Search Results: "pm"

10 January 2006

Zak B. Elep: Packaging Gyach-Enhanced^WImproved

Last October I filed an RFP for GyachE, a feature-rich Yahoo! Messenger client that supports, among other things, webcams. I requested so because Eric wanted to package this, and at the time I didn’t have any time to allot for packaging. Now, Eric has asked me to take over the packaging. And indeed, this is a difficult package, since upstream (aka Ms. Erica Andrews) seems to have a rather snobbish attitude with regard to providing support for GyachE (well, it is not required anyway, remember about the non-warranty clause.) She can’t even provide a decent autotooling of the software, and what’s worse, is that the source itself seems to be a mixture of two different applications, one involving GTK2 and the other Python. Hell, I couldn’t even get the source to compile, and when I tried fixing the autotools, it was even more hell

I almost gave up on it, until I came across gyach-improved from Google. Mick Howe, thank you for being such a nice guy!

/me proceeds to renaming the ITP…

Uwe Hermann: Drupal 4.7.0 beta 3 available

Just a quick note: Drupal 4.7.0 beta 3 is available now, fixing more than 100 bugs since the last beta. If you have any further issues or suggestions for 4.7 — now is the time to speak up, file bug reports, post patches etc. I haven't had too much time for Drupal development recently, but I guess I should really start updating the poormanscron module now (finally!) and help with getting the German translation up-to-date...

8 January 2006

Andrew Pollock: [tech] The quest for IPMI LAN access over down interfaces continues

Today I upgraded daedalus to 2.6.14. I had to backport yaird to stable, which wasn't a big deal. It's available here if you're interested. The kernel package for 2.6.14 from unstable worked fine otherwise. I had two motivations behind upgrading - inotify and another look to see if the situation with IPMI had changed. Well inotify just works, and is the bomb. I'm going to have lots of fun with it. IPMI, on the other hand is still broken, which makes me sad. As I've previously pointed out by way of example, LAN access to the base-board management controller via IPMI is impossible after Linux shuts down the interface. It's supposed to work, but the way Linux does it seems to stop it from working. I'd read that the problem was resolved in 2.6.12, and so dutifully tested it out on daedalus to my detriment. I also tested it on 2.6.14, but again, had the same problem (I remembered to schedule a deferred reboot this time). So IPMI with a box running Linux is all good as long as the box is actually running. I suspect if the box panicked and/or hung itself, it'd also be useful for rebooting it, but if you shut the box down and remove power, IPMI won't allow you to turn it back on again.

Martin F. Krafft: Secure (!) APT updates

Andrew, your method leaves you and your system wide open to MITM attacks. All I need to do is poison your DNS cache at the right moment, and you'll trust my key (apologies to ari for misattribution in a previous edition of this post; thanks to dato for letting me know). I strongly suggest going via gnupg and verifying the fingerprint as well as the signatures on the key. You can use this page to help you verify these data (although the current lack of SSL doesn't really add a benefit, I am working on it). Here's what I usually do:

cirrus:~> GET http://ftp-master.debian.org/ziyi_key_2006.asc   gpg --import
gpg: key 2D230C5F: public key "Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key (2006)
  <ftpmaster<@t>debian.org>" imported
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg:               imported: 1
cirrus:~> gpg --check-sigs --fingerprint 2D230C5F
pub   1024D/2D230C5F 2006-01-03 [expires: 2007-02-07]
      Key fingerprint = 0847 50FC 01A6 D388 A643  D869 0109 0831 2D23 0C5F
uid   Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key (2006) <ftpmaster<@t>debian.org>
sig!3        2D230C5F 2006-01-03  Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key
                                  (2006) <ftpmaster<@t>debian.org>
sig!         2A4E3EAA 2006-01-03  Anthony Towns <aj<@t>azure.humbug.org.au>
sig!         4F368D5D 2006-01-03  Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key
                                  (2005) <ftpmaster<@t>debian.org>
sig!         29982E5A 2006-01-04  Steve Langasek <vorlon<@t>dodds.net>
sig!         FD6645AB 2006-01-04  Ryan Murray <rmurray<@t>cyberhqz.com>
sig!         AB2A91F5 2006-01-04  James Troup <james<@t>nocrew.org>

and then I check the trust path from my key to at least one of the keys used to sign the archive key. Only if I find an acceptable path will I then tell APT to trust the key:

cirrus:~> gpg --export -a 2D230C5F   sudo apt-key add -
Ok

Note that the key is signed with the previous archive key, so theoretically you can just build on your previous trust. Until Debian finally gets a proper PKI in place, this seems like the best way to do it.

