Dear lazyweb, I bought an Aten CS1784A DVI+USB KVM switch a couple of months ago. I m pretty happy with it except for one annoying problem. It has a Dell multimedia USB keyboard plugged into it (picked it up from a swap meet for $15 nice. it's a pretty good keyboard in its own right but i mostly bought it to match what I use at work), and a Logitech MX518 mouse connected. Also two computers one runs Linux only. The other is switched off most of the time, but is occasionally powered up to boot into either Linux to experiment with stuff i don't want to do on my main system (like gnome 3) or sometimes Win7 to play games. OK, that s the background data. Here s the problem Whenever I reboot either of the Linux installations, the KVM stops recognising the keyboard. I have to unplug the keyboard and plug it back in before any input is recognised. Keyboard input doesn't get through to the currently active system, and I can't even use the KVM's magic key <ScrlLock><ScrlLock>n<Enter> to switch between systems it doesn't even beep after the 2nd ScrlLock as it should, so it seems as if all keyboard input is ignored by the KVM, or the keyboard is totally confused and not sending anything. The mouse continues to work during this. Rebooting Win7 doesn't do this. The keyboard just works as it should. The problem occurs sometime between the time Linux is selected from the Grub2 menu and the gdm login screen is displayed (same result with both gdm on my main system and gdm3 on my secondary system). The keyboard works when plugged directly into either system, without the KVM. I d been using it for several months before I got the KVM, and I ve tested that it still works correctly across a reboot if i plug it in directly. Googling for "+linux +CS1784A" just gives me hundreds of pages from web sites selling the KVM, but no useful info. Anyone seen anything like this before? Can anyone think of anything that linux might be doing in it's console or X initialisation that would confuse the KVM? it's not a huge problem because I really don't reboot all that often more of an annoyance that I'd like to go away. problems with Linux and Aten CS1784A KVM switch is a post from: Errata

I've today released version 0.21 of Obnam, my backup application. This is the first version that also got uploaded to Debian. It is currently waiting for manual processing in the NEW queue. From the NEWS file: USER VISIBLE CHANGES:

• Obnam will now unlock the repository if there's an error during a backup. For the most part, the force-lock operation should now be unnecessary, but it's still there in case it's useful some day.

BUG FIXES:

• Negative timestamps for files now work. Thanks to Jamil Djadala for reporting the bug.
• The documentation for --checkpoint units fixed. Thanks, user weinzwang from IRC.
• The connections to the repository and live data filesystem are now properly closed. This makes benchmark read/write statistics be correct.

The German Linux Magazine runs a sponsored an "Open Source Lounge" at CeBIT each year. Last year I put in a proposal for DAViCal and it got accepted! With some airfare support from InternetNZ I got to showcase my Free Software project at the largest IT trade fair in the world.If you have an open source project to promote I can't recommend this highly enough. Below is a review of my experience at CeBIT early this year. This is long overdue for posting, and I'm prompted now because submissions are now open for the Open Source Project Lounge at CeBIT in 2012. Apply now.The German Linux Magazine runs a sponsored an "Open Source Lounge" at CeBIT each year. Last year I put in a proposal for DAViCal and it got accepted! With some airfare support from InternetNZ I got to showcase my Free Software project at the largest IT trade fair in the world. If you have an open source project to promote I can't recommend this highly enough. Below is a review of my experience at CeBIT early this year. This is long overdue for posting, and I'm prompted now because submissions are now open for the Open Source Project Lounge at CeBIT in 2012. Apply now. DAViCal at CeBIT 2011 CeBIT in Hannover is said to be the largest trade fair in the world, attracting over 300,000 visitors during it's five days. Late last year a DAViCal user in Germany suggested that I apply for a free booth for DAViCal in the Linux New Media Open Source Project Lounge . When DAViCal was accepted, I realised I needed some funding to help me travel around the world to attend, so I applied for a grant from InternetNZ who were kind enough to agree to cover part of my travel costs, and I was on my way. Germany in March is cold, especially for me coming from Summer! My travel allowed for a couple of days in Germany before CeBIT because that was when I could get the cheapest flights, and I wanted to have a little time to recover from the journey. Everyone had warned me to pack my winter woollies, and they were definitely needed! I stayed with a friend in Hamburg for two days and on the the second day we walked through the frozen park, past the frozen lake and over the frozen streams to see the Attraktor Hackerspace in Hamburg Nord where the CCC also hold their meetings a very impressive hackerspace in a repurposed bank (including the vault :-) with several separated areas for talks, meetings and workplaces. The day before CeBIT I travelled to Hannover to take a look at my booth space, fetch exhibitor passes for myself and volunteers and generally prepare to do battle with the crowds. The following day the fair started and it was up at 6:30 to get ready and catch the 7:38 train out to the fairgrounds. Although the fair opens at 9:00 there was always something to do between eight o'clock or so when I arrived at my booth and when the attendees started wandering past.
I was fortunate to have two volunteers for my booth who were there all week, as well as a couple more who turned up on the first two days. Not only did this mean that I got to spend a few hours during the week actually wandering the fairgrounds, but that I had some knowledgeable native german speakers for the occasional visitor who could not speak English. DAViCal has been translated into a dozen languages, and there had been some extra work put in to update the German translation before CeBIT also. As well as showing DAViCal, I was also able to demonstrate a new project at the fair which was aCal - a CalDAV Calendar Client for Android which I had released into the market just a few days beforehand for a token sum (it is licensed GPL v3 or later and the source code is available on gitorious.org). Having the smartphone devices available was great for giving live demonstrations, and I used the timetable for events at the Open Source Forum across the aisle from the Open Source Lounge to populate a calendar that we shared among a variety of devices. The first day was really the calm before the storm, and we saw lots of people asking what we were about, and had some good conversations with people wanting to know more, or telling us they used the software and were very happy with it.
CeBIT closes the gates at 18:00 with the visitor supply drying up pretty quickly around then and the secret lives of the exhibitors are revealed with people starting to relax and joke, and beer or wine starting to come out and some booth parties kicking off... if you have the stamina! I didn't, so it was off back to the train, to Hildesheim, to dinner and to bed. That first day blurred into the next, and the next and by Friday I was starting to lose my voice with all the talking I had been doing. I was visited by a chap from Posnan University who are a DAViCal user and he invited me down to the Polish stand to tell me about what they do there, and he agreed that they would love to help get the Polish translation improved. Another DAViCal user turned up with some bavarian wheat beer and a special beer glass for it by way of thanks. In some spare moments I fixed a bug in aCal's handling of character sets and uploaded a new version, so that we could use umlauts in events. Many people came past to talk to us, some of whom want to help with them project or have ideas for interesting things to do with DAViCal, some were already users of DAViCal and some went away thinking that they would be in the future. The last day of CeBIT is a little different: it's a Saturday and the doors are opened to the public and the minimum age is lowered to allow children to attend the event. I had been warned that this day is a madhouse, and it did indeed seem to be so for many booths. For DAViCal it was probably quieter than the day before, I think perhaps because calendar server software is inherently less sexy than many of the other things on display. We still had plenty of great discussions with interested people nonetheless and to be honest I was fairly happy to be spared the further exhaustion that had been threatened. Sunday was spent recuperating: discovering that Hildesheim has a great little restaurant that does traditional german pancakes for breakfast and then wandering around the small city soaking in the sunshine that I'd seen through the windows outside all week. On Monday I caught the train to M nchengladbach to meet with an organisation that might provide support for DAViCal in Germany, but who hadn't been able to come to the fair to see me due to illness. I was encouraged to spend the night in Aachen a beautiful little city , which I did, arriving around sunset and I spent a couple more days before flying home being intensely antisocial to recover from the furious week beforehand. Is CeBIT worth it? CeBIT seemed to me to be quite a different business model, or perhaps on a different scale. I've seen trade fairs in New Zealand for other purposes, but not to showcase software and services in quite this way. To give an idea of it's scale, consider that I had a tiny booth in a hall that was probably four times the size of the TSB Arena, and CeBIT included around 20 such buildings , packed with exhibitors, with free buses to get around the campus, acres of multi-storey parking buildings, two train stations, and so on. The scale of the event is incredible. As a result of this scale, CeBIT boasts impressive visitor numbers, and while a visitor will usually attend with a specific area of interest in relation to their business they will also wander the fair to see other areas of more personal interest, or just to see what is around. Open Source is a specific area of interest to a significant percentage of business in Germany, and Deutsche Messe, the fair operators, recognise the value of having an open source area as a draw for visitors, with the primary open source area placed in Hall 2, directly off the main north entrance. Within the open source area, the Open Source Project Lounge , where DAViCal was located, is a series of booths sponsored by Linux New Media AG. Projects in the Open Source Lounge are selected by a jury of Linux New Media, Deutsche Messe and several community advisors, so as such there is a range of interesting projects on show and the draw of any given project has a flow-on effect to the others. As an example, at one point while briefly minding the adjacent stand for the OpenEmbedded project I was unable to help an inquiring visitor, but I was able to talk about DAViCal with him until the exhibitor returned to answer his question. His interest in DAViCal was definitely increased in this process, and I'm sure that many people came into our area of the lounge attracted by a specific exhibitor and moving on to see some of the others. Outside of this association with open source, however, CeBIT offers something which general free software events cannot: an association with mainstream software and services. This presentation of Open Source alongside IBM, SAP, HP, Oracle, Software AG, Apple, Microsoft and so forth makes inclusion at this event particularly valuable. Free software solutions can have good brand recognition within the open ecosystem itself and yet be practically unheard of outside it. Most traditional methods of communication with suppliers don't work well with Open Source projects: a request for proposal will sail silently by, unless noted by a related commercial entity. In general there is no sales department, and marketing is frequently a desultory hit or miss affair. The fair is different. The fair is about talking with people. While there is still plenty of collateral marketing with brochures, signs, presentations and giveaway knick-knacks those things are just there to bring people into range: the real action happens when you engage a person in conversation, and at that point a humble free software project can be on an equal footing with a larger booth staffed with eager young salesmen. Of course there are a number of places where free software can get a booth. Linuxtag is a German example where there are many booths for free software projects, linux.conf.au also offers booths to free software projects during it's more outreach Open Day and software freedom day events happen all around the world where booths are available, but the audience arriving at these events are all largely pre-sold on openness and free software. So in presenting this broad blend of people, in a way in which free software projects can present on a roughly equal footing with their commercial brethren, CeBIT is an opportunity not to be missed. The numbers speak for themselves, too: traffic to the DAViCal websites has increased by about 50% around CeBIT with 25% coming from Germany, but significant increases also from France, Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland and Poland. Traffic to the DAViCal wiki has doubled over the last 12 months in a steady increase to around 200,000 page views each month. This sudden increase to around 10000/day in March, with some days during CeBIT peaking at over 20000/day The Future I won't be returning to CeBIT to represent DAViCal in Hannover next year as the sponsored booth is pretty much a one-time thing and the costs involved in purchasing a booth for attendance at the fair are significant (around NZD$15000 for a small 3m x 2m stall). It's possible that I will return next year in a different capacity, as one of the larger stand organisers has confidentially indicated he will invite me to attend as part of an Open Source Apps area that he is considering running on his stand, somewhat along the lines of the Open Source Lounge . Time will tell, I guess, but if invited I think I would definitely go for that. I will definitely be suggesting to a few specific free software projects that they should apply for the Linux New Media opportunity when it comes around again. Koha is one project that immediately springs to mind, but of course there are many, many worthy free software projects and this opportunity seems to be little-understood outside of Germany. If I do convince a project to apply, and they are successful, I will also try and give them some assistance and background knowledge to understand the fair, and how best they can take advantage of the opportunity it offers. Some basic tips would be:

