I feel happy about the last CGI.br election results, mainly concerning two new representatives from the third sector. I want to point them here:

• S rgio Amadeu da Silveira: a very popular sociologist and free software activist who has recently dedicated his time to fight against obscure cybercrimes bills in Brazil.
• Veridiana Alimonti: a lawyer from a well respected NGO IDEC (Brazilian Institute of Customer Protection). She was elected on a platform which also encourages Internet freedom. Also, AFAIK there were no women in the last CGI.br members group, which is too bad.Still, I got a little worried when I noticed that there was a candidate who works for the NGO Safernet. Although I believe he is an ethical person, I just don't like the idea of sponsored NGO's having influence/power over sponsors' funding decisions, so Safernet people don't get me wrong. (he didn't succeed anyway)The Brazilian Internet Steering Committee is, among other things, responsible for the Brazilian National Internet Registry, called Registro.br.

Terah and I recently decided that each of us could use a day off of not having to do work or supervise boys. Yesterday I had the day off work so that was mine. I took my Kindle, along with its Gutenberg copy of War and Peace, which yes, I m reading for fun. I slept in a bit, then got breakfast and sat down at Botanica, the Wichita Gardens with the Kindle for awhile. That was a nice way to spend the morning. Today was Terah s day off. Initially I thought of taking the boys to The Cosmosphere, one of the world s premier space museums, or to the Kansas Aviation Museum. But then I realized that the Midland Railway, a historic excursion line in Baldwin City, KS, was having their first train trip of the year. And it s the Easter special: you take the train a few miles out of town, get off, the kids do an Easter egg hunt, then also get to get their picture taken with the Easter bunny. Kid paradise, right? What could be better? So this is how my alarm came to be set for 5:15 on a Saturday morning. Oliver woke up early, but I had to get Jacob up. He was groggy, trying to cover his face and ears, and annoyed at me for trying to wake him up. Until I said, Jacob, it s time to get ready for the car trip to the train ride. Can you go get dressed for the day? Silence. Then about 5 seconds later, he jumped up, said, OK dad, I will do it, and he did. We drove our 2.5 hours. I had set out a non-dirty breakfast in the car for them the night before, so they munched while we drove. Then had to wait in a huge line for our tickets. An hour later we had them got the last 3 tickets for the first departure of the day, 10AM and ran to get on the train before it left. Jacob and Oliver both got very quiet. Sometimes Jacob especially does that when he s very excited about things. He doesn t always look it right then, but I knew I d be hearing about it later. He had his face almost pressed to the window the whole way. Oh, and yes, he dressed himself and I didn t check to make sure he had the correct shirt, or that it wasn t on inside-out, until it was too late. Oops. We rode in an ex-CP car built in 1936. One of the cars on the train was built in the 1890s quite some neat equipment. Anyhow, next came the hunt. There were two large lawns covered in eggs, separated by age group. Jacob and Oliver were in the younger group, but still only got a few eggs (there were lots of other parents, uhm, helping their kids by picking up eggs the kids were too slow to get and putting them in baskets ) But they were thrilled with the experience so that s what counts. They moved the locomotive to the other end of the train for the trip back using an adjacent track. Lots of the kids watched them couple it back on. Jacob and Oliver were particularly interested nothing could have distracted them from watching that train though they didn t particularly like the noise of the horn. On the way back, someone in an Easter bunny suit was on the train for pictures. I took the boys there. They usually refuse to sit on laps of Santa and such, so I didn t figure much success. They actually agreed to do it. And despite their expressions in this photo, Jacob later told me over and over how much fun it was to be with the Easter bunny. After we got back, we headed for the car. Jacob insisted on carrying his own Easter bag, and predictably wound up carrying it upside down for awhile. So his bag had some grass in it from picking the candy back up. Oliver discovered some rocks by a ditch and had fun throwing them in to make a splash, so we paused for that for awhile. By this point it was about noon. So at this point, what does a dad who has managed to keep two active boys in line for an hour, help them with an egg hunt and giant rabbit, and keep them from falling into the ditch they re throwing rocks into, do? Say that it s time to eat lunch and then head for home so we can be there in time for supper? Or go for MORE ADVENTURE? I said, Jacob, how would you like to eat lunch inside a big train station in Kansas City? Pause for a couple of seconds to think. YEAH! I have never had lunch in a train station before! Let s go! Shall we go NOW? So I gave them the leftover breakfast to eat during the hour drive on towards the beautiful Kansas City Union Station. It s one of the few grand American train stations that survives intact, and is just stunning. Jacob and Oliver both fell asleep on the way there. We parked, walked inside, and Jacob just froze. Dad WOW! That ceiling is SO HIGH! I can t even reach it! He then raised his hand as high as it would go and said, See dad, it is so high I can t touch it! (Most ceilings are, but this one is indeed much, much taller than most.) We ate lunch in the second level of a restaurant right in the Grand Hall, which Jacob really enjoyed. Here s Jacob, annoyed that I pulled out the camera again: Then we went exploring for an hour. Jacob talked about his adventure . We went up the elevators and checked out the balconies. Then we found the Model Railroad Experience. And oh my. The boys were visibly the most excited they had been all day. Oliver just froze at the spot he walked through the door, not caring to move and see the rest of the exhibit because he was so fascinated by what he already saw. There was a huge layout in the middle of the room, and smaller ones in adjacent rooms. We finally made our way there, and Oliver just ran round and round one of them, following a train, excitedly yelling There it is! There it is! There it is! Here s a photo from the big layout: Jacob cried when it was time to go, but I had promised them some dessert before we left, so after a bite of ice cream we were on our way. On the way home, every 15 minutes or so, Jacob would make a remark like this: Dad, the train ride was SO fun! or Dad, I really liked Kansas City Union Station! and so forth, naming every highlight of the day for him several times over: the Easter bunny, the egg hunt, train ride, and everything about Union Station. On the way home, we stopped at our favorite restaurant in Emporia: BobbyD s Merchant St. BBQ. This is always a hit for everyone in the family. A down-home place that has excellent food, is not far off our path, and never seems to have a wait. Yum.

