Some readers might not now that Debian is in this annual process where we vote for our Leader for the following next year.
I just submitted my vote.
I think it is worth mention that this year there is very little discussion on this subject among DDs. Also, I've practically seen nobody publicly posting their votes or preferences, as it is usual (well, usually we get maybe 10 votes posted to the planet or the different lists).
It must be related to the fact that this year we have neither a candidate or quasi-candidate who raises passions for or against (as the two last years), nor there are very significant differences between the three candidates. They are all quite OK, IMHO, uncontroversial.
This years' elections will probably be the first (at least, since I was accepted in the project) where no candidate is ranked below None of the above. And that, I think, is a good sign. It might be more boring, but shows maturity ;-) And yes, it also shows off good work from our current (and active, and much loved) leader, Sam.
...And yes, I'm not posting my vote either. As things are, the platforms/rebuttals/debate did shape my vote a bit, but the main differentiator ended up being... My personal relationship and opinion towards each of them.

I’ve just finished listening to the broadcast of a radio play based on Blood, Sweat and Tea a collection of posts from by favourite blog Random Acts of Reality. Random Acts is written by “Tom Reynolds” (a pseudonym) an EMT with the London Ambulance service. I guess I enjoy reading this blog so much because it shows an insight into the lives of members of an essential but very much unappreciated occupation. Well worth adding to your daily blog intake. Direct listen again link. Playing in the browser is all garbled :-/

Are you rebasing or merging? seems to be the 64 thousand dollar question over in vcs-pkg discussions. Various people have offered their preferences, and indeed, several case studies of work flows have been presented, what is lacking is an analysis of the work-flow; an exploration of which methodology has advantages, and whether there are scenarios in which the other work flow would have been better. Oh, what are all these work flows about, you ask? Most of the issues with packaging software for distributions have a few things in common: there is a mainline or upstream source of development. There are zero or more independent lines of development or ongoing bug fixes that are to be managed. And then there is the tree from which the distribution package is to be built. All this talk about packaging software work flows is how to best manage asynchronous development upstream and in the independent lines of development, and how to create a coherent, debuggable, integrated tree from which to build the distributions package. The rebasing question goes to the heart of how to handle the independent lines of development using git; since these lines of development are based off the main line of development, and must be periodically synchronized. Here is a first look at a couple of important factors that will have bearing on that question, and packaging software for a distribution using Git in general. This is heavily geared towards git (nothing else does rebases so easily, I think), but some of the concepts should be generic. I am not considering the stacked set of quilt patches source controlled with Git in this article (I don t understand that model well enough to do an analysis) As a teaser, there is a third answer: neither. You can just add an independent line of development, and just let it sit: don t rebase, and don t merge; and in some circumstances that is a winning strategy.

In my previous satire about SCO UnixWare, some SCO people of course didn’t think it was very nice. So, I guess I need to explain more about why I wrote the “review” the way I did. But, first the comment: Obviously any human being can recognize satire. There is obvious motivation on behalf of SCO’s PR department (correct me if I am wrong on where this comment originated; I did just some basic Google lookups, and also, this is a PR tactic known as “dead agenting”) to ignore the fact that this was clearly a satirical review. I would say, “perhaps SCO doesn’t understand why it is criticized,” but I believe it is obvious that they know why people are being critical and satirical of their company and their efforts. I would like for everyone to think, for a moment, about how things could be if SCO didn’t take the litigious strategy that they have taken over the past 6 years. SCO UnixWare could have remained a successful product, and could have in reality become a major asset to the open source world. SCO could have been the good guys here, but instead they chose a path of litigation instead of innovation. In the Open Source and Free Software world, innovation is what is seen as important. Companies may be in some sense rival to each other, but when it comes down to it, everyone appreciates and respects the work that everyone else contributes to the ecosystem. When people do not contribute in a positive way, or worse, betray their peers like SCO has done, it opens them up for criticism. As I see the situation, I think that SCO’s current tactics as a company represent those of someone who is paranoid. People who are paranoid attack first, instead of defend their position. So, while I am sure this is a pointless question, I believe it must be asked anyway: “What would SCO UnixWare have been like if they did not take a litigious strategy against Linux users?” If you look at it like this, it doesn’t really matter if we’re right, or SCO is right on who has the basic cases (well, it does, but we all know how that’s going to come out anyway). Why does SCO keep pursuing a strategy of litigation when the feasibility of this strategy is at best, unknown? To some extent, I think it is now a matter of morale. After all, it’s bad if you have to admit that the strategy you have taken for the last six years, was wrong. In some ways, you could say that SCO’s current strategy is cult-like. Furthermore, if any SCO people are interested in doing an interview about this whole matter, I encourage you to comment back, and I’ll be happy to publicize SCO’s viewpoint of this. It’s only fair.

