Search Results: "tach"

27 January 2016

Alessio Treglia: Quantum reflections of a winter evening

A problem of interpretation?

December 14th, 1900 is known as the date of birth of quantum physics. In fact, that day Max Planck presented his report to the German Physical Society in Berlin, in which he argued that the exchange of energy in the phenomena of emission and absorption of electromagnetic radiation occurs in discrete form, not in continuous form as claimed by electromagnetic classic theory.

It was like opening a door to a new universe, that of subatomic particles. In a few decades it was learned that the basis of the strength of the real world around us (people, objects, plants, animals, etc.) is a joyful swarm of tiny particles distributed in clouds of probability, essentially surrounded by empty space. A shocking and apparently incomprehensible reality for the man of the 900: how could that still solid rock actually contain billions of microscopic objects in motion?

With the passing of the years, the road was covered deeper and deeper, revealing ever smaller particles for which new unknown names were coined: Leptons, Gluons, Quarks, Neutrinos, Fermions, Bosons, and so on until

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21 January 2016

Jonathan Dowland: Network Attached Storage

little and large little and large
I've just upgraded my home Network Storage box. Until now, it was very discreet, about the size of a car radio. It lived on one of my bookcases and I was very happy with it but it could only take 2.5" sized hard drives and I've outgrown what you can fit on them. I've ended up moving to 2x4T 3.5" drives, a Coolermaster Elite 110 case and re-using the mainboard/CPU and RAM. This is hopefully enough capacity that I don't need to look at another upgrade for a few years, and the case could take more drives if I need it to. The Elite 110 is - by Mini-ITX case terms - pretty small, but still 6 times larger in volume than the old case. In the consumer NAS market, there are plenty of appliances that takes two 3.5" drives and are much smaller than that (such as the WD MyBook Duo, or Synology DS214). Unfortunately I could not find any cases that were of this size for a DIY build. Did I miss anything obvious? (As to why I choose DIY, that could be the subject for a future post.) The full boring details of the build are on the NAS system page.

15 January 2016

Mike Hommey: Announcing git-cinnabar 0.3.0

Git-cinnabar is a git remote helper to interact with mercurial repositories. It allows to clone, pull and push from/to mercurial remote repositories, using git. Get it on github. These release notes are also available on the git-cinnabar wiki. Development had been stalled for a few months, with many improvements in the
next branch without any new release. I used some time during the new year
break and after in order to straighten things up in order to create a new
release, delaying many of the originally planned changes to a future 0.4.0
release. What s new since 0.2.2? Development process changes Up to before this release closing in, the master branch was dedicated to
releases, and development was happening on the next branch, until a new
release happens. From now on, the release branch will take dot-release fixes and new
releases, while the master branch will receive all changes that are
validated through testing (currently semi-automatically tested with
out-of-tree tests based on four real-life mercurial repositories, with
some automated CI based on in-tree tests used in the future). The next branch will receive changes to be tested in CI when things
will be hooked up, and may have rewritten history as a consequence of
wanting passing tests on every commit on master.

14 January 2016

Vincent Sanders: Ampere was the Newton of Electricity.

I think Maxwell was probably right, certainly the unit of current Ampere gives his name to has been a concern of mine recently.

Regular readers may have possibly noticed my unhealthy obsession with single board computers. I have recently rehomed all the systems into my rack which threw up a small issue of powering them all. I had been using an ad-hoc selection of USB wall warts and adapters but this ended up needing nine mains sockets and short of purchasing a very expensive PDU for the rack would have needed a lot of space.

Additionally having nine separate convertors from mains AC to low voltage DC was consuming over 60Watts for 20W of load! The majority of these supplies were simply delivering 5V either via micro USB or DC barrel jack.

Initially I considered using a ten port powered USB hub but this seemed expensive as I was not going to use the data connections, it also had a limit of 5W per port and some of my systems could potentially use more power than that so I decided to build my own supply.

PSU module from ebay
A quick look on ebay revealed that a 150W (30A at 5V) switching supply could be had from a UK vendor for 9.99 which seemed about right. An enclosure, fused and switched IEC inlet, ammeter/voltmeter with shunt and suitable cables were acquired for another 15

Top view of the supply all wired up
A little careful drilling and cutting of the enclosure made openings for the inlets, cables and display. These were then wired together with crimped and insulated spade and ring connectors. I wanted this build to be safe and reliable so care was taken to get the neatest layout I could manage with good separation between the low and high voltage cabling.

Completed supply with all twelve outputs wired up
The result is a neat supply with twelve outputs which i can easily extend to eighteen if needed. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that even with twelve SBC connected generating 20W load the power drawn by the supply was 25W or about 80% efficiency instead of the 33% previously achieved.

The inbuilt meter allows me to easily see the load on the supply which so far has not risen above 5A even at peak draw, despite the cubitruck and BananaPi having spinning rust hard drives attached, so there is plenty of room for my SBC addiction to grow (I already pledged for a Pine64).

Supply installed in the rack with some of the SBC connected
Overall I am pleased with how this turned out and while there are no detailed design files for this project it should be easy to follow if you want to repeat it. One note of caution though, this project has mains wiring and while I am confident in my own capabilities dealing with potentially lethal voltages I cannot be responsible for anyone else so caveat emptor!

12 January 2016

Gunnar Wolf: Readying up for the second "Embedded Linux" diploma course

I am happy to share here a project I was a part of during last year, that ended up being a complete success and now stands to be repeated: The diploma course on embedded Linux, taught at Facultad de Ingenier a, UNAM, where I'm teaching my regular classes as well. Back in November, we held the graduation for our first 10 students. This photo shows only seven, as the remaining three have already relocated to Guadalajara, where they were hired by Continental, a company that promoted the creation of this specialization program. After this first excercise, we went over the program and made some adequations; future generations will have a shorter and more focused program (240 instead of 288 hours, leaving out several topics that were not deemed related to the topic or were thoroughly understood by students to begin with); we intend to start the semester-long course in early February. I will soon update here with the full program and promotional material, as soon as I receive it. update (01-19): You can download the promotional information, or go to an (unofficial) URL with the full information. We are close to starting the program, so hurry! I am specially glad that this course is taught by people I admire and recognize, and a very interesting mix between long-time academic and stemming from my free-software-related friends: From the academic side, Facultad de Ingenier a's professors Laura Sandoval, Karen S enz and Oscar Valdez, and from the free-software side, Sandino Araico, Iv n Chavero, C sar Y ez and Gabriel Salda a (and myself on both camps, of course )
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9 January 2016

