I've just switched https://l10n.cihar.com/ to Weblate as I think it's stable enough to replace Pootle installation there. This change immediately affects translation of all projects which were done there - phpMyAdmin, Gammu, Wammu, GePeS or Ukolovnik. In addition Weblate itself is also being translated there. Your old usernames and passwords should be valid (in case you've activated the account and used it in last year), but you might want to adjust your profile as the settings were intentionally not imported (many users had corrupted name in Pootle and hope this will let them fix it). Let's see how many bugs will this switch reveal, but I expect it will work quite smoothly.

Filed under: English Gammu Phpmyadmin Weblate Website 1 comments Flattr this!

I followed Gregor s evolution within Debian because I used to be somewhat active in the Perl team. His case is exemplar because it shows that you don t need to be an IT professional to join Debian and to make a difference. His QA page is impressive with hundreds of packages maintained and hundreds of non-maintainer uploads too. While he started out slowly, I remember meeting him at Debconf 7 in Edinburgh and after that he really got more implicated. Again a case of someone joining for technical reasons but getting more involved and staying there for social reasons! Let s jump into the interview and learn more about him. Raphael: Who are you? Gregor: I m 41 years old, and I live in Innsbruck, Austria, in a shared apartment with a friend of mine. In my day job, I m working at the regional addiction prevention agency, so I m one of the few Debian guys who s not an IT student or professional. I started maintaining packages in 2006, and I am a DD since April 2008. Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? Gregor: After having used Debian on servers for some years, I finally switched to it on the desktop after some procrastinating. Soon afterwards I wanted to know more about the making-of , started to join mailing lists, filed bugs, and tried to learn packaging. Luckily I quickly found a permanent sponsor Tony Mancill, and we re still co-maintaining each others packages. And when I packaged my first Perl modules, Gunnar Wolf invited me to join the Debian Perl Group, an offer I accepted a few days later. And I m still there Later, the NM process, although it involved some waiting times, was also a good learning experience due to my AM Wouter Verhelst. (And in the meantime the organization of the NM process has vastly improved, from what I hear.) So my starting point for joining Debian was my curiosity but what really helped me to find my way into the project was the support of the people who invited and helped me. Raphael: What s your biggest achievement within Debian or Ubuntu? Gregor: I m not sure I can name a single big achievement but I guess I can say that my contributions to the Debian Perl Group have helped to make and keep the team a success story. Raphael: The pkg-perl team seems to work very well. As an active member, can you explain us how it is organized? How do you explain its success? In particular it seems to be a great entry point for new contributors. Gregor: The team is huge, both in numbers of members and packages (over 2200). Since last DebConf we manage our source packages in git, we have 2 mailing lists and an IRC channel, and we manage to keep an overview by using PET, the Package Entropy Tracker. It s true that we get new members on a regular basis; we try to invite people (like it happened to me 6 years ago ) but there are also quite a few new contributors who find our docs and introduce themselves on the mailing list. Maybe someone should conduct a study and ask them what motivated them to join. We hand out group membership/commit access quickly, and we try to mentor new contributors actively during their early times in the group. Some of them leave for other projects after some time, but many also stay and become DDs later. I m not sure what the reasons for the group s success are, maybe a combination of:

• a culture in the group (and also in the upstream Perl community) that s based on fun, cooperation, and respect;
• the fact that packaging Perl modules is most of the time quite easy;
• a great set of tools, and also (hopefully) useful documentation;
• a bunch of relaxed people who are open to newcomers and try to help each other.

For everyone interested in joining the Debian Perl Group, our Welcome page on the wiki is a good starting point. Raphael: What are your plans for Debian Wheezy? Gregor: Nothing overly exciting. What I should do is getting a newer JabRef into Debian (which involves packaging some new Java libraries any takers?). A solution for libdatetime-timezone-perl (which ships timezone data converted to Perl modules and tends to get outdated when the timezone data change) would be nice; let s see if #660404 leads to some results And some Perl packages will also need a bit of work for the hardening build flags release goal (cf. #657853). Raphael: What s the biggest problem of Debian? Gregor: Inertia. While I really like the fact that Debian is a volunteer project, and that every contributor works when and on what they decide to work on, I get the feeling that Debian could do better in moving forward, innovating, taking decisions. I also think that more uniformity in managing source packages would make things easier; it s quite amazing to see how many source formats, packaging helpers, patch systems, RCSs etc. are used all over the archive. I m not advocating for mono-cultures, and I consider this diversity a strength in general, but having to find out first how this particular package works when preparing a bug fix can be annoying. On the bright side, I think that the myth Debian and its mailing lists are mostly about flames can be seen as dispelled in the meantime. Sure, sometimes the tone could be a bit more civil, but in general most of the interactions I ve seen in the last years were friendly and helpful. IMO, the Debian Project consists of mostly nice and cooperative people, and that s what makes it fun for me. Raphael: You re one of the most dedicated participants to RCBW (Release Critical Bugs of the Week), an initiative to fix RC bugs every week. How much time do you spend on it? What would you advise to people who are considering to join the movement? Gregor: I got into the habit of fixing RC bugs after having been invited to my first Bug Squashing Party in Munich some years ago. During this weekend I saw that fixing RC bugs can be fun, is often not that difficult, and gives a warm fuzzy feeling I can definitely recommend attending a BSP if one happens to be organized near you. After tasting blood at this first BSP I tried to continue looking at RC bugs, and I guess I spend something around half an hour per day on it. I usually blog about it once a week, in order to motivate others to join in. And joining is easy: just take a look at the tips people like Zack, Vorlon, or me have written. You don t have to be a DD to help, many of my NMUs are based on patches that others kindly prepare and send to the BTS kudos! Another nice aspect is that the RC bug list contains problems from different fields: general packaging problems, language-specific issues, policy violations, etc. So there s something for everybody, and you don t have to be an expert in all fields to fix a specific bug. What s rewarding about fixing RC bugs is not only the feeling of accomplishment and the knowledge about having helped the next release I also received quite a few Thank you mails from maintainers who were busy at that time and appreciated the help. Raphael: Do you have wishes for Debian Wheezy? Gregor: Well, there s not so much left of the Wheezy release cycle if we manage to freeze in June Some quick thoughts for Wheezy and Wheezy+1:

• Obviously, getting multi-arch and the hardening build flags as far as possible would be good.
• What I like is the idea of the time-based freeze, and I hope it will work out in June. And then I hope that the freeze will be shorter this time than during the last 2 releases.
• Unless I m missing something, the CUT discussions have more or less died down; IMO that s a pity because there are users who run testing and would like to avoid the several month long freeze. Maybe someone can come up with new ideas for Wheezy+1
• Too late for broad adoption in Wheezy but still: What constantly annoys me is the handling of conffiles during upgrades (when I want to keep changed values but at the same time want to add new variables). Config::Model seems to be the best idea so far for configuration upgrades but it s not yet widely adopted.

Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Gregor: There are many people in Debian I admire, too many to name them all. The first one that comes to my mind is Russ Allbery who not only does great work from lintian to Debian policy but who also sets a great example of communicating in a perfectly polite and respectful way even in heated discussions.

---

Thank you to Gregor for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Note that older interviews are indexed on wiki.debian.org/PeopleBehindDebian.

Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Google+, Twitter and Facebook.

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I ll be at PyCon with some of the Sunlight crew, and we ll be hosting a Hackathon after the talks. I hope anyone in the area will consider hacking with us this year. If you re going to PyCon, send me an email, tweet or other digital message - the talks this year look awesome!

Just a quick note that the merry Finnish localization folks are organizing an (extended) localization weekend, starting today. As a nice step towards ease of use, they're utilizing the long developed, maybe even underused Translatewiki.net platform, or to be precise a separate instance of it. Translatewiki.net is used by MediaWiki (Wikimedia Foundation), StatusNet and other high profile projects. Co-incidentally the main developer of Translatewiki.net is Finnish as well.

Anyway enough of the platform, join the translation frenzy at http://l10n.laxstrom.name/wiki/Gnome_3.4, but do make sure to read the notes at http://muistio.tieke.fi/IYZxesy9uc.

I've promised to help in upstreaming those to git.gnome.org on Sunday. There is additionally a new report about Ubuntu 12.04 LTS translations schedule (to which these GNOME contributions will find their way as well) at the ubuntu-l10n-fin mailing list by Jiri.

Ja sama suomeksi.

As the free software and free culture movements have sat quietly by, DRM is now well on its way to becoming the norm in the electronic book publishing industry. The free culture movement has failed to communicate the reality of DRM and, as a result, millions of people are buying books that they won't be able to read when they switch to a different model of ebook reader in the future. They are buying books that will become inaccessible when the DRM system that supports them is shut down -- as we've already seen with music from companies including Wal*Mart, Yahoo, and Microsoft. They are buying books that require that readers use proprietary tools that lock them out from doing basic things that have always been the right of a book owner. Some anti-DRM advocates are, indirectly, part of this problem as they buy these books and turn to shady methods of stripping the DRM. Buying DRMed books is voting with your wallet for a system that criminalizes those that insist on living in freedom and will screw us all in the long run when DRM is the only choice we are offered and removing the DRM is difficult, unsafe, and illegal. Buying non-DRMed e-books is a more freedom-friendly alternative for those that, like me, are excited about not lugging kilograms of paper around our cities and the world. We can do this at "non-mainstream" publishers like Smashwords who explicitly reject DRM. Of course, the big ebook sellers like Amazon, and Barnes and Nobel, and Google all offer non-DRMed books. But none of the major ebook retailers explicitly reveal the DRM status of locked down books before purchase. On Amazon, there are some cryptic signs and signals that, if you understand them, suggest the absence of DRM. Google and Barnes and Nobel currently offer no way to know if a book is DRMed without buying it first and questions in their support forums go unanswered. It's hard to support non-DRM alternatives when we can't recognize them. It's hard to tell people to not buy DRM ebooks if we can't even tell them apart. Getting this message through to book buyers -- and perhaps even to ebook retailers -- seems like a critical first step.

After about week of (not so heavy) development, I can announce availability of Weblate - web based translation tool with tight Git integration. The project was started because I was not happy with existing solutions (see my blog post) as all of them was missing some features I find useful. I started with quite simple definition:

Minimalistic web based translation with direct commit to git on each translation made. There is no plan in heavy conflict resolution as these should be primarily handled on git side.

Also the project started with defined list of features:

• Easy web based translation
• Propagation of translations across sub-projects (for different branches)
• Tight git integration
• Usage of Django's admin interface
• Upload and automatic merging of po files
• Links to source files for context

Pretty much all of that is completed right now, however there will be definitely some issues which will need fixing. All important information about the project are available on it's website, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user. Please give it some testing as I plan to deploy it on http://l10n.cihar.com/ pretty soon.

Filed under: Django English Weblate 5 comments Flattr this!

I recently got to rebuild an Android NDK with a fresh toolchain again, and hit an interesting problem. I actually had hit it before, but only this time I fully analyzed what s going on. [As a side note, if you build such a NDK, don't use mpfr 3.1.0, as there is a bug in the libtool it ships] Linking an application or a library pulls many things, that aren t part of the code being built. One of these many things is the libgcc static library. Part of libgcc consists in an implementation of the platform ABI. On Android systems, this means the ARM EABI. GCC, when compiling some instructions, will generate ABI calls. For example, integer divisions may call __aeabi_idiv. Consider the following minimized real world scenario:

$ echo "int foo(int a) return 42 % a; " > foo.c
$ arm-linux-androideabi-gcc -o libfoo.so -shared foo.c -mandroid

GCC will emit a call to __aeabi_idivmod for the % operation. With GCC 4.6.3, this function is in _divsi3.o under libgcc.a. That function itself calls __aeabi_idiv0, which lives in _dvmd_lnx.o under libgcc.a. When statically linking, ld will thus include foo.o, _divsi3.o and _dvmd_lnx.o, meaning it will include all functions from these object files. That is, foo, __divsi3, __aeabi_idiv, __aeabi_idivmod, __aeabi_idiv0 and __aeabi_ldiv0. And more than being included, these functions are exported, because symbol visibility in libgcc.a is default. So while we expect exporting foo from our library, we re actually exporting much more, including functions that just happened to be near the ones that our code (indirectly) uses. Now, let s say we want to build another library, using that foo function from libfoo:

$ cat > bar.c <<EOF
extern int foo(int a);
long long bar(long long a) return foo(a) % a;
EOF
$ arm-linux-androideabi-gcc -o libbar.so -shared bar.c -mandroid

