I am in search of a new laptop and this is difficult.

What I (know I) want:

• 1 GB of RAM (I am tired of not enough resources issues)
• battery life, the longer the better (I expect at least 3.5h - real, not advertised - in coding, reading style)
• at least 100GB storage
• functional sleep and/or hibernation (I was spoiled by my current PowerBook G4)
• a video card that is supported in Debian (I'd choose Intel, Nvidia, Ati, in this order) since I want to be able to play the games we package
• working wlan (open drivers are a plus), bluetooth, and LAN
• a dual core processor (Intel or AMD)
  

What I don't know for sure aka "help lazyweb":

• the video memory should be dedicated (does this affect performance that much these days? even on Intel Centrino sytems?)
• AMD Turion 64x2 (TL-35), that means amd64 arch (are they worth the money saved in comparison with the Intel Core Duo? 3.5h battery time on AMD compared to 5h on Intel would mean, no)

Dear lazyweb question:

• Does a 32bit wlan ndiswrapped works on amd64 system running in 64 bits mode?
• What real battery times do people have on their Turion 64x2 and Intel Core Duo respectively?
• What brands should I avoid?
  

Seems that I manage to publish yearly news. Well this time I've many of them. DebianPeru's event videos.
As promised, we've published the videos for our D aDebian 2006 anual event. You can find the event videos and also the lightning talks videos.
I want to thank our sponsors and people involved on producing them. We are already working on our next event which is mainly focused on attract, teach and involve more people on directly contributing to Debian and free software. Talking about Debian events and user-base growth, when I went to the place to make stickers for give out on our last event, I went with the swirl logo and said to the business owner: I want to print this. He said ok, and later he asked me: is it Debian right? I was like... yes!. Later we talked a bit more and he told me that he found Debian on the Internet while looking for alternatives to have his business run safely, since, as he related me looking worried, the police came to their place and seizure all the computers from other businesses claiming that they are running "pirated" software. So he found Linux and Debian. He told me that was having some issues with their devices, mostly his CD/DVD printers and scanners. We talked a bit more and I invited him to our local group and the event of course. It was a very cool incident, and I nominated him our official merchansiding supplier ;) Debian gaining market share.
Last year was quite good for Debian in Peru, besides the growing user-base, some government agencies have explicitly named as the operating system or linux-flavour they want third party deploy for them. One of the most important cases, IMHO, is the PDT software, which is the program that every business should use to submit taxes information. Currently it's only available for Windows and it's written in Visual Basic. Although, mostly because it's lack of stability and extensibility by third party, some government agencies have been pushing for SUNAT open it's source code. It was, as with many other out of place subjects, source of lot of flames and irrelevant waste of time by the local linux-supporters. Anyway, they didn't open the software, but instead they called for software vendors to compete for the development of a new version which should be multi-platform and according the specs at least run on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, and on the Linux side they mentioned specifically that the program should be apt-get-able, thus vendor should provide a Debian package compliant with 3.0 or superior. Microsoft loves Debian.
I was invited to, which was meant to be, the true and first Microsoft vs. free software debate in Peru, but was, as we in APESOL have experienced for years: Microsoft refusing to debate. So it was mostly APESOL being technical, as requested by orga, and Microsoft being funny. I was astonished that almost half of Microsoft speakers mentioned Debian at least 5 times in their talks and dedicated almost half of their time to talk about free software (open source), interoperability and technological neutrality. It was fun for me to see them helping us to get known. There are some pictures on my flickr page. Personal life and Debian work.
Last year I've lost my two cats, both died in not a very good way, they are missed for sure. I'm sure I want a full white one, but not sure how soon. I've been really busy working on my business which led me to not being able to contribute as much as I wanted but I managed to do some stuff. In the other hand I've learned many important things that we, as free software community should seriously consider. Most of them have been already pointed out by some people on p.d.o already. Ok I believe this is enough, blame this to the not-blogging-for-long-time syndrome due the commies hidden over there locking my access to former hosting.

We got back to Montreal yesterday morning just after midnight. Maj got us upgrades on United to business class, which was really a life-saver. There's a direct flight from San Francisco to Montreal, but it's 5 hours one way and 6 hours on another. This time traveling to California, we decided to split up the flight, stopping in Chicago about halfway between. Returning was a good flight. We were comfortable, there was room, Amita had enough space to play on the ground and sleep comfortably on our laps. Maj: "Business class isn't anything fancy; it's just enough space, good service and quality food that you feel like a human rather than like livestock." The only downside was that Chicago O'Hare is a half-ass airport. For one of the most (the most?) visited and transited airports in the world, it's really skimpy on services inside the security area. There aren't any big restaurants or nice bars or stores inside the B and C concourse; just stand-up kiosks. We walked halfway across the airport to find a pub to eat at. Probably the best thing about the airport is the giant brachiosaurus skeleton in B concourse. Amita June couldn't stop looking at it; she ran from foot to foot banging it with her hand. Good for her; it's a pretty neat thing to see in a boring airport. tags: airport travel ohare brachiosaurus amitajune maj

Ebjo Another Maj quote: "It's just a coincidence that we use the term blog as a cutesy contraction for 'Web log'. It could have easily have been a 'Web journal' people were contracting, and then we'd call it an ebjo." tags: ebjo blog maj