Iain R. Learmonth: Trust

This is not a new world, this is simply an extension of the old one. I'm not going to write here about sweeping changes that are happening now, but changes that have been taking place in plain sight for many decades. No one has flipped a switch, only tweaked and tuned variables here and there to lead us down this path. I'd like to reflect on where we are now but there is no way I could describe how it is we got here, the journey was far too complex and filled with ommissions, half-truths and outright lies. It's likely we will never know what has brought us here. I live in Scotland, a country that is a part of the United Kingdom and a member of the European Union. We have a Scottish Government, although certain matters are still handled by the UK Government. The European Government also handles some matters and these can take effect across the entire European Union. I do not feel that I can hold trust in any of these bodies anymore. The European Convention on Human Rights was, for me at least, a beacon of hope. A series of fundamental rights guaranteed to be upheld for every person within the European Union. A series of fundamental rights that has been ignored by governments repeatedly: This is not an exhaustive list, just select cross-sections of our recent history. It is important to remember that in each of these cases, it took a citizen to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights. These rights were violated by the UK government until the actions were challenged, the legislation that allowed them was currently enacted into UK law without regard for the ECHR. It should also be noted that the ban on prisoners voting is still in effect in the UK. We've learnt that the ECHR is not an effective safeguard against the abuse of powers by government. The UK government also sees the Human Rights Act as a problem, although at least scrapping it has been delayed for now. Much of these breaches of human rights are justified by the government as in the interest of the runaway train known as "national security". I have recently had direct contact with one aspect of this during my journey home from 32c3. You can read about my experiences with airport security here and here. My experiences at these airports angered me for a number of reasons. The first of which was that I was asked to expose my genitals as part of the routine screening, which I do not believe to be proportionate at all. At Luton, I was at the point where I was intending to leave the airport and take the train instead before I was allowed to excercise my right to opt-out of the nude body scanner. Since these incidents, I have conducted some research into these scanners and started an article on the Open Rights Group wiki. While the security officer at Luton had tried to tell me that the radio waves used could not penetrate clothing, they in fact can and this is the entire purpose of them. While the security officer at Luton told me that the machines did not generate an image, they are in fact doing exactly that, even if that image is processed by computer vision algorithms as opposed to being viewed by a human reviewer. A leaflet by the Department for Transport, made available on the Aberdeen Airport website, also states that no image is created, and yet this is exactly how the scanners work. I have never seen this leaflet printed and available in the airport itself, although I admit I do not fly regularly and may have missed it. That said, it does not provide a true representation of the scan process and I would go as far to say it contains an outright lie. In a document published by the UK Government titled "Response to the consultation on the use of security scanners in an aviation security environment", they state:
"nearly all passengers, if they fully understand the procedures, would be unlikely to opt for [the alternative of a private search]"
Even with this display of confidence that they believe the public are happy with the invasion of privacy brought by the security scanners, they have still chosen to not fully inform the public in the way in which the scanner operates. It is the lies that anger me the most. We claim to live in a democracy and you cannot have a democracy without transparency. It is not too late for the Government to earn back my trust, but for now, they haven't given me good reason to believe anything they produce. If you have read this article and you would like to support efforts for change in the United Kingdom, please consider joining the Open Rights Group and perhaps getting involved in their work.

7 January 2016

Elena 'valhalla' Grandi: Smartphones, ownership and hope for the fate of humanity

Smartphones, ownership and hope for the fate of humanity
Do you own your phone or does it own you? DanielPocock.com


I have conflicting opinions about this article.

Usually I carry a dumb phone, so I'm not completely disconnected, but I'm mostly self-limited to "useful" communications by the fact that I have to pay for calls and SMSs. It also has a few useful features like showing the time , an alarm clock and a led torch, but that's it.

I also carry a smartphone, but I've never been able to trust it with my personal data, so there is no email on it and no communication software. It's also always offline to preserve battery, unless I'm actually using it for something (usually maps). It does have an offline wikipedia reader, which is the second thing I use it more often for. About half of the time I try to use it, however, it is off because I forgot to charge it, unless I've planned in advance to use it (which usually means I'm also carrying a laptop and will need to tether it).

So I guess that I should be agreeing with the article that offline life is better, and that we shouldn't depend on phones in our daily life, and mostly I do.

On the other hand, I'm not so sure that all of the people who seem to be interacting with a phone are actually disconnected from the local reality.

More than once I've experienced the use of smartphones as part of a local interaction: one typical case involves people having a conversation IRL and checking some fact on the internet and then sharing the results with the rest of the local group.

Actually, most of the time I've seen a smartphone being used at our table while eating with friends or collegues it was being passed around to show something to the people at the table, or at the very least being read aloud from, so it was part of the local experience, not a way to disconnect from it.

I'm sure that there are cases of abuse, but I still have hope that most of the connected humanity is managing to find a good balance between online and offline.

I don't want to go back carrying a wrist watch. I remember them as something unconfortable that ended up hitting stuff as I moved my hands, and I'd rather have my wrists free while I type, thanks. Pocket watches, OTOH...

the main exception involved one young adult in the middle of significantly older relatives, which is a somewhat different issue, and one that I believe predated smartphones (IIRC in my case similar situations involved trying to be somewhere else by reading a book).

6 January 2016

Norbert Preining: TeX Live security improvements

Today I committed a set of changes to the TeX Live subversion repository that should pave the way for better security handling in the future. Work is underway to use strong cryptographic signatures to verify that packages downloaded and installed into a TeX Live installation have not been tinkered with. texlive2015 While there is still a long way to go and to figure out, the current changes already improve the situation considerably. Status up to now Although we did ship size and checksum information within the TeX Live database, these information were only considered by the installer when re-starting an installation to make sure that the downloaded packages are the ones we should use. Neither the installer nor tlmgr did use the checksum to verify that the downloaded packages is correct, relying mostly on the fact that the packages are xz-compressed and would create rubbish when there is a transfer error. Although none of us believes that there is a serious interest in tinkering with the TeX Live distribution maybe to steal just another boring scientific paper? the door was still open. Changes implemented The changes committed to the repository today, which will be in a testing phase to get rid of bugs, consists of the following: Together these two changes will allow install-tl/tlmgr to verify that a package (.tar.xz) is according to the information in the accompanying texlive.tlpdb. This still leaves the option of tampering with a package and updating the texlive.tlpdb for the fixes checksums/sizes. Upcoming changes For the future we do plan mostly two things: The last step above will give a very high level of security, as it will be not practically possible to alter the information in the texlive.tlpdb, thus no tampering with the checksum information of the containers, and in turn no tampering with the actual containers will be possible. Restrictions Due to the wide range of supported architectures and operating systems, we will not make verification obligatory, but if a gpg binary is found, it will be used to verify the downloaded texlive.tlpdb.checksum. Details have to be hammered out and the actual programming has to be done, but we are on the way. Enjoy.

5 January 2016

Benjamin Mako Hill: Celebrate Aaron Swartz in Seattle (or Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, NYC, SF)

I m organizing an event at the University of Washington in Seattle that involves a reading, the screening of a documentary film, and a Q&A about Aaron Swartz. The event coincides with the third anniversary of Aaron s death and the release of a new book of Swartz s writing that I contributed to. aaronsw-tiob_bwcstw The event is free and open the public and details are below:

WHEN: Wednesday, January 13 at 6:30-9:30 p.m.

