por Andrew Gon alves
O Debian Day em Santa Maria - RS 2024
foi realizado ap s 5 anos de hiato, foi feito durante a manh do dia 16/08/2024
no Sal o Azul da Universidade Franciscana (UFN) com
apoio da comunidade Debian e do Laborat rio de Pr ticas da Computa o da UFN.
O evento contou com alunos de todos os semestres dos cursos de Ci ncia da
Computa o, Jogos Digitais e Sistemas de Informa o, fizemos um coffee break
onde tivemos a oportunidade de conversar com os participantes.
Cerca de 60 alunos prestigiaram uma palestra de introdu o ao Software Livre e
de C digo Aberto, Linux e foram introduzidos ao projeto Debian, tanto sobre a
filosofia do projeto, at como ele acontece na pr tica e oportunidades que se
abriram para participantes do projeto por fazerem parte do Debian.
Ap s a palestra foi feita uma demonstra o de empacotamento pelo DD local
Francisco Vilmar, que demonstrou na pr tica como funciona o empacotamento de
software no Debian.
Gostaria de agradecer a todas as pessoas que nos ajudaram:
Projeto Debian
Professora Ana Paula Canal (UFN)
Professor Sylvio Andr Garcia
Laborat rio de Pr ticas da Computa o
Francisco Vilmar (DD local)
E um muito obrigado a todos os participantes que nos prestigiaram neste evento
fazendo perguntas intrigantes e se interessando pelo mundo do Software Livre.
Algumas fotos:
por Thiago Pezzo e
Giovani Ferreira
As celebra es locais do Dia do Debian 2024
tamb m aconteceram em
Pouso Alegre, MG, Brasil. Neste
ano conseguimos organizar dois dias de palestras!
No dia 14 de agosto de 2024, quarta-feira pela manh , estivemos no campus Pouso
Alegre do
Instituto Federal de Educa o, Ci ncia e Tecnologia do Sul de Minas Gerais
(IFSULDEMINAS). Fizemos a apresenta o introdut ria do Projeto Debian,
sistema operacional e comunidade, para os tr s anos do Curso T cnico de Ensino
M dio em Inform tica. O evento foi fechado para o IFSULDEMINAS e estiveram
presentes por volta de 60 estudantes.
J no dia 17 de agosto de 2024, um s bado pela manh , realizamos o evento aberto
comunidade na Universidade do Vale do Sapuca
(Univ s), com apoio institucional do Curso de Sistemas de Informa o. Falamos
sobre o Projeto Debian com Giovani Ferreira
(Debian Developer); sobre a equipe de tradu o Debian pt_BR
com Thiago Pezzo; sobre experi ncias no dia a dia com uso de softwares livres
com Virg nia Cardoso; e sobre como configurar um ambiente de desenvolvimento
pronto para produ o usando Debian e Docker com Marcos Ant nio dos Santos.
Encerradas as palestras, foram servidos salgadinhos, caf e bolo, enquanto os/as
participantes conversavam, tiravam d vidas e partilhavam experi ncias.
Gostar amos de agradecer a todas as pessoas que nos ajudaram:
Michelle Nery (IFSULDEMINAS) e Andr Martins (UNIV S) pelo aux lio na organiza o local
Paulo Santana (Debian Brasil) pela organiza o geral
Virg nia Cardoso, Giovani Ferreira, Marco Ant nio e Thiago Pezzo pelas palestras
E um agradecimento especial a todas e todos que participaram da nossa comemora o!
So a common theme on the Internet about Debian is so old. And
right, I am getting close to the stage that I feel a little laggy: I
am using a bunch of backports for packages I need, and I'm missing a
bunch of other packages that just landed in unstable and didn't make
it to backports for various reasons.
I disagree that "old" is a bad thing: we definitely run Debian stable
on a fleet of about 100 servers and can barely keep up, I would make
it older. And "old" is a good thing: (port) wine and (any) beer
needs time to age properly, and so do humans, although some humans
never seem to grow old enough to find wisdom.
But at this point, on my laptop, I am feeling like I'm missing
out. This page, therefore, is an evolving document that is a twist
on the classic NewIn game. Last time I played seems to be
#newinwheezy
(2013!), so really, I'm due for an update. (To be fair to myself, I do
keep tabs on upgrades quite well at home and
work, which do have their share of "new in", just after the fact.)
New packages to explore
Those tools are shiny new things available in unstable or perhaps
Trixie (testing) already that I am not using yet, but I find
interesting enough to list here.
New packages I won't use
Those are packages that I have tested because I found them
interesting, but ended up not using, but I think people could find
interesting anyways.
kew: surprisingly fast music player, parsed my entire library
(which is huge) instantaneously and just started playing (I still
use Supersonic, for which I maintain a flatpak on my
Navidrome server)
mdformat: good markdown formatter, think black or gofmt but
for markdown), but it didn't actually do what I needed, and
it's not quite as opinionated as it should (or could) be)
Backports already in use
Those are packages I already use regularly, which have backports or
that can just be installed from unstable:
Last words
If you know of cool things I'm missing out of, then by all means let
me know!
That said, overall, this is a pretty short list! I have most of what I
need in stable right now, and if I wasn't a Debian developer, I don't
think I'd be doing the jump now. But considering how easier it is to
develop Debian (and how important it is to test the next release!),
I'll probably upgrade soon.
Previously, I was running Debian testing (which why the slug on that
article is why-trixie), but now I'm actually considering just
running unstable on my laptop directly anyways. It's been a long time
since we had any significant instability there, and I can typically
deal with whatever happens, except maybe when I'm traveling, and then
it's easy to prepare for that (just pin testing).
I m happy to announce that Netplan version 1.1 is now available on GitHub and is soon to be deployed into a Debian and/or Ubuntu installation near you! Six months and 120 commits after the previous version (including one patch release v1.0.1), this release is brought to you by 17 free software contributors from around the globe.
Kudos to everybody involved!
Highlights
Custom systemd-networkd-wait-online logic override to wait for link-local and routable interfaces. (#456, #482)
Modification of the embedded-switch-mode setting without virtual-function (VF) definitions on SR-IOV devices (#454)
Parser flag to ignore individual, broken configurations, instead of not generating any backend configuration (#412)
Another loss last week of a friend. I am staying strong and working through it. A big thank you to all of you that have donated to my car fund, I still have a long way to go. I am not above getting a cheap old car, but we live in sand dunes so it must be a cheap old car with 4 4 to get to my property. A vehicle is necessary as we are 50 miles away from staples such as food and water. We also have 2 funerals to attend. Please consider a donation if my work is useful to you. https://gofund.me/1e784e74 All of my work is currently unpaid work, as I am between contracts. Thank you for your consideration. Now onto the good stuff, last weeks work. It was another very busy week with Qt6 packaging in Debian/Kubuntu and KDE snaps. I also have many SRUs for Kubuntu Noble .1 release that needs their verification done.
Kubuntu:
See Debian for the qt6 Plasma / applications work.
Evolution of the situation
In July, we have released 1 DLA.
August will be the month that Debian 11 makes the transition to LTS. Our
contributors have already been hard at work with preparatorty tasks and also
with making contributions to packages in Debian 11 in close collaboration with
the Debian security team and package maintainers. As a result, users and
sponsors should not observe any especially notable differences as the transition
occurs.
While only one DLA was released in July (as a result of the transitional state
of Debian 11 bullseye ), there were some notable highlights. LTS contributor
Guilhem Moulin prepared an update of libvirt for Debian 11 (in collaboration
with the Old-Stable Release Managers and the Debian Security Team) to fix a
number of outstanding CVEs which did not rise to the level of a DSA by the
Debian Security Team. The update prepared by Guilhem will be included in Debian
11 as part of the final point release at the end of August, one of the final
transition steps by the Release Managers as Debian 11 moves entirely to the LTS
Team s responsibility. Notable work was also undertaken by contributors Lee Garrett
(fixes on the ansible test suite and a bullseye update), Lucas Kanashiro (Rust toolchain, utilized by the clamav,
firefox-esr, and thunderbird packages), and Sylvain Beucler (fixes on the ruby2.5/2.7 test
suites and CI infrastructure), which will help improve the quality of updates produced during
the next LTS cycle.
June was the final month of LTS for Debian 10 (as announced on the
debian-lts-announce
mailing list). No additional Debian 10 security updates will be made available
on security.debian.org.
However, Freexian and its team of paid Debian contributors will continue
to maintain Debian 10 going forward for customers of the
Extended LTS offer. Subscribe right
away if you still have Debian 10 systems which must be kept secure (and which
cannot yet be upgraded).
Thanks to our sponsors
Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.
Vienna - the capital of Austria - is one of the most visited cities in the world, popular for its rich history, gardens, and cafes, along with well-known artists like Beethoven, Mozart, G del, and Freud. It has also been consistently ranked as the most livable city in the world.
For these reasons, I was elated when my friend Snehal invited me last year to visit Vienna for a few days. We included Christmas and New Year s Eve in my itinerary due to the city s popular Christmas markets and lively events. The festive season also ensured that Snehal had some days off for sightseeing.
Indians require a visa to visit Austria. Since the travel dates were near, I rushed to book an appointment online with VFS Global in Delhi, and quickly arranged the required documents. However, at VFS, I found out that I had applied in the wrong appointment category (tourist), which depends on the purpose of the visit, and that my travel dates do not allow enough time for visa authorities to make a decision. Apparently, even if you plan to stay only for a part of the trip with the host, you need to apply under the category Visiting Friends and Family .
Thus, I had to book another appointment under this category, and took the opportunity to shift my travel dates to allow at least 15 business days for the visa application to be processed, removing Christmas and New Year s Eve from my itinerary.
The process went smoothly, and my visa application was submitted by VFS. For reference, here s a list of documents I submitted -
VFS appointment letter
Duly-filled visa application form
Original passport
Copy of passport
1 photograph
My 6 months bank account statement
Cover letter
Consent form (that visa processing will take up to 15 business days)
Snehal s job contract
My work contract
Rent contract of Snehal
Residence permit of Snehal
A copy of Snehal s passport
Invitation letter from Snehal
Return flight ticket reservations
Travel insurance for the intended travel dates
The following charges were collected from me.