(The code above has absolutely no meaning, it just triggers the same function calls as what I was getting in the actual real world case) When statically linking the above code, GCC will generate a call to __aeabi_ldivmod, which calls __aeabi_ldiv0, and many other things, directly or indirectly. When linking as above, nothing particularly nasty is going to happen. However, linking as above is actually wrong: the resulting library has an undefined reference to the foo symbol, and doesn t depend on libfoo. At runtime, if libfoo wasn t already loaded somehow, loading libbar would fail. The proper way to link is the following:

$ arm-linux-androideabi-gcc -o libbar.so -shared bar.c -mandroid -L. -lfoo

A feature of ELF static linking is that when it resolves undefined symbols, the linker will choose to use the first occurrence of a symbol it finds in the various objects and libraries given on its command line. So with the command line above, for each __aeabi_* symbol, it will first look in libfoo if there isn t one. And while __aeabi_ldivmod is not in libfoo, __aeabi_ldiv0 is (see above). So instead of including the code for __aeabi_ldiv0 from libgcc.a, it will call the copy from libfoo. This wouldn t be so much of a problem if __aeabi_ldiv0 wasn t a weak symbol. Enters faulty.lib. In the real world case, libfoo is loaded by the system dynamic linker, and libbar by faulty.lib. When resolving symbols for libbar, faulty.lib has to resolve libfoo symbols with the system linker, using dlsym(). On Android, dlsym() returns NULL for weak (defined) symbols, so faulty.lib can t resolve __aeabi_ldiv0. The real world case wasn t a problem with GCC 4.4.3 from the vanilla Android NDK because in that GCC version, __aeabi_ldivmod doesn t call __aeabi_ldiv0. This wouldn t happen if shared libraries wouldn t expose random platform ABI specific bits depending on what they use and depending on other symbols that happen to be in the same object files. A similar issue happened a little while ago on Debian powerpc because a shared library was exporting ABI specific bits. Even worse, the toolchain was assuming the symbols would come from libgcc.a and generated wrong relocations for these symbols. Update: Interestingly, the __aeabi_* symbols are hidden, in libgcc.a as provided on the Debian armel port.

I have just finished updating the user-space SE Linux code in Debian/Unstable to the version released on 2012-02-16. There were some changes to the build system from upstream which combined with the new Debian multi-arch support involved a fair bit of work for me. While I was at it I converted more of them to the new Quilt format to make it easier to send patches upstream. In the past I have been a bit slack about sending patches upstream, my aim for the next upstream release of user-space is to have at least half of my patches included upstream this will make things easier for everyone. Recently Mika Pfl ger and Laurent Bigonville have started work on Debian SE Linux, they have done some good work converting the refpolicy source (which is used to build selinux-policy-default) to Quilt. Now it will be a lot easier to send policy patches upstream and porting them to newer versions of the upstream refpolicy. Now the next significant thing that I want to do is to get systemd working correctly with SE Linux. But first I have to get it working correctly wit cryptsetup. Related posts:

1. SE Linux Status in Debian 2011-10 Debian/Unstable Development deb http://www.coker.com.au wheezy selinux The above APT sources.list...
2. SE Linux Status in Debian 2012-01 Since my last SE Linux in Debian status report [1]...
3. Debian SE Linux Status At the moment I ve got more time to work on...

One of the best way to add SNMP support to an application is the use of AgentX protocol: an application can act as a subagent and handle requests from a master agent using AgentX protocol. The most widespread implementation for such a task is the one from Net-SNMP. TL;DR: An application asynchronously leveraging Net-SNMP AgentX implementation has many opportunities to get stuck when the master agent becomes temporarily unavailable. A mostly efficient workaround is to dedicate a master agent for AgentX and delegate MIB handling to a subagent.

Pinging the master agent Net-SNMP uses an event-based model. It also provides some synchronous functions but they are built on top of the asynchronous ones. It is shipped with its own event loop. Therefore, Net-SNMP AgentX protocol implementation seems a fine choice to add SNMP support to an event-based program, for example in Keepalived, a VRRP daemon and a monitoring daemon for LVS clusters. Unfortunately, an AgentX subagent is expected to check, at a regular interval, if the master agent is alive . This is handled automatically with Net-SNMP implementation as long as you call run_alarms() function which will call agentx_check_session():

/*
 * check a session validity for connectivity to the master agent.  If
 * not functioning, close and start attempts to reopen the session 
 */
void
agentx_check_session(unsigned int clientreg, void *clientarg)
 
    /* [...] */
    DEBUGMSGTL(("agentx/subagent", "checking status of session %p\n", ss));
    if (!agentx_send_ping(ss))  
        snmp_log(LOG_WARNING,
                 "AgentX master agent failed to respond to ping.  Attempting to re-register.\n");
        /*
         * master agent disappeared?  Try and re-register.
         * close first, just to be sure .
         */
        agentx_unregister_callbacks(ss);
        agentx_close_session(ss, AGENTX_CLOSE_TIMEOUT);
        /* [...] */
        if (main_session != NULL)  
            /* [...] */
            main_session = NULL;
            agentx_reopen_session(0, NULL);
         
        else  
            snmp_close(main_session);
            main_session = NULL;
         
      else  
        DEBUGMSGTL(("agentx/subagent", "session %p responded to ping\n",
                    ss));
     
 

This piece of code will end up calling (directly or indirectly) the following functions¹ which are using agentx_synch_response():

• agentx_send_ping()
• agentx_open_session()
• agentx_reopen_session()
• agentx_close_session()
• agentx_register()
• agentx_unregister()
• agentx_register_index()
• agentx_unregister_index()
• agentx_add_agentcaps()
• agentx_remove_agentcaps()

agentx_synch_response() will synchronously wait for an answer from the master agent. Your event-based program will just sit here doing nothing while this happens. For example, keepalived may be unable to send VRRP probes resulting in some serious havoc in your cluster. Functions prefixed by agentx_ are not part of NetSNMP API and could therefore be rewritten to do their work asynchronously. Unfortunately, talk is cheap. Moreover, there exists other deep paths that will block a subagent. For example, the low-level connection to the master agent (using TCP or a Unix socket, but not with UDP) will use a blocking connect() call. It seems quite difficult to fix this. Here are some (partial) workarounds:

• Call agentx_check_session() less often. The default interval is 15 seconds. Disabling it completely or using a very high value is not advised because this function is the only way to reestablish a connection to the master agent when it is, for example, restarted. Here is how to change the delay to 120 seconds:

  netsnmp_ds_set_int(NETSNMP_DS_APPLICATION_ID,
                     NETSNMP_DS_AGENT_AGENTX_PING_INTERVAL, 120);
  

• Don t call agentx_check_session() if we know the master agent is alive. For example, if it just sent us a new request, no need to ping it. I have written a patch implementing such a workaround. The ABI is left untouched, therefore, you only need to recompile Net-SNMP libraries.
• Use a lower timeout and no retry. By default, the timeout for synchronous requests is 1 second and a failed request will be retried 5 times. Because several synchronous functions are used in a row, you may be trapped for as long as 30 seconds with those settings. Here is how² to disable the retry mechanism and to set the timeout to a very low value:

  static int
  snmp_setup_session_cb(int majorID, int minorID,
                void *serverarg, void *clientarg)
   
      netsnmp_session *sess = serverarg;
      sess->timeout = ONE_SEC / 3;
      sess->retries = 0;
      return 0;
   
  void some_init_function()
   
      /* [...] */
      snmp_register_callback(SNMP_CALLBACK_LIBRARY,
         SNMP_CALLBACK_SESSION_INIT,
         snmp_setup_session_cb, NULL);
      /* [...] */
   
  

Unresponsive master agent Why is the master agent unresponsive? snmpd is also an event-based program and, trust me, there are a lot of places where it will become unresponsive. Here are two examples:

• When using the pass or the pass_persist directive, Net-SNMP will block until the delegated command outputs a complete line.

  /* var_extensible_pass() in agent/mibgroup/ucd-snmp/pass.c */
  /*
   * valid call.  Exec and get output 
   */
  if ((fd = get_exec_output(passthru)) != -1)  
      file = fdopen(fd, "r");
      if (fgets(buf, sizeof(buf), file) == NULL)  
          fclose(file);
          wait_on_exec(passthru);
          /* [...] */
          continue;
       
      /* [...] */
      fclose(file);
      wait_on_exec(passthru);
      /* [...] */
   
  

• DISMAN-PING-MIB implementation will just hang while pinging the remote host. If the host is down and you have requested 5 probes with a timeout of 1 second, snmpd will be unresponsive for 5 seconds. A similar problem exists with DISMAN-TRACEROUTE-MIB.

Minimal master agent More and more code is running in the main agent. You cannot expect it to not block. But we could add a minimal master agent to the mix: it will handle only a few MIB modules by itself while most MIB modules will be delagated to a complete agent running as a subagent. Your own subagent will connect to the minimal master agent. It is quite easy to turn snmpd into a subagent: just use -X flag. We should also disable unwanted MIB modules for each agent with -I flag. For the minimal master agent, we only enable some modules. All other modules³ will be served by snmpd acting as a subagent.

$ MODS="snmp_mib,sysORTable,usmConf,usmStats,usmUser,vacm_conf,vacm_context,vacm_vars"
$ snmpd -Lsd -Lf /dev/null -u snmp -g snmp \
>   -C -c /etc/snmp/snmpd.master.conf \
>   -p /var/run/snmpd.master.pid \
>   -I $MODS
$ snmpd -Lsd -Lf /dev/null -u snmp -g snmp \
>   -p /var/run/snmpd.pid -X \
>   -I -$MODS

Access control configuration should be placed in /etc/snmp/snmpd.master.conf, as well as master agentx directive. Other directives (like pass, pass_persist, load, sysname, ) in /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf. The minimal master agent is very unlikely to block and while the ground cause is still here, it is now very much mitigated. You may extend this solution by splicing snmpd into several subagents: one handling safe modules, one handling pass and pass_persist stuff and a last one for unsafe modules (like DISMAN-PING-MIB).

---

1. agentx_reopen_session() will call agentx_close_session() and agentx_open_session(). agentx_register() and the following functions will be called by those two functions.
2. NETSNMP_DS_AGENT_AGENTX_TIMEOUT and NETSNMP_DS_AGENT_AGENTX_RETRIES variables are only used by the master agent, not by a subagent.
3. Use snmpd -Dmib_init -H to get the list of modules. You may want to add smux module to the master agent.

What is it? Last month I started what I am calling the LUV Hardware Library. It s a briefcase full of computer parts that are free to LUV members which I plan to bring to all LUV meetings [1]. The issue is that there is a lot of hardware which has no great value to people and is often excess to requirements but which is still somewhat expensive or difficult to obtain and thus transferring it from the people who don t need it to people who do provides a significant benefit to the recipient but no real cost to the donor. Currently my briefcase has a range of different types of DIMM, some PCI cards, some assorted cables, a laptop SATA disk, and a bunch of other random things. Most of the stuff has been in my spare parts pile for a year or two, but some of it has been donated by other people. What we Need The next thing we need is more packaging, anti-static bags for RAM and PCI cards, sealable bags for screws, and some way of storing motherboard batteries. In terms of hardware that can be donated one thing that would be really useful is SATA disks. I m sure that there are lots of people who have upgraded the storage of their computer and kept the old drive with no real chance of using it. But there are lots of people who need such disks, for example I ve been giving away a bunch of P4 systems which lack disks and are not cabled for IDE disks a supply of SATA disks would make them a lot more usable. Also any other random electronic stuff is of interest, including non-Linux things such as mobile phones (but only if not network locked). If you have something that s big or heavy to donate then contact me via email first. Other Options Computerbank does great work in rebuilding old PCs and selling them cheaply to worthy people [2], but most of the spare hardware I get is below the minimum specs that they will accept. I m not planning to compete with Computerbank in any way, I just want to provide a useful service to LUV members who want to upgrade their PC for free. I encourage other people to do the same at other LUG meetings!

• [1] http://luv.asn.au/
• [2] http://www.computerbank.org.au/

Related posts:

1. Donating old Hardware On a recent visit to my local e-waste disposal place...
2. Giving Away Hardware For the last few years I have been actively seeking...
3. Shelf-life of Hardware Recently I ve been having some problems with hardware dying. Having...