WHERE: Communications Building (CMU) 120, University of Washington

We invite you to celebrate the life and activism efforts of Aaron Swartz, hosted by UW Communication professor Benjamin Mako Hill. The event is next week and will consist of a short book reading, a screening of a documentary about Aaron s life, and a Q&A with Mako who knew Aaron well details are below. No RSVP required; we hope you can join us.

Aaron Swartz was a programming prodigy, entrepreneur, and information activist who contributed to the core Internet protocol RSS and co-founded Reddit, among other groundbreaking work. However, it was his efforts in social justice and political organizing combined with his aggressive approach to promoting increased access to information that entangled him in a two-year legal nightmare that ended with the taking of his own life at the age of 26.

January 11, 2016 marks the third anniversary of his death. Join us two days later for a reading from a new posthumous collection of Swartz s writing published by New Press, a showing of The Internet s Own Boy (a documentary about his life), and a Q&A with UW Communication professor Benjamin Mako Hill a former roommate and friend of Swartz and a contributor to and co-editor of the first section of the new book. If you re not in Seattle, there are events with similar programs being organized in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, New York, and San Francisco. All of these other events will be on Monday January 11 and registration is required for all of them. I will be speaking at the event in San Francisco.

4 January 2016

Benjamin Mako Hill: The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz

The New Press has published a new collection of Aaron Swartz s writing called The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz. I worked with Seth Schoen to introduce and help edit the opening section of book that includes Aaron s writings on free culture, access to information and knowledge, and copyright. Seth and I have put our introduction online under an appropriately free license (CC BY-SA). aaronsw_book_coverOver the last week, I ve read the whole book again. I think the book really is a wonderful snapshot of Aaron s thought and personality. It s got bits that make me roll my eyes, bits that make me want to shout in support, and bits that continue to challenge me. It all makes me miss Aaron terribly. I strongly recommend the book. Because the publication is post-humous, it s meant that folks like me are doing media work for the book. In honor of naming the book their progressive pick of the week, Truthout has also published an interview with me about Aaron and the book. Other folks who introduced and/or edited topical sections in the book are David Auerbach (Computers), David Segal (Politics), Cory Doctorow (Media), James Grimmelmann (Books and Culture), and Astra Taylor (Unschool). The book is introduced by Larry Lessig.

2 January 2016

Daniel Pocock: The great life of Ian Murdock and police brutality in context

Tributes: (You can Follow or Tweet about this blog on Twitter) Over the last week, people have been saying a lot about the wonderful life of Ian Murdock and his contributions to Debian and the world of free software. According to one news site, a San Francisco police officer, Grace Gatpandan, has been doing the opposite, starting a PR spin operation, leaking snippets of information about what may have happened during Ian's final 24 hours. Sadly, these things are now starting to be regurgitated without proper scrutiny by the mainstream press (note the erroneous reference to SFGate with link to SFBay.ca, this is British tabloid media at its best). The report talks about somebody (no suggestion that it was even Ian) "trying to break into a residence". Let's translate that from the spin-doctor-speak back to English: it is the silly season, when many people have a couple of extra drinks and do silly things like losing their keys. "a residence", or just their own home perhaps? Maybe some AirBNB guest arriving late to the irritation of annoyed neighbours? Doesn't the choice of words make the motive sound so much more sinister? Nobody knows the full story and nobody knows if this was Ian, so snippets of information like this are inappropriate, especially when somebody is deceased. Did they really mean to leave people with the impression that one of the greatest visionaries of the Linux world was also a cat burglar? That somebody who spent his life giving selflessly and generously for the benefit of the whole world (his legacy is far greater than Steve Jobs, as Debian comes with no strings attached) spends the Christmas weekend taking things from other people's houses in the dark of the night? The report doesn't mention any evidence of a break-in or any charges for breaking-in. If having a few drinks and losing your keys in December is such a sorry state to be in, many of us could potentially be framed in the same terms at some point in our lives. That is one of the reasons I feel so compelled to write this: somebody else could be going through exactly the same experience at the moment you are reading this. Any of us could end up facing an assault as unpleasant as the tweets imply at some point in the future. At least I can console myself that as a privileged white male, the risk to myself is much lower than for those with mental illness, the homeless, transgender, Muslim or black people but as the tweets suggest, it could be any of us. The story reports that officers didn't actually come across Ian breaking in to anything, they encountered him at a nearby street corner. If he had weapons or drugs or he was known to police that would have almost certainly been emphasized. Is it right to rush in and deprive somebody of their liberties without first giving them an opportunity to identify themselves and possibly confirm if they had a reason to be there? The report goes on, "he was belligerent", "he became violent", "banging his head" all by himself. How often do you see intelligent and successful people like Ian Murdock spontaneously harming themselves in that way? Can you find anything like that in any of the 4,390 Ian Murdock videos on YouTube? How much more frequently do you see reports that somebody "banged their head", all by themselves of course, during some encounter with law enforcement? Do police never make mistakes like other human beings? If any person was genuinely trying to spontaneously inflict a head injury on himself, as the police have suggested, why wouldn't the police leave them in the hospital or other suitable care? Do they really think that when people are displaying signs of self-harm, rounding them up and taking them to jail will be in their best interests? Now, I'm not suggesting this started out with some sort of conspiracy. Police may have been at the end of a long shift (and it is a disgrace that many US police are not paid for their overtime) or just had a rough experience with somebody far more sinister. On the other hand, there may have been a mistake, gaps in police training or an inappropriate use of a procedure that is not always justified, like a strip search, that causes profound suffering for many victims. A select number of US police forces have been shamed around the world for a series of incidents of extreme violence in recent times, including the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, shooting Walter Scott in the back, death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore and the attempts of Chicago's police to run an on-shore version of Guantanamo Bay. Beyond those highly violent incidents, the world has also seen the abuse of Ahmed Mohamed, the Muslim schoolboy arrested for his interest in electronics and in 2013, the suicide of Aaron Swartz which appears to be a direct consequence of the "Justice" department's obsession with him. What have the police learned from all this bad publicity? Are they changing their methods, or just hiring more spin doctors? If that is their response, then doesn't it leave them with a cruel advantage over those people who were deceased? Isn't it standard practice for some police to simply round up anybody who is a bit lost and write up a charge sheet for resisting arrest or assaulting an officer as insurance against questions about their own excessive use of force? When British police executed Jean Charles de Menezes on a crowded tube train and realized they had just done something incredibly outrageous, their PR office went to great lengths to try and protect their image, even photoshopping images of Menezes to make him look more like some other suspect in a wanted poster. To this day, they continue to refer to Menezes as a victim of the terrorists, could they be any more arrogant? While nobody believes the police woke up that morning thinking "let's kill some random guy on the tube", it is clear they made a mistake and like many people (not just police), they immediately prioritized protecting their reputation over protecting the truth. Nobody else knows exactly what Ian was doing and exactly what the police did to him. We may never know. However, any disparaging or irrelevant comments from the police should be viewed with some caution. The horrors of incarceration It would be hard for any of us to understand everything that an innocent person goes through when detained by the police. The recently released movie about The Stanford Prison Experiment may be an interesting place to start, a German version produced in 2001, Das Experiment, is also very highly respected. The United States has the largest prison population in the world and the second-highest per-capita incarceration rate. Many, including some on death row, are actually innocent, in the wrong place at the wrong time, without the funds to hire an attorney. The system, and the police and prison officers who operate it, treat these people as packages on a conveyor belt, without even the most basic human dignity. Whether their encounter lasts for just a few hours or decades, is it any surprise that something dies inside them when they discover this cruel side of American society? Worldwide, there is an increasing trend to make incarceration as degrading as possible. People may be innocent until proven guilty, but this hasn't stopped police in the UK from locking up and strip-searching over 4,500 children in a five year period, would these children go away feeling any different than if they had an encounter with Jimmy Saville or Rolf Harris? One can only wonder what they do to adults. What all this boils down to is that people shouldn't really be incarcerated unless it is clear the danger they pose to society is greater than the danger they may face in a prison. What can people do for Ian and for justice? Now that these unfortunate smears have appeared, it would be great to try and fill the Internet with stories of the great things Ian has done for the world. Write whatever you feel about Ian's work and your own experience of Debian. While the circumstances of the final tweets from his Twitter account are confusing, the tweets appear to be consistent with many other complaints about US law enforcement. Are there positive things that people can do in their community to help reduce the harm? Sending books to prisoners (the UK tried to ban this) can make a difference. Treat them like humans, even if the system doesn't. Recording incidents of police activities can also make a huge difference, such as the video of the shooting of Walter Scott or the UK police making a brutal unprovoked attack on a newspaper vendor. Don't just walk past a situation and assume everything is under control. People making recordings may find themselves in danger, it is recommended to use software that automatically duplicates each recording, preferably to the cloud, so that if the police ask you to delete such evidence, you can let them watch you delete it and still have a copy. Can anybody think of awards that Ian Murdock should be nominated for, either in free software, computing or engineering in general? Some, like the prestigious Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering can't be awarded posthumously but others may be within reach. Come and share your ideas on the debian-project mailing list, there are already some here. Best of all, Ian didn't just build software, he built an organization, Debian. Debian's principles have helped to unite many people from otherwise different backgrounds and carry on those principles even when Ian is no longer among us. Find out more, install it on your computer or even look for ways to participate in the project.

