TED has published a list of resources for suicide prevention and to help survivors and their families [1]. Psychology Today has an interesting article by Paula J. Caplan, Ph.D about the recent US Supreme Court decision denying female employees of Walmart the ability to file a class action lawsuit about their poor pay and working conditions [2]. She describes the problem as a focus on rights of the ruling class vs fairness to the workers, it could also be described as prioritising perceived rights of the rich over the rights of workers to fair treatment. It seems to me that her article has relevance to some of the discussions related to the treatment of women in the Free Software community. New Scientist has an interesting article by Ferris Jabr about the use of MRI to discover brain-wave patterns correlated with Autism in sleeping toddlers [3]. This doesn t seem likely to be useful for scanning the entire population as it currently has a false-positive rate of 7/43 (which would make false-positives outnumber true-positives by about 15:1). But it does seem likely to do some good in identifying young children who might be on the Autism Spectrum. Shea Hembry gave an amusing TED talk about how he created art works for 100 fictional artists for his own exhibition [4]. He created a biography for each artist and every one had a unique style of art. Steve Keil gave a passionate TED talk about the benefits of play for children and for adults [5]. He focussed on the benefits for Bulgaria (where his talk was given) but it all applies to all humans. Frederic Bastiat s 1850 essays on economics are interesting, informatice, and well written [6]. Some of the themes such as the supposed economic benefits of maintaining a large army are the subject of political debate today. Paula J. Caplan, Ph.D wrote an insightful article for Psychology Today about the recent US supreme court decision in regard to the Wal-mart case [7]. Her article seems to have some obvious parallels to the situation in the FOSS community. The idea of rights vs fairness, beliefs that are unconscious or unexamined, and the comparison of attitudes towards racial vs sexual discrimination (in terms of not treating sexual discrimination and harassment seriously) seem to all apply clearly. Al Jazeera reports that the Fukushima disaster is worse than is reported in the mainstream western press [8]. Generally I wouldn t be inclined to trust al Jazeera if other news sources were reliable. But unfortunately reliable news related to contentious issues such as nuclear power is quite rare. It will probably be quite a long time before we can be confident that we know much about Fukushima, everyone who knows seems to be lying.

• [1] http://blog.ted.com/2011/06/11/resources-for-suicide-prevention-post-attempt-survivors-and-their-families/
• [2] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/science-isnt-golden/201106/americans-fail-take-sexism-seriously-the-supreme-courts-wal-mart-rul
• [3] http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2011/06/brain-out-of-sync-in-toddlers.html
• [4] http://www.ted.com/talks/shea_hembrey_how_i_became_100_artists.html
• [5] http://www.ted.com/talks/steve_keil_a_manifesto_for_play_for_bulgaria_and_beyond.html
• [6] http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html
• [7] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/science-isnt-golden/201106/americans-fail-take-sexism-seriously-the-supreme-courts-wal-mart-rul
• [8] http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/06/201161664828302638.html

I often get requests of persons who would like to contribute to Debian but who don t know where to start. Let s try to answer this question properly so that I can give out this URL the next time that I am asked. The Debian website has a page explaining how to help Debian. While it provides no less than 10 suggestions in a daunting text-only list, it s difficult to know what to do next once you picked up something that you could do. I will try to fix this by providing concrete information for each cases in upcoming articles but in the mean time I propose you another approach to start with. Before answering your question ( what can I do for Debian ), we need to know some information about you. What motivates you? You re a volunteer, you re not doing stuff for Debian because someone told you so. You must have some intrinsic motivation and the ultimate motivation is usually that you re enjoying what you re doing. So what are you enjoying and/or what are your motivations ?

• Is there something that you would like to learn? A new programming language? Packaging? Coding? System administration? A specific software?
• Do you want to interact with smart people?
• Do you like to help users?
• Do you like to fix software just so that it works for you?
• Do you like to build something remarkable and useful for millions of people?

On the opposite, make sure to know what you hate and what you want to stay far away from. Maybe you dislike a programming language so much that you don t want to be involved in a project where you would have to use it, etc. Write down the answers to the questions, you might need them later when you ll ask other Debian contributors how you can help. What are your skills? If you re not interested in learning new skills, then you must obviously select a task where your current skills are sufficient. Again make a list of your skills and in particular of skills that you d like to practice! Here s a non-exhaustive list of skills to consider:

• What languages are you fluent with? Are you confident to write documentation or translate documentation in those languages?
• Are you a programmer? If yes, which languages do you know?
• Can you diagnose problems? Can you debug problems with strace and/or gdb?
• Can you triage bugs?
• Do you know some Debian packaging?
• Are you an artist and/or a web designer?
• Do you know how to work with VCS (subversion, git, bzr, )?

How much time can you spend on Debian? This is the last important information that you need to communicate whenever you re asking someone else what you could do for Debian. There s no point giving you a big task if you can only spend 30 minutes every week. On the opposite if you can work on Debian full time during a week (because you re between 2 contracts or because you re in vacation), it s equally important to know. In general contributing to Debian requires time, you should be ready to spend at least several hours per week and possibly more at the start while you re learning everything. Find something to do At this point you have a generic idea of what you d like to do but you re still missing a concrete objective. Let s try to find one, we ll explore several ways to do this. Scratch your itch The best objectives are those that satisfy your own needs. Here are some examples:

• Did you notice a missing feature? Try to implement it.
• Have you been annoyed by a bug? Try to fix it.
• Did you lose too much time on something because there was no documentation? Write the missing documentation and submit it where appropriate.
• File bug reports for the things that you can t fix yourself. Even wishlist bug reports for new features.
• Do you use software that are not packaged for Debian? Create the package(s) and maintain it/them.
• Do you need a newer version of a package compared to what s in Debian unstable? Contact the maintainer and propose your help to update the package.
• Do you need a newer version of a package compared to what s in Debian stable? Contact the maintainer and propose your help to create a backport.

If you re a good Debian citizen, you have already filed bugs for issues that bugged you. Then you can browse http://bugs.debian.org/from:hertzog@debian.org to find out some ideas of stuff to do (obviously replace hertzog@debian.org by your own email address). Join a team If you don t have a specific itch to scratch, you might want to focus your work on a specific team. Head over to wiki.debian.org/Teams and browse the list of teams. You ll surely find one that works in an area that you like. If you select a packaging team, pick one that works on packages that you re actually using. Some of the teams have instructions for newcomers, follow them when that is the case. Otherwise join the mailing list and the IRC channel, and get a feel of how the team works. See if it suits you, you can follow several teams at the same time and pick the one that you prefer after a few days/weeks. Once you have lurked a bit, if you still don t know how you could help, then just ask on the mailing list. Include all the answers you have collected to the 3 questions on your motivations, your skills and your time available. Focus on a specific package You can concentrate your work on a specific package even if you re in a team, it s often a good idea. But I list it separately because not all packages are team maintained and you might want to help maintain a package where there s a single maintainer currently. I leave it up to you to find a way to select a package that interests you Then head over to the package tracking system: http://packages.qa.debian.org/dpkg (replace dpkg by the name of the package that interests you) Fill in the form in the bottom-left corner with your email and select opts in the drop-down list, then click go . You get a new form where you can select the information that you ll receive, I recommend you to keep everything except upload-binary and to validate the form. From now on, you get the same mails than the maintainer (and a bit more actually), and it s a good idea to inform the maintainer that you subscribed and that you re going to help a bit. Maybe he s willing to grant you commit rights immediately, maybe he will ask you to send patches for a start. The important thing is to create a good relationship. In any case (even if you did not get any answer from the maintainer), you should be free to help triage existing bugs and to help deal with the flow of incoming bugs (including forwarding bugs when appropriate). Help a Debian developer Paul Tagliamonte once blogged Hey, DDs, need help?. He offered his help to overworked Debian developers . His post was missing all the information required (cf motivations/skills/time) but the approach is a good one. The best way to start contributing is to work with existing Debian developers. Even if you just want to be sponsored for your own pet package, you should consider that mentoring is a burden for many Debian developers and that you re more likely to get a sponsor if you have an existing relationship with a Debian developer that you helped. Pick a developer that works in an area that is of interest, and offer him your help. To simplify things even further, I have created a wiki page where you can find out how you can help me and thus build a relationship with me. That s it for now, I hope this article will help you to start contributing. Don t forget to subscribe to my newsletter to not miss future articles for new contributors. Note that you can refer to this article with the following URL: http://raphaelhertzog.com/go/contributing/ (easier to type and remember).

