I spent a week recently working on the nonfree firmware problem in debian-installer. The problem of course, is that nasty nonfree firmware is needed to use many wireless cards, some other NICs, and some disk controllers, but cannot be included in d-i images. The fix/workaround landed in unstable today. d-i will detect if a driver needs firmware that is not available. It'll then prompt the user to put the firmware on removable media (such as a USB stick, or floppy, or really anything you can plug into a machine without drawing blood). The debian-cd team will be building some zip files and tarballs containing all the firmware that debian ships in non-free. (images here) Extract one of those onto a USB stick (vfat formatted), and you're good to go. The installer will also tell you the names of the firmware files it needs, so if they're some of the ones that Debian cannot even legally distribute (such as the ipw2200 firmware), you can go hunt them down, and dump them onto your USB stick too. The installer can find firmware files loose on the USB stick, or packaged up in a .deb (or .udeb). The firmware will be used during the installation, and also installed into the finished system. So providing it in .debs is cleanest. (BTW, if you package a firmware deb for debian, please avoid putting anything but firmware and documentation in it. These firmware debs are also installed into the d-i environment now.) This could be considered a little clumsy, needing to manually find the bits and put them on a USB stick. I think that people who install Debian frequently will probably end up gravitating toward the "hd-media" installer that boots from USB stick. The firmware can then be put on the same USB stick that contains the installer, and only one thing be needed to install. Still to do: Use discover's capabilities to scan for firmware that is needed by other devices on the machine, that are not needed to install, but can be used later, and install that firmware too. (This will also support installing non-free kernel modules and other such evil.)

It's never too late. Today, I finally figured out that "TIA", which I see here and there in mails, is meaning "Thanks in advance". After about 20 years of electronic communication, it was about time. This is a great time for this as I recently figured out "IANAL" and "TTBOMK". Always learning, finally. Time for me to use these now. I think I'll use their French version (which nobody uses) to make this as cryptic as those acronyms were for me:

• MDA == TIA
• PAQJLS == TTBOMK (actually PAQJLS is more AFAIK, but heh)
• JNSPUA == IANAL

Dear LazyWeb, I use the standard ciabot.pl script in a git post-receive hook. This works ok, except in the case where changes are made in a published branch, and then that branch is merged into a second published branch. In that case, ciabot.pl reports all the changes twice, once when they're committed to the published branch, and again when the branch is merged. This is worst when I sync up two branches; if there were a lot of changes made on either branch, they all flood into the irc channel again. Am I using the ciabot.pl script wrong, or is there a better script I should use? Or maybe there's a CIA alternative that is smarter about git commits, so it will filter out duplicates? Here, FWIW, is how I currently use it in my post-receive hook.

while read oldrev newrev refname; do
    refname=$ refname#refs/heads/ 
    [ "$refname" = "master" ] && refname=
    for merged in $(git rev-list --reverse $newrev ^$oldrev); do
        ciabot_git.pl $merged $refname
    done
done

---

Update: After hints and discussion from Buxy, I arrived at the following:

while read oldrev newrev refname; do
    branchname=$ refname#refs/heads/ 
    [ "$branchname" = "master" ] && branchname=
    for merged in $(git rev-parse --symbolic-full-name --not --branches   egrep -v "^\^$refname$"   git rev-list --reverse --stdin $oldrev..$newrev); do
        ciabot_git.pl $merged $branchname
    done
done

With this, changes available in another published branch are not sent to CIA. There might still be some bugs with this.

My Dell PowerEdge T105 server (as referenced in my previous post [1]) is now working. It has new memory (why replace just the broken DIMM when you can replace both) and a new BIOS (Dell released an “Urgent” update yesterday that fixes a problem with memory timing and Opteron CPUs). The BIOS update can be installed from a DOS executable (traditionally done from a floppy disk) or an i386 Linux executable. As I didn’t have a floppy drive in my new server I had to use Linux (not that I object to using Linux, but I’d rather have had the technician do it all for me). I used rescue mode from a Fedora 9 CD that was convenient, mounted a USB stick that I had used to store the BIOS update, and then ran it. The Dell service was quite good, on-site service and the problem was fixed approximately 27 hours after I called them. Replacing a couple of DIMMs is hardly a test of skill for the repair-man (unlike the time in Amsterdam when a Dell repair-man swapped a motherboard in a server with only 20 minutes of down-time). So I haven’t seen evidence of them doing anything really great, but getting someone on-site close to 24 hours after the report is quite decent, especially considering that I paid for the cheapest support that they offer. When I got it working I was a little surprised by the memory speed, I had hoped that a new 2GHz Opteron would perform similarly to an Intel E2160 and better than an old Pentium-D (see the results here [2]). Also the memtest86+ run took ages on the step of writing random numbers (I don’t recall ever seeing that step on previous runs, let alone having a system spend half an hour doing it). It seems that the CPU (Opteron 1212) doesn’t perform well for random number generation. In terms of actual operation all I’ve done so far is to install Debian. The process of installing Debian packages was quite fast (even with a RAID-1 reconstruction occurring at the same time) and the boot time is also very quick. The hard drive “rails” seemed a little flimsy. The way they attach to the drive is that they have screws that end in pins, so you screw them into plastic and the pins just sit in the holes in the drive where screws normally attach. I think that it would make more sense to have them not screw onto the plastic and instead screw onto the disk. Then if the plastic part that connects the two sides was to break it would still be usable. In fact they could just make the “rails” be separate rails as most other manufacturers do. One thing that surprised me was the lack of PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports. I had expected that such ports would last longer than serial ports and floppy drives. However my Dell has a power connector for a floppy drive and has a built-in serial port (with some BIOS support for management via a serial port - I have not investigated this because I always plan to use a keyboard and monitor). Of course I expect that most other machines will start shipping without PS/2 ports now and I will have to dispose of my stockpile of PS/2 keyboards and mouses. I generally like to keep a few on hand so that I can give friends and relatives a chance to try a selection and discover which type suits them the best. But I probably don’t need a dozen of them for that purpose. While a comment on my previous post noted that the floppy drive bay can be used for another disk, it seems that a disk is not going to fit in there easily. It looks like I might be able to install a disk there from the front if I unscrew the face-plate - but that’s more effort than I’m prepared to exert for testing the system (for production I will only have two disks). In terms of noise, the Dell seems considerably better than a NEC machine which was designed for desktop use. Of course it’s difficult to be certain as part of the noise is from hard disks and one of the disks I’ve installed in the Dell is a WD “Green” disk and the other may have newer technology to minimise noise. Also the mounting brackets for disks in a server may be better at damping vibrations than screwing a disk to the chassis of a desktop machine. Finally the NEC machine does seem to make more noise now than it used to, so maybe it would be best to compare after a few months use to allow for minor wear on the moving parts. I was initially going to run Debian/Etch on the machine. But as Debian didn’t recognise the built-in Ethernet card and the Xen kernel crashed when doing intensive disk IO I was forced to use CentOS. CentOS 5.1 didn’t start my DomU’s for some reason (which I never diagnosed) but CentOS 5.2 worked perfectly. Finally I was shocked when I realised that the Dell has no sound hardware! When the CentOS post-install program said that it couldn’t find a sound device I thought that meant that it didn’t support the hardware (it’s the sort of thing that sometimes happens when you get a new machine). But it actually has no sound support! It seems really strange that Dell design a desk-side server (which is quiet) and don’t include sound support. If nothing else then using something like randomsound to take input from the microphone line as a source of entropy is going to be useful on servers. While the seven USB ports initially seemed like a lot, being forced to use them for keyboard, mouse, and sound (if I end up using it on a desktop) means that there would only be four left.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/06/26/dell-poweredge-t105/


• [2] http://doc.coker.com.au/computers/ram-speed-memtest86/

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Late last year, I spent some time disentangling aptitude's internal UI library and packaging it as a separate library, which I named cwidget. This article is the first in what will hopefully become a series describing the basic concepts and APIs of cwidget. It applies to the versions of cwidget currently available in Debian sid and lenny, 0.5.11-1 and 0.5.12-1. Autogenerated documentation of cwidget can be found here (but beware that as of this writing it is somewhat incomplete).