31 December 2015

Chris Lamb: Free software activities in December 2015

Here is my monthly update covering a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world (previously):
Debian My work in the Reproducible Builds project was also covered in more depth in Lunar's weekly reports (#31, #32, #33, #34).
LTS

This month I have been paid to work 12 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS). In that time I did the following:
  • Issued DLA 363-1 for libphp-phpmailer fixing a header injection vulnerability.
  • Issued DLA 365-1 for foomatic-filters correcting a shell injection vulnerability.
  • Issued DLA 369-1 for pygments fixing an issue shell injection vulnerability.
  • Issued DLA 374-1 for cacti to fix an SQL injection vulnerability.
  • Did some futher investigation of CVE-2011-5325 in busybox.
Uploads
  • python-django (1.9) New upstream release.
  • redis (3.0.6) New upstream stable release. I additionally backported this package to Debian stable.
  • redis (3.2~rc1) Uploaded upstream's "testing/next" branch to experimental for testing.
  • gunicorn (19.4.1) New upstream release.
Patches contributed

I also filed FTBFS bugs against acpid, android-platform-frameworks-base, antlr3, artemis, beignet, bisonc++, bobcat, bustle, cargo, checkbox-ng, code2html, cplay, datanommer.commands, dcmtkpp, debci, diffutils, diod, django-restricted-resource, docker-libkv, doomsday, dvdauthor, dwww, elasticsearch, elki, flask-script, freeipa, fso-frameworkd, funny-manpages, ggcov, ghc-mod, gmpc-plugins, gparted, gs-collections, guacamole-server, guncat, haskell-concrete-typerep, haskell-geniplate, haskell-nats, haskell-x509-util, hawtbuf, heimdal, htsjdk, inspircd, jboss-xnio, jenkins-winstone, jpeginfo, jruby-openssl, kaffeine, kdbg, ktp-accounts-kcm, kuser, libcommons-cli-java, libcommons-openpgp-java, libconfig-model-lcdproc-perl, libdata-faker-perl, libexplain, libgettext-commons-java, libgtk2-ex-printdialog-perl, libmoops-perl, libnet-frame-perl, libsendmail-milter-perl, libupnp, libuv, libvpx, liwc, m4, maven2, meep-mpich2, nagios-plugin-check-multi, natlog, netpipe, ocserv, ogre-1.8, orthanc-dicomweb, perspectives-extension, php-mail, php-pinba, phpseclib, pkg-haskell-tools, plastimatch, plexus-compiler, plexus-compiler-1.0, python-acme, python-crontab, python-cs, python-csscompressor, python-debian, python-distutils-extra, python-django-compressor, python-django-openstack-auth, python-django-tagging, python-pygit2, python-pyramid, python-pywcs, python-releases, python-shade, python-statsd, python-tasklib, python-tasklib, python-webm, python-websockets, regina-normal, rinetd, roboptim-core, rpm2html, rpm2html, ruby-factory-girl, ruby-fogbugz, ruby-i18n-inflector, ruby-loofah, ruby-protected-attributes, ruby-rack-contrib, ruby-rufus-scheduler, ruby-sanitize, ruby-sidetiq, ruby-sinatra, scsh-0.6, shogun, sleekxmpp, slugimage, spatial4j, sqwebmail-de, trac-announcer, ttt, txaws, umbrello, wine-gecko-2.21, xboxdrv, xfonts-wqy, xserver-xorg-video-openchrome, yorick & yoshimi.

28 December 2015

Alessio Treglia: Pallinux: Olly Olly Oxen Free!

Pallinux: Artwork by Fabio "Pixel" Colinelli

Pallinux: Artwork by Fabio Pixel Colinelli

In a world far away, in the dark Land of Digitos only populated by machines and computers, the evil Mister Woo was ruling over all. Over time, this terrible dictator was becoming a horrendous fire-eyed giant, walking the whole day by vibrating the heavy steps into his Kingdom, leaving behind him a trail of smoke and terror. Mr. Woo always wore a long, shabby and dirty top hat that had once been white, so old and ragged that he could not even keep it up straight on his head. Throughout the Land of Digitos, the inhabitants computers were scattered, each <Read more >

27 December 2015

Steve Kemp: Some things are universal?