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Today I was made aware of bug #607839, and it makes me sad. I think its a great example about how trademarks and free software do not coexist well together. This bug started out as a question of the copyright license of a file, but quickly turned into a discussion about the GNOME [0] trademark, and the GNOME Foundation Trademark Usage Guidelines for Third Parties I believe that the GNOME project would be standing on solid legal ground if they wanted to actually try to aggressively protect their trademark. It is easy for me to find hundreds of places we use their mark in ways that are expressly forbidden by their trademark license. Here are some examples:

grep -i "gnome's" /var/lib/dpkg/available  # many package descriptions invalidly using a possessive
grep -i "gnome[^ ]" /var/lib/dpkg/availabe # returns nothing, trademark symbol is required

Probably to be in strict compliance, we would need to allow uppercase letters in package names. (I doubt this would happen, especially not for a reason like this). I am sure that a lawyer would tell us that the safest legal place for Debian would be to abandon all use of their marks. This would unfortunately be a herculean effort on Debian's part; we'd have to rename tons of packages, create and maintain tons of patches, create new logos, etc. And, I believe it would have the unfortunate side-effect of having a negative impact on both projects from a publicity standpoint. As with the firefox/iceweasel situation, the company trying to protect its trademark looks like a bully, and Debian looks like out-of-touch zealots. From the tone of the conversation in the bug report, I do not believe that this is something that the GNOME Foundation would force on us, and I certainly don't believe it would be an outcome they would hope for. They could give us written permission to use their marks in the ways we are already using them, however, lots of people would point at DFSG#8, and this would fail the 'tentacles of evil' test. (We are, of course, already under the grasp of these tentacles, as their current trademark license is subject to change) Better for us would be if they modified their trademark license agreement in order to allow our current usages of their mark. I feel that this quite unlikely to happen. It would certainly weaken their hold on the mark. Trying to apply the DFSG in these situations also doesn't work as well as it should. The DFSG is written with copyrights in mind and not patents and trademarks. This feels to me similar to situations we have with patent encumbered software which is under a perfectly free license. We can distribute the software without fear of a claim that we are violating copyrights, but the software is still not perfectly free since as I user, my rights to use and distribute the software might be severely limited from a legal standpoint. Also by Debian choosing to distribute software which has these kinds of potential problems, we might be putting a legal liability on members of the project and people that run mirrors for us. Of course, to add to the conflict I feel, Debian has its own trademarks, which it is poor at enforcing. On one hand, its bad for all the reasons that this situation is bad. On the other hand I sometimes wish that Debian did a better job of protecting its own trademark. It's clear from how many people show up in #debian expecting support for linuxmint or aptosid claiming "linux mint debian edition IS Debian, it says so on linuxmint.org" that we have allowed our mark to be diluted. NOTE: I became aware of this bug because of Zack CCing the FTP team. I serve on this team as an assistant, however, My comments here come from me personally without any discussion with other members of FTP team and should not be taken as any kind of offical word from the FTP team. [0] I suddently feel compelled to mention that The GNOME name is a registered trademark of GNOME Foundation in the United States or other countries.

After testing Emacs, Eclipse, KDevelop and CodeBlocks for writing C++ code, I decided to stick with Netbeans. It seems to be the most simple to configure and yet full of features and plugins. I was having one problem with it that when I focused out the window, and then focused on it again, it would not really grab the focus, in the sense that I would not be able to type without first clicking with the mouse. At first I thought the problem was with Netbeans, then with the JRE. I tried using sun-java6-jre, I tried upgrading my openjdk-6-jre, and nothing worked. I searched a little bit more and got to a discussion about this problem in ion3, and that made me think that the problem could be related to the window manager I use, XMonad. After searching a bit about it, I found on the XMonad FAQ some work arounds for problems with Java apps, but they didn't solve my problem. Then, I found the solution on this bug report. I got the darcs version of xmonad and XMonadContrib, included takeTopFocus on logHook, and now it's working!

I have bought a Samsung Galaxy S Android phone some time ago. One of the first thing that you try to do with such a phone is to switch to some alternate firmware (the coined term is ROM ), like CyanogenMod. Flashing a firmware is a whole new universe. You are told about a lot of proprietary tools, you need to download a lot of things from MegaUpload and friends and nobody really explains what s going on under the hood. I was a bit lost at first. I will not provide a step-by-step guide since I cannot afford to stay up-to-date. Such a guide is usually posted on some forum. It assumes you are running Windows and provides appropriate download links. You must follow it (and check that it is recent enough). I will just provide you some background to understand those guides.

Android firmwares There are several Android firmwares. Most of them are specific to a given phone (or its close variations). They can be sorted in three categories:

1. Official firmwares from the phone manufacturer include a kernel with appropriate drivers and, usually, a customized interface (HTC Sense for HTC, TouchWiz for Samsung). Some manufacturers will lag a lot behind Android schedule and you may not get all the new shiny features.
2. Modified firmwares are built from the official firmwares. They usually add a lot of hacks on top of the original firmware, remove some cruft but are still closely related to the official firmware.
3. Firmwares built from Android Open Source Project (the open source version of Android) do not share nothing with the official firmware except some bits related to the kernel (drivers, hacks).

Darky ROM Darky ROM is a modified firmware. It takes the original firmware from Samsung, adds a custom kernel (based on the source of the official kernel), adds a lot of hacks, some additional applications and removes some unwanted cruft. This is a very nice firmware which is quite snappy. This is a drop-in replacement for the default firmware: you will only get improvements. The latest version is 10.1 and there is a neat guide on how to install it.

CyanogenMod CyanogenMod is a firmware built from AOSP. It supports several devices and provide an unified firmware on all of them. Support for the Samsung Galaxy S is recent and is not present in the stable build. However, some RC build is now available. Be sure to read the FAQ (most notably the part saying that you need to install from Froyo 2.2 because the bootloader provided by Samsung with Gingerbread 2.3 is not compatible). You can also grab some information from the wiki. The major drawback of using this firmware instead of going for a modified firmware like Darky ROM is that the battery life may suck. I now need to charge my phone every day instead of once every two days. On the plus side, you get a very clean firmware with a lot of features and almost no cruft. For example, the notification bar can be customized and OpenVPN is available out of the box. Moreover, almost everything is open source (if you don t install Google apps). You can see this firmware as an open source distribution for your phone. There is no need to download random files linked from a random forum to make it work. There is no package manager, though. Despite the bad battery life, I prefer this firmware.

Prerequisites Before trying to flash a new firmware, there are some tools that you need to have. Note that you don t need root access to flash a new firmware.

Download & recovery mode Before trying to install any firmware, you must check that your phone can access download and recovery modes. The download mode allows to flash any new firmware, even if the current firmware does not boot at all. As long as this mode is available, there is very little chance that you brick your phone. To access those modes, you need to use the three-button combo . Here are the steps (your phone should not be plugged):

1. Power off the phone (wait for the phone to vibrate).
2. Hold the Volume down button for download mode. Hold the Volume up button for recovery mode.
3. Hold the Home button.
4. Hold the Power button. The phone will start.
5. Once you have the Samsung logo displayed on the screen, release the Power button.
6. Only release the two other buttons when you enter the recovery mode or download mode. The recovery mode displays a menu. The download mode displays a big yellow Android logo.

If after ten tries, you are unable to access those modes, maybe they have been disabled. Keep reading, there is a solution.

Heimdall Heimdall is a tool to flash a new firmware to your phone. This is not a mandatory tool but you will have to use it if something goes wrong. Most guides will tell you to use Odin. It is a leaked Samsung tool running on Windows only. You can use Heimdall instead.

$ git clone https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/Heimdall.git
Cloning into Heimdall...
remote: Counting objects: 423, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (271/271), done.
remote: Total 423 (delta 220), reused 332 (delta 138)
Receiving objects: 100% (423/423), 5.91 MiB   962 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (220/220), done.
$ cd Heimdall/heimdall
$ sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0-dev
$ ./configure && make
[...]
$ sudo cp 60-heimdall-galaxy-s.rules /etc/udev/rules.d
$ sudo /etc/init.d/udev reload

You need to use this tool while in download mode. You can test it, while in download mode, with:

$ ./heimdall print-pit

This will display the partition table of your phone. This is enlightening to know what it contains:

• IBL+PBL is the boot loader, be extra careful with it;
• PIT is the partition table;
• EFS contains some important data like IEMEI, be extra careful with it;
• SBL is the second boot loader;
• SBL2 is the backup of the second boot loader;
• PARAM contains some images used as various stage of the boot process;
• KERNEL is the kernel;
• RECOVERY is the backup of the kernel;
• FACTORYFS contains /system file system which is some kind of root file system;
• DBDATA contains /data file system which is the database to store application parameters;
• CACHE contains /cache file system which contains the Dalvik cache;
• MODEM contains the firmware for the modem.

As we will see, Heimdall is able to flash any of those partitions with flash subcommand.

adb adb stands for Android Debug Bridge. Among other things, this tool allow you to drive your phone through the USB connection. You can get a shell, reboot into download or recovery mode, push files to your Android device, etc. To get this tool, you need to download the full Android SDK.

$ tar zxvf ~/download/android-sdk_r11-linux_x86.tgz
$ cd android-sdk-linux_x86
$ tools/android update sdk
[select Android SDK Platform-tools]
$ platform-tools/adb shell
# uname -a
Linux localhost 2.6.35.7-I9000XWJVH-CL184813 #Dark_Core_2.4 PREEMPT Mon May 16 15:02:38 EEST 2011 armv7l GNU/Linux

The important commands are:

• shell to get a shell on the device;
• reboot recovery to reboot in recovery mode;
• reboot download to reboot in download mode;
• push to put a file on the phone;
• pull to retrieve a file;
• install to install an application from its APK;
• logcat to see the logs and what happens, very useful!

Restore download mode If your phone is missing download mode, you can recover it with the help of adb and heimdall. You need to grab some official firmware and extract boot.bin and Sbl.bin from it.

$ adb reboot download
$ heimdall flash --primary-boot ~/download/boot.bin --secondary-boot ~/download/Sbl.bin

Be extra careful here. You may brick your phone. Double check that you grab the correct files and that they are really for your phone (there exists some variants). It worked for me.

Installing a new firmware While you can switch from one firmware to another without losing your data, it is better to wipe your system and your data before switching firmware. This means that you will lose all your applications and the data inside them (list of contacts, SMS, preferences). However, nothing will ever modify your data in the internal SD card or in the external SD card (which are both inside the phone). They usually contains your music and your photos. There are two ways to install a firmware:

1. via Heimdall, or
2. using the recovery.