• Book accommodation early, a small apartment or B&B is good. CeBIT accommodation prices are exceptionally high 3 or more times normal rates. There are companies that specialise in renting apartments for the week of CeBIT which are more reasonably priced.
• The fair is in Hannover , except that really it is some distance to the southeast. Exhibitors tickets provide free transport within greater Hannover for the whole week, so you don't actually need to be that close. Options like Hildesheim, a city of some 120k people south of Hannover (where I stayed), are also good although they add a small transport cost.
• Have a pop-up banner for your project.
• Develop a slideshow which tells people about your project and which can just be left running on a larger screen.
• Have a flyer you can hand out to interested people.
• Get at least one committed person to assist on the stand for the whole week.
• Get some more volunteers to assist on the stand for one day each.
• Pace yourself: get to bed early and try not to overdo the partying it's a long week!
• If you want to take a look around the fair don't wait until Friday or Saturday do it on Thursday or earlier.

and finally... I would like to express my appreciation to InternetNZ for the grant to partially cover my travel costs to Hannover, making my attendance at this outstanding event much more achievable. My thanks also to Britta Wulfling who supported all of the projects in the Open Source Lounge. My friends Alexander & Meike in Hildesheim who supplied somewhere for me to recuperate, and accompanied me to the fair every day to run the Debian booth. Thanks also, of course, to the German Linux Magazine for selecting DAViCal for a free booth, and to Benny who pointed the opportunity out, encouraged me to apply, and came along and helped out for the whole week.

I think I'm currently supposed to be out buying a TV at the moment. Or something else expensive. Instead I'm lying on the sofa listening to Whale and drinking tea. That's much better in my opinion, but it reminded me that I hadn't mentioned that I bought a projector. I had the loan of a projector for a while when I was in Belfast. It was a huge thing that made a lot of noise, but was pretty cool for watching films with. When I moved to the US I decided not to bother with a TV to start with - using my laptop did just fine for most things. Except films. They really benefit from a bigger screen. Especially if you want to watch them with someone else. So I started looking at pico projectors, because I wanted something small and cute that I could throw in a bag with my tiny laptop. At the time the best the pico projectors could do was 840x480, which I felt wasn't really that great. However back in January TI announced their DLP Pico HD chipset, offering a resolution 1280x800. I kept a look out for projectors using this to appear, and eventually, in July, Amazon claimed to have availability of the Vivtek Qumi. So I bought one. And I'm very happy with it. I'm not a heavy user, and there are some niggles, but it's small and does exactly what I want. In low light conditions it'll happily throw an image all the way across the room, which is more than it's rated at. There's a mini-HDMI connector on the back, so it's a doddle to plug it into my laptop using the supplied HDMI to mini-HDMI cable. The laptop auto-detects the device and extends the desktop appropriate, as you'd expect. It'll also do media playback itself - there's a USB host port and a micro SD slot on the back. This works ok, and the included remote means you can easily set the projector somewhere above your head and still be able to easily control it. Unfortunately the built in speakers are fairly useless. There's a 3.5mm socket for external speakers, but having to plug something else in detracts from the convenience factor of the built-in media player. Also my unit had the power switch installed upside down (the little red line indicating the power is on actually shows up when it's off), but that's the only complaint I've got about the build quality. There's a little neoprene case to store the thing in as well. So, er, yeah. I think I can continue to make do without a normal TV for a while longer and avoid the nightmare that I suspect are the shops on Black Friday.