Service Description
Amount (Indian Rupees)
Cash Handling Charge - SAC Code: (SAC:998599)
0
VFS Fee - India - SAC Code: (SAC:998599)
1,820
VISA Fee - India - SAC Code:
7,280
Convenience Fee - SAC Code: (SAC:998599)
182
Courier Service - SAC Code: (SAC:998599)
728
Courier Assurance - SAC Code: (SAC:998599)
182
Total
10,192
I later learned that the courier charges (728 INR) and the courier assurance charges (182 INR) mentioned above were optional. However, VFS didn t ask whether I wanted to include them. When the emabssy is done processing your application, it will send your passport back to VFS, from where you can either collect it yourself or get it couriered back home, which requires you to pay courier charges. However, courier assurance charges do not add any value as VFS cannot assure anything about courier and I suggest you get them removed.
My visa application was submitted on the 21st of December 2023. A few days later, on the 29th of December 2023, I received an email from the Austrian embassy asking me to submit an additional document -
Subject: AUSTRIAN VISA APPLICATION - AMENDMENT REQUEST: Ravi Dwivedi VIS 4331
Dear Applicant,
On 22.12.2023 your application for Visa C was registered at the Embassy. You are requested to kindly send the scanned copies of the following documents via email to the Embassy or submit the documents at the nearest VFS centre, for further processing of your application:
Kindly submit Electronic letter of guarantee EVE- Elektronische Verpflichtungserkl rung obtained from the Fremdenpolizeibeh rde of the sponsor s district in Austria. Once your host company/inviting company has obtained the EVE, please share the reference number (starting from DEL_____) received from the authorities, with the Embassy.
Kindly Note:
It is in your own interest to fulfil the requirements as indicated above and submit the missing documents within 14 days of the receipt of this email. Otherwise a decision will be taken based on the documentation available.
Sie werden in Ihrem Interesse ersucht, die gekennzeichneten M ngel so schnell wie m glich zu beheben bzw. fehlende Unterlagen umgehend nachzureichen, um die weitere Bearbeitung des Antrages zu erm glichen. Sollten Sie innerhalb 14 Tagen die gekennzeichneten M ngel nicht beheben bzw. die fehlenden Unterlagen nicht nachreichen, wird ber den vorliegenden Antrag ohne diese Unterlagen bzw. M ngelbehebung entschieden.
Austrian Embassy New Delhi
R.J/ Consular Section
+91 11 2419 2700
EP-13, Chandragupta Marg, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi 110 021, India
bmeia.gv.at/botschaft/new-delhi
facebook.at/AustrianEmbassyNewDelhihttp://www.facebook.at/AustrianEmbassyNewDelhi twitter.com/MFA_Austriahttp://www.twitter.com/MFA_Austria
[refocus1][Signatur_V+30]https://www.bmeia.gv.at/en/european-foreign-policy/foreign-trade/refocus-austria/[Logo_AT_IN_22px]
I misunderstood the required document (the EVE) to be a scanned copy of the letter of guarantee form signed by Snehal, and responded by attaching it.
Upon researching, Snehal determined that the document is an electronic letter of guarantee, and is supposed to be obtained at a local police station in Vienna. He visited a police station the next day and had a hard time conversing due to the language barrier (German is the common language in Austria, whereas Snehal speaks English). That day was a weekend, so he took an appointment for Monday, but in the meantime the embassy had finished processing my visa.
My visa was denied, and the refusal letter stated:
The Austrian embassy in Delhi examined your application; the visa has been refused.
The decision is based on the following reason(s):
The information submitted regarding the justification for the purpose and conditions of the intended stay was not reliable.
There are reasonable doubts as to your intention to leave the territory of the Member States before the expiry of the visa.
Other remarks:
You have been given an amendment request, which you have failed to fulfil, or have only fulfilled inadequately, within the deadline set.
You are a first-time traveller. The social and economic roots with the home country are not evident. The return from Schengen territory does therefore not seem to be certain.
I could have reapplied after obtaining the EVE, but I didn t because I found the following line
The social and economic roots with the home country are not evident.
offensive for someone who was born and raised in India, got the impression that the absence of electronic guarantee letter was not the only reason behind the refusal, had already wasted 12,000 INR on this application, and my friend s stay in Austria was uncertain after January. In fact, my friend soon returned to India.
To summarize -
If you are visiting a host, then the category of appointment at VFS must be Visiting Friends and Family rather than Tourist .
VFS charged me for courier assurance, which is an optional service. Make sure to get these removed from your bill.
Neither my travel agent nor the VFS application center mentioned the EVE.
Snehal informed me that a mere two months ago, his wife s visa was approved without an EVE. This hints at inconsistency in processing of applications, even those under identical categories.
Such incidents are a waste of time and money for applicants, and an embarrassment to VFS and the Austrian visa authorities. I suggest that the Austrian visa authorities fix that URL, and provide instructions for hosts to obtain the EVE.
Credits to Snehal and Contrapunctus for editing, Badri for proofreading.
Planing A Self Organized Solo Trip
You know the movie Queen?
The actor Kangana Ranaut plays in that movie the role of Rani Mehra, a
24-year-old Punjabi woman, who was a simple, homely girl that was always
reliant on her family. Similar to Rani I too rarely ventured out without my
parents and often needed my younger sibling by my side. Inspired by her
transformation, I decided it was time to take control of my own story and
discover who I truly am.
Trip Requirements
My First Passport
The journey began with a significant first step: Obtaining my first
passport
Never having had one before, I scheduled the nearest available interview
date on June 29 2022. This meant traveling to Solapur, a city 309 km from my
hometown, accompanied by my father. After successfully completing the
interview, I received my passport on July 14 2022.
Select A Country, Booking Flights And Accommodation
Excited and ready to embark on my adventure, I planed trip to Albania and
booked the flight tickets. Why? I had heard from friends that it was a
beautiful European country with beaches and other attractions, and
importantly, it didn t require a visa for Indian citizens and was more
affordable than other European destinations. Before heading to Albania, I
planned a overnight stop in Abu Dhabi with a transit visa, thanks to friend
who knew the process for obtaining it.
Some of my friends did travel also to Europe at the same time and quite
close to my plannings, but that I realized just later the trip.
Day 1, Starting The Experience
On July 20, 2022, I started my journey by traveling from Pune, Maharashtra,
to Delhi, where my brother lives. He came to see me off at the airport,
adding a touch of warmth and support to the beginning of my solo adventure.
Upon arriving in Delhi, with my next flight scheduled for July 21, I stayed
at a backpacker hostel named Zostel, Paharganj, Delhi to rest.
During my stay, I noticed that many travelers at the hostel carried
rucksacks, which sparked a desire in me to get one for my own trip to
Europe. Up until then, I had always shopped with my mom and had never bought
anything on my own. Inspired by the travelers, I set out to find a suitable
rucksack. I traveled alone by metro from Paharganj to Rohini to visit a
Decathlon store, where I purchased a 50-liter rucksack. This was a
significant step in preparing for my European adventure and marked a
milestone in my journey of self reliance.
Day 2, Flying To Abu Dhabi
The following day, July 21 2024, I had a flight to Abu Dhabi. I spent the
night at the hostel to rest before my journey. On the day of the flight, I
needed to reach the airport by 3 PM, and a friend kindly came to drop me
off. With my rucksack packed and excitement building, I was ready for the
next leg of my adventure.
When we arrived at the airport, my friend saw me off, marking the start of
my international journey. With mom made spices, chutneys, and chilly flakes
packed for comfort, I completed my immigration process in about two and a
half hours. I then settled at the gate for my flight, feeling a mix of
excitement and anxiety as thoughts raced through my mind.
To ease my nerves, I struck up a conversation with a man seated nearby who was
also traveling to Abu Dhabi for work. He provided helpful information about
safety and transportation in Abu Dhabi, which reassured me. With the boarding
process complete and my anxiety somewhat eased. I found my window seat on the
flight and settled in, excited for the journey ahead. Next to me was a young
man from Ranchi(Zarkhand, India), heading to Abu Dhabi for work at a mining
factory. We had an engaging conversation about work culture in Abu Dhabi and
recruitment from India.
Upon arriving in Abu Dhabi, I completed my transit, collected my luggage, and
began finding my way to the hotel Premier Inn AbuDhabi,
which was in the airport area. To my surprise, I ran into the same man from the
flight, now in a cab. He kindly offered to drop me at my hotel, which I gladly
accepted since navigating an unfamiliar city with a short acquaintance felt
safer.
At the hotel gate, he asked if I had local currency (Dirhams) for payment,
as sometimes online transactions can fail. That hadn t crossed my mind, and
I realized I might be left stranded if a transaction failed. Recognizing his
help as a godsend, I asked if he could lend me some Dirhams, promising to
transfer the amount later. He kindly assured me to pay him back once I
reached the hotel room. With that relief, I checked into the hotel, feeling
deeply grateful for the unexpected assistance and transferred the money to
him after getting to my room.
Day 3, Flying And Arrive In Tirana
Once in the hotel room, I found it hard to sleep, anxious about waking up on
time for my flight. I set an alarm to wake up early, but my subconscious mind
kept me alert, and I woke up before the alarm went off. I got freshened up and
went down for breakfast, where I found some vegetarian options like
Idli-Sambar and bread with butter, along with some morning tea.
After breakfast, I headed back to the airport, ready to catch my flight to my
final destination: Tirana, Albania.
I reached Tirana, Albania after a six hours flight, feeling exhausted and I was
suffering from a headache. The air pressure had blocked my ears, and jet lag
added to my fatigue. After collecting my checked luggage, I headed to the first
ATM machine at the airport. Struggling to insert my card, I asked a nearby
gentleman for help. He tried his best, but my card got stuck inside the
machine. Panic set in as I worried about how I would survive without money.
