At the recent Ubuntu Developer Summit, I managed to convince a few people (after assurances that there would be no permanent damage) to plug a USB stick into their machines so we could watch Xorg crash and wedge their console. What was this evil thing, you ask? It was an AVR microprocessor connected to USB, acting as a USB HID Keyboard, with the product name set to %n . Recently a Chrome OS developer discovered that renaming his Bluetooth Keyboard to %n would crash Xorg. The flaw was in the logging stack, triggering glibc to abort the process due to format string protections. At first glance, it looks like this isn t a big deal since one would have to have already done a Bluetooth pairing with the keyboard, but it would be a problem for any input device, not just Bluetooth. I wanted to see this in action for a normal (USB) keyboard. I borrowed a Maximus USB AVR from a friend, and then ultimately bought a Minimus. It will let you put anything you want on the USB bus. I added a rule for it to udev:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ACTION=="add", ATTR idVendor =="03eb", ATTR idProduct =="*", GROUP="plugdev"

installed the AVR tools:

sudo apt-get install dfu-programmer gcc-avr avr-libc

and pulled down the excellent LUFA USB tree:

git clone git://github.com/abcminiuser/lufa-lib.git

After applying a patch to the LUFA USB keyboard demo, I had my handy USB-AVR-as-Keyboard stick ready to crash Xorg:

-       .VendorID               = 0x03EB,
-       .ProductID              = 0x2042,
+       .VendorID               = 0x045e,
+       .ProductID              = 0x000b,
...
-       .UnicodeString          = L"LUFA Keyboard Demo"
+       .UnicodeString          = L"Keyboard (%n%n%n%n)"

In fact, it was so successfully that after I got the code right and programmed it, Xorg immediately crashed on my development machine. :)

make dfu

After a reboot, I switched it back to programming mode by pressing and holding the H button, press/releasing the R button, and releasing H . The fix to Xorg is winding its way through upstream, and should land in your distros soon. In the meantime, you can disable your external USB ports, as Marc Deslauriers demonstrated for me:

echo "0" > /sys/bus/usb/devices/usb1/authorized
echo "0" > /sys/bus/usb/devices/usb1/authorized_default

Be careful of shared internal/external ports, and having two buses on one port, etc.

2012, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

This year, the annual Debian conference will be held in Managua, Nicaragua. And I'll be lucky enough to spend two weeks visiting the country after Debconf, along with Elisabeth. Yes, I'll arrive in Nicarague on July 2nd, spend nearly the entire Debcamp, then Debconf, then we'll spend 16 days around the western part of Nicaragua, trying to discover the magic of this country. So, this post is about sharing our plans with my readers. Of course, I do not know the country so we may have made mistakes and bad choices. We'll see. Immediately after Debconf, Elisabeth will join in Managua. She'll be landing on July 15th. We'll then spend a night in an hotel near the airport and immediately leave the day after for Matagalpa, in North Nicaragua. We rented a car for the entire trip indeed, and will be on our own on wild Nicaragua roads..:-) We'll spend two nights in Matagalpa. We plan to visit some coffee or cigar plants, probably have a trip to Lake Apanas and Jinotega. Then, we'll have a short road trip to Esteli where we spend again two nights. We'll be visiting a coffee growing place (beneficio seco de caf ). A full day visit is planned at Miraflor natural reserve to enjoy te beauties of hundreds orchids and some local natural marvels. The next move will be to Leon, where we'll spend 4 nights, visiting a cigar factory (tabacaleras de puros?) on the way, as well as San Jacinto, a place with hydrothermal sources and "Hervideros" (geysers). Four nights in Leon leaves plenty of time for several activities *and* enjoying the colonial city. We'll have a full day at Juan Venado Island reserve with boat trip from Las Penitas (on a fisherman's boat from what the travel agency mentioned), then another full day climbing on the Cerro Negro volcano. Indeed, I was originally considering climbing the Momotombo, but our travel agency warned about the high difficulty. I would have loved that myself but maybe not the two of us...and this is a trip for both of us! So, we played the safe option..:-) After these 4 nights in Leon, we'll move to Granada for 3 nights, through Leon Viejo (the former site of Leon). From Granada, one day will there be used for a visit in the Masaya National Park and see the beauties of Masaya volcano (this is indeed something that could be done for Debconf day trip, IMHO, as it doesn't seem that far from Managua). Another day will be spent to Las Isletas on lake Nicaragua and others visiting the colonial city of Granada. Or, of course, whatever things we don't even known about now..:-) Then we'll move to what I personnally consider the peak of the trip: 3 nights on Ometepe island on lake Nicaragua. Just check Wikipedia to see why Ometepe is, in my opinion, THE place to go in Nicaragua. Here, I'll have my volcano..:-). Indeed, Elizabeth "authorized" me to book a local guide and then climb Concepcion Volcan, if the weather allows for it. 1600m height, that doesn' seem to be a big issue....except when starting from a little bit above sea level and are climbing a volcano that looks like s postcard volcano : nearly a perfect cone shape. So, let's cross fingers for having good weather that day. I promise myself I'll record the GPS track of that one and, even if I'll probably be walking most of the climbing (except if I have a very trained guide...), I'll add it to my run tracks! We might also be going to climb Ometepe's other volcano (Maderas) the day after so that Elizabeth also enjoys these beauties. There also seems to be great places around Maderas such as San Ramon Cascade, Finca el Porvenir, etc. Then, at the end of all this, it will be time to come back to Managua in the final day and fly back to Paris in the early morning of July 31st. All over, I'll be in Nicaragua from July 2nd until July 31st! Full month away, yay! Hurrah for the crazy number of holidays those lazy French people have..:-) During this trip, we might find it interesting some local geeks (not too many as Elizabeth is not that deeply interested in beersigning!) and share a few nice things in local places which are only known by locals. In case you're interested, out (very clever) travel agency is named Nicaragua Adventures and they're definitely worth contacting if you want to travel around .ni, particularly if we prefer booking things in advance as we do. They speak Spanish (of course!), English and French. They're very responsive to e-mail as well.