Being tired of feeling embarrassed when noticing some warning in a buildd log only after having it uploaded and looking at the buildd logs of the other architectures, I've decided to write some little infrastructure to scan buildd logs for things that can be found in buildd logs. The result can be visited at https://buildd.debian.org/~brlink/. Note that it currently only has one real check (looking for E: Package builds NAME_all.deb when binary-indep target is not called.) yet and additionally two little warnings (dh_clean -k and dh_installmanpages deprecation output) which lintian could at catch just as well. The large size of the many logs to scan is a surprisingly small problem. (As some tests indicated it would only take a couple of minutes for a full scan, I couldn't help to run one full scan, only to learn afterwards that wb-team was doing the import of the new architectures at that time. Oops!) More surprising for me using small files to keep track of logs already scanned does not scale at all with the large number of source packages. File system overhead is gigantic and it makes the whole process needlessly IO bound. That problem was be easily solved using sqlite to track things done, though as buildd.debian.org doesn't have that installed yet, so no automatic updates yet. [Update: already installed, will be some semi-automatic days first, though anyway] The next thing to do is writing more checks, where I hope for some help from you: What kind of diagnostics do you know from buildd logs that you would like to be more prominently visible (hopefully soon on packages.qa.debian.org, wishlist item already filed)? Trivial target is everything that can be identified from regular expression applied to every line of the buildd log. For such cases the most complicated part is writing a short description of what this message means. (So if you sent me some suggestions, I'd be very happy to also get a short text suitable for that, together with the message to looks for and ideally some example package having that message in its buildd log). I'm also considering some more complicated tests. I'd really like to have something to test for packages being built multiple times to due Makefile errors and stuff like that.

Could you not trust this man?Max and Fraser are very interested in this year's election. I guess political awareness starts at the first election after you turn 10, or so. They're both very curious about how mum and dad are voting, and while their mother will not tell (though we all have our suspicions :-) I don't see any reason not to discuss my political leanings with them.I've been what is commonly termed a 'floating' voter for most of my voting life. I imagine the politicians themselves might term people like me 'floaters', with an eye to the scatalogical implications. After all, their livelihoods are on the line!So, after reading this blog post I thought I might as well also share my personal voting plans with the world.

alt="imagine an xkcd-style infographic here" 0 seconds

• peace and quiet
• full history of all my projects (git repos)
• my blog
• email

0.5 seconds

• chatting on IRC
• searching through all email received since 1994
• music
• cached web pages

5 seconds

• ssh to a server
• search the web
• lwn, hacker news, reddit, metafilter, and other web aggregators

10 seconds

• resuming laptop from sleep and waiting for network-manager
• view an unnecessarily pastebinned scrap of text
• access local Debian mirror
• looking up a typical bug report

20 seconds

• click on a typical link from a web aggregator
• an hour of video pulled from a USB drive with git-annex

2 minutes

• downloading new email
• commute to work
• an increasing number of websites that force https (average of 3 reloads needed due to timeouts)

5 minutes

• viewing a single file, bug report, or merge request on github
• cloning the full content of a typical not too large git repo
• retriving data from archival drives via git-annex
• going offline and making a phone call
• apt-get update (thanks aj, for the pdiffs)
• viewing a single a twitter page (megabytes of crud and #! redirections)

10 minutes

• entering a state of flow while programming
• boingboing.net (with all the pretty pictures)
• my mailbox (after a nice walk down a long driveway)

22 minutes

• milk and eggs
• a swim in the river

30 minutes

• broadband internet access
• someone else who knows what linux is

32 minutes

• an hour of video pulled from my server with git-annex (includes travel time to broadband access point)

70 minutes

• a halfway decent but slightly overpriced grocery store
• a produce stand
• a coffee shop

180 minutes

• family
• a bakery with real bread

300 minutes

• downloading a typical podcast

On occasion I receive death threats in comments on my blog. This doesn t bother me, I had more than a few pathetic losers say similar things to me in high school but the difference is that a pathetic loser on the other side of the world can t do much about it. The latest one is on my post Is Asperger Syndrome a Good Thing? [1]. At 11:04AM my time (00:04 UTC) on the 23rd of November someone using IP address 82.14.50.190 (registered to NTL Infrastructure for Tesco Guildford ) and with the claimed email address of sharkbait @ tesco.net told me that I m on his to kill list . He was angry because my post apparently didn t satisfy his need to prove to people that they don t want AS . As it s not possible to choose your DNA there is really no point in trying to prove that one set of genes is better than another, unless of course you want to harass people who have different genes to you. Naturally he didn t read my post, in fact the differences between his comment and what I wrote made me suspect that it s something he was pasting in to lots of blogs, but it seems unlikely that he would use an iPhone for such a copy/paste job so he must just not read. For example he rhetorically asks did you even mention it was a form of autism in your negative points when I gave a link to the proposed DSM changes where Asperger Syndrome is being merged with Autistic Disorder and the word Autism appears 5 times in the post. He has one specific complaint about people he knows who are on the Autism Spectrum, he says Every time someone speaks to them they get angry and tell said person to back the fuck off. I ve been on the receiving end. Generally there are two possible reasons for being told to fuck off , one is that the person telling you is an asshole and the other is that you are being an asshole. If you are the type of person who sends death threats to bloggers then you really should consider the latter explanation. He also suggests that I watch Boston Legal presumably because that show has one character who is an Aspie. Now I have actually watched that show and it s the worst legal show I ve ever seen, when a legal show has such unrealistic portrayal of court scenes I don t think it should be relied on for information on any other topic. I watched a couple of episodes of Boston Legal and only saw one scene with the Aspie guy, so I can t even determine whether it s a realistic portrayal he s a minor character. In any case there are plenty of Aspie guys in the Free Software community who I interact with regularly, I read forums such as AspiesForFreedom.com, and I ve read some text books on the topic. So even if a TV show had a very accurate portrayal of an Aspie character I still doubt that I would learn anything by watching it. As a general tip for flamers, if you want to accuse someone of being a member of a NAZI or KKK type organisation then the word you are after is Aryan not ayrien . If you don t know a word then don t use it. Please note the conditions of sending me email [2], I reserve the right to publish all threats in any way that I wish. A Final Note Thanks sharkbait for adding me to your to kill list , I m sure that there are lots of nice people on it and I ve got good company. If I didn t get the occasional death threat I would worry that I m not writing well enough or failing to address important issues. I will write more about Autism in the future.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/03/26/asperger-good/
• [2] http://doc.coker.com.au/legal/conditions-email/