Heimdall When a guide tells you to use Odin, you can use Heimdall instead. Odin takes a TAR file. You should untar it and uses its content with Heimdall. For example:

$ ./heimdall flash --repartition --pit s1_odin_20100512.pit \
>                  --factoryfs factoryfs.rfs \
>                  --cache cache.rfs --dbdata dbdata.rfs \
>                  --param param.lfs --modem modem.bin \
>                  --kernel zImage --secondary-boot Sbl.bin 
Claiming interface again...   Success
Setting up interface...   Success
Beginning session...
Handshaking with Loke...   Success
Uploading PIT
PIT upload successful
Uploading SBL
100%
SBL upload successful
Uploading KERNEL
100%
KERNEL upload successful
Uploading MODEM
100%
MODEM upload successful
Uploading PARAM
100%
PARAM upload successful
Uploading FACTORYFS
100%
FACTORYFS upload successful
Uploading DBDATAFS
100%
DBDATAFS upload successful
Uploading CACHE
100%
CACHE upload successful
Ending session...
Rebooting device...

You may be interested to update your modem using Heimdall. This is usually independent of the firmware you want to use. Also, no need to provide a PIT file if you don t want to repartition. Heimdall can read the current one and flash only one of the partitions.

Recovery mode The base recovery shipped with the Samsung Galaxy S does not have a lot of options. Moreover, it may be locked and will accept to install only signed firmwares. Most firmwares come with ClockWorkMod, a more advanced recovery. Once you get it, you will be able to use any ZIP file to install a new firmware. My advice is to try to get ClockWorkMod as soon as possible. If you are root, you can install ROM Manager that will install it for you. If you are not root, most custom firmwares will provide ClockWorkMod. Therefore, you can just install a custom firmware with Heimdall. There exists special firmwares just for this, like EZbase. If you want to install CyanogenMod, be sure to download a Froyo firmware, not a Gingerbread one. Keep in mind that the recovery is located inside the kernel. It is not self-contained in the bootloader (unlike download mode). If you don t want to flash a whole firmware (and lose everything on your phone) just to get the recovery, you can just flash the kernel. The ClockWorkMod recovery comes with an utility to backup your whole phone. This way, you can easily restore your previous firmware if you don t like the current one. This is what is called a Nandroid backup.

Lagfix A lot of guides will tell you to enable or disable lagfix. Samsung shipped the Galaxy S with some crappy filesystem called RFS (which is some kind of enhanced FAT). It is slow and seems responsible for some lags that may happen on the interface. A lagfix is a way to replace this filesystem by something better, like EXT4 or YAFFS2. The process is pretty straighforward and consist to backup all the partition to the SD card, reformat it with another filesystem and restore the backup. The lagfix may be applied automatically with some firmware (like CyanogenMod) or you may request it in the recovery mode (most modified firmwares work this way). In this case, it will be applied automatically on the next boot. You should disable it before installing another firmware with the recovery mode (no need if you install it with Heimdall).

Applications You can find many free (as in free speech) applications for Android. Unfortunately, Android Market does not allow to use this criteria as a filter. F-Droid is an alternate market featuring only FOSS applications. Here is a short selection of free applications:

• ADW.Launcher is a home replacement app. It is very configurable and themable.
• K-9 Mail is a very nice email client.
• Xabber is a XMPP/Jabber client.
• ConnectBot is an SSH client (as well as a terminal).
• DroidWall is an application firewall (using Netfilter). It lets you select which application can access to Internet depending on your connection (wifi or 3G).
• Barcode Scanner decodes 1D/2D barcode including QR codes.
• OsmAnd is a replacement for Google Maps using OpenStreetMap. The free version on Android Market is out-dated. Buy the plus version or download it throught F-Droid.

Another must-have application is Titanium Backup which allows to backup any application with data. Unfortunately, this is not a free (as in free speech) application.

I have bought a Samsung Galaxy S Android phone some time ago. One of the first thing that you try to do with such a phone is to switch to some alternate firmware (the coined term is ROM ), like CyanogenMod. Flashing a firmware is a whole new universe. You are told about a lot of proprietary tools, you need to download a lot of things from MegaUpload and friends and nobody really explains what s going on under the hood. I was a bit lost at first. I will not provide a step-by-step guide since I cannot afford to stay up-to-date. Such a guide is usually posted on some forum. It assumes you are running Windows and provides appropriate download links. You must follow it (and check that it is recent enough). I will just provide you some background to understand those guides.

Android firmwares There are several Android firmwares. Most of them are specific to a given phone (or its close variations). They can be sorted in three categories:

1. Official firmwares from the phone manufacturer include a kernel with appropriate drivers and, usually, a customized interface (HTC Sense for HTC, TouchWiz for Samsung). Some manufacturers will lag a lot behind Android schedule and you may not get all the new shiny features.
2. Modified firmwares are built from the official firmwares. They usually add a lot of hacks on top of the original firmware, remove some cruft but are still closely related to the official firmware.
3. Firmwares built from Android Open Source Project (the open source version of Android) do not share nothing with the official firmware except some bits related to the kernel (drivers, hacks).

Darky ROM Darky ROM is a modified firmware. It takes the original firmware from Samsung, adds a custom kernel (based on the source of the official kernel), adds a lot of hacks, some additional applications and removes some unwanted cruft. This is a very nice firmware which is quite snappy. This is a drop-in replacement for the default firmware: you will only get improvements. The latest version is 10.1 and there is a neat guide on how to install it.

CyanogenMod CyanogenMod is a firmware built from AOSP. It supports several devices and provide an unified firmware on all of them. Support for the Samsung Galaxy S is recent and is not present in the stable build. However, some RC build is now available. Be sure to read the FAQ (most notably the part saying that you need to install from Froyo 2.2 because the bootloader provided by Samsung with Gingerbread 2.3 is not compatible). You can also grab some information from the wiki. The major drawback of using this firmware instead of going for a modified firmware like Darky ROM is that the battery life may suck. I now need to charge my phone every day instead of once every two days. On the plus side, you get a very clean firmware with a lot of features and almost no cruft. For example, the notification bar can be customized and OpenVPN is available out of the box. Moreover, almost everything is open source (if you don t install Google apps). You can see this firmware as an open source distribution for your phone. There is no need to download random files linked from a random forum to make it work. There is no package manager, though. Despite the bad battery life, I prefer this firmware.

Prerequisites Before trying to flash a new firmware, there are some tools that you need to have. Note that you don t need root access to flash a new firmware.

Download & recovery mode Before trying to install any firmware, you must check that your phone can access download and recovery modes. The download mode allows to flash any new firmware, even if the current firmware does not boot at all. As long as this mode is available, there is very little chance that you brick your phone. To access those modes, you need to use the three-button combo . Here are the steps (your phone should not be plugged):

1. Power off the phone (wait for the phone to vibrate).
2. Hold the Volume down button for download mode. Hold the Volume up button for recovery mode.
3. Hold the Home button.
4. Hold the Power button. The phone will start.
5. Once you have the Samsung logo displayed on the screen, release the Power button.
6. Only release the two other buttons when you enter the recovery mode or download mode. The recovery mode displays a menu. The download mode displays a big yellow Android logo.

If after ten tries, you are unable to access those modes, maybe they have been disabled. Keep reading, there is a solution.

Heimdall Heimdall is a tool to flash a new firmware to your phone. This is not a mandatory tool but you will have to use it if something goes wrong. Most guides will tell you to use Odin. It is a leaked Samsung tool running on Windows only. You can use Heimdall instead.

$ git clone https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/Heimdall.git
Cloning into Heimdall...
remote: Counting objects: 423, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (271/271), done.
remote: Total 423 (delta 220), reused 332 (delta 138)
Receiving objects: 100% (423/423), 5.91 MiB   962 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (220/220), done.
$ cd Heimdall/heimdall
$ sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0-dev
$ ./configure && make
[...]
$ sudo cp 60-heimdall-galaxy-s.rules /etc/udev/rules.d
$ sudo /etc/init.d/udev reload

You need to use this tool while in download mode. You can test it, while in download mode, with:

$ ./heimdall print-pit

This will display the partition table of your phone. This is enlightening to know what it contains:

• IBL+PBL is the boot loader, be extra careful with it;
• PIT is the partition table;
• EFS contains some important data like IEMEI, be extra careful with it;
• SBL is the second boot loader;
• SBL2 is the backup of the second boot loader;
• PARAM contains some images used as various stage of the boot process;
• KERNEL is the kernel;
• RECOVERY is the backup of the kernel;
• FACTORYFS contains /system file system which is some kind of root file system;
• DBDATA contains /data file system which is the database to store application parameters;
• CACHE contains /cache file system which contains the Dalvik cache;
• MODEM contains the firmware for the modem.

As we will see, Heimdall is able to flash any of those partitions with flash subcommand.

adb adb stands for Android Debug Bridge. Among other things, this tool allow you to drive your phone through the USB connection. You can get a shell, reboot into download or recovery mode, push files to your Android device, etc. To get this tool, you need to download the full Android SDK.

$ tar zxvf ~/download/android-sdk_r11-linux_x86.tgz
$ cd android-sdk-linux_x86
$ tools/android update sdk
[select Android SDK Platform-tools]
$ platform-tools/adb shell
# uname -a
Linux localhost 2.6.35.7-I9000XWJVH-CL184813 #Dark_Core_2.4 PREEMPT Mon May 16 15:02:38 EEST 2011 armv7l GNU/Linux

The important commands are:

• shell to get a shell on the device;
• reboot recovery to reboot in recovery mode;
• reboot download to reboot in download mode;
• push to put a file on the phone;
• pull to retrieve a file;
• install to install an application from its APK;
• logcat to see the logs and what happens, very useful!

