Nokia is in the news for it s CEO announcing that they have a Burning Platform , Jeff Waugh gives an interesting analysis of the situation [1].What is a Platform for Phones?This whole scenario makes me wonder about what a platform should mean in terms of mobile devices. Wikipedia says A computing platform is some sort of hardware architecture and software framework (including application frameworks) that allows software to run. Typical platforms include a computer s architecture, operating system, programming languages and related user interface (run-time system libraries or graphical user interface). [2]I think that Nokia s problem was that it didn t leverage it s strength in making great phone hardware. Nokia used to have a commanding share of the market due to simply making better phones. They had phones that were upwardly compatible (the same UI and used the same chargers), their phones were always very solidly constructed, and they had some good design features such as having the battery comprise part of the case which allowed a replacement battery to be physically larger for longer battery life. Even now they have hardware features which are better than the rest such as the N8 which is widely regarded as having the best camera of any phone. Nokia also did some smart things like releasing their N800 series of phones with more open software than most companies used, they supported running arbitrary Linux applications.While they kept the platform as the API interface on a phone OS and maintained several different OSs (with multiple versions in production at any time) they made a less desirable platform for developers and a lot more development work for themselves.Nokia fragmented their own market. There is no technical reason why they couldn t manufacture a phone that is capable of running a choice of their own OS as well as Android (or alternatively their own OS or the Windows Phone OS). There may be technical issues that prevent designing a phone to run either Android or Windows phone, but they could have got two out of three options available.On top of a hardware phone platform we could have multiple software platforms, Android, Windows, Meego, etc. The users could then decide which one to use.A Hardware Platform for PhonesI think that it would be ideal if a phone company offered phones with a choice of OS and allowed the user to change the OS. The N8 is a great phone and the hardware is really appealing, I would have definitely bought one for my wife if it ran Android. Also the resale value of phones can be improved if they can be re-purposed. If someone knew that people on ebay were paying good rates for an old phone because it could be re-programmed then they would be more likely to buy it. As phones are essentially free for most people due to telco deals, a phone that has a resale value of $200 is a lot more desirable than one with a resale value of $100 if all other things are equal.I would like to see the mobile phone as a platform just as the IBM PC compatible was a platform. Imagine if IBM had sued Compaq into oblivion when they first cloned the PC, if that had happened I don t think that I would be using an IBM PC (Thinkpad) right now. The early IBM PCs really weren t great systems for home use, for pretty much anything you might want to do the early PCs didn t compete well with CP/M systems and systems from Commodore and Apple. It was only when cheap clones flooded the market that the PC platform took off. Modern PCs can boot from disks that were created 20 years ago. At every time during the PC s history there has been a choice of OSs available that work with the standard BIOS boot loader and expect certain essential hardware (such as a BIOS interface for video, keyboard, and storage). This choice increased the market allowing economies of scale in production. It also allowed competition between vendors which forced the margins to be low and resulted in PCs becoming cheap over the last 20 years every aspect of a PC apart from Intel CPUs and Microsoft Software has steadily dropped in price.I would like to see phones designed with a common boot loader, a common core set of CPU functions (I believe that with ARM CPUs a lot is optional), and common interfaces to the touch-screen and the GSM system. The boot loader would ideally have support for booting multiple OSs, in a typical end-user case the store would provide the phone configured to quietly only boot one of the available OSs but it would be trivial to offer the user a choice of OS at boot time for advanced users. The process of installing a custom ROM image in a phone is regarded as dangerous at the moment and most people who would like to do such things are hesitant due to the risk of bricking their phone. If booting the last good OS was an option then more people would try new OSs. With the current situation I am a little hesitant to re-program my new phones (and I m braver about such things than most people).One of the many problems with the current situation is that the phone vendor has to officially support every phone OS. One example of the problems with this is the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 which is a fine piece of hardware that has been saddled with an older version of Android for it s entire life, Sony has stated that they won t produce any more updates and thus the demand for this phone is a lot lower than it might be. I believe that this is why the Xperia X10 is significantly cheaper than any other phone with similar features. Sony is losing money because they have a closed hardware platform and don t support the recent versions of Android!Ways of Booting the OSIt shouldn t be a technical challenge to have support for basic touch-screen IO and 3G Internet access in the boot loader of the phone. Then an OS such as Android could be loaded from the network before being booted without needing an older version of Android running. 80386 systems with a few megs of RAM used to be able to boot from a LAN, a modern phone has much more powerful hardware and a network connection that s at least as good as 10base2 networking so it should be able to do the same.Modern phones have micro-SD cards for local storage. There s no reason why the OS couldn t be loaded on micro-SD card. Fixing the OS on a phone that was bricked could be achieved by putting the micro-SD card in a PC and then copying the files across just as I often fix PC OS problems by installing the hard drive in a working system.Changing the OS of a phone should be easier than changing a PC between Ubuntu and Fedora (the Linux distributions that seem to have the most usage by less technical users).ConclusionIf Sony had made their platform the hardware then they could have spent their effort on what they do well (making great phone hardware) and delegated almost all of the work related to creating the OS to other companies (Google, MS, telcos, etc).If the entire industry moved to a hardware platform for phones then the result would be lower prices and some thin margins for manufacturers. This would be good for users and OK for manufacturers. The current situation however is quite bad for users who can never get phones to do exactly what they want and not so good for phone manufacturers such as Nokia (and everyone else who does business with Microsoft) who find themselves on the wrong side of market forces. The phone as a hardware platform shouldn t be too bad for Microsoft either, they did OK on the PC hardware platform.

• [1] http://bethesignal.org/blog/2011/02/11/elopocalypse-nokia-chooses-microsoft/
• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computing_platform

In Ubuntu, the use of ptrace is restricted. The default allowed relationship between the debugger and the debuggee is that parents are allowed to ptrace their descendants. This means that running gdb /some/program and strace /some/program Just Works. Using gdb s attach and strace s -p options need CAP_SYS_PTRACE, care of sudo. The next most common use-case was that of crash handlers needing to do a live ptrace of a crashing program (in the rare case of Apport being insufficient). For example, KDE applications have a segfault handler that calls out to kdeinit and requests that the crash handling process be started on it, and then sits in a loop waiting to be attached to. While kdeinit is the parent of both the crashing program (debuggee) and the crash handling program (debugger), the debugger cannot attach to the debugee since they are siblings, not parent/descendant. To solve this, a prctl() call was added so that the debugee could declare who s descendants were going to attach to it. KDE patched their segfault handler to make the prctl() and everything Just Works again. Breakpad, the crash handler for Firefox and Chromium, was updated to do effectively the same thing, though they had to add code to pass the process id back to the debuggee since they didn t have it handy like KDE. Another use-case was Wine, where for emulation to work correctly, they needed to allow all Wine processes to ptrace each other to correctly emulate Windows. For this, they just declared that all descendants of the wine-server could debug a given Wine process, there-by confining their ptrace festival to just Wine programs. One of the remaining use-cases is that of a debugging IDE that doesn t directly use ptrace itself. For example, qtcreator will launch a program and then later attach to it by launching gdb and using the attach command. This looks a lot like the crash handler use-case, except that the debuggee doesn t have any idea that it is running under an IDE. A simple solution for this is to have the IDE run its programs with the LD_PRELOAD environment variable aimed at a short library that just calls prctl() with the parent process id, and suddenly the IDE and its descendants (i.e. gdb) can debug the program all day long. I ve got an example of this preloadable library written. If it turns out this is generally useful for IDEs, I could package it up like fakeroot and faketime.

