn't been entirely trivial, as the default meeting place was in Rome, I live in Paris, and the agency didn't really have a travel budget for committee members. That's why I've sought sponsorship from Debian, offering to represent Debian views within the committee; Lucas kindly agreed to my request. So what did I do on behalf of Debian as a committee member during those months? Most of my job has been some sort of consulting on how community-driven Free Software projects like Debian work, on how the software they produce can be relied upon and contributed to, and more generally on how the PA can productively interact with such projects. In particular, I've been happy to work on the related work section of the guidelines, ensuring they point to relevant documents such as the French government guidelines on how to adopt Free Software (AKA circulaire Ayrault). I've also drafted the guidelines section on Free Software directories, ensuring that important resources such as FSF's Free Software Directory are listed as starting points for PAs that looking for software solutions for specific needs. Another part of my job has been ensuring that the guidelines do not end up betraying the principle of Free Software preference that is embodied in article 68. A majority of committee members came from a Free Software background, so that might not seem a difficult goal to accomplish. But it is important to notice that: (a) the final editor of the guidelines is the agency itself, not the committee, so having a "pro-Free Software" majority within the committee doesn't mean much per se; and (b) lobbying from the "pro-proprietary software" camp did happen, as it is entirely natural in these cases. In this respect I'm happy with the result: I do believe that the software selection process recommended by the guidelines, finally published in January 2014, upholds the Free Software preference principle of article 68. I credit both the agency and the non-ambiguity of the law (on this specific point) for that result. All in all, this has been a positive experience for me. It has reaffirmed my belief that Debian is a respected, non-partisan political actor of the wider software/ICT ecosystem. This experience has also given me a chance to be part of country-level policy-making, which has been very instructive on how and why good ideas might take a while to come into effect and influence citizen lives. Speaking of which, I'm now looking forward to the first alleged violations of article 68 in Italy, and how they will be dealt with. Abundant popcorn will certainly be needed. Links & press If you want to know more about this topic, I've collected below links to resources that have documented, in various languages, the publication of the CAD68 guidelines.

• official material:
  • announcement (it) by the agency
  • guidelines (.pdf, it)
• press releases:
  • FSFE press release (en), also covered by LWN (en)
  • April press release (fr), also in english
• press/blog coverage:
  • on Joinup (en), European Commission blog dedicated to Free Software adoption in Europe, with comments by yours truly and Carlo Piana
  • on OpenSource.com (en), popular blog for FOSS-related topics
  • by Carlo Piana (it), fellow member of the CAD68 committee, representing KDE and FSFE
  • on Punto Informatico (it), popular Italian tech blog
  • on Apogeo online (it), blog of a popular Italian publisher of IT books
  • on Agenda Digitale EU (it), blog dedicated to digital innovation in the Italian PA
  • by Simone Aliprandi (en), lawyer who followed closely the work of CAD68 committee
• interviews:
  • on My Solution (it), by yours truly
  • radio interview (it) by yours truly for Caterpillar, RAI Radio 2

Petter posted yesterday about Listadmin, the quick way to moderate mailman lists. Petter: THANKS. I am a fan of automatization. But, yes, I had never thouguht of doing this. Why? Don't know. But this is way easier than using the Web interface for Mailman:

$ listadmin 
fetching data for conoc_des@my.example.org ... nothing in queue
fetching data for des_polit_pub@my.example.org ... nothing in queue
fetching data for econ_apl@my.example.org ... nothing in queue
fetching data for educ_ciencia_tec@my.example.org ... nothing in queue
fetching data for est_hacend_sec_pub@my.example.org ... 
[1/1] ============== est_hacend_sec_pub@my.example.org ======
From:     sender@example.org                                            
Subject:  Invitaci n al Taller Insumo Producto                          
Reason:   El cuerpo del mensaje es demasiado grande: 777499    Spam? 0  
Approve/Reject/Discard/Skip/view Body/Full/jump #/Undo/Help/Quit ? a
Submit changes? [yes] 
fetching data for fiscal_fin@my.example.org ... nothing in queue
fetching data for historia@my.example.org ... nothing in queue
fetching data for industrial@my.example.org ... nothing in queue
fetching data for medio_amb@my.example.org ... nothing in queue
fetching data for mundial@my.example.org ... nothing in queue
fetching data for pol_des@my.example.org ... nothing in queue
fetching data for sec_ener@my.example.org ... nothing in queue
fetching data for sec_prim@my.example.org ... nothing in queue
fetching data for trab_tec@my.example.org ... nothing in queue
fetching data for urb_reg@my.example.org ... nothing in queue
fetching data for global@my.example.org ... nothing in queue

I don't know how in many years of managing several mailing lists I never thought about this! I'm echoing this, as I know several of my readers run mailman as well, and might not be following Planet Debian.

You only know two things about Docker. First, it uses Linux
containers. Second, the Internet won't shut up about it. -- attributed to Solomon Hykes, Docker CEO

So what is Docker? Docker is a relatively new open source application and service, which is seeing interest across a number of areas. It uses recent Linux kernel features (containers, namespaces) to shield processes. While its use (superficially) resembles that of virtual machines, it is much more lightweight as it operates at the level of a single process (rather than an emulation of an entire OS layer). This also allows it to start almost instantly, require very little resources and hence permits an order of magnitude more deployments per host than a virtual machine. Docker offers a standard interface to creation, distribution and deployment. The shipping container analogy is apt: just how shipping containers (via their standard size and "interface") allow global trade to prosper, Docker is aiming for nothing less for deployment. A Dockerfile provides a concise, extensible, and executable description of the computational environment. Docker software then builds a Docker image from the Dockerfile. Docker images are analogous to virtual machine images, but smaller and built in discrete, extensible and reuseable layers. Images can be distributed and run on any machine that has Docker software installed---including Windows, OS X and of course Linux. Running instances are called Docker containers. A single machine can run hundreds of such containers, including multiple containers running the same image. There are many good tutorials and introductory materials on Docker on the web. The official online tutorial is a good place to start; this post can not go into more detail in order to remain short and introductory.