Goethe One of the things that I've found as a participant in Open Source software and Open Content is that there are a lot of different people involved. And today, in 2007, Germany and France have become important loci of new developments in Free Culture. I've been working on my French for a while, and I think I'm getting pretty good, but I've never learned any German. At all. But German Wikitravel is one of the largest and most popular versions of the project. And I want to be more of a participant -- or, at least, have some better relationships with our German users. So, today I signed up for German lessons at the Montreal Goethe Institute. The Goethe Institute promotes German language and culture world-wide, including high-quality lessons in German. Montreal's is in a beautiful old building right at the corner of Sherbrooke and St. Denis. It's got a nice office and a friendly warm bookstore, "Das Buch". I'm going to take the intensive beginner's course -- mornings Tuesday and Thursday for 6 weeks. I hope at the end of that time I'll be better able to meet German-speaking Free Software advocates, Open Content participants, and most of all Wikitravellers a little more towards halfway. tags: goethe institute german wikitravel classes montreal

La ka I went to La ka this afternoon again to meet a couple of people. It was my first two-meeting day at La ka, which I think is a bad sign I'm turning into a serious maven. But like they say, it's really where the hipsters are doing business on this le lately. The nice thing was that I got to introduce two Montrealers that I like a lot. Hugh Macguire of, among other things, the Librivox public-domain audiobook project, is really interesting and passionate about communities and free content. Nicolas Ritoux is one of the most clued-in tech journalists I've met. It was nice to introduce them, and it was good that they seemed to get along. Depressing, on the other hand, was walking around the Plateau in January with 12C weather. This has gotten beyond funny into scary -- we just haven't had any serious snow in Montreal this winter. I'm worried that it's going to get worse, too, and I don't know what that will mean for Quebec's culture. Mon pays, c'est l'hiver, goes the song, and I'm not sure I get what a city without winter would mean here. tags: winter laika hugh macguire nicolas ritoux librivox montreal snow

House Maj and I have been watching House on DVD. It's really good, although a little formulaic. Everybody's always running around and bleeding and vomiting, and people get an average of 3.8 different rare diseases per episode. There's also a lot of cheating and sneakiness. It's great. tags: house tv

Mantini One nice thing about New Year's Eve this year was that Baron Earl served a refreshing -- nay, energizing -- spocktail called a mantini. I was especially pleased to find out that the first ingredient was not, in fact, a praying mantis. With the Baron, you never know. tags: mantini spocktail baron earl

Kewstoke is connected to the town of Weston-super-Mare by the mile-or-so of Kewstoke Toll Road but since 2005, there has been no toll collector. Unsurprisingly, the number of the least desirable vehicle types (Chelsea tractors/SUVs and light goods) using this coast road has doubled while the toll has been missing. Now the council is looking at putting up the season ticket rates from 5.50 to somewhere between 22.00 and 35.00 if they bring the toll back. A seven-fold increase? The alternative is to abolish to toll: which do you think is more likely? The latest report lists

"Unrestricted access and egress between Kewstoke and Weston-super-Mare"

as a benefit of abolition. Becoming a rat-run between the town centre and M5 is a benefit for who exactly? Certainly no benefit to the residents of Kewstoke or the top end of WsM who get the extra traffic wriggling along small roads with junctions not designed for that flow. Probably no benefit to drivers if they start to rely upon a hazardous road along the cliff-tops, which can be totally closed by just one break-down. It also goes against the Joint Local Transport Plan which says the council will

"direct traffic and particularly freight onto the most appropriate roads. Manage safe travel taking into account the current and desired uses of the network. Improve quality of life for local people."

Are press releases like Toll Road Accidents Reduced trying to convince us that driving along the cliff-tops is safe? More reports can be found among the items of the Strategic Planning and Economic Development Policy and Scrutiny Panel

I used to live in Norfolk, so Norwich Evening News: Was top cyclist killed by driver asleep at the wheel? (Updates: EDP: Death crash trial hears of "most viable explanation" and EDP: Driver guilty of causing cyclist's death ) and Norwich Evening News: Cyclist hit by bus on A47 are rather worrying. Weston super Mare Weston Mercury: Town centre havoc reports that Wales and West Utilities will be digging up Orchard Street followed by Alexandra Parade, Regent Street, Walliscote Road, High Street and Knightstone Road over 16 weeks from 8 January, and also

"Three months worth of work to remove the central reservation and add a filter lane to Herluin Way is also due to start on the same day [...] Uphill Road South in Uphill is closing on January 9 for six weeks as Wessex Water repairs the highway's sewer. [...] Winters Lane in Redhill is shutting for two months while a new sewer is put in."

Pipe works seldom seem to take up the full width of the road and the Herluin Way cycle track only crosses Herluin Way at a few points. Will these roads be kept open for cycling? They should be. All of these seem to be starting just before next week's Cycle Forum (7pm Wednesday 10 January at Worle Campus, press release ). Interesting new year present.

