Search Results: "will"

9 March 2011

Rog rio Brito: (Some) Solutions with Chromium

In my previous post, I was pointing out some of my frustrations with Chromium/Chrome. A very kind reader, Timo Juhani Lindfors, gave me answers to many of the problems that I pointed out and got me straight on some issues:

I can disable full zoom in Iceweasel (i.e., I only want to zoom the text, not the images). According to Chromium's project BTS, it seems that this will be a WONTFIX bug, despite many people asking for it (and it having a lot of duplicates).

Timo told me that there is an extension called "Font Size Increase" (ID: ombpcpigmndepfckcifdblemkabaoihk) that adds a button on the side of the URL bar that you can click to increase the size of the text, without affecting the size of the images. Highly recommended. Not that I need this one as much as "Font Size Increase", but there is also a "Font Size Decrease" (ID: mpajngnpcmjjeoflljdjpnehcfaldcia) that, as the name implies, decreases the size of the text. It is nice to have this one when you clicked on the button to increase the size of the font one or two times too many.

In Iceweasel, I have a way (without resorting to many extensions or hackish solutions) to use the equivalent of Firefox's "View > Page Style > No Style" (i.e., to ignore any CSS sheet that the document author may have specified on the page).

Timo also told me that there is a very cool extension called "Chrome Page Style" (ID: ddpkgkegfklikkmfmneldonhldahhacb) that allows you to alternate between stylesheets provided by the page (see Joey Hess's ikiwiki's CSS Market for an example of that). It also has the possibility of disabling all the CSS'es that a page may have, which, in many cases around the web actually improves the readability of the pages, for many "fancy" things detract from readability, especially if you have poor eyesight. Although I had said that I didn't want to resort to extensions, this was a simple solution enough that made me consider revisit my requirements. I do, though, wonder why some frequently used extensions are not built into the programs from stock.

In Iceweasel, I can press Ctrl+Q and make the damn browser quit, instead of me having to use the mouse/trackpad/pointing device. This is probably a lack of my understanding on how to associate key bindings to Chromium, but the problem still stands.

Of course, Timo also set me straight and told me about Ctrl+Shift+Q for that purpose, which I had missed completely.

Similarly, when there is only one tab open, pressing Ctrl+W in Chromium does not close the tab (say, presenting me a blank tab or the list of most visited sites), nor it closes the application.

As a poor writing of my part, Ctrl+W does close the tabs. But when there is only one tab present, it doesn't close the window. I'm OK with that, since I now know the way to close the window. Thanks again Timo. Oh, and one point that may not be known by many is that using about:flags in Chrome does something analogue to Firefox's about:config (even with the warning). And tweaking with it you can try to see if you can enable hardware acceleration of some parts of your pages, as present in newer releases of Chromium. So, there I am: way more satisfied than with earlier with Chromium, but still having Firefox/Iceweasel as my primary browser. Good to have two usable browsers now.

Sean Finney: compiz updates!

For those who are interested in the world of compiz, new development snapshots have been trickling their way into experimental for the past week and are now available for widespread testing. They're being sent to experimental instead of straight to unstable for a few reasons:

None of us really know how stable / problematic they will be, whether they will build on all arches, or have other RC bugs. So this lets us evaluate the situation and not commit ourselves if we think it's still premature to support them.
Updating these packages is a major pain and very time consuming, due to how the authors choose to maintain/organize their software. This is really a rant for another day though. Short version is that packages have to be dealt with manually and in a serial manner, and this means they don't all arrive ready to go in one evening's worth of work.
Since 0.8.x, the upstream authors have moved the locations of some of the repositories, and in some cases rebuilt the repositories from scratch in the process. That meant I had to spend lots of time learning about how to do a few arcane things in git.
Some of the new packages are using git submodules, which by itself isn't necessarily bad. However, for maintaining debian packages out of git with submodules, this a fairly exotic concept and requires some changes to the typical packaging workflows as well as maybe needing to hack some support into commonly used packaging tools.

So, anyway, the packages are all uploaded now--give them a try!