This is both a release announcement for the next installment of The MirBSD Korn Shell, mksh R40b, and a follow-up to Sune s article about small tools of various degrees of usefulness. I hope I don t need to say too much about the first part; mksh(1) is packaged in a gazillion of operating environments (dear Planet readers, that of course includes Debian, which occasionally gets a development snapshot; I ll wait uploading R40c until that two month fixed gcc bug will finally find its way into the packages for armel and armhf. Ah, we re getting Arch Linux (after years) to include mksh now. (Probably because they couldn t stand the teasing that Arch Hurd included it one day after having been told about its existence, wondering why it built without needing patches on Hurd ) MSYS is a supposedly supported target now, people are working on WinAPI and DJGPP in their spare time, and Cygwin and Debian packagers have deprecated pdksh in favour of mksh (thanks!). So, everything looking well on that front. I ve started a collection of shell snippets some time ago, where most of those small things of mine ends up. Even stuff I write at work we re an Open Source company and can generally publish under (currently) AGPLv3 or (if extending existing code) that code s licence. I chose git as SCM in that FusionForge instance so that people would hopefully use it and contribute to it without fear, as it s hosted on my current money source s servers. (Can just clone it.) Feel free to register and ask for membership, to extend it (only if your shell-fu is up to the task, KNOPPIX-style scripts would be a bad style(9) example as the primary goal of the project is to give good examples to people who learn shell coding by looking at other peoples code). Maybe you like my editor, too? At OpenRheinRuhr, the Atari people sure liked it as it uses WordStar like key combinations, standardised across a lot of platforms and vendors (DR DOS Editor, Turbo Pascal, Borland C++ for Windows, ) ObPromise: a posting to raise the level of ferrophility on the Planet aggregators this wlog reaches (got pix)

It s been one year since the first People behind Debian interview. For this special occasion, I wanted a special guest and I m happy that our Debian Project Leader (DPL) Stefano Zacchiroli accepted my invitation. He has a difficult role in the community, but he s doing a really great job of it. He s a great mediator in difficult situations, but he s also opinionated and can push a discussion towards a conclusion. Read on to learn how he became a Debian developer and later DPL, what he s excited about in the next Debian release, and much more. Raphael: Who are you? Stefano: I m Stefano Zacchiroli, but I prefer to be called Zack, both on the Internet and in real life. I m 32, Italian, emigrated to France about 4 years ago. I live in Paris, and I find it to be one of the most gorgeous and exciting cities in the world. As my day job I m a Computer Science researcher and teacher at University Paris Diderot and IRILL. In my copious free time I contribute to Debian, and I m firmly convinced that doing so is an effective way to help the cause of Free Software. Besides, I find it to be a lot of fun! Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? Stefano: Flash back to 1999, when I was a 2nd year student in Computer Science at the University of Bologna. Back then in Italy it was uncommon for young geeks to get exposed to Free Software: Internet was way less pervasive than today and most computer magazines didn t pay much attention to GNU/Linux. Luckily for me, the professor in charge of the student lab was a Free Software enthusiast and all students machines there were running Debian. Not only that, but there was also a student program that allowed volunteers to become sysadmins after having shown their skills and convinced the director they were trustworthy. Becoming one of those volunteer Debian admins quickly became one of my top objectives for the year, and that is were I ve learned using Debian. The year after that, I got in touch with a research group that was to become the happy bunch of hackers with whom I would have done both my master and PhD theses. They were designing a new proof assistant. Most of the development was in OCaml and happened on Debian. OCaml was available in Debian, but many of the libraries we needed were not. So I approached the Debian OCaml Team offering to help. Before I realize what was going on I was (co-)maintainer of tens of OCaml-related packages. At some point I got told I think you should apply as a Debian Developer . So I did and in a couple of months I went through the New Member (NM) process, that was back then in its infancy. I still remember my happiness while reading the account created mail, the day after my 22nd birthday. I know the NM process went through some bad publicity in the past, but I m happy to see that nowadays the process can be as swift as it has been for me 10 years ago. Raphael: It s your second year as Debian Project Leader (DPL). Are you feeling more productive in the role? Do you fear to burn out? Stefano: I m feeling way more productive, no doubts. The task of the Debian Project Leader is not necessarily difficult, but it is a complex and scarcely documented one. It is also profoundly different from any other task that Debian people usually work on, so that experience doesn t help much in getting started. Before becoming effective as DPL one needs to get to know many people and mechanisms he is not familiar with. More importantly, one needs to set up a personal work-flow that allows to keep up with day-to-day DPL tasks (which are aplenty) as well as with urgencies (that tend to pop-up in the leader@debian.org INBOX at the least convenient time). Finally, one also needs to do proper traffic shaping and always retain enough motivation bandwidth to keep the Project informed about what is going on in DPL-land. Finding the right balance among all these ingredients can take some time. Once one is past it, everything goes way more smoothly. The above is why I m constantly encouraging people interested in running for DPL in the future to reach out to me and work on some tasks of the current DPL s TODO list. I swear it is not just a cheap attempt at slavery!. It is rather an attempt at DPL mentoring that could be beneficial: both to give future candidates more awareness of the task, and to reduce the potential downtime when handing over from one DPL to the next. Regarding burn out, I don t feel prone to its risk these days. If I look back, I can say that my contributions as DPL have been pretty constant in volume over time; my enthusiasm for the task, if anything, is on the rise. The effectiveness of my contributions as DPL are, on the other hand, not mine to judge. Raphael: If you had to single out two achievements where you were involved as DPL, what would they be? Stefano: I d go for the following two, in no particular order:

• Dialogue with derivatives. When I became DPL ~1.5 years ago the situation on that front was pretty dire. In the specific case of Ubuntu, by far the most successful and customized of all Debian derivatives, I remember being scared of raising the topic of collaboration with them on mailing lists. More generally, we had no specific initiatives to foster technical collaboration with and among derivatives. A huge potential of (forwarded) contributions to Debian was being wasted. Today things look much better, as I ve documented in recent talks at DebConf11 and UDS-P. The amount of forwarded patches we receive from downstream is at its maximum and many people who apply to become Debian Developers come from derivatives. Conflict situations still exist, for good reasons that we still have to either fix or figure out entirely. But I m positive we re on the right track.

  The amount of forwarded patches we receive from downstream is at its maximum

  This is by far not an achievement of mine alone. In particular, many of the activity of the Derivatives Front Desk have been organized by other enthusiastic volunteers. But I ve done my part, especially in breaking the ice and in proposing a vision of Free Software distribution where all distros play a role and are welcome to join the game, as long as they give back and give credit to their respective upstreams.
• Process membership. I m proud of having promoted the general resolution (GR) that has clarified (and advertised to the world) that Debian welcomes all kind of contributions, and that they all equally matter to become proper members of the Project. I notice only now while writing this that the GR title, traditionally chosen by the secretary, was Debian Project Members . That choice harmonically closes the circle with the recent renaming of the NM process to New Member process. Today, we have several project members (AKA Debian Developers ) that are active citizen of Debian with voting rights, even though they take care of tasks other than packaging. Anyone can become a Debian citizen, as long as they are ready to abide by Debian s values, have a track record of verifiable contributions to Debian, and are committed to keep them coming in the future.

  We have several project members that [ ] take care of tasks other than packaging.

  Once gain, this is by far not an achievement of mine alone, very little project-wide achievements are. DAM has helped a lot and support from the project as a whole has been immense.

OK, let me cheat and add a third one I m also proud of having been able to report to the Project my whereabouts as DPL, thoroughly and periodically, since the very beginning is first term. People annoyed by my reporting logorrhea now have all my sympathies. Raphael: Among the possible new features of Debian Wheezy, which one gets you excited most? Stefano: It s multi-arch, no doubt. Even though it is not a directly user visible change, it s a very far reaching one. It is also one of those changes that make me feel that moment of truth of coders, when you realize you are finally doing the right thing and ditching piles of ugly hacks.