So what is Rocker? At its core, Rocker is a project for running R using Docker containers. We provide a collection of Dockerfiles and pre-built Docker images that can be used and extended for many purposes. Rocker is the the name of our GitHub repository contained with the Rocker-Org GitHub organization. Rocker is also the name the account under which the automated builds at Docker provide containers ready for download.

Current Rocker Status

Core Rocker Containers The Rocker project develops the following containers in the core Rocker repository

• r-base provides a base R container to build from
• r-devel provides the basic R container, as well as a complete R-devel build based on current SVN sources of R
• rstudio provides the base R container as well an RStudio Server instance

We have settled on these three core images after earlier work in repositories such as docker-debian-r and docker-ubuntu-r.

Rocker Use Case Containers Within the Rocker-org organization on GitHub, we are also working on

• Hadleyverse which extends the rstudio container with a number of Hadley packages
• rOpenSci which extends hadleyverse with a number of rOpenSci packages
• r-devel-san provides an R-devel build for "Sanitizer" run-time diagnostics via a properly instrumented version of R-devel via a recent compiler build
• rocker-versioned aims to provided containers with 'versioned' previous R releases and matching packages

Other repositories will probably be added as new needs and opportunities are identified.

Deprecation The Rocker effort supersedes and replaces earlier work by Dirk (in the docker-debian-r and docker-ubuntu-r GitHub repositories) and Carl. Please use the Rocker GitHub repo and Rocker Containers from Docker.com going forward.

Next Steps We intend to follow-up with more posts detailing usage of both the source Dockerfiles and binary containers on different platforms. Rocker containers are fully functional. We invite you to take them for a spin. Bug reports, comments, and suggestions are welcome; we suggest you use the GitHub issue tracker.

Acknowledgments We are very appreciative of all comments received by early adopters and testers. We also would like to thank RStudio for allowing us the redistribution of their RStudio Server binary. Published concurrently at rOpenSci blog and Dirk's blog.

Authors Dirk Eddelbuettel and Carl Boettiger

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

This brief announcement was released yesterday to the debian-devel-announce mailing list. Ciao! The Debian Multimedia Maintainers have been quite active since the Wheezy release, and have some interesting news to share for the Jessie release. Here we give you a brief update on what work has been done and work that is still ongoing. Let s see what s cooking for Jessie then. Frameworks and libraries Support for many new media formats and codecs. The codec library libavcodec, which is used by popular media playback applications including vlc, mpv, totem (using gstreamer1.0-libav), xine, and many more, has been updated to the latest upstream release version 11 provided by Libav. This provides Debian users with HEVC playback, a native Opus decoder, Matroska 3D support, Apple ProRes, and much more. Please see libav s changelog for a full list of functionality additions and updates. libebur128 libebur128 is a free implementation of the European Broadcasting Union Loudness Recommendation (EBU R128), which is essentially an alternative to ReplayGain. The library can be used to analyze audio perceived loudness and subsequentially normalize the volume during playback. libltc libltc provides functionalities to encode and decode Linear (or Longitudinal) Timecode (LTC) from/to SMPTE data timecode. libva libva and the driver for Intel GPUs has been updated to the 1.4.0 release. Support for new GPUs has been added. libva now also supports Wayland. Pure Data A number of new additional libraries (externals) will appear in Jessie, including (among others) Eric Lyon s fftease and lyonpotpourrie, Thomas Musil s iemlib, the pdstring library for string manipulation and pd-lua that allows to write Pd-objects in the popular lua scripting language. JACK and LADI LASH Audio Session Handler was abandoned upstream a long time ago in favor of the new session management system, called ladish (LADI Session Handler). ladish allows users to run many JACK applications at once and save/restore their configuration with few mouse clicks. The current status of the integration between the session handler and JACK may be summarized as follows:

• ladish provides the backend;
• laditools contains a number of useful graphical tools to tune the session management system s whole configuration (including JACK);
• gladish provides a easy-to-use graphical interface for the session handler.

Note that ladish uses the D-Bus interface to the jack daemon, therefore only Jessie s jackd2 provides support for and also cooperates fine with it. Plugins: LV2 and LADSPA Debian Jessie will bring the newest 1.10.0 version of the LV2 technology. Most changes affect the packaging of new plugins and extensions, a brief list of packaging guidelines is now available.
A number of new plugins and development tools too have been made available during the Jessie development cycle: LV2 Toolkit LVTK provides libraries that wrap the LV2 C API and extensions into easy to use C++ classes. The original work for this was mostly done by Lars Luthman in lv2-c++-tools. Vee One Suite The whole suite by Rui Nuno Capela is now available in Jessie, and consists of three components:

• drumkv1: old-school drum-kit sampler synthesizer
• samplv1: polyphonic sampler
• synthv1: analog-style 4-oscillator substractive synthesizer

All three are provided in both forms of LV2 plugins and stand-alone JACK client. JACK session, JACK MIDI, and ALSA MIDI are supported too. x42-plugins and zam-plugins LV2 bundles containing many audio plugins for high quality processing. Fomp Fomp is an LV2 port of the MCP, VCO, FIL, and WAH plugins by Fons Adriaensen. Some other components have been upgraded to more recent upstream versions:

• ab2gate: 1.1.7
• calf: 0.0.19+git20140915+5de5da28
• eq10q: 2.0~beta5.1
• NASPRO: 0.5.1

We ve packaged ste-plugins, Fons Adriaensen s new stereo LADSPA plugins bundle. A major upgrade of frei0r, namely the standard collection for the minimalistic plugin API for video effects, will be available in Jessie. New multimedia applications Advene Advene (Annotate Digital Video, Exchange on the NEt) is a flexible video
annotation application. Ardour3 The new generation of the popular digital audio workstation will make its very first appearance in Debian Jessie. Cantata Qt4 front-end for the MPD daemon. Csound Csound for jessie will feature the new major series 6, with the improved IDE CsoundQT. This new csound supports improved array data type handling, multi-core rendering and debugging features. din DIN Is Noise is a musical instrument and audio synthesizer that supports JACK audio output, MIDI, OSC, and IRC bot as input sources. It could be extended and customized with Tcl scripts too. dvd-slideshow dvd-slideshow consists of a suite of command line tools which come in handy to make slideshows from collections of pictures. Documentation is provided and available in /usr/share/doc/dvd-slideshow/ . dvdwizard DVDwizard can fully automate the creation of DVD-Video filesystem. It supports graphical menus, chapters, multiple titlesets and multi-language streams. It supports both PAL and NTSC video modes too. flowblade Flowblade is a video editor like the popular KDenlive based on the MLT engine, but more lightweight and with some difference in editing concepts. forked-daapd Forked-daapd switched to a new, active upstream again dropping Grand Central Dispatch in favor of libevent. The switch fixed several bugs and made forked-daapd available on all release architectures instead of shipping only on amd64 and i386. Now nothing prevents you from setting up a music streaming (DAAP/DACP) server on your favorite home server no matter if it is based on mips, arm or x86! harvid HTTP Ardour Video Daemon decodes still images from movie files and serves them via HTTP. It provides frame-accurate decoding and is main use-case is to act as backend and second level cache for rendering the
videotimeline in Ardour. Groove Basin Groove Basin is a music player server with a web-based user interface inspired by Amarok 1.4. It runs on a server optionally connected to speakers. Guests can control the music player by connecting with a laptop, tablet, or smart phone. Further, users can stream their music libraries remotely.
It comes with a fast, responsive web interface that supports keyboard shortcuts and drag drop. It also provides the ability to upload songs, download songs, and import songs by URL, including YouTube URLs. Groove Basin supports Dynamic Mode which automatically queues random songs, favoring songs that have not been queued recently.
It automatically performs ReplayGain scanning on every song using the EBU R128 loudness standard, and automatically switches between track and album mode. Groove Basin supports the MPD protocol, which means it is compatible with MPD clients. There is also a more powerful Groove Basin protocol which you can use if the MPD protocol does not meet your needs. HandBrake HandBrake, a versatile video transcoder, is now available for Jessie. It could convert video from nearly any format to a wide range of commonly supported codecs. jack-midi-clock New jackd midiclock utility made by Robin Gareus. laborejo Laborejo, Esperanto for Workshop , is used to craft music through notation. It is a LilyPond GUI frontend, a MIDI creator and a tool collection to inspire and help music composers. mpv mpv is a movie player based on MPlayer and mplayer2. It supports a wide variety of video file formats, audio and video codecs, and subtitle types. The project focuses mainly on modern systems and encourages developer activity. As such, large portions of outdated code originating from MPlayer have been removed, and many new features and improvements have been added. Note that, although there are still some similarities to its predecessors, mpv should be considered a completely different program (e.g. lacking compatibility with both mplayer and mplayer2 in terms of command-line arguments and configuration). smtube SMTube is a stand-alone graphical video browser and player, which makes YouTube s videos browsing, playing, and download such a piece of cake.
It has so many features that, we are sure, will make YouTube lovers very, very happy. sonic-visualiser Sonic Visualiser Application for viewing and analysing the contents of music audio files. SoundScapeRenderer SoundScapeRenderer (aka SSR) is a (rather) easy to use render engine for spatial audio, that provides a number of different rendering algorithms, ranging from binaural (headphone) playback via wave field synthesis to higher-order ambisonics. Videotrans videotrans is a set of scripts that allow its user to reformat existing movies into the VOB format that is used on DVDs. XBMC XBMC has been partially rebranded as XBMC from Debian to make it clear that it is changed to conform to Debian s Policy. The latest stable release, 13.2 Gotham will be part of Jessie making Debian a good choice for HTPC-s. zita-bls1 Binaural stereo signals converter made by Fons Adriaensen zita-mu1 Stereo monitoring organiser for jackd made by Fons Adriaensen zita-njbridge Jack clients to transmit multichannel audio over a local IP network made by Fons Adriaensen radium-compressor Radium Compressor is the system compressor of the Radium suite. It is provided in the form of stand-alone JACK application. Multimedia Tasks With Jessie we are shipping a set of multimedia related tasks.
They include package lists for doing several multimedia related tasks. If you are interested in defining new tasks, or tweaking the current, existing ones, we are very much interested in hearing from you. Upgraded applications and libraries

