As blogged on friday, it's quite easy to run Etch on the OLPC XO-1 laptop. I've now put my notes describing the neccessary steps on my own webspace - the OLPC page on the wiki needs some more cleanup to make it more useful again and I created that webpage of mine anyway, to document my backports for the XO. So this was just an easy step to share my notes with the world.

Before creating a d-i image for the XO, I'll probably finish the sugar-base packaging and upload it, as this is more urgent (or relevant for development) than having a(nother) native installation method. ("Another" because I think there is some debootstrap based shell script somewhere...)

What a disaster!
HP and NVidia making laptops unusable
I've been considering a new laptop for weeks - mainly to get more RAM, more space but without adding to the actual size of the machine (or weight). I know, I should have taken more time over the selection, I should have found out more about the hardware, etc.etc.
I've ended up with an HP Pavilion dv6000 (dv6615ea) for the 2Gb RAM, 15inch screen, 250Gb hard drive to replace my ageing iBook 12inch with 128Mb RAM and 30Gb hard drive - all for barely an inch extra depth and very similar weight (and it was cheaper than the original price of the iBook). I thought I'd made a good choice. Yes, it was "NVidia Graphics" according to the sticker and yes, I could have spent more time (and money) finding a pre-installed lappy but I was hasty. (Much the same way as you should never go food shopping whilst hungry). I've managed with NVidia graphics before without using the horrid proprietary rubbish and I was prepared to put up with less-than-perfect graphics (I never use 3D anyway) because the free driver is at least stable with the graphics that I actually need.
What I wasn't expecting was that the dv6615ea has a lot more NVidia stuff than just the graphics card - including the network card! This really trashes a normal install because eth0 simply does not exist. OK, I can work around that for a while but there's more - the graphics don't work with standard Debian kernels and the standard Debian 'nv' driver. Ubuntu managed some graphics with the restricted NV support but only in VESA-safe-mode. Next stop was Mepis.
Don't buy a HP Pavilion dv6000 (dv6615ea)!
Just to see if the graphics would work at all, I tried it. Aha - the non-free changes to the Mepis kernel solved both problems so at least I now have a working ethernet card and a working graphics card. That at least allows me to finish the rest of the setup to find a better way of getting the graphics to work without the non-free kernel.
I'm not happy though - I'm annoyed with myself that I got suckered into a non-free-only lappy. I'm annoyed with NVidia for being stupid about Linux support. I'm annoyed that this new lappy is just going to end up MORE unstable than my existing one because of all the proprietary crap. (I'll still need some firmware for the bcm43xx wireless card - and it is that firmware that made my previously ultra-reliable iBook into a flaky, power hungry psycho-beast.)
Currently, I'm still migrating this horrid little piece of rubbish from Mepis to Ubuntu (Hardy from Breezy) then from Hardy to Debian unstable.
GNOME doesn't yet work because of the proprietary crap but the Mepis GNOME packages are also v.old so I'm hoping that a genuine Sid installation of GNOME can actually start up but I suspect that the Mepis patches are KDE-specific and I hate KDE.
I've just wasted 500 and that's why I'm really annoyed.
I've wasted a day and a half too, making things worse.
I'm probably going to have to leave this new lappy behind and take my existing iBook to Fosdem in a few weeks and that makes me even more annoyed. Even worse, this is an amd64 machine but I'm stuck with a 32bit installation because of the proprietary crap. I doubt I'll be able to trust any packages built on this laptop - or even be able to report bugs from this machine without first replicating the bug on a genuine Debian box. There is just SO much proprietary pollution in this piece of crap. I didn't think companies were still producing crap of this pitiful standard - HP: you stink.
I'm not a happy bunny. Not even slightly.

On a lighter note - it just goes to show how I've been isolated from all this stuff until now. My other machines are fine and have no need for any non-free stuff. Nice that I don't have to deal with this every day but such a shock to the system when I'm confronted with such horrors.