In a discussion on a mailing list, on a topic that isn't relevant to this log entry, someone wrote: "I just have expectations that if there is going to be progress in the [civil liberties/equality issue], that the 'Free' software world would be at the forefront of that effort". This is a common mistake. The thing that unites the free software developers, and the only thing that unites us, is that we make free software. Even though many of the us are liberal, or libertarian, or "leftist", or "green", or whatever you perceive as the common trait, it is wrong to assume all of us are. Some free software developers are very much "leftist", to the extent of being members of the communist party. Some are stout, Bush-voting Republicans. A couple are neo-Nazis. Some are worried about global warming; others are working full time to prove it isn't happening. ESR has a gun fetish, I'm nervous even of policemen carrying guns. All free software developers aren't even united in their opinions on matters that affect free software development directly. Some organize campaigns against software patents, others (although admittedly very few) apply for them. I'm a free software developer and the only thing about me you can deduce from that is that I develop free software.

Note: This post grew larger than originally intended. It drifted away from Vista to general rants about Microsoft and the content industry towards the end of the post, so just skip the rest if this is not of interest to you.
The latest thing I heard about Vista is that Microsoft bribes bloggers with Vista notebooks. As the article points out, this is plain wrong. Apart from crossing the line by not only giving away their own product to reviewers for free, but by actually providing an additional benefit (in the form of the notebook), they also did it wrong because - as the article on tech.blorge.com linked above points out - they don’t understand the way blogging “works”. Too many will be more or less angry because they didn’t get a free notebook (if anything at all).

In my opinion though, this is by far the least important mistake they made with Vista. All their content protection stuff is far worse. It basically does what current copy protection mechanisms already do, but to a much larger extend: Bother the legitimate users while users of pirated copies are uneffected. I don’t think they can avoid pirated copies for a minute. A friend already has a nice HD video player (HDDVD IIRC) and a nice HDCP capable TFT-display, both bought in december. Problem is that the HDCP protected connection resets every few minutes, causing a dropout in both video and sound for a few seconds each time. Seems HDCP compatible player and HDCP compatible display doesn’t necessarily mean that the two work together. Fortunately, in this case, there is some “secret” code you can enter on the players remote to disable HDCP completely. Of course, technically, this is not legal use, but if he didn’t use that hack, he wouldn’t be able to watch his legitimately bought video with his legitimate player and display. Given this problem, I can only shudder when thinking what will happen on Windows Vista with all those encrypted and signed communication channels (drive->memory->videocard->display, just to name the most obvious ones). And there is also the degradation of totally unrelated audio and video stuff while some “premium content” is played. Assume that I play some premium audio stuff. According to the hardware and driver specs for Vista, the availability of any premium content means that any non-encrypted channels need to be turned off or artificially degraded (like downsampling video from 1080p to VGA and upsampling it again since the display might be limited to only display 1080p). This is oh-so-stupid.
And there is also their EULA, as reviewed by Ed Foster. I won’t go into details here, but let’s just say that the EULA is the final nail in Vista’s coffin for me. I’ve been a Windows user since Windows for Workgroups came out (though I’ve used Linux on my machines since 1993 - and almost exclusively since 1998), but I won’t buy Vista, not even when it would be included with a new PC. By the way: This also most likely means that I won’t buy any HD video stuff at all, since the Vista content protection stuff was mostly dictated by the big Hollywood studios. Seems like I will be saving quite some money over the next years. (Which I actually need to do anyway.) Other interesting links regarding Vista:

• The Inquirer - Charlie Demerjian: Microsoft Vista is not an option
• The Register - Scott Granneman: Surprises inside Microsoft Vista’s EULA
• Juha Saarinen: DRM behind lack of Windows Vista drivers… and fear the new content protection
• Techworld.com - Chris Mellor: Vista crippled by content protection
• The Register - Andrew Orlowski: Vista’s Suicide Bomb: Who gets hurt?

I said they did it all wrong because they forgot that they are selling Windows not to the content industry but to the consumers. Sure, the consumers want to see what Microsoft calls premium content, but I’m also sure that they don’t want all that content protection nonsense Microsoft built into Vista for the sake of the content providers. They lost the balance between avoiding pirated copies (which I think the content protection stuff will have no big effect on) and bothering users of legitimate copies. Heck, I already use “pirate” copies of most of the (Windows-based) games I play because I don’t want to be bothered by their original-CD-checks, even though I own at least one legal copy of all the games I play. Would I need to download pirate copies of the HD movies I want to watch because I don’t want to be bothered by whatever side-effects VCP will have, even if I own legal copies of the same movies? Dear Microsoft, dear Content-Industry (TimeWarner, Disney, whoever), please re-think who you want to sell your content to. I already avoid DVDs which carry additional copy protection (apart from CSS), and if they were available at all, I would prefer to buy DVDs without even CSS. The same is true for CDs (except that they obviously don’t have CSS). Consequently, I’m likely to avoid buying HD videos which impose unpleasant restrictions on me, including those that disable the S/PDIF output of my player (no matter wether PC or standalone) since I paid a lot of money for decent HIFI equipment two years ago and I sure as hell won’t want to by new equipment within the next few years. Luckily, I didn’t yet buy any HD video gear, though my notebook, when equipped with a HDDVD or Blueray drive should be capable of playing HD video - if MS and the content industry wouldn’t impose stupid restrictions.