Restore download mode If your phone is missing download mode, you can recover it with the help of adb and heimdall. You need to grab some official firmware and extract boot.bin and Sbl.bin from it.

$ adb reboot download
$ heimdall flash --primary-boot ~/download/boot.bin --secondary-boot ~/download/Sbl.bin

Be extra careful here. You may brick your phone. Double check that you grab the correct files and that they are really for your phone (there exists some variants). It worked for me.

Installing a new firmware While you can switch from one firmware to another without losing your data, it is better to wipe your system and your data before switching firmware. This means that you will lose all your applications and the data inside them (list of contacts, SMS, preferences). However, nothing will ever modify your data in the internal SD card or in the external SD card (which are both inside the phone). They usually contains your music and your photos. There are two ways to install a firmware:

1. via Heimdall, or
2. using the recovery.

Heimdall When a guide tells you to use Odin, you can use Heimdall instead. Odin takes a TAR file. You should untar it and uses its content with Heimdall. For example:

$ ./heimdall flash --repartition --pit s1_odin_20100512.pit \
>                  --factoryfs factoryfs.rfs \
>                  --cache cache.rfs --dbdata dbdata.rfs \
>                  --param param.lfs --modem modem.bin \
>                  --kernel zImage --secondary-boot Sbl.bin 
Claiming interface again...   Success
Setting up interface...   Success
Beginning session...
Handshaking with Loke...   Success
Uploading PIT
PIT upload successful
Uploading SBL
100%
SBL upload successful
Uploading KERNEL
100%
KERNEL upload successful
Uploading MODEM
100%
MODEM upload successful
Uploading PARAM
100%
PARAM upload successful
Uploading FACTORYFS
100%
FACTORYFS upload successful
Uploading DBDATAFS
100%
DBDATAFS upload successful
Uploading CACHE
100%
CACHE upload successful
Ending session...
Rebooting device...

You may be interested to update your modem using Heimdall. This is usually independent of the firmware you want to use. Also, no need to provide a PIT file if you don t want to repartition. Heimdall can read the current one and flash only one of the partitions.

Recovery mode The base recovery shipped with the Samsung Galaxy S does not have a lot of options. Moreover, it may be locked and will accept to install only signed firmwares. Most firmwares come with ClockWorkMod, a more advanced recovery. Once you get it, you will be able to use any ZIP file to install a new firmware. My advice is to try to get ClockWorkMod as soon as possible. If you are root, you can install ROM Manager that will install it for you. If you are not root, most custom firmwares will provide ClockWorkMod. Therefore, you can just install a custom firmware with Heimdall. There exists special firmwares just for this, like EZbase. If you want to install CyanogenMod, be sure to download a Froyo firmware, not a Gingerbread one. Keep in mind that the recovery is located inside the kernel. It is not self-contained in the bootloader (unlike download mode). If you don t want to flash a whole firmware (and lose everything on your phone) just to get the recovery, you can just flash the kernel. The ClockWorkMod recovery comes with an utility to backup your whole phone. This way, you can easily restore your previous firmware if you don t like the current one. This is what is called a Nandroid backup.

Lagfix A lot of guides will tell you to enable or disable lagfix. Samsung shipped the Galaxy S with some crappy filesystem called RFS (which is some kind of enhanced FAT). It is slow and seems responsible for some lags that may happen on the interface. A lagfix is a way to replace this filesystem by something better, like EXT4 or YAFFS2. The process is pretty straighforward and consist to backup all the partition to the SD card, reformat it with another filesystem and restore the backup. The lagfix may be applied automatically with some firmware (like CyanogenMod) or you may request it in the recovery mode (most modified firmwares work this way). In this case, it will be applied automatically on the next boot. You should disable it before installing another firmware with the recovery mode (no need if you install it with Heimdall).

Applications You can find many free (as in free speech) applications for Android. Unfortunately, Android Market does not allow to use this criteria as a filter. F-Droid is an alternate market featuring only FOSS applications. Here is a short selection of free applications:

• ADW.Launcher is a home replacement app. It is very configurable and themable.
• K-9 Mail is a very nice email client.
• Xabber is a XMPP/Jabber client.
• ConnectBot is an SSH client (as well as a terminal).
• DroidWall is an application firewall (using Netfilter). It lets you select which application can access to Internet depending on your connection (wifi or 3G).
• Barcode Scanner decodes 1D/2D barcode including QR codes.
• OsmAnd is a replacement for Google Maps using OpenStreetMap. The free version on Android Market is out-dated. Buy the plus version or download it throught F-Droid.

Another must-have application is Titanium Backup which allows to backup any application with data. Unfortunately, this is not a free (as in free speech) application.

Hello The last version (1.247, available in Debian unstable as libconfig-model-perl) of Config::Model provides a brand new model for /etc/LCDd.conf. With this model, you can edit or validate your lcdproc configuration. To edit this configuration the first time, you will have to run:

config-edit -application lcdproc -force

The -force option is required to load the file the first time. (because the default LCDd.conf file contains configuration options for all drivers, even though only one them if usefull). You will get this screen:
In this screen, you can setup the driver for your adress with a right click on Driver parameter. Once youv e selected the driver and clicked on store , the driver will be listed in the left part of the window so you can tune the parameters of this specific driver: In this screen, I ve turned the backlight off and added a small note to remember why. This small note will be writted in a comment in /etc/LCDd.conf. Once all required modifications are done, it s time to save the configuration file using the menu entry File -> save Now, let s see the resulting file (which is a bit long due to the amount of comments in the original LCDd.conf file):

## This file was written by Config::Model
## You may modify the content of this file. Configuration
## modifications will be preserved. Modifications in
## comments may be mangled.
# LCDd.conf -- configuration file for the LCDproc server daemon LCDd
#
# This file contains the configuration for the LCDd server.
#
# The format is ini-file-like. It is divided into sections that start at
# markers that look like [section]. Comments are all line-based comments,
# and are lines that start with '
#
# The server has a 'central' section named [server]. For the menu there is
# a section called [menu]. Further each driver has a section which
# defines how the driver acts.
#
# The drivers are activated by specifiying them in a driver= line in the
# server section, like:
#
#   Driver=curses
#
# This tells LCDd to use the curses driver.
# The first driver that is loaded and is capable of output defines the
# size of the display. The default driver to use is curses.
# If the driver is specified using the -d  command line option,
# the Driver= options in the config file are ignored.
#
# The drivers read their own options from the respective sections.
[server]
# Where can we find the driver modules ?
# IMPORTANT: Make sure to change this setting to reflect your
#            specific setup! Otherwise LCDd won't be able to find
#            the driver modules and will thus not be able to
#            function properly.
# NOTE: Always place a slash as last character !
DriverPath=/usr/lib/lcdproc/
# Tells the server to load the given drivers. Multiple lines can be given.
# The name of the driver is case sensitive and determines the section
# where to look for further configuration options of the specific driver
# as well as the name of the dynamic driver module to load at runtime.
# The latter one can be changed by giving af File= directive in the
# driver specific section.
#
# The following drivers are supported:
#   bayrad, CFontz, CFontz633, CFontzPacket, curses, CwLnx, ea65,
#   EyeboxOne, g15, glcdlib, glk, hd44780, icp_a106, imon, imonlcd,
#   IOWarrior, irman, joy, lb216, lcdm001, lcterm, lirc, lis, MD8800,
#   mdm166a, ms6931, mtc_s16209x, MtxOrb, mx5000, NoritakeVFD, picolcd,
#   pyramid, sed1330, sed1520, serialPOS, serialVFD, shuttleVFD, sli,
#   stv5730, svga, t6963, text, tyan, ula200, xosd
Driver=imonlcd
# Tells the driver to bind to the given interface
Bind=127.0.0.1
# Listen on this specified port; defaults to 13666.
Port=13666
ReportLevel=3
# Sets the reporting level; defaults to 2 (warnings and errors only).
# ReportLevel=3
# Should we report to syslog instead of stderr ? [default: no; legal: yes, no]
# ReportToSyslog=yes
# User to run as.  LCDd will drop its root priviledges, if any,
# and run as this user instead.
User=nobody
Foreground=no
Hello=    Hello
Hello=    LCDproc!
GoodBye=    GoodBye
GoodBye=    LCDproc!
# The server will stay in the foreground if set to true.
# Foreground=no
# Hello message: each entry represents a display line; default: builtin
# Hello="  Welcome to"
# Hello="   LCDproc!"
# GoodBye message: each entry represents a display line; default: builtin
# GoodBye="Thanks for using"
# GoodBye="   LCDproc!"
# Sets the default time in seconds to displays a screen.
WaitTime=5
# If yes, the the serverscreen will be rotated as a usual info screen. If no,
# it will be a background screen, only visible when no other screens are
# active. The special value 'blank' is similar to no, but only a blank screen
# is displayed. [default: on; legal: on, off, blank]
# ServerScreen=no
# Set master backlight setting. If set to 'open' a client may control the
# backlight for its own screens (only). [default: open; legal: off, open, on]
# Backlight=open
# Set master heartbeat setting. If set to 'open' a client may control the
# heartbeat for its own screens (only). [default: open; legal: off, open, on]
# Heartbeat=open
# set title scrolling speed [default: 10; legal: 0-10]
# TitleSpeed=10
# The "...Key=" lines define what the server does with keypresses that
# don't go to any client.
# These are the defaults:
ToggleRotateKey=Enter
PrevScreenKey=Left
NextScreenKey=Right
ScrollUpKey=Up
ScrollDownKey=Down
# ScrollUpKey=Up
# ScrollDownKey=Down
# If you have only 4 keys, you can choose to use this:
# ToggleRotateKey=Enter
# PrevScreenKey=Up
# NextScreenKey=Down
# If you have only 3 keys, you can choose to use this:
# ToggleRotateKey=Enter
# PrevScreenKey=Up
[menu]
# You can configure what keys the menu should use. Note that the MenuKey
# will be reserved exclusively, the others work in shared mode.
# The following works excellent with 4 keys or more.
MenuKey=Escape
EnterKey=Enter
UpKey=Up
DownKey=Down
LeftKey=Left
RightKey=Right
[imonlcd]
Protocol=0
OnExit=2
Device=/dev/lcd0
# My fishes dont like the glow
Backlight=off
DiscMode=0