NPR has been doing an interesting series this week. They've sent out a reporter who is going all across Pennsylvania interviewing people at local food markets. He found a fish shop in Pittsburgh, a market in Lancaster, and some shops in Philadelphia. He sought out Democratic voters to ask them about their thoughts on Clinton vs. Obama.

A lot of the Pennsylvania voters were for Clinton. When asked why, most of them said that they liked Bill Clinton and his policies. A few said they liked how Hillary handled the Lewinsky affair. To me, none of that has anything to do with whether Clinton or Obama would be better for the country.

Then there was the person this morning who was criticizing Obama for not offering specifics. She said she is Jewish, and so Israel is important to her, and Obama hasn't said anything about helping along the peace process. So I went to barackobama.com, clicked Enter the Site, went to Issues, Foreign Policy, then Israel. Then I clicked on the full fact sheet, which was a full 2 pages on Israel, including far more detail than the voter said she wanted.

I often wonder about these people that say Obama doesn't have specifics. Just because each speech doesn't read off a whole lot of information doesn't mean that he doesn't have it -- it's all there on the website. I'm sure people that don't have Internet access could call the Obama campaign and get information, too. It seems Obama ought to do a better job of mentioning this fact at every possible opportunity.

Then I hear a lot of Clinton supporters saying that since Clinton has won states like Ohio in the primaries, she'd do better there in the general election. I think that is a totally facetious argument. Just because Clinton did better with Democrats doesn't mean that she'd do better in the general election. We can generally assume that the Democratic voters will vote for the Democratic nominee, whoever it is. The question is how many independents and Republicans a person can win over.

Bernie S again tipped me off that ETBsat is showing the GP Indurain on Saturday. I see they’re listing at 15:50 CET TXIRRINDULARITZA:INDURAIN SARIA “SANTUARIO DE PUY. LIZARRA” which I think might be it. Nice spot again Bernie!

/me has moved to Paris Well, this is not really an "I'm moving" post, but rather a "I've moved" post: starting from past Tuesday I'm now living in Paris. I will be working as a post-doc in the mancoosi project, which is a wonderful occasion to merge my research work with my free software enthusiasm. I've also submitted a talk proposal about mancoosi for DebConf8, ... it will be a good occasion to chat about it if you are interested. My office is in the PPS lab, which was already quite packed of Debianers, /me is just one more, happy to join the crowd! The first day of shopping in Paris forces me to post a picture on the very same lines of Enrico's "how to freak out a French person". Mine below can be titled how to freak out an inhabitant of Modena: Here you are: balsamic vinegar flavoured with figs or honey ..., tasty eh? (dedicated to gareuselesinge) PS unfortunately at home I'm still without network connectivity (unless you count poorly working, up 1 random hour per day, stolen wi-fi as connectivity), so I won't be able to work on Debian et al. a lot from home in the next few weeks.

