To keep non-Debian-related articles from showing up on Planet Debian, my blog used to have a Debian-English category which was subscribed to Planet Debian. This also meant that only English-Language, and Debian-related articles showed up there which made my kind of an irregular contributor. I’m going to change this. Recent Serendipity have the possibility to free-tag articles and generate RSS-Feeds for these tags. After using tags for a few weeks, I am now reasonably comfortable to put them to real use. A new tag planet-debian will be generated and subscribed to Planet Debian. And then I’m going to tag articles that I decide to put up to Planet Debian with this tag. To avoid old articles from showing up again, I’ll refrain from tagging them planet-debian. This also means that the “Debian-English” category is going to disappear and to be replaced by “Debian” (or even other categories). An additional tag “english” is going to appear on english language articles. So you can now choose whether you want to read only my english articles. btw, what’s the stance of Planet Debian about non-Debian articles and/or native language (in my case: German) on the Planet?

If you have a hard drive with two or more logical partitions in one extended partition and then proceed to erase the first of those logical partitions (in GParted), then you will soon discover that the number of the second logical partition changed (from sda6 to sda5 in my case). If you then try to create a partition in the free space and launch cfdisk, you will notice that there is no free space where it should have been. If you then manage to get to GParted and create a partition there, then do not relax, as your perils are not yet over. Upon reboot you will find that the logical partition that is in the beginning of the logical partition got a new number (sda7 in my case) and the your valuable second logical partition is still numbered wrongly (it was sda5 instead of expected sda6). Even more so, if you try to fix it with cfdisk, it bails out with a fatal error of overlapping extended partitions. The fix is to start fstab, press “x” for advanced operations and press “f” to reorder the partitions according to the order on disk (do not forget to enter “w” to write the changes). That fixed the problem. But I have no idea who to bug for this wonderful Mongolian Clusterf*ck of Partition Numbering. And that is only a tiny preview of the immense fun I am having right now by trying out installations of Debian etch and Ubuntu edgy on my Dell M1710. If you want a stable desktop on this computer right now - use Ubuntu Dapper (with nvidia binary drivers). You will have much unneeded fun with IPW3945 wifi and the NVidia video card drivers otherwise.

So, thanks to Ari I'm all moved in to my new place with Nicole. It's a complete mess and but it's going to be fun being there. I don't have internet at home right now (posting this from work) so I'll be going in to Debian hibernation mode for the most part during this time. Speakeasy is scheduled to come and hook things up on the 13th, which would be a nice post-birthday event. I'll be working on some Debian stuff in the meantime which doesn't require internet access though.

On other matters, reading Scott's post made me sad, though not surprised, much like it felt reading Matthew's post. It's sad to see people go, although they're still in the Debian family more or less. I can only wish them the best and hope that I get to meet them sooner than later.

Scott's post, as well as discussions with Mako, have got me thinking about setting up a committee in parallel to the technical committee: a distribution steering committee. The tech committee would be around to perform the same function it already does, but the steering committee would be the ones to make decisions that don't involve so much in the way of conflict. Questions like default MTA and desktop environment (which are more matters of preference than clear superiority) could be handled by the steering committee. The rationale for separating it from the tech committee would be to have the tech committee act as a check to balance the power of the steering committee. There could be a limited amount of overlap between the two, but not enough to allow a majority in either committee to serve in both. In order for this to work, the steering committee would have to have the ability to override maintainer decisions on matters that affect the entire distribution. If a maintainer had a serious issue with this, they could take it to the tech committee, who would have the final say. Any developer could do work on things mandated by the steering committee, including 0 day NMU's with such features, thereby allowing people to work across packages they don't own easily.

The key to the steering committee would be that it would set active goals for the release. The release team is able to currently set release goals, but they don't do so with any strong authority right now. People who wanted to do something like make upstart the default in Debian, would bring the case before the committee (who would also potentially set their own goals rather than wait around for people), get it approved, and then start working. They wouldn't own the packages they alter, but this would give them the ability to get the necessary work done. It would require a culture and a group of people who were actively interested in making things happen across the entire distro, much like Ubuntu has. I'd love to get some feedback on this to see if people think it's a good idea to pursue creating it. It would require changes to the constitution, but it might give us a mechanism to drive the project forward without resorting to a benevolent dictatorship of the DPL.