• Aeolus: 0.9.0
• Aliki: 0.3.0
• Ams: 2.1.1
• amsynth: 1.4.2
• Audacious: 3.5.2
• Audacity: 2.0.5
• Audio File Library: 0.3.6
• Blender: 2.72b
• Bristol: 0.60.11f
• C* Audio Plugin Suite: 0.9.23
• Cecilia: 5.0.9
• cmus: 2.5.0
• DeVeDe: 3.23.0-13-gbfd73f3
• DRC: 3.2.1
• EasyTag: 2.2.2
• ebumeter: 0.2.0
• faustworks: 0.5
• ffDiaporama: 1.5
• ffms: 2.20
• gmusicbrowser: 1.1.13
• Hydrogen: 0.9.6.1
• IDJC: 0.8.14
• jack-tools: 20131226
• LiVES: 2.2.6
• mhWaveEdit: 1.4.23
• Mixxx: 1.11.0
• mp3fs: 0.91
• MusE: 2.1.2
• Petri-Foo: 0.1.87
• PHASEX: 0.14.97
• QjackCtl: 0.3.12
• Qtractor: 0.6.3
• rtaudio: 4.1.1
• Rosegarden: 14.02
• rtmidi: 2.1.0
• SoundTouch: 1.8.0
• stk: 4.4.4
• streamtuner2: 2.1.3
• SuperCollider: 3.6.6
• Synfig Studio: 0.64.1
• TerminatorX: 3.90
• tsdecrypt: 10.0
• Vamp Plugins SDK: 2.5
• VLC: Jessie will release with the 2.2.x series of VLC
• XCFA: 4.3.8
• xwax: 1.5
• xjadeo: 0.8.0
• x264: 0.142.2431+gita5831aa
• zynaddsubfx: 2.4.3

What s not going to be in Jessie With the aim to improve the overall quality of the multimedia software available in Debian, we have dropped a number of packages which were abandoned upstream:

• beast
• flumotion
• jack-rack
• jokosher
• lv2fil (suggested replacement for users is eq10q or calf eq)
• phat
• plotmm
• specimen (suggested replacement for users is petri-foo fork of specimen)
• zynjacku (suggested replacement for users is jalv)

We ve also dropped mplayer, presently nobody seems interested in maintaining it.
The suggested replacements for users are mplayer2 or mpv. Whilst the former is mostly compatible with mplayer in terms of command-line arguments and configuration (and adds a few new features too), the latter adds a lot of new features and improvements, and it is actively maintained upstream. Please note that although the mencoder package is no longer available anymore, avconv and mpv do provide encoding functionality. For more information see avconv s manual page and documentation, and mpv s encoding documentation. Broken functionalities rtkit under systemd is broken at the moment. Activity statistics More information about team s activity are available. Where to reach us The Debian Multimedia Maintainers can be reached at pkg-multimedia-maintainers AT lists.alioth.debian.org for packaging related topics, or at debian-multimedia AT lists.debian.org for user and more general discussion.
We would like to invite everyone interested in multimedia to join us there. Some of the team members are also in the #debian-multimedia channel on OFTC. Cheers! Alessio Treglia
on behalf of the Debian Multimedia Maintainers

First, read these slides. Done? Good.

(Edit: Just to clarify - these are not my slides. They're from a presentation Jerome Petazzoni gave at Linuxcon NA earlier this year)

Hypervisors present a smaller attack surface than containers. This is somewhat mitigated in containers by using seccomp, selinux and restricting capabilities in order to reduce the number of kernel entry points that untrusted code can touch, but even so there is simply a greater quantity of privileged code available to untrusted apps in a container environment when compared to a hypervisor environment[1].

Does this mean containers provide reduced security? That's an arguable point. In the event of a new kernel vulnerability, container-based deployments merely need to upgrade the kernel on the host and restart all the containers. Full VMs need to upgrade the kernel in each individual image, which takes longer and may be delayed due to the additional disruption. In the event of a flaw in some remotely accessible code running in your image, an attacker's ability to cause further damage may be restricted by the existing seccomp and capabilities configuration in a container. They may be able to escalate to a more privileged user in a full VM.

I'm not really compelled by either of these arguments. Both argue that the security of your container is improved, but in almost all cases exploiting these vulnerabilities would require that an attacker already be able to run arbitrary code in your container. Many container deployments are task-specific rather than running a full system, and in that case your attacker is already able to compromise pretty much everything within the container. The argument's stronger in the Virtual Private Server case, but there you're trading that off against losing some other security features - sure, you're deploying seccomp, but you can't use selinux inside your container, because the policy isn't per-namespace[2].

So that seems like kind of a wash - there's maybe marginal increases in practical security for certain kinds of deployment, and perhaps marginal decreases for others. We end up coming back to the attack surface, and it seems inevitable that that's always going to be larger in container environments. The question is, does it matter? If the larger attack surface still only results in one more vulnerability per thousand years, you probably don't care. The aim isn't to get containers to the same level of security as hypervisors, it's to get them close enough that the difference doesn't matter.

I don't think we're there yet. Searching the kernel for bugs triggered by Trinity shows plenty of cases where the kernel screws up from unprivileged input[3]. A sufficiently strong seccomp policy plus tight restrictions on the ability of a container to touch /proc, /sys and /dev helps a lot here, but it's not full coverage. The presentation I linked to at the top of this post suggests using the grsec patches - these will tend to mitigate several (but not all) kernel vulnerabilities, but there's tradeoffs in (a) ease of management (having to build your own kernels) and (b) performance (several of the grsec options reduce performance).

But this isn't intended as a complaint. Or, rather, it is, just not about security. I suspect containers can be made sufficiently secure that the attack surface size doesn't matter. But who's going to do that work? As mentioned, modern container deployment tools make use of a number of kernel security features. But there's been something of a dearth of contributions from the companies who sell container-based services. Meaningful work here would include things like:

• Strong auditing and aggressive fuzzing of containers under realistic configurations
  
• Support for meaningful nesting of Linux Security Modules in namespaces
  
• Introspection of container state and (more difficult) the host OS itself in order to identify compromises

These aren't easy jobs, but they're important, and I'm hoping that the lack of obvious development in areas like this is merely a symptom of the youth of the technology rather than a lack of meaningful desire to make things better. But until things improve, it's going to be far too easy to write containers off as a "convenient, cheap, secure: choose two" tradeoff. That's not a winning strategy.