8 March 2011

Evgeni Golov: Desktop in a shell: irssi

Continuing my series about my desktop in a shell, in this chapter I will present you my irssi setup.Irssi is the most customized part of my setup, using many scripts from the irssi-scripts Debian package and some from the internet , handling 6 irc networks with a total of 34 channels plus ~~Jabber~~XMPP, ICQ, Twitter and identi.ca. My custom irssi settingsI like my conversations to look like Buddy, you rock instead of Buddy: you rock , so:
/set completion_char ,I also like *long highlighted text*, so:
/set emphasis_multiword onHide mIRC and ANSI colors when turned on. This can be used to eliminate angry fruit salad syndrome in some channels. (Quote from irssi.org/documentation/settings, do I have to say more?):
/set hide_colors onWhen talking in more than one channel, it sometimes comes handy to repeat something from the past said in THAT channel, not searching though all:
/set window_history onTell irssi to shutup when away, noone will hear/see the beep anyways:
/set beep_when_away offI want my screen to inform me about new messages, so I need this:
/set bell_beeps onBeep for query text, notices, dcc, dcc text and hilight:
/set beep_msg_level MSGS NOTICES DCC DCCMSGS HILIGHMy used irssi scriptsactive_notice.pl (from irssi-scripts)Show notices in the active window or the corresponding query instead of the status-window.
No further configuration needed.adv_windowlist.pl (from anti.teamidiot.de)Some really smart windowlist, see my previous post about adv_windowlist.pl, I won t explain its features and settings here again.autorealname.pl (from irssi-scripts)Show peoples real-name when they join (my $nick $name memory is poor :()
No further configuration needed.chansort.pl (from irssi-scripts)Automatically sort my channels alphabetically, grouped by network.
Enable via /set chansort_autosort on<Update>kaimi asked me yesterday, whether chansort could ignore the network and just sort ALL channels in alphabetical order. Well, it could not, until yesterday ;) Fetch either the patch against chansort.pl or my chansort-ng.pl and set chansort_ignore_network to ON. You can also set chansort_ignore_windowtype to mix channels and queries if you like to.</Update>hack-whois-in-current-window.pl (from dgl.cx)Display /whois in the current window or the corresponding query instead of the status-window.
No further configuration needed.keepnick.pl (from irssi-scripts)Restore my nick after it is free again (like after a ping timepout).
Set the nick via /keepnick [-net chatnet] [nick]nickserv.pl (from irssi-scripts)Automatically authorize me on networks with NickServ.
Enable by settings services address, nick and password via:

/nickserv addnet freenode NickServ@services.
/nickserv addnick freenode Zhenech mypass

screen_away.pl (from irssi-scripts)Set away when screen is detached.
Will be enabled automatically, but you maybe want to tweak screen_away_message :)seen.pl (from irssi-scripts)Add a /seen nick command to lookup when and where nick was online the last time.
No further configuration needed.trackbar.pl (from irssi-scripts)Draw a line when you switch irssi windows so you can see which part of the conversation you have already seen.
No further configuration needed.BitlBeeI m using BitlBee as my irssi-to-every-im gateway of choice ;) But while it sounds easy, my setup isn t. I am using BitlBee only to connect to jabber.die-welt.net, my Jabber/XMPP server. There I have a pyICQt instance running, to connect to ICQ via Jabber (yes, BitlBee would support that directly, but that would fail on me when I would like to connect from a different Jabber-client). Twitter and identi.ca are handled via Jabber too: identi.ca does support this by themself, for Twitter I use the tweet.im service.
But besides of my strange setup, BitlBee is easy: apt-get install bitlbee, connect irssi to localhost:6667, you will be force-joined to &bitlbee, where you do:

register somepassword
account add Jabber you@jabberserber.example.com jabberpassword
account on 0

and done, you@jabberserver.example.com is online :)The all awaited screenshot (from my last irssi-post):

And the whole ~/.irssi/config: http://files.die-welt.net/irssi-config.txt, read it carefully while waiting for the next post about newsbeuter :)

7 March 2011

Ritesh Raj Sarraf: Microsoft, Nokia and Qt

Nokia has announced that it is selling off its Qt business. This needed to happen given the change in the company's strategy. Microsoft is a software vendor providing Mobile OS, with Nokia being one of its consumers. For Nokia, to have a tier 1 alliance with Microsoft, it would have been important for the company to show positive gesture. With this move, Microsoft and Nokia will strengthen their partnership. This move will focus on tighter integration in between the 2 company's portfolios. Nokia mentioned in the announcement that it'd further continue Qt core development. I don't see what value that has to bring to the company. It either has to do with the company making some money with whatever IP it acquired in Trolltech, or else, it'd be just a phased wise approach in selling off the Qt business. Also it could be Nokia's Plan B, in case the Micro-Noki team fails to build the ecosystem that it is aspiring for. As for Qt, we'll have to see. Given that it is GPL, we don't have too much to worry (hopefully).