It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to publish another interview with the people behind Debian Edu and Skolelinux. This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor details get right before release. Who are you, and how do you spend your days? My name is J rgen Leibner, I'm 49 years old and living in Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany. I worked nearly 20 years as certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an international company for machinery and equipment. Since 2011 I'm a certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer. From April this year I will manage the department of technical documentation at a manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering. My first contact with linux was around 1993. Since that time I used it at work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively as I do now at home since 2006. How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu project? Once a day in the early year of 2001 when I wanted to fetch my daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the middle of 20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old computers in use. I answered: "Yes". Some weeks later every of the 10 classrooms had one computer running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as gifts and installed the first computer room with a peer-to-peer network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time and with a lot of fun. About one year later the school was connected to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school building. That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a Linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and being able to do this in a transparent and economic way, without extra costs for things like licence and software. So I searched for a school server system running under Linux and I found a couple of people nearby who founded 'skolelinux.de'. It was the Skolelinux prerelease 32 I first tried out for being used at the school. I managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in Bielefeld in December of 2006. What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu? When I'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages for me as today. In the past there were advantages like:

• I don't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as they had little money to spent for computers and software.
• It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without cost.
• It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows clients because of it's preconfigured overall concept of being a infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a server
• I was able to configure the server to the needs of the school.

Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones came up in this way:

• Most schools here do have money to buy hardware and software now.
• They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.
• With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa for management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the interfaces used in the past.
• It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the different needs.
• The documentation is usable and gets better every day.
• More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the world and so the community, which is an very important part I think, is sharing knowledge and minds.
• Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are solved today by Debian Edu.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu?

• There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even whole municipality areas.
• Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projects not enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to politicians.
• Technically there are no disadvantages I'm aware of.

Which free software do you use daily? I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. The applications I use on my laptop and my desktop are Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel, KMail, DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I need from the KDE environment. On console I use newsbeuter, mutt, screen, irssi and all the other famous and useful tools. My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube and mutt over ssh on the console, file services with samba, NFS, rsync, web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services with gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with MySQL for me and the whole family. I probably forgot something. Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to get schools to use free software? I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different countries and areas all over the world.

like in the last two weeks, this week's bug squashing was mostly related to the gcc 4.7 FTBFS bugs:

• #667139 coin3: "coin3: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  send debdiff to the BTS
• #667238 lfhex: "lfhex: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing include, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667263 linamc: "linamc: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  patch to enable missing include, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667272 mcmcpack: "mcmcpack: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add this-> qualifiers, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667277 milkytracker: "milkytracker: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing include, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667281 minitube: "minitube: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing include, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667284 mm3d: "mm3d: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  patch to add include and this-> qualifiers, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667289 mswatch: "mswatch: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing include, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667292 musique: "musique: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing include, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667295 netperfmeter: "netperfmeter: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing include, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667298 nmapsi4: "nmapsi4: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch from Francesco Cecconi (add missing includes), upload to DELAYED/2, then solved with a maintainer upload
• #667302 numptyphysics: "numptyphysics: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing include, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667303 nxcl: "nxcl: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing include, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667318 owx: "owx: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing include, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667337 qbankmanager: "qbankmanager: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to use class name, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667343 qterm: "qterm: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch from Paul Tagliamonte (missing include), upload to DELAYED/2
• #667347 rafkill: "rafkill: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing include, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667348 ragel: "ragel: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  patch to this-> qualifiers, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667373 simgear: "simgear: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  apply patch from Matthias Klose, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667428 zoneminder: "zoneminder: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch from Cyril Brulebois, upload to DELAYED/2
• #669432 src:milkytracker: "milkytracker: FTBFS: ./zzip_file.h:34:18: fatal error: zlib.h: No such file or directory"
  add missing build dependency, upload to DELAYED/5