You will notice a few things:

• Comments from the original file in section [server] and [menu] were kept
• Unused drivers sections are gone
• The fishy note about backlight was saved as a comment above the backlight parameter

If you need to update the file, you will have to run:

sudo config-edit -application lcdproc

The -force option is no longer needed. If you don t like to click, you can run:

config-edit -application lcdproc -ui none -save

For instance:

config-edit -application lcdproc -ui none -save 'server driver=imonlcd - imonlcd Device="/dev/lcd1" '

Further reading If you want to know more about lcdproc model, you can view:

• LCDd model and all models for the drivers
• LCDd documentation and the drivers documentationgenerated from these models

Under the hood I was too lazy to write myself the models of all drivers (about 3500 lines for them all). All models were generated from the LCDd.conf template file provided by lcdproc project. This blog explains how this was done. But the result is far from perfect. Event though LCDd.conf comments give a lot of semantic information, parameter types could be better adjusted and some of the examples provided in LCDd.conf confuse the model generator.
So the current comments are good, but not enough. In the future, we could decide on better structural conventions for the comments that would give users the information they need and give a model generator enough information to generate better models. This will hopefully be the topic of yet another blog All the best

Right around the time I immigrated to the US Alex Trebek began a revival of a TV game show originally hosted by Art Fleming called Jeopardy. In fact I believe I saw the first episode or one of the first ones anyway. And ever since I began watching, people have said to me I ought to be a contestant. I've tried to get on every now and again with little success until this year. In February I took the online entrance test not expecting any results as usual. Indeed nothing happened at first then suddenly, a few weeks ago, I was surprised to receive an email inviting me to an audition. So today (or yesterday depending on when you read this. June 27th.) I went to a conference room in the New York Sheraton Towers hotel to show off my telegenic looks, rapier wit and mastery of general knowledge to the Jeopardy producers. I had to bring in a list of five fun facts about myself for the between-round amusing banter. You'll have to wait until I actually appear on the show (if in fact I do. See below.) but let me assure you my banter is very amusing. My spirit flagged a bit when they took a photo of me for their files. I managed to do a convincing impression of Tow Mater from Cars 2 which is not quite the showbiz look I was going for. My morale rose again after the next portion of the audition in which you had to answer 50 trivia questions in about 8 minutes. They don't tell you your score but based on my conversations with fellow auditionees (there were about 20 of us) I think I only got 1 wrong. The next part of the audition was a mock game with a real board and buzzers etc. I was in the first group of three to play which further leads me to believe I got a good score in the questions. Unfortunately I had a bit of bad luck in the categories half of which were not in my strong subjects but I did ok. More importantly I demonstrated a good speaking voice (a lot of people mumble or speak too softly), good buzzer technique and as I may have previously mentioned, amusing banter. Does this mean I am actually going to be on TV? I don't know. Every year they select approximately 2,000 people for auditions and of those, around 400 are selected for the contestant pool. So I have a 1 in 5 chance of making it. The consensus in the group was I had done pretty well for a first timer (Some were making their second or third attempt.) so I am optimistic. All I know is that sometime in the next 18 months I might receive the call to fly to Los Angeles and fulfill my destiny. Btw, in case you were wondering about the title.

It has been over 5 years since we voted on the GNU FDL. At the time I was misled by certain people who insisted that they had inside knowledge and that the GFDL was going to be fixed within the year. The FDL is still a bad license, and the successor meant to be less bad, the GSFDL, has not progressed beyond a discussion draft from September 2006. Personally, I feel dirty having voted the way I did. We compromised our principles and ended up in a stalemate that many people on either side of the issue are still unhappy about to this day. Hopefully I have learned my lesson.

I ve gotten fed up with Evolution s bugs and slowness. Even though I experience less problems than some weeks ago since I ve applied a patch related to locks in e-d-s, Evolution has now become really too slow and given that my mail flow is not really diminishing, I ve come to the point when I think about migrating. I ve been a user of Gnus for years also (at home, with much satisfaction, as it runs fine inside a GNU Screen), so I could switch to it with moderate damage. Also, as I m using org-mode, it would be quite complementary of course, staying more in Emacs One nice (and even priceless) feature of Evolution is the vfolders, that allow me to manage the tons of emails in different contexts, wherever that may be located. AFAIK, Gnus doesn t offer any comparable feature. But it seems that the most interesting way to have it is to integrate Gnus with NotMuch. Fortunately, my colleague Roland has written a nice howto explaining (among other details of his mail system setup) how to integrate these together. Now, if I m able to setup a similar NotMuch + Gnus setup for newly received mail, I m left with migrating all my piles of old mail, currently stored in Evolution. It seems that one possible way to do so is through copying Evolution mail folders into a newly setup local IMAP server s Maildir storage. The copy is supposed to preserve some flags like the read/unread status of the important flag. From the first tests I ve made, it s possible to install a local Dovecot IMAPd server, configure it so that the mail is stored in the user s ~/Maildir/ maildir directory, which can then be recognized by Evolution as a target for copying mail. It seems that nomuch can then be configured so that it doesn t flag all new mails as unread, and understangs the imap server flags accordingly (unread, important, and such). Needless to say, I m glad all these useful programs are packaged in Debian I need to make further tests and also test Gnus + Notmuch integration, but having a possible solution to migrate my existing mail looks like a relief. I d be curious to read your alternative ideas for such a migration. Stay tuned for next iterations.

As a Debian/Ubuntu user, you re likely to be exposed at some point to an error reported by dpkg. In a series of articles, I ll explain some of the errors that you might encounter. Some error messages can be confusing at times. Most of the error strings do not appear very often and developers thus tend to use very terse description of the underlying problem. In other cases the architecture of the software makes it difficult to pin-point the real problem because the part that displays the error is several layers above the one that generated the initial error. This is for example the case with this error of dpkg:

Unpacking replacement xulrunner-1.9.2 ...
dpkg-deb (subprocess): data: internal gzip read error: '<fd:0>: too many length or distance symbols'
dpkg-deb: error: subprocess <decompress> returned error exit status 2
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/xulrunner-1.9.2_1.9.2.17+build3+nobinonly-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb (--unpack):
 short read on buffer copy for backend dpkg-deb during  ./usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.2.17/components/libdbusservice.so'

First, the decompression layer discovers something unexpected in the data read in the .deb file and dpkg-deb outputs the error message coming from zlib ( too many length or distance symbols ). This causes the premature end of dpkg-deb --fsys-tarfile that dpkg had executed to extract the .data.tar archive from the deb file. In turn, dpkg informs us that dpkg-deb did not send all the data that were announced (and hence the short read in the error message) and that were meant to be part of the file /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.2.17/components/libdbusservice.so . That s all nice but it doesn t help you much in general. What you must understand from the above is that the .deb file is corrupted (sometimes just truncated). In theory it should not happen since APT verifies the checksums of files when they are downloaded. But computers are not infallible and even if the downloaded data was good, it can have been corrupted when stored on disk (for example cheap SSD disks are known to not last very well). Try removing the file (usually with apt-get clean since it s stored in APT s cache) and let APT download it again. Chances are that it will work on the second try. Otherwise consider doing a memory and HDD check as something is probably broken in your computer.

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Just been testing the upcoming lintian 2.5.2 vendor-profile branch for operations with packages processed by emdebian-grip, both for the emdebian-grip and the emdebian-baked vendors.

The good news is that instead of the problematic support from Lenny, lintian in Wheezy will have support for testing Emdebian packages using Emdebian Policy. All Debian tags are up for grabs, no more exceptions for checks which couldn't be disabled before (like the forced removal of manpages).

Also been able to work out how to sort out lintian checks for Emdebian Crush including adding the extra tags which haven't seen use since Lenny.

So that's outline lintian support for Grip, Baked and Crush. Thanks to Niels Thykier for the lintian support.

Last week I tried switching a library to Gtk3. The needed changes to the code are available through --with-gtk3. However this is generally not enough. Even if your symbol list doesn't change, the ABI changes implicitly. The library in question had a .symbols file, but that's not enough because the resulting GUI application will bail out at runtime if symbols of both Gtk2 and Gtk3 are found in the same address space. That's mostly because C symbols don't contain any signatures with return types and parameters.

So if your library upstream did not change the soname for the Gtk3 build, please encourage them to do so. Also keep in mind that this most likely means new pkg-config files specific to the Gtk3 build, too. At least if you want your reverse-depends to be able to build against either Gtk2 or Gtk3 in a predictable way.

An example is this change to gtk-vnc, which uses gtk-vnc-2.0 as the new API/pkg-config name for the Gtk3 build, gtk-vnc-1.0 remains the old Gtk2 one. The soname changes from libgtk-vnc-1.0.so.0 to libgtk-vnc-2.0.so.0.