I have just got a new Xperia X10i for my wife. It s with Virgin who use the Optus network. Optus apparently have better coverage than Three (who we have been using for 6.5 years) and Virgin offers the best deals they have good phones on low monthly rates and do nice things like selling most phones unlocked (the Xperia is one that comes unlocked).I chose the phone for use in system administration work. A large screen should be good for reading email and running a ssh client. Hopefully I will be able to use the phone s Wifi to provide mobile net access to a laptop for any problem that can t be solved on a tiny screen. My wife doesn t do much sysadmin work nowadays, but it ll save some effort if we can both use the same model of phone. Also according to Amobil.no the Xperia X10 is the second best phone for camera-phone functionality [1], and my wife would really like to take some good pictures with her phone (she loves the LG U990 Viewty that she has right now).ScreenOne major reason for choosing this phone is that it has the biggest and highest resolution of any phone that doesn t cost a huge amount of money. It does well in this regard, the screen is very good to look at. However it is apparently not particularly sensitive and we still have the protective cover on the screen which makes the swipe to unlock operation quite difficult. My wife generally likes to keep the protective plastic on such screens for a while to prevent damage, but she may take this off sooner than on other devices.Sony FoolishnessOne reason that this phone is cheaper than any other phone with similar specs is that it s made by Sony. Sony won t provide updates to Android 2.2 or better and they have their own stupid applications installed in an intrusive manner. The main screen of the phone has a large icon for the Sony Timescape program. If you choose a background image of a person s face then the Timescape logo is in the ideal location to obscure the person s eyes. Generally it s not desired to have the person in your phone background look like Zorro. Fortunately you can delete icons from the home screen, you just have to press and hold the icon until a trash-can appears at the bottom of the screen and then drag it to the trash.Phone BookThe core phone functionality is fairly important for a mobile phone. But it seems that every modern phone has some serious failings in this regard. The Xperia comes with a phone book that is reasonably good for managing contacts and partially coalesces multiple entries with the same name which is convenient as I somehow managed to import 3 copies of each entry in my wife s phone book. The down-side is that the multiple entries are still stored, so when it comes time to update someone s phone number my wife will have to separate the entries and then delete all but one of them, adding probably a minute of effort for each one. With 60 phone book entries that s probably an hour of wasted time during the course of her phone use.They really should do a time based analysis of phone use and optimise the UI for efficiently performing common tasks. I think that an ideal design would start off by asking the user to rate the importance of phone functionality, camera, facebook, twitter, etc and then give a UI that matches the important tasks. A device that has 384M of RAM, 1G of built-in Flash storage, and an 8G micro-SD card (which Virgin provided with the phone) should be able to offer a selection of UIs.CameraThe configuration for the camera allows some settings to be changed easily and others have to be changed through the advanced settings which requires one more button press and a few extra taps on the screen. One real stupidity is to have the phone light be in the advanced settings, so if the room happens to be a little darker than expected you suddenly need to go to a lot of extra effort to turn on the light.Finally it would be really good to be able to take a quick picture. I would like to be able to be able to press a combination of buttons and have it immediately take a picture regardless of what had been running before. Not press the main menu button, the camera icon (which I made a link from the home screen), wait a second for it to load, and then press the shutter button. Ideally I would like to press a combination of hardware buttons to have it immediately take a picture even when the screen is locked. I don t want to wait for the screen unlock process, sometimes the perfect shot is only available for a second.WifiIt doesn t support ad-hoc networks. This is really annoying for me as I don t own an access point and I don t plan to buy one just for a phone. My laptop (Thinkpad T61 with Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG [Golan]) doesn t seem to support running as an access point, and my EeePC 701 with an Atheros AR5001 has the same problem, here is the error message:# iwconfig wlan0 mode master essid x
Error for wireless request Set Mode (8B06) :
SET failed on device wlan0 ; Invalid argument.I have a cheap Realtec USB Wifi device that claims to support being an access point but just fails when I try it. So presumably it doesn t really support it but the driver is buggy.It seems that I may need to put a custom Android installation on it to get ad-hoc working.Also it s apparently necessary to root the Xperia to get Wifi tethering to work for providing net access to a laptop. So I guess I ll hacking it soon.Internet AccessThe Virgin web site couldn t help me set up the Internet access because I ported a phone number from another Telco. I had to use the phone number supplied by Virgin to login to their web site and the site then wanted to sent (probably SMS) the settings to my phone, but of course it couldn t SMS to that number as I ve got the Three number active. Presumably they were expecting that customers would setup Internet access before porting their old number.I phoned the Virgin tech support and used the settings they suggested, but it didn t work. Then I took the phone to a Virgin store and it started working after they rebooted it with no changes to settings. Just like Windows used to be. :(Email Access Default AppThe email setup defaults to port 143 IMAP access, so even when a mail server provides access on port 993 for IMAPS and on port 995 for POP3S probably most users will not use any encryption because their phone doesn t default to it. Also one annoying feature is that when I gave it the email address test@coker.com.au it decided to use test as the user-name for IMAP by default. It seems that a very large portion of the active email accounts nowadays are on systems that handle multiple domains and thus require the domain name in authentication, and a large portion of the remainder accept domain names even when they aren t required. Besides it s a lot easier to delete a domain name when it s not needed than to type it in when it is.The default hostname for sending and receiving mail is the domain name, if the MUA configuration program had checked the MX record it would have known that smtp.sws.net.au is a better default choice for the mail server. I ve now started the practice of creating a CNAME entry named m in every domain I run, so when someone is setting up a mobile phone they just have to add m. to the start of the default hostname to use for sending and receiving mail. By doing this I can probably save an average user at least 30 seconds of typing, which is particularly important if I happen to be talking them through the process!The MUA uses IMAP commands to load the text of the message without attachments and then loads attachments on demand, this will be handy for when people attach unreasonably large files. With IMAP caching and partial loads the core functionality seems OK, and some quick tests of standard but not commonly used IMAP functions such as noticing that mail has been deleted by another client seemed to work well. The performance of loading a new mailbox with 369 message was quite poor, I m not sure how much of this is due to the network connection and how much is due to the client implementation. This is a real concern for me as I typically have about 7,000 messages in my IMAP account and 3,000 unread messages most of which are in two folders.Another problem is the fact that there seems to be no way of searching in the list of messages, sorting/grouping by subject or sender, or showing unread messages. This makes the Xperia unsuitable for the task of reading mailing lists when on public transport. I would really like to be able to sort through a folder of mailing-list mail, delete messages that I don t need to keep and flag ones that need attention when I have the resources of a desktop system when I m on a tram or in other situations where a laptop can be inconvenient.One undeniable bug I discovered (as opposed to the missing features I listed) is that when a message has a line with a URL followed by many spaces it won t load correctly in the web browser, the spaces will be treated as part of the URL. I ve changed the default signature in my email to have a description followed by a URL to avoid triggering this bug. Presumably other Android phones are bug for bug compatible. :(Moxier MailThere is a complete set of email and calendaring applications preloaded from Moxier.com. The Moxier mail client uses company.com as an example domain name (they should use example.com does no-one read the RFCs?). It s nice that they verify the SSL certificate and display the details when it s not signed.Unfortunately Moxier doesn t support anything other than Exchange, and I can t delete it either as it s part of the base set of applications from Sony.SMSThe SMS application is supposedly conversation based. This doesn t seem like a benefit to me, it s a pity that there is no option to make it act more like every other SMS implementation I ve used over the last 12 years.BatteryThe battery is described as having a capacity of 1500mAh, for comparison a AA rechargeable batteries have capacities ranging from 1800mAh to 2800mAh. My first mobile phone had a rechargeable battery that took the same space as 4*AA batteries and the phone was designed to run on AA batteries if the main battery wasn t charged. I would like to have an Android phone that had a battery pack of similar size to at least 2*AA batteries, and 4*AA would be OK too.The Xperia battery was reported as being half discharged after playing with the phone for less than an hour. Basically when doing anything with the phone that is remotely intensive I need to have it plugged in. Unless of course I m using one of the star-chart applications LightsThere are two white leds in the gaps between the keys for Settings, Main-Menu, and Back on the front. They are quite bright and annoying to look into at night.SSHSSH was one of the reasons for getting an Android phone, but it was one of the last things I worked on because everything else was so much fun. I m currently using ConnectBot, it supports storing ssh host keys, generating a key-pair from random screen touches, locking and unlocking the key-pair (with a pass-phrase) and pasting the public key to an open window. All the basic functions just work although it s rather inconvenient to enter the CTRL keys.The next thing to investigate is a small and light Bluetooth keyboard. Using an external hardware keyboard will save me from the pain of entering CTRL keys (which is even worse than the pain of entering passwords that contain digits and mixed case). It will also allow me to type a lot faster and use the entire screen for the ssh session.Current Bug SummaryWifi doesn t do ad-hoc mode or tethering.MUA doesn t correctly handle URLs in messages if many spaces follow the URL and is also unsuitable for mailing list mail.Sometimes requires a reboot to make Internet access settings take affect.Camera light can t be easily turned on and off.This isn t too bad.ConclusionMost things do what I want. Once I get a MUA working with all my email, Wifi doing what I want, and a Bluetooth keyboard it ll be a fairly ideal mobile sysadmin terminal. I ll probably order one for myself this weekend.