It s multi-arch [ ] you realize you are finally doing the right thing and ditching piles of ugly hacks.

Raphael: If you were not DPL and could spend all your time on Debian, what project would you do? Stefano: I would sit down and do software development for Debian. It s impressive how many important and beneficial changes for Debian could be delivered by specific software improvements in various parts of our infrastructure. We tend to attract many packagers, but not so many people willing to maintain Debian infrastructure softwares like dak, britney, debbugs, the PTS, etc. Their maintenance burden then falls on the shoulders of the respective teams which are generally very busy with other important tasks. As a project, we seem to be more appealing to packagers than to software developers. That is a pity given the amount of exciting coding tasks that are everywhere in Debian. Part of the reason we are not appealing to developers is that we are not particularly good at collecting coding tasks in a place where interested developers could easily pick them up. It also takes quite a bit of inside knowledge to spot infrastructure bugs and understand how to fix them. I long for some spare hacking time to check if I m still good enough of a coder to hunt down longstanding bugs in our infrastructure, which have ended up being my pet peeves. I d also love to dive again into RCBW. It s less committing than package maintenance, more diverse and challenging, and also an immensely useful activity to get Debian releases done. Raphael: Martin Michlmayr is worried that there is so few paid opportunities around Debian. Do you agree with his sentiment, and if yes do you have ideas on how to improve this situation? Stefano: The idealistic me wishes Debian to be a community made only of volunteers that devote their free time to the Project. Oh, and that me also wishes Debian to be competitive with similar projects, no matter how many full-time employees others have! That is coherent with a view of society where everyone has a day job, but also engages in volunteering activities ensuring that public interest is pursued by people motivated by interests other than profit. But I do realize that for Free Software to succeed companies, employees, and salaries should all have a role. I admire projects that strike a good balance between volunteer and paid work. The Linux kernel is emblematic in that respect: many developers are paid by companies that have a commercial or strategic interest in Linux. Nevertheless volunteers contributions are aplenty and the Linux community gives a convincing impression that choices are driven by the community itself (or by its benevolent dictator) without money-driven impositions.

I do realize that for Free Software to succeed companies, employees, and salaries should all have a role.

Such an ecosystem does not exist around Debian. We do have a partner program that allows for it to happen, but we have very few partners with an interest in doing distribution development work. Like Martin, I m worried by this state of affairs, because it de facto means we lag behind in terms of available people power. In a community of volunteers, that might frustrate people and that is not good. To improve over the status quo the first step is to federate together small and medium companies that have a strategic interest in Debian and listen to their needs. I m already in touch with representatives of such companies that, in many cases, already employ Debian Developers to do some distribution work in Debian. We will be soon sending out a call to reach out to more such companies, but since we are discussing this, why waiting? If some of our readers here are representative of such companies, I encourage them to get in touch with me about this. Raphael: You know that the fundraising campaign for the Debian Administrator s Handbook is on good track but the liberation of the book is not yet assured. What do you think of this project? Stefano: I m happy about the project, to the point that I ve accepted writing a testimonial for it . I m sad about the scarce availability of up to date and high quality (DFSG-)Free books about Debian and I welcome any initiative that might help closing that gap.

I m sad about the scarce availability of up to date and high quality (DFSG-)Free books about Debian.

Free Culture is a great offspring of Free Software and I m convinced we need to stand up against double standards in the two camps. Letting aside software-specific licensing details, the basic freedoms to be defended are the same. They are those freedoms that ensure that a reader is in full control of his book, pretty much as they ensure that a computer user is in full control of the software that runs on it. I m therefore proud that Debian has long resolved that the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) apply not only to software but also to books and other pieces of documentation. But the status quo implies that not only we have very few up to date, high quality books about Debian. It also implies that, at present, we have no such book that we can distribute in the Debian archive, showing off the Free Software (and Free Culture!) values we stand for.
Crowdfunding is considered to be a good mate for Free Culture, where the services model that applies to Free Software is more difficult to exploit. I so wish any luck to yours and Roland s initiative. A different matter is whether Debian, as a project, should endorse the initiative and actively campaign for it. As you know, I think it should not. While we do advertise general project donations, we don t do mission-specific fundraising campaign for Debian itself. Coherently with that, I don t think we should relay crowdfunding campaigns for 3rd parties, even when the result would be beneficial to Debian. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Stefano: There are two classes of people that I particularly admire in Debian:

• Those with an uncanny ability to guide discussions towards constructive conclusions. We are lucky to have many in Debian and I admire all of them. Having to single out one I d name Russ Allbery, in honor of whom I hereby propose the periodic Russ Allbery s Distinguished Flametamer Award .
• People stepping up for responsibility roles, especially when the responsibility put them in tough spots. Release teams, ftp-masters, DSA, DAM, as well as past and present members of teams with similarly hot seats have all my admiration.

---

Thank you to Zack 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, Google+, Twitter and Facebook .

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

Arrival in a new country is always exciting. This was my first time ever to visit India, and although I have heard especially cultural bits and pieces, I was as usual nowhere near "well" prepared. How to fill out the registration forms (surprisingly needed in addition to the visa already gathered ahead of departure) when your only known address in India is on the laptop you completely drained the battery of during the flight? Luckily they tolerated the "address during stay" to be left blank. I got out in the heat of Hyderabad in the late afternoon, got a cab, and had my host instruct the cab driver - over the phone via roaming to Denmark - where to drop me off. After a long ride with cows and beautiful dressed pedestrians casually crossing the high speed road and a short pitstop at an ATM, I finally met Pavithran. Until then we only knew each other from casual online chat. (I should later learn that my first impression was quite unusual - not cows or clothes or chat, but roads capable of driving at high speed!) Pavithran checked me into a small hotel and we visited his home. It was in the middle of being rebuild, so impossible to stay at as had been our original planed. After a few hours of looking at the neighbourhood and talking about possible events during the week, we decided to cancel the hotel and instead go visit his parents in Khammam, some 5 hours away by bus This text is part of my Asia 2011 scriblings.

Many of us out there writes small tools to just solve a simple task that you need. Here, I will present a tool I needed last night. I have a small job doing a wordpress site for some people, and I needed a image with the site title in a font matching some specific criteria (like a double story lowercase A and a small serif on lowercase L, while in general being a Sans Serif type). So what I needed was a application that let me write a word or a phrase, and see it written with all available fonts on the system. So, it took a little more than a effective hour and 120 lines of code to come up with this: Click to see image And if anyone cares, I have pushed the sources to git.kde.org. I m sure many of you also have various such small apps. Let s see them. That s also you Eike and your svgtoy app :) Another thing I learned from this app is that the ukij fonts targetted the Uyghyr language actually is very interesting also for western europeans.