(Thanks to Michael Biebl and Julien Cristau for pointing out the obvious to me.)

The goal of this lab is to setup a site-to-site IPsec VPN. This lab is similar to my first lab using UML. The major differences are:

• We only setup one VPN instead of two.
• Static routing is used in place of BGP for inter-site routing. Moreover, BIRD is used as a routing daemon.
• VPN are using an external network for Internet access.
• Both internal network and external network are redundant using one OSPF instance each.

The lab

The big picture The main point of this architecture is that you get two redundant networks for each site. The external ones are used when hosts need Internet access. The internal ones are used when they want to communicate with each other. Because we don t want hosts from the first site to communicate with hosts from the second site through the external network, we extend the internal network with the help of a site-to-site IPsec VPN. Each set of networks is using two layer-3 networks on top of two layer-2 networks. OSPF is used to provide redundancy and aggregation. For example, R1 has two routes through V1 to access R2 which is on the other site:

# ip route show 192.168.96.0/19
192.168.96.0/19  proto zebra  metric 10000 
        nexthop via 192.168.1.100  dev eth0 weight 1
        nexthop via 192.168.2.100  dev eth1 weight 1

Setting up the lab First, grab the source of the lab:

$ git clone https://vincentbernat@github.com/vincentbernat/network-lab.git
$ cd network-lab/lab-s2s-vpn

You may try to run ./setup directly. It may be safer to build an image of Debian inside inside a directory and use it as a base for the lab.

$ sudo debootstrap sid ../sid-chroot http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian/
[...]
$ sudo chroot ../sid-chroot /bin/bash
# apt-get install iproute zsh rsyslog less makedev tcpdump
# apt-get install bird quagga racoon
# exit
$ ROOT=../sid-chroot ./setup

You still need a working UML kernel. On Ubuntu, the one provided in user-mode-linux does not contain the aufs.ko module. I did not find a simple workaround. You can just grab the package from Debian and install it on your Ubuntu with dpkg -i.

Use of BIRD With the previous lab, Quagga was used as an OSPF routing daemon. We still use it on R1, R2, E1 and E2. However, Quagga is not able to run multiple instances of OSPF. BIRD can. Therefore, we use it on V1 and V2 because we need two OSPF instances: one for the external network and one for the internal network. Since we also need ECMP, we need at least BIRD 1.3.0. BIRD allows the definition of multiple routing tables. Those tables are independant of the kernel routing tables. Each protocol will maintain its own set of routes and will allow to export (or import) routes from one of the routing table maintained by BIRD. In our setup, we use four protocols and only one routing table (the default one). The ospf EXTERNAL protocol is one of the two OSPF instances we use on V1. We import all the routes learned through the OSPF process into the internal BIRD routing table. We don t export any route from the BIRD routing table to this OSPF instance. Here is the configuration of this protocol:

protocol ospf EXTERNAL  
   ecmp yes;
   import all;
   export none;
   area 0.0.0.0  
      networks  
         203.0.113.0/26;
         203.0.113.64/26;
         203.0.113.150/32;
       ;
      interface "eth2";
      interface "eth3";
      interface "lo"  
        stub yes;
       ;
    ;
 

203.0.113.150/32 is defined on the loopback interface of V1. This is the IP of the local VPN endpoint. The ospf INTERNAL protocol is the second OSPF instance. We import all routes from this protocol to the BIRD routing table. We also want to advertise the route to the remote site. This route is defined in the static STATIC protocol and imported into BIRD routing table.

protocol static STATIC  
   import all;
   export none;
   route 192.168.96.0/19 via "lo";
 

Therefore, ospf INTERNAL protocol export all routes originating from the static STATIC protocol. This is done using filters:

protocol ospf INTERNAL  
   ecmp yes;
   import all;
   export filter  
     if proto = "STATIC" then accept;
     reject;
    ;
   area 0.0.0.0  
      networks  
         192.168.1.0/24;
         192.168.2.0/24;
       ;
      interface "eth0";
      interface "eth1";
    ;
 

The kernel protocol is managing one kernel routing table. By default, it handles the main table. We don t import any route from the kernel. However, we copy routes that come from other protocols, except the static route because we already have a default route and the static route is some kind of blackhole, we don t want to use it for real routing.

protocol kernel  
   persist;
   import none;
   export filter  
     if proto = "EXTERNAL" then accept;
     if proto = "INTERNAL" then accept;
     reject;
    ;
 

The filtering mechanism built inside BIRD is pretty powerful.

Testing After starting the lab, you need to wait a few seconds. You should then be able to ping R2 from R1:

R1# ping -c3 -I 192.168.15.1 192.168.115.1
PING 192.168.115.1 (192.168.115.1) from 192.168.15.1 : 56(84) bytes of data.
Warning: time of day goes back (-5435us), taking countermeasures.
64 bytes from 192.168.115.1: icmp_req=1 ttl=62 time=0.921 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.115.1: icmp_req=2 ttl=62 time=0.569 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.115.1: icmp_req=3 ttl=62 time=0.698 ms
--- 192.168.115.1 ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2009ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.569/0.729/0.921/0.147 ms

On V1, you can check BIRD internal routing table using birdc:

> show route 
0.0.0.0/0          multipath [EXTERNAL 19:43] * E2 (150/10/1) [0.0.0.11]
        via 203.0.113.1 on eth2 weight 1
        via 203.0.113.65 on eth3 weight 1
192.168.96.0/19    dev lo [STATIC 19:42] * (200)
192.168.1.0/24     dev eth0 [INTERNAL 19:42] * I (150/10) [0.0.0.100]
192.168.2.0/24     dev eth1 [INTERNAL 19:42] * I (150/10) [0.0.0.100]
192.168.15.0/24    multipath [INTERNAL 19:43] * I (150/20) [0.0.0.10]
        via 192.168.1.10 on eth0 weight 1
        via 192.168.2.10 on eth1 weight 1
203.0.113.0/26     dev eth2 [EXTERNAL 19:42] * I (150/10) [0.0.0.100]
203.0.113.64/26    dev eth3 [EXTERNAL 19:42] * I (150/10) [0.0.0.100]
203.0.113.150/32   dev lo [EXTERNAL 19:42] * I (150/0) [0.0.0.100]

The kernel routing table is similar except it does not contain the static route.

Adding more redundancy The first goal of this lab was to test multiple OSPF instances and ECMP with BIRD. It could be completed:

• Adding a redundant VPN is easy: this is just a matter of duplicating the setup of the existing VPN.
• Each router should be redundant by getting a sibling with the same configuration. In the case of R1 and R2, a VIP could be shared between the router and its sibling with VRRP to allow hosts behind to have a single gateway and not use a routing protocol.
• Because of the use of static routes instead of BGP, there is nothing to detect a VPN failure (which may be problematic if we setup a redundant VPN). Some VPN are able to invalidate a route when the associated VPN is down. This is not our case. Moreover, there may be some duplication in routing. This is not the case here because each site has its own internal network.

The goal of this lab is to setup a site-to-site IPsec VPN. This lab is similar to my first lab using UML. The major differences are:

• We only setup one VPN instead of two.
• Static routing is used in place of BGP for inter-site routing. Moreover, BIRD is used as a routing daemon.
• VPN are using an external network for Internet access.
• Both internal network and external network are redundant using one OSPF instance each.

The lab

The big picture The main point of this architecture is that you get two redundant networks for each site. The external ones are used when hosts need Internet access. The internal ones are used when they want to communicate with each other. Because we don t want hosts from the first site to communicate with hosts from the second site through the external network, we extend the internal network with the help of a site-to-site IPsec VPN. Each set of networks is using two layer-3 networks on top of two layer-2 networks. OSPF is used to provide redundancy and aggregation. For example, R1 has two routes through V1 to access R2 which is on the other site:

# ip route show 192.168.96.0/19
192.168.96.0/19  proto zebra  metric 10000 
        nexthop via 192.168.1.100  dev eth0 weight 1
        nexthop via 192.168.2.100  dev eth1 weight 1

Setting up the lab First, grab the source of the lab:

$ git clone https://vincentbernat@github.com/vincentbernat/network-lab.git
$ cd network-lab/lab-s2s-vpn

You may try to run ./setup directly. It may be safer to build an image of Debian inside inside a directory and use it as a base for the lab.

$ sudo debootstrap sid ../sid-chroot http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian/
[...]
$ sudo chroot ../sid-chroot /bin/bash
# apt-get install iproute zsh rsyslog less makedev tcpdump
# apt-get install bird quagga racoon
# exit
$ ROOT=../sid-chroot ./setup

You still need a working UML kernel. On Ubuntu, the one provided in user-mode-linux does not contain the aufs.ko module. I did not find a simple workaround. You can just grab the package from Debian and install it on your Ubuntu with dpkg -i.