I roll my eyes a little when I think that Unhappy Birthday is the document I have written that has been read by the most people. The page -- basically a website encouraging people to rat on their friends for copyright violation for singing Happy Birthday in public -- has received millions of page views and has generated tons of its own media (including a rather memorable interview of CBC's WireTap). At the bottom of the page I am listed, by name and email, as the "copyrighteous spokesman" for the initiative. And since the page has been online, I have received hate mail about it. Constantly. Since the email only goes to me, I thought it might be fun to share some of these publicly. All these messages are quoted verbatim but I have not included the senders' names. Be warned: the language is often salty. This email is years old now but it is probably still my favorite:

Atrocity and strife run rampant in this world. Babies are abandoned in dumpsters. Teachers molest students. Impoverished Indonesians make sneakers for pennies while the spoiled jackhole in the 30-second commercial makes millions for sinking a three-pointer and smirking at the camera. Forms of religion are interpreted as to compel people to strap explosives to their chest and board buses full of innocents. Boss Tweeds embezzle and get severance pay while John Q. Workingman gets put out on the street when the corporation goes belly up. Out of all these indignities and countless others I haven't the time to mention, why do you make it your personal crusade to assist in the flagrant persecution of family restaurants for partaking in the time-honored tradition of singing "Happy Birthday"? God forbid these foul brigands bend copyright law in order to bring a smile to somebody's face. Food for thought...without the accompanying song.

Many others strike a defiant, if less poetic, tone:

Good luck! There are millions of us who refuse to accept the ridiculous "copyright" on Happy Birthday. If Time Warner were an ethical company rather than a greedy megacorp they would do something truly special and release it into the public domain. There are some things in this world more important than money.

Quite a few people notice that my last name is Hill and suspect that I must be related to the Hill sisters who originally penned the song. I'm not, to my knowledge, although since Time Warner bought the rights, it's not clear it would matter:

I am writing to just let you know how disappointed I am that a large corporation and others (like the HILL family) are making $2 million plus for a song that was created over 100 years ago with noone knowing who created the lyrics! None of us at our place of employment could believe this and we certainly won't encourage people to send money to ASCAP. It is a shame that ASCAP license fees aren't used to pay more to up-and-coming artists who I'm sure need this money alot more than Time Warner. We all plan to sing Happy Birthday MORE now in public places and if anyone asks if it is copyrighted we will say "of course not". Maybe this way the song will not die out completely as more and more other "birthday" songs are being sung. It would also be nice if your website cited whose opinion is writing the piece and your obvious conflict of interest.

Or another:

Is it a coincidence that your last name is the same as the last name of the authors of the song "Happy Birthday?" You seem to have a personal monetary motive for your work with the "grassroots project" you call Unhappy Birthday, and if you do not, your concern is misplaced all the same. Whom do you imagine your campaign serves? And do you realize whom it harms? I do not question the illegality of performing the copyrighted song publicly. And you are correct that most of the public is not even aware that the song is under copyright. I think the harm done to Time Warner and its associates by such public performances is far outweighed by the joy created when the much-loved happy tune is shared. I urge you to ask yourself why you think the immortal Hill sisters wrote the song in the first place. It was not to put more money Time Warner's pocket. It was, I would argue, for the sake of the song itself and the happiness it brings when performed (publicly or otherwise). Please consider siding with the children and the artists; let the lawsuits alone.

Some people suspect the site may be satire, but include insults and and attacks just in case it isn't:

I'm trying to figure out if your Unhappy Birthday site is meant to be in jest. If so Rofl, and congrats on a hilarious site. If you're actually serious, then fuck you Nazi cunts and your corporate butt buddies. Thank you for your time.

Or these two alternatives (each were separate emails):

If this is a joke then it's rather funny. However if this website is serious then you're a fucking idiot. Get a life!!!! if it is a form of protest, then THANK YOU! if it is not, then screw you all!

One memorable piece of mail was from someone who knew of me from my activities in the free software and free culture communities and had a hard time reconciling my work there with the high protectionist website:

I was quiet surprised to see your name and email address at the bottom of the home page of the site Unhappy Birthday. The site claims that you are their spokesman. Is this correct? I do not understand... You have all this Open Source/ Free Software background and then this site that defends one of the most controversial copyright issues??? Do you really mean this? Do you want to help Time Warner?

I've also received probably half a dozen mails that offer some sort of support! For example, this person liked the website -- and even wanted to buy one of our t-shirts -- but objected to our logo:

I was going to buy one of your products from your Unhappy Birthday Shop at CafePress but there's a problem. I hate emblems that uses human skulls in them. Being a member of ASCAP I really do support your cause but I can't buy a product that I would never wear.

And many people are simply confused asking something like this one:

So I saw the unhappy birthday site and I'm just a little confused. Is this a joke or a serious thing?

I usually reply and explain that I have tried to ensure that the site describes the legal situation around Happy Birthday honestly and correctly. That said, the vast majority of messages I receive are unequivocal. Like this email that I received last week addressed to "you anti-free speech fascists":

         __
        /  \
            
            
            
 __  __      __
/  \/  \    /  \
                \
                  
                 /
                 \
                  /
\                /
                 
                 

Half an hour later, the author followed up with a English version of the same message, set to the tune of happy birthday. You might think that getting insulted and flipped off by confused people on the Internet might get me down. It doesn't! I made Unhappy Birthday because I thought that the fact that something as important to our culture as Happy Birthday could be owned was outrageous. Every piece of hate mail means that somebody else -- almost always somebody who isn't a "copyfighter" or a free culture geek -- is now upset about the current state of copyright too. Sure, Unhappy Birthday makes me a tiny bit sad about people's ability to recognize satire. But it makes me really happy about people's ability to get very annoyed at what they think is the outrageous control of our culture through copyright. When more people are as mad as the the people I've quoted above, we will be able to change copyright into something less outrageous to all of us.

Released a few hours ago, here is the monthly report of DPL activities for February 2012.

