I just uploaded newsbeuter 0.3 to unstable (get it from incoming until it hits the archive).

The release is mainly a bugfix release but there are also some cool new features and improvements.
- The html rendering especially encoding issues are fixed now.
- Everything is stored as UTF-8 internally and gets converted on-the-fly.
- libidn is not needed anymore
- gettext support (at the moment just german translation, translators wanted)

And last but not least podcast support.
For this there is a new tool included in newsbeuter named podbeuter. When updating feeds newsbeuter searches for podcast files and
adds them to a download queue. podbeuter then is the download manager to do automatic or manual downloads of the podcasts.



Have fun and test it.
Oh and YVFI we hang around in #newsbeuter on freenode now

A while back, I entered a competition to win one of a few prizes. The results came in, and it looks like I was a runner up, netting me a Mac Mini.

First, a rant about Mac OS X. It appears that there is no way to:

• Use a non-mac keyboard without using an external keyboard definition file
• Set the MTU for wireless connections
• Set the 'switch windows' to something other than the awful ctrl+F4
• Set the end and home keys to go to the start and end of the input line, respectively

They also asked me to " become one of our evangelists and tell your developer friends and colleagues about Zimki".
Well, I'm not so sure about evangelism, but I'll certainly blog about their platform, as it's fairly interesting.
So, what exactly is Zimki?
Well, it's basically a server side Javascript parser, based on SeaMonkey. The thought of using Javascript as a server side language is, initially, enough to make you run a thousand miles. After you get over your initial shock of this and examine it a little more closely, it does make at least a moderate amount of sense. It's entirely OO, so you should be able to pull in common functionality, perfect for the quick deployment of Webapps that Zimki is designed for.
Of course, this does rely on having the core libraries available. The only ones which seem to exist at the moment are:

• trimpath.js - a JavaScript templating language
• wiky.js - a Wiki markup language
• feed.js - an RSS / Atom feed generator

So, I can make a wiki which uses a template, and outputs it as an RSS feed. The rest I have to code myself - or do I?
This brings me nicely on to the next issue: documentation. There is a thorough lack of it. Thus, more classes may exist, but who knows. This is my MAJOR bugbear about Zimki. Give developers docs, and a nice coding environment, and they're happy. Zimki doesn't have either. Oh wait? I haven't mentioned the coding environment?
All editing seems to be done via a text box with some AJAX magic on the save button. But the save button doesn't work in Linux. Oh, and you can't indent your code. And you can't use a local editor.

This may sound all doom-and-gloom for Zimki, but it isn't. The editor could do with some attention, but it's not a show stopper. Zimki does manage to throw together HA concepts, backups and database (ish. The database object idea which Zimki uses is something I really don't like, but that's personal preference). The cost model they use is rather... odd. A charge is made for each call to the Zimki framework. I'm not a beancounter though, so I can't tell you how cheap/expensive this system is. If you know JavaScript well, and want to develop a complete webapp in it, this is certainly a good tool.

Now hopefully they'll get some documentation together and so people can actually USE the thing. If you're bored, why not play with my app that I wrote.

Debian as a Linux distrubtion is all about integration and ease of management, which includes init-scripts. I d like to propose a feature that might be helpful to quite a few system administrators while being non-disruptive to all others.For a lot of daemons there are use-cases that require more than one instance of the daemon to be running. With instance I mean a separate process with it s own configuration files, but on the same system, which rules out virtualisation or changeroots. Examples are copies of the main server running on a different port, to test new settings, different servers on different IPs, a HTTP-Server-Split into a slick static-and-proxying server and a heavy backend server, a mail server split with a virus scanner in between etc.So as an administrator I currently not only have to write the configuration for the additional instances, but also write my own init scripts and modify them, never being sure if I did it good or whether it will cause problems on package upgrade or similar things. I d rather see the functionality built-in to the package s init script directly.There is a package in Debian that already provides this: The OpenVPN package maintained by Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta allows the user to define new instances of OpenVPN simply by adding a new file to /etc/openvpn/. The file /etc/default/openvpn defines which of these instances are to be started when I or the system start runs /etc/init.d/openvpn start. /etc/init.d/openvpn stop stops all running instances and /etc/init.d/openvpn restart also restarts just the currently running servers. I can easily control a specific instance by adding it s name (which is the configuration file s basename) after the command to the init script.I think these semantics are clear, sensible and non-disruptive and should be available with every Debian package where the administrator might want to run several instances at once: web server, mail server, ftp servers, name servers etc.In those cases where the daemon is not configured by a single file alone, one directory with the configuration for one instance is needed. Otherwise, I don t see why this should be a problem. For backwards compatibility, the normal configuration file locaction could be an implicit instance called default and all additional instances go to their own directory (e.g /etc/ntpd.conf is instance default , and /etc/ntpd/public.conf is instance public ).Comments welcome.