• [1] http://www.amobil.no/artikler/norges_beste_kameramobil/79081

Maximilian, along with the other members of the Debian kernel team, has the overwhelming job of maintaining the Linux kernel in Debian. It s one of the largest package and certainly one where dealing with bug reports is really difficult as most of them are hardware-specific, and thus difficult to reproduce. He s very enthusiastic and energetic, and does not fear criticizing when something doesn t please him. You ll see. My questions are in bold, the rest is by Maximilian. Who are you? My name is Maximilian Attems. I am a theoretical physicist in my last year of PhD at the Technical University of Vienna. My main research area is the early phase of a Quark-Gluon Plasma as produced in heavy ion collisions at the LHC at CERN. I am developing simulations that take weeks on the Vienna Scientific Cluster (in the TOP 500 list). The rest of the lab is much less fancy and boils down to straight intel boxes without any binary blobs or external drivers (although lately we add radeon graphics for decent free 3D). Mathematica and Maple are the rare exceptions to the many dev tools of Debian (LaTeX, editors, git, IDE s, Open MPI, ..) found at the institute, as those are unfortunately yet unmatched in Free Software for symbolic computations. The lab mostly runs a combination of Debian stable (testing starting from freeze) for desktops and oldstable/stable for servers. Debian is in use for more than 10 years. So people in the institute know some ups and downs of the project. Newcomers like my room neighbors are always surprised how functional a free Debian Desktop is. What s your biggest achievement within Debian? Building lots and lots of kernels together with an growing uptake of the officially released linux images. I joined the Debian kernel team shortly after Herbert Xu departed. I had been upstream Maintainer of the linux-2.6 janitor project for almost a year brewing hundreds of small cleanups with quilt in a tree named kjt for early linux-2.6. In Debian we had lots of fun in sorting out the troubles that the long 2.5 freeze had imposed: Meaning we were sitting on a huge diverging monolithic semi-good patchset. It was great fun to prepare 2.6.8 for Sarge with a huge team enthusiastic in shipping something real close to mainline (You have to imagine that back then you had no stable or longterm release nor any useful free tools like git. This involved passing patches around, hand editing them and seeing what the result does.) From the Sarge install reports a common pattern emerged that the current Debian early userspace was causing lots of boot failures. This motivated me to develop an alternative using the new upstream initramfs features. So I got involved in early userspace. Thanks to large and active development team initramfs-tools got a nice ecosystem. It still tries to be as generic and flexible as possible and thus gains many nice features. Also H. Peter Anvin (hpa) gave me the official co-maintenance of klibc. klibc saw uptake and good patches from Google in the last 2 years. I am proud that the early userspace is working out fairly well these days, meaning you can shuffle discs around and see your box boot. Later on we focused on 2.6.18 for Etch, which turned out to a be good release and picked up by several other distributions. Only very much later we would see such a sync again. With 2.6.26 for Lenny we got somehow unlucky as we just missed the new longterm release by one release. We also pushed for another update very late (during freeze) in the release cycle, which turned out to semi-work as too much things depend on linux-2.6. For Squeeze 2.6.32 got picked thanks to discussions at Portland Linux Plumbers and it turned out to be a good release picked up by many distributions and external patchsets. The long-term support is going very well. Greg KH is doing a great job in collecting various needed fixes for it. Somehow we had hoped that the Squeeze freeze would start sooner and that the freeze duration would be shorter, since we were ready for a release starting from the actual freeze on. The only real big bastard on the cool 2.6.32 sync is Red Hat. Red Hat Enterprise 6.0 is shipping the linux-2.6 2.6.32 in obfuscated form. They released their linux-2.6 as one big tarball clashing with the spirit of the GPL. One can only mildly guess from the changelog which patches get applied. This is in sharp contrast to any previous Red Hat release and has not yet generated the sharp and snide comments in press it deserves. Red Hat should really step back and not make such stupid management moves. Next to them even the semi-maintained Oracle Unbreakable 2.6.32 branch looks better: It is git fetchable. What are your plans and those of the kernel team for Debian Wheezy? Since 2.6.32 many of the used patches landed upstream or are on the way (speakup, Kbuild Debian specific targets, ..). The proper vfs based unionfs is something we d be looking forward. We haven t yet picked the next upstream release we will base Wheezy on, so currently we can happily jump to the most recent ones. There are plans for better interaction with Debian Installer thanks to generating our udebs properly in linux-2.6 source itself. Also we are looking forward to using git as tool of maintenance. We d hope that this will also allow for even better cross distribution collaboration. Concerning early userspace I plan to release an initramfs-tools with more generic userspace for the default case and finally also a klibc only for embedded or tuning cases. What do you like most in Debian? For one thing I do like the 2 year release cycle. It is not too long to have completely outdated software and on the other hand it gives enough time to really see huge progress from release to release. Also at my institute the software is is recent enough without too much admin overhead. For servers the three years support are a bit short, but on the manageable side. I do enjoy a lot the testing distribution. For my personal use it is very stable and thus I mainly run testing on my desktop and work boxes. (Occasionally mixing in things from sid for unbreaking transition or newer security fixes). Debian is independent and not a commercial entity. I think this is its main force and even more important these days. I enjoy using the Debian platform a lot at work thus in return this motivates me to contribute to Debian itself. I also like the fact that we strive for technical correctness. Is there some recurrent problem that hinders the progress of Debian? The New Maintainer process is a strange way to discourage people to contribute to Debian. It is particularly bureaucratic and a huge waste of time both for the applicant and his manager. It should be completely thrown overboard. One needs a more scalable approach for trust and credibility that also enhances the technical knowledge for coding and packaging of the applicant. NM is currently set in stone as any outside critics is automatically rejected. Young and energetic people are crucial for Debian and the long-term viability of the project, this is the reason why I d consider the New Maintainer process as Debian s biggest problem. Note from Rapha l Hertzog: I must say I do not share this point of view on the New Maintainer process, I have witnessed lots of improvements lately thanks to the addition of the Debian Maintainer status, and to the fact that a good history of contribution can easily subsume the annoying Tasks & Skills questionnaire. Another thing I miss is professional graphics input both for the desktop theme and the website. I know that effort has been done there lately and it is good to see movement there, but the end result is still lacking. Another trouble of Debian is its marketing capabilities. It should learn to better sell itself. It is the distribution users want to run and use not the rebranded copies of itself with lock-in sugar . Debian is about choice and it offers plenty of it: it is a great default Desktop. Linus Torvalds doesn t find Debian (and/or Ubuntu) a good platform to hack on the kernel. Do you know why and what can we do about this? The Fedora linux-2.6 receives contributions from several Red Hat employed upstream sub-Maintainers. Thus it typically carries huge patches which are not yet upstream. As a consequence eventual userland troubles get revealed quite quickly and are often seen there first. The cutting edge nature of Fedora rawhide is appealing for many developers. The usual Debian package division of library development files and the library itself is traditionally an entry barrier for dev on Debian. Debian got pretty easily usable these days, although we could and should again improve a lot more in this sector. Personally I think that Linus hasn t tried Debian for years. I have the feeling that the implication of the Debian Kernel team in LKML has been on the rise. Is that true and how do you explain this? Ben Hutchings is the Nr.1 contributor for 2.6.33. He also is top listed as author of patches on stable 2.6.32. Debian is not listed as organization as many send their linux-2.6 patches from their corporate or personal email address and thus it won t be attributed to Debian. There is currently no means to see how many patches get forwarded for the stable tree, but I certainly forwarded more then fifty patches. I was very happy when Greg KH personally thanked me in the 2.6.32.12 release. In the Squeeze kernel, the firmwares have been stripped and moved into separate packages in the non-free section. What should a user do to ensure his system keeps working? There is a debconf warning on linux-2.6 installation. It is quite clear that the free linux-2.6 can t depend on the firmware of the non-free archive (also there is no strict dependency there technically). On the terminal you d also see warnings by update-initramfs on the initramfs generation for drivers included in the initramfs. The debconf warning lists the filename(s) of the missing firmware(s). One can then apt-cache search for the firmware package name and install it via the non-free repository. The check runs against the current loaded modules. The match is not 100% accurate for special cases as the one where the device might be handled well by this driver without firmware, but is accurate enough to warrant the warning. The set of virtualization technologies that the official Debian kernel supports seems to change regularly. Which of the currently available options would you recommend to users who want to build on something that will last? KVM has been a smooth ride from day zero. It almost got included instantly upstream. The uptake it has is great as it sees both dev from Intel and AMD. Together with libvirt it s management is easy. Also the performance of virtio is very good. The linux containers are the thing we are looking forward for enhanced chroots in the Wheezy schedule. They are also manageable by libvirt. Xen being the bad outside boy has an incredible shrinking patchset, thus is fair to expect to see it for Wheezy and beyond. For many it may come a bit late, but for old hardware without relevant CPU it is there. Many tend to overstate the importance of the virtualization tech. I d be much more looking forward to the better Desktop support in newer linux-2.6. The Desktop is important for linux and something that is in heavy use. The much better graphics support of the radeon and nouveau drivers:

• For Nouveau in 32 with 33 drm we could only deliver a first taste meaning something better then rusty nv.
• For Radeon the support for Evergreen and newer is only been shaping now.

The performance optimizations thanks to dcache scalability work and the neat automatic task-grouping for the CPU scheduler are very promising features for the usability of the linux desktop. Another nice to have feature is the online defrag of ext4 and its faster mkfs. Even cooler would be better scalability in ext4 (This side seems to have seen not enough effort lately). Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Hans Peter Anvin and Ted Tso are a huge source of deep linux-2.6 knowledge and personal wisdom. I do enjoy all sorts of interactions with them. Christoph Hellwig with Matthew Wilcox and also William Irwin for setting up the Debian kernel Team. Several Debian leaders including the previous and the current one for their engagement, which very often happens behind the scene. The Debian Gnome Team work is great, also the interactions have always been always easy and a pleasure. Martin Michlmayr and previously Thiemo Seufer do an incredible job in porting Debian on funny and interesting ARM and MIPS boxes. Debian has a lot of upcoming potential on this area. I m looking forward to other young enthusiastic people in that area. Colin Watson is bridging Debian and Ubuntu, which is an immense task. Michael Prokop bases on Debian an excellent recovery boot CD: http://www.grml.org. I d be happy if any Debian Developer would work as carefully coding and working.

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Thank you to Maximilian 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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As I have complained quite loudly in this blog, I think it's fair to post a status update again. Yesterday the emails started suddenly to work. So the major reason for my complains is gone. What I still don't like that this issue was not at all communicated to project admins. It stopped to work, what was sort of announced in blog post. It started to work again without any announcement and last status update in blog still claims they do not work. At least for direct question, we've received reply that they have intentionally re-enabled this service.

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* It is always fantastic being with Kernel, Device Drivers, File Systems and Network Protocol and yeah, Illumos, NCP and NexentaStor! So, if you re around or in St. Petersburg, Krasnodar or Northen Boston (or even somewhere else too) read below we re hiring! From, John Goerzen s recent post,

Oh, and if you d like to work for us, you should probably be sending me an email. No, I m not going to list the address here on this blog post. If you can t figure it out, I don t want to hear from you

It seems that Matthew Palmer misread my blog post as a complaint against developers asking for patches in exchange of pet feature requests. He really should pay more attention, since I gave pet feature requests as an example of case where it would be appropriate to ask for a patch:

Of course, there are cases where it s perfectly reasonable to ask for a patch: when the task is expected to take hours, or when the result is of limited interest to everybody except the demander.

But even then, it s not clear. This morning I got an email from a someone involved in PHP packages maintenance, who said that Bugs Search @ UDD was a great tool, but that he would love to have a way to list all bugs affecting packages with the implemented-in::php debtag.
To produce a working patch for this would probably take him at least an hour. You need to set up a copy of the CGI on alioth, understand the DB structure, dig into the code, etc. If you don t understand SQL and Ruby, it could be a really difficult process. Also, it s probably quite uninteresting for him to do that, since he is unlikely to stick around developing UDD.
Instead, it didn t take me more than 5 minutes to produce a one-liner.
The net result for Debian in that case? 55 minutes saved by a developer. Update:
Torsten Werner wrote an angry reply to my post. It s true that yesterday s episode triggered my blog post, because I felt quite frustrated to have to provide a patch for something that simple, and would have preferred to use the time for a Debian task where I would be more efficient. But I was not particularly angry at that episode, since that s something I ve seen on several occasions. That s also why I did not mention any team in particular.
The feature request I was making was reasonable, and cannot really be considered a pet feature request (though I might be biased with my QA hat on): mentionning in the dak templates used for bug closure that packages removed from Debian can still be found on snapshot.d.o. The fact that he thinks that addressing this himself turns him into a slave raises interesting questions.

On the gripping hand, Matthew, notice that patches written by someone utterly unfamiliar with the code in question aren't always welcome. While some people don't mind spending several days on something that may or may not be accepted to begin with, it's important to realize that talking about wishlist items before even thinking about possibly writing a patch is more likely to result in the desired behaviour than writing and submitting patches in a fire-and-forget manner. In that light, there are cases where 'please send a patch' can be quite demotivating, and it makes sense as a developer to engage in a discussion about a wishlist item, even if you're not immediately interested in implementing said feature yourself. Such a discussion could lead to either you implementing it, or someone else implementing it, or the other person finally understanding that your vision for the software in question doesn't match theirs, and that they should just find something else to spend their time on. I guess the moral of the story is: as a user with a wishlist item, you should talk to developers, let them know what you think is important, and be prepared to write a patch yourself if needs be and you have the skill. As a developer, you shouldn't interpret every wishlist request as a question to 'please please please implement my pet feature', but as an opportunity to reconsider your views, and possibly implement some nice new feature that you hadn't thought about originally but which you think might be nice, too. If people reply with 'please provide a patch' to each and every wishlist request, they're stupid; even more so than users who think they have anything to demand.