I have just stayed at the Victoria Hotel Melbourne. I booked it through www.WotIf.com and paid ~$110 per night instead of the list price of $186 per night. The location is great (little Collins St near Swanston St). It’s a short walk from most things that are in the central city area and the nearest tram stop has a tram that goes directly to Melbourne University which will be good for people attending LCA (although it’s close enough that you might want to walk and save a few dollars). The price is pretty good too (you don’t get much cheaper than that in the central city area). But there are some down-sides. The hotel is old and has an old design. It has small windows and air-conditioners are retro-fitted into the window (as opposed to the modern design of having huge windows and A/C in the ceiling). The air-conditioning is barely adequate and once the hotel walls heat up the room will be warm all night. The window-based air-conditioning also greatly diminishes the possibility of looking out the window, and for people who are tall enough to see over it they will probably find that the bed is too short for them (I stayed in a twin room, maybe a double bed would be longer - of course if I was alone in a double bed then I could probably sleep diagonally). The room lights are all halogen spotlights, that includes the reading lights over the beds. This is 90’s architectural fashion and not a functional design. If you want to lie on your bed to read a book or watch TV then you will be able to see at least three halogen lights from the corner of your eye. Seeing such a small intense light source in your peripheral vision is really unpleasant. The pool is about 5M*5M in size and approximately 1.1M deep (it seems deeper than a 1.0M pool I recently swam in but shallower than a 1.2M pool). In conclusion I think that the Oaks on Market [1] apartments are better value for money, altough Market street is less convenient. Update: I forgot to mention one last failing. For curtains my room had nothing other than a Venetian blind. As such a blind does not cover the entire window space I was woken by the sun rise. It’s bad enough seeing a sunrise after a hard night coding, I definitely don’t want to see one when I had planned to sleep in. Curtains that properly cover the window is not an expensive feature to add.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/01/07/oaks-on-market/

Share This

When talking in Spanish these days, particularly on IRC, but increasingly more in e-mail and even speech, I like being free to draw words from English, either because there isn’t or I can’t think of a Spanish word or expression to mean the same, or (many times) just because I find the result aesthetically more pleasing (!). Some people, of course, find this practice horrendous and something to be ashamed of, but alas, so do some others about other practices in my life, so, there. Last night with friends, I used the form refraineado, which would be the Spanish participle for the English verb refrain. One of these friends, who did not know the English verb at all, said: “ITYM refrenado?” As it happens, both verbs obviously (?) share the same roots, and they mean the same. This one time, though, I didn’t know the (relatively rare?) Spanish one, so that makes up for a bit of an excuse, but reality is that I cannot promise I will use refrenado and not refraineado the next time I need to use it. Oh well.

2.6.24-rc7 is available on 5 architectures (amd64, i386, powerpc, s390, sparc). Please add the following line to your Lenny or Sid box sources.list and report back:

deb http://kernel-archive.buildserver.net/debian-kernel trunk main

This is not yet the real Etch + 1/2 kernel, but comes pretty close. According to our initial testing and user feedback 2.6.24 promises to be a great release. It will help Etch to have proper hardware support for newer hardware, has better power efficiency due to tickless kernel, enhanced wireless card support, the CFS scheduler and much more... It is a Debian novelty to provide an supported optional Linux kernel upgrade for a stable release. This is not the final as due to incompatible user interface the Etch build will have the old firewire stack. Once aboves land in Sid and got broader coverage will announce the Etch snapshots. So please give it a shot on your Testing/Unstable boxes.

Been a week since I posted. I've not done much, though I did complete most of the migration of my planet-searching code to gluck.debian.org. This is now logging to a local SQLite database, and available online. I've updated the blog software so that I can restrict comments to posts made within the past N days - which has helped with spam. My other comment-spam system is the use of the crm114 mail filter. I have a separate database now for comments (distinct from that I use for email), and after a training on previous comments all is good. Other than being a little busy over the past week life is good. Especially when I got to tell a recruitment agent that I didn't consider London to be within "Edinburgh & Surrounding Region". Muppets. The biggest downside of the week was "discovering" a security problem in Java, which had been reported in 2003 and is still unfixed. Grr. (CVE-2003-1156 for those playing along at home). Heres the code:

#!/bin/sh
#
#  Grep for potentially unsafe /tmp usage in shared libraries
#
find /lib -name '*.so' -type f -print > /tmp/$$
find /usr/lib -name '*.so' -type f -print >> /tmp/$$
for i in $(cat /tmp/$$ ); do
    out=$(strings $i   grep '/tmp')    
    if [ ! -z "$out" ]; then
        echo "$i"
        echo "$out"
    fi
done
rm /tmp/$$

Originally I planned to post this with the title "Last night I slept with 300 people" but this night happened two weeks ago... It was the night before the fourth and last day of the 24C3 were I slept in the gym :-) Actually I also planned to blog on the third day but then this day turned out to be really busy... and then I arrived home on new years eve and suddenly it was a week later and now it's the 10th of January. Time flies when you're having fun. And as you might have noticed it's not even the 10th anymore...

Timewarp back to the chaos communication congress! I think it's safe to say that the Debian booth at the 24C3 was a success. It was a nice meeting (and storage) point for Debian people, we collected quite some donations for t-shirts and stuff (the exact amount needs to be examined still) and we were able to help various users and contributors answering Debian specific questions of both kinds: how to install/configure/fix foo and packaging and other development questions from a number of people.. And we had a babelbox setup which was much better understood and perceived, once I added a sign explaining it :-)

Thanks a lot to the 24C3 organizers and the angels (thats how the congress volunteers are called) for making such a smooth and interesting conference as well as giving such a great space to the Debian booth! And equally thanks a lot to all the people operating our booth! For those who are interested to attend next year: roughly 64 talks were held in english, and 26 in german. I saw about five events live...