Whee, I actually managed to vote in the DPL race. Out of 5 votes I sent, 3 were rejected and 2 where ack'ed (theser were 5 different variants of MUA's, gpg usage and character set stuff.) Now I just hope that I actually voted the way I intended. (for those who are interested: my ballot is roughly the one I announced.)

I abandoned paper calendars in 1997. For a few years I used various Palm devices, then Evolution. For the most part, this has worked fine. One of the drawbacks is that I have not had any info in my calendar about official holidays in Finland. That would be useful so that I would know when other people are going to be responding to e-mail slowly, and get annoyed if I call them on business. Evolution can deal with several calendars at the same time, and can import calendar files in various formats. A couple of years ago I found an iCal file with Finnish holidays, and imported that to Evolution, but it's out of date by now. This week I decided to look for a new one, but before I did, Droidy, the fastest interface to search engines, found one for me. Unfortunately, it was severly lacking, and did not even include Midsummer Eve, the biggest summer festivity in Finland. I then decided to make my own. I skimmed the web pages of The Almanac Office at University of Helsinki. They used to have the monopoly on making calendars in Finland (and what a silly anachronism that was), and they still have the copyright on name days, but that stuff doesn't interest me. The list of holidays is uncopyrightable, and that's the info I extracted from their pages. I also looked at the list of times when food stores are allowed to be open. That's actually more important to me than holidays. I ended up making two .ics files: aukiolot2007.ics for opening hours, and suomi2007.ics for the holidays. They're probably riddled with errors: if you find any, e-mail me and I'll fix and update. I hope they're of some use for someone. (I realize that someone is going to tell me about a complete and officially supported .ics file with all the above data as a response to this log entry. Good.)

Applications are still open until March 26th. Note: the following is my personal opinion; I'm not the coordinator of the Debian GSoC project, and others might disagree. Debian has received a couple of applications, but there were rather few among them I found really convincing. :-( What I usually dislike in applications:

• doesn't state an actual project (yes, this happens, we nuke them pretty quickly. "Debian for my life" is not a real project, you know...)
• isn't related to Debian. For example "face recognition PAM module" certainly is an interesting topic, but I don't think Debian is the appropriate organization to mentor this. We aren't an organization of image recognition experts, but our key strength is distribution infrastructure.
• doesn't say much more than the suggested topic already did (note that for such 'popular' topics from the Wiki we usually receive more than one application; so adding some good ideas yourself or at least writing a good plan is key to being accepted!)
• doesn't give the impression of having done some basic background research, such as having searched in the Debian packages repository with "apt-cache search"

So if your application is really Debian-related, invest a few hours in writing the application and your chances are pretty good at being accepted! Of course Debian could be an Umbrella for e.g. another network configuration GUI, a tool to configure traffic shaping etc.; however I don't think that should be our focus. In fact, Google itself could mentor these topics maybe as good as we can. So please don't just submit a proposal to us because you happen to be a Debian user, or submit it to all mentoring organizations. Instead try to find an appropriate mentoring organization. (On a side note, the mentoring organization is supposed to provide you with a mentor which can actually help you on the topic). Debian is a good choice when it comes to integrating software, software management, system administration and such. Thats what we do: collect existing software and try to make it work together as good as possible. And build infrastructure and tools to make this task easier. This of course touches e.g. porting to different architectures and writing new administration frontends, however we try to avoid reinventing the wheel. One of the suggested topics, where I'm really surprised to not having seen a proposal yet is CRMI; which matches what I sometimes call a "per package wiki for metadata". Or a Debtags related project. Or a SELinux project. These are both pretty interesting technologies, which offer substantial benefits when actually used. When properly integrated in the distribution.

There's a lot going on, since we're getting closer to the International Free Software Forum 8.0 that will be held in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Sacix new website is online at: www.sacix.org.br (sorry Portuguese only yet), and we've received a impressive amount of new subscribers to the related mailing lists.