Matt Zimmerman: Listening to users

In the software community, people hold strong opinions on the subject of listening to users. Some feel that users are an essential source of information for making successful products, as evidenced in the customer development methodology, and seek to involve users deeply in product development. Others believe that users don t know what they want, invoking the quote attributed to Henry Ford, If I d asked customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse . Some say that user needs are unknowable except through the lens of a marketplace, where people choose in aggregate which products suit them best, and customers vote with their wallets (anything else is anecdata ). Regular readers will not be surprised that I believe they are all right, but only in certain contexts. The right strategy for involving users in product decisions will depend on factors related to the product itself, the market, and the product development method being used. One of the most important is the life cycle stage of the product: is it a new and rapidly evolving concept, or a mature commodity, or somewhere in between? Simon Wardley explains this well over on his blog, so I won t rehash his points here, but will add a few of my own. If what we re looking for is inspiration for a new product, it s here that Henry Ford was right: users generally won t hand you a complete product vision on a silver platter. They ll frame their input in terms of what they know, and the choices already available to them. However, this doesn t mean that users don t have a role to play in this instance: watching users can be a great source of inspiration. It s the combination of domain knowledge and passionate imagination which triggers the creative spark. Henry Ford applied his engineer s interests to a problem which was evident all around him. If our goal is to test whether a new product is a good fit for its users, there is no substitute for user feedback. We can guess at whether there is a fit, and our intuition may be good, but users are the ultimate judges, and we don t know if we re right or wrong until users evaluate it. So ask them! By engaging in dialogue with individual users, we can learn unexpected things which will help to refine the idea. If we don t find what they think until our new product is released, we risk making something that no one wants. Why wait until it s too late? It can be challenging to extract useful feedback for a product which doesn t yet exist, but this effort is well worth it to avoid wasting much more effort in software engineering. When our objective is to incrementally improve an existing product, individual anecdotes can mislead us. A given change may be an improvement for one user, but a disaster for another. What we want to know is whether the new version is better for the population as a whole, and in this case, we do well to rely on data. There are pitfalls here as well, of course. We need to choose our questions carefully, and realize that users will often resist any change: not because they re stodgy by nature, but because they have to invest effort in adapting to the change. I think of incremental improvement as a joint investment made between product developers and their users, to improve the whole system of people and technology for the better. By choosing the right tool for the job, we can make better decisions, improve faster, and ultimately solve the right problem for our users.

Gerfried Fuchs: Squeeze RCs

Alright, the stress of the release and its aftermath with respect to the New Website is getting lower. We even were explicitly mentioned for that during the introduction to the category Outstanding Contribution to Open Source/Linux/Free Software at this year's Linux New Media Awards. Given that the Webmaster Team is much more energetic and lively these days I will shift a bit of my efforts to stable RC squashing again. I came to the conclusion that working on lenny RCs doesn't gain much of appreciation or real turnaround, and given that my time is limited I started to switch over to work on squeeze RCs. This is the list of bugs that I squashed last week (actually, marked them as invalid/not affecting squeeze):

549054: Still uses gmime2.2, not relevant for squeeze.
549056: Still uses gmime2.2, not relevant for squeeze.
549057: Still uses gmime2.2, not relevant for squeeze.
549058: Still uses gmime2.2, not relevant for squeeze.
554310: FTBFS with binutils-gold, not relevant for squeeze.
554557 FTBFS: undefined reference to symbol 'gzclose', not failing in squeeze.
596569: Depends on xview, not relevant for squeeze.

I hope to be able to keep up that pace for a few weeks (currently there are 168 RC bugs in squeeze listed), and hopefully being able to motivate others to also support our stable release instead of only working on unstable.

/debian permanent link Comments: 0 Flattr this

Alexander Reichle-Schmehl: Debian honoured with LNM award for Outstanding Contribution to Free Software

Those who followed the live stream or read our News already knew it: Debian has been honored with the Linux New Media Award in the Categories "Best Open Source Server Distribution" and Outstanding Contribution to Open Source/Linux/Free Software. Especially the second one, considered to be the "kings class" of the LNM awards, is a great honour. While it is called the Linux New Media award, the decision of whom to honor with them isn't done by the company themselves, but by a bigger jury, consisting of over 300 representative community members, developers, journalists and companies. Deciding in a secret vote¹. To the best of my knowledge, there's nothing similar. So one can truly say, we weren't awarded by a company, but by the entire Free Software community! Congratulations to everyone involved! For our Outstanding Contribution to Open Source/Linux/Free Software award, we also had the special pleasure, to receive our presentation speech from Karsten Gerloff, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe, who found words, I can hardly explain myself. As it might take some time for the video of the award ceremony to be published and several people already asked for it, you'll find the text of the speech below. Still, you might want to watch the video for a special surprise by Karsten:

I'm here to congratulate the Debian project. Debian has recently taken a nearly unprecedented step, one that many people thought would never come to pass: The project has updated its website design. Today, Debian receives the Linux New Media Award for its outstanding contribution to Free Software. I could hardly think of a more fitting recipient for such an award. Debian is coming of age, literally. In August, the distribution will turn 18. Debian offers great technology. It's stable. Really stable. It's highly flexible, and performs well in lots of different roles. IT supports more different architectures than almost anything else out there. It runs on pretty much anything. The package management is great. It makes a highly complex system of almost 30,000 packages extremely simple to configure and use. Debian started out as a true pioneer. When the project was created in 1993, the whole concept of a distribution wasn't too well established. Ian Murdock announced the project thus:
"Debian Linux is a brand-new kind of Linux distribution. Rather than being developed by one isolated individual or group, as other distributions of Linux have been developed in the past, Debian is being developed openly in the spirit of Linux and GNU. [...] Debian is being carefully and conscientiously put together and will be maintained and supported with similar care." At a recent conference, the current Debian project lead, Stefano Zacchiroli, gave a talk titled Who the bloody hell cares about Debian? Turns out that many people do indeed. Debian is the GNU/Linux distribution that has the most derivatives based on it currently 128, if Distrowatch.com is to be believed: Ubuntu, Knoppix, gNewSense, and many more. And those distributions again have their own derivatives. None of these could function without Debian. Lots of people rely on Debian. That makes it all the more important that Debian is so reliable. The Debian project gives us Free Software that is both rock-solid and exciting. But the greatest thing about Debian is not the fact that it delivers great software. Other distributions do that, too. The big thing about Debian is the *idea* of Debian: The idea that a massive Free Software project can be totally independent. Debian shows how it's possible to build a highly reliable operating system without a formal body. The project has created some pretty complex structures to run itself, as a do-ocracy, based on consensus and running code. This is important. We are currently debating how Free Software projects can best be governed in the long run. How do we make sure that a project's users can always enjoy the freedom they deserve? How can we structure a project in a way that makes it immune to a hostile takeover? Oracle's acquisition of Sun has shown that these are important question. A Free Software license, preferably one like the GPL that protects freedom in the long run, is an important first step. But a Free Software project consists of much more than code. While uncounted people and companies are earning good money with Debian, the Debian project itself can't be bought simply because there is noone you could buy it from. Debian has been doing vendor independence long before it was cool. What I love most about Debian is that like few other big projects, Debian has the idea of freedom at its core. Debian's Free Software guidelines are a central manifesto for software freedom. The Debian Social Contract does not mention a single package or program. But it is without a doubt one of Debian's most important pieces of documentation. In Debian, quality is the focus of everyone's attention. But those who work on the Debian system know that great software is worth nothing without Freedom. With the release of Squeeze, the latest stable version, in February, Debian has taken the important step of offering a completely free kernel, with no binary blobs. This is a first for a major distribution in recent times. Debian is giving its users Freedom by default. And this Freedom for users and developers on a massive scale truly is Debian's outstanding contribution, not just to Free Software, but to the information society. On behalf of the Free Software Foundation Europe, I would like to thank everyone in Debian for their work, and congratulate them on this award. It's well deserved. Keep up the good work!

1: I forgot to mention one small, but important detail: The voting period for the jury ended on December 23, 2010, so long before Squeeze was released. So we can be quite sure, that the Jury didn't followed the Squeeze-Hype with their decision, but really thinks, we did something great :)

Craig Small: JFFNMS at RC2, ncurses at 5.8

After some reports back about jffnms 0.9.0rc1 I have now updated it to rc2. Thanks for all who gave me information about how it worked in YOUR setup. I cannot be sure but I d say the second RC will be the last until the release itself. Sven has also given me the nod and ncurses 5.8 migrated into unstable. We ve had one report that the new version of ncurses might not play well with stfl (see #616711 ) but generally speaking it should work ok. Finally, congratulations to the debian project on winning two categories at the Linux New Media Awards. It was especially good to hear the presentation by Karsten Gerloff who is president of the Free Software Foundation Europe. ncurses bug update It seems that the ncurses bug is more serious and is to do with newwin() function in the library. If you get crashes when a program starts and its linked to ncurses 5.8 (even if it is not a Debian system) you may have this problem. It doesn t happen to all ncurses programs, as the stfl example code and mutt work ok. Y9VW3CNYRFF6

Jonathan Wiltshire: Response from ALLOW Ltd.