As a Debian developer I have on occasion felt a bit out of touch with doing things with Debian and out of touch with other users. I mentioned to some folks at DebConf7 that I felt I focused too much on working on Debian and not actually connected to what the benefit of working on Debian is. Partially as a result of those feelings and partially because I thought it would be an interesting thing to do, I started to prepare a couple of simple surveys early this year. The first one went out earlier last month and I posted the second one a few days ago after far too much procrastination and running the wording by a few people - thanks to Micah for the drug boats question So, if you are a Debian user or are a new contributor (or DM/NM/AM or new DD), I would greatly appreciate hearing from you. Please respond to the survey addresses rather than my personal ones. So far I have 15 or so responses to the new contributor survey, but ideally I would have many more, so please send something in if you are getting involved in Debian development or helping others get involved. I've had about 24 responses to the user survey so far. Many of you will have heard about Debian success stories like Extremadura, Bhutan, HP, Skolelinux, Sanger and other high-profile Debian users. I'm hoping to hear about as many different uses of Debian as possible, so please keep the responses coming in. The primary audience for these surveys is the Debian development community. The results will go to the debian-devel-announce and debian-private, I also hope to have a discussion or two about them at DebConf8 in Argentina. There is no time-frame for closing the survey or releasing the results, like the Debian distribution, I release when ready PS: Please install the popularity-contest package on your machines if possible and subscribe to the packages.qa.debian.org pages for packages that you particularly care about. PPS: Please feel free to ask me questions in your responses and I will attempt to reply as time allows.

After the approval of OOXML as a standard by ISO, it seems that there are two months for appealing the decision. The European Commission, Europe’s top antitrust authority, will investigate whether OOXML, as the format is known, is “sufficiently interoperable with competitors’ products”, as well as if there have there been any irregularities or attempts to influence the debate or vote. If national ISO bodies return evidence that Microsoft attempted to influence the votes to secure acceptance of OOXML, it would strengthen the Commission’s antitrust case. According to Thomas Vinje, legal counsel for the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS), “Even if the votes were legitimately won, which I doubt, OOXML is not an open standard because it isn’t fully implemented on competing platforms, and its future shape is subject purely to Microsoft’s control”. “Granting ISO status to OOXML doesn’t begin to resolve the competition law questions the Commission is looking into”. Lets hope the European Union investigates and clarifies all this. “An appeal would have to be resolved before publication of a document as an International Standard”, said Roger Frost, spokesperson for ISO. In other words, if an appeal is filed, it’s conceivable that final publication of OOXML as a standard could be delayed. Lets hope ISO appealing process, if followed, is less irregular than the approval one. Maybe I can still recover my trust in ISO. Lest see how it goes.

Dear lazyweb, I have a question with regard to image manipulation. Given an rectangle image with a continous function on it (in my case, walking distance from a certain point), I can easily draw the contour lines of the function, i.e. for a given distance from the center mark all points that have this distance. This looks very similar to the contour lines of height map. I d like to morph this image now that all these contour lines are circles around the centers, but I don t have a good idea how to do that with a minimum amount of distorting. Any suggestions or pointers to algorithms are welcome.

Since about half a year now we have a fibre to the home connection. This means that two fiber lines terminate at a box in our living room. It is a blown fibre which means that a tube is buried to your house, after which they use air pressure to put the actual fibre from the house to the POP. There are two fibers: one for bidirectional data (IP), and one that does nothing more than carry the analog cable TV signal. We started out with only the internet facility but now have so-called triple play: phone, analog tv and internet connectivity. The results are in: I find it to be just as good or better than the previous offerings: phone from KPN, tv from Casema or internet from Surfnet. But there's nothing revolutionary. Phone and tv just provide the same service over a different medium. The internet connection is with the standard of 24 Mb/s more than fast enough for any day to day use and an upgrade to 50 Mb/s is pending. A real improvement is that the upstream speed is just as high, very useful when uploading photos, packages or the text of this blog post. One drawback is that they only provide one IP address instead of 32. Also, the service provider (XMSnet) does seem to be a bit stuck in the late nineties with an unfriendly help desk telling you that your situation is impossible , and bad billing, There are plans however to open up the line to other providers in the future. So for now it's just a convenience bundling of services, but nothing really ground breaking. Let's see what the future brings.