Paulo and I managed to add usbfloppy support into ltspfs that I've forward to Vagrant from pkg-ltsp in Debian, Oliver (ubuntu/edubuntu) and upstream. It was just a detail for many but a huge step for us, considering that more than 100.000 end users are using their floppies into a usbfloppy drive so we really needed that in time for Sacix next release (Sagui).

Quick notes:
* My new car has a week of life
* Developers, please vote for DPL!

I'm now warming up for Roger Waters gig. See you!

Thomas mentions that Etch will release with glibc 2.3 rather than glibc 2.4, and wonders why that is. There are two simple reasons for this:

1. AIUI, glibc 2.4 drops support for non-NPTL kernels (i.e., 2.4 and earlier Linux kernels). Since sarge's default kernel was still a 2.4-based kernel, upgrading to a glibc 2.4 will immediately break everything on your system, since at that point your libc suddenly refuses to cooperate with your kernel. Not providing an upgrade path for users who run a supported kernel of our previous release is not an option.
2. Etch will have official support for 11 architectures: i486 and later intel-compatibles, SPARC, Alpha, PowerPC, ARM, big- and little-endian MIPS, PARISC, ia64, S/390 and AMD64. If we want to migrate to glibc 2.4 or later and still release, then it has to work on all those architectures. Since NPTL requires some architecture-specific support and since that architecture-specific support is not available for some of our current architectures, this is not the case (also see the above). It may be possible that Debian "lenny" will drop some architectures because the most recent version of glibc still does not support them, but ultimately that decision will be up to the release managers.

So, while I'll agree that it kindof sucks that Debian will release with a somewhat outdated version of glibc, it's not as if there isn't a valid reason.

On Tuesday my Thinkpad was taken for service to fix the problem described in this post.

The problems I described were overheating, wear on the keyboard (from a minimum of 8 hours a day 7 days a week use) and a missing rubber foot on the base. The statement of work includes a replaced system-board, keyboard, CPU fan, and "cover(s)" (not that I can see any difference in that regard). No new rubber foot. Also they upgraded the BIOS.

It's interesting to note that in the list of "diagnostics performed" they listed "HDD" - of course I removed the hard drive before giving it to them.

Anyway 2 days turn-around is pretty good service and I'll ask them to post me a new rubber foot so I can stick it on myself.

Update:
The IBM support team were quite helpful about this and now have a set of misc small parts being couriered to me - it may arrive tomorrow or Monday.

It's a minor annoyance that they didn't fix everything when they had it, but shipping me a set of small parts is great service. With a bit of luck I'll get some other parts that will be useful to me at some future time too. ;) My Thinkpad leaves warranty in a few months and I'll be on my own for all future repairs.

For the first time I am actually considering paying for extra warranty support. I think that I'm one of the more expensive IBM customers in terms of warranty support. I typically go through one keyboard and one system-board per Thinkpad that I own. I guess that IBM make the most money from managers who have laptops always sitting on their desk. People like me who take their laptops everywhere, use them extensively, and wear things out (doing what laptops are designed to do) would be less profitable.

In the last weeks I've focused more on doing things than writing about them. I've (for the most part) managed to become an early riser, getting up at 5 o'clock each morning, and gotten a number of things sorted in the two hours between breakfast and going to work. The time for this got taken away from the part of the evening where I'm too tired to do anything meaningful and so end up reading emails. This, of course, means that I will have less time for reading mail, and so I've changed my mail setup so that list mail no longer goes into my inbox. This was long overdue, and it is a good thing that the blue "message" LED now only lights up for mail addressed to me (and spam, but I'm going to deal with that later).

There are times when you want to track the bleeding edge of a particular project, and having a new laptop is often one of those moments... I've recently bought an HP Compaq nx6320 and while most of it is working, one of the reasons I got it was because of Keith Packard's work on the RandR extensions for X. Well, I was definitely seeing this bug but with a small patch I can get the latest (experimental) packages for xserver-xorg-video-intel to work, and now with a few magic tweaks to my xorg.conf I can make my desktop expand to another monitor when I unsuspend at work, and contract back to just the laptop screen when I resume somewhere else. The Magic Expanding X Config First of all, when I got the driver to actually work, xrandr explained to me that my maximum resolution was 1400x1400:

Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1400 x 1050, maximum 1400 x 1400
VGA disconnected (normal left inverted right)
LVDS connected 1400x1050+0+0 (normal left inverted right) 305mm x 228mm
   1400x1050      60.0*+
   1280x800       60.0  
   1280x768       60.0  
   1024x768       60.0  
   800x600        60.3  
   640x480        59.9  
TV disconnected (normal left inverted right)