Taking a deep breath, I found an airport employee and explained the situation.
The gentleman stayed with me, offering support and repeatedly apologizing for
his mistake. However, it wasn t his fault, the ATM was out of order, which I
hadn t noticed. My focus was solely on retrieving my ATM card. The airport
employee worked diligently, using a hairpin to carefully extract my card.
Finally, the card was freed, and I felt an immense sense of relief, grateful
for the help of these kind strangers. I used another ATM, successfully withdrew
money, and then went to an airport mobile SIM shop to buy a new SIM card for
local internet and connectivity.
Day 4, Arriving In Tirana, Facing Challenges In A Foreign Country
I had booked a stay at a backpacker hostel near the city center of Tirana.
After sorting out the ATM and SIM card issues, I searched for a bus or any
transport to get there. It was quite late, around 8:30 PM, and being in a
new city, I was in a hurry. I saw a bus nearly leaving the airport, stopped
it, and asked if it went to the city center. They gave me the green flag, so
I boarded the airport service bus and reached the city center.
Feeling very tired, I discovered that the hostel was about an hour and a
half away by walking. Deciding to take a cab, I faced a challenge as the
driver couldn t understand my English or accent. Using a mobile translator
to convert my address from English to Albanian, I finally communicated my
destination to him. With that sorted out, I headed to the
Blue Door Backpacker Hostel and arrived around 9 PM,
relieved to have finally reached my destination and I checked in.
I found my top bunk bed, only to realize I had booked a mixed-gender
dormitory. This detail had completely escaped my notice during the booking
process. I felt unsure about how to handle the situation. Coincidentally,
my experience mirrored what Kangana faced in the movie Queen .
Feeling acidic due to an empty stomach and the exhaustion of heavy
traveling, I wasn t up to cooking in the hostel s kitchen.
I asked the front desk about the nearest restaurant. It was nearly 9:30 PM,
and the streets were deserted. To avoid any mishaps like in the movie
Queen, I kept my passport securely locked in my bag, ensuring it wouldn t
be a victim of theft.
Venturing out for dinner, I felt uneasy on the quiet streets. I eventually
found a restaurant recommended by the hostel, but the menu was almost
entirely non-vegetarian. I struggled to ask about vegetarian options and was
uncertain if any dishes contained eggs, as some people consider eggs to be
vegetarian. Feeling frustrated and unsure, I left the restaurant without
eating.
I noticed a nearby grocery store that was about to close and managed to get
a few extra minutes to shop. I bought some snacks, wafers, milk, and tea
bags (though I couldn t find tea powder to make Indian-style tea). Returning
to the hostel, I made do with wafers, cookies, and milk for dinner. That day
was incredibly tough for me, I filled with exhaustion and struggle in a new
country, I was on the verge of tears .
I made a video call home before sleeping on the top bunk bed. It was a new
experience for me, sharing a room with both unknown men and women. I kept my
passport safe inside my purse and under my pillow while sleeping, staying
very conscious about its security.
Day 5, Exploring Nearby Places
I woke up the next day at noon. After having some coffee, the hostel
management girl asked if I wanted breakfast. She offered curd with
cornflakes, which I refused because I don t like curd. Instead, I ordered a
pizza from a vegetarian pizza place with her help, and I started feeling
better.
I met some people in the hostel, some from Syria and others from Italy. I
struggled to understand their accents but kept pushing myself to get
involved in their discussions. Despite the challenges, I felt more at ease
and was slowly adapting to my new environment.
I went out from the hostel in the evening to buy some vegetables to cook
something. I searched for shops and found some potatoes, tomatoes, and rice. I
decided to cook Khichdi, an Indian dish made with rice, and added
some chili flakes I brought from home. After preparing my dinner, I ate and
then went to sleep again.
Day 6, Tiranas Recent History
The next day, I planned to explore the city and visited Bunkart-1,
a fascinating museum in a massive underground bunker from the communist era.
Originally built as a shelter for Albania s political and military elite, it
now offers a unique glimpse into the country s history under Enver Hoxha s
oppressive regime. The museum s exhibits include historical artifacts,
photographs, and multimedia displays that detail the lives of Albanians during
that time. Walking through the dimly lit corridors, I felt the weight of
history and gained a deeper understanding of Albania s past.
Day 7-8, Meeting Friends From India
The next day, I accidentally met with Chirag, who was returning from the
Debian Conference 2022 held in Prizren, Kosovo, and staying at the same
hostel. When I encountered him, he was talking on the phone, and I
recognized he was Indian by his accent. I introduced myself, and we
discovered we had some mutual friends.
Chirag told me that our common friend, Raju, was also coming to stay at the
hostel the next day. This news made me feel relaxed and happy to have known
people around. When Raju arrived, the three of us, Chirag, Raju, and
I planned to have dinner at an Indian restaurant and explore Tirana city. I
had a great time talking and enjoying their company.
Day 9-10, Meeting More Friends
Raju had a ticket to leave soon, so Chirag and I made a plan to visit
Shkod r and the nearby Komani Lake for kayaking. We started our journey
early in the morning by bus and reached Shkod r. There, we met new friends
from the conference, Pavit and Abraham, who were already there. We had
dinner together and enjoyed an ice cream treat from Chirag.
Day 12, Kayaking And Say Good Bye To Friends
The next day, Pavit and Abraham had a flight back to India, so Chirag and I
went to Komani Lake. We had an adventurous time kayaking, even though
neither of us knew how to swim. We took a ferry through the backwaters to
the island on Komani Lake and enjoyed a fantastic adventure together. After
our trip, Chirag returned to Tirana for his flight back to India, leaving me
to continue my journey alone.
Day 13, Climbing Rozafa Castel
By stopping at Shkod r, I visited Rozafa Castle. Despite the language
barrier, as most locals only spoke Albanian, people around me guided me
correctly on how to get there. At times, I used applications like Google
Translate to communicate. To read signs or hotel menus, I used Google
Photos' language converter. I even used the audio converter to understand
and speak some basic Albanian phrases.
I took a bus from Shkod r to the southern part of Albania, heading to
Sarand . The journey lasted about five to six hours, and I had booked a stay
at Mona s Hostel. Upon arrival, I met Eliza from America, and we went
together to Ksamil Beach, spending a wonderful day there.
Day 14, Vlora Beach: Beach Side Cycling
Next, I traveled to Vlor , where I stayed for one day. During my time there, I
enjoyed beach side cycling with a cycle provided by the hostel owner and spent
some time feeding fish. I also met a fellow traveler from Delhi who had brought
along some preserved Indian curry. He kindly shared it with me, which was a
welcome change after nearly 15 days without authentic Indian cuisine, except
for what I had cooked myself in various hostels.
Day 15-16 Visiting Durress, Travelling Back To Tirana
I then visited Durr s, exploring its beautiful beaches, before heading back
to Tirana one day before my flight home. On the day of my flight, my alarm
didn t go off, and I woke up late at the hostel. In a frantic rush, I packed
everything in just five minutes and dashed toward the city center to catch
the bus to the airport. If I had been just five minutes later, I would have
missed the bus. Thankfully, I managed to stop it just in time and began my
journey back home, reflecting on the incredible adventure I had experienced.
Fortunately, I wasn t late; I arrived at the airport just in time. After
clearing immigration, I boarded my flight, which had a layover in Warsaw,
Poland. The journey from Tirana to Warsaw took about two and a half hours,
followed by a seven to eight-hour flight from Poland back to India. Once I
arrived in Delhi, I returned to Zostel and booked a train ticket to
Aurangabad for the next three days.
Backview
This trip was an incredible adventure for me. I never imagined I could
accomplish something like this, but I did. Meeting diverse people,
experiencing different cultures, and learning so much made this journey
truly unforgettable.
Looking back, I realize how much I ve grown from this experience. Although I
may have more opportunities to travel abroad in the future, this trip will
always hold a special place in my heart. The memories I made and the
incredible people I met along the way are irreplaceable.
This experience goes beyond what I can express through this blog or words;
it was incredibly precious to me. Every moment of this journey is etched in
my memory, and I am grateful for every part of it.
Welcome to the July 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project!
In our reports, we outline what we ve been up to over the past month and highlight news items in software supply-chain security more broadly. As always, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.
Table of contents:
Reproducible Builds Summit 2024
Last month, we were very pleased to announce the upcoming Reproducible Builds Summit, set to take place from September 17th 19th 2024 in Hamburg, Germany. We are thrilled to host the seventh edition of this exciting event, following the success of previous summits in various iconic locations around the world, including Venice, Marrakesh, Paris, Berlin and Athens. Our summits are a unique gathering that brings together attendees from diverse projects, united by a shared vision of advancing the Reproducible Builds effort. During this enriching event, participants will have the opportunity to engage in discussions, establish connections and exchange ideas to drive progress in this vital field. Our aim is to create an inclusive space that fosters collaboration, innovation and problem-solving.
If you re interesting in joining us this year, please make sure to read the event page, which has more details about the event and location. We are very much looking forward to seeing many readers of these reports there.
a bootstrappable build is one that builds existing software from scratch for example, building GCC without relying on an existing copy of GCC. In 2023, the Guix project announced that the project had reduced the size of the binary bootstrap seed needed to build its operating system to just 357-bytes not counting the Linux kernel required to run the build process.
The article goes onto to describe that now, the live-bootstrap project has gone a step further and removed the need for an existing kernel at all. and concludes:
The real benefit of bootstrappable builds comes from a few things. Like reproducible builds, they can make users more confident that the binary packages downloaded from a package mirror really do correspond to the open-source project whose source code they can inspect. Bootstrappable builds have also had positive effects on the complexity of building a Linux distribution from scratch [ ]. But most of all, bootstrappable builds are a boon to the longevity of our software ecosystem. It s easy for old software to become unbuildable. By having a well-known, self-contained chain of software that can build itself from a small seed, in a variety of environments, bootstrappable builds can help ensure that today s software is not lost, no matter where the open-source community goes from here
Towards Idempotent Rebuilds?Trisquel developer Simon Josefsson wrote an interesting blog post comparing the output of the .deb files from our tests.reproducible-builds.org testing framework and the ones in the official Debian archive. Following up from a previous post on the reproducibility of Trisquel, Simon notes that typically [the] rebuilds do not match the official packages, even when they say the package is reproducible , Simon correctly identifies that the purpose of [these] rebuilds are not to say anything about the official binary build, instead the purpose is to offer a QA service to maintainers by performing two builds of a package and declaring success if both builds match.