It's time to upgrade my xen servers to squeeze. I've already put this off too long and now I've to task to go from etch to squeeze in one long step. In order to avoid problems I just did a first upgrade etch -> lenny and then to squeeze. However, since so much has changed in the meantime, and so much twicking of essential components is needed (such as Xen !), I guess I could have gone directly from etch to squeeze in one go, and fix everthing in the process... Anyway, to late for this kind of considerations.

The xen debian wiki is full of invaluable information. Kudos to the xen team for their hard work. To get you started on squeeze you need to install the xen hypervisor. Everything is provided by one package: This will pull the latest linux kernel and xen-hypervisor to run on dom0 . By default the hypervisor is probably not going to be the default kernel. If you want to change this, you should edit the grub default values : to make sure that the default kernel on dom0 is the xen-hypervisor. This is tricky, because grub let you define a default w.r.t the list of available kernels. so if you install a new kernel, you have to change the default accordingly with the list of kernels in /boot/grub/grub.cfg. It would be nice if I could define the default kernel with a label instead of a number... ( ref #505517 ) Alternatively, as suggested in the wiki, you can just move the xen kernel out of the way ... When installing xen related tools, aptitude will also probably install by default rinse and xenwatch. The first one is to boostrap redhat machines and maybe you don't need it. The second one is a GUI and will pull in a lot of X-related dependencies. If we have similar needs, you can just remove what is not needed... Something that is new, is the new schema for virtual devices. Now all vms will see /dev/xdva1 instead of /dev/sda1 as before. This needs to be changed in the domU as well as in the xen config files (/etc/xen/vm.cfg). One fantastic news is that xen 4 now uses pyGrub. It is not mandatory (so if you want, you can stick with the old configuration file). But if you use pygrub, on the domU you can install whatever kernel you want. Finally, your users will have complete freedom to pick and choose their kernels ! There was a small detail I didn't notice on the debian wiki, that is, if you try to use grub2 in squeeze, it will fail when probing the device#601974 . The workaround described in the wiki is to use xvd a,b,c,... as device names (and not xvd 1,2,3,... ) to make grub happy. Once you have changed then naming schema, grub will be able to see the disks and install the bootloader. Another solution is to install the os-prober from unstable / experimental. It seems a patch is on the works. On newly created images, you can also pass the --scsi parameter to xen-create-image to ignore this problem altogeher... I'm not sure if this will have other implications...

The console name is also changes from tty to xhv0 . To get back the console you should add this line in the inittab of all you VMs. A last note is about the merge upstream of the xen patch !! \o/ yeiiii !!

There s a frequent pattern in the Debian community where someone would suggest an improvement to some package or service, and the person responsible for it would reply with please send a patch . Of course, there are cases where it s perfectly reasonable to ask for a patch: when the task is expected to take hours, or when the result is of limited interest to everybody except the demander.
But often, it would be much more efficient for the person responsible for the service to take 5 or 10 minutes to make the change, than for the demander to spend half an hour learning how to contribute to this service, writing an untestable patch, and sending it back to the person responsible for the service for integration. It is important to see this problem as the issue of maximizing the usefulness of the resources we have. Often, we are in a situation where we could either:

• spend 30 minutes on a service we don t know, just to push one change
• spend 30 minutes making three or more changes that others would like to see in a service we know

It would be much better if, instead of saying Please send a patch , people would say Are you interested in contributing a patch, or should I make the change myself? . Remember that each time you ask someone to take some time to contribute a patch in an area where he is not an efficient contributor, you take some time away from him that could be used to contribute something in an area where he is efficient.

Reading job listings for any sort of IT job is depressing. It s been quite some time since I ve had to do that, but how many times have you seen something like this:

• 5 years of Java experience required.
• 3 years of Java experience with modules X, Y, Z required.
• 6 years of experience administering Linux machines running RHEL 4 on a Windows 2000 domain with 1500 clients in an educational setting preferred.

I could go on and on. As a job seeker, that sort of thing is fundamentally devaluing to someone who has strengths in being adaptable and quickly learning new tools, languages, or even entire environments. As an employer, it sends a message that you re not interested in more than a surface look at someone s strengths, and probably don t care to hire the best and the brightest. After all, would you turn away a rockstar programmer simply because he or she had been writing filesystem code in C the last 3 years instead of the latest whizbang Java web widget that will probably be obsolete in a year and unsupported in two? I am quite certain that there are plenty of managers that do. Even if you are a company large enough to have an entire team of people that do nothing but work on that whizbang app, don t you still want the best you can find, realizing that some of the best people to work on that app may not have even heard of it yet? (And that when the app goes obsolete in 5 years, you d rather not have to lay off a large team of single-skill people) Some of you may know that I work in IT at a manufacturing company. We have a small IT team here, about seven people, and are a heavy Debian shop. And we have a vacancy open up in our development/Linux admin group. I m the manager of that group, which is why I m thinking about this right now. We re too small for single-subject specialists to make sense, yet we re big enough to appreciate skill, experience, flexibility, and rigor. Consequently, when the occasion arises for me to look for new employees, I don t prepare a laundry list of things we use in-house and would like experience with. The list of almost-required things generally begins with Linux and ends with experienced , and has nothing else in between. In other words, I d like it if I don t have to explain to you what a symlink or a hardlink is, but I d be willing to do so if I think you d internalize it quickly. On the experienced side, it would be nice if you already have a well-developed sense of fear at running rm when you re root, or have designed a storage infrastructure for a network before, or are paranoid about security. But again, if people can pick up those traits on the job, we are usually still interested. If learning how to package up software for Debian, fix bugs in software you ve never seen in a language you ve never heard of, raise good questions about things you may not have lots of experience with, and write documentation for it all on a wiki sounds like fun, then that s probably the kind of person I want, even if you ve never used our particular tools before. If I were to judge based on the stuff I normally see in job postings, I guess you might conclude I m nuts. I don t think I am, but then again I m also the only person I know that formats his own resume in hand-crafted LaTeX. What do you all think? The next question is: how should one evaluate candidates given this sort of philosophy? I m not a fan of canned tests, or even whiteboard tests that tend to be some sort of canned topic that may test the applicant s specific knowledge base more than overall skill and flexibility. Similarly, as an applicant in years past, I ve struggled with how to present the I ve never used $LANGUAGE, but I know I could pick it up quickly and do it very well vibe. To certain people, that might sound like BS. To the more geeky managers, perhaps it sounds like what they want. We ve built a fairly diverse team on the back of this approach, and it s worked out well for us so far. I m interested to hear your thoughts. Oh, and if you d like to work for us, you should probably be sending me an email. No, I m not going to list the address here on this blog post. If you can t figure it out, I don t want to hear from you <grin>

Last week, we learned how to get rid of obsolete packages. This time, we re going to learn how to bring back your computer to a state close to a pure Ubuntu/Debian installation. Thanks to the power of APT, it s easy to add new external repositories and install supplementary software. Unfortunately some of those are not very well maintained. They might contain crappy packages or they might simply not be updated. An external package which was initially working well, can become a burden on system maintenance because it will be interfering with regular updates (for example by requiring a package that should be removed in newer versions of the system). So my goal for today is to teach you how to identify the packages on your system that are not coming from Debian or Ubuntu. So that you can go through them from time to time and keep only those that you really need. Obsolete packages are a subset of those, but I ll leave them alone. We took care of them last week. Each (well-formed) APT repository comes with a Release file describing it (example). They provide some values that can be used by APT to identify packages contained in the repository. All official Debian repositories are documented with Origin=Debian (and Origin=Ubuntu for Ubuntu). You can verify the origin value associated to each repository (if any) in the output of apt-cache policy:

[...]
 500 http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ lenny/main i386 Packages
     release v=5.0.8,o=Debian,a=stable,n=lenny,l=Debian,c=main
     origin ftp.debian.org
[...]