Sebastian Thrun gave an interesting TED talk about the Google driverless car project and explains how his main aim is to avoid all the needless road deaths that are due to human error [1]. Finally a good use for the Google street-view type data! AnnMarie Thomas gave an interesting short TED talk about using play-dough to make circuits [2]. There are two recipies for play-dough, the one made with salt conducts well and the one made with sugar conducts poorly. That allows making wires with salty dough and insulators with the sugar dough. John Robb has published an interesting article about a Chinese fake revolutionary group that is triggering a backlash from Chinese security forces [3]. Even if this isn t accurate it seems like a good way to make people hate their local security forces and thus demand political change. Chris Rock made an interesting observation, we aren t making progress on racial issues, white people are getting less crazy [4]. Red Hill has an interesting article about 486 motherboards with fake cache chips that were sold in the 90 s [5]. One thing I disagree with is that they blame the customers for seeking low prices. When a white-box PC cost $2000 (which is $3000 in today s money) it made sense to try and get the cheapest option possible. Now that major department stores sell name-brand laptops for $400 it really makes sense to buy name-brand quality rather than white-box rubbish. IHollaBack.org is an interesting project to combat street harassment of women [6]. Psychology Today has an interesting article by Joe Navarro (former FBI counter-intelligence agent and author) about the serious implications of attempting to detect lies [7]. His main point is that most people over-estimate their ability to detect lies and because the legal system believes such claims from law enforcement officers many innocent people get found guilty and criminals get away free! Cory Doctorow wrote an informative article about the ways of persuading people to pay for content that can be obtained for free [8]. The main message seems to be that the big media companies are doing things the wrong way in everything that they do. The news satire site CBS Breaking News has an interesting about page explaining their mission [9]. They stopped their automated disaster generator after the Japanese Tsunami, while I can understand them wanting to keep some good taste and be sympathetic to the plight of the Japanese people it seems that they have forgotten that there is always a disaster somewhere. The typical bus plunge is just as bad as the Tsunami to the people on the bus and their relatives! Psychology Today has an interesting blog post by Satoshi Kanazawa explaining how criminals don t specialise, the psychological factors that make someone likely to commit one crime will make them likely to commit others, this makes it logical to collect DNA samples from all criminals [10]. Psychology Today has an interesting blog post by Dave Niose about a landmark US legal case in 1948 where Vashti McCollum had to escalate to the Supreme Court to allow her children to receive secular education [11]. We need something like this in Australia now as the religious extremists are going too far in indoctrinating children. Sam Richards gave a TED talk titled A Radical Experiment in Empathy which aims to teach Americans how to understand the way that people in the middle-east feel [12]. The comments suggest that his talk wasn t successful. Of course the fact that empathy doesn t have a clear definition in the English language doesn t help, and the fact that most people don t seem to interpret it in any way that corresponds to any dictionary and that most people seem unable to define what they mean by it makes things worse. At the moment I can t think of any examples of successfully teaching empathy to unwilling people. The people who want to learn will do so eventually, you can have some good success in helping them to learn faster. Kathryn Schulz gave an interesting TED talk about Being Wrong [13]. One interesting point that she makes concerns the way that people assume that people who disagree are ignorant, stupid, or evil instead of just having a different set of data or a different understanding of the same data. Of course it is possible for someone to be ignorant/stupid/evil AND have a different understanding. Marcin Jakubowski gave an inspiring TED talk about his project to develop free blueprints that allow anyone to create all machines needed to sustain civilisation with minimal cost [14]. His Open Source Ecology project has a blog and a wiki with blueprints and files for CAD/CAM [15]. Dave Meslin gave an insightful TED talk about apathy in the political process [16]. Among other things he compares council notices that supposedly request citizen input with adverts for running shoes which encourage people to buy them. One thing he didn t mention is the difference that technology can make, a short council advert with a QR code is probably a lot more useful than the current dense text-based adverts for today s audience.

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/sebastian_thrun_google_s_driverless_car.html
• [2] http://www.ted.com/talks/annmarie_thomas_squishy_circuits.html
• [3] http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2011/04/the-jasmine-revolution.html
• [4] http://www.youtube.com/v/z_L7qoP17-w
• [5] http://www.redhill.net.au/b/b-bad.html
• [6] http://www.ihollaback.org/
• [7] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/spycatcher/201010/detecting-lies-v-detecting-truth-serious-implications
• [8] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2011/apr/20/digital-free-persuade-pay-cory-doctorow
• [9] http://cbsbreakingnews.com/about
• [10] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201008/does-it-make-sense-collect-dna-samples-misdemeanor-convict
• [11] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/our-humanity-naturally/201104/atheist-mom-goes-the-supreme-court-and-wins
• [12] http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_richards_a_radical_experiment_in_empathy.html
• [13] http://www.ted.com/talks/kathryn_schulz_on_being_wrong.html
• [14] http://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski.html
• [15] http://opensourceecology.org/
• [16] http://www.ted.com/talks/dave_meslin_the_antidote_to_apathy.html

Apologies for yet more politics; normal-ish service will be resumed shortly, I hope. I've just put the following into the "BBC News website feedback" form, but I doubt it will have any impact. Quoting it here for the record... The BBC news website appears to be showing a systemic bias over the AV referendum. For the last few weeks, there has been regular coverage of the referendum and it seems that there has been the usual blind adherence to "balance" - every story about AV has included some of the (incorrect, unscientific, even hate-filled) propaganda from the "no to AV" campaign without critique or analysis. It's difficult to see any justification for this except deliberate editorial bias, but I don't imagine that there's much that can be done about that. However, right now on the BBC News front page at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ I can see that there is a link "Referendum views" that points to yet another opinion piece from a "No" campaigner (Frederick Forsyth). I only see a single view here, not the plural "views" suggested. I don't see any positive view for AV promoted from the front page at all, nor any link from this puff piece to the other articles that have been written in the recent past. Looking further, I can see that there *has*, in fact, been a positive piece on the News Front Page today (from Billy Bragg) but there are no visible links to it any more. Both articles were posted/updated at the same time this morning (22nd April, 08:34 BST) yet now only the negative one remains. Very shoddy, and not at all what I would expect from the BBC.

A newly founded Logic Group in Mumbai, which seems to be a private thing but some professors from the IIT Bombay are taking part, has approached me and asked if I can give a talk about Church s lambda calculus and how he used it to show that Hilbert s Entscheidungsproblem is not solvable. They are starting a series of talk on logic on the occasion of Turing s 100th birth year and because I am finally leaving the IIT campus in two days, my talk turned out to be the opening talk for the series. Roughly guessed about fifty people attended, some professors but most of them students from fields other than mathematics and computer science I hope that they were not too confused by distinguishing truth and provability, expressability and computability, of which I did not give a proper explanation.
I started with a historical exposition of the state of logic in the beginning 20th century, then gave an introduction to lambda calculus, encoding of natural numbers in then, G del encoding. Finally I sketched the proof of the unsolvability of the question whether a lambda term has a normal form and then concluded by showing how this implies that the Entscheidungsproblem is not solvable.
I have before hand written out the talk in full, and again I ended up saying completely different things or at least said things completely different. Nevertheless, I am sharing the (planned) text of my talk, including the timeline that I draw on the whiteboard.