---

In this tutorial, I will walk through a simple program (hello.cc) that initializes cwidget, displays a simple message box, and then terminates the program when the user confirms the message. I assume a basic familiarity with C++. The first thing to do is to include the portions of cwidget that our program will use. Most importantly, we need the top level cwidget routines. These are the global routines that initialize cwidget, shut it down, and control its main loop (among other things).

#include <cwidget/toplevel.h>

cwidget comes with a collection of stock dialog boxes for things like displaying messages to the user. To access the routines that build these dialogs, we write:

#include <cwidget/dialogs.h>

All the symbols provided by the cwidget library are in the cwidget namespace. Using the full library name means that there's a reasonable chance that its names will not conflict with the names provided by other libraries; however, it's a real pain to type cwidget over and over. Since this is the only namespaced library we are using in this program, it's handy to define cw as an alias for cwidget:

namespace cw = cwidget;

Now we're ready to write the main routine. The first interaction of client code with the cwidget library is to initialize it. This will initialize the ncurses library and put the terminal into a mode suitable for a full-screen curses program.

cw::toplevel::init();

Next, we create a dialog box that will be displayed to the user. There are two things to note about this code:

1. cwidget is Unicode-aware and the ok() routine expects the message string to be a wide-character string. In this case, that means that we need to pass in a wide-character string (indicated by typing L in front of the string).
2. The second argument tells cwidget what to do when the ok button is pressed. The expression

     sigc::ptr_fun(cw::toplevel::exitmain);
   

   creates a slot using libsigc++. Briefly, a slot is a reference to a function or to a method of a class instance. When invoked, this particular slot will call cwidget::toplevel::exitmain(), which causes the main cwidget loop to exit. The slot is wrapped in cwidget::util::arg, a utility function that handles passing slots as optional arguments.

cw::widgets::widget_ref dialog =
    cw::dialogs::ok(L"Hello, world!",
                    cw::util::arg(sigc::ptr_fun(cw::toplevel::exitmain)));

Now that we have a widget, the next step is to arrange for it to appear on the terminal. In cwidget, control of the terminal is assigned to a single top-level widget: whatever it displays is what gets displayed on the terminal, and all user input is passed directly to it. In a real program this widget will typically manage a collection of sub-widgets and assign each one a screen region, but for now let's just display the dialog box we created:

cw::toplevel::settoplevel(dialog);

With everything initialized, we're ready to start the main loop. mainloop() will keep the display up-to-date and dispatch incoming events (for instance, keystrokes and mouse presses) until exitmain() is invoked.

cw::toplevel::mainloop();

When the user presses Enter or clicks on the Ok button in the dialog, exitmain() will be invoked by the binding that we set up earlier. Once this happens, we need to shut down cwidget in order to restore the terminal to its original state. If you skip this step, the terminal will be garbled and will not work properly when your program exits.

cw::toplevel::shutdown();

And that's it! To compile the program, change to the directory containing hello.cc and run:

$ g++ -o hello hello.cc $(pkg-config --cflags --libs cwidget)

Of course, you'll need to have the g++ and libcwidget-dev packages installed for this to work!

Yesterday, my friend Marc had to visit a court in Barcelona, after being accussed for an electoral penalty. Marc has always had a strong Catalan sentiment, and fights for the independence of his country from the French and Spanish states in as many ways he finds convenient. In this direction, he's been involved in countless activities promoting independence, in the Internet and in the streets. For now, he has to deal with living in the Spanish state, and recently this became a legal problem. Spain held parlamentary elections in March, and Marc was appointed to serve at one of the polling stations in Barcelona. Believing he had nothing to do with an election process to elect the Spanish parliament, he conciously refused to take his seat during that Sunday, infringing the Spanish electoral law. He presented his allegations to the officer, and refused to declare anything else. He now faces a fine ranging from 180 to 1800 or community work (which he would, again, object to perform). The officer told him that he's apparently the first Catalan to object like this, so what will happen next (besides he'll have to sit in court and see how it goes) is unprecedented. While Marc and I don't share many of our political views, I admire his dedication and his solid defence of his ideals. If I had been called to serve in a polling station last March, I would most probably have had my own personal debate on what to do, but suspect I would have ended going there to avoid creating these kind of situations, and would have had to participate in a process that I consider broken, unfair and undemocratic. I admire and support Marc for being stubborn enough to get this far. His case has had quite some echo in the Catalan blogsphere and some Catalan media like VilaWeb. Some people have started a campaign to collect money to help Marc pay the fine. The response so far has been surprisingly positive. Marc, molta sort i una abra ada!