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Howdy, dear Project Members,
here's another round of updates about what has happened in DPL land, this time during February 2012. Highlights Quit a bit of highlights for this month:

• The first item is not pleasant but important. Early February I've submitted to the attention of the Technical Committee the upload of multi-arch enabled dpkg to the archive. The Technical Committee quickly reached a decision. Shortly afterwards an upload to experimental has happened and discussions on -devel ensued. Please help out with testing.
• Thanks to IBM and OSUOSL we have some new fairly capable (virtual) machines for powerpc* ports. See the announcement for more info. In particular, please note the call for powerpc64 porters. If you're interested in contributing to such a port, please get in touch with DSA.
• Google Summer of Code project is up again. As usual, it is a good chance to get some work done and, more importantly, to let students who are passionate about Free Software discover Debian. I've delegated the task of GSoC admins --- thanks Ana, Gergely, and Sukhbir! A call for project proposals has already been sent out; there isn't much time left, so please hurry up and drop your ideas to the wiki page and contact the soc-coordination mailing list.
• A couple of important discussions have been going on on -project. The first is the old "trademark vs DFSG" discussion. I've posted there results from legal advice that I've sought on the matter, based on your suggestions. Then, I've posted a proposal on how to deal with trademarks issues in the archive.
• The second discussion is about Debian affiliation with OSI. We've been approached by OSI about that, as I've summarized on -project. Helped by the feedback received, I've decided to go ahead with affiliation and I'm now discussing with OSI representative the next steps.
• The long running work on software patent issues in the archive has been concluded publishing a policy on the matter. We now have a contact point and legal advice with whom we can discuss specific issues if/when they arise; hopefully that would help us to discriminate actual issues in the archive (if any) from the vast amount of FUD in the area.

Talks, interviews, and the like

• Following up Debian related talks at FOSDEM, I've been interviewed, together with Lars Wirzenius and Wookey, for The Register.
• I've took part at a FOSDEM panel session on comparing the organization of local user groups, ambassadors, and the like. We've mostly to learn from others in this area, but I've took the change to summarize what we currently have in a slide deck.

Sprints Plenty of sprints related news!

• DSA and the Groupware team will be holding sprints later on in March, while DAM / FrontDesk are having one right now co-located with the BSP in Moenchengladbach
• the video team sent out a report for their sprint back in November
• debbugs (AKA bugs.debian.org) hackers are organizing a sprint to get people interested in contributing to the code base up to speed. If you're, drop a line in the thread

It would be amazing to have an average of one sprint per month for 2012, and we're on good track for it. If you want to help, organize one for your team as documented on the wiki. Legal stuff

• Thanks to SPI, we've established contacts with the owners of debian.eu, domain we believe we legitimately own. As a first step they've set up HTTP redirection from debian.eu to debian.org (instead of a computer hardware shop, as it was before) and we're now discussing actual transfer of domain ownership to a Debian Trusted Organization.
• We've contacted the Japanese trademark office to transfer the "debian" trademark there to SPI. Thanks to the previous owners (all Debian developers or contributors) for agreeing to the move. Now "only" a nasty pile of paperwork remains to be done.

Appointments In addition to the GSoC admins delegation (see above), I've agreed with former secretary Kurt Roeckx to reappoint him as a secretary for another year. Many thanks, Kurt! Miscellaneous

• We have been invited to attend the OpenStack summit in April and have a presence there, free of charge. Loic Dachary, active member of the OpenStack packaging team in Debian, has agreed to go and represent Debian there. Thanks a lot to Stefano Maffulli for the invitation and to Loic for his availability!
• We are in the process of joining as a project, instead of relying on individual maintainers as in the past the ISC forum to get access to embargoed vulnerability information for important pieces of software such as BIND and DHCP. They've kindly offered us membership free of charge. I've submitted a draft of the membership agreement to SPI and I'm waiting for their decision.
• Steady progress on the front of periodic budget reports, thanks to the work of Martin Michlmayr. We've discussed at length during FOSDEM and agreed on procedures to query the state of Debian finances that work for both auditors and the DPL. Martin has also set up a shared ledger repository and already checked in into it a lot of money transactions for the past few years not from all trusted organizations yet, though. Have faith, we'll get there

Happy Debian hacking.

---

PS as usual, the boring day-to-day activity log is available at master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.*

git-annex has special remotes that allow large files checked into git to be stored in arbitrary places, that are not proper git remotes. One key use of the special remotes is to store files in The Cloud. Until now the flagship special remote used Amazon S3, although a few other things like Archive.org, rsync.net, and Tahoe-Laffs can be made to work too. One of my goals is to add as many cloud storage options to git-annex as possible. Box.com came to my attention because they currently have a promotion that provides 50 gigabytes of free "lifetime" service. Which is a nice amount of cloud storage to have for free. I decided that I didn't want to spend more than 4 hours of my time to make git-annex use it though. (I probably have spent a week on the S3 support by contrast.) So, this is a case study in quickly adding support for one cloud storage provider to git-annex.

• First, I had to sign up to box.com. Their promotion requires an android phone be used to get the 50 gigabytres. This wasted about an hour getting my unused phone dusted off etc. This also includes time spent researching ways to access box.com's storage, including reading their API documentation. I found it has a WebDAV interface.
• Sadly, there is not yet a native WebDAV library for haskell. This is a shame, because it would make the implementation better. But, I'm confident someone will eventually write one. My experience with haskell libraries for other web APIs (S3, GitHub) is that it's an excellent language to write them in, the code tends to be very simple, concise and clear. But I can't do it in 4 hours. So for now, the workaround is to use a WebDAV mounting tool. I picked davfs2 as it was the first one I got to work with box.com's slightly broken WebDAV. 2 hours spent now.
• With box.com mounted, I was neary done; git-annex's directory special remote can use the mount point. But there was a catch: box.com only allows up to 100 mb large files. I spent 1 hour or so adding support to the directory special remote for chunking files into a user-specified size.
  This was a fairly complex problem -- the existing code had a ByteString that when accessed lazily read the whole large file (from disk or from gpg, depending), and just called writeFile on it.
  I needed to still consume it lazily to avoid reading the whole file into memory, but write out chunks. This gets a bit into haskell's ByteString internals, but they're very well suited to this kind of thing, and so after 15 minutes familiarizing myself with the data structures, it was actually fairly easy to write the code. patch
• I spent my last hour testing and tuning the box.com special remote. Using davfs2 as a quick fix caused some technical debt that I had to make up for. In particular, the chunked filename retrieval code had to make sure not to open every chunk at once, because that makes davfs2 try to cache them all, instead of streaming one at a time. patch
• Not counted toward my 4 hour limit is the ... er ... 4 hours I spent last night adding a progress bar to the directory special remote. A progress display while transferring the files makes using box.com as a special remote much nicer, but also makes using my phone's SD card as a special remote much nicer! This is why I'm a poor consultant -- when faced with something generic and generally useful like this, I have difficulty billing for it.