Last week a developer meeting of the FAI project took place in Cologne/Germany. Four core developers (project lead Thomas Lange and 3x Michael ) met for two days to discuss and work on the FAI project. The first day (2011-04-14) started at 11:45 and lasted until around 21:15, the second day (2011-04-15) started at 11:00 and lasted until 22:00. We made 134 svn commits in those two days. The developer meeting was great, we got tons of stuff done:

• New release candidate version for stable release 3.4.8
• Implemented support for CentOS 5
• Website improvements:
  • Put website into svn
  • Deployed FAQ and Team webpage
• Setup-storage improvements:
  • Backport from trunk/experimental of setup-storage into 3.4.8
  • Cleanup of setup-storage patches
  • Minor bugfixes
  • setup-storage in 3.4 got align-at and default to cylinder alignment if preserve is used
• Worked on autotesting using Kantan:
  • new kantan release with new features and better performane
  • prepared initial test-suite scenarios for usage inside Kantan
• Discussed Release management:
  • 3.4.x considered as long term stable release (includes tested bugfixes and tested features that have been backported from developer versions (4.x and experimental))
  • 4.x considered as developer version (inclusion of fast bugfixes, inclusion of big features which might break stable version, )
• Documentation:
  • Officially documented release management notes for stable release
  • Officially documented developer policy (WIP)
• Unsorted other stuff:
  • Removed obsolete branches in svn
  • Grub now being installed from inside the target instead of nfsroot
  • Changelog in trunk got entries from 3.4.X with fixed git commit ids; entries were merged to find exact diff of trunk to 3.4.X
  • Defined what needs to be done after the developer meeting.