I ve had a very courteous email from one of the founders of ALLOW, following my analysis of their password reset procedure.

Thank you for your feedback regarding the security of our platform. We are constantly reviewing these processes and regard our members security as paramount, whilst ensuring our processes are navigable to the majority of the UK. We have had the platform professionally penetration tested but your email demonstrates an excellent understanding of the challenges and we would welcome your suggestions on our options of improving the password reset process. We will be extending our SSL certificate to the publicly accessible website and please be assured that this is held on a different architecture to that of the Member application.

This is very promising!

Response from ALLOW Ltd. is a post from: jwiltshire.org.uk Flattr

6 March 2011

Tim Retout: Software Architect

I've been promoted - my job title will now be 'Software Architect'. This seems to mean I'll be writing documents rather than code - any higher-level, and I'd need Mark Shuttleworth's spacesuit. Is this a good thing? Anyway, I celebrated by opening my last bottle of Debian wine. <spam>Unfortunately, I can't take up my new role until we have hired a replacement. UK-based developers who know Perl and ideally PostgreSQL might want to look at the job description, although I'd recommend sending your CV and covering letter to me directly. I don't get a referral bonus, it's just that I don't like what that agency does with your carefully-crafted application.</spam> I'd like to thank everyone who maintains LaTeX for their assistance in this matter. In other news, I'm studying a couple of Open University courses part-time - one on software development (i.e. UML), and one on interaction design. They're going well so far - I've had a couple of tutorials, and the first part of an assignment came back with good marks. I've been reading the Lean Software Development books by Mary and Tom Poppendieck. They seem to put Agile development into a 'respectable' historical context of similar improvements in manufacturing, which might be useful for persuading project managers.

Neil Williams: Checking build-dependencies

I've been nagged for a while (by Wookey mainly) about the unhelpfulness of dpkg-checkbuilddeps when it outputs the versions and alternatives alongside the package names which are missing, making it harder to pass the list to the package manager. apt-get build-dep isn't particular helpful either - it doesn't look at the modified package at all.

Of course, once the output is in a suitable format, a new script might as well make it possible to simply pass that output to said package manager. Once it can do that, it can then pass the output to the cross-dependency tools, like xapt.

So, I've refactored the embuilddeps script in the xapt package to do just this.

It's gained a few features in the process:

Support for Build-Conflicts resolution

Support for virtual packages, swapping the virtual for the first package to provide it (borrowed some code from Dpkg::Deps for that one).

Support for Build-Depends alternatives (currently using the buildd default of "first alternative gets first chance")

Reads data from debian/control, not the apt cache - to help with the package you're building instead of the one you've already uploaded.

Handles cross dependencies (which are always assumed to not currently be installed) and native dependencies. This support is transitory until such time as enough packages are Multi-Arch compatible that Cross-Multi-Arch becomes trivial.

Support for being used as a build-dependency resolver in pbuilder, including cross-architecture dependencies with pdebuild-cross.

Can locate a debian/control file in a specified directory without needing to be called from that directory

Checks your apt-cache policy to see if the required version of a package is available from your current apt sources. Fails completely if not. (The pdebuild-cross usage will need that to be extended a touch to look at the apt-cache policy from within the chroot.)

Hector Oron has also been asking me to get embuilddeps working with sbuild, so I'm working on that feature too.

verbose and quiet support (so use -q inside other scripts)

most output is already translated - more translations are welcome, especially for the documentation, but hold on until this version has actually been uploaded.

More testing is needed, particularly that the extensive refactoring hasn't broken the pbuilder resolution support and then looking at what still needs to be done for sbuild support. The new script is in Emdebian SVN.

The first-choice method for virtuals and alternatives may well bear extension to explicit management via command-line options. I'm unsure yet whether it needs to be a configuration file setting. It could simply be a recursive - try one, move on - model.

Yves-Alexis Perez: Update on Xfce 4.8

Since the last post, few things did happen. Basically, it's still not the right time for Debian users to upgrade to Xfce 4.8. We eventually managed to upload the whole desktop part (except the xfce metapackage) to experimental and we did upload some of the goodies too. Licensing issues have been solved so the concerned packages have been uploaded, and we're right now waiting on the three packages sitting in NEW.

garcon is really mandatory for Xfce 4.8 since it implements the menu library, used by xfce4-panel, xfdesktop and xfce4-appfinder;
thunar-vfs is needed if you want to keep the goodies not yet ported to the new thunar gio-based API (right now that means squeeze, the archiver, not the distribution);
tumbler is a replacement for thunar-thumbnailers, implementing a standard thumbnailing interface, so it's possible to skip it for now.