However, Simon s post swiftly moves on to announce a new tool called debdistrebuild that performs rebuilds of the difference between two distributions in a GitLab pipeline and displays diffoscope output for further analysis.
Reproducible Central is an initiative that curates a list of reproducible Maven libraries, but the list is limited and challenging to maintain due to manual efforts. [We] investigate the feasibility of automatically finding the source code of a library from its Maven release and recovering information about the original release environment. Our tool, AROMA, can obtain this critical information from the artifact and the source repository through several heuristics and we use the results for reproduction attempts of Maven packages. Overall, our approach achieves an accuracy of up to 99.5% when compared field-by-field to the existing manual approach [and] we reveal that automatic reproducibility is feasible for 23.4% of the Maven packages using AROMA, and 8% of these packages are fully reproducible.
Nichita Morcotilo reached out to the community, first to share their efforts to build reproducible packages cross-platform with a new build tool called rattler-build, noting that as you can imagine, building packages reproducibly on Windows is the hardest challenge (so far!) . Nichita goes onto mention that the Apple ecosystem appears to be using ZERO_AR_DATE over SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. []
Roland Clobus announced that the Debian bookworm 12.6 live images are nearly reproducible , with more detail in the post itself and input in the thread from other contributors.
Daniel Gr ber asked for help in getting the Yosys documentation to build reproducibly, citing issues in inter alia the PDF generation causing differing CreationDate metadata values.
James Addison continued his long journey towards getting the Sphinx documentation generator to build reproducible documentation. In this thread, James concerns himself with the problem that even when SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH is configured, Sphinx projects that have configured their copyright notices using dynamic elements can produce nonsensical output under some circumstances. James query ended up generating a number of replies.
Allen gunner Gunner posted a brief update on the progress the core team is making towards introducing a Code of Conduct (CoC) such that it is in place in time for the RB Summit in Hamburg in September . In particular, gunner asks if you are interested in helping with CoC design and development in the weeks ahead, simply email rb-core@lists.reproducible-builds.org and let us know . []
[S]oftware repositories are a vital component of software development and release, with packages downloaded both for direct use and to use as dependencies for other software. Further, when software is updated due to patched vulnerabilities or new features, it is vital that users are able to see and install this patched version of the software. However, this process of updating software can also be the source of attack. To address these attacks, secure software update systems have been proposed. However, these secure software update systems have seen barriers to widespread adoption. The Update Framework (TUF) was introduced in 2010 to address several attacks on software update systems including repository compromise, rollback attacks, and arbitrary software installation. Despite this, compromises continue to occur, with millions of users impacted by such compromises. My work has addressed substantial challenges to adoption of secure software update systems grounded in an understanding of practical concerns. Work with industry and academic communities provided opportunities to discover challenges, expand adoption, and raise awareness about secure software updates. [ ]
Since build-tools >= 35.0.0-rc1, backwards-incompatible changes to apksigner break apksigcopier as it now by default forcibly replaces existing alignment padding and changed the default page alignment from 4k to 16k (same as Android Gradle Plugin >= 8.3, so the latter is only an issue when using older AGP). []
She documented multiple available workarounds and filed a bug in Google s issue tracker.
Lastly, diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb uploaded version 272 and Mattia Rizzolo uploaded version 273 to Debian, and the following changes were made as well:
Chris Lamb:
Ensure that the convert utility is from ImageMagick version 6.x. The command-line interface has seemingly changed with the 7.x series of ImageMagick. []
Factor out version detection in test_jpeg_image. []
Correct the import of the identify_version method after a refactoring change in a previous commit. []
Move away from using DSA OpenSSH keys in tests as support has been deprecated and removed in OpenSSH version 9.8p1. []
Move to assert_diff in the test_openssh_pub_key package. []
Update copyright years. []
Mattia Rizzolo:
Add support for ffmpeg version 7.x which adds some extra context to the diff. []
Rework the handling of OpenSSH testing of DSA keys if OpenSSH is strictly 9.7, and add an OpenSSH key test with a ed25519-format key [][][]
Temporarily disable a few packages that are not available in Debian testing. [][]
Stop ignoring the results of Debian testing in the continuous integration system. []
Adjust options in debian/source to make sure not to pack the Python sdist directory into the binary Debian package. []
Adjust Lintian overrides. []
Website updates
There were a number of improvements made to our website this month, including:
Bernhard M. Wiedemann updated the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH page to include instructions on how to create reproducible .zip files from within Python using the zipfile module. []
Chris Lamb fixed a potential duplicate heading on the Projects page. []
Fay Stegerman added rbtlog to the Tools page [] and IzzyOnDroid to the Projects page [], also ensuring that the latter page was always sorted regardless of the ordering within the input data files. []
Upstream patches
The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:
Reproducibility testing framework
The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework running primarily at tests.reproducible-builds.org in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In July, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen, including:
Grant bremner access to the ionos7 node. [][]
Perform a dummy change to force update of all jobs. [][]
In addition, Vagrant Cascadian performed some necessary node maintenance of the underlying build hosts. []
If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:
I m finishing typing up this blog entry hours before my last 13 hour leg back home, after I spent 2 weeks in Busan, South Korea for DebCamp24 and DebCamp24. I had a rough year and decided to take it easy this DebConf. So this is the first DebConf in a long time where I didn t give any talks. I mostly caught up on a bit of packaging, worked on DebConf video stuff, attended a few BoFs and talked to people. Overall it was a very good DebConf, which also turned out to be more productive than I expeced it would.
In the welcome session on the first day of DebConf, Nicolas Dandrimont mentioned that a benefit of DebConf is that it provides a sort of caffeine for your Debian motivation. I could certainly feel that affect swell as the days went past, and it s nice to be excited about some ideas again that would otherwise be fading.
Recovering DPL
It s a bit of a gear shift being DPL for 4 years, and DebConf Committee for nearly 5 years before that, and then being at DebConf while some issue arise (as it always does during a conference). At first I jump into high alert mode, but then I have to remind myself it s not your problem anymore and let others deal with it.
It was nice spending a little in-person time with Andreas Tille, our new DPL, we did some more handover and discussed some current issues. I still have a few dozen emails in my DPL inbox that I need to collate and forward to Andreas, I hope to finish all that up by the end of August.
During the Bits from the DPL talk, the usual question came up whether Andreas will consider running for DPL again, to which he just responded in a slide Maybe . I think it s a good idea for a DPL to do at least two terms if it all works out for everyone, since it takes a while to get up to speed on everything.
Also, having been DPL for four years, I have a lot to say about it, and I think there s a lot we can fix in the role, or at least discuss it. If I had the bandwidth for it I would have scheduled a BoF for it, but I ll very likely do that for the next DebConf instead!
Video team
I set up the standby loop for the video streaming setup. We call it loopy, it s a bunch of OBS scenes that provide announcements, shows sponsors, the schedule and some social content. I wrote about it back in 2020, but it s evolved quite a bit since then, so I m probably due to write another blog post with a bunch of updates on it. I hope to organise a video team sprint in Cape Town in the first half of next year, so I ll summarize everything before then.
It would ve been great if we could have some displays in social areas that could show talks, the loop and other content, but we were just too pressed for time for that. This year s DebConf had a very compressed timeline, and there was just too much that had to be done and that had to be figured out on the last minute. This put quite a lot of strain on the organisers, but I was glad to see how, for the most part, most attendees were very sympathetic to some rough edges (but I digress ).
I added more of the OBS machine setup to the videoteam s ansible repository, so as of now it just needs an ansible setup and the OBS data and it s good to go. The loopy data is already in the videoteam git repository, so I could probably just add a git pull and create some symlinks in ansible and then that machine can be installed from 0% to 100% by just installing via debian-installer with our ansible hooks.
This DebConf I volunteered quite a bit for actual video roles during the conference, something I didn t have much time for in recent DebConfs, and it s been fun, especially in a session or two where nearly none of the other volunteers showed up. Sometimes chaos is just fun :-)
Baekyongee is the university mascot, who s visible throughout the university. So of course we included this four legged whale creature on the loop too!
Packaging
I was hoping to do more packaging during DebCamp, but at least it was a non-zero amount:
Uploaded gdisk 1.0.10-2 to unstable (previously tested effects of adding dh-sequence-movetousr) (Closes: #1073679).
Worked a bit on bcachefs-tools (updating git to 1.9.4), but has a build failure that I need to look into (we might need a newer bindgen) update: I m probably going to ROM this package soon, it doesn t seem suitable for packaging in Debian.
Calamares: Tested a fix for encrypted installs, and uploaded it.
Calamares: Uploaded (3.3.8-1) to backports (at the time of writing it s still in backports-NEW).
Pixelorama 1.0 I did some initial packaging for Pixelorama back when we did the MiniDebConf Gaming Edition, but it had a few stoppers back then. Version 1.0 seems to fix all of that, but it depends on Godot 4.2 and we re still on the 3 series in Debian, so I ll upload this once Godot 4.2 hits at least experimental. Godot software/games is otherwise quite easy to run, it s basically just source code / data that is installed and then run via godot-runner (godot3-runner package in Debian).
BoFs
Python Team BoF
Link to the etherpad / pad archive link and video can be found on the talk page: https://debconf24.debconf.org/talks/31-python-bof/
The session ended up being extended to a second part, since all the issues didn t fit into the first session.
I was distracted by too many thing during the Python 3.12 transition (to the point where I thought that 3.11 was still new in Debian), so it was very useful listening to the retrospective of that transition.