From there on, we can simply ask aptitude to compute a list of packages which are both installed and not available in an official Debian repository:

$ aptitude search '?narrow(?installed, !?origin(Debian))!?obsolete'
or
$ aptitude search '~S ~i !~ODebian !~o'

You can replace search with purge or remove if you want to get rid of all the packages listed. But you re more likely to want to remove only a subset of carefully chosen packages you re probably still using some of the software that you installed from external repositories. With synaptic, you can also browse the content of each repository. Click on the Origin button and you have a list of repositories. You can go through the non-Debian repositories and look which packages are installed and up-to-date. But you can do better, you can create a custom view. Click on the menu entry Settings > Filter . Click on New to create a new filter and name it External packages . Unselect everything in the Status tab and keep only Installed . Go in the Properties tab and here add a new entry Origin Excludes ftp.debian.org . In fact you must replace ftp.debian.org with the hostname of your Debian/Ubuntu mirror. The one that appears on the origin line in the output of apt-cache policy (see the excerpt quoted above in this article). Note that the term Origin is used to refer to two different things, a field in the release file but also the name of the host for an APT repository. It s a bit confusing if you don t pay attention. Close the filters window with OK. You now have a new listing of External packages under the Custom Filters screen. You can see which packages are installed and up-to-date and decide whether you really want to keep it. If the package is also provided by Debian/Ubuntu and you want to go back to the version provided by your distribution, you can use the Package > Force version menu entry.

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As much for my own reference as anything else... I quite often use vmplayer on my work desktop, and occasionally on my laptop. Other options might work better for other people, but the company have already settled on using vmware on their Linux machines to give users access to Outbreak, Office etc. I try to avoid them as much as possible, but about the only effective option for calendaring at work is Outbreak. *spit*. And on my laptop, I just have a vmplayer setup containing a trivial Windows XP installation for things like Nokia firmware updates. It's more hassle than I can be arsed with to move to something else - the only thing worse than using Windows is installing it, in my experience. In most respects, vmplayer is working OK for me. But: it has one intermittent and really annoying bug. Every now and again, as I switch away from the vmplayer session to another desktop using Ctrl-Alt, then Ctrl-Alt-Cursor, vmplayer eats the state of the X keyboard modifier keys. This makes things interesting after that point: my normal use of emacs, firefox, xterms, mutt (etc.) is fairly heavily dependent on being able to use the Shift and Ctrl keys. This looks like it has been documented as a bug in a number of places over the past few months/years (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.) but there doesn't seem to be a fix coming. However, what I have found out is that there is a workaround: setxkbmap will reset the modifier key state when things have broken. If only I'd been able to find that earlier - I've ended up restarting X or rebooting in the past... :-(

As I've already written, SourceForge.Net has limited things which you can do on git/mercurial servers and one of the things they have prohibited is sending emails. This is one of few things which almost every projects uses so it has brought quite obvious reaction, people are reporting bugs that it stopped to working. The major reason for reporting bug is that this change was not at all communicated to users (nor users nor project admins), so it was just a surprise and every body expects bug and not this kind of reply. As I don't have way to reopen the ticket, I had to open another one, that the documentation is wrong and I hope the reply will be slightly better. SF.net, if you still don't believe people used this feature quite a lot, just look at number of bug reports you have in your tracker right now...

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I just realized that the Debian Installer is ten years old! It actually got started ten years ago last summer, but now is also an apt anniversary -- ten years ago, I successfully booted d-i for the first time. It's amazing that d-i has been around as long as Debian Developers who have "been with the project longer than most". (Many of whom have been long-time contributors to d-i themselves.) Astonishing that my basic design has held up and remains relevant. And every time I boot up the Debian kFreeBSD installer, or run the graphical installer, or hear someone raving about how easy Ubuntu was for them to install (and know d-i was underneath), I'm amazed at the places people have taken d-i. The code has recently moved to git. As changes like ext4 by default start to flow in to d-i, with Wheezy development starting up, I hope to see more people enticed into working on d-i. Anyone can do like Matthew Palmer has done with netcfg -- pick a component of d-i that interests you, check out its git repository, and take it from being reasonably well team-maintained to awesomely you-maintained. In five or ten years Matthew will be able to look back at all the people who have used d-i to install over IPv6, and on WPA wireless, and with his other netcfg improvements. Trust me, it's a great feeling. Previously: d-i retrospective (better written than the above & well worth a re-read)

I ve got a few mails lately enquiring about the lack of visible activity on forked-daapd in recent times. Well, for one, I ve been busy with other things, but there s also been some non-public activity. So, here s what should happen in the next few months, in no particular order:

• overhaul of the database schema and code;
• metadata handling will (finally, probably) move away from ffmpeg;
• release of the libdispatch-based forked-daapd code.

The database overhaul will bring a much-needed speedup on small devices and big libraries. It s being worked on, but it ground to a halt with new year and all. Hopefully it ll resume soon. I m also giving up on ffmpeg for metadata extraction. It doesn t work well at all (as everybody knows by now) and it s actually getting worse and worse. With the ffmpeg takeover/fork (call it whatever you want) it s unclear what s going to happen on this front. So I m giving up and the metadata scanner will probably switch to using TagLib (one more dependency, yay). Last, but definitely not least, the libdispatch codebase should finally see the light at the end of the tunnel in the coming months. I ve been working on this since July last year, moving away from libevent. If you never heard about libdispatch, or Grand Central Dispatch, read my previous post on the subject. I ll talk about it in more details at a later date. Finally, as far as Squeeze is concerned, I plan to provide forked-daapd backports as long as it ll be practical to do so. This is it for now. I don t have a one more thing in my sleeve, sorry. Time is at a premium right now, so big things have to wait.

<iframe frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&amp;bc1=000000&amp;IS2=1&amp;bg1=FFFFFF&amp;fc1=000000&amp;lc1=0000FF&amp;t=dedasys-20&amp;o=1&amp;p=8&amp;l=as4&amp;m=amazon&amp;f=ifr&amp;asins=B003YH9MMI" style="width: 120px; height: 240px; float: left; margin-right: 10px;"></iframe> I tend to be a sucker for business books, to the point where I created (and later sold) a site to discuss them. Part of the motivation for creating that site was that a lot of them tend to contain one good idea, and an inordinate amount of fluff. This book does not - it's good material that could not easily be summarized because it's full of information. I think it's actually one of the more relevant books I've ever read in that, for my situation, the idea behind it really speaks to me. I work as a consultant during the days, and I like it a lot. Rather than working on the same old thing year after year, I get to meet new people, new clients, new situations, and help them out, which is motivating. However, consulting has its downsides too, in that it doesn't create a great deal of long-term value. Once you've finished up a project, it's on to the next one, or no money comes in. I'm also a bit older and more set in my ways: I did my time in the California Bay Area, and I don't relish going back and working like mad on a "Real Startup" with VC backing, crazy hours, and having the thing consume my life. The idea behind "Start Small, Stay Small" is to find and create really niche products: stuff that will earn you some extra money as a developer, but also niches that are small enough to not really be interesting to larger companies that need a lot of income to justify a forray into a particular market segment. This, then, becomes your 'competitive advantage': Microsoft, or even 37 Signals, simply isn't going to chase after a market that is worth 20,000 dollars a year. And yet for someone working on their own, if you manage to set up something that brings in that money, and mostly automate it so that it's not a second job, it's a tidy extra bit of money. Several projects like that might even be enough to live on, depending on your lifestyle. With that in mind, the authors, Rob Walling and Mike Taper, delve into the details of how to go about doing so. The whole thing is done under the assumption that you don't have a lot of time or money to throw at things that don't bring in concrete results in relatively short order. Various subjects discussed in detail include how to find a niche, how to create a sales web site, how to measure market demand, conversion rates, how to productively outsource less critical portions of your business, and much more. They also discuss what sorts of numbers to look at for various aspects of the business, and anchor the discussion with real numbers for many things, rather than just giving you a hand-wavy phrase that's not that useful in the real world. It's not a 'timeless' book as all the concrete numbers and techniques reference technologies, sites, and the market dynamics of 2011, but after all, that's part of what makes it good. Other things I didn't like so much were being sold on their for-pay "micropreneur community", and the relatively high price of the book but I think it's worth it given the real advice you get. If you don't like marketing, and think that products succeed or fail on their merits alone, of course the book will leave you cold, but of course you're wrong about that anyway!