The sign hung for about an hour unmodified...

On the third day of the congress we had an OLPC.de meeting, which was quite productive and resulted in us founding OLPC Germany this monday. In the aftermath of this meeting I came up with the idea of having an OLPC Europe event at FOSDEM in Brussels in February, which by now has been accepted and scheduled by the FOSDEM organizers. Yay! So if you are in Europe and involved or interested in the OLPC, please mark the 23rd of February 15-17 localtime in your calendar :-) The idea of these projects is probably best summarized with "think global, act local and global", for more detail please read our vision. (And keep in mind this is in its very early stages.) OLPC Europe should also become an interface for all those european OLPC efforts which have been popping up recently and which all take up ressources in Cambridge, the OLPC "mothership", taking ressources away from the children of the world.

Then on the last day of the 24C3 congress I also gave the DebConf7 "thank you, Sponsor"-package to those four people from the freifunk community, who helped us out with accesspoints for Edinburgh. Much to my surprise and joy, they were really happy about it! Funnily two of those four are also among the three OpenWRT developers who ported OpenWRT to the OLPC laptop, which I borrowed to them somewhat in return :-) And now we work together in OLPC.de and .eu. Networking is sometimes really really fun.

Fast forward to 2008. Two days ago I finanlly had the time to to run etch, lenny and sid on the OLPC laptop (with wireless (including WPA), xorg and sound working and dualbooting with the original fedora install) and then yesterday I've created a usbstick which successfully booted a "d-i prototype". Yay! And best of all (for me), most of the actual work was done by other people, I just had to collect the pieces. My next steps will be documenting what I did and prepare a d-i image which actually works. I don't have pics yet (it's Debian running on a laptop, I guess you can imagine this), so for now I will just post another picture I received some three months ago and which made me incredibly happy at that time:



When I have a working d-i running on it, I'll post more pics.

I bought one of the new terabyte drives, to double the storage space on my home network. I put it in a Thecus, so I have a terabyte of storage in a computer about the size of my first computer's floppy disk drive.

Bits from the Debian i18n meeting (Extremadura 2007)

From December 12th to December 15th, Junta de Extremadura hosted another one of the Debian Meetings; five i18n guys shared ideas, food, buses and fun with the Debian KDE maintainers. We would like to thank Extremadura for hosting us during the Hispalinux Meeting 2007, the event was held at Universad de Derecho (Law University) in Caceres, Spain.

These are the minutes, results and notes from our work, it is a brief description but hopefully complete of what we have done and what is still missing/pending.

Thanks to Cesar (cek) we had the chance to work on churro (i18n.debian.net) locally; the server is still running a 2.4 kernel because of some "tick" problems with 2.6 series, the last one tried was 2.6.21 and we should try newer ones, in order to support upgrades and not get stuck with 2.4, we hope Cesar will find time to test new Debian kernels.

First, let me introduce everybody to the services, robots and resources being hosted by i18n.d.n:

• MoinMoin wiki for local and simple reference documentation, it contains all the links to the below resources. (http://i18n.debian.net/wiki/)
• Pootle experimental server
• dl10n scripts, aka dl10n robots (codename Lion), these scripts are responsible for the status of pseudo URLs used by some translation teams, by the Project Smith and by the NMU Priority List for i18n NMU Campaign
• Synchronization of the i18n material used by the Debian website to generate translation statistics about PO and PO-debconf
• Generation of Compendium PO files per-language
• Different types of statistics
• Other non user-visible services like a full source mirror for stable, testing, unstable and experimental, used by the scripts and robots.
• DDTP, Debian Descriptions Translation Project
• DDTSS, The Debian Distributed Translation Server Satellite, a web front-end for DDTP, now integrated to DDTP to use the Database back-end instead of the e-mail interface.

And, at some point, we found important to state clear the acronyms and names used in related DDTP projects/tools:

• DDTS, Debian Description Translation Server, this is the main "back-end" used in DDTP, it tends to be the interface between translator tools (present and future ones) and the database;
• ddt.cgi is a CGI interface that is able to provide info for specific packages or translations, including diffs, related packages and active/inactive descriptions.
• DDTC which is the old (and still functional) command line client for DDTP.

We took the chance to organize a few things on churro, old accounts were cleaned out and removed, we moved from /org to /srv and got more GBs of space to the "playground". Old files were also removed and some are schedule to deletion on early 2008. With the reallocation of /org we also find some more space to /home and /var, we reorganize some of the links on the web space (specially to remove services from people's accounts), and we changed the mirror script to also synchronize the Packages and Contents files.