Using a few clues from Ross Burton I managed to get that "maximum 1400x1400" to increase. The trick is to add a "Virtual" setting for screen size into your "Screen" Section, like so:

Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "Default Screen"
        Device          "Intel 945GM/GMS/940GML"
        Monitor         "Laptop Panel"
        DefaultDepth    24
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth           24
                Virtual         2680 1050
        EndSubSection
EndSection

The downside of this is that if you set the width greater than 2048 (as I have here) then DRI won't work, so you won't get 3d stuff. I guess I can manage without ice-cream, just so long as I get my cake! Once I have the "Virtual" setting, when I resume at the office I can:

xrandr --output VGA --mode 1280x1024 --pos 1400x0

And then when I resume somewhere without the external monitor, I can:

xrandr --output VGA --off

Quibbles All of these features are kind of under development, but Xorg 7.3 will support this stuff, and then Gnome and suchlike will have to start thinking about how to deal with it. The dynamic screen changing is not something these environments are completely ready for. One example is that while I know that monitor is always on the RHS of my docking station, X wants it to be the primary monitor and Gnome moves both panels onto that screen. Perhaps that's not a choice that can be made automatically. Someone who had an external keyboard plugged into their docking station might want the opposite behaviour, and there is certainly no way the environment can magically know whether that monitor is left or right of my laptop screen. Eventually I expect that Gnome will recognise this monitor, and will make the panels and location automatically set the RandR environment to match the way I set it last time. It is also somewhat annoying that I have to actually choose the virtual size. No doubt this configuration will disappear in due course and it is not really surprising to see it for something which is admittedly quite bleeding edge! I noticed at LCA that Keith had his own screen set for a Virtual size of 2048x2048, and now I know why: that's the maximum size that is supported for DRI, so if I expand my desktop onto a 1280x1024 screen I'm going to have some overlap. In fact I could almost configure my external monitor to be above my normal screen and use it that way, but it would feel pretty weird I think. In the meantime I've gone back to "blank screen" for my screen saver which admittedly is currently the only application for 3d acceleration on my desktop. Remaining Problems with this Laptop The only outstanding issues for me with this laptop are:

• Suspend/Resume to RAM does not work (I use suspend to disk)
• Fingerprint Sensor does not work (AuthenTec say Linux support will be available later this year)

That's about the best Linux compatibility I have had for any of my last five laptops within a month of buying it. Most of them have had much more significant stuff less supported even after three years of use!

Working on cluster testing is not easy and debugging can be extremely more complicated that you can think of given the distributed nature of the software you are running. So RedHat Cluster guys (Patrick and Lon) and I have been sitting together on IRC for the past couple of days trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with this bug that did block services from being switched from one node on the cluster to the other that is sort of vital functionality for a cluster itself. Everything turned up to be a kernel race condition in the DLM (Distributed Lock Manager) that we were able to workaround in userland by changing the way the resource manager tells the kernel (via libdlm2) to de-allocate the lock_space with a one liner. So what's the point? Simple.. these guys could have just turned me down and send me away since we were testing on Ubuntu, but they didn't. They have been of great help (nevermind that you can really have a good time working with them) and extremely responsive. They really rock hard. Clearly.. get to know your upstream! it's vital for your activity as Ubuntu Developer. Get to know what you are working on! Packaging is not just a matter of creating a debian/ dir in your source to build the code and ship a .deb. You have to know what's in that code and how things work. Upstream can always help you, but you need to be helpful to upstream too and let them understand that you are not just another packager for yet another distribution.

Microsofts view of Linux users, and how to convince them of Windows. I don't like linking to Microsoft stuff, and especially not to Microsoft FUD (the flash presentation of theirs will in turn try to bring you to their "get the facts" wrong site...) However, for Linux evangelists it's a good opportunity to see Microsofts strategy at attacking Linux, and where we should improve to counter their claims (e.g. with respect to mangeability). It's also nice to see that they actually feel oblieged to counter SAMBA and other Linux technology, and that especially in the networking part they have little to claim to be superior. And also for Samba all they claim is "higher value because of better integration and manageability". And I definitely have to agree that management of a larger Linux network isn't easy, and we could do with some better tools. (And especially tools to do tools for network management; we have different requirements, and there are good tools, but they are either hard to roll out and customize - cfengine -, or too primitive to be of use to many - webmin etc.) Still the average Linux administrator does manage a significantly higher number of servers than a Windows admin, so their claim actually is incorrect. And it's totally absurd they claim to be better in security with Exchange. Maybe better than their older crap, but I still would never ever trust a Microsoft system for Email... just remember all those bad email vacation notices etc. Microsoft delivers... So: know your "enemy"s tactics.