My Dell PowerEdge T105 server (as referenced in my previous post [1]) is now working. It has new memory (why replace just the broken DIMM when you can replace both) and a new BIOS (Dell released an “Urgent” update yesterday that fixes a problem with memory timing and Opteron CPUs). The BIOS update can be installed from a DOS executable (traditionally done from a floppy disk) or an i386 Linux executable. As I didn’t have a floppy drive in my new server I had to use Linux (not that I object to using Linux, but I’d rather have had the technician do it all for me). I used rescue mode from a Fedora 9 CD that was convenient, mounted a USB stick that I had used to store the BIOS update, and then ran it. The Dell service was quite good, on-site service and the problem was fixed approximately 27 hours after I called them. Replacing a couple of DIMMs is hardly a test of skill for the repair-man (unlike the time in Amsterdam when a Dell repair-man swapped a motherboard in a server with only 20 minutes of down-time). So I haven’t seen evidence of them doing anything really great, but getting someone on-site close to 24 hours after the report is quite decent, especially considering that I paid for the cheapest support that they offer. When I got it working I was a little surprised by the memory speed, I had hoped that a new 2GHz Opteron would perform similarly to an Intel E2160 and better than an old Pentium-D (see the results here [2]). Also the memtest86+ run took ages on the step of writing random numbers (I don’t recall ever seeing that step on previous runs, let alone having a system spend half an hour doing it). It seems that the CPU (Opteron 1212) doesn’t perform well for random number generation. In terms of actual operation all I’ve done so far is to install Debian. The process of installing Debian packages was quite fast (even with a RAID-1 reconstruction occurring at the same time) and the boot time is also very quick. The hard drive “rails” seemed a little flimsy. The way they attach to the drive is that they have screws that end in pins, so you screw them into plastic and the pins just sit in the holes in the drive where screws normally attach. I think that it would make more sense to have them not screw onto the plastic and instead screw onto the disk. Then if the plastic part that connects the two sides was to break it would still be usable. In fact they could just make the “rails” be separate rails as most other manufacturers do. One thing that surprised me was the lack of PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports. I had expected that such ports would last longer than serial ports and floppy drives. However my Dell has a power connector for a floppy drive and has a built-in serial port (with some BIOS support for management via a serial port - I have not investigated this because I always plan to use a keyboard and monitor). Of course I expect that most other machines will start shipping without PS/2 ports now and I will have to dispose of my stockpile of PS/2 keyboards and mouses. I generally like to keep a few on hand so that I can give friends and relatives a chance to try a selection and discover which type suits them the best. But I probably don’t need a dozen of them for that purpose. While a comment on my previous post noted that the floppy drive bay can be used for another disk, it seems that a disk is not going to fit in there easily. It looks like I might be able to install a disk there from the front if I unscrew the face-plate - but that’s more effort than I’m prepared to exert for testing the system (for production I will only have two disks). In terms of noise, the Dell seems considerably better than a NEC machine which was designed for desktop use. Of course it’s difficult to be certain as part of the noise is from hard disks and one of the disks I’ve installed in the Dell is a WD “Green” disk and the other may have newer technology to minimise noise. Also the mounting brackets for disks in a server may be better at damping vibrations than screwing a disk to the chassis of a desktop machine. Finally the NEC machine does seem to make more noise now than it used to, so maybe it would be best to compare after a few months use to allow for minor wear on the moving parts. One interesting feature is the Broadcom Gig-E port on the motherboard, it supports iSCSI as a boot protocol which is an interesting alternative to PXE, so if you have a server attached to a SAN via iSCSI you can use the same protocol for booting. There is a USB port inside the case (for permanently attached USB devices), however the USB boot option states that it is offering the option to boot from front USB ports - and it claims that no operating system is found on the USB stick that I use to boot my Thinkpad. The down-side is that the bnx2 module in the Debian/Etch kernel doesn’t seem to work with it. I want the machine to have three Ethernet ports, I have a two-port PCI card and if I can get the port on the motherboard to work then I’ll have enough. Otherwise I need to buy a PCIe Ethernet card (the machine only has one PCI slot). I ended up installing CentOS on the machine after the Debian/Etch Xen kernel started falling over on disk IO load (a problem I had seen on another Debian/Etch 64bit Xen machine). CentOS 5.1 supports the built-in Ethernet device, but didn’t work correctly with Xen (my DomU’s would just hang or abort). CentOS 5.2 is now working correctly.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/06/26/dell-poweredge-t105/


• [2] http://doc.coker.com.au/computers/ram-speed-memtest86/

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One interesting aspect of the TED conference [1] is the fact that they only run one stream. There is one lecture hall with one presentation and everyone sees the same thing. This is considerably different to what seems to be the standard practice for Linux conferences (as implemented by LCA, OLS, and Linux Kongress) where there are three or more lecture halls with talks in progress at any time. At a Linux conference you might meet someone for lunch and start a conversation by asking “did you attend the lecture on X“, as there are more than two lecture halls the answer is most likely to be “no“, which then means that you have to describe the talk in question before talking about what you might really want to discuss (such as how a point made in the lecture in question might impact the work of the people you are talking two). In the not uncommon situation where there is an interesting implication of combining the work described in two lectures it might be necessary to summarise both lectures before describing the implication of combining the work. Now there are very good reasons for running multiple lecture rooms at Linux conferences. The range of topics is quite large and probably very few delegates will be interested in the majority of the talks. Usually the conference organisers attempt to schedule things to minimise the incidence of people missing talks that interest them, one common way of doing so is to have conference “streams”. Of course when you have for example a “networking” stream, a “security” stream, and a “virtualisation” stream then you will have problems when people are interested in the intersection of some of those areas (virtual servers do change things when you are working on network security). There seem some obvious comparisons between Planet installations (as aggregates of RSS feeds) and conferences (as aggregates of lectures). On Planet Debian [2] there has traditionally been a strong shared context with many blog posts referring to the same topics - where one person’s post has inspired others to write about similar topics. After some discussion (on blogs and by email) it was determined that there would be no policy for Planet Debian and that anyone who doesn’t want to read some of the content should filter the feed. Of course this means that the number of people who read (or at least skim) the entire feed will drop and therefore we lose the shared context. Planet Linux Australia [3] currently has a discussion about the issue of what types of content to aggregate. Michael Davies has just blogged a survey about what types of content to include [4]. I think it’s unfortunate that he decided to name the post after one blogger who’s feed is aggregated on that Planet as that will encourage votes on the specific posts written by that person rather than the general issue. But I think it’s much better to tailor a Planet to the interests of the people who read it than to include everything and encourage readers to read a sub-set. When similar issues were in discussion about Planet Debian I wrote about my ideas on the topic [5]. In summary I think that the Gentoo idea of having two Planet installations (one for the content which is most relevant and one for everything that is written by members) is a really good one. It’s also a good thing to have a semi-formal document about the type of content that is expected - this would be useful both for using a limited feed for people who go significantly off-topic and as a guideline for people who want to write posts that will be appreciated by the majority of the readers. Planet Ubuntu has a guideline, but it was not very formal last time I checked. Finally in regard to short posts, they generally don’t interest me much. If I want to get a list of hot URLs then I could go to any social media site to find some. I write a list post at most once a month, and I generally don’t include a URL in the list unless I have a comment to make about it. I always try to describe each page that I link to in enough detail that if the reader can’t view it then they at least have some idea of what it is about (no “this is cool” or “this sucks” links).

• [1] http://www.ted.com/


• [2] http://planet.debian.org/


• [3] http://planet.linux.org.au/


• [4] http://www.michaeldavies.org/weblog/tech/linux-australia/mikal-blather-poll.html


• [5] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/04/21/purpose-of-planet-debian/

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Just read on Farewell LUGRadio? [theangryangel] and Ashes to ashes, dust to dust... Lugradio is at an end [sungate] that the most famous UK Free Software podcast is ending at the end of this year. I don't know the reasons yet, but it seems a shame. I've been listening again since they proved me wrong and sorted out the dumb licensing terms so it's clearly legal to cut the shows up and only copy the bits that interest me, and Season 5 seems more interesting than previous ones. Then again, I enjoyed Red Dwarf VIII, so what do I know? (but VI and VII did drag a lot) Maybe I will go to Lugradio Live 2008 in Wolverhampton on 19-20 July now I know when it is! (Why is the date only as a large slow graphic on the event page? D'oh! (Yeah I know I should have emailed them, but I had an unfun experience with the show, so I'd rather shout this in public. Wow. I guess I'm still unhappy about them regressing to school playground name-calling.)) There are some suggested alternatives on theangryangel, but most are more Ubuntu-centric (which wasn't a good thing about LR), non-Ogg and/or non-European, so it looks like I'll give LinuxOutlaws a try. Any other recommendations?