Galaxy S Review I ve just been given an indefinite loan of a Samsung Galaxy S which is more useful than the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 that I own. I think that the main benefit is that it runs Android 2.2 instead of Android 2.1 on the Xperia. 2.2 is what gives it USB tethering support without extra software (something I haven t tested yet but will use a lot if it works correctly) and Wifi AP support. Both phones are about the same size, the Galaxy S has slightly more RAM (reported as 304M vs 280M which doesn t really matter) and a lot more main storage (1.87G vs 465M usable after the OS is loaded). The main down-sides of the Galaxy S is that it lacks a flash . I m not aware of any phone camera having a proper flash, but the limited LED flash is useful for taking pictures at times and there are a variety of programs that can turn it on for use as a torch. Also I wonder whether the Samsung people actually test their phones in real use or whether they just build them to spec. When you read the specs it sounds nice to have a phone that s only 9.9mm thick (apart from the bulge at the bottom), but that makes it really difficult to hold. The Xperia X10 is 13mm thick and isn t as slick so you are much less likely to drop it. I sometimes wonder whether phone companies are designing their products to be broken so that they can sell replacements. Three Networking Sucks My parents use 3G broadband from Three as their only connection to the Internet, this is fast enough for viewing Youtube on occasion and generally works well for them. However whenever I try to transfer any data to their system which has integrity checks it turns out to be corrupted. About every megabyte of data transferred has a corrupt packet that has a matching checksum presumably it s a bug in Three s network. Because Three are desperate for customers they have given me a free 6 month subscription to a data SIM [1]. I ve been using that SIM with my Galaxy S and found the same data corruption problem and I ve reproduced it in many places around Melbourne so this isn t just one unreliable cell tower, it s something broken in the core of the Three network. The obvious solution to this is to use a VPN so the corrupt packets will be dropped. So I set up a PPTP VPN only to discover that it seems impossible to make the default route be via the VPN, there has been a bug report about this since 2009 the iPhone allows configuring whether Internet traffic should go via the VPN, it can t be that hard [2]. There is an option to use a proxy for web access, but when I tried that on Android 2.1 it only worked for the system web browser not for things like the Android Market. But there is no option for configuring a proxy for use when the VPN is active, so it doesn t seem likely that I could run a proxy on the VPN network and direct all traffic to it. Due to corruption on the Three network and the inability to get a VPN working correctly it seems that I can t use the Three SIM. Android isn t Really Free Software While Android implementations generally stick to the GPL and other free software licenses that are involved they seem to be a poor example of providing freedom to users. My Xperia X10 is running Android 2.1 because Sony-Ericsson has locked the boot loader so I can t install a newer kernel. They don t care enough to release a new version this is stupid of them because it means that I am much less likely to recommend their products. If Sony-Ericsson releases a newer Android release then it will be a total OS reinstall, unlike the way I can upgrade a Debian system an application at a time. I can t install new packages that replace system packages, so the Email and SMS programs that I ve installed sit along side the ones that came with the system. Periodically the unwanted SMS and Email programs show up. I can t make my Android phones perform basic networking tasks that I ve done on Linux systems since the early 90 s. Hiding the complexity from the newbies is OK, but they need to make the full capabilities of the system available to experts. It seems to me that Android effectively gives the majority of users no more freedom than the iPhone does. Even for the small minority of us who are technically capable of rooting phones and installing CyanogenMod etc it s often limited by technical measures and the amount of time required. Update: Philipp Kern pointed out that his Galaxy S has a front facing camera. I have checked my phone and discovered that it has one too. When I published this post I criticised the Galaxy S for not having a front facing camera for video-calls based on a misunderstanding of the Wikipedia page (which says that SOME models lack it) and not testing it. Thanks for the correction Philipp and sorry for publishing wrong data.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/06/04/leaving-three/
• [2] http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=4205

So I've been recently screwing around with VirtualBox on a personal project, and I ran into an issue with not being able to enable 2D/3D acceleration on Ubuntu 11.10. After quite a bit of debugging and forum searching, the problem was that the NVIDIA GLX driver was being loaded instead of the standard MESA one, preventing any video acceleration from properly working on my Intel based video card.

I just recently reinstalled Kubuntu on this laptop, and since its a fairly stock install at the moment, I suspect that this is a general (K)ubuntu bug, and not something related to me screwing around with my system. In addition, since I switched to using Kubuntu full time, this is the first time I've seen transparency and other desktop effects, and system performance has improved dramatically. While I can't say for certian, I suspect that my system was also affected on its previous install. Part of the issue may be related to what packages are seeded per flavour, so this bug may only affect those who installed Kubuntu over say Xubuntu or Ubuntu; without more information, its impossible to say.

This is where you can help; if you are running any flavor of Ubuntu with an Intel based video card, you might be affected by this too.

Here's how to check; open a terminal, and type:

mcasadevall@daybreak:/var/log$ cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log

then find the section where the glx module is loaded. It looks something like this:

[236901.570] (II) LoadModule: "glx"
[236901.571] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libglx.so
[236901.578] (II) Module glx: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
[236901.578] compiled for 1.10.4, module version = 1.0.0
[236901.578] ABI class: X.Org Server Extension, version 5.0

(this is on a machine where the Intel acceleration is properly working).

If it says 'ATi' or 'NVIDIA', you've run into the same issue I have. So dear readers, I ask that if you've had any issue with graphic performance, gaming, or simple UI lag and have an Intel video card, please post a comment with you video card, what flavor of Ubuntu you have installed, and the glx section of Xorg.0.log. If I get a few reports that confirm this, I'll file a proper bug in Launchpad, and then work to get this fixed.

Screensaver control on the Linux desktop is a total mess, but the xdg-screensaver command provided an interim cross-desktop solution by detecting and using the appropriate underlying interfaces. For GNOME, it depends on the gnome-screensaver-command --poke option, but that has been broken and then removed in favour of the cross-desktop D-Bus API org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver another GNOME-specific API which can't practically be used by xdg-screensaver. What's more, switching to the new API seems to have introduced various bugs in GNOME's own video player, Totem, such that it often failed to inhibit the screensaver in GNOME 2.32 and 3.0. Apparently everything is wonderful again in 3.2; here's hoping. (In case anyone asks where my bug report on the totem package is, I already looked at the bug list and it's clear that there's no point.) Updated: Well I said the GNOME Session D-Bus API couldn't practically be used in xdg-screensaver, but then set out to prove myself wrong. And with the aid of Perl, I may have succeeded.

You might remember the action puzzle game Zaz. Well, we now have a new puzzle game from the same author (Remigiusz mal1ce Dybka), called Phlipple. The goal of the game is to reduce a 3D shape to a single square in each level, removing squares by flipping edges around, like you would do in a cardboard box. The Free/Open source version of the game, including 50 levels, is now available in Debian, in case that you want to give it a chance. You can watch the promo video in Youtube if you want to have a better idea of what the game looks like. I hope that you like it, I do Here are some screenshots of the game:

This is interesting. It's obviously lacking in details yet, but it does highlight one weakness of secure boot. The security for secure boot is all rooted in the firmware - there's no external measurement to validate that everything functioned as expected. That means that if you can cause any trusted component to execute arbitrary code then you've won. So, what reads arbitrary user data? The most obvious components are any driver that binds to user-controlled hardware, any filesystem driver that reads user-provided filesystems and any signed bootloader that reads user-configured data. A USB drive could potentially trigger a bug in the USB stack and run arbitrary code. A malformed FAT filesystem could potentially trigger a bug in the FAT driver and run arbitrary code. A malformed bootloader configuration file or kernel could potentially trigger a bug in the bootloader and run arbitrary code. It may even be possible to find bugs in the PE-COFF binary loader. And once you have the ability to run arbitrary code, you can replace all the EFI entry points and convince the OS that everything is fine anyway.