Awhile back, one of my favorite bloggers, Philip Dawdy of Furious Seasons, deviated from his usual posts that place a big fat critical magnifying glass under the marketing (and other shady) tactics of Big Pharma and wrote a very thoughtful, (also furious) account of Web 2.0 claiming:

this whole Web 2.0, social networking, virtual community business is essentially a pornography of the self a projected, fictionalized self that is then worshipped by the slightly less-perfect self.

It is a little off the top at times but makes some really good points that I agree with (and generated a really interesting discussion). It merits reading alongside Danah Boyd’s recent rumination on the very same topic, fame, narcissism and MySpace, where she seeks to address narcissism but she deflects blame the suite of technologies and places it instead on the broader set of cultural practices that sustain this accentuated inward focus:

My view is that we have trained our children to be narcissistic and that this is having all sorts of terrifying repercussions; to deal with this, we’re blaming the manifestations instead of addressing the root causes and the mythmaking that we do to maintain social hierarchies. Let’s unpack that for a moment.

These two read nicely with an older piece in Harpers Attack of the superzeroes: why Washington, Einstein, and Madonna can t compete with you . The author, Thomas de Zengotita claims “Being famous isn’t what it used to be” because new technologies of mediation and reflexivity (and by new, he means a lot more than web 2.0, it includes reality shows, focus groups, karaoke, the hyper-representation of the real stars, alongside the usual suspects) and concludes that we life as if we were always on stage, concluding somewhat disparagingly “We are all method actors now.” Of course, this is an important part of the story but not the whole story. There are times, for example, these social technologies help to patch up what is arguably as common in North America as is this narcissistic self, which is the fragmented self, that comes into being, for example because many of us, migrate here and the, for example, for work. So a social networking site like Facebook, provides somewhat of a stable point of reference, where there are individuals collected, in the same place, even though the people are no longer really in the same place. It is at least a recognition of certain relationships whose “local” face has now passed but instead of completely completely fading into the realm of memory, the past lives on, albeit in transformed ways, within a virtual space. This facet of social networking is not particularly narcissistic, but is building new technologies of memory that I think works somewhat against the conditions that fragment the self. And while the patching up of the person may make an individual “whole” and “individuated” it seems it is a form that is much more mundane than the “pornography” or “narcissism,” explored above, though of course, they do abound–but karaoke, that is always pornography of the self. But… porn can be fun.

Uwe asks about fast, reliable, not noisy storage mechanisms - And yes, of course, he talks about Flash memory's well known limitation: The relatively low number of write cycles each area of the memory is known to be able to withstand. I recently told this same argument to a friend who was enthusiastically telling me about his dream project of setting up a computer based exclusively on solid-state storage. Of course, he didn't like the limitation.
But after reading a bit (sorry, I don't have the URLs at hand - but Google is a good friend), it seems that many (most? all?) controllers work around this limitation by rearranging the most used blocks around, so that the Flash gets as evenly used as possible. Quoting from Wikipedia's article on Flash memory:

Another limitation is that flash memory has a finite number of erase-write cycles (most commercially available flash products are guaranteed to withstand 1 million programming cycles). This effect is partially offset by some chip firmware or file system drivers by counting the writes and dynamically remapping the blocks in order to spread the write operations between the sectors. This technique is called wear levelling. Another mechanism is to perform write verification and remapping to spare sectors in case of write failure, which is named bad block management (BBM).

So, Uwe, just check the media you get supports wear levelling technology, and you should be safe.

In response to a couple of comments about my post about pesky binary firmware, I can only say that after removing the last entrails of network-manager and network-manager-gnome, everything appears fine. Command-line configuration wins over GUI eye candy, again.

At no point did network-manager[-gnome] cope with my setup, principally due to WPA difficulties, it did connect once when WPA was disabled at my Access Point at home but that simply isn't an option in the real world. (And it's not a problem with my home setup because network-manager also failed (comprehensively) with a completely different wifi setup - the one I'm using here on hols.)

Oh and by the by, if anyone has a problem with the template I've chosen for my blog, there is always the option to select a different template via the drop-down box. I happen to like the current one and it's my blog so, umm, that's how it will stay.