So you'll need to be a little more patient and kindly wait for our ftp-masters to process the (quite huge) NEW backlog. After that we'll need a bit more time in experimental to test upgrade cases, then we'll do an upload to unstable of the whole desktop part and the whole goodies. Upgrading to xfce4-panel 4.8 means *all* plugins need to be rebuilt too, so that means a huge upgrade and a quite large transition to handle for the release team, so we'll have to schedule the unstable upload with them in order not to break all their plans (yes, we try to be good Debian citizens) So please be patient, but you'll see Xfce 4.8 in unstable in a not too distant future. I'll put an update here when we'll need brave volunteers willing to break their systems by doing upgrade tests. [UPDATE]: garcon, thunar-vfs and tumbler were just accepted into experimental, thanks to our ftp-masters. Now we'll synchronize with release team and upload to unstable when possible.

Gintautas Miliauskas: Trip to Bay Area coming to an end

My trip to the Bay Area is coming to the end. It has been surprisingly productive. Here's some things I have done in the nearly two weeks I have been here:

got acquainted with San Francisco
interviewed for a job at a startup
visited Stanford University & Berkeley University campuses
visited Google Mountain View and San Francisco offices
hanged out with folks from Google, from Twitter and from some very promising startups, also a Stanford professor, a researcher from Berkeley and a Berkeley undergrad student, among others
hanged out with people from The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
spent a day biking in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area

While I am getting a little travel-weary, I know I will be sad leaving this place.

Thorsten Glaser: mksh gains recursive parser for command substitutions $( )

mksh-current has just gained an experimental recursive parser for command substitutions, fixing RedHat BZ#496791 and decades-old complaints about the pdksh codebase, compared to AT&T ksh93. (GNU bash could also do the example, but not some other things mksh(1) parses fine now.)

This means that things like the following work now.

	# POSIX, should  always  work
	echo $(case 1 in (1) echo yes;; (2) echo no;; esac)
	# POSIX optional, works now in mksh, works in GNU bash
	echo $(case 1 in 1) echo yes;; 2) echo no;; esac)
	# GNU bash seems to choke on comments ending with backslash
	# a comment with " ' \
	x=$(
	echo yes
	# a comment with " ' \
	)
	# No non-recursive COMSUB parser can pass all of the above
	# tests and these below at the same time (some extensions)
	echo $(typeset -i10 x=16#20; echo $x)
	echo $(typeset -Uui16 x=16#$(id -u)
	) .
	echo $(c=1; d=1
	typeset -Uui16 a=36#foo; c=2
	typeset -Uui16 b=36 #foo; d=2
	echo $a $b $c $d)
	# the  #  is especially tricky, that s why the above cases

Next on my TODO is the complete rewrite of the read built-in command, as well as its documentation. I think that the (reduced) goals for mksh R40 will have been met by then, except porting to LynxOS and MPE, but we re working on it, and re-testing Syllable and Plan 9). Of course, a release implies testing on a lot of the supposedly supported platforms, so it won t be out immediately . Though, associative arrays have been removed from the R40 goals, so that I can at least get a new release out. Note that Debian and OpenSuSE Buildservice users have been provided with somewhat well-tested mksh-current snapshots for a while already, and Gentoo users can use the live ebuild ; there s always compiling from source too