When I wrote lvmsync late last year, I didn t realise I was being typecast. Before too long, I realised that the logic that I d implemented for lvmsync would also help me with a separate migration project I d been dreading getting the day job off VMware. Back in the early days of virtualisation, management made the decision to run VMware, for all the usual reasons ( commercially supported! , industry standard! , and so on). Unsurprisingly (to me, anyway) it didn t take too long for management to realise that it wasn t the best choice for us. When you ve got umpty-billion dollars to spend on hardware, software, and support, VMware might be the right option (although Amazon doesn t seem to think so). Anchor s company culture, on the other hand, is build around smart staff, simple systems over dumb staff, smart vendors , because no vendor is ever going to care about our customers as much as we do. So VMware was never going to work for us. Unfortunately, as happens all too often, once VMware was in place, there was very little motivation to get rid of it and move those customers onto the chosen replacement (that we were deploying all new customers on). I happen to think this is a terrible attitude in general one that makes life so much harder in the long term. I believe strongly in retrofitting old systems to keep them up-to-date with the current state of the art, and keeping technical debt under control. But, I wasn t running the show back when we stopped putting new customers on VMware, so the few VMware servers we had stayed around far longer than they should have. Recently, though, bad things started to happen. The VMware servers were starting to fall apart. The Windows machine we had to keep around to use the VMware management console started crapping out, and when the choice was between doing unspeakable things to Windows, and just ditching VMware well, it wasn t much of a choice. The only remaining question was how to do the migration off VMware with the least amount of downtime to our customers. I was really quite surprised that nobody out in Internet land appeared to have come up with a simple, robust tool to do this. Sure, some vendors had all-singing, all-dancing toolkits that cost ridiculous amounts of money, required you to install their agent on the machine involved, and promised the earth, but it all smelt of snakeoil and bullshit. In true hacker style, then, I decided to write something myself. The model I came up with mirrored lvmsync s quite closely because that one worked, and it turned out to be surprisingly easy to implement once I managed to reverse-engineer the file format (VMware has a PDF spec of a bunch of it s file formats, but whoever wrote it was enough of an evil genius to make it utterly incomprehensible to anyone who doesn t already know the file format, whilst making perfect sense to anyone who already does). The result: vmdksync. It is nothing but 80-odd lines of ruby whose sole purpose is to take a delta.vmdk file and write the changes that are stored in that file to a file or block device that is a copy of the flat.vmdk file that you can copy while the VM is still running (after you ve made a snapshot, of course). It helped me provide a painless migration path away from VMware, and I d be really pleased if it helped some other people do the same. Share and enjoy!

I ve send a mail today with a summary of some of my experiences in Managua and tiny bits of Nicaragua late April / early May 2012. If you are considering going to DebConf12 (which you obviously should do as you are reading this!) go and read this mail, as it includes a thematically sorted list of impressions and advice written by Gunnar, Norman, Leo, Felix and myself, which should give you some better idea about DebConf12 in Managua! While I spent 14 days in Nicaragua in total, for the last three days I was joined by Gunnar Wolf, to make sure my impressions about the local team, the status of the preparations and everything were correct. Our visit also seems to have been very motivating to local team members, whom I ve seen really enthusiastic to welcome a huge Debian crowd for the first DebConf in Central America in just a few weeks! At the last DebConf12 IRC meeting I summarized it like this: in very short: my two weeks were great, I had a great vacation, met many members of the localteam, which is way bigger then it seems on irc, saw and liked UCA (Universidad Centroamericana, the DebConf12 venue), had zillions of reunions (meetings, see schedule wiki page) and met many nice people and a very hot & interesting country+capital with great countryside. The deadline for sponsored accomodation ends in three days - so if you haven t registered yet, hurry up, DebCamp starts in 49 days! :-) (After that registration is still possible, but you will need to pay for your costs yourself.) We re looking forward to see you there and have a great DebConf together! Hopefully we sweat together while Wheezy is frozen :-D

• Content: explanations about cryptography, SSL and PGP, then signing-party
• Location: EPN la Bourdonnais, 105 avenue de la Bourdonnais, 75007 Paris
• Date: 2012-05-21 18:45+02:00
• Duration: 02:15

Monday 21st during at 18:45, in Paris, there will be a conference organized by Parinux, where I will explain the principles of cryptography and their application in the SSL and PGP systems. This conference will be followed at 20:30 by a signing-party PGP et CAcert. For the signing-party, I will ask participants to:

1. generate a key pair if you do not already have one;
2. send me you public key and register;
3. print some copies of your key fingerprint;
4. print the list of participants I will send you;
5. come with all that stuff and one or two identity documents.

This is a partial translation of the full article I wrote in French, in case foreigners could attend. Sorry for the very late notice

The bug webinterface of the Ultimate Debian Database currently knows about the following release critical bugs:

In Total:	1609
Affecting Wheezy:	1136
Wheezy only:	206
Remaining to be fixed in Wheezy:	930

Of these 930 bugs, the following tags are set:

Pending in Wheezy:	83
Patched in Wheezy:	208
Duplicates in Wheezy:	46
Can be fixed in a security Update:	27
Contrib or non-free in Wheezy:	12
Claimed in Wheezy:	2
Delayed in Wheezy:	31
Otherwise fixed in Wheezy:	61

Ignoring all the above (multiple tags possible) 556 bugs need to be fixed by Debian Contributors to get Debian 7.0 Wheezy released. However, with the view of the Release Managers, 1025 need to be dealt with for the release to happen. Please see Interpreting the release critical bug statistics for an explanation of the different numbers.