There was a discussion whether Python 3.13 could still make it to testing in time for freeze, and it seems that there is consensus that it can, although, likely with new experimental features like disabling the global interpreter lock and the just in time compiler disabled.
I learned for the first time about the dead batteries project, PEP-0594, which removes ancient modules that have mostly been superseded, from the Python standard library.
There was some talk about the process for changing team policy, and a policy discussion on whether we should require autopkgtests as a SHOULD or a MUST for migration to testing. As with many things, the devil is in the details and in my opinion you could go either way and achieve a similar result (the original MUST proposal allowed exceptions which imho made it the same as the SHOULD proposal).
There s an idea to do some ongoing remote sprints, like having co-ordinated days for bug squashing / working on stuff together. This is a nice idea and probably a good way to energise the team and also to gain some interest from potential newcomers.
Louis-Philipe V ronneau was added as a new team admin and there was some discussion on various Sphinx issues and which Lintian tags might be needed for Python 3.13. If you want to know more, you probably have to watch the videos / read the notes :)
Debian.net BoF
Link to the etherpad / pad archive link can be found on the talk page: https://debconf24.debconf.org/talks/37-debiannet-team-bof
Debian Developers can set up services on subdomains on debian.net, but a big problem we ve had before was that developers were on their own for hosting those services. This meant that they either hosted it on their DSL/fiber connection at home, paid for the hosting themselves, or hosted it at different services which became an accounting nightmare to claim back the used funds. So, a few of us started the debian.net hosting project (sometimes we just call it debian.net, this is probably a bit of a bug) so that Debian has accounts with cloud providers, and as admins we can create instances there that gets billed directly to Debian.
We had an initial rush of services, but requests have slowed down since (not really a bad thing, we don t want lots of spurious requests). Last year we did a census, to check which of the instances were still used, whether they received system updates and to ask whether they are performing backups. It went well and some issues were found along the way, so we ll be doing that again.
We also gained two potential volunteers to help run things, which is great.
Debian Social BoF
Link to the etherpad / pad archive link can be found on the talk page: https://debconf24.debconf.org/talks/34-debiansocial-bof
We discussed the services we run, you can view the current state of things at: https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianSocial
Pleroma has shown some cracks over the last year or so, and there are some forks that seem promising. At the same time, it might be worth while considering Mastodon too. So we ll do some comparison of features and maintenance and find a way forward. At the time when Pleroma was installed, it was way ahead in terms of moderation features.
Pixelfed is doing well and chugging along nicely, we should probably promote it more.
Peertube is working well, although we learned that we still don t have all the recent DebConf videos on there. A bunch of other issues should be fixed once we move it to a new machine that we plan to set up.
We re removing writefreely and plume. Nice concepts, but it didn t get much traction yet, and no one who signed up for these actually used it, which is fine, some experimentation with services is good and sometimes they prove to be very popular and other times not.
The WordPress multisite instance has some mild use, otherwise haven t had any issues.
Matrix ended up to be much, much bigger than we thought, both in usage and in its requirements. It s very stateful and remembers discussions for as long as you let it, so it s Postgres database is continuously expanding, this will also be a lot easier to manage once we have this on the new host.
Jitsi is also quite popular, but it could probably be on jitsi.debian.net instead (we created this on debian.social during the initial height of COVID-19 where we didn t have the debian.net hosting yet), although in practice it doesn t really matter where it lives.
Most of our current challenges will be solved by moving everything to a new big machine that has a few public IPs available for some VMs, so we ll be doing that shortly.
Debian Foundation Discussion BoF
This was some brainstorming about the future structure of Debian, and what steps might be needed to get there. It s way too big a problem to take on in a BoF, but we made some progress in figuring out some smaller pieces of the larger puzzle. The DPL is going to get in touch with some legal advisors and our trusted organisations so that we can aim to formalise our relationships a bit more by the time it s DebConf again.
I also introduced my intention to join the Debian Partners delegation. When I was DPL, I enjoyed talking with external organisations who wanted to help Debian, but helping external organisations help Debian turned out to be too much additional load on the usual DPL roles, so I m pursuing this with the Debian Partners team, more on that some other time.
This session wasn t recorded, but if you feel like you missed something, don t worry, all intentions will be communicated and discussed with project members before anything moves forward. There was a strong agreement in the room though that we should push forward on this, and not reach another DebConf where we didn t make progress on formalising Debian s structure more.
Social
Conference Dinner
Conference Dinner Photo from Santiago
The conference dinner took place in the university gymnasium. I hope not many people do sports there in the summer, because it got HOT. There was also some interesting observations on the thermodynamics of the attempted cooling solutions, which was amusing. On the plus side, the food was great, the company was good, and the speeches were kept to a minimum, so it was a great conference dinner, even though it was probably cut a bit short due to the heat.
Cheese and Wine
Cheese and Wine happened on 1 August, which happens to be the date I became a DD at DebConf17 in Montr al seven years before, so this was a nice accidental celebration of my Debiversary :)
Since I m running out of time, I ll add some more photos to this post some time after publishing it :P
Group Photo
As per DebConf tradition, Aigars took the group photo. You can find the high resolution version on Debian s GitLab instance.
Debian annual conference Debconf 24, Busan, South Korea Photography: Aigars Mahinovs aigarius@debian.org License: CC-BYv3+ or GPLv2+
Talking
Ah yes, talking to people is a big part of DebConf, but I didn t keep track of it very well.
I mostly listened to Alper a bit about his ideas for his talk about debian installer.
I talked to Rhonda a bit about ActivityPub and MQTT and whether they could be useful for publicising Debian activity.
Listened to Gunnar and Julian have a discussion about GPG and APT which was interesting.
We had the usual continuous keysigning party. Besides it s intended function, this is always a good ice breaker and a way to for shy people to meet other shy people.
and many other fly-by discussions.
Stuff that didn t happen this DebConf
loo.py A simple Python script that could eventually replace the obs-advanced-scene-switcher sequencer in OBS. It would also be extremely useful if we d ever replace OBS for loopy. I was hoping to have some time to hack on this, and try to recreate the current loopy in loo.py, but didn t have the time.
toetally This year videoteam had to scramble to get a bunch of resistors to assemble some tally light. Even when assembled, they were a bit troublesome. It would ve been nice to hack on toetally and get something ready for testing, but it mostly relies on having something like a rasbperry pi zero with an attached screen in order to work on further. I ll try to have something ready for the next mini conf though.
extrepo on debian live I think we should have extrepo installed by default on desktop systems, I meant to start a discussion on this, but perhaps it s just time I go ahead and do it and announce it.
Live stream to peertube server It would ve been nice to live stream DebConf to PeerTube, but the dependency tree to get this going got a bit too huge. Following our plans discussed in the Debian Social BoF, we should have this safely ready before the next MiniDebConf and should be able to test it there.
Desktop Egg there was this idea to get a stand-in theme for Debian testing/unstable until the artwork for the next release is finalized (Debian bug: #1038660), I have an idea that I meant to implement months ago, but too many things got in the way. It s based on Juliette Taka s Homeworld theme, and basically transforms the homeworld into an egg. Get it? Something that hasn t hatched yet? I also only recently noticed that we never used the actualhomeworld graphics (featuring the world image) in the final bullseye release. lol.
So, another DebConf and another new plush animal. Last but not least, thanks to PKNU for being such a generous and fantastic host to us! See you again at DebConf25 in Brest, France next year!
One of our newest servers, with a hefty 256GB of RAM, recently began killing
processes via the oomkiller.
According to free, only half of the RAM was in use (125GB). About 4GB was
free, with the remainer used by the file cache.
I m used to seeing unexpected free RAM numbers like this and have been
assured that the kernel is simply not wasting RAM. If it s not needed, use it
to cache files to save on disk I/O. That make sense.
However why is the oomkiller being called instead of flushing the file
cache?
I came up with all kinds of amazing and wrong theories: maybe the RAM is
fragmented (is that even a thing?!?), maybe there is a spike in RAM and the
kernel can t flush the cache quickly enough (I really don t think that s a
thing). Maybe our kvm-manager has a weird bug (nope, but that didn t stop me
from opening a spurious bug
report).
I learned lots of cool things, like the oomkiller report includes a
table of the memory in use by each process (via the rss column) - and you
have to muliply that number by 4096 because it s in 4K pages.
That s how I discovered that the oomkiller was killing off processes with only
half the memory in use.
I also learned that lsof sometimes lists the same open file multiple times,
which made me think a bunch of files were being opened repeatedly causing a
memory problem, but really it amounted to nothing.
That last thing I learned, courtesy of an askubuntu
post is that
the /dev filesystem is allocated by default exactly half the RAM on the
system. What a coincidence! That is exactly how much RAM is useable on the
server.
And, on the server in question, that filesystem is full. What?!? Normally, that
filesystem should be using 0 bytes because it s not a real filesystem. But in
our case a process created a 127GB file there - it was only stopped because the
file system filled up.
Most banks are behind CDNs and DDoS mitigation providers nowadays, though they still hold their own IP space. Was interested in this, so compiled a list from BGP.Tools and Hurricane Electric BGP Toolkit.
Thankfully no tragedies to report this week! I thank each and everyone of you that has donated to my car fund. I still have a ways to go and could use some more help so that we can go to the funeral. https://gofund.me/033eb25d I am between contracts and work packages, so all of my work is currently for free. Thanks for your consideration.
Another very busy week getting qt6 updates in Debian, Kubuntu, and KDE snaps.
Kubuntu:
Merkuro and Neochat SRUs have made progress.
See Debian for the qt6 Plasma / applications work.
Debian:
qtmpv in NEW
arianna in NEW
kamera experimental
libkdegames experimental
kdenetwork-filesharing experimental
xwaylandvideobridge NEW
futuresql NEW
kpat WIP
Tokodon Done, but needs qtmpv to pass NEW
Gwenview WIP needs kamera, kio-extras
kio-extras Blocked on kdsoap in which the maintainer is not responding to bug reports or emails. Will likely fork in Kubuntu as our freeze quickly approaches.