Meike Reichle is a Debian developer since 2008 but has been involved for longer than that, in particular in Debian Women. She s a great speaker and shared her experience in a Debconf talk. She s also part of the Debian publicity team and managed the live coverage of the last release on identi.ca. Enough introduction, learn more about her by reading the interview. My questions are in bold, the rest is by Meike. Who are you? My name is Meike Reichle, I am a studied information scientist and work as a project manager at Pengutronix, an embedded Linux company probably best known for their ARM kernel work. I live in Germany, more exactly in Lower Saxony, but I was originally born and raised in Swabia. Although I moved here ten years ago I still have a rather strong Swabian cultural identity. (Among other things I pride myself on having introduced a number of fellow DDs to the true promise that are real hand-made Sp tzle ) I am married to Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, we ll have our third wedding anniversary this summer. Apart from Debian most of my spare time is used for all kinds of crafts and DIY activities. Making things with my hands always gives me a great sense of accomplishment. My Free software history is summed up pretty quickly. Like most women of my age I wasn t introduced to computers until well into my teens. I didn t have a computer of my own until I started studying at the university in 2001. From there on things developed rather quickly: Working on the University s Unix terminals got me hooked on *nixes, so I got me one of those Linuxes everyone talked about. I tried a couple of different distributions, ended up with Debian around 2004, started contributing in 2005, and finally became a full DD what a nice coincidence! exactly this day (Apr 18th) three years ago. You re part of Debian Women. How is the project going? I have the feeling that the number of women involved in Debian has not significantly increased. The amount of women active within Debian is a tricky thing to judge. Here s a quick example why: When the DPL was elected in 2004 there were 911 Debian Developers eligible to vote, 4 of them were female. Shortly after, during DebConf4, debian-women was founded. When the current DPL was reelected last month, there were again 911 Debian Developers eligible to vote, but this time 13 of them were women. You can look at these numbers and say The number of female DDs has more than tripled, what a success! Or you can pull out your calculator and it will tell you that in terms of ratio this puts us from a measly 0.4% to an only slightly less measly 1.4% ratio of female DDs. This still is pardon my language a bloody shame, but sadly also pretty close to the average ratio of women in Free Software. So, while I do think that the debian-women project did already have a significant impact on the Debian project as a whole, I don t think it has achieved its goals yet. Not for a long time. There s still a lot to be done but unfortunately the debian-women project has somewhat run out of steam at the moment. The seven years of its existence divide quite equally into the first half, which was very active and saw great results, and the second half, which was very slow and much more passive. In my impression debian-women is currently undergoing a rather bumpy generational change. On the one hand a lot of the original members, including myself, have reduced their involvement. Speaking for myself this is caused by shift of interests as much as general weariness. On the other hand there are only very few women following up. This development is also reflected quite harshly in DD numbers: If I don t misjudge any first names (and I desperately hope I do!) for the last three years not a single woman has joined Debian as a developer! After the great start debian-women has had, this is a very painful thing to see! That said, things don t look all bad. There is a number of women maintaining packages without being DDs and there s also at least one woman currently in NM, so there s hope this standstill won t last very much longer. But still, the fact remains that debian-women is suffering from a rather serious recruitment problem and I hope that this interview might actually help to spur some new or not yet active members into action. The aim of debian-women is far from achieved and now that its initial members are receding its time for new members to step up and take initiative. What should Debian do to be more attractive to women ? I think the general atmosphere has improved, we re less tolerant with rude behaviour, the usual tone on mailing lists has improved. Yet it doesn t seem to be enough. If there was a female DD for every time I answered that question First of all, I agree, Debian as a community has improved tremendously! Our general tone is much more friendly and cooperative and there is now a much better awareness of the impression we give to outsiders and newcomers. Now on to the difficult part: The question what should be done to get more women into Free Software has been around almost as long as Free Software exists, and it has been answered very well by a lot of people: Twenty years ago Ellen Spertus wrote Why are There so Few Female Computer Scientists? and most of it still holds true. Almost ten years ago Val Henson (now Aurora) wrote HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux and that also is still pretty accurate. In 2006 Floss Pols undertook extensive research to find out why there were so few women in Open Source and Free Software and how that could be changed. They also came up with a very good set of recommendations. All of these texts highlight different aspects of that question and all of them have very good points. I personally have, over the years, arrived at a rather sociological, not to say holistic point of view. In fact I answered the exact same question a few days ago, and the answer I gave then was this: After ~10 years of women in tech advocacy I d say the ultimate and final measure to get more women into Free Software is by finally achieving a truly equal society and at the same time dramatically improving child care support in almost any country. I ve come to the conclusion that what really holds women back in practice is not so much a lack of skill or interest but a simple lack of opportunity. For most of us Free Software is what we do in our spare time and that s something that women, even today, have considerably less of than men. Even in couples where both partners work full-time it is still mostly the woman who does the majority of the housework and child care duties. In most cultures men have a perceived right to their leisure time that does not to the same degree exist for women. That is one major reason, the other is instilled modesty, which has kind of become my personal arch-enemy by now. I ve talked to so many girls and women at all sorts of events about why they won t take up Computer Science studies or join a Free Software project and the answer I hear most often is that they do not consider themselves good enough in one or another aspect. Sometimes they will doubt their technical skills, sometimes their language skills, sometimes their stamina. Needless to say these girls and women were not any less qualified than the people already active in Free Software. So, yes, in the short and medium term making Debian a more welcoming and friendly place is the way to go. As many others pointed out already this will not only benefit prospective contributors but the community as a whole: those new to it as well as those who ve been in it for a long time. In the long term however what we need is empowerment! Women who are just as confident about their skills as men and are not discouraged by uncooperative environments. This is of course something that is culturally deep-rooted and can only happen in a very large time frame. So, for the moment the way to go in my view is accessibility: a cooperative atmosphere, a code of conduct, comprehensive documentation not only of technical aspects but also of structures and processes. The other thing we need to do is to have as many already active women as possible attend as many Linux/Debian/Free Software/Whatever events as possible. In my experience it happens quite often that other women see these women, feel very inspired by them, get to talk to them and then a few days later show up on some mailing list or IRC channel. From what I ve seen personal contact still beats any other kind of recruiting measures. You re a Debian developer but you re also married with a Debian developer (Alexander Reichle-Schmehl). Did you meet because of Debian? If not, who introduced Debian to the other one? We did in fact meet because of Debian. More specifically during our booth shift at the Debian booth at LinuxTag 2005, where I did a talk on the debian-women project and Alex organised the DebianDay. After that our relationship developed pretty much along our Debian activities: After our initial meeting we talked a lot on #debian.de, when Alex went to DebConf5 and I didn t we noticed that we kind of missed each other. The first gift he ever gave me was a Debconf5 shirt and a box Finnish chocolates (I still have one of them today. ) Our first secret kiss was at ApacheCon 2005, where we were both staffing the Debian booth (kudos to abe for pretending not to notice). We then became an official couple at Berlinux 2005 where we were both staffing the Debian booth and giving talks on packaging and user motivation. Our first real relationship stress test was when we both joined the DebConf6 orga team. It was a stressful time, but we passed it with flying colours! About a year later we announced our engagement via planet.debian.org. Our wedding was a veritable MiniDebConf, one of the best gifts we got was a Debian cookbook including the favourite recipes of DDs from around the world. By now we ve both finished university and work full-time jobs, so we don t do as many talks and attend as many Debian events as we used to. Instead we now mainly focus on press and publicity work, which is quite practical to work on as a pair. It s actually rather funny that way, Alex and I get confused with each other quite often, since we have almost the same name, often pick up on each other s E-Mail conversations and are most often quoted by our function rather than by name. Because of we have kind of merged into this virtual Debian Press Person in the perception of many of our contacts. You also have another hat : Debian Press Officer. What is this about? What would you suggest to people who would like get involved in that domain? Debian press work is mainly about providing an official and coordinated point of contact to anyone wanting information from or about Debian. The press team answers all sorts of inquiries (the most popular one is is of course always the next release date) and makes sure all important events and developments within Debian receive the attention and recognition they deserve. Debian is a diverse project where every sort of contributor is free to voice his or her opinion in any way. We don t have NDAs or prescribed terminology. That s one of the things I love about Debian but also something that makes us difficult to handle for conventional media. They want official statements, in generally understandable terms, at appointed times. That s what the press team takes care of. Almost all of the press work is done in the publicity team, which coordinates using IRC, Mail and SVN. The publicity team also publishes the Debian Project News, which are very popular among our users and developers. Press work is also an area of work that offers lots of possibilities for non-technical contribution. http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Publicity lists a number of possibilities for contribution and, like most Debian Teams, we d be more than grateful to get some more helping hands and happy to introduce interested newcomers to our work. What s the biggest problem of Debian? In my view: Overwork. Debian has thousands of contributors but still a lot of the main work rests on very few shoulders. We need more contributors, especially, but not only in the key teams. In order to get more people we need to do some marketing which is very hard for us, since we are very proud of our independence and have a strong focus on purely technical aspects rather than aiming for popularity. However, with the current amount of Open Source and Free Software projects to join we find ourselves not only in a contest on technical excellence but also a sort of popularity contest that is about perception rather than hard facts. This popularity contest is difficult for Debian and currently costs us quite a bunch of very capable people. Do you have wishes for Debian Wheezy? My answer to that is a non-technical one: I think Debian is currently very under-appreciated, we do a lot of great work and maybe even more importantly we do a lot of important work for Software Freedom, sometimes even at the cost of our above-mentioned popularity. I hope people will appreciate that more again in the future. Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Over the years I have made a lot of friends within the Debian community, some have even become family. That makes it somewhat hard to single out individual people. I think what I admire most is continuous commitment. I am very impressed by those among us who have kept up a high level of commitment over many years and at the same time managed to bring that in line with a fulfilled personal/family life. That s something that I hope I ll also be able to achieve in the years to come.

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

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The password-gorilla package has lacked some love since a while and at some point in time I orphaned it.
That happened due to the fact, that the upstream author was pretty unresponsive and inactive and my own TCL skills are very limited. As a result password-gorilla package was in a bad state, at least from a user point of view, with several (apparently) random happening error message and alike, stalling feature development etc.

But in the meanwhile there was a promising event arising. A guy, named Zbigniew Diaczyszyn, wrote me a mail that he intended to continue upstream development. Well, meanwhile is kind of an understatement. That first mail already happened in December 2009. And he asked me, if I'd like to continue maintaining password-gorilla in Debian. I agreed to that, but as promising as it sounded to have a new upstream, I was not sure if that would work out. However: My doubt were not justified.

In the time between 2009 and now Zbigniew managed to become the official upstream (with the accreditation of the previous upstream), create a github project for it and make several releases.