What a great day it was in the Bay Area today -- just beautiful. It's Rose Bowl weather, of course -- Nature blesses California on the day of the Rose Bowl, just so people in the rest of the USA say, "Damn those Californians and their great weather!" Still, there's something so rejuvenating every year around the 10th-11th of Niv se. I wonder what it is? Oh, and: no, we don't have the Rose Bowl in northern California. It's just one of the few times of year that San Franciscans are happy to share the state with their southern neighbors. tags: niv se rose bowl california weather

Fruitcake So, there's a comedy tradition around the holidays that marks the crappiest possible gift you can get for Christmas as a fruitcake. This is stupid; fruitcake is delicious. Candied fruit + nuts + cake + rum = hooray for fruitcake. My parents got a couple of fruitcakes for Christmas, and they tasted great. I've been noshing on them a bit at a time all week. Great stuff! Rumtastic. Anyone who says otherwise is full of malarkey. In conclusion, fruitcake is delicious and Carthage must be destroyed. tags: fruitcake christmas delicious carthage malarkey

New Year's Eve Maj, Amita June and I had a hard New Year's Eve. Our friends Earl and Sue have an NYE party in Walnut Creek every year, and a lot of our friends from Pigdog Journal are there every year. We had planned to have a room at the nearby Embassy Suites, and have friends over before the party to see Amita June (who needs to be asleep by New York midnight, i.e. 9PM PST). But Maj is feeling really sick -- flu-y and nauseous -- and we had to cancel this pre-event. Bad feelings about this; we've missed seeing this group of friends a few times since the baby was born, and some of them have never met her. Eventually, we all managed to go to Earl and Sue's party together, then left early so Amita could get to sleep. A pretty good solution all around. I got to see a lot of old friends, including Sam and Shannon who just announced that she's blogging for two now. (Congrats!) Tjames was there with his ladyfriend Robyn, which was really nice. They made out a lot, which makes me pretty happy. We saw Dan, Johnny, Randy, Dave, and of course Earl and Sue themselves. A really good party. tags: nye earl sue sick maj amitajune sam shannon pigdog

All is quiet I had a pretty mild shom-pan-yah hangover this morning, so we were fully able to go see friends Zach and Wendy in El Cerrito for brunch. We hit delicious Picante off of Gilman Street, which is a massive Mexican restaurant, near the Berkeley Gourmet Ghetto and showing some of the foodie-ism of the weird East Bay scene. I had a really good plate of chilaquiles, and Maj had some huevos rancheros and made a pretty good dent in them -- the first food she's really eaten in a few days. Amita June got a great quesadilla with queso fresco that tasted really good. Then, everyone was ready for a nap, so we said goodbye and cut the visit short by heading back to Los Altos Hills. tags: zach wendy picante berkeley chilaquiles

Ads on Wikipedia So, there's been quite a dust-up on Wikimedia Foundation lists about their recent fund-raising drive. The WMF is having its annual fundraising drive (and, if you can, please help with a donation), and the Virgin Group's charity organization, Virgin Unite, set up a matching fund a few days ago so that all donations to the WMF were effectively doubled. All fine so far, right? But a small logo in the donations notice -- seen by non-logged-in users on every page of every WMF site -- was considered by many Wikipedians and other WMF editors as dangerously close to the line on advertising -- or over it. There have been several prominent users who have left the project because of it. I'm not sympathetic with these folks; in fact, I'm in solid opposition. I think that Wikipedia's huge amount of Web traffic is a resource that the Foundation is squandering. Traffic like Wikipedia's is worth tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars in ad revenue per year. That's money that could go to disseminate free (libre and gratis) paperback pocket encyclopedias to millions of schools and millions of children, in their own language, around the world. It's irresponsible to abuse that opportunity. Brion Vibber's defense of the logo on the Wikimedia Foundation's mailing list is really interesting and instructive. tags: wikipedia wikimedia ads virgin unite

In my previous work as a sys-admin I have worked for a number of companies that depend heavily on free software. If you use a commercially supported distribution such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux then you get high quality technical support (much higher than you expect from closed-source companies), but this still doesn't provide as much as you might desire as it is reactive support (once you notice a problem you report it). Red Hat has a Technical Account Manager offering that provides a higher level of support and there is also a Professional Services organization that can provide customised versions of the software. But the TAM and GPS offerings are mostly aimed at the larger customers (they are quite expensive).

It seems to me that a viable option for companies with smaller budgets is to have an employee dedicated to enhancing free software and getting changes accepted upstream. For a company that has a team of 5+ sys-admins the cost of a developer dedicated to such software development tasks should be saved many times over by the greater productivity of the sys-admins and the greater reliability of the servers.

This is not to criticise commercial offerings such as Red Hat's TAM and GPS services, a dedicated free software developer could work with the Red Hat TAM and GPS people thus allowing the company to get the most value for money from the Red Hat consultants.

If using a free distribution such as Debian the case for a dedicated liason with the free software community is even stronger, as there is no formal support organization that compares to the Red Hat support (there are a variety of small companies that provide commercial support, but I am not aware of a 24*7 help desk or anything similar). If you have someone employed full-time as a free software developer then they can provide most of your support. It would probably make sense for a company that has mission critical servers running Debian to employ a Debian developer, a large number of Debian developers already work as sys-admins and finding one who is looking for a new job should not be difficult. There are more companies that would benefit from having DDs as employees than there are DDs, this isn't an obstacle to hiring them as most hiring managers don't realise the technical issues involved.