For a long time I wanted to play with IPv6, but I never liked any of the tunnels I saw. This evening I started wondering if my Cisco 837 ADSL router cannot handle some form of tunnel.

A short time later and:

router#ping ipv6.google.com
Translating "ipv6.google.com"...domain server (195.238.2.21) [OK]

Type escape sequence to abort.
Sending 5, 100-byte ICMP Echos to 2001:4860:0:1001::68, timeout is 2 seconds:
!!!!!
Success rate is 100 percent (5/5), round-trip min/avg/max = 276/278/284 ms

How to do it: I configured a 6to4 tunnel on the router:

ipv6 unicast-routing
ipv6 cef
! enable ipv6
ipv6 inspect name MyIPv6Inspection tcp
ipv6 inspect name MyIPv6Inspection udp
ipv6 inspect name MyIPv6Inspection ftp
ipv6 inspect name MyIPv6Inspection icmp
! let's have a firewall
interface Tunnel1
no ip address
no ip redirects
ipv6 address 2002:51F0:CCA5::1/128
ipv6 enable
ipv6 traffic-filter ipv6ip in
ipv6 inspect MyIPv6Inspection out
tunnel source Dialer1
tunnel mode ipv6ip 6to4

interface Ethernet0
ipv6 address 2002:51F0:CCA5:DEAD::1/128
ipv6 enable

ipv6 route 2002::/16 Tunnel1
ipv6 route ::/0 2002:C058:6301::

ipv6 access-list ipv6ip
 deny ipv6 any any

Of course the 6to4 ip (the one on Tunnel0) is derived from my ipv4 ip. Which changes now and again. So I uploaded to the flash of my router the following file:

proc doconf   section setting   
if   [ catch   ios_config $section $setting   errmsg ]     error "configuration of $section $setting failed";  
 

set ipaddr [exec "show ip interface Dialer1   i Internet address"]
regexp  is ([0-9.]*)/  $ipaddr match ip
regexp  ([0-9]*).([0-9]*).([0-9]*).([0-9]*)  $ip match a b c d
set newipv6 [format "2002:%2x%2x:%2x%2x::1" $a $b $c $d]
set newintipv6 [format "2002:%2x%2x:%2x%2x:dead::1" $a $b $c $d]
doconf "interface Dialer1" "no ipv6 address"
doconf "interface Dialer1" "ipv6 address $newipv6/128"
doconf "interface Ethernet0" "no ipv6 address"
doconf "interface Ethernet0" "ipv6 address $newintipv6/64"

This is a TCL script that will get the current external ip (from Dialer1) and give the correct IPv6 ips to the right interfaces.

And with alias exec updateipv6 tclsh flash:update-ipv6.tcl I can quickly login and adapt the addresses myself.

The router handles IPv6 autoconfiguration on the inside, so my machine now says:

# ip addr show dev wlan0 scope global
4: wlan0:  mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast qlen 1000
 link/ether 00:19:d2:28:2c:a4 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
 inet 192.168.1.53/24 brd 192.168.1.255 scope global wlan0
 inet6 2002:51f0:cca5:dead:219:d2ff:fe28:2ca4/64 scope global dynamic
    valid_lft 2590061sec preferred_lft 602861sec

The one remaining problem is that when the external ip changes the autoconfig announcements change too, but the old ipv6 IPs remain on the interfaces.