The end result is that there are detailed instructions for using box.com as a special remote. And it seems to work quite well now. I just set up my production box.com special remote. All content written to it is gpg encrypted, and various of my computers have access to it, each using their own gpg key to decrypt the files uploaded by the others. (git-annex's encryption feature makes this work really well!) So..
There is a DropBox API for haskell. But as I'm not a customer, the 2 gb free account hardly makes it worth my while to make git-annex use it. Would someone like to fund my time to add a dropbox special remote to git-annex?

If you ever used filelight or baobab you probably know how useful they are. If you didn't, then you missed a lot on how you can spot (and fix) where your disk space is wasted.

With my recent attempt to upgrade to GNOME 3 which, because of its innate property to be useless and counter-productive, actually made me to use Xfce4 with a mix of GNOME aplications (since Xfce lacks a few functionalities here and there), I ran into all sorts of problems.

As a side note, Xfce4 is quite decent, but if you like some icons on your panels to be left aligned and some right aligned, you should know that you can add a Separator item to the panel, right click on it -> Properties and tick the Expand* check box. And if you also set the Transparent style, it will look nice, too.

Back to the topic. With my mix of Xfce and Gnome apps, I configured my top panel to contain a Free Space Checker for my /home file system and today it alerted me that I was low on disk space, so I started baobab to check what I can clean up.

When I found a possible suspect, I wanted to open the directory with a file browser, but, instead, Totem was started and started trying to queue all the files in the offending directory. The problem is that one way or another, Totem (or VLC) was configured to be the default handler for directories instead of the file manager.

The solution is simple, open with an editor the file ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list and search for the line starting with inode/directory= and you'll see something like:

inode/directory=nautilus-folder-handler.desktop;baobab-usercreated.desktop;vlc-usercustom.desktop;

Remove the offending part, vlc-usercustom.desktop;, save the file and try again to open that directory from baobab. If you are double-lucky :P and now it opens with Totem, you will have to remove a reference to a "totem-usercustom.desktop;" or something of that sort. Now, on my system, that line looks like this:

inode/directory=nautilus-folder-handler.desktop;baobab-usercreated.desktop;

And now it works as expected**

* I suppose it's called like that in English, I have my desktop in Romanian
** Except that I would like it to start my desktop preferred file manager, not Nautilus, but that's another issue.

Symbiosis

Symbiosis is the collective name given to a group of Debian GNU/Linux packages which implement simple virtual hosting. It is developed by my employers Bytemark. Symbiosis is basically a collection of configuration snippets, code, and libraries which works to offer virtual hosting in a reliable consistent and easy to understand fashion. You implement hosting for a new domain by merely creating a directory tree. So for example you might configure the hosting for the domain example.com by running:

mkdir -p /srv/example.com/public/htdocs
echo "hello, world" >> /srv/example.com/public/htdocs/index.html
mkdir -p /srv/example.com/mailboxes/webmaster
echo "super-secret" > /srv/example.com/mailboxes/webmaster/password
mkdir -p /srv/example.com/config
echo "3l33t" > /srv/example.com/mailboxes/config/ftp-password

There you are, now http://www.example.com/ and http://example.com/ will work, and you may login to check mail with the email address webmaster@example.com via POP3, IMAP, IMAPS, or POP3S. Finally you can FTP with username example.com and be dropped into the public directory. The mail handling is very flexible, and the webhosting supports wonderful things. I don't generally talk about work-stuff explicitly, but we've just made a major new release of the Symbiosis system such that it works upon Squeeze and has lots of IPv6 support out of the box. (Email, DNS, HTTP, Firewalling, FTP etc.) All in all it is simple, well-documented, and open-source with a reasonably large user-base. More external testers, users, and developers would be a wonderful thing..

Mutt Mailboxes & Idle Hooks?

Mutt is wonderful but I'm starting to get annoyed by its lack of auto-mailbox discovery. Assuming you use procmail you might deliver mail to ~/Maildir/.foo/ and mutt won't notice that if the directory is created once it starts. (This is because generally mailboxes are defined via "mailboxes =one =two ..", even if you use a shell snippet it won't get updated unless you re-read configuration, or re-exec mutt). I wish it were possible to use inotify/dnotify/something magic such that everything beneath ~/Maildir would just work. (Re-reading mailboxes manually is one solution but it is .. nasty?) I'm thinking that of all the possible solutions one of the most potentially interesting would be to define a new hook: "idle-hook command .." That way "command" would be executed every time the client is idle. (This is a distinct state unrelated to IMAP IDLE times.) Nopte: There is already "mail_check" & "timeout" options. Even running a defined command immediately following the code for mail_check would be reasonable.

Reverse Proxy

I continue to use, love, and enjoy my node.js-based reverse HTTP proxy, and pub discussions seemed to suggest it is a great idea (due to flexibility) but it will never take on because people don't trust node. I'm almost tempted to re-code it in LUA & C. But I can't help but think that would be a waste of time which would not increase adoption - after all most people use "simple" reverse proxies, and they are well suited by Apache, nginx, or even varnish. Still no rush I suppose.

In more personal news after living in this flat for 7 years, or so, I'm getting a new bathroom designed and deployed. Good times. In the meantime I've been steadily watching Stargate SG-1 having recently purchased a box-set of series 1-10. I've just started series six this evening, and I'm enjoying it a lot. ObQuote: "You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan armada. " - The Last Starfighter (1984). First film I ever saw at a cinema as a child.

I've been asked (or been criticised through indirect media) about why packages are removed and as I've just done quite a lot of removals at the Cambridge BSP (I've done some uploads too, it's not one-sided), I thought I'd explain my rationale in the hope that it will encourage others to remove more packages and fix those which warrant fixing. This, is an approximation of the kind of scoring I would use when assessing whether to fix a package or remove it. All bug counts are for the entire source package, including all bugs reported against binaries built from that source.

• R - Release critical bugs - count the bugs cumulatively - 1 point for 1 bug, 3 points for two (1+2), 6 points for 3 (1+2+3) etc.


• U - Uninstallable binary packages - extra points if a -dev package is involved as this will cause FTBFS in reverse dependencies. 1 point for every unrelated package affected. Add extra points if the uninstallable packages are reported as bugs rather than just as notices in the PTS. Add further points for each follow-up message to those bugs. (Filing or following up to a bug report is an indication of user impact as someone had to actually make a contribution.)