4 March 2011

Jo Shields: Protip: parallel-installing Mono versions in an APT-happy way

If you ve ever gotten tired of waiting for a new Mono release to appear, and taken matters into your own hands by compiling your own copy of Mono, you ve likely faced the problem of missing libraries. That s weird, it says it can t find gtk-sharp, but I have that package! This happens because every version of Mono on your system has what s called a Global Assembly Cache a location where all system-wide assemblies lives. So when you run an app like Tomboy, it loads its libraries such as GTK# from the GAC belonging to the Mono runtime being used. Ordinarily, this is in /usr/lib/mono/gac on a Debian/Ubuntu system. When you have your parallel Mono, it doesn t share a GAC as a result, libraries in your main distro GAC are not available in your DIY GAC, as they were never registered in there. Typically, the advice is to either start compiling every lib you need into a non-standard place too however, here s a better idea. Why not make Apt take care of not only your system s GAC but additional GACs too? We actually have structures in place to handle this, so it s not as hard as you think (merely relatively unknown). This guide does NOT take startup scripts into account it s your problem to ensure you re using the correct mono command to run your copy of MonoDevelop or Tomboy or whatever. You should probably learn about update-alternatives and $PATH for this. Oh, and this guide will BREAK HORRIBLY if you try to uninstall system mono completely. Don t try it. Setup step 1: preparation Don t install parallel Mono into /usr/local. I don t care what happens to you if you do. Use some random folder in /opt, usually a per-build prefix like /opt/mono-2.10 Setup step 2: duplicating existing magic Open a terminal, and copy /usr/share/cli-common/runtimes.d/mono to a new filename, e.g. /usr/share/cli-common/runtimes.d/mono-2.10 Setup step 3: tweak duplicate magic Open your copied file in an editor, and change the name value on line 27ish (e.g. from Mono\n to Mono (parallel 2.10 install)\n ). Then change the two places in the file, on lines 64ish and 120ish, from /usr/bin/gacutil to /opt/mono-2.8.2/bin/gacutil or equivalent. Setup step 4: apply magic to existing packages Run /usr/share/cli-common/gac-install mono-2.10 (or whatever filename you picked for your runtimes.d entry) as root. This will instantiate your parallel GAC(s). From now on, every GAC library you install or uninstall will happen to every single runtime in runtimes.d. To go back to how things were before, with only a single Mono runtime: Uninstall step 1: empty out parallel GAC Run /usr/share/cli-common/gac-remove mono-2.10 (or whatever filename you picked for your runtimes.d entry) as root. This will remove all packaged entried from your parallel GAC(s). Uninstall step 2: remove magic Delete your file from runtimes.d

Wouter Verhelst: Dear lazyweb,

I'm a complete font n00b. How does one install Type1 fonts as part of a Debian package in such a way that:

The package is policy-compliant
Ghostscript will find the fonts
The fonts really live in /usr/share/pmw/psfonts/

PMW, which I'm packaging for Debian, includes Type1 postscript fonts that it absolutely cannot live without; and while it's possible to create a .ps file from pmw that includes those fonts, by default it does not, so it's generally useful to put those fonts somewhere that ghostscript can find them. Only I know squat about how ghostscript finds fonts, and just adding a symlink /usr/share/fonts/type1/gsfonts/pmw -> ../../../pmw/psfonts (as was suggested to me on IRC) does not seem to do the trick. Thanks,

Craig Small: Apache and incomplete redirection messages

As part of moving my site around, I needed a bunch of redirects so that http://enc.com.au/docs/linuxload.html now becomes http://enc.com.au/2010/07/manually_calculating_process_times/ because its now controlled by WordPress. so I used the RedirectPermanent feature of mod_alias to do it with lines like:

RedirectPermanent /docs/linuxload.html /2010/07/manually_calculating_process_times/

So you come in on /docs/linuxload.html and redirect to the blog entry, simple really! It actually works, kinda, but the log files fill with things like:

[Fri Mar 04 14:40:17 2011] [warn] [client 172.16.242.1] incomplete redirection target of '/2010/07/manually_calculating_process_times/' for URI '/docs/linuxload.html' modified to 'http://enc.com.au/2010/07/manually_calculating_process_times/

What is going on? Why won t Apache just be quiet and be happy? The reason is in the Redirect Directive documentation on the 2.0 mod_alias page:

Also, URL-path must be a fully qualified URL, not a relative path, even when used with .htaccess files or inside of <directory> sections.

But I m running Apache 2.2 and the 2.2 mod_alias page says:

The new URL should be an absolute URL beginning with a scheme and hostname, but a URL-path beginning with a slash may also be used, in which case the scheme and hostname of the current server will be added.

That s it, you two choices:

Use relative urls and have Apache complain
Use absolute urls and have a happy Apache

Changing the above config snippet to use absolute paths fixed it.

RedirectPermanent /docs/linuxload.html http://enc.com.au/2010/07/manually_calculating_process_times/

Cyril Brulebois: Debian XSF News #7

Time for a seventh Debian XSF News issue!