In my last blog post about smartphones, I urged the universe at large to help maintain a variety of ecosystems, to help foster competition and originality amongst vendors and the same day I hit publish, WebOS was killed. Apparently the universe hates me. Since then, a few things have changed. My main phone since the day of its release was the HP Pre 3, running WebOS and whilst I still have a soft spot for the OS, the Pre 3 was simply too buggy for me to use full time. The main issue is that I use my phone as an MP3 player in the car but the Pre 3 would pause playback at the end of a track every half dozen tracks or so making it impossible to drive the 85 miles to work without needing to root around in the armrest and poke a touchscreen. Not something I really want to do whilst moving and ultimately too big a papercut to deal with. So, come the new year, I moved on to my next device, a Nokia N9 running MeeGo Harmattan. Ultimately, this was an even bigger failure for me than the Pre 3 was, and I lasted maybe two weeks with it before giving up and going back to the HP. Beyond massive usability errors in the software (especially the braindead unkillable pop-up demanding Internet access, even when none is available), the worst for me was how it handled the MP3 player task. My usual way of working is to have the phone hooked up to the stereo with a 3.5mm jack, and the car switches to headset Bluetooth profile to handle calls this is pretty common on cars too old to support A2DP profile (Stereo music-capable headphones). WebOS and Android are fine with this but not the N9. The N9, instead, will output all audio through the last connected audio device, regardless of how much that might not be helpful. Get in car, start music playing, plug in cable, start engine and it plays audio for about three seconds before the Bluetooth connects, and it switches to outputting music via the Headset bluetooth profile (not something that my car can do). Unplug and replug the cable, and music works but incoming calls are silent until I disconnect the 3.5mm jack, as it outputs the headset audio through the headphone socket. I just couldn t deal with this big a step back from WebOS as far as my workflow goes, and gave up. So, where next? Well, a funny thing happened a co-worker with generally very good instincts regarding consumer electronics usability told me that his housemate had just bought a Nokia Lumia 800 Windows phone (the WP7-based cousin to the N9) and loved it. Enough that said co-worker was considering getting one himself. This was a very strange thing to hear, especially from an iPhone owner, about a Microsoft product. I d been generally interested in WP7 on an academic level for a while, but to hear that degree of praise of the actual product was interesting. Also interesting, and roughly simultaneous, was seeing Sajid Anwar s reverse engineering of the proprietary Zune file transfer protocol go from theory into an actual set of libmtp patches. So if the capability to use Banshee to transfer music on is here or near and it can t be as braindead as Harmattan when it comes to headphone/bluetooth behaviour, then why not jump ship and squeeze a handset out of Orange? About a week after my co-worker replaced his iPhone with a Lumia 800, I bought one too. So where to begin? Well, I ll begin at the start: WP7 is a joy to use. It really just is. It s the first mobile OS to try something radically different in the UI department for years. Everyone else these days (especially Android) builds iPhone rip-offs to varying degrees, and even the iPhone interface has a lot in common with the old old OLD interfaces found on the dumb Nokia phones of the 1990s. WP7 has an interface which provides just the right level of passively visible information and interactivity, and manages to do it with an elegance that no Android home screen filled with widgets will ever manage. The uncluttered screens are easy to read, and the Metro usability paradigms are trivial to pick up and learn. Without a doubt I d recommend WP7 to friends and family from a usability perspective, and the Microsoft engineers and designers responsible for cooking up the WP7 interface are worthy of praise. And I m not the only one saying this Apple co-founder Steve Woz Wozniak recently came out with a similar line. That s the good. There s also some bad, make no mistake. I m going to cover all the reasons WP7 sucks over several paragraphs. But overall, a smartphone is a device which I expect to suck the question is how bad the suck is, and whether it gets in the way of me using the device for what I need at the time. Moreso than MeeGo, moreso than Android, and even WebOS (and I m still a big WebOS fan), WP7 has more good points than bad points. But there s still some room for improvement, and some room for caution and since I know there are a few Microsoft folks following me on Twitter, I m going to go over my prescription for continued platform success. Oh, one more thing before I start: I know WP7 isn t Free Software. As an end user, I really don t care about that. I just want something that works something I didn t get from WebOS and Harmattan, both of which are primarily Free Software stacks. I m not saying there s a causal relationship there, or that a mobile OS can t be both Free Software and good just that as an end user, my favourite platform right now is non-Free. Take from that whatever you like. It s also vitally important, as Free Software folks, never to lose sight of what the other players in the market are up to. If you can t objectively assess why people are using a proprietary option by using it & recognising its good points (i.e. what to steal & what to improve) then you can t hope to win over users. So. WP7 s downsides in detail. In-place updates. Seriously guys, even Apple can manage this now. Why can t Windows Phone? I understand that making backups is smart and all updates come with a mandatory backup but I really shouldn t be tied to a PC to update a post-PC device. Also, those backups are useless, since they cannot be restored onto replacement devices in the case of failure or theft, so fix that too. Update all the things. An iPhone sold in June 2009 still has access to the latest iOS releases. Android phones are notorious for shipping with an outdated version of the OS, then getting at most one major update over the phone s lifetime (usually the device is abandoned by its manufacturer within months of release). Which camp does Microsoft want to align with, there? Every Windows phone 7 device released should receive Windows Phone 8, even with some features disabled. Anything less is punishing every existing customer, in the hope that you ll attract new ones not a winning strategy for a fringe platform whose biggest evangelists are its users. Fix IMAP. IMAP isn t hard. Yet WP7 never seems to work properly with a subset of my mail, never showing the message body & just saying Downloading forever. Fix it. Bing sucks. Bing s search results are terrible. Either do something to make them bearable, or allow me to pick which search engine I get when I hit the search button. A Google live tile isn t the same thing. Make killing apps easier. I know you stole the WebOS card view for multitasking (hold the back button) please also steal the WebOS ability to close apps. I don t want to have to go into an app and bash back repeatedly until it quits. This is particularly annoying for Internet Explorer. Make reinstalling apps easier. If I want to install every app I previously had installed on a new device, without restoring a backup, this should be easy. There are third party apps which try to plug this gap. Find a way to support copyleft. I d like to port a few C# apps to WP7, but because they re LGPL, I can t. The code s copyright holders would have no issue with their code being on WP7, as long as end users have a mechanism to replace the libraries, so why not find a way to allow this? e.g. when compiling an app, let me mark a library as user-replaceable , then allow for some mechanism where an end user can replace those assemblies with their own version. Let me use multiple Google calendars. WP7 only lets me add/see appointments on my default Google calendar. I want to add/see things on my wife s calendar, which is shared with me. WebOS can do this. MTP-Z is the devil. I do not need or want encrypted end to end communication between my PC and my camera device, to transfer a photo off. I do not need or want encrypted end to end communication between my PC and my MP3 player to transfer a photo on. Let s be honest, the only reason for MTP-Z is to enforce DRM on Zune-rented music tracks and honestly, there s no good reason to require MTP-Z for *all* communications if all you want to do is protect one folder or file extension. Now, since MTP-Z theoretically forces me to use Zune for many tasks better handled by other apps, now I get to write multiple criticisms of Zune s desktop app and as long as MTP-Z is enforced, every Zune failing is a Windows Phone failing too. Zune: Support Windows codec infrastructure, and transcode where needed. Windows Media Player can play Ogg Vorbis files. No, not out of the box, but if one installs the required codecs. Zune should support the same files as WMP if you want to ensure people don t try to copy files to a portable device which are not supported on that device, then you should have an API in place to allow for pluggable seamless transcoding of files as required Banshee allows me to do this (e.g. to copy files I have as .flac to devices which do not support it). Zune: Search my tracks, not the web. Zune s searching is terrible it doesn t do as-you-type searches, and when I hit enter, matches from my collection are given a tiny little space compared to matches from the Zune music store. Let me easily pick the track I feel like listening to, don t make it a chore Zune: Let s solve metadata together. I absolutely love how nicely the Zune app on desktop and on phone shifts as appropriate to the currently playing artist (e.g. changing the lock screen to an image of the artist in question). However, Zune doesn t make it obvious how to set an album s metadata to support this, and it s particularly frustrating when it s a minor difference of spelling causing a track not to get the nice treatment e.g. UNKLE versus U.N.K.L.E. . Either start making heavy use of audio fingerprinting services like MusicBrainz to fill in metadata, or allow me to search for fully supported artists when filling in track metadata Zune: Random playlists are useless on devices. I like smart playlists. In Banshee, I have one to pick 12GB of random tracks, which I can sync to my phone. I can t do this with Zune. If I try to just sync all my random music to my phone, it errors out due to lack of space. If I have a random playlist, the random selection changes multiple times during a sync resetting the sync, wiping out half the tracks that were transferred on, and starting again. As a result, the sync goes on for literally hours, never ending up with more than a gig or so of tracks on the phone. Random playlists should be freezable, so I can transfer them to my device in peace, then get a new random selection when I want. So, that s my list of miserable failure and it s still a less painful list than any other mobile OS I ve used. Perhaps one day Android will approach being usable, perhaps Blackberry s BBX will actually appeal to human beings rather than corporate IT managers, and perhaps Mozilla s delightfully named Boot to Gecko will get some traction. Who knows. All I know is, My Lumia 800 is the best phone I think I ve ever owned, and it s important for anyone working in the mobile space to understand why.