This is not to say that a company which can't hire a DD should use a different distribution, merely that their operations will not be as efficient as they might be.

While reading the discussion of Vista security on Bruce Schneier's blog it occurred to me that comparing the issues of DRM that face MS with the issues faced by SE Linux developers provides some benefits.

SE Linux is designed to enable the owner of a computer to effectively enforce security policies to protect their system integrity and the confidentiality of their data. Some of the SE Linux users (military users) use all the available features, but most people only use the targeted policy which provides a sub-set of the system integrity and data confidentiality protections that are available to give a greater ease of use.

Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux ship with the SE Linux targeted policy enabled by default. This policy is not something that most users notice. The main program that is commonly used which might have an issue with the default SE Linux policy is Apache. Fedora and RHEL systems that do not run Apache (which is most of them) can run SE Linux with almost no costs.

setsebool -P httpd_disable_trans 1
/etc/init.d/httpd restart

It seems clear to me that there is no good reason for disabling SE Linux by default. There are reasons for running a particular daemon in the unconfined_t domain via the FOO_disable_trans boolean. EG to run Apache without restrictions you would type the above commands.

In spite of the SE Linux targeted policy being so easy to use, the fact that it prevents certain daemon compromises from allowing immediate control of the system, and also prevents some kernel exploits from working, there are still some people who turn it off when installing Fedora and RHEL systems and advise others to do so.

Given this great fear of some people to use a technology that is specifically designed for their own benefit I find it difficult to imagine that any users will be inclined to accept the MS DRM technology that is specifically designed to go against their interests.

ESR claims that the 64bit transition is the critical period for Linux to move on the desktop. While he makes many interesting observations I don't find his argument convincing. Firstly current P4 CPUs with PAE can handle significantly more than 4G of RAM (64G is possible now). Secondly it's quite possible to run a 64bit kernel with 32bit applications, this means that you can use a 64bit kernel to access >64G of RAM with each 32bit application getting direct access to something slightly less than 4G of virtual memory. As ESR's point seems based on total system memory the 4G per application doesn't seem to be an issue. As an aside the only applications I've used which could benefit from >4G are database servers (in the broadest interpretation - consider an LDAP server as a database) and JVM environments. Again it would not be difficult to ship an OS with mostly 32bit code that has a 64bit kernel, JVM, and database servers.

I hope that Vista will be a good opportunity for mass transition to Linux. Vista offers little that users desire, many things that will hurt them, and is expensive too!

With Vista you pay more for the OS and more for the hardware (Vista has the usual excessive Windows hardware requirements plus the extra hardware for TPM encryption) without providing anything substantial in return.

What I want to see next is support for Security Enhanced X to protect desktop environments against hostile X clients. This will make a significant difference to the security of Linux desktop environments and provide another significant benefit for choosing Linux over Windows. While MS is spending their effort in making their OS act against the best interests of the users we will keep making Linux enforce the access controls that users need to protect their systems. Hopefully Linux users will choose to use SE-X, but if they don't they are given the freedom to make that choice - unlike the poor sods who use Windows.

We had a great day on the coast yesterday, just the three of us -- Maj, me, and Amita June. We drove over Highway 92 from my parents' place in Los Altos Hills, a pretty steep and winding highway, down to Half Moon Bay on the peninsula's coastline. We were going to head up to Montara Beach, one of my favorite places in the Bay Area, but it's a bit of a drive and we had plans to be back in Mountain View for dinner. So instead we turned off at the nearest coastal access -- Venice Beach, right in HMB -- and parked for a little beach time. Unfortunately, the strong winds and storms that we've had in the Bay Area this week have also caused higher-than-normal surf. We couldn't actually get to the beach from our parking lot -- Frenchman's Creek was blocking the staircase down to the sand. We think it might have been diverted by the high surf and winds. Anyways, we had to walk about 20 minutes out of the way to actually get down to the beach. Which was, of course, fantastic. I don't think there's anything quite like a Costanoan beach on a December day. The Bay Area's Pacific coast is quite unfairly ignored by most visitors, but a drive down scenic Highway 1 from SF to Santa Cruz can give a really good idea of what most of coastal Northern California is like -- from Santa Barbara up to Eureka. Venice Beach has nice yellow sand, Amita June loved running through the sand in bare feet. We chased seagulls (Amita tried to talk chicken-language to them: "bok bok bok!") and kicked around a soccer ball we'd brought. The surf has been exceptionally high, and it was probably pretty reckless to do, but the tide was going out, so we took off our shoes and dipped our feet in at the top of the sand. Amita loved seeing the waves come in, and running away when they got close. After a lot of playing and a little bit of a tantrum when we decided to leave, we all headed to lunch at the Distillery in Moss Beach. The Distillery is a California historical site -- an old speakeasy, built on the peninsula's coast in the 1920s when Canadian rum-runners would drop off their wares under these remote cliffs. It's kind of hard to find -- down some teensy residential streets on the ocean cliffs -- but it's a local landmark. The view was excellent and the food was great -- I had a big tub of steamers, and Maj had a really good plate of seaweed-wrapped prawns. The only problem was the wait -- we got there just as the lunch rush was starting, and didn't leave until after 3PM. That would have been nice for a romantic lunch for two, but with a one-year-old you're on a pretty tight schedule. Back over the Coast Range and down again to the introspective Bay, we took long naps then headed over to brother Andy's house for turkey soup and some family time. I dunno if there's any kind of tired like sun-and-wind tired from the beach. tags: beach half moon bay maj moss beach amitajune distillery bay area

What is Debian Desktop?
Debian Desktop is a Debian's subproject created to be a joint effort of
all groups involved or related with the desktop to give our users a
better environment to use and easier to install experience.