Grisu and Martijn worked mainly on DDTP and DDTSS integration. DDTSS now provides statistics for stable, testing and unstable, we are also working with Debian Med to provide support and infrastructure to a specific audience, like packages related to Medicine. The conversion to talk directly with DDTP/DDTS database also provided:

• Fetching new translations is almost instantaneous and marks translation as requested (avoiding duplicated works via the e-mail interface).
• After sufficient reviews occurred, the upload is instant
• Committed DDTS / DDTSS / DDTP website generation into SVN
  • Added READMEs for the above directories

DDTSS now announces the user using authentication because of its integration with the Database backend used by DDTP. Quick trivia: DDTP is now a compound of 25 languages occupying 18 GBytes.

A few days before the meeting we had the offer to use "AUTOBYHAND" to upload a package with the Translation-* files. The package is now called 'ddtp-translations' and we worked during the meeting to create scripts to build the package and to test it on the archive side. This approach allow Debian i18n Team to upload new translations and remove old ones (or inactive ones) without bother FTP Master Team. Special thanks to Anthony Town, he has been working with us to prove tips, fixes and info on how to produce the package and the scripts. The code is available in the debian-l10n SVN under pkg-ddtp-translations:
http://svn.debian.org/viewsvn/debian-l10n/pkg-ddtp-translations

In our case, "BYHAND" processing consists of a simple tarball of the main,contrib,non-free /i18n/Translation-*, we decide to work on a set of scripts to make it easier to create new packages (ddtp-translations) in a consistent way and keeping debian/changelog up-to-date. We also made some suggestions to the script what will run on the archive side to check the tarball structure, base on the examples of debian-maintainers and debtags (tags-override).

One of our initial targets for the meeting with regards to Pootle and Debian was to try big PO files per language, fortunately, Nicolas and Friedel were able to increase Pootle performance enough to get a few languages from DDTP loaded in Pootle. Using the upstream Pootle-diet branch, which uses a database back-end for the generation of statistics, the time to browse the DDTP POs of a language (~20.000 files) went down to a dozen of seconds.

Speaking about Pootle, Friedel gave us a good picture of what is coming next in terms of Pootle's development. There are improvements planned in the areas of permissions and rights delegation, as well as file management (for projects and templates). Improved management of terminology projects is also planned.

Improvements in the QA capabilities of the translate toolkit and Pootle are planned to help with the "false positives" of the pofilter checks. Better reuse of existing translations will become possible by using better translation memory techniques. There is also work planned on formats and converters involving, for example, XLIFF, TMX, TRADOS and WordFast.

Another pending task for quite a while was the CVS migration to SVN, it is now done, with a new layout. Commits to the CVS were disabled and every single script or resource depending on CVS should be changed to use SVN. For now, we are publishing (via HTTP) the status files generated by the pseudo-urls robots until we can fix the scripts to re-enable the commit of the files. You can find them here: http://i18n.debian.net/debian-l10n/status/

We are pretty happy with the changes and results of the work during those days, but we still have some items pending on our TODO list:

• More advertisement and usage information about PO Compendiums
  There are two use cases are identified:
  
  • Filling new PO files.
  • QA work to find inconsistent translations.
  Maybe Eddy would love to do that? :-)
• Extend the duration of the statistics history. (Nekral)
• Debian packages of the services running on churro
  • DDTP (Grisu)
  • DDTSS (Martijn)
  • dl10n (Nekral)
• DDTP: add some scripts to handle packages with version in the description (e.g. kernel and kernel modules) (Martijn)
• DDTP: Standard generation of the translation tarballs (faw)
• DDTP: document the bracketed stats on the main page (faw)
• DDTC: should be updated to match the current features. Documentation to ease integration with procmail. (Nekral - low priority)
• Implement mail service for translation teams with their own robots (e.g. Dutch) (faw)
• Collect data from http://www.debian.org/devel/website/stats/ (Nekral)
• http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/po/,
  http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/po-debconf/
  are built based on the churro material. It would make more sense to build these statistics on churro (Nekral)
  • We could "fork" the page and add some fancy new features on these pages (Nekral)
  • Add information from the coordination page to indicate that a translation is ongoing. (Nekral)
• Pootle: missing review indication. Hard with PO back-end. (Friedel)

There are a couple more reports to be sent but they are more focused on i18n specific questions, tools and plans for 2008. So, probably those will be sent only to debian-i18n mail list. If you are interested, please, stay tuned. :-)

Posted on d-d-a: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/01/msg00002.html
And a big thanks to Nicolas François (aka nekral), he helped me a lot making notes, preparing the text and reviewing it; and was patient enough to wait for the report while I was solving some personal problems.

An article by Sam Varghese appeared on ITwire today, entitled linux.conf.au: What is Novell doing here?:

A GNU/Linux system does not normally load modules that are not released under an approved licence. So why should Australia’s national Linux conference take on board a sponsor who engages in practices that are at odds with the community? What am I talking about? A company which should not be in the picture has poked its nose in as a sponsor. Novell, which indicated the level of its commitment to FOSS by signing a deal with Microsoft in November 2006, will be one of the supporting sponsors for the conference.