Martin F. Krafft: Plone 2.1.1 - WOW

My tendonitis forced me to take a leave of absence from Plone development right in the middle of the Plone 2.1 release cycle. As life moves on, however, I find myself in the position to teach Plone to employees development of the Humboldt University Berlin in two weeks, so I spent today checking out what I missed the last couple of months. Life did go on, and the Plone guys didn't sleep. Without going into details, I would like to give a big shout out to everyone who contributed to the 2.1 release (although my name was left out of the CREDITS.txt file -- I surely wasn't instrumental in the release, but I did make several commits). Plone 2.0 felt great, Plone 2.1 is even slicker. Even better UI, great development features, and it's all a lot cleaner and nicer to work with now. In fact, I grew mildly ecstatic upon first encounter. Great work, guys (and girls). I had previously considered Ruby on Rails, but I noticed too many parallels to Zope for it to be worth the effort. Plus, Rails has to come a long way to reach up to what Plone can already do (correct me if I am wrong)... and that's before Plone does the migration to Zope 3. I am proud to be able to teach Plone to others in two weeks. Update: Philipp, thanks for getting the comparison right. I completely agree with you.

6 January 2006

Joey Hess: sleep

Gunnar, I'm pleased to inform you that I stayed up until 11 am this morning (and slept till 2 pm), and that the day before I was up until about 8 am (and again, slept till 2:30). This is the first really bad sleep schedule I've had since Oldenburg. I'm glad that this makes someone happy.

Gunnar Wolf: Early risers

For many years already (probably since I have been a productive member of the society, or at least pretended so), I have been an early riser, unlike most people in the community. Today, I seldom stay awake after 12AM, and wake up shortly before 7. Some months ago, I think I was an hour or two more sleepful, but since I picked up morning excercise... Well :)
But it worries me to see people in Debian following a trend to change for this more human-like lifestyle - I interact with many Europeans, and it's nice for me to have them online during the same period I am online - +- 9AM to 8PM.
If more Debianers start waking up and going to sleep early, it will affect my interactions! Please, stay up late!

Michael Janssen: nobody thinks or expects too much

Today is a bunch of quickies about random stuff.

Sleeping.. ..and subsequently waking up. I have been trying out the advice of How to Become an Early Riser recently, after discovering it about a week ago from some people. I had been sleeping from about 4am to noon or 1pm, depending on the day. I decided to go all out and set my alarm clock for 5:30am, never to be reset again. It didn't work out the first couple days, but after three days of getting up on time, my body is definitely adjusting well to it, and I get a bunch of work done in the morning before I head off to work at 9. Debian packages-arch-specific vgrabbj finally got out of packages-arch-specific hell and is building on almost all architectures. I think the addition of a new person to the team maintaining packages-arch specific helped a bunch, because shortly after I emailed the new maintainer movement occurred after two months of nothing from the other two. I don't know if they had to actually check out the package itself efore removing the line, but it seems like something as simple as removing one line from a file in cvs shouldn't take that long. Planet issues For some reason, the posts from my blog which are syndicated to PlanetDebian are showing up on the planet 2 times for every post I make. If anyone has some insight as to why, and whether it's a problem on my end, I'm all ears. Diana Diana makes me happy like a bright sunny day after a long cloudy winter week.