My first ever Linux installation was done in the late nineties 1998 or thereabouts but was a RedHat 4.5 installation rather than a Debian one. The reason for that was fairly simple: the Infomagick sixpack CD set that I'd bought contained RedHat, Debian, and Slackware, but the RedHat installation was the only one that could be installed directly from CD the other two required me to write floppies and boot from those to start the installation, and I wasn't very fond of that idea. It was only a few years and a few broken RedHat upgrades later that I saw the light and considered trying out this Debian thing that some of my classmates were talking about. The fact that I'd just bought my own computer (rather than having to compete for time with my siblings on my parents' computer) was a good reason to do a fresh Linux installation. I'd been planning to install Linux From Scratch, but as what was still known as the LFS HOWTO told me you'd need a working Linux installation to do that, I considered my options. Since I'd developed a strong dislike of RedHat, I wasn't interested in doing another RedHat anymore. So, I downloaded the most recent version of Debian at the time (Potato Test Cycle III), wrote it to a CD, and installed. I've probably still got the CD lying around somewhere. A few months later, I found these "Linux Gazette" packages in the archive, with the latest packaged issue being 47, but the latest upstream version being much higher. Trying to figure out what was going on, I mailed the maintainer, Adrian Bridgett, who encouraged me to take over maintenance. Thus began my life of actively contributing to Open Source software. In November 2000, I applied to become a Debian Developer. In January 2001, Martin Michlmayr was assigned to be my AM. And in early February 2001, now just over ten years ago, I'd become a Debian Developer. Yes, that was fast, and no, I probably wasn't really ready yet, at the time. Originally, I only cared much about these Linux Gazette packages. But, as time went on, I started looking around, too. A friend passed me an old Macintosh Centris 610. As I tried to install Debian on it, I found that it didn't actually run very well. This turned out to be due to it having a broken 68LC040 processor, so I bought me another m68k-based mac, one with a full 68040 processor (a Centris 650). Thus I became involved in the m68k port and buildd maintenance. As these old machines came with 80MB or 250MB SCSI hard disks of which I had none laying around, and a then-recent Debian installation had minimum requirements of about 200MB, I was in need of network storage to be able to do anything useful with the mac. NFS didn't work as expected; the RTC implementation on m68k mac hardware was reverse engineered and didn't work too well at the time, which meant that the clock would run slower if the machine was under load, and that in turn would mean that make would get confused about timestamps, since they would suddenly appear to originate from the future (in NFS, it's the server that assigns time stamps, not the client). There was a simple solution, however; Pavel Macheck had written this neat 'Network Block Device', which would let the client do its own filesystem on network storage. Only it wasn't packaged; but then, that was easy to fix. Thus I started maintaining the single piece of software that I've worked the most on, to date. A few years later, Pavel lost interest in maintaining NBD, and handed over upstream maintenance to me and maintenance of the kernel side to Paul Clements. Thus began my life in upstream work. And while I originally joined Debian with the intent of using it as a learning experience and stepping stone on my way to more "important" free software, I found that it wasn't as satisfying as was my work for Debian. Over the years, there's been this duality where I've felt like I was doing too much and not enough at the same time. Too much, because the things I was doing would eat up much of my spare time, leaving little time left for other hobbies. Not enough, because I witnessed other people doing much more for Debian than I did, and I wanted to make a difference. As the years passed by, many things have changed. Not only in Debian, but also besides it. I became an independent contractor, focusing mostly on supporting people in using Debian (although I support them with other distributions, too). The importance of a port went from 'something which these weird porter people are doing, and that we should probably help them with if it doesn't work, but is their problem really' to 'something that I really really really have to make sure works for my packages', and back for the port that I cared about most. After several years of trying, I finally managed to explain to my parents what this Debian thing is, why it matters, and what my role in the whole thing is. We did a few releases, some taking longer than I would've liked. People joined the project, and left again. Some of my friends died. My fame in the project rose, even though I wasn't aware of it initially; and thus I was rather surprised when someone asked me whether I was "the Wouter Verhelst" at a key signing party. Recently, I've started looking back, and considered the things which Debian has meant to me. Ten years ago, I was 22, still in college, and had way too much spare time on my hands. I'd recently gotten my first Internet installation, and all these online communities were very new to me. Yes, that was all probably rather late. Debian has changed my life in many ways; it has allowed me to meet various kinds of people, both online and in meatspace. I've been to Helsinki, Edinburgh, Mar del Plata, C ceres, and New York City, places that I might otherwise not have visited. Each of these trips was an incredible experience that I have fond memories of; and while the most fond ones originate from Helsinki, I cherish the memories of each of these trips as some of the best trips I've ever done. Working on Debian has forced me to learn about the inner workings of a Linux-based system, which is knowledge that has helped me tremendously professionally, too. And finally, working on Debian has given me a unique perspective on this whole FOSS community, which has helped shape my ethics and my view of the world. While I believe that I would've subscribed to most of that ideology at any rate, I'm not sure that the details of my beliefs and understanding would've been exactly the same. And while I don't agree on every position that the project subscribes to as a whole, I do believe that the philosophies that lie at the core of this project contain just the right mix of pragmatism and ideology that makes it possible for our project to thrive in a changing world of not only a growing group of people who subscribe unconditionally to the free software ideals, but also business people who care mostly about money. Over the years, somehow I moved from "one of the recent batch of new Debian Developers" to "someone who's been with the project longer than most". It still feels weird to see people shut up because you've built up a reputation in some area, and you give your gut opinion on some subject without researching it too much. I try not to let that happen too often. Today, ten years and just over a week ago, my life as a Debian Developer started, and it would change the way I looked at the world, the things I would do in my spare time, and the people I would meet. I wouldn't have it any other way. Thanks, Debian, for what's been a blast; may the next ten years be as inspiring to me and everyone as the past ten!

After recent attack on sf.net servers, some services have been unavailable for some time. Now things are returning to "normal" operations, CVS has been made available yesterday. But this has lead to other (quite unrelated) change, affecting all SCM services:

outbound email is not functional, so any script utilizing this will fail. If you need to send outbound email, a workaround would be to use curl and and external site or Project Web to send the email.

I think this is just wrong. If this is as a measure against spam, it will rather open dozens of other places where to send spam, because every project wanting commit notifications (or using CIA.vc), will need to deploy some script on web to send mail. And I guess it simply won't be much protected. Maybe it's time to consider changing service provider... PS: The bug I've reported on this topic is here.