Novell was also a minor sponsor of the 2007 conference, and Sam wrote an article in January expressing similar thoughts, which included this quote from Bruce Perens:

“I’d rather they hadn’t accepted a Novell sponsorship. It wasn’t very clueful of them, given Novell’s recent collaboration with Microsoft in spreading fear and doubt about Linux and software patents,” Perens said.

Ultimately, I think that’s a mistaken view. Linux.conf.au is what it is thanks to the contributions of four groups:

the organisers

who create the conference, get a venue, organise a schedule of events, help the speakers and attendees to get there, and generally make it easy for everyone to just get immersed in cool Linux stuff

the speakers

who provide the core of the schedule, the reason for attendees to go, and a core depth of awesome technical knowledge and ideas

the attendees

who fill in the organisational/content gaps that the organisers and speakers miss, who make for fascinating corridor and dinner conversations, who make side events like the miniconfs, the hackfest or open day interesting, and who pay the rego fees that lets the conference happen

the sponsors

who provide a chunk of money to fill out the conference budget letting us commit to venues and events earlier (when we might otherwise have to wait to see how many people come), and let us do extra things that registration fees alone wouldn’t cover

Obviously sometimes you have to exclude people from participating, but that’s mostly only if they’re actually causing trouble for the event. For sponsors, that pretty much means trying to interfere in the conference itself, or not paying on time. Otherwise, if you’re contributing to the conference, and not causing problems, you certainly should be recognised for that, as far as I can see. For me, the same thing would apply if Microsoft was offering to sponsor the conference – if they’re willing to contribute, and not cause problems, I’m all for it. If they happen to not be doing anything constructive in Linux-space anywhere else, well, it seems perfectly fine to me to start contributing by helping make linux.conf.au awesome. In Microsoft’s case that would be hard, because all the people going “oh my gosh, Microsoft, Linux! Wolves, sheeps! Hell, snow!” along with possible mixed messages from Microsoft and our long-term major sponsors HP and IBM about the future of Linux and whatnot could really distract us from all the cool technical stuff the conference is fundamentally about. I don’t think there’s anything Microsoft could offer to justify that much disruption, but having more of the world’s software companies involved in free software would probably be worth a bit of hassle, if the disruption could be minimised. Ultimately, I guess my disagreement comes down to these couple of comments from Sam’s article:

Asked whether it was right that Novell should be allowed to be a sponsor for a conference such as this - which, in my view, is a privilege - […] […] Novell, obviously, is hoping that, as public memory is woefully short, it will be able to wriggle its way back into the community. Providing such leeway is, in my opinion, a big mistake.

In my opinion, the ability to contribute to open source isn’t a privelege, it’s something that should be open to everyone, including people who’ve made mistakes in the past: and that’s precisely what the “free” in free software is all about. OTOH, if you want to see who’s been participating most in the Linux world lately, you’re much better off looking at the list of speakers than sponsors. Novell (or at least SuSE) folks giving talks in the main conference this year seem to include John Johansen and Nick Piggin. Interestingly, the count of HP folks seems a bit low this year, with only two that I can see, which leaves them not only merely equalling Novell/SuSE, but beaten by both Intel and Catalyst. Tsk! I guess we’ll have to wait and see if that changes when we can see the list of attendees’ companies in the booklet this year…