Axel Beckert: Blosxom like alternatives to Blosxom

I really like the simplicity of Blosxom as blogging framework and I also like Perl very much. But somehow this Perl 4 alike global variables madness of Blosxom v2 sucks in several ways: It effectively prevents Blosxom from being used with mod_perl and it’s just not what I would call an API. I would like to have a more object-oriented plugin API and it should be save for use with FastCGI, mod_perl or similar possibilities to cache the parsed script code instead of reparsing with each request. Another thing should be a tagging facility. Had to write that by myself for Blosxom v2. (Wasn’t that hard though.) But since Blosxom v3 development seemed to have stopped in May 2004, I have been thinking about and looking for alternatives. First thought was to write a Blosxom clone by myself using Embperl as framework (as I did with web galleries after not finding any web gallery software fitting all my needs). But since I got infected with Ruby recently, I also thought about writting a Blosxom clone in Ruby, which would give me quite a lot of Ruby experience and would make a good fit since Ruby as well as Blosxom have some kind of Zen (or KISS) philosophy. The next thought was: I can’t be the first to come up with that idea and googled a little bit. First thing I digged up was Rage, some kind of Blosxom on Rails. But I didn’t find any source code although the author seems to prefer open source software. Seems as if it is seems to be ready for production but not ready for public release. The next thing I found was hint to some Blosxom clones in the Ruby Application Archive (RAA). Unfortunately two of them (sakura and lily) seem to have Japanese only web pages. :-( But for luck the third Ruby based Blosxom clone found in the RAA, Blosxonomy, seems to be quite well featured, under actual development, has a english written web page and one of if its main concepts is taggability. And also the other core concepts sound fine: simplicity, extensibility and compatibility. Sounds really perfect and I’ll probably give it a try, but not on my current blog host: There is no Ruby installed and it’s not my own box.

Now playing: Rolling Stones — Ruby Tuesday

Simon Law: Debian meetup

 ____       _     _               __  __           _               
   _ \  ___   __ (_) __ _ _ __      \/    ___  ___   _ _   _ _ __  
       / _ \ '_ \   / _    '_ \     \/   / _ \/ _ \ __        '_ \ 
   _     __/  _)     (_                    __/  __/  _   _     _)  
 ____/ \___ _.__/ _ \__,_ _   _   _    _ \___ \___ \__ \__,_  .__/ 
                                                             _

So what does a Debian beer stein have to do with this gathering?

Debian stein

Absolutely everything! We're getting together a bunch of Debian Developers in Montr al to drink and chat. There are rumours that you can even get your GnuPG key signed, if you buy enough rounds. What a great deal! Thusly, the beer goes down and the trust scores rise! The relevant details:

Who:: The Debian community.
Where:: Hurley's Irish Pub
Date:: Saturday, 7 January 2006.
Time:: 17:00 or 5 PM.

5 January 2006

Anthony Towns: On the technical committee

And thus the entrapment's completed,
With the motion so newly anointed.
Wichert, Jason, and Guy? 
   They're deleted!
Steve, Andy and I? 
   We're appointed!

Inspired by Mr Srivastava:

<Manoj> congrats vorlon, aba, aj (*snigger suckers *snigger)

Anthony Towns: On the technical committee

And thus the entrapment's completed,
With the motion so newly anointed.
Wichert, Jason, and Guy? 
   They're deleted!
Steve, Andy and I? 
   We're appointed!

Inspired by Mr Srivastava:

<Manoj> congrats vorlon, aba, aj (*snigger suckers *snigger)