KDE Snaps:
Updated QT to 6.7.2 which required a rebuild of all our snaps. Also found an issue with mismatched ffmpeg libraries, we have to bundle them for now until versioning issues are resolved.
Made new theme snaps for KDE breeze: gtk-theme-breeze, icon-theme-breeze so if you use the plasma theme breeze please install these and run
for PLUG in $(snap connections grep gtk-common-themes:icon-themes awk ' print $2 '); do sudo snap connect $ PLUG icon-theme-breeze:icon-themes; done
for PLUG in $(snap connections grep gtk-common-themes:gtk-3-themes awk ' print $2 '); do sudo snap connect $ PLUG gtk-theme-breeze:gtk-3-themes; done
for PLUG in $(snap connections grep gtk-common-themes:gtk-2-themes awk ' print $2 '); do sudo snap connect $ PLUG gtk-theme-breeze:gtk-2-themes; done
This should resolve most theming issues. We are still waiting for kdeglobals to be merged in snapd to fix colorscheme issues, it is set for next release. I am still working on qt6 themes and working out how to implement them in snaps as they are more complex than gtk themes with shared libraries and file structures.
Please note: Please help test the edge snaps so I can promote them to stable.
Dear Debian community,
this are my bits from DPL written at my last day at another great
DebConf.
DebConf attendance
At the beginning of July, there was some discussion with the bursary and
content team about sponsoring attendees. The discussion continued at
DebConf.
I do not have much experience with these discussions. My summary is that
while there is an honest attempt to be fair to everyone, it did not seem to
work for all, and some critical points for future discussion remained. In
any case, I'm thankful to the bursary team for doing such a time-draining
and tedious job.
Popular packages not yet on Salsa at all
Otto Kek l inen did some interesting investigation about
Popular packages not yet on Salsa at all.
I think I might provide some more up to date list soon by some UDD query
which considers more recent uploads than the trends data soon. For
instance wget was meanwhile moved to Salsa (thanks to No l K the for this).
Keep on contacting more teams
I kept on contacting teams in July. Despite I managed to contact way
less teams than I was hoping I was able to present some conclusions in
the Debian Teams exchange BoF and Slide 16/23 of my
Bits from the DPL talk.
I intend to do further contacts next months.
Nominating Jeremy B cha for GNOME Advisory Board
I've nominated Jeremy B cha to
GNOME Advisory Board.
Jeremy has volunteered to represent Debian at
GUADEC in Denver.
DebCamp / DebConf
I attended DebCamp starting from 22 July evening and had a lot of fun with
other attendees. As always DebConf is some important event nearly
every year for me. I enjoyed Korean food, Korean bath, nature at the
costline and other things.
I had a small event without video coverage
Creating web galleries including maps from a geo-tagged photo collection.
At least two attendees of this workshop confirmed success in creating their
own web galleries.
I used DebCamp and DebConf for several discussions. My main focus was on
discussions with FTP master team members Luke Faraone, Sean Whitton, and
Utkarsh Gupta. I'm really happy that the four of us absolutely agree on
some proposed changes to the structure of the FTP master team, as well
as changes that might be fruitful for the work of the FTP master team
itself and for Debian developers regarding the processing of new
packages.
My explicit thanks go to Luke Faraone, who gave a great introduction to
FTP master work in their
BoF.
It was very instructive for the attending developers to understand how the
FTP master team checks licenses and copyright and what workflow is used
for accepting new packages.
In the first days of DebConf, I talked to representatives of DebConf
platinum sponsor WindRiver, who announced the derivative
eLxr. I warmly welcome
this new derivative and look forward to some great cooperation. I also
talked to the representative of our gold sponsor, Microsoft.
My first own event was the
Debian Med BoF.
I'd like to repeat that it might not only be interesting for people
working in medicine and microbiology but always contains some hints how
to work together in a team.
As said above I was trying to summarise some first results of my team
contacts and got some further input from other teams in the
Debian Teams exchange BoF.
Finally, I had my
Bits from DPL talk.
I received positive responses from attendees as well as from remote
participants, which makes me quite happy. For those who were not able to
join the events on-site or remotely, the videos of all events will be
available on the DebConf site soon. I'd like to repeat the explicit need
for some volunteers to join the Lintian team. I'd also like to point out
the "Tiny tasks" initiative I'd like to start (see below).
BTW, if someone might happen to solve my quiz for the background images
there is a
summary page
in my slides which might help to assign every slide to some DebConf. I
could assume that if you pool your knowledge you can solve more than just
the simple ones. Just let me know if you have some solution. You can add
numbers to the rows and letters to the columns and send me:
2000/2001: Uv + Wx 2002: not attended 2003: Yz 2004: not attended 2005: 2006: not attended 2007: ... 2024: A1
This list provides some additional information for DebConfs I did not
attend and when no video stream was available. It also reminds you about
the one I uncovered this year and that I used two images from 2001 since
I did not have one from 2000. Have fun reassembling good memories.
Tiny tasks: Bug of the day
As I mentioned in my
Bits from DPL talk,
I'd like to start a "Tiny tasks" effort within Debian. The first type of
tasks will be the
Bug of the day
initiative. For those who would like to join, please join the corresponding
Matrix channel. I'm
curious to see how this might work out and am eager to gain some initial
experiences with newcomers. I won't be available until next Monday, as I'll
start traveling soon and have a family event (which is why I need to leave
DebConf today after the formal dinner).
Kind regards from DebConf in Busan
Andreas.
Debconf 24 is coming to a close in Busan, South Korea this year.
I thought that last year in India was hot. This year somehow managed to beat that. With 35C and high
humidity the 55 km that I managed to walk between the two conference buildings have really put the
pressure on. Thankfully the air conditioning in the talk rooms has been great and fresh water has been
plentiful. And the korean food has been excellent and very energetic.
Today I will share with you the main group photo:
You can also see it in:
The rest of my photos from the event will be published next week. That will give me a bit more time to process
them correctly and also give all of you a chance to see these pictures with fresh eyes and stir up new memories from
the event.
This is one of those posts that s more for my own reference than likely to be helpful for others. If you re unlucky it ll have some useful tips for you. If I m lucky then I ll get a bunch of folk pointing out some optimisations.
First, what I m trying to achieve. I want a virtual machine environment where I can manually do tests on random kernels, and also various TPM related experiments. So I don t want something as fixed as a libvirt setup. I d like the following:
It to be fairly lightweight, so I can run it on a laptop while usefully doing other things
I need a TPM 2.0 device to appear to the guest OS, but it doesn t need to be a real TPM
Block device discard should work, so I can back it with a qcow2 image and use fstrim to keep the actual on disk size small, without constraining my potential for file system expansion should I need it
I ve no need for graphics, in fact a serial console would be better as it eases copy & paste, especially when I screw up kernel changes
That turns out to be possible, but it took a bunch of trial and error to get there. So I m writing it down. I generally do this on a Fedora based host system (FC40 at present, but this all worked with FC38 + FC39 too), and I run Debian 12 (bookworm) as the guest. At present I m using qemu 8.2.2 and swtpm 0.9.0, both from the FC40 packages.
One other issue I spent too long tracking down is that the version of grub 2.06 in bookworm does not manage to pass the TPMEventLog through to the guest kernel properly. The events get measured and the PCRs updated just fine, but /sys/kernel/security/tpm0/binary_bios_measurements doesn t even get created. Using either grub 2.06 from FC40, or the 2.12 backport in bookworm-backports, makes this work just fine.
Anyway, for reference, the following is the script I use to start the swtpm, and then qemu. The debugcon line can be dropped if you re not interested in OVMF debug logging. This needs the guest OS to be configured up for a serial console, but avoids the overhead of graphics emulation.
As I said at the start, I m open to any hints about other options I should be passing; as long as I get acceptable performance in the guest I care more about reducing host load than optimising for the guest.
Review: The Book That Wouldn't Burn, by Mark Lawrence
Series:
Library Trilogy #1
Publisher:
Ace
Copyright:
2023
ISBN:
0-593-43793-4
Format:
Kindle
Pages:
561
The Book That Wouldn't Burn is apparently high fantasy, but of the
crunchy sort that could easily instead be science fiction. It is the
first of a trilogy.
Livira is a young girl, named after a weed, who lives in a tiny settlement
in the Dust. She is the sort of endlessly curious and irrepressible girl
who can be more annoying than delightful to adults who are barely keeping
everyone alive. Her settlement is not the sort of place that's large
enough to have a name; only their well keeps them alive in the desert and
the ever-present dust. There is a city somewhere relatively near, which
Livira dreams of seeing, but people from the settlement don't go there.
When someone is spotted on the horizon approaching the settlement, it's
the first time Livira has ever seen a stranger. It's also not a good
sign. There's only one reason for someone to seek them out in the Dust:
to take. Livira and the other children are, in short order, prisoners of
the humanoid dog-like sabbers, being dragged off to an unknown fate.
Evar lives in the library and has for his entire life. Specifically, he
lives in a square room two miles to a side, with a ceiling so high that it
may as well be a stone sky. He lived there with his family before he was
lost in the Mechanism. Years later, the Mechanism spit him out alongside
four other similarly-lost kids, all from the same library in different
times. None of them had apparently aged, but everyone else was dead.
Now, years later, they live a strange and claustrophobic life with way too
much social contact between way too few people.
Evar's siblings, as he considers them, were each in the Mechanism with a
book. During their years in the Mechanism they absorbed that book until
it became their focus and to some extent their personality. His brothers
are an assassin, a psychologist, and a historian. His sister, the last to
enter the Mechanism and a refugee from the sabber attack that killed
everyone else, is a warrior. Evar... well, presumably he had a book,
since that's how the Mechanism works. But he can't remember anything
about it except the feeling that there was a woman.
Evar lives in a library in the sense that it's a room full of books, but
those books are not on shelves. They're stacked in piles and massive
columns, with no organizational system that any of them could discern.
There are four doors, all of which are closed and apparently impenetrable.