I bought an Airkey wireless keyboard from eBay; £11.50, IR, presents as PS/2, range of up to 30ft. Seems to do the job; the trackpad thingy isn't perfect, but good enough for basic X use which is all I want. Surprisingly no one seemed to comment on my query about RF wireless keyboard security. It seems like the sort of thing someone like Adam Laurie would have had a look at, but I couldn't find anything obvious. Anyone got any pointers to research about these? Oh, and tonight I had to fight interrupt conflicts to make the IR PS/2 mouse work - that machine hadn't had a mouse before and it turned out several things were sharing IRQ 12, leading to Linux not even finding the port. So I rejigged things around in the BIOS so it was saved for just the mouse port and that managed to make things work. SiS 630E chipset for anyone else seeing a similar issue. It felt like I was back in the 90s.

Nothing stops the MIA team! Maintainers beware! Resistance is futile. We might even knock on your door!

My dear friend Pablo, who I got involved into all this Debian craze, fun, cult, family... was a great maintainer until he gradually became MIA. In fact he has not had packages in unstable for almost a year and a half. His account is about to be deleted... I could not allow this!

So we spent Sunday together. Diana, his fiancee, made wonderful maki, sushi (yummm & yay!) and delicious tempura. We watched a strange, but hilarious movie: Laurel Canyon (warning: not recommended) and walked around Galapagar, a nice little place north of Madrid. Their house is absolutely cute, they are getting married and getting a kitten. We talked about the old times, the new times, the changes in our lifes... it was so great to see them again, it had been a long time!

It reminded me of the lifestyle choices we all make and made me think about mine. So far I am still happy single, cute-home-less and childless, although I must admit the clock recently began to tick at times, and I bug Holgi about it. Poor Holgi. Maybe it s time for a kitten for me too!

Read Pablo s side of the story here. He s looking for packages to adopt. I think adding him to Planet by surprise would be nasty, so I ll ask first. I already asked him to vote in the DPL election. I am so evil... /me works on a hackergotchi now.

N.P: Dani California - Red Hot Chili Peppers - Stadium Arcadium

This is what I just wrote on Mark’s blog about Ian’s move to Sun:

“To some extent I m quite excited by what this might mean for OpenSolaris going forward, but Nexenta have been pushing the OS/Debian (or Ubuntu, more accurately) integration kick for some while without actually seeming to get any (public) traction within Sun
I ve also been disappointed by how little Ian seems to be in touch with how linux development works these days, but that s mostly from what he s been writing in public, rather than any particularly interaction with him, so hopefully that s not a fair summary.
I really hope that Sun can actually make this work.”

I thought I’d expand on this a bit, especially in light of my past moaning about Solaris and the installer and package management in the installer specifically.
What I really, really want, is a modern OS, which has an easily extensible and controllable installer, with good visibility and debugging infrastructure, which is very easy to manage on a grand scale - by which I mean hundreds or thousands of machines up to date, secure and consistent. At present, Ubuntu comes closest:

• d-i is a superb installer that is very easy to drive in an automated fashion – far easier than either kickstart or jumpstart in my opinion, even though both have been around far longer!
• People say apt-get, but that rather misses the point – or rather, it’s the icing on the cake. As most Debian or Ubuntu developers will tell you, the real strength of packages on the platform is in the underlying metadata, and the well maintained and enforced packaging Policy.
• Every packager is a specialist – more or less, if you’re packaging something in Ubuntu or Debian it’s because you use it, either professionally or personally, and have an interest in, and knowledge of, making it work as well as possible.
• The FHS – until my $PATH on Solaris is shorter than the next Harry Potter tome, Ubuntu has this won hands down.

However, there are some definite areas where Ubuntu or Debian (or Linux in general) struggle compared to Solaris – the sheer engineering resources that Sun can throw at a problem, and the talent they have available to them do result in fantastic results when they correctly identify a problem space. They also “own” Solaris – there’s no need for them to try and build awareness of a problem, and the correct solution, over a number of disparate communities.
ZFS and DTrace are the hackneyed and obvious projects here, but from a sysadmin perspective I think FMA, while far less sexy, is one of the best things Solaris10 has. And this is what I mean when I say operating system visibility.
The integration of Zones is also far better than Zen on Linux can offer currently, although both Red Hat and skx are working hard to fix this.
I’m really looking forward to the day when I get an OS that solves all these problems…