Wouter Verhelst: Replacing a mainboard

About a week or two ago, my sister called me that her computer didn't boot anymore. After looking at it for a short while and asking her how it had stopped working, there was only one conclusion that I could come to: the processor fan had broken down, which meant that she'd had a processor meltdown (she had a Pentium I-class system; back then, builtin thermometers weren't as common as they are now). She needed a replacement. Now I do have a bunch of spare hardware, but I didn't have anything that could compare to her 200-something Mhz system, and she was already complaining that the thing was rather slow; so I helped her find a 233Mhz Pentium mainboard (with processor) on eBay. That arrived on monday at her place, and she brought it to me to install it. That's done now, but not before I had to tell the thing it was the worst mainboard design that I have ever seen. No, really. And I've seen quite some mainboards already, since I used to work for a place where they sold hardware, a while back. The power connector, IDE connectors, serial ports, parallel port, and floppy drive connector are all positioned in the top left corner of the mainboard, above the PCI slots and right below where the power block is supposed to be. As a result, it's nearly impossible to reach them. When you do reach them, they're all placed so fucking close to eachother that it's nearly impossible to fit them all and to do so correctly. The one exception to that rule is the parallel port, which is fairly close to the rest, but still in the same area. It gets in fairly easily—unfortunately, it also gets out fairly easily if you touch them cables, which you have to do to put the topmost PCI card in its slot. Grmbl. Can't they put those cables in the center right, where they belong?!? After fighting with them cables, it was time for the RAM. That mainboard contains two DIMM slots and four 72-pin SIMM thingies. I have one RAM module for the DIMM slots, but unfortunately it didn't work with that module; I'm not sure whether it's the RAM that's broken, or whether the mainboard simply doesn't want to accept it. Fortunately, I have some 72pin RAM modules left. Unfortunately, I found that the 72pin slots were placed so close to the top of the mainboard that I had to get it out again in its entirety to be able to fit the topmost module. Grmbl. One centimeter of space is too much to ask? After that, it turned out that the machine still didn't boot. At first I thought this was one of those braindead BIOSes that doesn't boot unless you hook up a keyboard, but in the end that didn't seem to be the case. After one by one disconnecting everything, it turned out that the system would boot when I didn't connect the CD writer, but it would not boot at all when I did connect it. And when I say "not boot", I really mean it that way; it didn't even start the POST. Replacing the IDE data cable didn't help. I even tried using the one of the hard disk (which worked, because I had already done a boot from disk), or to connect the writer to as slave to the primary connector, but no luck; it simply wouldn't boot with that writer connected. Well, I'm tired of it now. Maybe I'll go to the shop with that writer again (it was a christmas present, so should still be under warranty) and ask them to have a look at it, but otherwise sis won't have a writer.

3 January 2006

Simon Richter: On motivation

Jacobo, I can understand what you mean. Back in 1999, there was a small project created by two students, called ACPI4Linux.
we started out by building a "hello world" kernel module to get into kernel development, then added some code to have it extract the ACPI tables for us and started work on a small disassembler and bytecode interpreter.
After some time, we had working code to turn off the CPU fan on the Compaq Armada. We got invited to talk about our work at the Atlanta Linux Showcase.
There, we met some guys from Intel, who, with the best intent, presented us with ACPI-CA, which was a full implementation of the VM we had been starting to implement, and they already had Linus' approval to move it into the kernel (which is an idea I got yelled at for suggesting on the LKML, as it added 250KiB to the kernel).

Colin Watson: Single-stage installer

Hot on the heels of Joey's tale of getting rid of base-config (the second stage of the installer) in Debian, we've now pretty much got rid of it in Ubuntu Dapper too. The upshot of this is that rather than asking a bunch of questions, installing the base system, and rebooting to install everything else, we now just install everything in one go and reboot into a completed system. This does mean that, if your system doesn't boot, you don't get to find out about it for a bit longer. However, it has lots of advantages in terms of speed (the much-maligned archive-copier mostly goes away), reducing code duplication (base-config had a bunch of infrastructure of its own which was done better in the core installer anyway), comprehensibility, and killing off some annoying bugs like #13561 (duplicate mirror questions in netboot installs), #15213 (second stage hangs if you skip archive-copier in the first stage), and #19571 (kernel messages scribble over base-config's UI). To go with Joey's Debian timeline, the Ubuntu history looks a bit like this:

2004 (Jul): First base-config modifications for Ubuntu; we need to install the default desktop rather than dropping into tasksel.
2004 (Aug): Mark phones me up and asks if I can make the installer not need the CD in the second stage by copying all the packages across beforehand. Although it's a bit awkward, I can see the UI advantages in that, so I write archive-copier at the Canonical conference in Oxford.
2004 (Sep): Mark asks me if we can ask the timezone, user/password, and apt configuration questions before the first reboot. With less than a month to go until our first release, I have a heart-attack at how much needs to be done, and it eventually gets deferred to Hoary.
2005 (Jan): Matt fixes up debconf's passthrough frontend for use on the live CD, and we realise that this is an obvious way to run bits of base-config before the first reboot. It's rather messy and takes until March or so before it really works right, but we get there in the end.
2005 (Apr): I get "put a progress bar in front of the dpkg output in the second stage" as a goal for Breezy. Naïvely, I think it's a simple matter of programming, since I'd already done something similar for debootstrap and base-installer the previous year.
2005 (May): I hack progress bar support into debconf. Nothing actually uses it for anything yet, except as a convenient passthrough stub.
2005 (Jul/Aug): I actually try to implement the second-stage progress bar and realise that it's about an order of magnitude harder than I thought, requiring a whole load of extra infrastructure in apt. Fortunately Michael Vogt saves the day here by writing lots of working code, and the progress bar works by early August.
2005 (Sep-Dec): Upstream d-i development ramps back up again, with tzsetup, clock-setup, apt-setup, and user-setup all being cranked out in short order and the corresponding pieces removed from base-config. I merge these as they mature, and manage to get agreement on including the Ubuntu debconf template changes in upstream apt-setup, which helps the diff size a lot.
2005 (Nov/Dec): Joey and I chat one evening about the Ubuntu second-stage progress bar work, and we end up designing and writing debconf-apt-progress based on its ideas, after which Joey knocks up pkgsel in no time flat.
2006 (Jan): The rest of the pieces land in Ubuntu, and we drop base-config out of the installer. To my surprise, nearly everything still just works.

Although it caused some friction, I'm glad that we did the first cuts of many of these things outside Debian and got to try things out before landing version-2-quality code in Debian. The end result is much nicer than the intermediate ones ever were.

2 January 2006

James Morrison: Sharp Musique

I finally got around to using itunes today. I compiled sharpmusique. I had to hack around the build system in the old snapshot of vlc shipped in the 1.0 tarball. Then once I had that working, it was time to figure out why the files were saved with as " - - - .m4a", which looks wrong. Fortunately, there was a comment in saying what is probably wrong when saving the files, so I rigged up a patch.

John Goerzen: New Mic Equipment

I wrote yesterday that I'm looking for a nice microphone. I decided to go mostly with the setup suggested by The Roadhouse:

MXL 990 Condensor Mic ($50)
Behringer eurorack UB802 Mixer/Preamp ($50)

After assorted accessories (mic stand, XLR cable, pop filter, etc.) I wound up spending $143 at Musician's Friend. I just need a 1/4" to 1/8" adapter cable yet from RadioShack to hook this up to the audio input on a sound card (or my iMic USB gadget). Librivox sounds great and I look forward to volunteering.

1 January 2006

Roger So: No Way For Linux To Replace Proprietary Software

First of all, thank you DebConf5 organizers! You guys did a fantastic job in providing the opportunity for both DDs and non-DDs alike to meet face-to-face with each other. Debian definitely is alive and kicking! So it is with great disappointment to see articles like this (”No Way For Linux To Replace Proprietary Software”) when I came back to Hong Kong. It’s an op-ed piece in a local newspaper by Charles Peter Mok, and begins by attacking last week’s Evans Data report for lacking objective data, therefore the conclusion reached (OSS adoption is speeding up) is too far-fetched. This is followed by (translation to English mine):

In fact, due to their love of open source systems (sic), open source supporters often are shallow when it comes to analysis and reaching conclusions, and confirming their subjective wants become their priority; of course, open source critics, like the Microsoft Windows camp and Sun Micro’s Unix camp, sometimes do the same thing.

Maybe he takes the /. crowd too seriously? Anyway, he then essentially translates the month-old SG Cowen report as an example of an objective argument… actually the translation is rather dubious. For example, the report only said “Linux seems to be hitting a limit” (via BusinessWeek); he translated that as “Linux’s development has reached the stage where it’s facing piling limitations”. What a nice and objective extrapolation! Moving on, he uses the report to reach the conclusion that (again translations mine):

… whether Linux will still enjoy considerable growth, or the red light has been lit, is at the moment too early to say. Enterprise and personal users who use proprietary software such as Windows are still the majority.