In front of one of them is a hundred yards of char and burned book
remnants, but that door is just as impenetrable as the others. There is a
pool in the center of the room, crops surrounding it, and two creatures
they call the Soldier and the Assistant. That is the entirety of Evar's
world.
As you might guess from the title, this book is about a library. Evar's
perspective of the library is quite odd and unexplained until well into
the book, and Livira's discovery of the library and subsequent
explorations are central to her story, so I'm going to avoid going into
too many details about its exact nature. What I will say is that I have
read a lot of fantasy novels that are based around a library, but I don't
think I've ever read one that was this satisfying.
I think the world of The Book That Wouldn't Burn is fantasy, in
that there are fundamental aspects of this world that don't seem amenable
to an explanation consistent with our laws of physics. It is, however,
the type of fantasy with discoverable rules. Even better, it's the type
of fantasy where discovering the rules is central to the story, for both
the characters and the readers, and the rules are worth the effort. This
is a world-building tour de force: one of the most engrossing and
deeply satisfying slow revelations that I have read in a long time. This
book is well over 500 pages, the plot never flags, new bits of
understanding were still slotting into place in the last chapter, and
there are lots of things I am desperately curious about that Lawrence left
for the rest of the series. If you like puzzling out the history and
rules of an invented world and you have anything close to my taste in
characters and setting, you are going to love this book.
(Also, there is at least one C.S. Lewis homage that I will not spoil but
that I thought was beautifully done and delightfully elaborated, and I am
fairly sure there is a conversation happening between this book and Philip
Pullman's His Dark Materials series that I didn't quite untangle
but that I am intrigued by.)
I do need to offer a disclaimer: Livira is precisely the type of character
I love reading about. She's stubborn, curious, courageous, persistent,
egalitarian, insatiable, and extremely sharp. I have a particular soft
spot for exactly this protagonist, so adjust the weight of my opinion
accordingly. But Lawrence also makes excellent use of her as a spotlight
to illuminate the world-building. More than anything else in the world,
Livira wants to understand, and there is so much here to
understand.
There is an explanation for nearly everything in this book, and those
explanations usually both make sense and prompt more questions. This is
such a tricky balance for the writer to pull off! A lot of world-building
of this sort fails either by having the explanations not live up to the
mysteries or by tying everything together so neatly that the stakes of the
world collapse into a puzzle box. Lawrence avoids both failures. This
world made sense to me but remained sufficiently messy to feel like humans
were living in it. I also thought the pacing and timing were impeccable:
I figured things out at roughly the same pace as the characters, and
several twists and turns caught me entirely by surprise.
I do have one minor complaint and one caveat. The minor complaint is that
I thought one critical aspect of the ending was a little bit too neat and
closed. It was the one time in the book where I thought Lawrence
simplified his plot structure rather than complicated it, and I didn't
like the effect it had on the character dynamics. There is, thankfully,
the promise of significant new complications in the next book.
The caveat is a bit harder to put my finger on, but a comparison to Alaya
Dawn Johnson's The Library of Broken
Worlds might help. That book was also about a library, featured a
protagonist thrown into the deep end of complex world-building, and put
discovery of the history and rules at the center of the story. I found
the rules structure of The Book That Wouldn't Burn more
satisfyingly complicated and layered, in a way that made puzzle pieces fit
together in my head in a thoroughly enjoyable way. But Johnson's book is
about very large questions of identity, history, sacrifice, and pain, and
it's full of murky ambiguity and emotions that are only approached via
metaphor and symbolism. Lawrence's book is far more accessible, but the
emotional themes are shallower and more straightforward. There is a
satisfying emotional through-line, and there are some larger issues at
stake, but it won't challenge your sense of morality and justice the way
that The Library of Broken Worlds might. I think which of those
books one finds better will depend on what mood you're in and what reading
experience you're looking for.
Personally, I was looking for a scrappy, indomitable character who would
channel her anger into overcoming every obstacle in the way of thoroughly
understanding her world, and that's exactly what I got. This was my most
enjoyable reading experience of the year to date and the best book I've
read since Some Desperate Glory.
Fantastic stuff, highly recommended.
Followed by The Book That Broke the World, and the ending is a bit
of a cliffhanger so you may want to have that on hand. Be warned that the
third book in the series won't be published until 2025.
Rating: 9 out of 10
The Combatants
In the red corner, weighing in at nah, I m not going to do that schtick.
The plaintiff in the case is Alegeus Technologies, LLC, a Delaware Corporation that, according to their filings, is a leading provider of a business-tobusiness, white-label funding and payment platform for healthcare carriers and third-party administrators to administer consumer-directed employee benefit programs .
Not being subject to the US bonkers health care system, I have only a passing familiarity with the sorts of things they do, but presumably it involves moving a lot of money around, which is sometimes important.
The defendant is DigiCert, a CA which, based on analysis I ve done previously, is the second-largest issuer of WebPKI certificates by volume.
The History
According to a recently opened Mozilla CA bug, DigiCert found an issue in their domain control validation workflow, that meant it may have been possible for a miscreant to have certificates issued to them that they weren t legitimately entitled to.
Given that validating domain names is basically the YOU HAD ONE JOB! of a CA, this is a big deal.
The CA/Browser Forum Baseline Requirements (BRs) (which all CAs are required to adhere to, by virtue of their being included in various browser and OS trust stores), say that revocation is required within 24 hours when [t]he CA obtains evidence that the validation of domain authorization or control for any Fully Qualified Domain Name or IP address in the Certificate should not be relied upon (section 4.9.1.1, point 5).
DigiCert appears to have at least tried to do the right thing, by opening the above Mozilla bug giving some details of the problem, and notifying their customers that their certificates were going to be revoked.
One may quibble about how fast they re doing it, but they re giving it a decent shot, at least.
A complicating factor in all this is that, only a touch over a month ago, Google Chrome announced the removal of another CA, Entrust, from its own trust store program, citing a pattern of compliance failures, unmet improvement commitments, and the absence of tangible, measurable progress in response to publicly disclosed incident reports .
Many of these compliance failures were failures to revoke certificates in a timely manner.
One imagines that DigiCert would not like to gain a reputation for tardy revocation, particularly at the moment.
The Legal Action
Now we come to Alegeus Technologies.
They ve opened a civil case whose first action is to request the issuance of a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) that prevents DigiCert from revoking certificates issued to Alegeus (which the court has issued).
This is a big deal, because TROs are legal instruments that, if not obeyed, constitute contempt of court (or something similar) and courts do not like people who disregard their instructions.
That means that, in the short term, those certificates aren t getting revoked, despite the requirement imposed by root stores on DigiCert that the certificates must be revoked.
DigiCert is in a real rock / hard place situation here: revoke and get punished by the courts, or don t revoke and potentially (though almost certainly not, in the circumstances) face removal from trust stores (which would kill, or at least massively hurt, their business).
The reasons that Alegeus gives for requesting the restraining order is that [t]o
Reissue and Reinstall the Security Certificates, Alegeus must work with and
coordinate with its Clients, who are required to take steps to rectify the
certificates. Alegeus has hundreds of such Clients. Alegeus is generally
required by contract to give its clients much longer than 24 hours notice
before executing such a change regarding certification.
In the filing, Alegeus does acknowledge that DigiCert is a voluntary member of the Certification Authority Browser Forum (CABF), which has bylaws stating that certificates with an issue in their domain validation must be revoked within 24 hours.
This is a misstatement of the facts, though.
It is the BRs, not the CABF bylaws, that require revocation, and the BRs apply to all CAs that wish to be included in browser and OS trust stores, not just those that are members of the CABF.
In any event, given that Alegeus was aware that DigiCert is required to revoke certificates within 24 hours, one wonders why Alegeus went ahead and signed agreements with their customers that required a lengthy notice period before changing certificates.
What complicates the situation is that there is apparently a Master Services Agreement (MSA) that states that it constitutes the entire agreement between the parties and that MSA doesn t mention certificate revocation anywhere relevant.
That means that it s not quite so cut-and-dried that DigiCert does, in fact, have the right to revoke those certificates.
I d expect a lot of update to your Master Services Agreement emails to be going out from DigiCert (and other CAs) in the near future to clarify this point.
Not being a lawyer, I can t imagine which way this case might go, but there s one thing we can be sure of: some lawyers are going to able to afford that trip to a tropical paradise this year.
The Security Issues
The requirement for revocation within 24 hours is an important security control in the WebPKI ecosystem.
If a certificate is misissued to a malicious party, or is otherwise compromised, it needs to be marked as untrustworthy as soon as possible.
While revocation is far from perfect, it is the best tool we have.
In this court filing, Alegeus has claimed that they are unable to switch certificates with less than 24 hours notice (due to contractual SLAs ).
This is a pretty big problem, because there are lots of reasons why a certificate might need to be switched out Very Quickly.
As a practical example, someone with access to the private key for your SSL certificate might decide to use it in a blog post.
Letting that sort of problem linger for an extended period of time might end up being a Pretty Big Problem of its own.
An organisation that cannot respond within hours to a compromised certificate is playing chicken with their security.
The Takeaways
Contractual obligations that require you to notify anyone else of a certificate (or private key) changing are bonkers, and completely antithetical to the needs of the WebPKI.
If you have to have them, you re going to want to start transitioning to a private PKI, wherein you can do whatever you darn well please with revocation (or not).
As these sorts of problems keep happening, trust stores (and hence CAs) are going to crack down on this sort of thing, so you may as well move sooner rather than later.
If you are an organisation that uses WebPKI certificates, you ve got to be able to deal with any kind of certificate revocation event within hours, not days.
This basically boils down to automated issuance and lifecycle management, because having someone manually request and install certificates is terrible on many levels.
There isn t currently a completed standard for notifying subscribers if their certificates need premature renewal (say, due to needing to be revoked), but the ACME Renewal Information Extension is currently being developed to fill that need.
Ask your CA if they re tracking this standards development, and when they intend to have the extension available for use.
(Pro-tip: if they say we ll start doing development when the RFC is published , run for the hills; that s not how responsible organisations work on the Internet).