PS: for those not in the know: I work for Cisco but this was done after hours and using public information (of course)

I’ve been using an EEE PC since december, and people keep asking me if they should buy one. So here are some things you should know before making a decision. Screen The screen is small, but that’s OK. I couldn’t find many applications that didn’t work in 800×480. And for the remaining ones, you can usually use hacks such as running the app in a larger virtual desktop. Not ideal, but it works. Regarding usability, it’s not a too big problem. Jut expect to use many apps maximized, and use scrolling and virtual desktops a lot. (Important note: Xmoto doesn’t work!!) Keyboard The keyboard is probably a bigger problem than the screen (I hadn’t expected it to be a so big problem before buying the laptop). Every other keyboard seems to have HUGE keys after typing on the EEE PC keyboard. But with some training, you can type quite fast, even if probably not as fast as with a full size keyboard. The layout of the “special” keys is quite good (esp. the PgUp/Down, Home and End keys on the arrows. I should remap my other keyboard like that). Battery, power consumption One big problem with the EEE PC is that it consumes a lot of power while sleeping (using suspend to RAM). If you leave it sleeping for more than a few hours, expect the battery to be empty. That really sucks, especially since suspend to disk isn’t really a good option on such a device. Another problem related to power is that charging the battery is quite slow. SDHC card reader If you want to expand the storage capacity of your EEE PC with the SDHC port, choose your SDHC card carefully. There are only a few cards that work. The other ones will cause write error (they will work in read-only mode, so I’m using an external card reader to write, which sucks). A list of supported cards is available in the EEE PC manual. Random Q&A Q: I don’t have a laptop. Should I buy it? A: If you want to do a lot of real work on it, it’s probably not a very good idea. There are faster (but bigger) laptops at around 450-500 EUR. They are probably a much better option. The EEE PC is perfect as a the second laptop you only bring to places where you want to stay connected, read email and surf on the web (like conferences and meetings). Q: Does the VGA output works well? A: Yes. And it uses an Intel video card which works like a charm with xrandr. I already gave several presentations and classes using it. The laptop can output 1280×1024 (maybe 1600×1200, not sure). The only problem is that you will only have the top-left part of your slides on the laptop’s screen, because of the smaller resolution there. Annoying if you plan to read your slides.

Conclusion So, should you buy one? If you can’t wait, go ahead. If you can wait, it might be a good idea to wait until Asus fixes some of the problems (the SDHC card reader and the power consumption while sleeping are the most annoying ones).

Flip Video Ultra on Linux My Flip video camera arrived yesterday, and I'm quite happy with it. It does everything it's supposed to: starts up fast, records and plays back through an astoundingly simple interface, and mounts as a USB mass storage device. The videos play back perfectly on my Ubuntu 7.10 system, and Kino can import and edit them if ffmpeg is installed. I did have some problems using the camera with a Windows XP laptop. The Windows program stored on the camera failed to start up, saying that "E:\SYSTEM\VIEWER\PD\settings\pathsInfo.txt does not contain a valid list." The firmware updater from the Flip web site failed with a similar error. Finally I found the Flip Video Program installer, which fixed both of those problems. (It took me a while to figure this out, so I'm documenting it here in case other Flip owners have the same problem.)

Today is a sad day. Corruption has won over rationality. ISO sucks. I guess I lost all the trust I had on the standards organizations. OOXML is a standard covered by many patents, ambiguous enough for Microsoft to keep the real specs closed, far worse than the previous ISO standard for the same task (ODF), and approved in a very suspicious way, in a process full of irregularities, which I hope the European Union will investigate.

Since mutt seems to be all the rage these days at work, I might as well document here a few things about my .muttrc that might be useful to others.

(I recommend that you start off with the Debian or Ubuntu package for mutt since a large chunk of necessary customization work has already been done by the Debian maintainers.)

Here is how I handle two user accounts. Let's start off by listing both of these addresses so that mutt can recognize emails using these as being sent by me:

alternates "(fmarier@gmail\.com) (francois@debian\.org)"

Now this is to allow me to change the From address within the editor, in case I forgot to set the right one before pressing 'm':

set use_from

Here are the two settings that I'm going to change when switching to a different identity (from address and status bar display).