Thanks for stating the obvious, Charles. So where’s the objective argument that supports the title of the article?

Gergely Nagy: 2006

2006, what a lovely year! Not. I heard its a custom, that at the start of the new year, one looks back at the past one. So I did, and wasn't impressed at all. Mind you, the same happens each and every year, so it is no suprise, really. For the past year, I have been rather inactive, I should have gone on an extensive vacation from Debian a long time ago, around May, when I quit my last job. I intend to rectify that as soon as I manage to dig up my GPG key. Most of my packages will get officially orphaned too, as I lack the time and motivation to work on them - no news here, either, as this is the case since early last year. Lets see what I did on the free software front in the past year or two... One of my most succesfull projects was CCZE, a log colouriser. Needles to say, the idea is not mine. The crap implementation, the most messy and bad code I've ever written, is mine, though. It hasn't seen an update since I don't know when. Nor will it in the foreseeable future. The only thing that could help the codebase, is a rewrite, which I had been planning since 2003, and not a bit of code was committed ever. In the meantime, new programs appear, whose logs could be colourised, new demands arrive, but the project has been dead for good. Once, Thy was the software I was most proud of. I really loved it, and spent most of my time hacking on it. Those times are past, new, similar software appeared, that surpassed my beloved HTTP daemon in nearly every respect. I don't believe thy has any place among todays similar projects. This, I truly regret, I had great fun developing Thy. But as everything, even good things must come to an end. Back when I worked for a company that was into this media streaming business, I contributed a few bits and pieces to GStreamer, but all the "grand ideas" I had, and wished to make reality, never happened. Looking further back, I can't notice any significant contribution I made.. except maybe one, a very small one.. Even nowadays, I can't stop feeling a little proud, when it crosses my mind. Some may know, most probably don't, I acted as an application manager for Debian, and for a little while, I like to think I wasn't that bad at that job. For a little while... Anyway, during this, I had the pleasure to work with Daniel Stone. Heh, those were good times! I hope, that what we've done there, was of at least a bit useful. Meh, enough of this. My projects failed, I didn't have the neccessary resources to make some of my dreams come true. All I need now, is a break, a break so I will not feel bad about things I do not have time for. I'll let them go, as I should have done ages ago, that's best both for them, and me. Until a time I feel I can contribute back something, for all I received from the free software community, I'll take a vacation. From time to time, I'll be hanging around on IRC, but my activity will be as low as it was during the past year. Good bye, and thanks for all the fish! P.S.: Yamm, my over-sized tamagotchi expressed interest in maintaining me in Debian. If, by any chance, he'd take over my computer, and expressed his wish to run for DPL-ship, please, by all means, stop him. Thank you.

31 December 2005

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: Upgraded Wordpress

Just upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.0. It looks everything went quite nicely, I see no major problems and considering how coolly the Finnish blog list service Blogilista took the upgrade, it is likely that Planet Debian will no throw a fit either. First impressions: the admin interface looks cool. The new editor is usable. Update: In the upgrade, I followed the instructions with a twist: I made the following changes to my server config prior to the upgrade so that any transitional problems would not be visible: RewriteEngine on RewriteCond % REMOTE_ADDR !^130\.234\.192\.228$ RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI !^/503.cgi$ RewriteRule ^/newblog /503.cgi The effect of this was that I (having the IP address 130.234.192.228) would see the blog as it is, but others would see the 503 ‘Service unavailable’ error message that my 503.cgi created. Update(2): Argh! The new editor handles pre tags badly. Had to hack around it in the ugly way seen above. Update (3): Fixed the WP2 link above. Update (4): It seems I was wrong about Planet’s sensibilities. However, now I’m blaming Planet, not the upgrade, since Blogilista handled the upgrade without thinking I had made any new posts!

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