I am so glad that we managed to complete this project. Roland and I have spent countless hours on this book since December, both for the translation itself and also for all the things that we tend to forget: a nice book cover, a great book layout for the print version, coordinating the work of reviewers, registering as an editor to get an ISBN, etc. I think I will come back to this in a future article because some parts of the story are interesting. In the mean time, enjoy the DFSG-free Debian Administrator s Handbook:

• get it from unstable with apt-get install debian-handbook;
• browse the online version;
• get the paperback or the ebook (available as PDF, EPUB, MOBI);
• grab the sources with git clone git://anonscm.debian.org/debian-handbook/debian-handbook.git and contribute a translation

Check out the official announce (there s a discount for early buyers of the paperback).

12 comments Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

DebConf12 is drawing closer and closer! Have you ever been to a DebConf? You will surely agree with us: It s a life-changing event! It s one of the greatest geek gatherings in the world! It s something you can t afford on missing out! It s wait.. Oh, sorry, I had my spam mode set to highest. But still, that does not make it any less true. And one third of May has already passed. This means that the first deadlines are just around the corner: next Tuesday (15-may), sponsored registration will close, so make sure to register before it s too late. But wait wasn t this about the call for papers? Right, that s not the point of my post, I wandered off again. I m sorry, I just visited Managua last weekend (Holger will soon tell you about our visit), and it s impossible to keep the mind off the excitement. I wanted to ask you to share your greatest, latest ideas or projects. DebConf is about many things But one of its most important features is its rich set of talks, usually with very high and interesting contents in the technical, social, organizational levels Or several of them at once. As always, you will be able to submit talks until a day before you present it. However, it s best for your intended audience to know bits about your proposed topic, possibly even to share some information beforehand, so that the exposition can be as smooth as possible and the interaction during the talk even more And this is specially true for BoF sessions. However, we do have one advertised deadline: Talks submitted up to June 1st will be considered to be pre-scheduled. This means, to be part of the officially announced program, and have guaranteed coverage of our (always great) video team. DebConf Tracks But maybe you don t feel comfortable presenting a topic. Or you are, but you think it would be important to have several thematically related talks be grouped together. And if you are interested in this group of talks, you will probably know who would be more interesting to invite to present the topics - And will be able to prod them to do so. You can request to coordinate a track. That will ensure you get a contiguous block of timeslots for the talks you schedule, and do a great contribution to DebConf. To add your track, please mail talks@debconf.org. Please, specially if you do so in the few days following May 9, send me a copy to gwolf@gwolf.org, as it seems the alias is not yet set up. Tutorials and mentoring This year, we will have a high number of very motivated attendees from the many countries in the Central American region who want to get started in helping Debian, but have not yet found how to do it. Usually we would see local communities as prime material for DebianDay However, many of them are more interested in getting hands-on tutorials and be mentored into contributing to Debian. So, if you are part of a team working on a given aspect of Debian, or want to get people involved into your project, register it in the Tutorials and mentoring track. See you all soon, very soon, in tropical Managua for the hottest DebConf ever! (oh For those who remember days long past in Helsinki: There is even a sauna! ;-) And it s GREAT)

There s only a few days left before the sponsored registration for DebConf12 closes. If you haven t registered yet, please do it before May 15th and consider submitting a talk. We re looking forward to see you in Managua in July!