(Disclaimer: I work for MIT Information Services & Technology blah blah blah I am a student blah blah these are only my words and do not represent the opinion(s) of my employer.) Way back in the day in 1983, MIT started something it called Project Athena, which had the goal of investigating how computers could be used to enhance education at MIT. This project became the origin of such pieces of software as the X Window System and Kerberos, as well as a campus-wide network of workstations all running similar software. In 1991, Project Athena ended, but the Athena system continued on, taken over by MIT Information Systems. It’s 2008, and Athena still exists at MIT—walk into a computing cluster, and chances are all the machines will be running Athena software. (Unless that particular cluster has been taken over be Athena’s evil sibling, often referenced as “WinAthena”, which often seems to be maintained by no one, and whose existence is sometimes denied by those who maintain and support Real Athena. Not many machines have suffered this agonizing fate, luckily.) Unfortunately, as the years have progressed recently, fewer and fewer resources have been put into the development of Athena. In many ways it is no longer on the cutting edge of things as it has been in the past, though it is certainly still useful. Some students these days, however, even think of Athena as only “their MIT email” or maybe use it occasionally to print something in a cluster on the way to class. I’ve seen people grow frustrated and storm out of a cluster due to things like instructions for using a flash drive that involve more steps than just plugging it in. While on the one hand it’s easy to laugh at people for a lack of patience or being open to a computing system that is not either Windows or Mac and perhaps a bit more complicated on the surface, on the other hand, some of these things really should just work by now, and on other UNIX-based systems they do—but Athena has lagged behind. When you log into an Athena workstation for the first time, you are confronted with what looks like this: That’s GNOME 2.8, and it looks kind of like the GNOME 2.8 default but uglier. When you look under the hood, there are pieces of the system that obviously originated in a time where nothing better existed and so something new had to be created—the “xlogin” login system doesn’t support PAM, and the login path involves a hairy maze of scripts that perform various tasks. Under the hood, the base OS is currently RHEL 4 or Solaris 10. I still can’t remember what the right options are to feed RPM whenever I need some information that I think I should be able to get from it. These things were once necessary but today just look crufty. Some people have tossed around the idea that everyone has a laptop these days and thus clusters are uselessly expensive, but it’s been met with a lot of resistance. I’m all for progress, but I use clusters all the time! They’re one thing that makes it an easy choice for me to have a really portable laptop, because when I really need computing power or screen space on campus away from my room, there is always a cluster nearby. They’re also nice isolated places that can be associated with “work mode”, which is good for productivity. Beyond all this, Athena provides a common platform that all technical classes can depend on, from providing standard and specialized academic software to standing as a baseline of “make sure your code works on this before handing it in because that is how it will be graded”. At any rate, things are finally happening on this front. Athena can’t stay RHEL 4 forever—while AFS allows non-system software to be easily updated for all machines without requiring any OS release, hardware moves on and compatibility is lost, and the rest of the world is coming up with new awesome things that Athena machines are missing out on. A student group that I am vaguely involved with, SIPB, took the early initiative with this and created DebAthena, which takes stock Debian and Ubuntu and allows it to closely resemble an Athena environment. We even run a campus Linux dialup using the packages. (I won’t claim to have done much work on DebAthena myself because, well, I didn’t.) Amazingly, the Athena release team has decided to work with the SIPB on the next release of Athena. So, what I really just wasted over 600 words prepping for is to say that Athena 10 will be based on Ubuntu. This is only relatively new news, but I am lame about finishing blog posts. There are a variety of reasons why Ubuntu was chosen over Debian. Some of them are lame and some of them are not. Even so, I am excited about this prospect—and it should be possible to peripherally support Debian in such a way that was not possible with Athena 9.4. I really like Athena. Even coming to MIT with a background in Linux there has been a steep learning curve, though, and I think that things could be better. Lots of people here have their first encounter with a ‘nix system in the form of Athena, and we should strive to make that experience as good as possible. I’m kind of skeptical on the expected release date of this upcoming summer, but as long as it happens soon it will be a big step forward. In some ways it’s kind of sad that I’m excited about a big part of a research institution catching up with others—but inertia is a strong force, and dealing with thousands of workstations is no trivial task. I kind of long for the exciting days of creating new big pieces of free software like X. I bet I imagine those days as being better than they actually were.

It's been a while, but a new update to DebTorrent is available in unstable. There is also a new version of the helper apt-transport-debtorrent (0.2.0) to go with it, which was mostly the cause of the long delay (due to a pending apt transition to testing). It is now highly recommended to install both, read below for new reasons why. One of the previous problems with debtorrent was the incorrect status updates displayed by apt, due to it not being aware of pieces of large files that have already downloaded. Using these new versions together will help to improve the update status messages shown during a download. Now, apt-get update will display a status at the bottom that will look something like:

DebTorrent: 837MiB left at 319 KiB/s (46m03s)

You may not be able to see it all if there are multiple updates to different mirrors under way. In aptitude, the status will appear on a line by itself at the bottom of the list of downloaded files. The status line will update about once per second, and should give a good indication of how much time is really left. The other (incorrect) status information presented by apt/aptitude will still be there but you can ignore it. I've only tested apt and aptitude, so I'm not sure how (or if) synaptic, adept or gnome-apt will display these messages, though they are general apt status messages, usually used for displaying the status while logging into an FTP server. This should also fix another problem that debtorrent can have with downloading large files (usually on slower connections). Since apt can't see the download happening for a long time, the connection would sometimes time out. With these status updates the connection is constantly active, so the timeouts shouldn't be a problem when downloading large packages (although they may still occur when doing an apt-get update, as there are no status updates during that process). I did implement a better solution, as suggested by Micha Politowski on the wiki. This solution uses the creation of sparse files to let apt know how much of a file has actually been downloaded. However, apt doesn't understand how a single process can download multiple files in prarallel, so it only follows the last file that was started, and complains when a file finishes that was not the last one that started. I've disabled that for now while I see if it's possible to modify apt to work better in this situation. Here are the changes for debtorrent:

• Update to support apt debtorrent transport version 0.2
  • send piece downloaded status messages (currently disbaled due to apt not liking it)
  • send general status update messages
• Fix some minor packaging issues
• Upgrade to standards version 3.7.3 (no changes)
• Remove the unneeded binary-arch rule
• Changes the XS-Vcs-* headers to Vcs-*
• Moved Homepage from description to Source package fields

And for apt-transport-debtorrent:

• Upgrade transport version to 0.2
  • Create sparse files based on status messages (102) from DebTorrent
  • Send general status updates to apt (103) from DebTorrent
• Remove support for Range headers as they may confuse the sparse file allocation
• Fix typo in long description
• Upgrade to standards version 3.7.3 (no changes)
• Changes the XS-Vcs-* headers to Vcs-*
• Moved Homepage from description to Source package fields

It s been a long time since I ve written about our local unconferences, but a neat one coming up is DemoCamp CUSEC 2. It s attached to the Canadian Undergraduate Software Engineering Conference, which is being held in Montr al again. Last year, I did a demonstration on how to cook an omelette, with it being a metaphor for software engineering. This year, I m going to do something more prosaic and run a round of Powerpoint karaoke, under the guise of getting people to practise their presentation skills. Or it will be a convincing argument against its use. Show up if you can! Present something you ve been working on! (There are still some slots left.) It ll be exciting. DemoCamp CUSEC 2
Thursday, 17 January 2008
19:00 21:00
Centre Mont-Royal
2200 rue Mansfield
Free admission ( Sign up Google Maps )

#debian-devel-changes on OFTC now spams newly opened bugs, accepted uploads and closed bugs for your idling pleasure. It’s fairly interesting, at the very least.

To see what happens if you hire people who think the average page on myspace looks good to redo your news site you only have to look at the horror of the new site of the vrt.

Even with adblock and noscript tuned I cannot make it into a descent form. A sad day for webdesigners in .be.

Form over function indeed...

Last weekend was as hectic as my life has been lately: I have been trying to restore sanity into my NSLU2, I went to a lecture from Andrew S. Tanenbaum and I made a 2.5 hours drive to my parents in about 4 hours because of the fog.

First, my slug:

• refuses to recognise the USB NIC I have been using until the latest incidents (it either says 'not accepting address, error -71' or 'device descriptor read/64, error -71')
• sometimes reboots when I insert the USB NIC
• either doesn't boot at all or boots really slowly when the USB NIC is inserted
• (obviously) doesn't show the NIC in lsusb listing when is not recognised

Since the USB NIC works on my laptop, I suspect a hardware problem with the slug. Bummer!

Dear no-so-lazyweb, is there a way to install Debian on an ASUS WL-500G Premium router without loosing wireless ability? Or, is there a way to make use of my USB NIC with the ASUS router?

---

Second, Andrew S. Tanenbaum visited Romania and lectured Friday at the University Politehnica Bucharest.

He presented Minix3's architecture and the advantages it has over monolithic OSes. I attended the lecture (although I am not a student anymore) and found it quite nice and well prepared, but I had the feeling that sometimes he was trying to avoid or to bash topics that were not putting Minix into a good light or challenged its title of being the first open[0] OS based on a micro-kernel architecture[1]. In spite of that, I found him to be a really good speaker and I liked the overall presentation, although, I also expected some on the spot demos or at least some recordings.

The things that I remember:

• 2.4 millions subtle code alterations in drivers with only 80000 driver crashes (of course, no kernel crashes)
• simulation of network driver repeated crashes at different time intervals and how it affects performance - a 30% degradation at crashes that occur once every second and an insignificant degradation at crashes occurring at each 10 seconds
• every driver has a set of rights assigned to it; it was difficult for them to define this - this sounds a lot like SELinux issues
  
• messages have a fixed length
• there is no dynamic memory allocation within the kernel
• the kernel is 5000 lines of code (all drivers are in user space)
• really secure system
• there were performance comparisons with Minix2 and the hit was about 20%; still, is said that L4 has only an approximate 2-5% performance hit because of the micro-kernel architecture
  
• apparently the FreeBSD kernel has only 3 bugs /1000 lines of code
• Minix uses a BSD license
  

I also got a Minix live CD (which is more like the Gentoo Linux install CD - just console in the live system) and made an installation of Minix in a qemu machine[2]. Unfortunately, I don't think I'll have the time to dwell into the source.

I was thinking, would it worth the effort to try to make a GNU/Hurd/Minix system (i.e. replace Mach with Minix's micro-kernel)? BTW, is Debian GNU/Hurd now based on L4 or does it still uses Mach?


Note: Some of my work colleagues suggested that the presentation was the same as one he made at linux.conf.au last year, but I can't confirm/infirm that since I didn't saw the recording.

---

I won't write about the "fog drive", but I'll just say it wasn't pleasant at all, and I felt I was in driving in The Twilight Zone for the whole Friday evening.