Use of BIRD With the previous lab, Quagga was used as an OSPF routing daemon. We still use it on R1, R2, E1 and E2. However, Quagga is not able to run multiple instances of OSPF. BIRD can. Therefore, we use it on V1 and V2 because we need two OSPF instances: one for the external network and one for the internal network. Since we also need ECMP, we need at least BIRD 1.3.0. BIRD allows the definition of multiple routing tables. Those tables are independant of the kernel routing tables. Each protocol will maintain its own set of routes and will allow to export (or import) routes from one of the routing table maintained by BIRD. In our setup, we use four protocols and only one routing table (the default one). The ospf EXTERNAL protocol is one of the two OSPF instances we use on V1. We import all the routes learned through the OSPF process into the internal BIRD routing table. We don t export any route from the BIRD routing table to this OSPF instance. Here is the configuration of this protocol:

protocol ospf EXTERNAL  
   ecmp yes;
   import all;
   export none;
   area 0.0.0.0  
      networks  
         203.0.113.0/26;
         203.0.113.64/26;
         203.0.113.150/32;
       ;
      interface "eth2";
      interface "eth3";
      interface "lo"  
        stub yes;
       ;
    ;
 

203.0.113.150/32 is defined on the loopback interface of V1. This is the IP of the local VPN endpoint. The ospf INTERNAL protocol is the second OSPF instance. We import all routes from this protocol to the BIRD routing table. We also want to advertise the route to the remote site. This route is defined in the static STATIC protocol and imported into BIRD routing table.

protocol static STATIC  
   import all;
   export none;
   route 192.168.96.0/19 via "lo";
 

Therefore, ospf INTERNAL protocol export all routes originating from the static STATIC protocol. This is done using filters:

protocol ospf INTERNAL  
   ecmp yes;
   import all;
   export filter  
     if proto = "STATIC" then accept;
     reject;
    ;
   area 0.0.0.0  
      networks  
         192.168.1.0/24;
         192.168.2.0/24;
       ;
      interface "eth0";
      interface "eth1";
    ;
 

The kernel protocol is managing one kernel routing table. By default, it handles the main table. We don t import any route from the kernel. However, we copy routes that come from other protocols, except the static route because we already have a default route and the static route is some kind of blackhole, we don t want to use it for real routing.

protocol kernel  
   persist;
   import none;
   export filter  
     if proto = "EXTERNAL" then accept;
     if proto = "INTERNAL" then accept;
     reject;
    ;
 

The filtering mechanism built inside BIRD is pretty powerful.

Testing After starting the lab, you need to wait a few seconds. You should then be able to ping R2 from R1:

R1# ping -c3 -I 192.168.15.1 192.168.115.1
PING 192.168.115.1 (192.168.115.1) from 192.168.15.1 : 56(84) bytes of data.
Warning: time of day goes back (-5435us), taking countermeasures.
64 bytes from 192.168.115.1: icmp_req=1 ttl=62 time=0.921 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.115.1: icmp_req=2 ttl=62 time=0.569 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.115.1: icmp_req=3 ttl=62 time=0.698 ms
--- 192.168.115.1 ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2009ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.569/0.729/0.921/0.147 ms

On V1, you can check BIRD internal routing table using birdc:

> show route 
0.0.0.0/0          multipath [EXTERNAL 19:43] * E2 (150/10/1) [0.0.0.11]
        via 203.0.113.1 on eth2 weight 1
        via 203.0.113.65 on eth3 weight 1
192.168.96.0/19    dev lo [STATIC 19:42] * (200)
192.168.1.0/24     dev eth0 [INTERNAL 19:42] * I (150/10) [0.0.0.100]
192.168.2.0/24     dev eth1 [INTERNAL 19:42] * I (150/10) [0.0.0.100]
192.168.15.0/24    multipath [INTERNAL 19:43] * I (150/20) [0.0.0.10]
        via 192.168.1.10 on eth0 weight 1
        via 192.168.2.10 on eth1 weight 1
203.0.113.0/26     dev eth2 [EXTERNAL 19:42] * I (150/10) [0.0.0.100]
203.0.113.64/26    dev eth3 [EXTERNAL 19:42] * I (150/10) [0.0.0.100]
203.0.113.150/32   dev lo [EXTERNAL 19:42] * I (150/0) [0.0.0.100]

The kernel routing table is similar except it does not contain the static route.

Adding more redundancy The first goal of this lab was to test multiple OSPF instances and ECMP with BIRD. It could be completed:

• Adding a redundant VPN is easy: this is just a matter of duplicating the setup of the existing VPN.
• Each router should be redundant by getting a sibling with the same configuration. In the case of R1 and R2, a VIP could be shared between the router and its sibling with VRRP to allow hosts behind to have a single gateway and not use a routing protocol.
• Because of the use of static routes instead of BGP, there is nothing to detect a VPN failure (which may be problematic if we setup a redundant VPN). Some VPN are able to invalidate a route when the associated VPN is down. This is not our case. Moreover, there may be some duplication in routing. This is not the case here because each site has its own internal network.

While I'm keenly interested in where mobile phone technology is going, I've never been much for living on the cutting edge of new and expensive phones. I originally wrote Hecl for the humble Nokia 3100, and got a Nokia 6210 classic a few years ago. For the first time in... probably something like 10 years, I got something that wasn't a Nokia: a new Samsung phone with Android. I find it interesting because my own, small purchase appears to very closely mirror a broader trend in the market. Since more or less the day it came out, Android jumped out at me as the place to be for an open source guy like me, and indeed, I'm quite happy with the phone, even though it's towards the low end of the Android range. It does everything I need though - music, GPS, photos, email, Kindle, etc... etc.... To tell the truth, even though it's a cheaper phone (around 140 euros) than the Nokia, it does far more. To some degree, that's of course to be expected, because the Nokia is at this point something like 3 years old, but going from the traditional rocker switch to a touch screen is really a night-and-day difference. Many of you are probably saying "duh" at me and wondering what sort of luddite I am, but like I said, I started hacking on Android when it came out, but it took me a while to finally get one. For a few things like making calls, the Nokia experience is in some ways still superior. It's got 'call' buttons that you can hit and be talking to people in short order, but for most of the rest of the applications and software are just night and day better on the Android phone. Gmail and Maps both strike me as something I could use more readily, rather than the hacky, slow Gmail that ships for Symbian. And of course, with a slightly bigger screen, the web is also a bit better. More than anything, it feels a lot more like a 'system' rather than a very, very solid core phone/sms system with some other junk bolted on.

Sam Hartman is a Debian developer since 2000. He has never taken any sort of official role within Debian (that is besides package maintainer), yet I know him for his very thoughtful contributions to discussions both on mailing lists and IRL during Debconf. Until I met him at Debconf, I didn t know that he was blind, and the first reaction was to be impressed because it must be some tremendous effort to read the volume of information that Debian generates on mailing lists. In truth he s at ease with his computer much like I am although he uses it in a completely different way. Read on to learn more, my questions are in bold, the rest is by Sam. Raphael: Who are you? Sam: I m Sam Hartman. I m a 35-year-old software engineer. I am a principal consultant and co-owner of a small consulting company, called Painless Security. I started using Debian in the mid 1990 s around the time of the bo release. I ended up deciding to join the project as a developer in 2000. Raphael: You re blind and yet you re using your computer as effectively as I am. Can you explain us how you setup your computer ? Sam: I gave a talk at Debconf9 on how my computer is set up; you can watch the video for full details. My main laptop runs Debian. I use the gnome-orca package as my primary screen reader. It speaks the Gnome desktop. It does a relatively good job of speaking Iceweasel/Firefox and Libreoffice. While it does speak gnome-terminal, it s not really good enough at speaking terminal programs that I am comfortable using it. So, I run Emacs with the Emacspeak package. Within that, I run the Emacs terminal emulator, and within that, I tend to run Screen. For added fun, I often run additional instances of Emacs within the inner screens. Raphael: Are there important problems in Debian in terms of accessibility to blind people? KDE documentation talks a lot about accessibility, but at least for blind users, the code completely fails to deliver. That means there are a lot of good packages a blind user cannot use. The non-free Adobe Flash player has some accessibility, but it could be a lot better. The free alternatives have none. The free PDF readers have basically no accessibility. You can use pdftotext, but you cannot actually read a PDF in a graphical application. It s way too easy for a misbehaving program to lock up the entire accessibility infrastructure. Gnash is a big culprit here: if my Iceweasel starts Gnash, there s a good chance that either Iceweasel or the entire desktop will appear to hang from an accessibility standpoint. Other programs, including gksu tend to fail in this way. Some of the more dynamic website features like pop up menus or selection lists are really difficult to find and click without causing them to disappear. This gets better and worse over time as the accessibility support in Iceweasel changes and as websites change. Raphael: What s your biggest achievement within Debian? Sam: I decided to be a Debian developer because I thought that in 2000, Debian support for using enterprise security and infrastructure software was lacking. Back then, any software that included crypto functionality was segregated into a special non-us archive. Some of the software was missing; I started by packaging MIT Kerberos for Debian. Other software had security or enterprise features disabled in the packages. At the height of working on this, I was maintaining krb5, some SASL modules, PAM, some PAM modules,OpenAFS, a version of and Ssh with Kerberos support. I was also involved in the effort to resolve the legal issues so that we could move security software into the main archive. I think this work has been a huge success. In fact, it s been such a success that other people are now doing most of the work. I still maintain the krb5 package. When I started I felt like I was pushing against the flow trying to get people to add patches, sometimes even having to fork a package. However, now, I can maintain just one component and there are enough others who shared my original goal that the work continues. These days, I m working on something that s an evolution of this enterprise security work. I m packaging Project Moonshot for Debian and Ubuntu. Project Moonshot is a response to the wide variety of identity management systems such as OpenID, Oauth, SAML, and the like. Moonshot works to create an identity management approach that works well both for the web and for client-server and other applications. The project is a lot of fun, but the role of Debian in the project is also interesting. One of the things we want to show with Moonshot is how our technology can be effective when it is integrated throughout a platform. To really show the potential it needs to work with as many applications in a given platform as possible. The open and collaborative nature of the Debian community makes it possible to introduce a new technology and have that technology evaluated based on its merits. We don t need huge business relationships or marketing deals to integrate our technology: we need some combination of doing the work ourselves and showing others the benefits of working with us. For someone trying to do innovative work, the Debian model is powerful. Raphael: If you could spend all your time on Debian, what would you work on? Sam: I d really love to work with the embedded Debian folks. The vision of a single source base that could be the stack from devices from small embedded devices all the way up to high-end servers is very appealing. Doing that with Debian involves a number of challenges. However with the right people working on meeting these challenges full-time, I think we could offer something promising. I d also love to have the time to contribute to project infrastructure: working on the release team, helping ftpmaster, that sort of thing. However I don t. I m just happy that so much of my consulting practice involves working on open-source software. Raphael: What s the biggest problem of Debian? Sam: There s something really not right about how we transition libraries from unstable to testing. Every time I get involved in a library transition I m shocked at how complicated it is and how disruptive it is both to testing and unstable. We need to look at technology and processes to break up the dependency snarles. For example we don t have good archive tools for keeping old versions of libraries around to ease transitions. If you haven t thought about this issue you ll probably say that I m being overly picky and this can t be the major problem for Debian. However, if you think about how much this impacts our ability to introduce things into unstable around the times of the freeze or about how much it slows the release process, you may begin to appreciate how big of an issue this is. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Sam: There are a number of people who have been role models for me over the years. Anthony Towns really helped me understand a lot of what drives free-software projects and what needs to be true for positive motivation. Joey Hess showed us all that sometimes, social problems do have technical solutions. If the tools are so good that doing the right thing is far easier than any other course of action, quality improves.