# default profile
set from="fmarier@gmail.com"
set status_format="-%r-fmarier@gmail.com: %f [Msgs:%?M?%M/?%m%?n? New:%n?%?o? Old:%o?%?d? Del:%d?%?F? Flag:%F?%?t? Tag:%t?%?p? Post:%p?%?b? Inc:%b?%?l? %l?]---(%s/%S)-%>-(%P)---"

Here are the macros I use to switch from one account to the next (bound to ESC-1 and ESC-2):

macro index \e1 ":set from=fmarier@gmail.com\n:set status_format=\"-%r-fmarier@gmail.com: %f [Msgs:%?M?%M/?%m%?n? New:%n?%?o? Old:%o?%?d? Del:%d?%?F? Flag:%F?%?t? Tag:%t?%?p? Post:%p?%?b? Inc:%b?%?l? %l?]---(%s/%S)-%>-(%P)---\"\n" "Switch to fmarier@gmail.com"
macro index \e2 ":set from=francois@debian.org\n:set status_format=\"-%r-francois@debian.org: %f [Msgs:%?M?%M/?%m%?n? New:%n?%?o? Old:%o?%?d? Del:%d?%?F? Flag:%F?%?t? Tag:%t?%?p? Post:%p?%?b? Inc:%b?%?l? %l?]---(%s/%S)-%>-(%P)---\"\n" "Switch to francois@debian.org"

And this is the code that uses these macros to switch to the right identity automatically:

folder-hook =inbox 'push \e1oi'
folder-hook =debian-inbox 'push \e2oi'

(The 'oi' part at the end is there to restore the default sort order.)

Finally, I've got this convenient shortcut which allows me to switch to my inbox quickly and to go from one inbox to the next:

macro index I "c=inbox\n" "Switch to inbox"
folder-hook =inbox 'macro index I "c=debian-inbox\n" "Switch to debian-inbox"'
folder-hook =debian-inbox 'macro index I "c=inbox\n" "Switch to inbox"'

Next up: indexing your emails using mairix.

My SE Linux Play Machine [1] has been online again since the 18th of March. On Monday the 11th of Feb I took it offline after a user managed to change the password for my own account (their comment was “ohls -lsa! i can change passwordls -lsals -lsa HACKED!“). Part of the problem was the way /bin/passwd determines whether it should change a password. The previous algorithm (and the one that is currently used in Debian/Etch) is that if the UID of the account that is having it’s password changed doesn’t match the UID of the process that ran /bin/passwd then an additional SE Linux check is performed (to see if it has permission to change other user’s passwords). The problem here is that my Play machine has root (UID==0) as the guest account, and that according to the /bin/passwd program there is no difference between the root account (for unprivileged users) and the bofh account (which I use and which also has UID==0). This means of course that users of the root account could change the password of my account. My solution to this was to run chcon on the /bin/passwd program to give it a context that denied it the ability to change a password. The problem was that I accidentally ran the SE Linux program restorecon (which restores file contexts to their default values) which allowed /bin/passwd to change passwords, and therefore allowed a user to change the password of my account. The semanage tool that allows changing the default value of a file context does not permit changing the default for a file specification that matches one from the system policy (so the sys-admin can’t override compiled in values). I have now fixed the problem (the fix is in my Etch SE Linux repository [2] and has been accepted for Debian/Unstable and something based on it will go into the upstream branch of Shadow. See the Debian bug report #472575 [3] for more information. The summary of the new code is that in any case where a password is not required to change the user’s password then SE Linux access checks will be performed. The long version is below: The new algorithm (mostly taken from the Red Hat code base which was written by Dan Walsh) is that you can only change a password if you are running as non-root (which means that the pam_unix.so code will have verified the current password) or if you are running as root and the previous SE Linux security context of the process is permitted access to perform the passwd operation in the passwd class (which means it is permitted to change other user’s passwords). The previous context (the context before one of the exec family of system calls was called) is used for such access checks because we want to determine if the user’s shell (or other program used to launch /bin/passwd) was permitted to change other user’s passwords - executing a privileged program such as /bin/passwd causes a domain transition and the context is different) than the program that was used to execute it. It’s much like a SETUID program calling getuid(2) to get the UID of the process which launched it. To get the desired functionality for my Play Machine I don’t want a user to change their own password as the account is shared. So I appended password requisite pam_deny.so to the file /etc/pam.d/passwd (as well as the chfn and chsh commands) so that hostile users can’t break things. The new code in /bin/passwd will prevent users from taking over the machine if my PAM configuration ever gets broken, having multiple layers of protection is always a good thing. The end result is that the Debian package and the upstream code base are improved, and my Debian Etch repository has the code in question.