On the documentation side, I tried to come up with a squeeze backports policy. There are some new upstream releases and xorg-server 1.10 coming up (read below), as well as X stack s migration to testing, to consider before thinking of backporting though.
Where backports will likely help is for old intel cards (see our FAQ entry). According to Chris Wilson, current kernels/intel drivers are better for 855+, but 830/845 still need a miracle.
Migrating the X stack to testing needs a bit of coordination, because of the always painful dependency between the nouveau driver and the Linux kernel version. As mentioned in my mail to debian-release@ that would be quite self-contained otherwise. Bottom line: we re waiting for the kernel.
As announced on debian-x@, the plan is to wait for this migration to happen before uploading new upstream releases of libdrm, the intel driver, and mesa to unstable. Both libdrm and mesa were prepared for Ubuntu, and will be likely uploaded to experimental soon. The intel driver was prepared, but only built against xorg-server 1.10 and uploaded to experimental for now.
On the xorg-server 1.10 side, the (very late) RandR patches were proven broken, so reverting RandR 1.4 was decided. With some minor tweaks (to the radeon driver), that went quite well, and xorg-server 1.10 got released. Unfortunately, there s still some missing fix for the build system, which explains why I didn t upload a final 1.10 to experimental yet; several patches were proposed already (I checked a bunch of them), but we re still waiting for a final patch.
As a result of the RandR 1.4 reverts, the video ABI was broken again. Fortunately I gave it a quick try right before 1.10rc3 got released, and noticed the breakage, so the video ABI got bumped. I was therefore very happy with my decision to only upload a bunch of drivers to experimental, built against 1.10rc* (see DXN#6), since I only needed to upload the following video drivers again: ati, dummy, fbdev, intel, mach64, nouveau, r128, vesa. It might make sense to add cirrus to that list next time, for tests under kvm and the like.
After I poked Peter Hutterer, he kindly and promptly released snapshots for the following input drivers: kbd, mouse, and synaptics, which I uploaded both to unstable (built against 1.9), and to experimental (built against 1.10).
If you re having troubles with your synaptics device, make sure you have no configuration issues in xorg.conf; even if that used to work somehow, autoconfiguration might fail if there s a misconfigured device (for example, wrong Device option there). You might want to have a look at our how to configure input documentation.
On the driver side, for 1.9/unstable, Tormod Volden prepared updates for the mga and savage video drivers, which I sponsored.
Julien Viard de Galbert prepared a new xserver-xorg-video-openchrome snapshot, which I uploaded to unstable.
He also prepared the addition of a debug package, which I also sponsored after setting the Dm-Upload-Allowed field to yes since he s doing a pretty good job already. It s currently sitting in NEW accordingly.
A while ago, Thibaut Girka requested the addition of an udeb for the libxtst library, it s now sitting in NEW. Thibaut is working on a virtual on-screen keyboard, initially for use in the Graphical Installer for devices lacking a keyboard (but likely useful in other circumstances). Work is going on, stay tuned.
Steve Langasek was kind enough to MultiArch-ify both libx11 and xorg; both were uploaded.
Wayland is getting way more funnier than planned: it is now needed to get mesa built against wayland libraries (to get the wayland EGL platform), and the needed mesa bits are (last I asked) only in master for now.
On the bugs side, I spent many hours pinging submitters and triaging bugs, mostly on the ati and intel video drivers, as well as on xorg-server again, along with the xorg meta package. (Clicking on a bug graph below leads to a cached full-year view.)

x-x-video-ati x-x-video-intel xorg-server xorg
According to the UDD view of XSF bugs, and to Julien s TXBW1, we went down from 880 bugs in november to 540 bugs now.

3 March 2011

Adrian von Bidder: Btrfs data deduplication

Apparently, it's coming. Haven't tested these patches, though (and why yet another btrfs-foo command rather than something integrated with the btrfs command?), but together with my hacked up dirvish (added support to create btrfs snapshots instead of hardlinked trees) this will save me a couple of gigabytes for all those backups of various servers (which I pretty much keep at the same releases.) The discussion on the btrfs mailing list got quite heated on the online vs. offline dedup issue (and also very silly IMO since nobody said online dedup shouldn't be supported. It's just not written yet...); What nobody mentioned was: how much memory is the hash index of an online dedup daemon going to consume, and how much CPU cache will it burn? This would be my main concern since my NAS only has 512M memory, and also needs to do NAT, VPN and DNS (yes, I'm a home user. I'd like to get the public IP off the NAS, but I'll have to buy some box to do this first...)

Kumar Appaiah: A new book on shell scripting

Over the next month or so, I've decided to read an interesting book which covers one of my favourite topics, shell scripting. The book is Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook. It has been quite a while since I have actually read a book on a programming topic (other than K&R or the like), but I guess it does feel "complete" to gain knowledge from a book and feel as though we have gained at least some mastery over the topic!Updates on this will follow.

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x-x-video-ati	x-x-video-intel	xorg-server	xorg