I know there are several people out there who tested password-gorilla. I know there were magazine reviews including the old version, which were a bit buggy with recent tcl/tk versions. It made a quiet good multi-platform password manager, with support for very common password file formats, stand in a bad light.
I recommend previous users of password-gorilla to try the new version, which recently has been
uploaded to unstable.

For marathon freaks, Boston marathon is a mythical one. Probably more than New York marathon, because this is the world's oldest annual marathon. Also because is is quite difficult to register for it (this year, the 20,000 seats reserved for qualifiers were distributed in....8 hours). In order to qualify, runners must have a previous mark that depends on their age and gender. For instance, in my age category (50-54), the required mark for men is 3h30, something I never achieved yet. This is what's required for the 2013 race. For 2012, it will be still 3h35, but a rolling process will be held to give best runners priority. So, in short, it will probably stay among my dream marathons forever..:-) The 2011 race happened yesterday and was a great event. Kenyan runners Geoffrey Mutai and Moses Mosop even broke Haile Gebresselassie's world record, set in Berlin, back in 2008. The ran in 2h03'02" while Gebresselassie's mark is 2h03'59". However, this record will not become official because Boston's race is one-way (thus with a possibility of consistent tailwind) and has a too big altitude difference between start and finish. However, many consider that hills on the race compensate this quite strongly, so this year's time is a really great time. And, really, from all reports I read and all images I saw, the level of support you get from the crowd is incredible there, with world famous moments like Wellesley College "scream tunnel", or Kenmore Square where, traditionnaly, the Red Sox have a game prior to marathon and the crowd then goes from Fenway Park to Kenmore Square to cheer the runners for their final mile (I have no idea how they can manage the unpredictable length of a base-ball game). And I can't even mention the final mile on Commonwealth Av., then Bolston St. Everybody who ran this once says this is something you have to do once in your life. So, well, I'm still crossing fingers..:-)...Maybe, one day a miracle happens, I can qualify *and* I get a seat and I fly to Boston...

Current mood: moved Today is an amazingly great day. I wrote a blog post about an event that I put together, and an attendee then followed-up by writing a long-form comment. The thing is, the attendee did a far better job of writing about the event than I did. The amount of emotional positive reinforcement that this comment gave me is hard to overstate. You can find it toward the end of the blog post but I hope you'll read the copy below. I am stunned and awed. I guess I have my work set out for me.

8----< CUT HERE >-----8

I have never written software for an open source project. I am not subscribed to any development mailing lists. I have not been in a chat room on IRC for months. Yet I was delighted to see this tweet from @torproject on 04/15/2011 https://blog.torproject.org/blog/vidalia-get-involved Join us in #vidalia on irc.oftc.net today at 13:00 UTC. The blog post described the Build It initiative for the Vidalia project, where people would be available to help you setup your build environment and compile the project. I have wanted to participate in open source projects for quite a while, but never really knew where to begin. I have experience (and enjoy) writing software. I am glad to learn the languages they are using. I know how to compile software. I m glad to learn their versioning system and build system. I looked into participating in several projects, but felt like I would be more of a burden than a help considering the relatively small amount that I was intending to contribute. I can generally figure anything out on my own, but it s nice to have somewhere to turn when you are struggling with something simple . I thought that this would be a perfect opportunity for me, since I already preach the use of Tor and Vidalia. I ve even demonstrated the bundle at a local LUG meeting. :) I joined the OFTC #vidalia room and waited nothing happened around 13:00 UTC, so I figured I d missed the event. They began around 13:30 UTC and walked us through the source code download process and compilation process. They directed our attention to the Volunteer page and the HACKING page. chiiph even suggested several simple OSX-specific tickets for me personally, since he knew that I was building on OSX. I ve already managed to contribute a patch for one ticket and am ready to begin a second ticket. I wouldn t have done it without help and feedback from chiiph and others. I am confident that there are many others who would be glad to help out with one or more of their favorite open source projects if they only had some place to begin. I hope that other project members or leaders offer a similar Build It events for their users. Jason Klein

Last week s post generated a lot of interest so I will make a small update to keep you posted on the status of GNOME 3 in Debian experimental. Experimental is not for everybody But first let me reiterate this: GNOME 3 is in Debian experimental because it s a work in progress. You should not install it if you can t live with problems and glitches. Beware: once you upgraded to GNOME 3 it will be next to impossible to go back to GNOME 2.32 (you can try it, but it s not officially supported by Debian). Even with the fallback mode, you won t get the same experience than what you had with GNOME 2.32. Many applets are not yet ported to the newest gnome-panel API. So do not upgrade to it if you re not ready to deal with the consequences. It will come to Debian unstable and to Debian testing over time and it should be in a better shape at this point. Good progress made Most of the important modules have been updated to 3.0. You can see the progress here. The exception is gdm, it still needs to be updated, the login screen looks quite ugly right now when using GNOME 3. Frequently Asked Questions and Common Problems Why do links always open in epiphany instead of iceweasel? You need to upgrade to the latest version on libglib2.0-0, gvfs and gnome-control-center in experimental. Then you can customize the default application used in the control center (under System Information > Default applications ). You might need to switch to iceweasel 4.0 in experimental to have iceweasel appear in the list of browsers. Or you can edit ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list and put x-scheme-handler/http=iceweasel.desktop;epiphany.desktop; in the Added Associations section (replace the corresponding line if it already exists and lists epiphany only). The theme looks ugly, and various icons are missing. Ensure that you have installed the latest version of gnome-themes-standard, gnome-icon-theme and gnome-icon-theme-symbolic. The network icon in the Shell does not work. Ensure you have upgraded both network-manager-gnome and network-manager to the experimental version. Some applications do not start at all. If an application loads GTK2 and GTK3, it exits immediately with a clear message on the standard error output (Gtk-ERROR **: GTK+ 2.x symbols detected. Using GTK+ 2.x and GTK+ 3 in the same process is not supported.). It usually means that one of the library used by that application uses a different version of GTK+ than the application itself. You should report those problems to the Debian bug tracking system if you find any. Some people also reported failures of all GTK+ applications while using the Oxygen themes. Switching to another theme should help. BTW, the default theme in GNOME 3 is called Adwaita. Where are my icons on the desktop? They are gone, it s by design. But you can reenable them with gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background show-desktop-icons true and starting nautilus (if it s not already running). (Thanks to bronte for the information) Why do I see all applications twice in the shell? The package menu-xdg generates a desktop file from the Debian menu information, those are in a menu entry that is hidden by default in the old GNOME menu. Gnome Shell doesn t respect those settings and displays all .desktop files. Remove menu-xdg and you will get a cleaner list of applications. APT pinning file for the brave Since last week, we got APT 0.8.14 in unstable and it supports pattern matching for package name in pinning files. So I can give you a shorter and more complete pinning file thanks to this:

Package: *gnome* libglib2.0* *vte* *pulse* *peas* libgtk* *gjs* *gconf* *gstreamer* alacarte *brasero* cheese ekiga empathy* gdm3 gcalctool baobab *gucharmap* gvfs* hamster-applet *nautilus* seahorse* sound-juicer *totem* remmina vino gksu xdg-user-dirs-gtk dmz-cursor-theme eog epiphany* evince* evolution* file-roller gedit* metacity *mutter* yelp* rhythmbox* banshee* system-config-printer transmission-* tomboy network-manager* libnm-* update-notifier shotwell liferea *software-properties* libunique-3.0-0 libseed-gtk3-0 libnotify* libpanel-applet-4-0 libgdata11 libcamel* libcanberra* libchamplain* libebackend* libebook* libecal* libedata* libegroupwise* libevent* gir1.2-*
Pin: release experimental
Pin-Priority: 500
Package: *
Pin: release experimental
Pin-Priority: 150

Putting the file above in /etc/apt/preferences.d/gnome and having experimental enabled in /etc/apt/sources.list should be enough to enable apt-get dist-upgrade to upgrade to GNOME 3 in experimental. But if you have packages depending on libimobiledevice1, you might have to wait until #620065 is properly fixed so that libimobiledevice2 is co-installable with libimobiledevice1. Update: integrated the explanation to reenable the desktop icons thanks to bronte s comment.

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Went to loadays, where I did a talk on "Single sign-on with Kerberos and LDAP". Or, at least, that was the intention when I found out that there was going to be a tutorial on LDAP the next day, I decided to focus my talk mostly on kerberos, only lightly touching LDAP. As it turned out, that was a great decision I could easily fill a whole hour on Kerberos, anyway, and though doing a kerberos setup without doing ldap too is fairly silly, doing it properly would have required more time than was assigned to me. Instead, I managed to talk the audience through most of the important theory about kerberos (things like "what is a principal", "what is a ticket", etc), and did a live demo in which I configured a kerberos realm on a virtual machine, and then used SSH to connect passwordless to that machine from a second virtual machine on the same virtual network. While I would've loved to make it even better by throwing in a kerberized HTTP configuration, I couldn't do much more than just mention the fact that it can be done as is the case for sasl-enabled protocols (imap, ldap, smtp, etc) and some other things. The talk seems to have been a success with the audience, too; the room itself was full, nobody actually left (which usually is a good sign in and of itself), and I got only positive feedback from the people who were there; one person even went so far as to say that he considerd it the best talk he'd seen thus far, today. Which I think is pretty high praise, considering how my talk was in the penultimate time slot. All in all, a good day.

I've read bits and pieces of the recent "Network Manager as default" thread on debian-devel. I have a strong personal preference towards one side, but that's not the point of this post (and I hope I can keep the tone neutral, hence why I didn't get into the mailing list discussion). I think this discussion is just a proxy flame-war to a bigger issue that lurks behind the scenes. That is, what is the most efficient way to configure systems. On one side, we have the sysadmins, with their toolbox, and who desire the most reliable way to configure systems. In the other corner, we have people whose problem is how to configure systems with the least amount of human involvement. Whether it's ifupdown versus NetworkManger, or explicit groups versus things like PolicyKit, it's basically the same thing: do we want to have an OS that is slimmer, more customisable and more stable, but needs hand-holding, or do we accept some degradation in flexibility/customisation in exchange for decreasing the cost of administration? I have personal preferences to one side, and practical preferences to another side. I'm not sure which is best in 2011, and it depends on many factors, but looking forward in 20 years: I don't think we will afford to hand-hold a Linux machine as mach as we were doing it 10 years or even 5 years ago. Presuming that software capabilities advance, it should be possible to hand-over responsibility of autoconfiguration to software, rather than hand-configuring config files (doing it via configuration management systems is beside the point, as it is a mixed setting; I'm discussing only the extremes). So in any case, we'll have to accept that at one point we will have to rely on automated stuff for some parts of the system. The question is when we as sysadmins will be ready to do that, and when the software will be mature enough to bear that kind of responsibility. And then there's my next gripe: what is good for a few systems (dpkg/apt-get) might not be good for many. I find lately that relying on dpkg plus a configuration management tool to keep many machines in sync is not the best way. Keeping with the time means changes, whether we want it or not. PS: for the record, not even my laptop(s) run NetworkManager

TED is offering an audition for future TED.com talks in New York on the 24th of May [1]. It would be good if we could have someone advocate Free Software there. The audition is a 1 minute talk, the speakers who pass the audition may be offered full ~17 minute lecture slots at the next TED conference, and some of the minute long talks will be published on TED.com (which has many viewers).Larry Lessig has previously given a TED talk about laws that strange creativity [2], while this is fairly typical of the type of talk that TED promotes (in terms of politics and presentation quality), a talk doesn t have to be so well produced to make the grade. Firstly some TED talks seem to be accepted with a lower presentation quality due to the speaker having some special knowledge a TED presentation doesn t have to be so slick if the speaker is sufficiently famous or the talk is particularly interesting. Also there are TEDx events which are organised independently, have less international attention, and therefore less competition for speaking slots. Larry gave a more recent talk at the TEDxNYED event about re-examining the remix and lessons that people on the political left can learn from conservatives about remix legislation [3], this talk is much more informal and also unfortunately has a much lower recording quality. But as it s published on TED.com it will still get a large audience.Promoting Free Software to the TED audience (which includes many senior politicians and other VIPs) would be a major achievement. Even a TEDx talk that gets published on TED.com would get seen by a huge and important audience.Who is capable of giving such a talk? Larry got a standing ovation for his TED talk so it seems most likely that he can give another TED talk without going through the public audition process, but it seems that he has other priorities at this time. Probably most people who have more than 10 years experience doing Free Software development and who have a reasonable amount of experience giving lectures at Free Software conferences could at least manage the TEDx quality and a good portion of the speakers from any of the major Linux conferences could potentially give a talk of TED quality if they spent enough time preparing it.What methods of funding are available? There are probably very few people who would travel far to give a 1 minute talk, Mark Shuttleworth is one person who can afford to travel for such things and who could potentially give a great TED talk (his story is the sort of thing that seems popular with the TED audience). Would any of the Free Software organisations sponsor someone to give such an audition? I would support having Debian funds spent on travel for one of the better Debian advocates to travel to NY for the audition I m sure that there are many other Free Software things that can be done in NY to help justify the expense. Maybe this would be something that is suitable for corporate sponsorship.Finally it seems like a good idea to create some very short talks anyway. It would probably be useful to have leaders of the Free Software community publish minute-long video talks about their favorite projects anyway. In some ways a short talk is a higher form of art than a long lecture, I think that the best talk I ever gave was my 5 minute lightning talk about installing SE Linux.UpdateTED now has a blog post with a FAQ about the talks [4]. Larry Lessig is the first example they cite of how to give a great TED talk!Also you can submit a video without attending New York and there is no restriction on publishing the video elsehere. So if you want to make a great 1 minute video about something important you can just send it to TED and see what happens and then publish it on Youtube or one of the other video services too.