[1] Companies using hypervisors! Audit your qemu setup to ensure that you're not providing more emulated hardware than necessary to your guests. If you're using KVM, ensure that you're using sVirt (either selinux or apparmor backed) in order to restrict qemu's privileges.
[2] There's apparently some support for loading per-namespace Apparmor policies, but that means that the process is no longer confined by the sVirt policy
[3] To be fair, last time I ran Trinity under Docker under a VM, it ended up killing my host. Glass houses, etc.

comments

On behalf of Jacques-Pascal Deplaix I am happy to announce the release of OASIS v0.4.5. OASIS is a tool to help OCaml developers to integrate configure, build and install systems in their projects. It should help to create standard entry points in the source code build system, allowing external tools to analyse projects easily. This tool is freely inspired by Cabal which is the same kind of tool for Haskell. You can find the new release here and the changelog here. More information about OASIS in general on the OASIS website. Here is a quick summary of the important changes:

• Build and install annotation files.
• Use builtin bin_annot and annot tags.
• Tag .mly files on the same basis as .ml and .mli files (required by menhir).
• Remove 'program' constraint from C-dependencies. Currently, when a library has C-sources and e.g. an executable depends on that library, then changing the C-sources and running '-build' does not yield a rebuild of the library. By adding these dependencies (rather removing the constraint), it seems to work fine.
• Some bug fixes

Features:

• no_automatic_syntax (alpha): Disable the automatic inclusion of -syntax camlp4o for packages that matches the internal heuristic (if a dependency ends with a .syntax or is a well known syntax).
• compiled_setup_ml (alpha): Fix a bug using multiple arguments to the configure script.

This new version is a small release to catch up with all the fixes/pull requests present in the VCS that have not yet been published. This should made the life of my dear contributors easier -- thanks again for being patient. I would like to thanks again the contributor for this release: Christopher Zimmermann, Jerome Vouillon, Tomohiro Matsuyama and Christoph H ger. Their help is greatly appreciated.

This is an update of my previous attempt at summarizing this discussion. As I proposed one of the amendments, you should not blindly trust me, of course. :-) First, let s address two FAQ: What is the impact on jessie?
On the technical level, none. The current state of jessie already matches what is expected by all proposals. It s a different story on the social level. Why are we voting now, then?
Ian Jackson, who submitted the original proposal, explained his motivation in this mail. We now have four different proposals: (summaries are mine)

• [iwj] Original proposal (Ian Jackson): Packages may not (in general) require one specific init system (Choice 1 on this page)
• [lucas] Amendment A (Lucas Nussbaum): support for alternative init systems is desirable but not mandatory (Choice 2 on this page)
• [dktrkranz] Amendment B (Luca Falavigna): Packages may require a specific init system (Choice 3 on this page)
• [plessy] Amendment C (Charles Plessy): No GR, please: no GR required (Choice 4 on this page)

[plessy] is the simplest, and does not discuss the questions that the other proposals are answering, given it considers that the normal Debian decision-making processes have not been exhausted. In order to understand the three other proposals, it s useful to break them down into several questions. Q1: support for the default init system on Linux
A1.1: packages MUST work with the default init system on Linux as PID 1.
(That is the case in both [iwj] and [lucas]) A1.2: packages SHOULD work with the default init system on Linux as PID 1.
With [dktrkranz], it would no longer be required to support the default init system, as maintainers could choose to require another init system than the default, if they consider this a prerequisite for its proper operation; and no patches or other derived works exist in order to support other init systems. That would not be a policy violation. (see this mail and its reply for details). Theoretically, it could also create fragmentation among Debian packages requiring different init systems: you would not be able to run pkgA and pkgB at the same time, because they would require different init systems. Q2: support for alternative init systems as PID 1
A2.1: packages MUST work with one alternative init system (in [iwj])
(Initially, I thought that one here should be understood as sysvinit , as this mail, Ian detailed why he chose to be unspecific about the target init system. However, in that mail, he later clarified that a package requiring systemd or uselessd would be fine as well, given that in practice there aren t going to be many packages that would want to couple specifically to systemd _or_ uselessd, but where support for other init systems is hard to provide.)
To the user, that brings the freedom to switch init systems (assuming that the package will not just support two init systems with specific interfaces, but rather a generic interface common to many init systems).
However, it might require the maintainer to do the required work to support additional init systems, possibly without upstream cooperation.
Lack of support is a policy violation (severity >= serious, RC).
Bugs about degraded operation on some init systems follow the normal bug severity rules. A2.2: packages SHOULD work with alternative init systems as PID 1. (in [lucas])
This is a recommendation. Lack of support is not a policy violation (bug severity < serious, not RC). A2.3: nothing is said about alternative init systems (in [dktrkranz]). Lack of support would likely be a wishlist bug. Q3: special rule for sysvinit to ease wheezy->jessie upgrades
(this question is implicitly dealt with in [iwj], assuming that one of the supported init systems is sysvinit)
A3.1: continue support for sysvinit (in [lucas])
For the jessie release, all software available in Debian wheezy that supports being run under sysvinit should continue to support sysvinit unless there is no technically feasible way to do so. A3.2: no requirement to support sysvinit (in [dktrkranz])
Theoretically, this could require two-step upgrades: first reboot with systemd, then upgrade other packages Q4: non-binding recommendation to maintainers
A4.1: recommend that maintainers accept patches that add or improve
support for alternative init systems. (in both [iwj] and [lucas], with a different wording) A4.2: say nothing (in [dktrkranz]) Q5: support for init systems with are the default on non-Linux ports
A5.1: non-binding recommendation to add/improve support with a high priority (in [lucas]) A5.2: say nothing (in [iwj] and [dktrkranz]) Comments are closed: please discuss by replying to that mail.