Just posted to d-d-a, here is the monthly report about my DPL activities.

---

Dear project members,
last bits of the past DPL term and first bits of the current term, all in one. Here is a report of what has happened in DPL land last April. Highlight: call for DPL helpers Before the report, though, let me point out that your friendly neighborhood DPL could use some help. As discussed during campaign, there are some intrinsic transparency and scalability limits in the DPL institution, when run by a single person. Before trying something new to fix that, I'd like to give a last try to an old "tactic": calling for help. If you're considering running for DPL or if you're simply interested in the job the DPL does and willing to help with that, please let me know. Ideally, if I find a group of people I'm happy to work with, I'd like to set up periodic IRC meetings with all "DPL helpers" to publicly discuss items in the DPL agenda and share the work-load. Ongoing discussions A big topic of last month has been the proposal by Francesca Ciceri to publish a diversity statement for the Debian Project. After a lively discussion on -project, we reached consensus on a text, and I've been happy to help with that. To finalize statement publication we now need to vote on it with a GR. I've helped drafting a corresponding GR proposal that has already been posted to -vote by Francesca. A final one, looking for seconds, will be posted there soon. Wrapping up March discussions on a revenue sharing agreement with DuckDuckGo, I've announced my intention to finalize the agreement and have done so shortly thereafter. The Iceweasel maintainer has deployed the corresponding search engine query string and other web browser maintainers could do the same, if they want to. In April I've also spent some time to move forward the long running conflict on Python maintenance, reported to the tech-ctte more than 2 years ago. With the help of people on the -python mailing list, I've now submitted to the tech-ctte an up to date list of potential maintenance teams. I hope the tech-ctte now have all the information needed to come to a decision. Speaking of which, I'm also discussing with tech-ctte members the possibility of having periodic ctte meetings; the idea is to ensure that outstanding issues are periodically reassessed, improving the reliability of tech-ctte decision times. I've also discussed at length with members of the pkg-multimedia-maintainers team the relationships with the unofficial debian-multimedia.org (d-m.o) repository, that have been a cause of tension for Debian multimedia users and maintainers for quite some time. On behalf of the team and of the Project I've now reached out to the d-m.o maintainer, hoping to come to some sort of amicable agreement on which packages belong where. Hardware replacement As anticipated in last report, I've started approving hardware purchases to implement the yearly hardware replacement plan prepared by DSA. During April I've approved requests to buy servers to replace the machines running the bugs-master, bugs-mirror, and UDD services. The total expected expenditure is about 15'000 USD. Communication I've delivered my classic Debian "18^W 19 years" talk at UNIVPM, a polytechnic university in center Italy; slides are available. I've then been contacted by people from the European Synchrotoron in Grenoble who, beside having recently migrated their infrastructure to Debian, are looking into organizing a workshop on Debian usage for large science facilities. I've been happy to help out providing a list of potential topics and speakers for the event. Also as anticipated last month, the Debian Project has been present at the OpenStack summit. Loic Dachary has represented Debian at the event and provided a nice report about his experience there. Speaking of which, I've also coordinated a news release about the availability of cloud technologies in Wheezy, taking the chance to point out the relationships between what Debian stands for and the ability to deploy your own private cloud. Sprints April has been a rather calm month on the sprint front, with the notable exception of the I18n team who is organizing a sprint for June in Paris. Miscellanea

• Google Summer of Code (GSoC) has now started and for Debian is already quite a success. Wrt last year we doubled the number of student applications and we jumped from 9 to 15 approved projects. More details about Debian in GSoC have been posted by Ana. I encourage all of you to take the chance of GSoC to bond with students and show them how nice is the Debian community to work with: that's the prime trait we need to exhibit to make sure we'll always have enough volunteers to run the Debian Project.
• The one month notice before opening up LDAP dnsZoneEntry has expired and the field has now been opened by DSA. Practically, this means that the full listing of *.debian.net entries can now be queried publicly via LDAP. If anyone would be so kind to provide a script that does so and produce a nice looking HTML index, we can now publish it somewhere and replace the perennially out of date wiki index

Thanks for reading thus far,
HDH! (Happy Debian Hacking)

---

PS the boring day-to-day activity log for April is available at master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201204