---

[0] he gave credit to QNX
[1] For instance, I tried to ask him twice if he felt that GNU Hurd was violating the micro-kernel paradigm or if he can compare it to Minix' architecture. I had the impression that both times he avoided to answer and started the usual Hurd bashing, "they have been developing it for 20+ years, but got nothing working", meanwhile "Minix is here". After the lecture/presentation somebody told me that AST shortly said that they "were similar, but different". I didn't catch that line.
[2] thanks to qemu-launcher it is trivial to create and manage multiple qemu virtual machines

Yesterday I got my laptop back. It was in service since the 6th of December.

They replaced the battery, and although it looked like the built-in charge indicator was defect, actually the button on this battery is buried deeper than it was on the previous one and I have to press really hard on it to trigger it.

According to the tests made yesterday night, this battery holds for about 2.5-3 hours when playing music. Also it has 96% of its designed capacity. I guess is OK enough since I don't want to be spared from my laptop anymore.

Next on the agenda:

• restore data sanity (I did clean up most of the data from the HDD before handing down the laptop for the case when I was forced to hand it over; lucky for me, I managed to keep the HDD)
• install armel Debian on my new[1] NSLU2, Kinder (more news on that later ;-) )
• fix my local network chaos triggered by the problems that hit Ritter (my older NSLU2)
  
• finish the wiki theme
• work a little more on svn-buildpackage and kill more of its bugs
• walk through my (game) packages' bugs and try to fix them, answer, etc.
• try to make bluetooth transfers to work from and to my laptop

BTW, I still hold to my opinion that Dell and Emag suck, although I might buy desktops from Dell, laptops are a no-no until they fix their broken batteries and their broken "1-year warranty for batteries" policy.

[1] I bought a new NSLU2 after I left my laptop in service and it has been waiting since then to run the Debian Arm EABI (armel) port

Just a quick note:

while wading through the list-archives, drop-boxes and list-configuration to find false positives and possiblities to optimise our mailinglists spam level i accidently removed the inclusion of our spamfilters from most lists.

I appologise for this.

Luckily zobel discovered my error and fixed it at 14:30 CET.

Since September 19th I have been mostly offline and unreachable. This was due to having started a new job in a wonderful new project: soitu.es, an online newspaper with a strong focus on Citizen Journalism: citizens playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information, I must mention the master mind behind this all: Gumersindo Lafuente, one very well known journalist in Spain. On the other hand, working with Ra l Rivero, not the Cuban poet but the technical soul of the project, is something I would pay for, and I get actually paid to learn from him! Too bad he doesn t digg Debian :)



The site was finally launched during Xmas, and we are all less busy, so despite having what I call the weekend flu (that only affects me during the weekends, but I never feel so bad that I need to miss work during the week), I am back to normal, If you thought I was quite MIA, keep in mind I was not one of busiest ones at work! Launching such a project takes a toll on everyone, though. I set up a Flick set for my new workplace: Amayita s Soitu.es Flickr photo Set, in case you are curious. There is also an official Soitu.es Flickr Photo Pool.

Today is a holiday in Spain, due to D a de Reyes, when kids usually get their Xmas presents here. As I am fully recovered from this weekend s flu (today is Monday after all), I had some spare time and my cats got a nice present too: A DIY scratching post. There is a WTF column in the effing middle of my kitchen, so after some cardboard, a wall stapler, sisal rope and a bit of round and round the column... This pic shows the result:



I couldn t resist filming a video, available on YouTube: This scratching post is now mine! - No! Mine! - I ll get you!

A few days ago I stayed in an apartment at the Oaks on Market [1] hotel which I booked through www.WotIf.com. The WotIf price was $159 per night - the list price was $376 per night. It was possible to get extra beds for $30 each per night if you wanted to get more people in the room. All rooms are of the Suite / Apartment [2] style. The room was a basic (twin or queen) room, it was quite large and well equipped. The TV in the room was quite large and TFT, it had a range of inputs which seemed to include everything other than VGA and DVI (if I was running a hotel every TV would have VGA or DVI input for laptops). All the basic kitchen facilities were there, including a microwave oven, a stove, and a toaster. There was even dish-washing liquid! The hotel pool (indoor and heated) is 25M long and 1.2M deep, there is a spa and a sauna. The pool isn’t cleaned as well as it might be, there was a band-aid stuck on a wall and sand and other stuff on the floor of the pool (including a hair elastic with a rusty clip - it had apparently been in the pool long enough to rust). The hotel is a short tram ride from the LCA venue, walking to LCA would be possible too (I walked further than that when at Dunedin). I can’t claim that this hotel is better than others, but it would do. Having a pool is a good thing, I recommend that all delegates bring their bathers for pool parties - the weather will probably demand such things.

• [1] http://www.theoaksgroup.com.au/Property.aspx?sid=31


• [2] http://doc.coker.com.au/travel/hotel-vs-apartment/

Share This