As a first tiny project in this HackWeek, Enca 1.16 has been just released. It mostly brings small code cleanups and missing aliases for languages, but fixes also some minor bugs found by Coverity Scan. 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 1.16 release:

• Fixed typo in Belarusian language name
• Added aliases for Chinese and Yugoslavian languages

Still enca is in maintenance mode only and I have no intentions to write new features. However there is no limitation to other contributors :-). You can download from http://cihar.com/software/enca/.

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Yesterday I managed to get the last ticket from the waitinglist for the premiere of Trans Gender Moves. It is a play about the lives of three people: A transman, a transwoman and an intersexual person. They tell stories from their life, their process of finding their own identity over time. With in parts amusing anecdotes and ones that gets you thinking I can just wholeheartly encourage you to watch it if you have the chance to. It will still be shown the next few days, potentially extending depending on the requests for tickets, from what I've been told by one of the actors. The most funny moment for me though was when I was talking with one of the actors about that it really touched me that I was told that one of them will be moving into into the same building I will be moving into in two year's time. Unfortunately that will be delayed a bit because they found me thinks field hamster or the likes in the ground and have to wait until spring for them to move. :/

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I m on my way home from D sseldorf where I attended the LinuxCon Europe and Linux Plumber conferences. I was quite surprised how huge LinuxCon was, there were about 1.500 people there! Certainly much more than last year in New Orleans. Containers (in both LXC and docker flavors) are the Big Thing everybody talks about and works with these days; there was hardly a presentation where these weren t mentioned at all, and (what felt like) half of the presentations were either how to improve these, or how to use these technologies to solve problems. For example, some people/companies really take LXC to the max and try to do everything in them including tasks which in the past you had only considered full VMs for, like untrusted third-party tenants. For example there was an interesting talk how to secure networking for containers, and pretty much everyone uses docker or LXC now to deploy workloads, run CI tests. There are projects like fleet which manage systemd jobs across an entire cluster of containers (distributed task scheduler) or like project-builder.org which auto-build packages from each commit of projects. Another common topic is the trend towards building/shipping complete (r/o) system images, atomic updates and all that goodness. The central thing here was certainly Stateless systems, factory reset, and golden images which analyzed the common requirements and proposed how to implement this with various package systems and scenarios. In my opinion this is certainly the way to go, as our current solution on Ubuntu Touch (i. e. Ubuntu s system-image) is far too limited and static yet, it doesn t extend to desktops/servers/cloud workloads at all. It s also a lot of work to implement this properly, so it s certainly understandable that we took that shortcut for prototyping and the relatively limited Touch phone environment. On Plumbers my main occupations were mostly the highly interesting LXC track to see what s coming in the container world, and the systemd hackfest. On the latter I was again mostly listening (after all, I m still learning most of the internals there..) and was able to work on some cleanups and improvements like getting rid of some of Debian s patches and properly run the test suite. It was also great to sync up again with David Zeuthen about the future of udisks and some particular proposed new features. Looks like I m the de-facto maintainer now, so I ll need to spend some time soon to review/include/clean up some much requested little features and some fixes. All in all a great week to meet some fellows of the FOSS world a gain, getting to know a lot of new interesting people and projects, and re-learning to drink beer in the evening (I hardly drink any at home :-P). If you are interested you can also see my raw notes, but beware that there are mostly just scribbling. Now, off to next week s Canonical meeting in Washington, DC!

1. These instructions are appropriate for version 7.1.2.2041-r0. Do not use them for any other version. Things will have changed.
2. Make sure your system has i386 architecture enabled. Follow the instructions in section "Configuring architectures" on the Debian MultiArch Wiki page to do so
3. Install lsb-core, and try to install the i386 versions of these packages, too!
4. Download the i386 version of the Google Earth package
5. Install the package by forcing dependencies, via

   sudo dpkg --force-depends -i google-earth-stable_current_i386.deb
   

6. As of now, your package manager will complain, and suggest to remove the package again. To make it happy, we have to hack the installed packages list. This is ugly, and you should make a backup. You can totally bust your system this way... Fortunately, the change we're doing is rather simple. As admin, edit the file /var/lib/dpkg/status. Locate the section Package: google-earth-stable. In this section, delete the line starting with Depends:. Don't add in extra newlines or change anything else!
7. Now the package manager should believe the dependencies of Google Earth are fulfilled, and no longer suggest removal. But essentially this means you have to take care of them yourself!

• Locales are busted. Use LC_NUMERIC=en_US.UTF-8 google-earth to start it. Otherwise, it will fail parsing coordinates, if you are in a locale that uses a different number format.
• You may need to install the i386 versions of some libraries, in particular of your OpenGL drivers! I cannot provide you with a complete list.
• Search doesn't work sometimes for me.
• Occassionally, it reports "unknown" network errors.
• If you upgrade Nvidia graphics drivers, you will usually have to reboot, or you will see graphics errors.
• Some people have removed/replaced the bundled libQt* and libfreeimage* libraries, but that did not work for me.