A client just lent me a new Mac Mini with OS/X Lion to play with. I think it s interesting to compare it with regular PCs running Linux. Hardware The Mac Mini is tiny. It s volume can be compared to that of a laptop. The entire outside apart from the base is made from aluminium which helps dissipate heat, it s not as effective as copper but a lot better than plastic. The ports on the system are sound input/output, 4*USB, Ethernet, Firewire, Thunderbolt (replacement for Firewire), SDXC, and HDMI. It ships with a HDMI to DVI-D adapter which is convenient if you have an older monitor (or if you have a recent monitor but no HDMI cable as I do). To open the case you unscrew the bottom, this is much like opening a watch. Also like opening a watch it s not particularly easy to screw it back on tightly, I will probably return the Mac Mini without managing to completely screw the base in. The hardware is very stylish and intricately designed, what we expect from Apple. It s also quiet. In every way it s a much better system than the workstation I m using to write this blog post. The difference of course is that this workstation was free and the Mac Mini cost just over $1000 including the RAM upgrade. A Mac Mini could be a decent Linux workstation and if I see one about to be recycled I ll be sure to grab it! Installation The Mac OS comes pre-installed so I didn t get to do a full installation. When I first booted it up it asked me if I wanted to migrate the configuration from an existing server, I don t know how well this works as I don t have a second Mac system but the concept is a good one. Maybe having full support for such a migration process would be a good release goal for a Linux distribution. After determining that the installation is a fresh one I was asked for a mac.com email address or other form of registration. I skipped this step as I don t have such an email address, but it could be useful. Red Hat has Kickstart to allow configuration of an OS install based on a file from a server (via NFS or HTTP). Debian supports preseeding to take OS configuration options from a file at install time [1] and the same option can be used for later stages of OS autoconfiguration. One thing that would be really useful is to allow the user to enter a URL for configuration data for an individual account or for all accounts, so someone with an account on one workstation could upload the configuration (which would be either encrypted or sanitised to not have secret data) and then download it when first logging in to a new system. I can easily take a tar archive of my home directory to a new system, but people like my parents don t have the skill to do that. One of the final stages of system configuration was to identify the keyboard. The system asked me to press the key to the right of the left shift key and then the key to the left of the right shift key and then offered me three choices of keyboard. That was an interesting way of reducing the list of possible keyboards offered to the user and thus preventing the user from selecting one that is grossly incorrect. Cloud Storage When first logging in I was asked for an iCloud [2] login. iCloud doesn t seem like a service that should be trusted, it s based in the US and has been designed to facilitate access by government agencies. Ubuntu One [3] is a similar service that is run by a more reputable organisation, but the data is still stored by Amazon (a US corporation) which seems like a security risk. Ubuntu One isn t in Debian (which is strange as Ubuntu is based on Debian) so it was too much effort for me to determine whether it encrypts data in a way that protects the users against US surveillance. The cost of Ubuntu One storage is $4 per month with music streaming. A better option is to use a self-hosted OwnCloud installation for a private or semi-private cloud [4]. A cheap server from someone like Hetzner (E49 per month for 3TB of RAID-1 storage) [5] is a good option for OwnCloud hosting. A cheap Hetzner server is about $US64 per month (at current conversion rates) which is equivalent to about 16 users of Ubuntu One for music streaming. So if 20 people shared a Hetzner server they could save money when compared to Ubuntu One while also getting a lot more storage. I ve got about 300G of unused disk space on the Hetzner server that hosts my blog and when the system is migrated to a newer Hetzner server with 3TB disks it will have 2.5TB of unused space, I could store a lot of cloud data in that! The main features of iCloud and Ubuntu One seem to be distribution of random data files (anything you wish), streaming music to various playing systems, and copying pictures from phones as soon as they are taken. These are all great features but it s a pity that they don t appear to support distributed document storage. Apple Pages apparently allows documents to be immediately saved to the cloud. I d like to be able to save a file with Libre Office at home and then access it from my netbook using the cloud, of course that would require encryption for secret files but that s not so hard to do. One advantage with such distributed storage is that when combined with offline-IMAP for email it would almost entirely remove the need for backups of the desktop systems I maintain for my relatives. I could have all their pictures and documents go to the cloud and all their email stay on the server so if their desktop PC dies I could just give them a new PC and get it all back from the cloud! OwnCloud supports replication, so if I got two servers I would be covered against a server failure. But I think that for a small server with less than a dozen users it s probably better to just take some down-time when things go wrong and do regular backups to an array of cheap SATA disks. App Store Apple has an App Store in the OS. The use of such a store on a desktop OS is a new thing for me. It s basically the same as the Android Market (Google Play) but on the desktop. I think that there is a real scope for an organisation such as Canonical to provide such a market service for Linux. I think that there is a lot of potential for apps to be sold for less than $10 to a reasonable number of Linux users. A small payment would be inconvenient for the seller if they have to interact with the customer in any way and also inconvenient for the buyer if they are entering all their credit card details into a web site for the sale. But for repeat sales with one company being an intermediary it would be convenient for everyone. A market program for a desktop Linux system could provide a friendly interface to selecting free apps from repositories (for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, or other distributions) and also have the same interface used for selecting paid applications. Conclusion This isn t much of a review of Apple OS/X or the Mac Mini. Thinking about ways of implementing the best features of Lion on Linux is a lot more interesting. I admire Apple in the same way that I admire sharks, they are really good at what they do but they don t care about my best interests any more than a hungry shark cares about me. Update I got the currency conversion wrong in the first version of this article. It seems that to save money via a shared Hetzner server instead of Ubuntu One about 20 users would be needed instead of 10. But that s still not too many and would still give a lot more storage. It would be a little more difficult to arrange though, probably anyone who is seriously into computers knows 10 people who would want to share such a service (including people like their parents who want things to just work and don t understand what s happening). But getting 20 people would be more difficult.