• B - Blocking other bugs - extra points for every RC bug which is blocking any other bug of any severity.


• B - Blocking transitions or release goals - extra points for every bug which is blocking a release transition. (Note this is not the same as being involved in the transition, it matters if the package is blocking the transition by making other packages involved in the transition unable to be rebuilt or migrate.)


• I - Interest - popcon is not much use here, "Interest" is a multiplier of the total of previous points. If the package is in testing, multiply the previous points total by the number of days the package has been waiting to enter testing beyond the normal limit. If it is blocking other packages from migrating, add the total number of excess days of all blocked packages. If the package is only in unstable, multiply the previous points total by the number of months the package has been waiting.


• S - Security - Count up the number of days the CVE has been waiting longer than a week, multiply that number of days by three and multiply the points so far by the result.


• H - Help - whether anyone has done any work at all, including the maintainer. Subtract 1 for any patches, 2 if the patches still apply and work. (It's not much for patches because if a patch exists and works, the excuses not to upload are less believable). Double the points so far for any working patches which have been ignored for more than a month (more than a week for a CVE or packages blocking transitions.

RUBBISH - easy to remember, maybe.

If someone comes up with a UDD query which can resolve the above as an algorithm, a) I'll buy them a beer at DebConf and b) it could be a useful addition to the PTS...

For giving new look to my blog I was trying out a lot of fonts from the FontSquirrel website but none of them satisfied my taste. While searching for the fonts identi.ca website fonts attracted my notice and the font used was Lato. I found it and used in this website. I was wondering why such a nice font is not present on Debian. Since it was on FontSquirrel that means the license should be friendly. So searched for the font in DuckDuckGo and found their website. So after all Lato fonts where under Open Font License which is DFSG compilant. That was sufficient for me to package it for Debian. Here is the ITP for fonts-lato and its already uploaded to Debian and waiting in the NewQueue Thanks to bubulle for uploading it quickly. Hope Debian users will love this new font. And yeah I packaged it using dh-make-font which I wrote majorly with help of my friends. And one more news is its waiting to be added into dh-make package here.

Well this is new, and I m utterly baffled. Here s a file that s not in use by anything.
$ md5sum xppro.vdi
589cbb5501dcddda047344a3550aaa95 xppro.vdi
$ md5sum xppro.vdi
a69806ec60d39e06473edbb0abd71637 xppro.vdi
Every time I run md5sum on it, I get a different answer. Same story with sha256sum. If I grab just the first 100MB, it gives the same answer each time. dmesg doesn t show any sort of errors whatsoever during the time I m running the tools. The file is 13GB, and was copied from one laptop to another (the new one being a Thinkpad T420s). The old laptop gives the same answer every time. The new one doesn t. I ve put the file on different ext4 filesystems on the same machine (one using LUKS encryption, the other not, both under LVM) same result. This will have also guaranteed different placement on the underlying hard disk. I verified that nothing is modifying the file by using lsof and inotify. The system is a freshly-installed Debian wheezy running kernel 3.2.0-1-amd64. Any ideas how I go about troubleshooting/fixing this? So far I don t know if it s hardware or software, though my gut says software; SMART isn t showing issues here, and the kernel didn t log hardware issues, either.

Today I went to the Laufsporttag Winthertur, another 11km run. Overall it was a smaller event (about a third of participants) than the Bremgarter Reusslauf; the organisation was OK, but you could see that it was smaller-scale. The big difference was that this was definitely not a flat course; the official course lists 150m gain in altitude, my Garmin recorded 220m (given that it has a barometric altimeter, and that the course was hard, I tend\^Wwant to believe the latter). The course starts with 50m of flat, and then up and up until you're in the woods, at which point it's a one third flat, one third down, one third up course; by the 8th km or so, you start the final descent (back to the starting point), and you simply go down and down for a long while, until the final (about 800m) flat distance. You can see a nice graph of the elevation profile here. I thought that since I'm not used to hills, I will simply go slower, and finish about 10 minutes later. However, I definitely underestimated the competition effect , and how much one can get into the spirit of the race . The end effect was that by the official timer, I finished about 1m30s faster than the previous race. I was so glad that the race was over that I forgot to press 'stop' on my Garmin ; also, it recorded only 10.51km (with the missing 500 meters all occurring in the last 2 km, I wonder what's up with these inconsistent numbers?). The final descent was so long that I managed to do kilometres 9 and 10 (according to the Garmin) at 4:34 each, which is something I definitely can't sustain (for 2km) on flat land. Speaking of the group run, it was nice that from about the 6th km until the end I have run in the same mini-group with two other people; it was helpful to have someone to follow/help you keep the pace (even though I finished last of this mini-group, ha!). This time I also had the heartbeat sensor, and I found out that I averaged about ~13 more bpm than in my training (flat) runs. So that's what running alongside other people does: it makes you push yourself (much) harder. On the cadence part, I was again averaging ~82 (times two), and for the last ~5 minutes I was running constantly at 83. Did I mention I like stats? One thing that surprised me on this hilly race was that most people kept about the same speed on downhill as on the flat parts; I wonder why, for me it seemed easy to go much faster (within the same heart rate). It is harder on the knees, so you have to be careful on how you set the foot down, but not that much that I would keep the same speed. Hmm And speaking of hilly races: one of the brochures I saw at the race was about this race: Glacier 3000 run, a 26km run with a nice 1,900 meters of gained altitude (starts at 1,050m and finishes at 2,950m). Basically, up, up and more up. Nice, but one would have to be quite crazy That's all, thanks for reading!

Farnell did take note of the pre-order: I've just had an email asking me to confirm an order. I've just put one in for 30 days delivery ...

A work colleague has also added me to a list he's putting together - this means I might get two :(

Torrent was running at 5.90 sharing ratio a couple of days ago when I stopped it. It's now running at 1.4 share ratio - there's a lot of interest

I put up most of the Debian AMD64 DVDs plus a couple of netinsts at the same time - only a couple of those have reached 1.0 share ratio or better and been deleted.

UPDATE - Using instructions on how to run the image in QEMU, I have managed to get the basic Debian image meant for the RaspberryPI to run on my small i686 laptop.

Well done to the folks at the University of Cambridge who've been using this as a development distribution: Fedora from University of Toronto will follow.
LXDE, compilers - and all running in 256M :)