Like last month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In September 2014, 3 contributors have been paid for 11h each. Here are their individual reports:

• Holger Levsen
• Rapha l Hertzog
• Thorsten Alteholz

Evolution of the situation Compared to last month, we have gained 5 new sponsors, that s great. We re now at almost 25% of a full-time position. But we re not done yet. We believe that we would need at least twice as many sponsored hours to do a reasonable work with at least the most used packages, and possibly four times as much to be able to cover the full archive. We re now at 39 packages that need an update in Squeeze (+9 compared to last month), and the contributors paid by Freexian did handle 11 during last month (this gives an approximate rate of 3 hours per update, CVE triage included). Open questions Dear readers, what can we do to convince more companies to join the effort? The list of sponsors contains almost exclusively companies from Europe. It s true that Freexian s offer is in Euro but the economy is world-wide and it s common to have international invoices. When Ivan Kohler asked if having an offer in dollar would help convince other companies, we got zero feedback. What are the main obstacles that you face when you try to convince your managers to get the company to contribute? By the way, we prefer that companies take small sponsorship commitments that they can afford over multiple years over granting lots of money now and then not being able to afford it for another year. Thanks to our sponsors Let me thank our main sponsors:

• Gold sponsors:
• The Positive Internet
• Silver sponsors:
• AD&D David Ayers IntarS Austria
• Blablacar
• Domeneshop AS
• Evolix
• Trollweb Solutions
• Universit Lille 3
• Bronze sponsors:
• Freeside Internet Service
• Intevation GmbH
• Linuxhotel GmbH
• MyTux
• Nantes M tropole
• Offensive Security
• Seznam.cz, a.s.

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Ever since I read about systemd-networkd being in the making I was looking forward to try it out. I kept watching for the package to appear in Debian, or at least ITP bugs. A few days ago, by accident, I noticed that I already have systemd-networkd on my machine: It is simply shipped with the systemd package! My previous setup was a combination of ifplugd to detect when I plug or unplug the ethernet cable with a plain DHCP entry in /etc/network/interface. A while ago I was using guessnet to do a static setup depending on where I am, but I don t need this flexibility any more, so the very simple approach with systemd-networkd is just fine with me. So after stopping ifplugd and

$ cat > /etc/systemd/network/eth.network <<__END__
[Match]
Name=eth0
[Network]
DHCP=yes
__END__
$ systemctl enable systemd-networkd
$ systemctl start systemd-networkd

I was ready to go. Indeed, systemd-networkd, probably due to the integrated dhcp client, felt quite a bit faster than the old setup. And what s more important (and my main motivation for the switch): It did the right thing when I put it to sleep in my office, unplug it there, go home, plug it in and wake it up. ifplugd failed to detect this change and I often had to manually run ifdown eth0 && ifup eth0; this now works. But then I was bitten by what I guess some people call the viral nature of systemd: systemd-networkd would not update /etc/resolve.conf, but rather relies on systemd-resolved. And that requires me to change /etc/resolve.conf to be a symlink to /run/systemd/resolve/resolv.conf. But of course I also use my wireless adapter, which, at that point, was still managed using ifupdown, which would use dhclient which updates /etc/resolve.conf directly. So I investigated if I can use systemd-networkd also for my wireless account. I am not using NetworkManager or the like, but rather keep wpa_supplicant running in roaming mode, controlled from ifupdown (not sure how that exactly works and what controls what, but it worked). I found out that this setup works just fine with systemd-networkd: I start wpa_supplicant with this service file (which I found in the wpasupplicant repo, but not yet in the Debian package):

[Unit]
Description=WPA supplicant daemon (interface-specific version)
Requires=sys-subsystem-net-devices-%i.device
After=sys-subsystem-net-devices-%i.device
[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/sbin/wpa_supplicant -c/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant-%I.conf -i%I
[Install]
Alias=multi-user.target.wants/wpa_supplicant@%i.service

Then wpa_supplicant will get the interface up and down as it goes, while systemd-networkd, equipped with

[Match]
Name=wlan0
[Network]
DHCP=yes

does the rest. So suddenly I have a system without /etc/init.d/networking and without ifup. Feels a bit strange, but also makes sense. I still need to migrate how I manage my UMTS modem device to that model. The only thing that I m missing so far is a way to trigger actions when the network configuration has changes, like I could with /etc/network/if-up.d/ etc. I want to run things like killall -ALRM tincd and exim -qf. If you know how to do that, please tell me, or answer over at Stack Exchange.

Ever since I read about sytemd-networkd being in the making I was looking forward to try it out. I kept watching for the package to appear in Debian, or at least ITP bugs. A few days ago, by accident, I noticed that I already have systemd-networkd on my machine: It is simply shipped with the systemd package! My previous setup was a combination of ifplugd to detect when I plug or unplug the ethernet cable with a plain DHCP entry in /etc/network/interface. A while ago I was using guessnet to do a static setup depending on where I am, but I don t need this flexibility any more, so the very simple approach with systemd-networkd is just fine with me. So after stopping ifplugd and

$ cat > /etc/systemd/network/eth.network <<__END__
[Match]
Name=eth0
[Network]
DHCP=yes
__END__
$ systemctl enable systemd-networkd
$ systemctl start systemd-networkd

I was ready to go. Indeed, systemd-networkd, probably due to the integrated dhcp client, felt quite a bit faster than the old setup. And what s more important (and my main motivation for the switch): It did the right thing when I put it to sleep in my office, unplug it there, go home, plug it in and wake it up. ifplugd failed to detect this change and I often had to manually run ifdown eth0 && ifup eth0; this now works. But then I was bitten by what I guess some people call the viral nature of systemd: sytemd-networkd would not update /etc/resolve.conf, but rather relies on systemd-resolved. And that requires me to change /etc/resolve.conf to be a symlink to /run/systemd/resolve/resolv.conf. But of course I also use my wireless adapter, which, at that point, was still managed using ifupdown, which would use dhclient which updates /etc/resolve.conf directly. So I investigated if I can use systemd-networkd also for my wireless account. I am not using NetworkManager or the like, but rather keep wpa_supplicant running in roaming mode, controlled from ifupdown (not sure how that exactly works and what controls what, but it worked). I found out that this setup works just fine with systemd-networkd: I start wpa_supplicant with this service file (which I found in the wpasupplicant repo, but not yet in the Debian package):