The Givings
If you ve found this helpful, consider shouting me a refreshing beverage.
Reading through legal filings is thirsty work!
With the work that has been done in the debian-installer/netcfg merge-proposal !9 it is possible to install a standard Debian system, using the normal Debian-Installer (d-i) mini.iso images, that will come pre-installed with Netplan and all network configuration structured in /etc/netplan/.
In this write-up, I d like to run you through a list of commands for experiencing the Netplan enabled installation process first-hand. Let s start with preparing a working directory and installing the software dependencies for our virtualized Debian system:
Next we ll prepare a VM, by copying the EFI firmware files, preparing some persistent EFIVARs file, to boot from FS0:\EFI\debian\grubx64.efi, and create a virtual disk for our machine:
Finally, let s launch the debian-installer using a preseed.cfg file, that will automatically install Netplan (netplan-generator) for us in the target system. A minimal preseed file could look like this:
For this demo, we re installing the full netplan.io package (incl. the interactive Python CLI), as well as the netplan-generator package and systemd-resolved, to show the full Netplan experience. You can choose the preseed file from a set of different variants to test the different configurations:
We re using the linux kernel and initrd.gz here to be able to pass the preseed URL as a parameter to the kernel s cmdline directly. Launching this VM should bring up the official debian-installer in its netboot/gtk form:
Now you can click through the normal Debian-Installer process, using mostly default settings. Optionally, you could play around with the networking settings, to see how those get translated to /etc/netplan/ in the target system.
After you confirmed your partitioning changes, the base system gets installed. I suggest not to select any additional components, like desktop environments, to speed up the process.
During the final step of the installation (finish-install.d/55netcfg-copy-config) d-i will detect that Netplan was installed in the target system (due to the preseed file provided) and opt to write its network configuration to /etc/netplan/ instead of /etc/network/interfaces or /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/.
Done! After the installation finished, you can reboot into your virgin Debian Sid/Trixie system.
To do that, quit the current Qemu process, by pressing Ctrl+C and make sure to copy over the EFIVARS.fd file that was modified by grub during the installation, so Qemu can find the new system. Then reboot into the new system, not using the mini.iso image any more:
Finally, you can play around with your Netplan enabled Debian system! As you will find, /etc/network/interfaces exists but is empty, it could still be used (optionally/additionally). Netplan was configured in /etc/netplan/ according to the settings given during the d-i installation process.
In our case, we also installed the Netplan CLI, so we can play around with some of its features, like netplan status:
Thank you for following along the Netplan enabled Debian installation process and happy hacking! If you want to learn more, find us at GitHub:netplan.
This week our family suffered another loss with my brother in-law. We will miss him dearly. On our way down to Phoenix to console our nephew that just lost his dad our car blew up. Last week we were in a roll over accident that totaled our truck and left me with a broken arm. We are now in great need of a new vehicle. Please consider donating to this fund: https://gofund.me/033eb25d . Kubuntu is out of money and I am between work packages with the project . We are 50 miles away from the closest town for supplies, essentials such as water requires a vehicle.
I have had bad years before ( covid ) in which I lost my beloved job at Blue Systems. I made a vow to myself to never let my personal life affect my work again. I have so far kept that promise to myself and without further ado I present to you my work.
Kubuntu:
Many SRUs awaiting verification stage including the massive apparmor policy bug.
sddm fix for the black screen on second boot has passed verification and should make .1 release.
See Debian for the qt6 Plasma / applications work.
Debian:
qtmpv in NEW
arianna in NEW
kamera uploading today
kcharselect Experimental
Tokodon Done, but needs qtmpv to pass NEW
Gwenview WIP needs kamera, kio-extras
kio-extras WIP
KDE Snaps:
Please note: for the most part the Qt6 snaps are in edge except the few in the project that are heavily tested. Please help test the edge snaps so I can promote them.
Elisa
Okular
Konsole ( please note this is a confined terminal for the project and not very useful except to ssh to the host system )
Kwrite
Gwenview
Kate ( classic )
Gcompris
Alligator
Ark
Blinken
Bomber
Bovo
Calindori
Digikam
Dragon
Falkon
Filelight
WIP Snaps or MR s made
KSpacedual
Ksquares
KSudoku
KTuberling
Kubrick
lskat
Palapeli
Kajongg
Kalzium
Kanagram
Kapman
Katomic
KBlackBox
KBlocks
KBounce
KBreakOut
KBruch
Please note that 95% of the snaps are free-time work. The project covers 5. I am going as fast as I can between Kubuntu/Debian and the project commitments. Not to mention I have only one arm! My GSOC student is also helping which you can read all about here: https://soumyadghosh.github.io/website/interns/gsoc-2024/gsoc-week-3-week-7/
There is still much work to do in Kubuntu to be Plasma 6 ready for Oracular and they are out of funds. I will still continue my work regardless, but please consider donating until we can procure a consistent flow of funding : https://kubuntu.org/donate/
Thank you for reading and have a blessed day!
por Andrew Gon alves
O Debian Day em Santa Maria - RS 2024
foi realizado ap s 5 anos de hiato, foi feito durante a manh do dia 16/08/2024
no Sal o Azul da Universidade Franciscana (UFN) com
apoio da comunidade Debian e do Laborat rio de Pr ticas da Computa o da UFN.
O evento contou com alunos de todos os semestres dos cursos de Ci ncia da
Computa o, Jogos Digitais e Sistemas de Informa o, fizemos um coffee break
onde tivemos a oportunidade de conversar com os participantes.
Cerca de 60 alunos prestigiaram uma palestra de introdu o ao Software Livre e
de C digo Aberto, Linux e foram introduzidos ao projeto Debian, tanto sobre a
filosofia do projeto, at como ele acontece na pr tica e oportunidades que se
abriram para participantes do projeto por fazerem parte do Debian.
Ap s a palestra foi feita uma demonstra o de empacotamento pelo DD local
Francisco Vilmar, que demonstrou na pr tica como funciona o empacotamento de
software no Debian.
Gostaria de agradecer a todas as pessoas que nos ajudaram:
Kudos to everybody involved! 
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by 
To ease my nerves, I struck up a conversation with a man seated nearby who was
also traveling to Abu Dhabi for work. He provided helpful information about
safety and transportation in Abu Dhabi, which reassured me. With the boarding
process complete and my anxiety somewhat eased. I found my window seat on the
flight and settled in, excited for the journey ahead. Next to me was a young
man from Ranchi(Zarkhand, India), heading to Abu Dhabi for work at a mining
factory. We had an engaging conversation about work culture in Abu Dhabi and
recruitment from India.
Upon arriving in Abu Dhabi, I completed my transit, collected my luggage, and
began finding my way to the hotel 
I reached Tirana, Albania after a six hours flight, feeling exhausted and I was
suffering from a headache. The air pressure had blocked my ears, and jet lag
added to my fatigue. After collecting my checked luggage, I headed to the first
ATM machine at the airport. Struggling to insert my card, I asked a nearby
gentleman for help. He tried his best, but my card got stuck inside the
machine. Panic set in as I worried about how I would survive without money.
Taking a deep breath, I found an airport employee and explained the situation.
The gentleman stayed with me, offering support and repeatedly apologizing for
his mistake. However, it wasn t his fault, the ATM was out of order, which I
hadn t noticed. My focus was solely on retrieving my ATM card. The airport
employee worked diligently, using a hairpin to carefully extract my card.
Finally, the card was freed, and I felt an immense sense of relief, grateful
for the help of these kind strangers. I used another ATM, successfully withdrew
money, and then went to an airport mobile SIM shop to buy a new SIM card for
local internet and connectivity.
I found my top bunk bed, only to realize I had booked a mixed-gender
dormitory. This detail had completely escaped my notice during the booking
process. I felt unsure about how to handle the situation. Coincidentally,
my experience mirrored what Kangana faced in the movie Queen .
Feeling acidic due to an empty stomach and the exhaustion of heavy
traveling, I wasn t up to cooking in the hostel s kitchen.
I asked the front desk about the nearest restaurant. It was nearly 9:30 PM,
and the streets were deserted. To avoid any mishaps like in the movie
Queen, I kept my passport securely locked in my bag, ensuring it wouldn t
be a victim of theft.
Venturing out for dinner, I felt uneasy on the quiet streets. I eventually
found a restaurant recommended by the hostel, but the menu was almost
entirely non-vegetarian. I struggled to ask about vegetarian options and was
uncertain if any dishes contained eggs, as some people consider eggs to be
vegetarian. Feeling frustrated and unsure, I left the restaurant without
eating.
I noticed a nearby grocery store that was about to close and managed to get
a few extra minutes to shop. I bought some snacks, wafers, milk, and tea
bags (though I couldn t find tea powder to make Indian-style tea). Returning
to the hostel, I made do with wafers, cookies, and milk for dinner. That day
was incredibly tough for me, I filled with exhaustion and struggle in a new
country, I was on the verge of tears .
I made a video call home before sleeping on the top bunk bed. It was a new
experience for me, sharing a room with both unknown men and women. I kept my
passport safe inside my purse and under my pillow while sleeping, staying
very conscious about its security.
I took a bus from Shkod r to the southern part of Albania, heading to
Sarand . The journey lasted about five to six hours, and I had booked a stay
at 
I m finishing typing up this blog entry hours before my last 13 hour leg back home, after I spent 2 weeks in 
Conference Dinner Photo from Santiago
Dear Debian community,
this are my bits from DPL written at my last day at another great
DebConf.
DebConf attendance
At the beginning of July, there was some discussion with the bursary and
content team about sponsoring attendees. The discussion continued at
You can also see it in:
This is one of those posts that s more for my own reference than likely to be helpful for others. If you re unlucky it ll have some useful tips for you. If I m lucky then I ll get a bunch of folk pointing out some optimisations.
First, what I m trying to achieve. I want a virtual machine environment where I can manually do tests on random kernels, and also various TPM related experiments. So I don t want something as fixed as a 
It s not often that a company is willing to make 