None of this should be surprising. Secure boot is predicated upon the firmware only executing trusted material until the OS handoff. If you can sidestep that restriction then the entire chain of trust falls down. We're talking about a large body of code that was written without the assumption that it would have to be resistant to sustained attack, and which has now been put in a context where people are actively trying to break it. Bugs are pretty inevitable. I'd expect a lot of work to be done on firmware implementations between now and Windows 8 ship date.

(Update: It's probably worth pointing out that although Ars talk about it defeating secure boot, the primary sources don't seem to mention secure boot at all. Windows 8 will boot without secure boot, so it's possible that this attack merely handles the non-secure boot case)

(Further update: It turns out to be a purely BIOS based attack. In other words, it's an example of the kind of thing that secure boot is intended to prevent, not any kind of compromise of a secure boot implementation)

comments

It seems that in theory cruises can make for quite economical vacations. The cheapest prices tend to be around $100 per person per night for an inside cabin (IE no window) with two people (there is a significant extra fee for having a cabin with only one person). If you book a room in a half-decent hotel with a pool in some moderately desirable place then you will probably pay about $200 per night which might get you free breakfast but won t include lunch or dinner. Cruises include all the free food you can eat for at least 16 hours of the day with maybe an extra fee for getting food in the middle of the night. When a cruise ship stops at the port you can pay for an expensive shore trip arranged by the cruise company or have a cheap trip that involves walking on the beach or taking a taxi to somewhere local. Of course there are lots of extras that can make a cruise really expensive, but if you don t plan to eat at speciality restaurants or drink much alcohol then that shouldn t be a problem. I ve just booked a short luxury cruise, mostly as a trial of the cruise concept. The process of doing so was difficult enough that even if I hadn t previously needed a holiday then I d probably need one now. It would be interesting to compare the amount of time that a reasonable person would be likely to spend choosing a holiday and purchasing it for the different types of holiday, I expect that cruising would be a long way behind everything that involves flying to a foreign city and staying in a hotel. The Issues of Booking When booking a regular holiday you choose where to visit, then choose the time of year, the accommodation, and travel. While the order can vary it s generally a sequential process without too many variables at any stage. With a cruise one of the first decisions is to choose the cruise line, different lines cater to various market segments it s clear what Disney cruises aim for but often not so clear for others. Apart from Disney the other cruise lines don t seem to make clear statements about who they are and aren t targeting. Then there are a variety of ships run by each cruise line which in many cases offer different features, do you want 1 pool or 4? Do you want ice skating? The cruise lines that I have investigated don t offer clear comparisons of their ships. As a cruise ship is essentially a hotel, a collection of restaurants, and some other entertainment you can t just arbitrarily choose one the way you might choose a random hotel with a suitable price and rating. Now while you can choose a hotel and generally get a room when you want a cruise booking has to be made when the ship is in a convenient port. So your holiday needs to be scheduled around the availability of the ship. CruiseCritic.com is an excellent source of information on cruises and has a very active and useful advice forum [1]. The forum appears to be dominated by retirees, presumably because retirees have time to just wait for a ship they like to visit their local port while people who have to schedule holidays around work projects etc. When booking a hotel I have found that Wotif.com is really good for comparing hotels and finding a reasonably cheap one and they also have periodic mail-outs about special deals. I have made a couple of short vacations based on Wotif offering me unusually good prices on a hotel in a place that I was mildly interested in visiting. There are also special deals on cruises, but it s a lot more difficult to take them. Firstly as cruises aren t as interchangeable as hotels it s not as appealing to take an offer of a cruise you didn t previously consider because it s going cheap. The second factor is that according to cruise reviews there is more variation among cabins than there is among hotel rooms. The design of the ship that is needed to cram everything in the available space means that some cabins apparently have noise pollution from various activities on the ship while others are considered to have problems for people prone to sea-sickness. Discounts probably only apply after people who pay non-discount rates have had a chance to book what might be considered the better cabins. Of course it could be a good thing to have most of the ship booked out, CruiseCritic.com has some reviews of individual cabins and presumably there are people who compare hundreds of cabins to discover what is ideal for them. The Problem with Princess I have booked a Princess cruise. I chose it because it was going cheap, but the first two travel agents that advertised it were unable to take my order because Princess only allows US based agencies (which means the discount agents on the net) to sell to US customers I don t think that the people who run the Princess cruise company know what the Internet is about. So I booked the cruise through the Princess web site, they took my money, told me that a good chunk of that money would never be returned if I cancelled, and then sent me to the web page for providing all the information that they need which is a lot. The big problem was when their web site absolutely demanded a passport number and said that I would not be allowed to board without one even though their FAQ (and common sense) indicated that a cruise which doesn t involve any international travel has no need of a passport. Taking someone s money and then telling them that they can t attend due to not having a valid passport is one way of making a future passenger very unhappy. I called the support people (which was Carnival) and had to listen to some really strange hold music it was difficult to determine if the music was produced by someone with unusual tastes in electronic music vastly different from my own preference or whether the computer which manages the phone calls was producing noise instead of music. Eventually I got through to an operator who was very helpful and stored my drivers license number which was adequate. While on the topic of their web site, when booking a cruise with Princess they list which types of cabin (interior, balcony, etc) are available and list the price for the cheapest category of cabin in each price. However if the cheapest category is all sold out then it will still list that cheapest price and thus be advertising a price that can t be booked. This is misleading and annoying. Further Hassle But the difficulty doesn t end here. On a cruise you have to book in advance for which dinner seating you desire which is usually only early or late but some ships offer anytime . Then if you happen to be travelling with people who are in a separate cabin and paying separately (which one would expect to be fairly common) there is no obvious way of synchronising dinner preferences the ship people might assign people to different tables. I admit that I haven t fully explored the post-booking part of the Princess web site, maybe I can arrange a shared table but for the moment my pain threshold for the cruise booking process has been exceeded. Other Cruising Stuff Insight Cruises (formerly Geek Cruises) offers a variety of educational cruises including science, astronomy, chess, art, history, and some other things [2]. From a casual inspection of their web site it seems that the cruise prices are around $300 per night for a 2 person cabin and the registration fees for the conferences are between $1200 and $1500. Most readers of my blog will consider this to be unreasonably expensive as registration for a Linux conference tends to be a lot less than $1000. But when compared to typical for-profit conferences $1500 isn t anywhere near the high end of the range. Also while someone who is choosing a cruise holiday can easily get a cruise that costs less than $200 per day for a 2 person cabin, for commercial conferences it s not uncommon to spend more than $300 per night for two people on accommodation and food. So the only noteworthy part about the cost is that accommodation will be quite expensive if you aren t sharing a room. If you want to run a conference on a cruise there are companies which specialise in such things, Landry and Kling is one company that specialises in planning corporate events [3]. They do seem to aim for the high end of the market, including chartering a small cruise ship or half a large cruise ship that means ~1000 passengers. While there are some conferences with more than 1000 delegates it seems that most conferences top out at about 500 delegates. However I know that some conferences have limited the number of delegates to the maximum capacity of the biggest lecture hall available as some cruise ships have a theater with more than 1000 seats it seems that similar conferences could potentially arrange a half ship charter. A half ship charter apparently allows exclusive access to one of the theaters (at least when it s not needed for evening entertainment) and exclusive seating at the main dining room. It s a standard feature that cruise ships have all the equipment you might need to run a conference. Autism on the Seas is a brand used by the Alumni Cruise company for their holiday packages for special needs children [4]. They sell cruise tickets at the regular list price and the commission that they receive when acting as a travel agency is enough to hire staff to look after the kids while presumably still running at a profit. It seems to me that a similar model could be used for a computer conference, make a profit on cruise ticket sales and then have no extra costs for the conference for people sharing a room that would be cheaper than most Linux conferences I ve attended. For smaller conferences and un-conferences there is no minimum reservation size. One down-side for a computer conference is the cost of Internet access, according to Wikipedia a personal installation of satellite net access costs $5 per megabyte and ship pricing for their Internet access is up around $30-$100 per hour per person! But in the old days when attending a conference meant a week of no net access we survived somehow. It also seems to me that if a company had a small development team it could be productive to put everyone on a cruise ship with a server for testing and version control. They could do 9 hour days on board and still have lots of time for relaxation as it s only a few minutes walk to the pool. Of course this wouldn t work if some members of the team wanted to stay home due to slow and expensive net access.