Actually we've members from: pkg-gnome, pkg-kde, pkg-xfce, pkg-galago,
tasksel and utnubu. We count with help from d-i and debian-cd members too.
The initiative merged the former Debian Desktop development page, debian-desktop
mailing list for the discussions and debian-desktop alioth project - its svn actually
hosts the desktop-base source package.

We did our best to deliver for our users a interesting desktop experience (including
laptop users) and it includes GNOME, KDE or Xfce (that's your choice) in our upcoming release: 4.0 (Etch).

What will be into Debian Etch Desktop ?
The desktop (task: desktop, installable through aptitude or tasksel):

• X Window System: Xorg 7.1
• Office suite: OpenOffice 2.0.4
• Graphics suite: GIMP 2.2.13

It also includes a simple window manager (twm), zeroconf (avahi), printing (cups) and scanning (sane) support

GNOME desktop (task: gnome-desktop, also installable through aptitude or tasksel):

• GNOME core: 2.14 with some 2.16 modules, eg.: totem (xine backend as default)
• Web Browser: Firefox 1.5 and Epiphany 2.14.3
• Feeds Manager: Liferea 1.0.26 (Liferea is Epiphany friendly)
  
• Mail/Calendar app: Evolution 2.6.3
• Instant Messaging Tool: GAIM 2.0.0beta5
• Multimedia Player: Rhythmbox 0.9.6
• Network (wired/wifi) manager: Network Manager 0.6.4
• Graphical Package Manager: Synaptic 0.57.11 with update-notifier
  
• Graphical Partition Manager: GParted 0.2.5
• CD/DVD Creation: GNOMEBaker 0.6.0
  
• Power Management Tool: GNOME Power Manager 2.14.3

It also includes bluetooth (bluez-gnome) support, multimedia in the browser support (totem mozilla plugin), bittorrent support (gnome-btdownload)

KDE desktop (task: kde-desktop, also installable through aptitude or tasksel):

• KDE: KDE 3.5.5 (base, pim, multimedia, graphics, artwork, network, utils and admin)
  
• Network (wired/wifi) manager: KNetworkManager 0.1
• CD/DVD Creation: k3b

We tried to add all the gnome task features into kde task too. KDE itself already contains a lot of them, if you find something missing please tell us at debian-desktop@lists.debian.org for a better next release, and wait your contribution enter Lenny.

Xfce desktop (task: xfce-desktop, also installable through aptitude or tasksel):

• Xfce: Xfce 4.3.99
• Calendar tool: orage 4.3.99
• Text editor: Mousepad 0.2.8

It also includes multimedia support and xfce goodies.

What if i've Debian testing or sid installed using GNOME or KDE or Xfce?
Open a terminal, check your /etc/apt/sources.list and run as root:
aptitude update
aptitude install desktop $foo-desktop

Please replace $foo with GNOME, KDE, Xfce - e.g: aptitude install desktop gnome-desktop

Note that desktop and $foo-desktop aren't metapackages - packages that usually contains just a few files (the required) to be installed in the system and its main feature is depend, conflict, recommend or suggest other packages. desktop and $foo-desktop are tasks and are in the tasksel source package, maintained by the tasksel team. The debian-installer uses tasksel to install a set of packages, and you should too.

How can i download Debian Desktop for tests?
The easier way to install is downloading a CD or DVD image from http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer . Please download
Debian Etch RC1 images or later for GNOME and something newer
(eg: weekly builds) for KDE or Xfce. Please note that DVD usage
is preferred, if you're going to use a CD broadband is recommended.

There are special first CDs images containing not GNOME key packages
but KDE or Xfce, look for debian-testing-i386-$foo-CD-1.iso (don't worry,
we've at least amd64 and powerpc images too) at:
http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/weekly-builds/i386/iso-cd/

How can i install Debian Desktop GNOME?
The first DVD image contains the entire GNOME set of packages, just
follow the installer and after the base system install select "default
desktop environment", if the system doesn't suggests it for you and
proceed - no network is required during installation.

The first CD image doesn't contains the entire GNOME set of packages,
just follow the installer and after the base system install select
"default desktop environment", if the system doesn't suggests it for
you and proceed - broadband connection is recommended.

How can i install Debian Desktop KDE?
Before the installer boots, please type:
install tasks=kde-desktop

* The first DVD image contains the entire KDE set of packages - no
network is required during installation.

* The first CD image doesn't contains the entire KDE set of packages -
broadband connection is recommended.

Note: Alternative first CD is available (see above).

How can i install Debian Desktop Xfce?
Before the installer boots, please type:
install tasks=xfce-desktop

* The first DVD image doesn't contains the entire Xfce set of packages
- broadband connection is recommended.

* The first CD image doesn't contains the entire Xfce set of packages
- broadband connection is recommended.

Note: Alternative first CD is available (see above).