---

Thank you to Sam for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook.

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When the programming language Python came out while it seemed like an interesting idea, I didn t really see the point. I already know Perl, PHP and C (plus a few others) why learn another language? So until recently, I didn t Recent frustrations with PHP and how loose it is with things like variables made me have another look at Python and what it could do for me. As just learning a language by itself it pretty boring I decided to write some small programs in the language and used the framework Turbogears to do it. First of all, learning the basics of python from perl or PHP is dead simple. The idea of what a language looks like is not too different between these three so it was a snap to write simple stuff in python. So, what does yet-another language give me?

• Variables must be defined before being used, but assigning them defines them too. This is a nice compromise between PHP where you can check undefined variables and C where it all must be defined first, or else.
• try and except. For code that might fail, use try and then catch the error in except. We ve all been guilty of using the @ symbol in PHP to supress stupid error messages, this does it correctly.
• No PHP extract() or compact(). Actually just no extract function is good enough. That function is pure evil.
• Sqlalchemy A proper you look after the database and ill play with objects database extraction layer thingamy. I don t want to play with databases just let me write code and thats what sqlalchemy does well.
• Testing Turbogears uses nosetests which does functional and unit testing. I do get some annoying artifacts based upon testing but generally its all good.
• Python has help() everywhere and pydoc on the command line. Not sure what variable foo can do? Just type help(foo) or even stick it in your script.
• paster! You can run a development site off the command-line using a simple sqlite database. Don t like it, dump the DB and reinstall it with one command.

It s not one-way though, there have been some challenges. Quite likely these are more my deficiencies than the languages.

• Error messages take up a whole screen and often make it difficult to isolate. It s not quite 10-screens-full ala Eiffel but sometimes the error messages tell you something is going wrong, but not what. Mess up your object versus database table references and you get something rather obscure.
• When is an integer not an integer? The answer is, sometimes. Sometimes they work, sometimes they break. It s probably more to do with what pysnmp is doing with them.
• Documentation some is great, some is downright misleading. It comes down to the writer of the documentation for modules. At least it doesn t have well get round to it like some functions in PHP on their website. Documents that say you can directly iterate dictionaries were another dead-end I wandered down. If you are stuck here, add a .items() at the end of it.
• Deployment. It s not just a matter of taring the files up and sticking them into /var/www/sitename and you re done. There are probably good reasons why, but its just annoying.

Despite the minor problems, python really does give you much much more than PHP and some more than Perl. For me and what I am intending on writing it is worth learning yet another language.

Related articles

• A Python programmer s first impression of CoffeeScript (ssokolow.com)
• Guido van Rossum: 21 Years of Python (perspectives.mvdirona.com)
• Which language next? (sfmlcoder.wordpress.com)
• Python vs. Perl vs. C++ Python is Better (strombergers.com)

John Atherton sent me a link to cyberunions discussing open-source and worker co-ops. In general, it s a very good show and worth a listen by anyone from the union movement, in my opinion. It s available in Ogg as well as MP3, which I think is also a plus point. There were a couple of points where I was ranting at the radio, though The first was the choice to try Skype alternatives. Leaving aside the danger of playing the alternatives game, I can understand why they chose that (the change of corporate control to Microsoft has been in the headlines recently and the phones affect them but not their listeners or readers), but open internet phones are a bit fiddly because they try to move quite a lot of data (audio) in real-time and a lot of domestic network devices don t behave correctly with the protocols that they use to do it. I agree with their conclusion that the problem is probably networking, but I wonder why they didn t log in to their routers, look at any debugging output and try to find the setting to change? Or try switching on debugging in the software and see what s wrong, or send it to someone who can help? Instead, it seemed like Linphone and Ekiga got blamed for not doing Skype-style router-busting without asking. They don t mention whether they tried switching on the STUN option mentioned in the Linphone FAQ and I don t see a email on linphone-users asking for support but I don t read every mail on that list. Am I being unfair, expecting them to seek support? Maybe but I m not sure. If you got the software from a store, what would you do? Would you throw it away and tell people that the stupid thing doesn t work? Moreover, would you use your podcast to say it doesn t work because users need to be clever enough for that obscure tool? That s a great way to scare people off unnecessarily. Wouldn t you usually think you might be overlooking some detail and ask for support, from its maker or the place where you got it? I think you d ask. I d probably ask, even though I m available for hire to fix FOSS problems and it s not the proudest feeling when I have a script-reading call-centre worker solve my mistake. Of course, with most from-store software, you ve paid an artificially-inflated box price, but the bigger cost is your time and that s the same for downloaded free and open source software, so why give it less of a chance to work? I also think they had easier options, like switching more of their website over to free and open source software, like getting rid of the rubbish comment system which doesn t work if you don t let it run javascript on your browser. I ve had a bit of discussion with them since the show and it seems my first suggestion may no longer work (typical!), so we ll see how that goes. Back to the show: the next segment did a good job of linking FOSS to the co-operative movement. I really think they should call it Free and Open Source Software and not just open source because I feel the freedom should be important to the labour movement. Also, calling the whole thing open source seems like calling all of the political left Revolutionary Socialism : inaccurate at best. I don t often express this objection these days (I ve bigger targets to work on), but it s important when trying to inform new audiences, else they only see part of our rainbow, a less radical part. Pretty interesting to suggest Orbea bikes as Mondragon s most famous brand. I d pick Eroski or Caja Laboral. What about you? Then it moved on to a pretty good description of UK co-ops, mentioning co-ops that I m a member of (the Co-operative Group) or buy from (John Lewis and Suma). I was surprised that it seemed to stop short and didn t mention any of the co-ops that work with free software, or with any software in fact. Of course, I d love software.coop to be mentioned, but there are other interesting and very different ones like BristolWireless.net and OSAlliance.com. Globally, many of the worker tech co-ops are linked through the tech-coop mailing list. This was the second part where I was shouting at the speakers. After all, Debian is a great voluntary project making a fantastic GNU/Linux distribution, but it is not a worker co-op by a long way and I suspect some of my fellow developers would be horrified to hear that suggested. Why not mention some actual tech worker co-ops? Finally, before the listener feedback, suggestions of tools which union activists could use. There was some minor confusion about exactly which version or name was really FOSS and a surprising claim about openoffice into LibreOffice (I thought Oracle were still screwing that up with Apache s help but I may have missed some news), but it was a good list of door-opening suggestions. I hope some activists will take them up. It seems there s an earlier show about open social networks, which is a topic I ll look at after I finish my series of posts about mailing lists. So, please let me know if you have comments on this show, that show, open social networks or mailing lists which you think I might find interesting, or if there s anything above you d like me to expand upon (or correct often, correct ).

The upstream and debian packages for psmisc version 22.14 were released tonight. This version has a lot of bugfixes. I ve also taken some time to clean up some of the minor compile warnings I used to get which were mainly variables set but not used. Two bugs that I ll concentrate on getting fixed for the next version are all about the command line. The first is that the fuser -s flag changes the return code for items found. It should be consistent so it doesnt matter if fuser displays values or not, 0 means found something and 1 means didn t find it. I can see why in the code it might be different, because the code follows different paths with the s option, but not exactly where the problem is. The second bug is the -M flag for fuser only works if it is before the mount points so -M -m /foo works but -m /foo -M does not. Unlike the -s problem, I can see where it is failing. Currently fuser scans the options one by one. If it finds a -m option, it checks at that point if the -M option is set. The solution is to store all potential targets and only after exhausting the entire command line do we add the potential targets to our real targets. It means scanning the command line, or a subset of it, twice but the performance penalty is tiny. Finally, I released there was a rather neat Makefile command make distcheck . This target makes a tar.g archive, extracts it, builds then cleans. It is a very good program for trapping things like a file exists in your local directory but is not included in the tar.gz (lists.h was missing until I ran this). For some make distcheck is something they re known for years, but if you have an autotools package you develop, have a look at it. With all the talk about testing and test driven releases, I was going to put some test cases in. The problem is there doesn t seem to be an easy way to do testing. I might have to just hack up some scripts but surely there is a better way. That would trap, for example that fuser -s returns 1 but fuser returns 0. I looked at check, but it doesn t work for single-file programs like psmisc is mainly made of.