I don't often do retrospectives, but this year has been an unusual one for me, as I moved to Finland almost six months ago. The topic has come up in conversation a lot over the past few months, so when people ask me what I think I can give some simple answers without too much thought. Here's a brief summary. There are some obvious changes:
The Traffic
The traffic drives on the right-hand side of the roads, which took a bit of getting used to, but isn't a huge surprise as I've travelled in Europe in the past. There aren't so many countries that drive on the left after all so most people probably wouldn't even notice this as odd. When it comes to traffic one thing nice about Helsinki is that most junctions are "zebra crossings". Sure they don't have flashing lights, but they have shaded areas, and pedestrians have right of way. As for transport the city of Helsinki has local trains, trams, buses and taxis. The trams and buses all use the same card for payment so transport is integrated very well. I buy a time-based card, spending about 50 for a month of unlimited travel. If you prefer you may add euros to your card and pay for distinct journeys - but that works out more expensive if you travel twice, or more, a day.
The Money
Finland uses the Euro these days, having switched from the Finnish markka in 2002. Enough said. Costs are largely in line with what I'd expect: Cigarettes are cheap, beer is expensive. Some things are very expensive, some things are very cheap. Largely the expensive things are those that are imported. It is a very small country after all.
The Language
Finnish is .. complex. But I've not struggled too much. Mostly I can buy what I want without difficulty. There are weird exceptions though for example I went out to buy soup one day and had to return carrying only shame and disappointment: I can't read the language on the tins and what I thought was soup turned out to be a can of chopped tomatoes. Food is good though, and available easily (!!). The only significant surprise when it comes to shopping is that loose goods must be weighed yourself. You pick up a bunch of bananas, take it to the scales, press the button that has a picture of a banana on it, and it prints out a label you attach to them - at the till the cashier will scan the label and charge you. If you forget, or don't know how to do it they'll tut and complain. In daily life I use two phrases frequently and they are sufficient for communcation:
  • "minua haluan ... kahvi kakku olut"
    • "I want ... coffee cake beer".
  • "kiitos"
    • "Thanks"
Usually people speak to me in English, which is a little annoying as it means I'm not learning as much as I could. But that said over the past few months I've had proper conversations entirely in Finnish with shop-keepers, and similar. So I'm getting better.
The Culture
Finnish people are friendly, but terse. That's the reputation. The Finnish people are alcoholics, and have high rates of suicide. Also the reputation. Finally we know that the Finnish people consume more coffee than the rest of the world. All those things are true, but they're not enough by far to describe the people. Obviously they're all different, and we have a lot of people from other parts of the world here too - Russians, Asians, Somalians. So culture is complex .. but markedly different than in the UK. I could write more about this, but I think for the moment I'll just draw a line under culture and say that I'm enjoying the interactions with people here, and while many things are slightly "off", it's not bad. Just different. Also saunas are fun. I've never had any qualms about being naked with strangers, so I don't really understand why Americans, and others, find this so difficult/surprising. But yeah, saunas are great. Things that Finland is known for internationally: The invention of the molotov cocktail, rally-driving, hockey, world's strongest man, Moomins, Tom of Finland, Salmiakki.
The Weather
Not too hot. Not too cold. But that's largely because I'm one of those "hot" people who doesn't really get cold even at the best of times. My ideal temperatures are about 13 C. My wife prefers 15 C, or more. We don't fight any more. Mostly. Winter is apparently full of snow, but this year has been poor. We had the first snowfall yesterday, here in Helsinki, and we woke this morning a blanket of snow about two inches high. It looks pretty. The biggest thing about weather in Finland is the constant darkness in winter, and the constant sun in Summer. In Summer there were like 22 hours of sunlight a day which made sleeping hard when we moved into our flat - with no curtains. In winter it feels like there is 20 minutes of sunlight a day. It's not that bad here in the south, although I think it is something like five hours and less in the north. I've never had any real issues with depression, or similar: People have good days and bad days, I'd generally be "OK" or "great". In the darkness? I've been grumpy at colleagues, I've made bad choices, I've lapsed attention. I'm not sure I can blame it on the weather, or my reaction to the weather, but I know I've not been as "happy" as I "should". It requires effort to be enthusiastic in a way I've never experienced before. Thankfully once I (slowly) realized this I took action and I think I'm good now. Unlike the UK the buildings here are relatively modern. I think that's the biggest contributing factor to how houses are "warm". Houses have all been built in the last 50-100 years, so you have proper insulation. Even though it might be very very cold outdoors indoors you can be naked without heating. Try that in the UK and you might freeze in some of the older leakier houses! You do have to laugh, though, when people point out "the oldest pub" in the city though. Where I come from if I pub isn't 500+ years old you wouldn't give it a seconds thought - places like The Golden Fleece, etc.
I could write more. I probably should. But it has been an interesting year, and although there are things I miss about the UK, and Edinburgh specifically, I have no regrets. I'm glad I came. What triggered this post? I said "Some things are universal" to my wife, when I saw a child riding a bicycle they'd obviously just received for Christmas. Her reaction "No Finnish person would buy a bicycle at Christmas - they'd expect too much snow!". So perhaps it was another immigrant family. Christmas bicycles universal, or not, it doesn't really matter.

Benjamin Mako Hill: Trust your technolust.

"Trust your technolust." from Hackers (1995)If you ve ever lusted for a Trust your technolust. poster like the one seen in background of the climactic sequence in the 1995 film Hackers, you re in luck. Just print this PDF template (also an SVG) onto a piece of yellow US letter paper. Although I m not even the first person I know to reproduce the poster, I did spend some time making sure that I got the typeface, kerning, wordspacing, and placement on the page just right. I figured I would share.

21 December 2015

Diego Escalante Urrelo: Stallman on happiness and perseverance

What does happiness signify to you, I asked him, if it isn t based on wealth and comfort? Happiness for me is a combination of feeling good about myself and having love, he said. And to feel good about myself, I have to do things that convince me I deserve it. ( ) The point is, even though it s sad to see people being foolish, there s no use giving up. Nothing good can come of giving up. That just means you lose completely, right away.
Richard Stallman on the 30th anniversary of the GNU Manifesto. It s amazing to think that a broken printer lead to the creation of the Free Software movement which, many years later, would give me a professional career, an education, and incredible friends around the world. Which reminds me I still keep the sticker Richard personally handed at the end of his first talk in Per , back in August 2003:
DSCF9847-web

GNU & Linux: the dynamic duo.

Bonus: Enjoy The Free Software Song by The GNU/Stallmans.

14 December 2015

Matthias Klumpp: AppStream/DEP-11 fully supported in Debian now!