Katherine's father bought her mother a laptop for Christmas. I am ashamed to admit that although I was responsible for the specification it was purchased from PC World. There is a lack of shops in Northern Ireland where you can walk in and purchase a reasonably cheap laptop unfortunately. The model we ended up with was an Advent 8111 (Dixons link as it's saner than the PC World one). It's not actually a bad spec; Core Duo 1.6GHz, 1GB RAM, 80GB HD, wireless/ethernet/modem, 15.4" 1280x800 widescreen TFT. I think it claims up to 3 hours battery life and I certainly had 2+ out of it though not under heavy use. I decided that it was getting Linux; Katherine's mum isn't used to any form of computer so there are no preconceptions about Windows to get over. While I'm a Debian person myself I felt it was time to give Ubuntu a chance; mjg59 (and others I'm sure) has spent a lot of time trying to get it happy on laptops and make sure things Just Work. I didn't have a lot of time to sit fiddling with the setup, so a shiny out-of-the-box distro seemed ideal. I downloaded ubuntu-6.10-desktop-i386.iso and burnt myself a CD. Dropped it in the drive and it booted into the live CD installer fine. The install process was simple and it managed to resize the Windows partition without problems (I would have deleted it but I couldn't convince the Windows rescue CD creator to work and I don't want to burn my bridges until I'm sure Linux works out ok for the owner). Rebooting into the freshly installed system I was surprised at the time the boot process took. It certainly felt a lot longer than it takes my (lower speced) laptop to boot to a GDM prompt under Debian. Also the display looked a bit fuzzy. Further investigation led to the discovery that although X correctly detected a panel size of 1280x800 it was only using 1024x768. Much searching found me i915resolution which did some magic that made things work. However this doesn't appear to be part of Ubuntu proper so I'm not sure if was the correct solution or if I should have done something else? Getting to the point where I could download i915resolution was interesting too. My parents have a WEP encrypted wireless network (to prevent casual use rather than because it's secure). I was expecting Ubuntu (which detected the Intel wireless card fine) to pop up some sort of dialog saying it had found a network and would I like to connect (if I provided the key). Something network-managery. But no. Even when I went to the network control panel and added all the details the connection didn't seem to come up. I gave up and did it manually with iwconfig and dhclient (I needed it to work quickly and at present it won't need wireless usually). Once I had the display working happily my other task was to tame the modem. It's an Intel HDA thing and I'd hoped sl-modem-daemon would drive it. Of course it didn't. Although it's an Intel chipset it has a bloody Conexant codec on it. Which of course there are no free or Free drivers for. I ended up trying the trial Linuxant driver, which did work fine at 14.4k, but that's really painful so I gave up and paid for the full version. I'd really rather have voted with my feet and ended up with some proper modem hardware, but it would have been an extra set of wires and cost more. I hate Conexant. Anyway, the drivers work (though seem to break sound; I haven't had enough time to prod this and the modem is much more important to have working). Hopefully in time I'll convince them they really want ADSL, but at present I think it would be quite hard as they don't have a high expected use. Once the modem was working I needed an easy way to dial up. I started playing with modem monitor, which had been installed by default. However I just couldn't figure out how to get it to allow me to dialup and dial down - the activate/disable options stayed greyed out. So I installed GNOME PPP which seems to work fine and be easy enough to drive - put a nice link to it on the desktop and stored all the details so it's a double click to launch and then a click of the "Connect" button. My final issue was that once I actually took the laptop to Katherine's house to show her mum how to use it it started hanging on boot. Booting into recovery mode showed a soft lockup error message around the point where it was setting up the network interfaces. I think this might have had something to do with me hitting the wireless kill switch (no point having it on when there's no wireless in the house), as disabling the device in the BIOS made the problem go away. I didn't have enough time to do a fully exhaustive check, but will look at it in the future. I wait with interest to see how use of the laptop goes. Expected usage to being with is mainly web and email (provided by the Ubuntu defaults of Firefox and Evolution) so hopefully it shouldn't be too problematic now I've fought the install process. I was really quite surprised at the problems I encountered (well, aside from the modem drivers); I'd expected a much smoother install that would leave me with everything working fine out of the box. I haven't yet filed any bugs or done more investigation - I only had about a day to setup the machine so couldn't prod it more just yet. I will of course try to do so when I get a free moment, but if I missed some obvious stuff please do point it out to me! (As if you wouldn't...) Oh, and here's some lspci output for anyone interested in some more details about the laptop:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03) (prog-if 00 [VGA])
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode])
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode])
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode])
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [UHCI])
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [UHCI])
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [UHCI])
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [UHCI])
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02) (prog-if 20 [EHCI])
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e2) (prog-if 01 [Subtractive decode])
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02)
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) Serial ATA Storage Controller IDE (rev 02) (prog-if 80 [Master])
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02)
02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection (rev 02)
04:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8055 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 10)
05:01.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments Unknown device 8039
05:01.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments Unknown device 803a (prog-if 10 [OHCI])
05:01.2 Mass storage controller: Texas Instruments Unknown device 803b
05:01.3 Class 0805: Texas Instruments Unknown device 803c (prog-if 01)