or ^C doesn’t kill processes, SIGINT does On the LUV mailing list recently, the perils of tty handling when booting with “init=/bin/bash” came up, and somebody asked why running ‘ping’ (without remembering to run stty or openvt first) will result in you having to reboot. i.e. “why doesn’t ^C work in emergency mode”? I wrote a fairly detailed, but comprehensible to a novice, answer and a friend suggested i should have written it as a blog post - which was the point of me setting up a blog in the first place. So here’s a slightly edited version of it: > Couldn’t you just open another console, run “top” and find the PID for
> ping and kill it? Or ps aux grep ping and kill it? Is a reboot the
> only way to kill a ping where ^C is not available? there’s nothing special about ^C except that by long convention it is mapped to the interrupt signal aka intr aka SIGINT. So, ^C itself doesn’t kill a program, the fact that it generates an interrupt signal does. If you’ve rebooted for emergency maintenance (e.g. “init=/bin/bash” on the LILO or GRUB command line) then all you get is ONE instance of /bin/bash. Nothing else is running and nothing else has been run (because you’ve overriden the usual init with /bin/bash). No setup has been done on the terminal, and no other virtual terminals have been opened. The emergency environment is minimal (and deliberately so - you asked for it, you got it). It’s up to you to do whatever is needed to set up the environment so that you can do the required maintenance/repair work. So if you run ping *before* remembering to set up the terminal (’stty sane’) then ^C doesn’t work because ^C doesn’t generate SIGINT so there’s no way of telling ping to quit, and if you haven’t opened another virtual terminal with openvt (aka “open” - it got renamed some time ago) then there is no other shell available to run top or ps or kill. BTW, it’s not just ping. You’ll see the same problem in the same environment with ANY program that runs continuously until it gets a signal to terminate it. ping’s just the most obvious and common example. Most programs, especially simple programs like ping, don’t have a ^C handler. They don’t need one. They have a signal handler which, amongst other things, handles SIGINT however it’s generated - it can be generated by pressing ^C in a normal tty environment, or by sending the program a SIGINT (e.g. “kill -2″). That, BTW, is a core difference between a SIGTERM (just plain ‘kill’ or ‘kill -15′) and SIGKILL (’kill -9′). SIGTERM is usually handled by the program by setting up a signal handler for it, and it voluntarily terminates when it receives the signal (usually cleaning up, closing files, etc before it does so). If the program hasn’t set up a handler for SIGTERM then the default action is to just terminate. A program can set up a handler which does nothing on SIGTERM, which effectively just ignores the signal. SIGKILL is handled by the kernel and it just kills the process immediately - it can not be blocked or intercepted by the program. (By common convention, SIGHUP or ‘kill -1′ tells a long running daemon process to just reload it’s config files. It’s also generated when the tty that the program is running on is terminated - e.g. you log out or the modem hangs up or the ssh session dies, hence the name “HUP” aka “HANGUP”. That’s why you need to use something like nohup or screen if you want a program to continue running after you log out) In a way, ‘kill’ is a bit of a misnomer. It’s actually a generic tool for sending signals to running processes, but the default action for most of those signals is to terminate the program. Here’s a list of the signals which can be sent.

$ kill -l
 1) SIGHUP	 2) SIGINT	 3) SIGQUIT	 4) SIGILL
 5) SIGTRAP	 6) SIGABRT	 7) SIGBUS	 8) SIGFPE
 9) SIGKILL	10) SIGUSR1	11) SIGSEGV	12) SIGUSR2
13) SIGPIPE	14) SIGALRM	15) SIGTERM	16) SIGSTKFLT
17) SIGCHLD	18) SIGCONT	19) SIGSTOP	20) SIGTSTP
21) SIGTTIN	22) SIGTTOU	23) SIGURG	24) SIGXCPU
25) SIGXFSZ	26) SIGVTALRM	27) SIGPROF	28) SIGWINCH
29) SIGIO	30) SIGPWR	31) SIGSYS	34) SIGRTMIN
35) SIGRTMIN+1	36) SIGRTMIN+2	37) SIGRTMIN+3	38) SIGRTMIN+4
39) SIGRTMIN+5	40) SIGRTMIN+6	41) SIGRTMIN+7	42) SIGRTMIN+8
43) SIGRTMIN+9	44) SIGRTMIN+10	45) SIGRTMIN+11	46) SIGRTMIN+12
47) SIGRTMIN+13	48) SIGRTMIN+14	49) SIGRTMIN+15	50) SIGRTMAX-14
51) SIGRTMAX-13	52) SIGRTMAX-12	53) SIGRTMAX-11	54) SIGRTMAX-10
55) SIGRTMAX-9	56) SIGRTMAX-8	57) SIGRTMAX-7	58) SIGRTMAX-6
59) SIGRTMAX-5	60) SIGRTMAX-4	61) SIGRTMAX-3	62) SIGRTMAX-2
63) SIGRTMAX-1	64) SIGRTMAX

See the man pages for init(8), kill(1), and especially signal(7) for more info on this topic. Syndicated from Craig Sanders' Errata: Tech Notes and Miscellaneous Thoughts Introduction to Linux Signals 101

So I am giving a talk this Friday at the University and here is the English introduction to my talk/paper and below is the Portuguese one. It starts at 9 am in Porto Alegre, Brazil and is being streamed. *O Departamento de P s-Gradua o da Antropologia e a Associa o Software Livre.org ...

The current autofs package in Debian unstable has twenty-nine patches applied to it. The Ubuntu autofs package in Hardy Heron LTS has thirty patches applied to it (twenty-nine of them being the Debian ones). We discovered a bug today in Hardy's autofs, which will undoubtedly also affect Debian's autofs as well, which is apparently fixed in the likes of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for something like four years. So either Red Hat is doing a shoddy job of feeding patches back upstream, or upstream is doing a shoddy job of accepting them. The fact that Debian has to carry twenty-nine patches suggests something is similarly wrong in our camp. We've been finding various problems in autofs in our environment recently, and have accumulated maybe half a dozen patches or so in the last month. I'll have to make sure that they get fed back into Debian and Ubuntu at the very least. Given the nature of one of the bugs we found today, I have grave doubts about the code quality of autofs. I have to wonder if it's worth rewriting from scratch in Python or something.

I already mentioned a few times in the blog that I’m working on a Debian package of the Conkeror web browser. And now, after a lot of fine-tuning (and I still further new ideas how to improve the package ;-) Conkeror is finally in the NEW queue and hopefully will hit unstable in a few days. (Update Thursday, 03-Jul-2008, 18:13 CEST: The package has been accepted by Jörg and should be included on most architectures in tonight’s updates.) Those who could hardly await it can fetch Conkeror .debs from http://noone.org/debian/. The conkeror package itself is a non-architecture specific package (but needs xulrunner-1.9 to be available), and its small C-written helper program spawn-process-helper is available as package conkeror-spawn-process-helper for i386, amd64, sparc, alpha, powerpc, kfreebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64. There are no backported packages for Etch available, though, since I don’t know of anyone yet, who has successfully backported xulrunner-1.9 to Etch. Interestingly the interest in Conkeror seems to have risen in the Debian community independently of its Debian packaging. Luca Capello, who sponsored the upload of my Conkeror package, pointed me to two blog post on Planet Debian, written by people being fed up with Firefox 3 already and are looking for a more lean, but still Gecko based web browser: Decklin Foster is fed up with Firefox’ -eh- Iceweasel’s arrogance and MJ Ray is fed up with Firefox 3 and its SSL problems. Since my previously favourited Gecko based web browser Kazehakase never became really stable but instead became slow and leaking memory (and therefore not much better than Firefox 2), I can imagine that it’s no more an candidate for people seaking for a lean and fast web browser. Conkeror has some “strange” concepts of which the primary one is that it looks and feels like Emacs:

• The current location is shown in a status bar below the website, where Emacs usually shows buffer names. All input, even entering new URLs to go to, is done via the mini-buffer, an input line below the status bar.
• Instead of tabs it uses Emacs’ concept of buffers. So no tab bar clutter and though easy access to all currently open pages.
• It has no buttons, menu-bar or such. And except the status bar and mini-buffer, it uses the whole size of the window for the displayed web page. This is the main reason why I prefer Conkeror on the 7” EeePC: I don’t want to waste any pixels for buttons or menu bars and still have a fully functional web browser.
• It of course has Emacs alike keybindings (with a slight touch of Lynx). While this may seem awkward for the vi world (Hey, they have the vimperator^*, also in Debian since a few days!), as an Emacs user you just have to remember that you web browser now also expects to be treated like an Emacs. It just works:

  C-x C-c

  Exit Emacs -eh- Conkeror

  C-x C-f

  Open File -eh- web page in new buffer

  C-x C-b

  Change to some other tab -eh- buffer

  C-x C-v

  Replace web page in this buffer and use the current URL as start for entering the new one

  C-x 5 2

  Open new frame -eh- window

  C-x 5 0

  Close current frame -eh- window

  C-x k

  Close tab, -eh- kill buffer

  C-h i

  Documentation

  C-s

  Incremental search forward

  C-r

  Incremental search backward

  C-g

  Stop

  l

  Go back (Think info-mode)

  g

  Go to (Open web page in this buffer)

  (Hehe, I like the faces of vi users having read these keybindings and now wondering how to remember them. SCNR. Well, sometimes vi key bindings are a mystery to me, too. :-) There are of course many more and nearly all are the same as in Emacs, even the universal argument C-u and the M-x command-line are there. E.g. C-u g lets you open a web page in a new buffer, too.
• Conkeror also has very promising concept for following and copying links with the keyboard only. Opera is very inefficient here since you have to jump from link to link to get to the one you want. In Conkeror you just press f for following or c for copying links and then all links on the currently shown part of the page show a small number attached to it. Then you just enter the number (and additionally press enter if the number is ambigous) and the link is either opened or copied to the clipboard. A funny anecdote about how this concept grew over the time: Early versions of Conkeror (back in the days when it just was a Firefox externsion as vimperator) numbered all links on the page, not only the visible ones. On large pages with many links or buttons (e.g. my blog ;-), this took minutes to complete. The idea to just number the visible links is so simple and important – but someone first needed to have it. :-)

Footnotes *) I just noticed that there is now also muttator, making Thunderbird look and behave like vim (and probably also mutt), too. Wonder into which e-mail client the Emacs community will convert Thunderbird. GNUS? RMAIL? VM? Wanderslust? What will it be called? Wunderbird? Thunderslust? (SCNRE ;-)

Jeff Bailey writes about the last 26 years of Microsoft [1]. He gives Microsoft credit for “saving us from the TRS 80″, however CP/M-86 was also an option for the OS on the IBM PC [2]. If MS hadn’t produced MS-DOS for a lower price then CP/M would have been used (in those days CP/M and MS-DOS had the same features and essentially the same design). He notes the use of the Terminate and Stay Resident (TSR) [3] programs. As far as I recall the TSR operation was undocumented and was discovered by disassembling DOS (something that the modern MS EULAs forbid). Intel designed the 8086 and 80286 CPUs to permit code written for an 8086 to run unchanged in “protected mode” on an 80286 (as noted in the Wikipedia page about the 80286 [4]). Basically all that you needed to do to write a DOS program with the potential of being run directly in protected mode (or easily ported) was to allocate memory by requesting it from the OS (not just assuming that every address above your heap was available to write on) and by addressing memory only by the segment register returned from the OS when allocating memory (IE not assuming that incrementing a segment register is equivalent to adding 16 to the offset). There were some programs written in such a manner which could run on both DOS and text-mode OS/2 (both 1.x and 2.x), I believe that such programs were linked differently. The term Fat Binary [5] is often used to refer to an executable which has binary code for multiple CPUs (EG PPC and M68K CPUs on the Macintosh), I believe that a similar concept was used for DOS / OS/2 programs but the main code of the application was shared. Also compilers which produce object code which doesn’t do nasty things could have their object code linked to run in protected mode. Some people produced a set of libraries that allowed linking Borland Turbo Pascal code to run as OS/2 16bit text-mode applications. The fact that OS/2 (the protected-mode preemptively multi-tasking DOS) didn’t succeed in the market was largely due to MS. I never used Windows/386 (a version of Windows 2.x) but used Windows 3.0 a lot. Windows 3.0 ran in three modes, “Real Mode” (8086), “Standard Mode” (80286), and “Enhanced Mode” (80386). Real Mode was used for 8086 and 8088 CPUs, for 80286 systems if you needed to run one DOS program (there was no memory for running more than one), and for creating or adjusting the swap-file size for an 80386 system (if your 80386 system didn’t have enough swap you had to shut everything down, start Real Mode, adjust the swap file, and then start it again in Enhanced Mode). Standard Mode was the best mode for running Windows programs (apart from the badly written ones which only ran on Real Mode), but due to the bad practices implemented by almost everyone who wrote DOS programs MS didn’t even try to run DOS programs in 286 protected mode and thus Standard Mode didn’t support DOS programs. Enhanced Mode allowed multitasking DOS programs but as hardly anyone had an 80386 class system at that time it didn’t get much use. It was just before the release of Windows 3.1 that I decided to never again use Windows unless I was paid to do so. I was at a MS presentation about Windows 3.1 and after the marketing stuff they had a technical Q/A session. The questions were generally about how to work around bugs in MS software (mainly Windows 3.0) and the MS people had a very detailed list of work-arounds. Someone asked “why don’t you just fix those bugs” and we were told “it’s easier to teach you how to work around them than to fix them“. I left the presentation before it finished, went straight home and deleted Windows from my computer. I am not going to use software written by people with such a poor attitude if given a choice. After that I ran the DOS multi-tasker DesqView [6] until OS/2 2.0 was released. Desqview allowed multitasking well written DOS programs in real mode, Quarterdeck was the first company to discover that almost 64K of address space could be used above the 1MB boundary from real-mode on a 80286 (a significant benefit when you were limited to 640K of RAM), as well as multitasking less well behaved DOS programs with more memory use on an 80386 or better CPU. OS/2 [7] 2.x was described as “A Better DOS than DOS, a Better Windows than Windows”. That claim seemed accurate to me. I could run DOS VM86 sessions under OS/2 which could do things that even Desqview couldn’t manage (such as having a non-graphical DOS session with 716K of base memory in one window and a graphical DOS session in another). I could also run combinations of Windows programs that could not run under MS Windows (such as badly written windows programs that needed Real Mode as well as programs that needed the amount of memory that only Standard or Enhanced mode could provide). Back to Bill Gates, I recently read a blog post Eight Years of Wrongness [5] which described how Steve Ballmer has failed MS stockholders by his poor management. It seems that he paid more attention to fighting Linux, implementing Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), and generally trying to avoid compatibility with other software than to actually making money. While this could be seen as a tribute to Bill Gates (Steve Ballmer couldn’t do the job as well), I think that Bill would have made the same mistakes for the same reasons. MS has always had a history of treating it’s customers as the enemy. Jeff suggests that we should learn from MS that the freedom to tinker is important as is access to our data. These are good points but another important point is that we need to develop software that does what users want and acts primarily in the best interests of the users. Overall I think that free software is quite well written in regard to acting on behalf of the users. The issue we have is in determining who the “user” is, whether it’s a developer, sys-admin, or someone who wants to just play games and do some word-processing.