[Unit]
Description=WPA supplicant daemon (interface-specific version)
Requires=sys-subsystem-net-devices-%i.device
After=sys-subsystem-net-devices-%i.device
[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/sbin/wpa_supplicant -c/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant-%I.conf -i%I
[Install]
Alias=multi-user.target.wants/wpa_supplicant@%i.service

Then wpa_supplicant will get the interface up and down as it goes, while systemd-networkd, equipped with

[Match]
Name=wlan0
[Network]
DHCP=yes

does the rest. So suddenly I have a system without /etc/init.d/networking and without ifup. Feels a bit strange, but also makes sense. I still need to migrate how I manage my UMTS modem device to that model. The only thing that I m missing so far is a way to trigger actions when the network configuration has changes, like I could with /etc/network/if-up.d/ etc. I want to run things like killall -ALRM tincd and exim -qf. If you know how to do that, please tell me, or answer over at Stack Exchange.

The other day, I wrote about my poor first impressions of systemd in jessie. Here s an update. I d like to start with the things that are good. I found the systemd community to be one of the most helpful in Debian, and #debian-systemd IRC channel to be especially helpful. I was in there for quite some time yesterday, and appreciated the help from many people, especially Michael. This is a nontechnical factor, but is extremely important; this has significantly allayed my concerns about systemd right there. There are things about the systemd design that impress. The dependency system and configuration system is a lot more flexible than sysvinit. It is also a lot more complicated, and difficult to figure out what s happening. I am unconvinced of the utility of parallelization of boot to begin with; I rarely reboot any of my Linux systems, desktops or servers, and it seems to introduce needless complexity. Anyhow, on to the filesystem problem, and a bit of a background. My laptop runs ZFS, which is somewhat similar to btrfs in that it s a volume manager (like LVM), RAID manager (like md), and filesystem in one. My system runs LVM, and inside LVM, I have two ZFS pools (volume groups): one, called rpool, that is unencrypted and holds mainly the operating system; and the other, called crypt, that is stacked atop LUKS. ZFS on Linux doesn t yet have built-in crypto, which is why LVM is even in the picture here (to separate out the SSD at a level above ZFS to permit parts of it to be encrypted). This is a bit of an antiquated setup for me; as more systems have AES-NI, I m going to everything except /boot being encrypted. Anyhow, inside rpool is the / filesystem, /var, and /usr. Inside /crypt is /tmp and /home. Initially, I tried to just boot it, knowing that systemd is supposed to work with LSB init scripts, and ZFS has init scripts with carefully-planned dependencies. This was evidently not working, perhaps because /lib/systemd/systemd/ It turns out that systemd has a few assumptions that turn out to be less true with ZFS than otherwise. ZFS filesystems are normally not mounted via /etc/fstab; a ZFS pool has internal properties about which dataset gets mounted where (similar to LVM s actions after a vgscan and vgchange -ay). Even though there are ordering constraints in the units, systemd is writing files to /var before /var gets mounted, resulting in the mount failing (unlike ext4, ZFS by default will reject an attempt to mount over a non-empty directory). Partly this due to the debian-fixup.service, and partly it is due to systemd reacting to udev items like backlight. This problem was eventually worked around by doing zfs set mountpoint=legacy rpool/var, and then adding a line to fstab ( rpool/var /var zfs defaults 0 2 ) for /var and its descendent filesystems. This left the problem of /tmp; again, it wasn t getting mounted soon enough. In this case, it required crypttab to be processed first, and there seem to be a lot of bugs in the crypttab processing in systemd (more on that below). I eventually worked around that by adding After=cryptsetup.target to the zfs-import-cache.service file. For /tmp, it did NOT work to put it in /etc/fstab, because then it tried to mount it before starting cryptsetup for some reason. It probably didn t help that the system s cryptdisks.service is a symlink to /dev/null, a fact I didn t realize until after a lot of needless reboots. Anyhow, one thing I stumbled across was poor console control with systemd. On numerous occasions, I had things like two cryptsetup processes trying to read a password, plus an emergency mode console trying to do so. I had this memorable line of text at one point: (or type Control-D to continue): Please enter passphrase for disk athena-crypttank (crypt)! [ OK ] Stopped Emergency Shell. And here we venture into unsatisfying territory with systemd. One answer to this in IRC was to install plymouth, which apparently serializes console I/O. However, plymouth is an attractive boot animation in place of the text messages that normally get shown. I don t want an attractive boot animation . Nevertheless, neither systemd-sysv nor cryptsetup depends on plymouth, so by default, the prompt for a password at boot is obscured by various other text. Worse, plymouth doesn t support serial consoles, so at the moment booting a system that uses LUKS with systemd over a serial console is a matter of blind luck of typing the right password at the right time. In the end, though, the system booted and after a few more tweaks, the backlight buttons do their thing again. Whew! Update 2014-10-13: uau pointed out that Plymouth is more than a bootsplash, and can work with serial consoles, despite the description of the package. I stand corrected on that. (It is still the case, however, that packages don t depend on it where they should, and the default experience for people using cryptsetup is not very good.)