• [1] http://blog.ted.com/2011/04/15/a-chance-to-audition-your-own-ted-talk/
• [2] http://www.ted.com/talks/larry_lessig_says_the_law_is_strangling_creativity.html
• [3] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/lessig_nyed.html
• [4] http://blog.ted.com/2011/04/20/questions-about-tedtalk-auditions-read-our-faq/

Theres an ongoing thread on the Debian mailing lists about making network-manager installed by default on new Debian installations. I won't say much about the thread. Its just a prototype example for Debian project discussions: Discuss everything to death and if its dead discuss a little more. And - very important - always restate the same arguments as often as you can. Or if its not your own argument you restate, restate the arguments of others. Ending with 100 times stated the same argument. Even if its already disproved.

I don't have a strong opinion about the topic in itself. However there is something I find kinda funny. A statement brought up by the people who strongly oppose network-manager as a default.
A statetement I've heard so often that I can't count it anymore.

The last time I've tried network-manager it sucked.

It often comes in different masquerades, like:

• network-manager is crap.
• network-manager is totally unusable
• network-manager does not even manage to keep the network connection during upgrades

When did you test network-manager the last time?

A long time ago. Must have been around Etch.

Sing it, Lars!

Most probably haven't noticed yet but I finished the Mono 2.10.1 debian packaging effort of the past 3 months and uploaded it to Debian/Experimental. With Mono 2.10 I had to make the biggest changes in Mono packaging since the big Mono 2.0 upload. The runtime no longer supports the 1.0 and 2.0 runtime profile, instead it now supports the 2.0 and 4.0 runtime profile. This meant I had to drop all libmono*1.0-cil packages and add libmono*4.0-cil packages. This sounds like a lot of s/1.0/4.0/ work but it actually wasn't. Mono 2.10 ships a lot of new libraries over 2.6 and I had again to decide where they should go. "Where should this $library go?" I have been playing this game for the past 7 years maintaining Mono and I finally gave up on it... What, where, when, why? I could give now a 2 hours talk of the issues behind the current packaging approach (keeping the number of library packages low) but instead I will do something else. Please, just take a look at this picture for a second: If your browser crashed, your eyes hurt or your brain simply melted, I think you have got the idea. The Big Split The cure? cli-common-dev! This is a package that contains 2 extremely important debhelper packaging tools for packaging Mono/CLI related packages called dh_makeclilibs and dh_clideps. If you don't know these, they do exact the same thing as dh_makeshlibs and dh_shlibdeps do. dh_makeclilibs generates library dependency tracking information and dh_clideps consumes that information to automatically generate the package dependencies for you. So each library of the 4.0 runtime profile has now it's own package, simple as that, the rest does cli-common-dev for me and you. "Hey, that Mono packaging bastard is polluting the Debian archive because of his laziness!" No, I am not. This packaging change not only has the advantage of simplifying the packaging and with that bringing new Mono versions faster to you but also reduces the typical install size for applications as they will only pull in the really used libraries of Mono instead of groups of them. I don't have any numbers handy right now as none of the applications are built against Mono 2.10 (yet), but when the transition starts we will get numbers. New Features There is also a new SGen flavor of Mono available called mono-runtime-sgen which is no longer using the conservative non-generational Boehm's garbage collector but SGen which is a simple generational garbage collector with promising advantages. And here some more Mono 2.8/2.10 news from /usr/share/doc/mono-runtime/NEWS.Debian.gz:

• SGen Precise Stack Scanning
• Enhanced SIMD with new methods for Vector data type conversions and swapping elements in vectors
• ASP.NET MVC 3.0 (not included, only supported)
• The C# Interactive Shell can now be used as shebang: #!/usr/bin/csharp
• .NET 4.0 runtime
• C# 4.0 compiler
• ASP.NET 4.0
• Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)
• System.Data.Services.Client (OData)
• glib was replaced with eglib
• Removed .NET 1.1 runtime

Architecture Regressions With the initial upload of Mono 2.10.1 to Debian/Experimental the architecture world broke apart and it regressed on all Mono architectures except for i386 and amd64 There is a reason it's called experimental isn't there? In mono 2.10.1-3 I could solve all regressions except for kfreebsd-* and armel. Jo Shields fixed the remaining regressions and the world started to look good again in mono 2.10.1-4! He also took care of mono-basic, mod-mono and xsp, but mod-mono and xsp are still waiting for the translation call deadline to pass by so they can also be uploaded to Debian/Experimental. Planned Transition As mentioned above, there will be a Mono 2.10 transition needed when the packages hit Debian/Unstable. There is no ETA yet on this when it will happen as I have to coordinate this with debian-release first. But as things are not showtime ready in experimental anyhow, this will not happen too soonish. The Mono 2.10 transition plan will be covered in a following post. GIVMENOWPLX OMG, all this rumbling about Mono 2.10 and I still haven't said a word on how to obtain it, sorry about this, just do this and I will shut up now:

echo "deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian experimental main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update
apt-get install -t experimental mono-complete

(this is the easiest way of getting only mono 2.10.1 from experimental)