• [1] http://jbailey.livejournal.com/55585.html


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M-86


• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminate_and_Stay_Resident


• [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/80286


• [5] http://msftextrememakeover.blogspot.com/2008/06/eight-years-of-wrongness.html


• [6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desqview


• [7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Os/2

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It's been a while since I've posted anything except reviews and I'm overdue for a general update. With the Kerberos upgrade project finished last month, I'm currently in the wonderful situation of not having any large active projects at work and being given time to generally catch up. With luck, I'll have a couple more months of that before things really heat up. I only have to consult on a few projects and otherwise can deal with all the operational issues that I'd been putting off. A lot of my time lately has been spent on Puppet configuration cleanup and improvements, and there's at least another solid week of that to go, as well as a pile of overdue documentation to write. On the Debian side, Lintian has moved to a new Git repository and Adam D. Barratt has started committing directly. Frank has also had time to do a lot of work, which means that Lintian development is proceeding quite well without a lot of active attention on my part. That's been wonderful and has given me time to focus on other things. Most of my Debian effort of late has gone into the new Shibboleth packaging team and review of Shibboleth 2.0 packages, the last of which was uploaded last week and is sitting in NEW. Thanks to Ferenc W gner for the fine work! All the packages are now in Git and migrated to Alioth and there's a wiki page for the packaging team. Scott Cantor, the primary upstream developer, has joined the mailing list and has been extremely helpful and responsive. Sam Hartman has also migrated the krb5 packaging repository to Git and Alioth, and last Friday I finally finished migrating the openafs repository. Both are unfortunately rather huge since they contain all the historic upstream tarballs (extracting that would have been hideously complicated to do as part of the migration), but they shouldn't grow nearly as much now that we can use pristine-tar. This is the heart of the Kerberos and AFS packaging; there's now just kerberos-configs and my two PAM modules to move (more on the complexities of the PAM module Git migration in a later post). On the personal front, I've been travelling a lot lately, but that will now calm down for a while. I have some company next month, though, and hopefully will be up for it by then (right now, I just want to hole up in my apartment and do my own thing and not interact for a bit). I've been reading George Orwell: An Age Like This (1920-1940), the first of a four-volume collection of his letters, essays, and reviews. I was inspired to buy the first volume after reading one of his essays on-line after a Usenet discussion some time back, and I'm delighted I did. It took me a bit to get into it, but now I'm finding it absolutely fascinating. Orwell has a talent for concise and accurate descriptions of life (primarily of the poor) that capture the emotional tone as well as the surface details. That's mixed with interesting book reviews (I love reading book reviews), intriguing tidbits on his writing process and how he viewed being a writer, and snippets of the day-to-day of his life that have survived in letters. It's rather like reading a blog, and Orwell is a good enough writer that even his unparagraphed, abbreviated commentary in letters is full of memorable turns of phrase or observations. If you like that sort of thing, I recommend it highly. I'm going to buy the remaining three volumes and read the whole collection, plus quite likely pick up Orwell's other books besides 1984 and Animal Farm.

• Updated the debian packaging and debian patches of KDE4 to the 4.0.84 tarballs
• Pushed kdelibs, kdepimlibs, kdebase-runtime and kdebase-workspace 4.0.84 to experimental
• Prepared the rest of the packages ready to be pushed to experimental when the auto-builders have built this
• Updated Arora packages to the 0.2 release

Ana guessed slightly wrong when trying to guess next update of kde4.1 in debian, but her howto still works. Give it a bit for the autobuliders to catch up though. But I guess I should find a rich uncle to give me newer hardware - my computer was only idle a few hours since friday evening. I do hope that plasma people soon reaches a stable ABI. And by the way:

Thanks to frisoftware.dk

I read 7 Ways Religion is Detrimental to Science, and thought it would be an interesting read. It was, but I don't think it really made sense. Let's look at the 7 ways they highlighted:

1. Faith and the Scientific Method are Opposites

The article states:

Faith is a belief in an idea regardless of the evidence for or against it.

Actually, that's not true at all, at least for traditional Christianity. (Note that traditional Christianity is not the same as fundamentalism). Marcus J. Borg describes faith in four ways:

Fiducia -- trusting in God. Borg says, "Faith . . . [means] we trust in God as the one upon whom we rely, as our support and foundation and ground, as our safe place."

Fidelitas -- loyalty, or "the comment of the self at its deepest level, the commitment of the 'heart'. Faith as fidelitas does not mean faithfulness to statements about God. . . Fidelitas refers to a radical centering in God."

Visio -- a way of seeing -- "a way of seeing the whole, a way of seeing 'what is'. . . the ability to love and to be present to the moment. It generates a 'willingness to spend and be spent' for the sake of a vision that goes beyond ourselves."

Assensus -- perhaps the closest to what the author meant, is "faith as belief." Borg goes on to add:

The notion that Christian faith is primarily . . . about belief, about a "head" matter, is recent. . . For many, Christian faith began to mean believing questionable things to be true. . . this is the most widespread contemporary understanding of "belief".

This is very different from what faith as assensus meant. . . A deep but humble (and therefore imprecise) understanding of Christian faith as assensus, as involving affirmation of the centrality of God as known in the Bible and Jesus, is very close to faith as vision. It is a way of seeing reality.

As a Christian, I do not find the scientific method to be a problem. I find it to be enlightening in all sorts of matters, including even the history of religion in some instances. Christian faith is not about believing in certain ideas (such as the world being created in 6 literal 24-hour days), though there are those that distort it to be so. Rather, Christian faith is about living your life a certain way, about the meaning of life, about our duties to make the world a better place.

2. People Vote Base on Religious Ideas

The author says that "Stem Cells weren t the first time a body of research didn t get proper funding because some religious wack-jobs." Well, I agree that that was a problem. Non-religious people can vote in odd ways too. I argue that the rejection of stem-cell research goes against Christian teaching; after all, we are to help the least among us, and do not people with Alzheimer's qualify?

I think the author's point should have been "exremists have odd views." Extremists can be atheist, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or other religions. Religion does not have a monopoly on them.

3. Religion Removes the Need For Science

The author says:

When people are content to believe in something that explains why they are here, even if it is wrong, they become less interested in other ideas. Religion often leads people to believe that they have all the answers. Science is self-correcting in that nobody assumes they are absolutely correct.