While its not the normal action people usually expect from me, I just felt the need to have a little posting saying Thanks to somebody. Who? Well. All of you doing work on a regular basis, like * Application Managers, who regularly process people that want to get Debian Developer status. They are doing a lot of work, asking questions, giving tips and in the end submit their report. Usually thats a process of multiple days up to some months work, depending on the time the Applicant and the AM has. * FrontDesk. who makes sure that the process keeps on running by managing all sorts of weird things people come up with, * Sponsors, who help non-DDs to get their package into the Debian Archive, * The release team, who always tries to get the best possible release out of the door, * All those people that make Debian what it is - the biggest and best distribution ever, * everyone that goes and fixes bugs in debian packages to keep the quality as high as possible, * all people that help people by answering questions on one of our mailinglists, on IRC or in web forums, * every upstream author that releases his software under a free license and happily works together with distribution maintainers to make their software the best it can be, * all those that help to organize DebConf, the yearly Debian Conference with all the time-consuming tasks that that includes, * the people that keep the infrastructure running that allows us to develop our own little gems, like the Debian Admins, SPI Admins, Alioth Admins, IRC Network Operators and anyone who provides and maintains machines for a free project out there, * those behind everyone I mentioned - the families. Who have to look for something else during the time people do all the mentioned work, * everyone who can resist feeding a flamewar, Did I forgot someone? I’m sure I did, so - start your own post and say thanks, without people spending a lot of their spare time you would not have such a great distribution to use and ease your life! Have a good new year and continue the good work!

I’ve been asked to keep my blog up to date with regard to Linux support of the MacBook Pro, so here are my latest findings. For more background, see the previous post on the same subject. Anything that I don’t mention here or in another post can be assumed to work (or I just haven’t tested that particular thing yet, though I’m doing some extensive tests).

• Sound: still nothing, none of the various patches floating are good enough
• Battery life: no news here, 1h30 is the max you’ll get. You need to suspend to disk if you want to swap the battery, it’s not possible to do that in suspend to ram like it was on the PowerBook (G4 500, at least). Sad.
• Heat/fan noise: catastrophic. Fans running at 4000-4200 rpm on a typical desktop or on my laps, down to 3000 rpm on a glass desktop. More on the SMC below.
• ATI drivers: still suck. No PowerPLAY support on amd64, which means the GPU is running at the highest clock rate, consuming a lot of power and generating a lot of heat. XVideo makes the X server segfault, watching a short movie using vlc’s OpenGL output managed to crash the box hard, corrupting part of the kernel memory. fglrx kills the machine on resume.

In a previous post, I was reporting a lot of timeouts from the applesmc “driver”. After a (very) quick look at the AppleSMC kext for OS X, I know why this happens. It looks like the OS X driver uses an interrupt and configures the SMC for that. So it probably doesn’t poll the SMC 20 times per second like the applesmc “driver” does. It also looks like the OS X driver uses SMC keys we know nothing about. I could also confirm that the SMC has access to temperature sensors for the CPU, GPU and memory, but it looks like we have no idea of the corresponding SMC keys. With this information, it’d be possible to switch the SMC to manual mode with a userspace governor. What probably happens when we run Linux on this machine is that the SMC stays in automatic mode, and it’s very conservative in this mode. It won’t hesitate to run the fans at high speed to keep the machine safe. It is highly probable that the OS X driver is taking over the fan control to keep the machine both cool and quiet. This is mostly speculation, as the better device power management in OS X plays a role too, and the SMC could very well still be in automatic mode under OS X keeping the fans at low speed just because the machine generates way less heat. Unfortunately, the AppleSMC kext isn’t released as part of Darwin, so we’ll have to wait until it is. Could be a long wait, though. The SMC handles a lot of things. I don’t feel safe running an OS without a proper driver for the SMC on this machine. The fans probably aren’t designed to run at 4000+ rpm for 3 years and will probably fail early or something.

From a suggestion on my previous blog entry I decided to test out google reader.

The first problem was that it caused Konqueror to SEGV in etch, I filed a bug report and switched to Firefox.

Next to add my feeds I had to either export them in OPML format or add them one at a time, there is no support for pasting in a list of URLs. If I was writing a RSS syndication program I would also make it parse the config files of some of the common programs, parsing a Planet config file is pretty easy.

I added a feed for a friend who's server seems to be down. While doing so I tried to add another feed, the google reader accepted the command to add the second feed but didn't actually do so - it was fortunate that I was pasting it in not typing it...

The killer issue is that it seems to be impossible to merge feeds. I want to read both Planet Linux Australia and Planet Debian, there are some people who are on both planets (EG me). So it makes no sense to do anything other than display both of them in the same view.

At this time it seems that google reader is unsuitable for my use. However it is a fairly slick system and I imagine that it would work quite well for people who have different needs to me. If you want to read the blogs of a few friends then it probably works really well. It just seems not to work well for a set of meshed communities (Debian developers and Linux users in Australia for example).


Please let me know if I somehow missed some configuration options to make google reader do what I want.

All though I don't celebrate it myself, I am not one of those tedious people who get all bent out of shape because someone wishes them a merry Christmas. In fact growing up in a small village in England, I used to play the Three Wise Men in my schools Nativity play. It was a very small village. My DateTime::Calendar::Discordian perl module (Also available as a Debian package.) is todays entry in the Perl Advent Calendar.