AppStream on DebianBack in 2011, when the AppStream meeting in N rnberg had just happened, I published the DEP-11 (Debian Extension Project 11) draft together with Michael Vogt and Julian Andres Klode, as an approach to implement AppStream in Debian. Back then, the FTPMasters team rejected the suggestion to use the official XML specification, and so the DEP-11 specification was adapted to be based on YAML instead of XML. This wasn t much of a big deal, since the initial design of DEP-11 was to be a superset of the AppStream specification, so it wasn t meant to be exactly like AppStream anyway. AppStream back then was only designed for applications (as in stuff that provides a .desktop file ), but with DEP-11 we aimed for much more: DEP-11 should also describe fonts, drivers, pkg-config files and other metadata, so in the end one would be able to ask the package manager meaningful questions like is the firmware of device X installed? or request actions such as please install me the GIMP , making it unnecessary to know package names at all, and making packages a mere implementation detail. Then, GNOME-Software happened and demanded all these features. Back then, I was the de-facto maintainer of the AppStream upstream project already, but didn t feel like being the maintainer yet, so I only curated the existing specification, without extending it much. The big push forward GNOME-Software created changed that dramatically, and with me taking control of the specification and documenting it properly, the very essence of DEP-11 became AppStream (that was around the AppStream 0.6 release). So today, DEP-11 is mainly a YAML-based version of the AppStream XML specification. AppStream XML and DEP-11 YAML are implemented by two projects, GLib and Qt libraries exist to access the metadata and AppStream is used by the software centers of GNOME, KDE and Elementary. Today there are two things to celebrate for me: First of all, there is the release of AppStream 0.9 (that happened last Saturday already), which brings some nice improvements to the API for developers and some micro-optimizations to speed up Xapian database queries. Yay! The second thing is full DEP-11 support in Debian! This means that you don t need to copy metadata around manually, or install extra packages: All you need to do is to install the appstream package, everything else is done for you, and the data is kept up to date automatically. This is made possible by APT 1.1 (thanks to the whole APT team!), some dedicated support for it in AppStream directly, the work of our Sysadmin team at Debian, which set up infrastructure to build the metadata automatically, as well as our FTPMasters team where Joerg helped with the final steps of getting the metadata into the archive. That AppStream data is now in the archive doesn t mean we live in a perfect utopia yet there are still issues to be handled, but all the major work is done now and we can now gradually improve the data generator and tools and squash the remaining bugs. And another item from the good news department: It s highly likely that Ubuntu will follow Debian in AppStream/DEP-11 support with the upcoming Xenial release! But how can I make use of the new metadata? Just install the appstream package everything is done for you! Another easy way is to install GNOME-Software, which makes use of the new metadata already. KDE Discover in Debian does not enable support for AppStream yet, this will likely come later. If you prefer to use the command-line, you can now use commands like 
sudo appsteamcli install org.kde.kate.desktop
This will simply install the Kate text editor. Who wants some statistics? At time the Debian Sid/Unstable suite contains 1714 valid software components. It could be even more if the errors generated during metadata extraction would be resolved. For that, the metadata generator has a nice statistics page, showing the amount of each hint type in the suite and the development of the available software components in Debian and the hint types count over time (this plot feature was just added recently, so we are still a bit low on data). For packagers and interested upstreams, the data extractor creates detailed reports for each package, explaining why data was not included and how to fix the issue (in case something is unclear, please file a bug report and/or get in contact with me). In summary Thanks to everyone who helped to make this happen! For me this project means a lot, when writing this blog post I realized that I am basically working on it for almost 5 years (!) now (and the idea is even older). Seeing it to grow to such a huge success in other distributions was a joy, but now Debian can join the game with first-class AppStream support as well, which makes me even happier. Afterall Debian is the distribution I feel most at home. There is still lots of work to do (and already a few bugs known), but the hardest part of the journey is done let s walk into a bright future with AppStream!