That is incorrect on several levels. First, science cannot explain why we are here. It can explain some of the mechanics. As an example, let us take for granted that modern scientific thought on the origin of humanity is correct: that there was a Big Bang, that single-celled creatures evolved on earth, and that human life eventually evolved through a complex process of evolution and natural selection. Fine; this does not contradict religion in any way. Science and religion answer different questions. Science answers "how". Religion answers "why". Science cannot answer the question "Why was there a big bang?" or "Did the evolution of humanity serve a larger purpose?"

Moreover, religion should not assume that they have all the answers, either. The canonical Christian Bible was mostly fixed within a few centuries AD. Life in 200AD was a lot different from life today. Part of the reason there are many different groups of Christians is the complexity of applying the stories in the Bible to modern life. The ideas in any given denomination evolve over time, too. I think it would be the height of hubris for anyone, religious or not, to claim that he or she had all the answers. Again, I know that some religious people act that way, but then so do some atheists or agnostics.

4. People Lean on Religion, When They Could Benefit From Science

The author of "7 Ways" cites the quite rare case where a child dies of a curable disease while his/her parents pray, refusing medical care. This is an extreme position that is not shared by the vast majority of religious people. Most religious people are perfectly content to use the latest medical care.

Meditation or prayer does not replace medical care; it supplements it. Scientific studies have even demonstrated its effectiveness.

5. The Church Takes Up Natural Resources

The original author states that "The land that churches take up around the world could be used to build schools, homes, recreational buildings and commercial operations." This is perhaps the most frivolous of arguments. Putting aside the fact that many churches operate schools, churches are often one of the few ways that modern city dwellers have to form a sense of community. They are not just places to engage in religion. They are places to meditate, to get away from it all, to meet your neighbors, to vote.

6. The Church Takes Up Monetary Resources

The original author says "if people donated to scientific advancement like they did to the church, imagine where we would be today." It's not a pleasant picture. Religion, and institutions supported primarily because of the teaching of religion, are the people that feed the hungry after natural disasters, that operate food pantries (our church operates the only one in our community, and it's open to anyone without any questions or talk about religion), that operate schools in disadvantaged areas, that have spread the whole idea of fair trade for third-world artisans, etc.

It is true that acts of evil have been committed in the name of the church, too. It is also unquestionably true that some church groups spend money more carefully than others. As with any donation, people should be careful where they give. Government-operated research studies are not necessarily a good use of money, either.

7. Religion is A Strong Meme

The author of the original story seems to be responding to a particular brand of Christianity: what Borg calls "literal-factual" religion. There are quite a few people that take that stand. They are sometimes inaccurately referred to as "evangelicals" or the "religious right"; while there is some overlap between the groups, they are not one and the same. The people with the literal-factual view are not representative of the whole.

More interestingly, Borg points out that the literal-factual view was actually a response to the development of the scientific method during the Enlightenment. As the modern idea of truth moved to literal, factual, provable truth, some Christians grew defensive about their faith, and started to look for "scientific" ways to prove that the world was created in 6 days, etc. in an attempt to show the world that Christianity fit their new notion of truth.

That makes a compelling argument that the scientific method is the stronger meme in today's Western world -- so strong that the author of the rant against religion has apparently forgotten the more prevalant -- both throughout history and today -- view of Christianity that is "more than" Science, not at odds with science.

It's interesting to think about Bill Gates retiring. When I think back to how much Microsoft has brought us over the years, both happiness and grief, it's a bit of a happy/sad end to an era for me.

Microsoft is what saved us from the TRS-80, and brought us into a world where clone hardware drove prices down to where everyone could afford them. MS-DOS may have been a bad rip off of CP/M and Unix, but to business operations brought us the ability to bring computing power right down to the desk and generally got out of the way. Dos had the neat ability to have TSRs that could deliver waiting applications at a keystroke (remember Sidekick?) Windows 386 and 3.0 brought us preemptive multitasking for DOS apps that weren't written for that in mind, and brought us the first environment the mass market had seen where any manufacturer could write drivers to a known programming interface and bring their hardware to the world. They brought us a world where hardware innovation was bringing crazy new things to us that had only been possible in Sci-Fi movies before. My first voice-recognition system on the computer was in 1990. =)

Windows 95 pushed that even further. No longer were drivers crazy TSRs, but actually loaded into the control panel with standard was of using them for established services such as Networking and Sound. For everything else, the model was extensible so that if you had a neat idea, you could bring it out to the world. I remember installing TwinBridge at work so that people could type in double-wide Chinese characters, despite the OS not being intended for that in the slightest.

Windows 98 brought us games that were better than we were seeing in DOS. DirectX and DirectSound were finally providing a good enough abstraction on top of the hardware that it was easier for authors to code to that than to code right to your Adlib card and whatever display adapter you had (were we using S3s yet, then?)

But that seems to have been the top point of their reign. At this point, as a user I was now so far from the guts of the machine, I no longer could easily tinker. I'd once coded in Z80 asm and 8086 asm to write little hacks, but Windows 98 was getting to the opinionated software stage: There were things you just couldn't do, for no reason other than the designers at Microsoft didn't think it was important.

I realise I'm not the usual mass-market type, but now the system that had been such a source of inspiration was now becoming a barrier to trying new ideas.

I had started playing with Linux in 1995, but 1998 had started to use it as my main machine at home. I had a roommate who had a dumb cheap machine that was slaved off of my main machine so that he could play Medievia all day and night. Setting up this networking, and the on-demand ISDN dialing was trivial to do under Linux, and nearly impossible under the Windows systems of the time.

The only thing one could say for FVWM95 at the time was that it was better than twm. We suffered through Enlightenment, said hello to wine, and joined an online community of people who'd all come together from various places in order to be free to play with the systems we had.

Microsoft became steadily less relevant to my day to day computing. My girlfriend (now wife) suffered through early incarnations of MS Word for windows 2.0 under Wine because it was still easier than teaching her emacs. And steadily, the system got better until we could honestly look at our family members and tell them that if they wanted to run Windows that was fine, but please don't call me about it.

We need to both say thank-you to Microsoft and learn from it. Microsoft made a business model of bringing us the technology we craved as geeks, and that society wanted to play with and integrated into our lives. Microsoft also taught us what it means to be the dominant player. For most of us, I suspect it was our only view into the world where a single player dominates and strives to cut down its competition. It's easy to romanticise the small business owner, and just as easy to forget that just about every small business owner wants to be a millionaire and a large business owner.

We need to remember that the pretty fancy interfaces can be as much about helping people do things as keeping them from doing things. We need to demand the freedom to tinker with our software and our devices, even if we choose to never do so. And after all that, we need to be able to take our data from a device, and take it to somewhere else. I think ultimately, this is what Microsoft has taught us. As we look for new companies to deliver us greater and shinier technology, this is a lesson we need to keep close at hand.