I've been running at capacity for a while now, and something went "snap" recently, so I decided to take a few days off to clear my head a bit. One of the things that came to mind is that I have too many 'side project' things. I have had lots of fun (and a few flame wars) over the years with LangPop.com but I decided that it's another thing that should probably go, in order to simplify my life some. It's a fairly popular site amongst programmers, as I think it's the best of the bunch in terms of guaging an admittedly tricky subject like language popularity, but there's lots of room to add to it. I've got various ideas for whoever ends up buying it! About money: it doesn't earn a lot. Programmers, I think, are fairly blind to advertisements. In the right hands I think it could do better, but most likely, it would work best as a bit of branding/advertising for your own business, much as TIOBE's index has spread their name far and wide. For the time being, I'll accept private bids, and depending on how well that does or doesn't go, may consider using something like Flippa.com later. Write me at davidw@dedasys.com if you're interested. I'd be happy to share some numbers and information with you. Perhaps I'll update this posting with them too. What you get: everything! Historicaly data, code, scripts to manage it, the domain. It could use some cleaning up and love, but it does get the job done. Running it just takes a few minutes a month, so I could hold on to it with no trouble, but I've decided that I want one less thing to think about. Update: Some Numbers In the last year, according to Google Analytics, the site had: 174,645 visits. In the last month, it had 17,047 visits. Revenue? Think of it as zero and you won't be too far off. You would have to rework things significantly to make money from ads on it, I think. Hosting costs? Not sure, particularly, it's on my Linode. It utilizes Ruby on Rails, but creates static HTML pages, so it's fairly cheap.

There are rumors that people have successfully integrated ikiwiki with pootle. So where is the code?

With all the buzz around GNOME 3, I really wanted to try it out for real on my main laptop. It usually runs Debian Unstable but that s not enough in this case, GNOME 3 is not fully packaged yet and it s only in experimental for now. I asked Josselin Mouette (of the pkg-gnome team) when he expected it to be available and he could not really answer because there s lots of work left. Instead Roland Mas gently answered me Sooner if you help . First steps as a GNOME packager This is pretty common in free software and for once I followed the advice, I spent most of sunday helping out with GNOME 3 packaging. I have no prior experience with GNOME packaging but I m fairly proficient in Debian packaging in general so when I showed up on #debian-gnome (irc.debian.org) on sunday morning, Josselin quickly added me to the team on alioth.debian.org. Still being a pkg-gnome rookie, I started by reading the documentation on pkg-gnome.alioth.debian.org. This is enough to know where to find the code in the SVN repository, and how to do releases, but it doesn t contain much information about what you need to know to be a good GNOME packager. It would have been great to have some words on introspection and what it changes in terms of packaging for instance. Josselin suggested me to start with one of the modules that was not yet updated at all (most packages have a pre-release version usually 2.91 in experimental, but some are still at 2.30). Packages updated and problems encountered (You can skip this section if you re not into GNOME packaging) So I picked up totem. I quickly updated totem-pl-parser as a required build-dependency and made my first mistake by uploading it to unstable (it turns out it s not a problem for this specific package). Totem itself was more complicated even if some preliminary work was already in the subversion repository. It introduces a new library which required a new package and I spent a long time debugging why the package would not build in a minimalistic build environment. Indeed while the package was building fine in my experimental chroot, I took care to build my test packages like the auto-builders would do with sbuild (in sid environment + the required build-dependencies from experimental) and there it was failing. In fact it turns out pkg-config was failing because libquvi-dev was missing (and it was required by totem-pl-parser.pc) but this did not leave any error message in config.log. Next, I decided to take care of gnome-screensaver as it was not working for me (I could not unlock the screen once it was activated). When built in my experimental chroot, it was fine but when built in the minimalistic environment it was failing. Turns out /usr/lib/gnome-screensaver/gnome-screensaver-dialog was loading both libgtk2 and libgtk3 at the same time and was crashing. It s not linked against libgtk2 but it was linked against the unstable version of libgnomekbdui which is still using libgtk2. Bumping the build-dependency on libgnomekbd-dev fixed the problem. In the evening, I took care of mutter and gnome-shell, and did some preliminary work on gnome-menus. Help is still welcome There s still lots of work to do, you re welcome to do like me and join to help. Come on #debian-gnome on irc.debian.org, read the documentation and try to update a package (and ask questions when you don t know). Installation of GNOME 3 from Debian experimental You can also try GNOME 3 on your Debian machine, but at this point I would advise to do it only if you re ready to invest some time in understanding the remaining problems. It s difficult to cherry-pick just the required packages from experimental, I tried it and at the start I ended up with a bad user experience (important packages like gnome-themes-standard or gnome-icon-theme not installed/updated and similar issues). To help you out with this, here s a file that you can put in /etc/apt/preferences.d/gnome to allow APT to upgrade the most important GNOME 3 packages from experimental:

Package: gnome gnome-desktop-environment gnome-core alacarte brasero cheese ekiga empathy gdm3 gcalctool gconf-editor gnome-backgrounds gnome-bluetooth gnome-media gnome-netstatus-applet gnome-nettool gnome-system-monitor gnome-system-tools gnome-user-share baobab gnome-dictionary gnome-screenshot gnome-search-tool gnome-system-log gstreamer0.10-tools gucharmap gvfs-bin hamster-applet nautilus-sendto seahorse seahorse-plugins sound-juicer totem-plugins remmina vino gksu xdg-user-dirs-gtk gnome-shell gnome-panel dmz-cursor-theme eog epiphany-browser evince evolution evolution-data-server file-roller gedit gnome-about gnome-applets gnome-control-center gnome-disk-utility gnome-icon-theme gnome-keyring gnome-menus gnome-panel gnome-power-manager gnome-screensaver gnome-session gnome-settings-daemon gnome-terminal gnome-themes gnome-user-guide gvfs gvfs-backends metacity mutter nautilus policykit-1-gnome totem yelp gnome-themes-extras gnome-games libpam-gnome-keyring rhythmbox-plugins banshee rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder system-config-printer totem-mozilla epiphany-extensions gedit-plugins evolution-plugins evolution-exchange evolution-webcal gnome-codec-install transmission-gtk avahi-daemon tomboy network-manager-gnome gnome-games-extra-data gnome-office update-notifier shotwell liferea epiphany-browser-data empathy-common nautilus-sendto-empathy brasero-common
Pin: release experimental
Pin-Priority: 500
Package: *
Pin: release experimental
Pin-Priority: 150

The list might not be exhaustive and sometimes you will have to give supplementary hints to apt for the upgrade to succeed, but it s better than nothing. I hope you find this useful. I m enjoying my shiny new GNOME 3 desktop and it s off for a good start. My main complaint is that hamster-applet (time tracker) has not yet been integrated in the shell.

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