• [1] http://www.coker.com.au/selinux/play.html


• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/10/19/my-se-linux-etch-repository/


• [3] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=472575

Share This

My workmate Mark just pointed out how these calls have reminded him of a time when he really wished he’d got a lawyer first before something. So guys, if this Melissa Something calls you, don’t speak to her and ask her to send whatever she wants to say in writing. Probably the best way to get a good lawyer for these GNOME-related issues is to contact the GNOME Foundation. Some people have suggested this could be an April fools joke. I sincerely hope it is, though if that is the case it is in very bad taste.

The usability experts of Ubuntu have finally started to handle the single most mentioned usability issue with Linux: the top level directory names.Quoting Finn C. Tional from the Ubuntu Usability Group:

It's one of the mysteries of Unix that the directory named "usr" is not for user data, and the directory named "etc" while looking like random stuff thrown together stores all the important config files. [...] This is probably the single most confusing hurdle for new Unix users. [...] We need to finally tackle this, before people are too used to these odd directory names.

Therefore, they propose the following renaming scheme:

/bin      /system/executables
/boot     /system/boot
/dev      /system/devices
/etc      /system/config
/lib      /system/libraries
/home     /users
/media    /storage
/mnt      /storage
/proc     /system/processes
/root     /users/Administrator
/sbin     /system/executables/admin
/tmp      /system/temporary
/usr      /system/applications

They'll include a patch for the GNU C library as well as for AppArmor to redirect the old path names to the new ones. Given the existing filename matching already done by AppArmor the overhead is expected to be neglible at least for AppArmor enabled systems. SELinux enabled systems will remain unchanged, since the user won't be allowed to see anything potentially irritating in the root directory anyway, but will be confined to his user directory.Since there are a dozen applications that will need changes to accomodate the new naming scheme, expect these changes only to be included with Ubuntu 10.4 (also lovingly named Ubuntu X) scheduled for April 2010.Other distributions are expected to follow up with these changes in 2011.P.S. Yeah, the Ubuntu folks really need to think this throuh some more. Russel pointed out that "My System" is even easier to understand; after all this is not about someone elses system or some systematic error or whatever. I figure he's right. How about "My Computer" than this lowercase (pessimistic?) "system" directory they're proposing there!

In case you wonder why NEW is growing, why I’m less responsive on IRC and don’t get around to do the usual amount of work - I’m sick. :( In the last few weeks I was very busy with stuff for $work, enough to even keep me working on it during the easter holidays. Now, where that is over - I feel horrible. I don’t want to eat (just makes it worse if I do), don’t even want to drink milk. Bah. It started somewhere during last weekend, where it felt like I’m getting a cold. Went to work yesterday and got sent home after being there for some 4 hours. Today I went to work again - and got sent home by my boss, with a comment like Go to the doctor and don’t get back to work this week. Oh well, so now I’m on my way back home (takes slightly more than an hour by train), from there to the Doc and then into bed. I’ll try and do NEW and some other stuff thats waiting for me tomorrow again. Maybe even late today, using my laptop. Don’t know. Yesterday I mostly slept and did nothing. :()