I put the Nokia E51, which I had previously acquired, onto Ebay last night, and it sold within minutes. Even though I made a 50 loss on the whole affair, this made me very happy! The phone is crap in so many ways that it made me quite angry. I now consider those 50 the investment I had to make to bring you this post: First of all, the reason why I bought the phone was because it sports wireless LAN as well as Voice-over-IP. Since I ve recently gotten into VoIP, I was looking for reasonable VoIP phones and even though the Siemens C450IP DECT phone works very well, it only does so at home, or where I find a switch port for it. So my theory was to get this Wifi+VoIP phone and be able to use my VoIP infrastructure from anywhere around the world. Penny has the Nokia E65 and loves it, so I went for the E51, a newer model that promised to address some of the issues she had with hers. All of the following is based on the E51 with the 100.34.20 firmware dated 29 September 2007, which runs the (crippled) Symbian S60r3 operating system.

Good things Let s start with the few good things up front: the E51 comes with a regular USB jack, allowing you to plug it into any computer and use it as mass storage device without the need for any Nokia-specific cables. I also liked the remote lock functionality: in the event of a stolen phone, you could send it a pre-defined passphrase that would cause the phone to lock itself. Also, the phone could be configured to lock itself (like a screensaver) after a given amount of idle time. Other than that, I could not find anything outstanding, so let s turn to the downsides, of which there are many more:

VoIP/SIP shortcomings I had previously dismissed the E series phones for good reasons, but both the E65 and the E51 improved their SIP clients a fair bit, and with the SIP VoIP settings utility, it was even possible to configure STUN. But unfortunately, the SIP client, while a nice toy, ended up being unusable in production. Here are some of the reasons: I got VoIP working at home and in some other places, but definitely not everywhere. It may be that some of those networks blocked the SIP port (5060/udp), or that the phone didn t feel well on the day, but in the majority of cases, I could not get the SIP client to connect. And there was no way to find out what was going on, as the client would just claim that registration failed without any additional information. It was also hard to retry, often requiring the phone to be restarted. Whenever if failed, the client would helpfully tell me that it could not establish a connection to the connection network . To get the phone to log on to the SIP server automatically, I had to define a home network for the SIP profile. Changing the access point for that network required a phone reboot to get SIP working again. It was possible to define multiple SIP profiles with different access points and add them all to the one, global VoIP profile, and theoretically get auto-login to work across multiple Wifi networks; unfortunately, I cannot say that this worked, there were always some problems requiring me to change defaults and shift things around. Also, after I had defined a few of those profiles and needed to make a change to the SIP settings (move the SIP port to 53/udp), I had to modify all profiles in turn; it was not possible to share settings. On the other hand, NAT traversal settings and timeouts, which can only be configured with the aforementioned SIP VoIP settings utility, applied to a VoIP profile and thus to all SIP profiles, without exception. I found it mildly annoying that I couldn t use # and * as part of the number/SIP address to call, nor was it possible to dial single-digit extensions the phone will ask you to associate a quick dial number with the key, even if quick dial has been explicitly disabled). I could also not dial a SIP address ad-hoc if I wanted to call sip:someone@sip.somewhere.org, I had to define a contact and add the Internet phone address. One can define Internet calls to be the default call type, thus routing all calls via VoIP if available. Unfortunately, once I dialed a number, the event was hardwired to the call type: I could not redial a number used previously for a VoIP call when all I had available was GSM coverage.

Gripes with the IMAP client The IMAP client, while an interesting addition to my day, turned out to be pretty unusable. The first mistake I made was to tell it to synchronise all messages in some of my larger mailboxes, which caused the phone to take tens of seconds until it switched a folder, and a few seconds just to scroll to the next screen in any given folder. I found that once any mailbox accumulates more than 100 messages, the client turns useless (Nokia s default is to synchronise 30 messages). I could tell the client to synchronise every hour, but only if I locked it to an access point, the home network . If I roamed to a different Wifi network, I could no longer connect to the IMAP server, as this access point would not be found. The phone would not let me use a different access point unless I changed the home access point, but changing that turned off the automatic mail sycnhronisation. If I say mail synchronisation, I mean header synchronisation. Even though there is an option for Headers only , it only applies to POP3; it is impossible to have the phone download message bodies automatically, only manually and then only per-message or per-folder, not for all folders at once. The IMAP client could delete messages, but it could not move a message to a different folder, nor create or delete folders. And even though I could turn off the message tone the phone would play when it received new email, it insisted on vibrating nevertheless. The only other IMAP client I found for Symbian phones is ProfiMail, which looked interesting and much more powerful, but which would randomly crash on me while browsing or operating on larger mailboxes.

Connection hickups While the an application was running that was using the network, the Wifi connection stayed open, but I could not make it stay open between sessions. The phone would obtains an IP, do what I asked it to, and then immediately close the connection. From a power management perspective, this makes sense, but not from the usability angle. I could not make the phone connect to a Wifi network that advertised both, WPA and WPA2 and had to disable WPA at home to let it connect. At times, it was not possible to reuse an existing connection. I haven t been able to figure out the details, but it seemed to me that whenever an application like the IMAP client was locked to an access point, it would be unable to make a connection to the IMAP server, even if e.g. the VoIP client was connected to the server by way of exactly the same access point. The phone would just say that a connection was already active and that I should close it and try again . I had a really hard time working with SSL-enabled websites and IMAP servers, because even though the phone presented me with the server certificate and offered the choice of accepting it permanently, it didn t and would ask the question again and again (which made the phone pretty unusable if the IMAP client was running in the background). Only after I had found out how to import the CACert root certificates, did this problem become irrelevant.

Other pet-peeves The phone came with a lot of smaller issues that made me ask the question of whether its designed ever had to use it too often. Possibly the most annoying aspect of the phone was its speed. It s a lot faster than the E61, but it still takes on the order of seconds to update screens or display simple text messages. Speaking of text messages, I am a little spoiled by the Sony Ericsson K610i (to which I now return), which would offer the contacts with whom I d recently interacted instead of presenting me with the full list, like the E51 does. I could filter the full list, but only by typing the start of the name substring matching was not implemented. It was impossible to receive text files via bluetooth and have them put onto the filesystem. On receipt, the phone just said text file saved , and it took me a while to figure out that it had stored them into the notepad, from where it could not be exported. To get my SSH identity onto the filesystem for PuTTY to use required me to access the phone via USB. The phone could receive vCards with new contacts, but it only offered to import the first contact, even though the standard allows for an arbitrary number of contacts per file. What s even worse though is that the phone silently failed to import contacts with non-ASCII characters in their name, such as or they just didn t show up even though the phone gave every indication of a successful import; creating such contacts on the phone worked, on the other hand. Each time I started the phone, the Nokia greeting screen would show up, accompanied with the Nokia tune, which could not be disabled. Enough said. The last problem I feel worth mentioning is hardly a Nokia or Symbian problem: battery life. With Wifi turned on, the phone would last about 24 hours on standby, which makes it pretty unusable for roaming Wifi or even VoIP usage.

Summing up I am happy to have sold the phone and look forward to returning to my Sony Ericsson K610i. After checking out the E61/E71 a bit, playing with the E65, and trying the E51 out for several weeks, I can conclude that Nokia has a long way to go before they can offer a usable smartphone with Wifi/VoIP capability. It would be a good step forward if they would open-source the Symbian operating system, but until that s done, I am going to look at the OpenMoko FreeRunner next. The E51 once again made it perfectly clear for me that proprietary software is no alternative for my use case. NP: Fat Freddy s Drop: Live at the Matterhorn