13 December 2015

Robert Edmonds: Works with Debian: Intel SSD 750, AMD FirePro W4100, Dell P2715Q

I recently installed new hardware in my primary computer running Debian unstable. The disk used for the / and /home filesystem was replaced with an Intel SSD 750 series NVM Express card. The graphics card was replaced by an AMD FirePro W4100 card, and two Dell P2715Q monitors were installed. Intel SSD 750 series NVM Express card This is an 800 GB SSD on a PCI-Express x4 card (model number SSDPEDMW800G4X1) using the relatively new NVM Express interface, which appears as a /dev/nvme* device. The stretch alpha 4 Debian installer was able to detect and install onto this device, but grub-installer 1.127 on the installer media was unable to install the boot loader. This was due to a bug recently fixed in 1.128: 
grub-installer (1.128) unstable; urgency=high
  * Fix buggy /dev/nvme matching in the case statement to determine
    disc_offered_devfs (Closes: #799119). Thanks, Mario Limonciello!
 -- Cyril Brulebois <kibi@debian.org>  Thu, 03 Dec 2015 00:26:42 +0100
I was able to download and install the updated .udeb by hand in the installer environment and complete the installation. This card was installed on a Supermicro X10SAE motherboard, and the UEFI BIOS was able to boot Debian directly from the NVMe card, although I updated to the latest available BIOS firmware prior to the installation. It appears in lspci like this: 
02:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller: Intel Corporation PCIe Data Center SSD (rev 01)
(prog-if 02 [NVM Express])
    Subsystem: Intel Corporation SSD 750 Series [Add-in Card]
    Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0
    Memory at f7d10000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
    Expansion ROM at f7d00000 [disabled] [size=64K]
    Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 3
    Capabilities: [50] MSI-X: Enable+ Count=32 Masked-
    Capabilities: [60] Express Endpoint, MSI 00
    Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting
    Capabilities: [150] Virtual Channel
    Capabilities: [180] Power Budgeting <?>
    Capabilities: [190] Alternative Routing-ID Interpretation (ARI)
    Capabilities: [270] Device Serial Number 55-cd-2e-41-4c-90-a8-97
    Capabilities: [2a0] #19
    Kernel driver in use: nvme
The card itself appears very large in marketing photos, but this is a visual trick: the photographs are taken with the low-profile PCI bracket installed, rather than the standard height PCI bracket which it ships installed with. smartmontools fails to read SMART data from the drive, although it is still able to retrieve basic device information, including the temperature: 
root@chase 0 :~# smartctl -d scsi -a /dev/nvme0n1
smartctl 6.4 2015-06-04 r4109 [x86_64-linux-4.3.0-trunk-amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-15, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Vendor:               NVMe
Product:              INTEL SSDPEDMW80
Revision:             0135
Compliance:           SPC-4
User Capacity:        800,166,076,416 bytes [800 GB]
Logical block size:   512 bytes
Rotation Rate:        Solid State Device
Logical Unit id:      8086INTEL SSDPEDMW800G4                     1000CVCQ531500K2800EGN  
Serial number:        CVCQ531500K2800EGN
Device type:          disk
Local Time is:        Sun Dec 13 01:48:37 2015 EST
SMART support is:     Unavailable - device lacks SMART capability.
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
Current Drive Temperature:     31 C
Drive Trip Temperature:        85 C
Error Counter logging not supported
[GLTSD (Global Logging Target Save Disable) set. Enable Save with '-S on']
Device does not support Self Test logging
root@chase 4 :~#
Simple tests with cat /dev/nvme0n1 >/dev/null and iotop show that the card can read data at about 1 GB/sec, about twice as fast as the SATA-based SSD that it replaced. apt/dpkg now run about as fast on the NVMe SSD as they do on a tmpfs. Hopefully this device doesn't at some point require updated firmware, like some infamous SSDs have. AMD FirePro W4100 graphics card This is a graphics card capable of driving multiple DisplayPort displays at "4K" resolution and at a 60 Hz refresh rate. It has four Mini DisplayPort connectors, although I only use two of them. It was difficult to find a sensible graphics card. Most discrete graphics cards appear to be marketed towards video gamers who apparently must seek out bulky cards that occupy multiple PCI slots and have excessive cooling devices. (To take a random example, the ASUS STRIX R9 390X has three fans and brags about its "Mega Heatpipes".) AMD markets a separate line of "FirePro" graphics cards intended for professionals rather than gamers, although they appear to be based on the same GPUs as their "Radeon" video cards. The AMD FirePro W4100 is a normal half-height PCI-E card that fits into a single PCI slot and has a relatively small cooler with a single fan. It doesn't even require an auxilliary power connection and is about the same dimensions as older video cards that I've successfully used with Debian. It was difficult to determine whether the W4100 card was actually supported by an open source driver before buying it. The word "FirePro" appears nowhere on the webpage for the X.org Radeon driver, but I was able to find a "CAPE VERDE" listed as an engineering name which appears to match the "Cape Verde" code name for the FirePro W4100 given on Wikipedia's List of AMD graphics processing units. This explains the "verde" string that appears in the firmware filenames requested by the kernel (available only in the non-free/firmware-amd-graphics package): 
[drm] initializing kernel modesetting (VERDE 0x1002:0x682C 0x1002:0x2B1E).
[drm] Loading verde Microcode
radeon 0000:01:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware radeon/verde_pfp.bin
radeon 0000:01:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware radeon/verde_me.bin
radeon 0000:01:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware radeon/verde_ce.bin
radeon 0000:01:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware radeon/verde_rlc.bin
radeon 0000:01:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware radeon/verde_mc.bin
radeon 0000:01:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware radeon/verde_smc.bin
The card appears in lspci like this: 
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Cape Verde GL [FirePro W4100]
(prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
    Subsystem: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Device 2b1e
    Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 55
    Memory at e0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
    Memory at f7e00000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256K]
    I/O ports at e000 [size=256]
    Expansion ROM at f7e40000 [disabled] [size=128K]
    Capabilities: [48] Vendor Specific Information: Len=08 <?>
    Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 3
    Capabilities: [58] Express Legacy Endpoint, MSI 00
    Capabilities: [a0] MSI: Enable+ Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
    Capabilities: [100] Vendor Specific Information: ID=0001 Rev=1 Len=010 <?>
    Capabilities: [150] Advanced Error Reporting
    Capabilities: [200] #15
    Capabilities: [270] #19
    Kernel driver in use: radeon
The W4100 appears to work just fine, except for a few bizarre error messages that are printed to the kernel log when the displays are woken from power saving mode: 
[Sun Dec 13 00:24:41 2015] [drm:si_dpm_set_power_state [radeon]] *ERROR* si_enable_smc_cac failed
[Sun Dec 13 00:24:41 2015] [drm:si_dpm_set_power_state [radeon]] *ERROR* si_enable_smc_cac failed
[Sun Dec 13 00:24:41 2015] [drm:radeon_dp_link_train [radeon]] *ERROR* displayport link status failed
[Sun Dec 13 00:24:41 2015] [drm:radeon_dp_link_train [radeon]] *ERROR* clock recovery failed
[Sun Dec 13 00:24:41 2015] [drm:radeon_dp_link_train [radeon]] *ERROR* displayport link status failed
[Sun Dec 13 00:24:41 2015] [drm:radeon_dp_link_train [radeon]] *ERROR* clock recovery failed
[Sun Dec 13 00:24:41 2015] [drm:si_dpm_set_power_state [radeon]] *ERROR* si_enable_smc_cac failed
[Sun Dec 13 00:24:41 2015] [drm:radeon_dp_link_train [radeon]] *ERROR* displayport link status failed
[Sun Dec 13 00:24:41 2015] [drm:radeon_dp_link_train [radeon]] *ERROR* clock recovery failed
[Sun Dec 13 00:24:41 2015] [drm:radeon_dp_link_train [radeon]] *ERROR* displayport link status failed
[Sun Dec 13 00:24:41 2015] [drm:radeon_dp_link_train [radeon]] *ERROR* clock recovery failed
There don't appear to be any ill effects from these error messages, though. I have the following package versions installed: 
 / Name                          Version             Description
+++-=============================-===================-================================================
ii  firmware-amd-graphics         20151207-1          Binary firmware for AMD/ATI graphics chips
ii  linux-image-4.3.0-trunk-amd64 4.3-1~exp2          Linux 4.3 for 64-bit PCs
ii  xserver-xorg-video-radeon     1:7.6.1-1           X.Org X server -- AMD/ATI Radeon display driver
The Supermicro X10SAE motherboard has two PCI-E 3.0 slots, but they're listed as functioning in either "16/NA" or "8/8" mode, which apparently means that putting anything in the second slot (like the Intel 750 SSD, which uses an x4 link) causes the video card to run at a smaller x8 link width. This can be verified by looking at the widths reported in the "LnkCap" and "LnkSta" lines in the lspci -vv output: 
root@chase 0 :~# lspci -vv -s 01:00.0   egrep '(LnkCap LnkSta):'
        LnkCap: Port #0, Speed 8GT/s, Width x16, ASPM L0s L1, Exit Latency L0s <64ns, L1 <1us
        LnkSta: Speed 8GT/s, Width x8, TrErr- Train- SlotClk+ DLActive- BWMgmt- ABWMgmt-
root@chase 0 :~#
I did not notice any visible artifacts or performance degradation because of the smaller link width. The sensors utility from the lm-sensors package is capable of reporting the temperature of the GPU: 
root@chase 0 :~# sensors radeon-pci-0100
radeon-pci-0100
Adapter: PCI adapter
temp1:        +55.0 C  (crit = +120.0 C, hyst = +90.0 C)
root@chase 0 :~#
Dell P2715Q monitors Two new 27" Dell monitors with a native resolution of 3840x2160 were attached to the new graphics card. They replaced two ten year old Dell 2001FP monitors with a native resolution of 1600x1200 that had experienced burn-in, providing 4.32 times as many pixels. (TV and monitor manufacturers now shamelessly refer to the 3840x2160 resolution as "4K" resolution even though neither dimension reaches 4000 pixels.) There was very little to setup beyond plugging the DisplayPort inputs on these monitors into the DisplayPort outputs on the graphics card. Most of the setup involved reconfiguring software to work with the very high resolution. X.org, for tl;dr CLOSED NOTABUG reasons doesn't set the DPI correctly. These monitors have ~163 DPI resolution, so I added -dpi 168 to /etc/X11/xdm/Xservers. (168 is an even 1.75x multiple of 96.) Software like Google Chrome and xfce4-terminal rendered fonts and graphical elements at the right size, but other software like notion, pidgin, and virt-manager did not fully understand the high DPI. E.g., pidgin renders fonts at the correct size, but icons are too small. The default X cursor was also too small. To fix this, I installed the dmz-cursor-theme package, ran update-alternatives --config x-cursor-theme and selected /usr/share/icons/DMZ-Black/cursor.theme as the cursor theme. Overall, these displays are much brighter and more readable than the ones they replaced.