• [1] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Preseed
• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icloud
• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_One
• [4] https://owncloud.com/
• [5] http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-ex

Related posts:

1. Xen and SE Linux EWeek review of RHEL5 The online magazine EWeek has done a review of RHEL5....
2. Servers vs Phones Hetzner have recently updated their offerings to include servers with...
3. Modern Laptops Suck One of the reasons why I m moving from a laptop...

The Gnome shell is a great step. Finally the Linux default Desktop is not only useful (as Gnome 2.X used to be), but also stylish and modern. It's a different kind of desktop, which seems to irk desktop habits of some peoples. I'm proud to show it off. This happened for the last time years ago while doing some funny config quirks of fvwm. Gnome 3.x is cool. (: Also the customisability via all the extensions is fun. What I do miss is the gnome weather (There used to be an incarnation with plenty of geographical sites, which got somehow got axed later.) and more packaged extensions for out of the box deployments (wish #661782). I seem to be too lunatic to find session settings in "System Settings" for having startup applications run or the used applications reopened (please yes evince show the same pdfs). The other minor critic is that "System Settings" is quite empty, but has on each system a funny advertisement for "Wacom Tablets". Ah and after a myriad of suspends and network-manager stops/restarts gnome-shell likes to segfault, which is no nuisance as it restarts.

I attended a hackfest for the alleged purpose of furthering data transparency and other such entertainment. I expected a full-blown circus of idiocy based on the lead-up: instructions to sign up to websites for the purpose of Centralizing things, downloading iPhone SDKs, and other blatant evidence of Not Actually Getting It At All. Imagine my surprise when I get to the registration desk and they offer me a photography opt-out. Now everyone knows that privacy opt-outs don't work; either they're ineffective or they are effective at a cost far greater than anyone should pay, but I appreciated the gesture anyway. So I received a badge advertising my first name and the fact that I was unwilling to be photographed. Spoiler alert: I was photographed at least six times. I have now cleverly changed my hairstyle so that no one can recognize me. After people had arrived and rubbed elbows and consumed things, the grand dignitaries took the stage for spectacles of egoism so great that relativity made Dan Kaminsky look almost like a humble and reasonable human being. This was succeeded by some organizing, coding, and ridiculousness. The group I landed in contained two employees of the advertising industry and one of the U.S. government. There was also someone I refer to as "ultracompetent astronut". Some things that were apparent: people

• really don't understand the issues
• don't care about or understand licensing
• are prone to insistent on the necessity of Github even when they don't know how to use it
• don't see why opt-outs are inherently flawed
• are perfectly willing to trade in their privacy for minimal return
• are sometimes willing to trade their privacy for different privacy
• insist that I should write in Python even when it turns out that I could have been using a real language
• still think that the threat model is only about what information you leak or choose to divulge about yourself, and not about other people informing on you.

Most popular web browsers cause quite a lot of I/O on a user s home directory and their cache s also take up quite some disk space with Google s Chrome/Chromium you can t even configure how much disk space should be used for the cache. This causes unnecessary network traffic and no more makes sense if the home directory itself comes over the network, e.g. via NFS or Samba. And on laptops it spins up the disks and unnecessarily costs battery power and therefore lowers the potential battery life. Such caches also costs scarce disk space on SSDs or flash cards as common in laptops, netbooks and other mobile devices, and often get backed up without any real use. To take some of this burden off our NFS servers at work I started to develop an Xsession.d hook which moves off such caches to the local disk and puts in symbolic links instead into the user s home directory when the user locally logs in. This hook quickly became a standalone Perl script named unburden-home-dir and the Xsession.d hook just a wrapper around it. Due to some unsolved issues I didn t feel it s good enough for Debian Unstable, so I uploaded it just to Debian Experimental back then. Pietro Abate s recent blog posting about unburden-home-dir on Planet Debian gave me the right kick to make another try to solve the remaining issues. And the mental distance gained over the time indeed helped and I could fix the remaining issues. So I added some polish to the package and uploaded it to Debian Unstable. If you used the previous version from experimental, you have to take care of a few things:

• Previously some configuration files sported unburden_home_dir as base name while others used unburden-home-dir as base name as that s also the package name. Now all configuration files use the package name, i.e. unburden-home-dir as base name.
• Conffiles under /etc/ should be renamed by dpkg automatically, but per-user configuration files ($HOME/.unburden_home_dir and $HOME/.unburden_home_dir_list) must be manually renamed to $HOME/.unburden-home-dir and $HOME/.unburden-home-dir.list.
• By adding UNBURDEN_HOME=yes to $HOME/.unburden-home-dir every user can decide himself if he wants the Xsession.d hook to be used when he logs in under X. On managed workstations with many users this eases testing of unburden-home-dir with just a few users a lot.

You can follow the development of unburden-home-dir also on GitHub and on Gitorious as well as on Ohloh. Enjoy!

... is drawing closer again, and today I've booked my flights. I'll be arriving in the early evening on the 1st, and leaving again on the 15th. The flights will be Brussels->London->Miami->Managua, which unfortunately means I'll have to deal with US border control, but hey. Also, in order to avoid having to get up at early-o-clock on the morning of the 1st, I'll be flying from Brussels to London on an afternoon flight on the 30th, which means I'll have an evening to spare in London. While I've been there a few times before, it's not a city that I've ever actually visited; my previous three visits were limited to Heathrow, King's Cross (IIRC; could be another train station) and driving through the city on my way from (and to) Steve's barbecue last summer. If anyone will be there as well that night and would like to meet for beer and/or keysigning, I'd be interested.