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The conference LCA 2011 had an anti-harassment policy [1] which was violated by a keynote speech. The speaker and the conference organisers apologised, but of course the matter didn t end there.Discussion continued on the lca-chat list (for conference delegates) [2], on the Linux-aus list (for members of Linux Australia the parent body of the LCA conference) [3], and in some blog posts.There is also some discussion on an LWN article that is linked from an ITWire article [4].I think that the policy was reasonable and from all the descriptions it seems to have worked reasonably well. With such things there are always possibilities to tweak things, so probably there will be future policies which are better in some ways, but it seemed to do the job. The way that the LCA organisers handled the situation was appropriate. In the discussion there were some comments with logical failures that I think need further analysis, I ll summarise them one per paragraph with the heading being a para-phrase of the claim.Is it Offensive?A particularly relevant blog post is Skud s post about avoiding the use of the word offense [5]. In the various discussions about the speech in question most of the people who disapprove of the erotic images don t use the word offense , this is presumably due in part to the influence of Skud s post. This hasn t stopped people claiming that the debate is about whether the images are offensive, I m not sure if this is a deliberate straw-man attack or just cluelessness.The anti-harassment policy does use the word offensive in two places, I think that this was a mistake but it doesn t detract from the overall meaning of the document.Is it Harassment?There was some discussion about whether the actions in question were harassment. Wordnet s definition of harassment includes the act of tormenting by continued persistent attacks and criticism . It seems unlikely that any of the people in the audience who objected to the erotic content in the lecture slides had never seen unwanted erotic material before. So I think that it s worth considering this incident as just another entry in a list of similar incidents that some of the delegates have experienced, and thus as a continuation of persistent attacks IE harassment. Melissa McEwan s post about the variety of harassment that she has received from men is worth reading in this regard [6].I think that a reasonable analogy here is the school bullying campaigns that were experienced by many members of the Linux community when they were younger. School bullying in most cases is not about a small number of extreme incidents, but about a large number of small incidents each of which when considered independently can be rationalised as something that isn t significant (excusing such incidents independently is what allows bullying to be rife in most schools). In many cases of high school bullying the victim is blamed for supposedly over-reacting after a reaction is compared to some small incident at the end of a long harassment campaign, some of the criticism of the Geek Feminists seems to echo this pattern.It seems to me that some of the more dismissive comments which demonstrated a lack of regard for the experiences of other people can reasonably be considered as harassment too (which is also something that Melissa McEwan mentions). Note that I am specifically not advocating that the discussion be shut down, merely that the people who claim that it s only the (supposed) opinion of the majority that matters are part of the problem. However the fact that the apology for the talk received applause from the majority of the audience seems to indicate that the majority is in fact in favor of the anti-harassment policy.Derald Wing Sue, Ph.D. and David P. Rivera (a doctoral candidate in counseling psychology) have written a couple of interesting short articles about this for Psychology Today. Bullying and Microaggressions describes bullying as more than physical violence and also discusses adult bullies [7]. The Power to Define Reality describes the way that the experiences of people who lack power can have the reality of their experiences denied [8] this one really relates to some of the discussions about harassment.But it s Legal!It has been claimed that the legal system works well in Australia and that Australian law should be the only necessary guide to content. A trivial counter-case that was noted in the discussion is the fact that pure sales presentations are not accepted at LCA and such presentations are certainly legal! There is a good precedent for prohibiting things that are legal as part of the conference speaker agreement.More generally the legal system changes slowly and still infringes on what many people in our community regard as basic human rights. There is no reason why an Australian conference should have as it s standards the bare minimum that is required by Australian law.It was pointed out that workplace social norms translate well between cultures, they are usually more stringent than Australian law requires and Australian workplace law is a lot more stringent than the laws relating to conferences and other public events. It seems to me that a presentation which would result in a visit from HR if given at the office shouldn t be regarded as suitable for a conference such as LCA.But there is a Balance of Men and Women in Erotic Pictures!The complaints are not about a lack of balance in the erotic material, but it s presence there at all. Defending the slides on the basis that there was a supposed balance of male and female misses the point that most people just want no erotic material in presentations at conferences.Also it seems to me that if there are pictures which aren t offensive then the way to demonstrate this would be to publish them and say look, they aren t offensive . If it takes 600 words in a blog post to justify the use of some images then that alone seems to be evidence that the images were poorly chosen.But the talk was EffectiveSome of the people who have commented on this issue mentioned that they couldn t remember what was said when the images in question were displayed. When images from the talk are remembered and the main content of the talk isn t that seems to be a failure of the talk.When a major sponsor of the conference complains and requests that the talk video never be published that also seems like a major failure of the talk.I think that the effective talks are ones that educate people and inspire them to do something positive and useful. A talk that inspires a discussion about whether the speaker deserves censure doesn t seem effective.There are claims that there is no way the talk could have made the point as well if it wasn t for the images in question. But I can t believe that someone who is capable enough to get awarded a keynote speaking position at a conference such as LCA is incapable of finding other images to make the same point.But Similar Images are on MTVWhen people want MTV content they can watch MTV.Why Can t we just try Educating Men?It was claimed that education works in dealing with such issues in corporate environments and sporting clubs. My observation of the corporate environment is that such training must be extremely rare in Australia, the Netherlands, and probably the UK due to the fact that none of my employers have done it. I have heard first-hand reports of diversity training from people who work in the US. I expect that the fact that people who fail diversity training in a corporate environment get a meeting with HR is a major factor in it s effectiveness.The long email discussions and blog comment threads when these incidents happen could theoretically be used as training. But when you have some men using multiple mailing lists and dozens of posts arguing without appearing to learn it seems clear that they are not about to learn anything no matter what education is offered. It seems to me that you could broadly divide the free software community into two groups, those who want to learn how to do things better (but who are unlikely to make gross errors anyway), and those who won t learn.Besides, having a keynote speaker at a major conference apologise should be educational.But Clueless Nerds Hit on GirlsI don t know why every discussion about the treatment of women ends up getting a mention of this supposed issue.But Women Could make False AccusationsIn any classification system you have to make some sort of balance between false-positives and false-negatives. If the aim is to get zero false-positives then the incidence of false-negatives will increase. So if the aim was to never ever have a false accusation brought against a man for sexual harassment then the vast majority of real harassment cases would result in no action at all.I don t think it s reasonable to expect that most women who are mistreated should suffer in silence just to reduce the possibility that men might be falsely accused.The Rape Statistics cited in the discussion may be InaccurateThere is no possible way of interpreting rape statistics to make it not be a serious problem, now matter how you analyse the available information it happens far too often and has a significant impact on the victim. Also the suggested reinterpretation of the statistics didn t contradict the claim that it is likely that there are multiple rape victims attending LCA. So interpreting the statistics in a different way to get different numbers doesn t change anything. Trying to diminish the significance of rape generally doesn t support any other arguments that you might make.There are things that you can just discuss for the heck of it and things which should be discussed with care (if at all) to avoid needlessly hurting people. In these sorts of discussions the right thing to do is to avoid debating the numbers as much as possible.I think that the numbers produced by RAINN [9] are as good as we can get.But I am very supportive of women in our communityIf you spend all your time arguing with women and don t listen to what they have to say then you really aren t supporting them.ConclusionAfter publishing this post I ll email the URL to a few of the men who helped inspire it, I will explain how disappointed I am and how I expect better from them. I encourage others to do the same.Also when such discussions happen I encourage men to vote in favor of the positions advocated by women. Writing a message that addresses points in the debate can be difficult and if the debate is rapid then you may find that every point that you might make has been made by someone else. But in that case just posting to agree with the women can really mean a lot.

• [1] http://lca2011.linux.org.au/about/harassment
• [2] http://lists.followtheflow.org/pipermail/chat/2011-January/001722.html
• [3] http://lists.linux.org.au/pipermail/linux-aus/2011-January/018431.html
• [4] http://www.itwire.com/opinion-and-analysis/open-sauce/44803-linux-australia-members-abused-over-pesce-keynote?start=1
• [5] http://infotrope.net/2009/08/05/action-and-reaction-on-avoiding-offense/
• [6] http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2009/08/terrible-bargain-we-have-regretfully.html
• [7] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/microaggressions-in-everyday-life/201101/bullying-microaggressions
• [8] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/microaggressions-in-everyday-life/201010/the-power-define-reality
• [9] http://www.rainn.org/