• [1] http://www.cruisecritic.com/
• [2] http://insightcruises.com/
• [3] http://landrykling.com/
• [4] http://alumnicruises.org/Autism/Autism_Home.htm

I'm working on a personal pet project and wanted to get some feedback on the best apps to use in a touch only environment. I know that there are a few people who use Debian or Ubuntu on a tablet, and I was hoping to get suggestions on the best desktop environment and apps available. Please leave some comments with suggestions, and with a little luck, I'll have something to demo on this blog in a few weeks.

There's been a lot of noise with Microsoft requiring Secure Boot for Windows 8 OEMs. For those of you unfamiliar with it, Secure Boot requires that the boot chain is signed, and this 'feature' must be enabled by default. Although I have been unable to find specific details, it appears that the chain of trust needs to extend from BIOS/UEFI all the way down to the kernel. Obviously, requiring a signed boot chain makes using FOSS platforms like Ubuntu or Debian an impossibility short of having the UEFI Platform Key and resigning the entire chain.

Steven Sinofsky's MSDN blog has a fairly good overview how it works. Canonical and Red Hat also have a good white paper on why secure boot is a serious problem for Linux distributions. Even if secure boot itself can be disabled, it *greatly* rises the bar for general end-users to successfully install Ubuntu on their machine. In addition, it is the responsibility of OEM and BIOS manufacturers to provide the option to disable it.

There already has been a long history of OEMs removing BIOS options or introducing DRM; for instance, locking out VTx on Sony laptops, or restricting laptops to only accept 'branded' wifi and 3G cards. Given this track record, can OEMs realistically be trusted to have this option available?

What most people don't realize is that secure boot itself is not a new concept; its simply part of the Trusted Computing initiative, and has been implemented on embedded platforms for many years. If you own any iPhone, or one of the vast majority of Android devices, you are using a device that either has the secure boot feature, or something very close. This especially painful in Android as Google's security system restricts users to a *very* limited shell and subset of utilities which can be used on non-rooted devices. WebOS, Maemo, and to my knowledge Meego give the end-user full unrestricted access to the boot chain and you can swap kernels and even the entire OS out if one was so motivated.

Although it is still an ongoing problem, several vendors such as HTC, Samsung, Motorola (kinda), and even Sony. In the Android community, having unlockable bootloaders has been a welcome middle ground in the traditionally restrictive and locked-down world of cellular devices.

While some may argue that such locks are necessary to protect consumers, it is perfectly feasible to create devices with unlocked bootloaders that are still secure. The Nook Color's is an Android powered eReader. It's stock firmware doesn't allow sideloaded applications or even access to a user shell via adb, but the BootROM on the device attempts to boot from the microSD card before eMMC, making it possible for enterprising users to easily modify the underlying OS (as well as making it physically impossible to brick the device due to a bad flash). Barnes and Nobles even sells a book on rooting the Nook Color; it was right next to the devices on display at the time. In addition, they've continued the tradition of easily modifiable devices with both the Nook Simple Touch, and the Nook Tablet.

One of the most impressive attributes is the possibility of running Ubuntu on it. The absolute poster child for this is the Toshiba AC100. For those of you unfamiliar, it ultralight netbook that shipped with Android 2.1/2.2 with easy access to the built in flash via the mini-USB port on the side of the device. Due to the valiant efforts of the AC100 community, Ubuntu was ported to this device, and became a supported platform with images available on cdimages.ubuntu.com. If you were an attendee at UDS, you likely saw several AC100s all running Ubuntu.

This brings me to the point that motivated me to write this post in the first place. One of the most impressive tablets I've seen to date is the ASUS eeePad Transformer, an Android tablet with fully dockable keyboard. I have one of these devices, and its one of the most impressive and usable Android tablets I own. Sadly, such a powerful device was hobbled from its true potential due to ASUS's decision to ship the device with a locked and encrypted bootloader. Surprisingly, the Secure Boot Key (SBK) was acquired and released to the wild, making it possible to reflash the device. Sadly, even with the SBK, the device's bootloader is still extremely hobbled compared to the AC100 making flashing a slow and difficult process.

In response, ASUS refreshed the eeePad's hardware to the new B70 SKU, which has a new Secure Boot. Despite this, a root exploit was recently found to allow people to circumvent these restrictions and install customs ROMs. It is however only a manor of time before ASUS responds and releases a new update that fixes this bug.

Steven Barker (lilstevie) on xda-developers successfully created a port of Ubuntu to the Transformer. Currently, installing Ubuntu on the Transformer requires nvflash access, so its not possible to use his image on the newly liberated B70 devices. I am certain that a new method of installing via an update.zip will be developed for those of us with hobbled devices.

It is a showcase of what is possible when you have open hardware, and also proves one indisputable point: any 'trusted boot' or DRM scheme can and will be defeated; at best you piss off your userbase, and at worst, you force users to exploit bugs to gain control of their device. As it is impossible to reflash these devices from the bootloader, a failed kernel flash WILL brick these devices, increasing warranty and support costs as users try to return their now broken devices.

In closing, while there have been some victories in ongoing war of open hardware vs. trusted comptuing, the road ahead still remains very murky. Victories in the mobile market have shown that there is a market for open devices. Google's own Nexus One was sold as a developers phone and as a way to encourage manufacturers to raise the bar. It sold well enough to recoup its development costs.. While there is no official statements, the Nokia N900 is suspected to have broken all sales expectations, backed up by the fact that Angry Birds sold extremely well on the Ovi Store for the N900.

From the article in question:

What reaction have you had in terms of sales and customer feedback?

Angry Birds had already been launched on App Store before it came out on Ovi Store, and it had a great review average from iPhone reviewers and users alike, so we expected a good reception from N900 users as well.

Even so, we were quite surprised by just how the N900 community immediately took the game to heart. The game obviously made many people very happy, and that is really the greatest achievement that anyone who creates entertainment for a living can hope for. Well, maybe the greatest achievement is huge bundles of cash, but making people happy comes a close second.

In the first week that Angry Birds has been on the Ovi Store, it has been downloaded almost as many times as the iPhone version in six weeks. Given that most N900 users have not even used Ovi Store yet, we are confident that there will be many more downloads in the months to come, and are sure that the N900 version will be very profitable.

That being said, with Microsoft pushing secure boot and trusted computing down everyone's throats with Windows 8, it is hard to say what the future might hold for those of us who want to own our devices.