12 December 2015

Daniel Pocock: TADHack Paris - 12-13 December 2015

I'm currently in Paris for TADHack, an opportunity to collaborate on a range of telephony APIs and services. People can also win prizes by doing something innovative with the platforms promoted by the sponsors. This has been a great opportunity to raise awareness of the RTC Quick Start Guide, introduce people to DruCall and JSCommunicator and identify other opportunities for business and technical collaboration. If you are in Paris, it is not too late to register and participate, please see the TADHack web site for details.
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11 December 2015

Matthias Klumpp: What s up in Tanglu?

tanglu logo pureIt is time again for another Tanglu blogpost (to be honest, this article is pretty much overdue ). I want to shine a spotlight on the work that s done in Tanglu, be it ongoing or past work done for the new release. Why is the new release taking longer than usual? As you might have noticed, usually a new Tanglu release (Tanglu 4 Dasyatis ) should be released this month. We decided a while ago, however, to defer the release and are now aiming for an release in February / March 2016. Reason for this change in schedule is the GCC 5 transition (and more importantly the huge amount of follow-up transitions) as well as some other major infrastructure tasks, which we would like to complete and give them a good amount of testing before releasing. Also, some issues with our build system, and generally less build power than in previous releases is a problem (At least the Debile build-system issues could be worked around or solved). The hard disk crash in the forum and bugtracking server also delayed the start of the Tanglu 4 development process a lot. In all of these tasks, manpower is of course the main problem Software Tasks General infrastructure tasks Improvements on Synchrotron Synchrotron, the software which is synchronizing the Tanglu archive with the Debian archive, received a few tweaks to make it more robust and detect installability of packages more reliably. We also run it more often now. Rapidumo improvements Rapidumo is a software written to complement dak (the Debian Archive Kit) in managing the Tanglu archive. It performs automatic QA tasks on the archive and provides a collection of tools to perform various tasks (like triggering package rebuilds). For Tanglu 4, we sometimes drop broken packages from the archive now, to speed up transitions and to remove packages which got uninstallable more quickly. Packages removed from the release suite still have a chance to enter it again, but they need to go through Tanglu s staging area again first. The removal process is currently semiautomatic, to avoid unneccessary removals and breakage. Rapidumo could benefit from some improvements and an interactive web interface (as opposed to static HTML pages) would be nice. Some early work on this is done, but not completed (and has a very low priority at the moment). DEP-11 integration There will be a bigger announcement on AppStream and DEP-11 in the next days, so I keep this terse: Tanglu will go for full AppStream integration with the next release, which means no more packaged metadata, but data placed directly in the archive. Work on this has started in Tanglu, but I needed to get back to the drawing board with it, to incorporate some new ideas for using synergies with Debian on generating the DEP-11 metadata. Phabricator Phabricator has been integrated well into our infrastructure, but there are still some pending tasks. E.g. we need subprojects in Phabricator, and a more powerful Conduit interface. Those are upstream bugs on Phabricator, and are actively being worked on. As soon as the missing features are available in Phabricator, we will also pursue the integration of Tanglu bug information with the Debian DistroTracker, which was discussed at DebConf this summer. UEFI support UEFI support is a tricky beast. Full UEFI support is a release-goal for Tanglu 4 (so we won t release without it). At time, our Live-CDs start on pure EFI systems, but there are several reported issues with the Calamares live-installer as well as Debian-Installer, which fails to install GRUB correctly. Work on resolving these problems is ongoing. Major LiveCD rework Tanglu 4 will ship with improved live-cds, which e.g. allow selecting the preferred locale early in the bootloader. We switched from live-boot to manage our live sessions to casper, the same tool which is also used in Ubuntu. Casper fixed a few issues we had, and brought some new, but overall using it was a good choice and work on making top-notch live-cds is progressing well. KDE Plasma Integration of the latest Plasma release is progressing, but its speed has slowed down since fewer people are working on it. If you want to help Tanglu s KDE Workspace integration, please help! For the upcoming release, the Plasma 5 packages which we created based on a collaboration with Kubuntu for the previous Tanglu 3 release have been merged with their Debian counterparts. This action fortunately was possible without major problems. Now Tanglu is (mostly) using the same Plasma 5 packages as Debian again (lots of Kudos go the the Kubuntu and Debian Qt/KDE packagers!). GNOME The same re-merge with Debian has been done on Tanglu s GNOME flavor (Tanglu also shipped with a more recent GNOME release than Debian in Tanglu 3). So Tanglu 4 GNOME and Debian Testing GNOME are at (almost) the same level. Unfortunately, the GNOME team is heavily understaffed a GNOME team member left at the beginning of the year for personal reasons, and the team now only has one semi-active member and me. Other An fvwm-nightshade spin is being worked on :-) . Apart from that, there are no teams maintaining other flavors in Tanglu. Security & Stable maintenance Thanks to several awesome people, the current Tanglu Stable release (Tanglu 3 Chromodoris ) receives regular updates, even for many packages which are not in the fully supported set. Tangluverse Tasks Tasks (not) done in the global Tanglu universe. HTTPS for community sites Thanks to our participation in the Let s Encrypt closed beta program, Tanglu websites like the user forums and bugtracker have been fully encrypted for a while, which should make submitting data to these sites much more secure. So far, we didn t encounter issues, which means that we will likely aim for getting HTTPS encryption enabled on every Tanglu website. Tanglu.org website The Tanglu main website didn t receive much love at all. It could use a facelift and more importantly updated content about Tanglu. So far, nobody volunteered to update the website, so this task is still open. It is, however, a high-priority task to increase our public visibility as a project, so updating the website is definitely something which will be done soon. Promotion It doesn t hurt to think about how to sell Tanglu as brand : What is Tanglu? Our motivation, our goals? What is our slogan? How can we communicate all of this to new users, without having them to read long explanations? (e.g. the Fedora Project has this nicely covered on their main website, and their slogan Freedom, Friends, Features, First immediately communicates the project s key values) Those are issues engineers don t think about often, still it is important to present Tanglu in a way that is easy to grasp for people hearing about it for the first time. So far, no people are working on this task specifically, although it regularly comes up on IRC. Sponsoring & Government Tanglu is by design not backed by any corporation. However, we still need to get our servers paid. Currently, Tanglu is supported by three sponsors, which basically provide the majority of our infrastructure. Also, developers provide additional machines to get Tanglu running and/or packages built. Still, this dependency on very few sponsors paying the majority of the costs is very bad, since it makes Tanglu vulnerable in case one sponsor decides to end sponsorship. We have no financial backing to be able to e.g. continue to pay an important server in case it s sponsor decides to drop sponsorship. Also, since Tanglu is no legal entity, accepting donations is hard for us at time, since a private person would need to accept the money on behalf of Tanglu. So we can t easily make donating to Tanglu possible (at least not in the way we want donations to be). These issues are currently being worked on, there are a couple of possible solutions on the table. I will write about details as soon as it makes sense to go public with them. In general, I am very happy with the Tanglu community: The developer community is a pleasure to work with, and interactions with our users on the forums or via the bugtracker are highly productive and friendly. Although the development speed has slowed down a bit, Tanglu is still an active and awesome project, and I am looking forward to the cool stuff we will do in future!

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