It’s been over a year now since my last proper upload to Debian, and nine months since I announced my intent to put aside working on Debian for a while. With Matthew Garrett’s resignation from Debian, several people have compared it to my own “resignation” from Debian. It has got my thinking about whether I currently intend to ever end my “Sabbatical” and return as an active Debian Developer. I think that the end of my love-affair with Debian started at Debconf last year where several developers treated those of us who also worked on Ubuntu quite rudely. Someone was attacked for wearing an Ubuntu t-shirt at the conference, while someone else was applauded for wearing a “Fuck Ubuntu” t-shirt. That’s where I realised that maybe I didn’t have as much in common with these people as I thought I did. I still don’t understand why Debian singles Ubuntu out for this kind of treatment, we’re still the only derviative distribution that makes all of our patches to Debian available, yet Ubuntu is claimed to not do anything at all. Another example is that Ubuntu is being asked to change the Maintainer field of every package, something no other derivative is being asked to do or has ever been asked to do. Martin Krafft has had some interesting things to say about this strange relationship in the past. If that was the start of my falling out with Debian, I think that Debian considering removing documentation and firmware from the distribution, especially the documentation, was another point I started wondering whether I shared anything in common with the project anymore. Call me strange, but I think that one of the fundamental purposes of a Linux distribution is to be useful to its users. If nobody can use the distribution because it doesn’t support their hardware, and even if it did, all the documentation has been stripped out; I started to wonder what it’s aims are. It became increasingly apparent that the only users Debian was considering a priority were its own developer. And the third thing is simply a matter of Fun. Fun for me, at the moment at least, has been to build a system that fits together extremely nicely with each component doing the right thing. For Ubuntu this has meant being a driving force for it being Linux 2.6 only, with reliance on udev for hardware, etc. Upstart is just a continuation of these goals, getting a system which all “just works”, even if it means throwing out a few things people were previously fond of. All of these things would have been impossible to do in Debian itself. Getting upstart installable required changes to twelve different packages, including sysvinit itself; at a worst case, this would have required the agreement of twelve different maintainers in Debian. It’s often exhausting just persuading one of the reason for the change, persuading a dozen would have been a herculian effort. Perhaps Matthew is right, what Debian lacks is a single leadership. There’s nobody in Debian I could have gone to for approval over the changes I wanted to make, whose decision developers cannot overrule. Ubuntu has such people (the Technical Board and sabdfl), which gives the project an obvious direction instead of a couple of hundred people all pulling in different directions. In a way, I don’t feel that I’ve left Debian. I feel like I was happily going along, only to realise the mob had gone in a different direction and with no easy way of rejoining the group.

After my iBook problems last week, I tried to install Debian on the thing. I have narrowed down the problem to something with the hard drive inside, because the machine seems to run fine and go through most of the installation without any trouble, but once I start using the hard drive, it completely freezes. I successfully ran the hardware test disc which came with it a couple times in extended mode, but I'm not sure that it uses the hard drive in it's tests long enough for it to exhibit the problem. The failure seems to be somewhat random in nature, occuring at different times in the install process. Now I have the unhappy decision of trying to save this laptop which is more than 3 years old, or to attempt to buy a new one. Right now I am leaning toward buying a new one.

Honeywell seems 1.5 times as long this week, mostly because I'm making up for a day which I missed a couple weeks ago. Things have settled down there in terms of software failure, so I'm back at the normal coding which I am doing. The code uses Ogre, which is a handy 3d engine, making it much easier than learning something like OpenGL, and as a bonus adding portability. I am considering building some play applicaitons with the toolkit at home just because it would be fun.

Tonight I need to build a couple presentations covering some papers which were in CVPR this year to present at a reading group at Honeywell. It would be fine except that I am completely unaware of any of the recent history of vision research, so it makes it much harder to build the presentations. I hope I can finish them in a reasonable amount of time so I can watch Eureka tonight.

The TiVo Diet is still working out as expected. I discovered that I don't really have anything to watch on Sunday or Monday of the week. I'm getting much more productive work done than I used to. One downside of the diet is that I tend to not want to just sit and veg at the end of the work day - I think it frustrates ceilingsarecool a bit because I'm always going off to the office to do something on the computer.

I recieved and watched the Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip yesterday. Being an Aaron Sorkin fan, I am excited for another of his shows to broadcast. Judging by the pilot, it should be a decent show.

Sidenote: Planet Debian seems to like one of my weekend weeviews a little too much, and is regrabbing it for the front page every so often. I can't figure out why this is happening, so any help would be greatly appreciated. Otherwise, in a couple more posts it should be off the RSS feed.

Well John Howard said he wanted to start a nuclear debate in Australia. Seems it has already started on Planet Linux Australia. I figure I might as well have a meandering blog post about alternative energy and current world events, since I've just been immersing myself in the best news I can obtain with my crappy cable package in a country not renowned for its awareness of world affairs. Firstly, since there's been talk about nuclear power, I'd like to offer my thoughts on Iran, and how it's sounding like Iraq all over again. People are getting in a flap about Iran enriching uranium. Iran says that they don't want "the bomb", they only want nuclear power to meet their energy demands. Now if this is true, then surely should applaud a country that sits on a chunk of the Middle East's oil reserves looking to use something other than oil for its energy needs. I for one don't know if you need to "enrich" uranium to use it for a nuclear reactor, or whether it's good enough "as is". But let's just assume that Iran's intentions are as they have said, then it's going to be Iraq all over again. The US said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The US is saying Iran is enriching uranium for the purposes of making a bomb. So far the former claim hasn't been proven, so what's to say the latter is true either? Let's say the nuclear debate in Australia determines that it'd be a good a thing for Australia to go nuclear. How is Australia enriching uranium for electricity generation any different to Iran doing it? (Other than Australia is in the Coalition of the Willing, and Iran is in the Axis of Evil). Speaking of Iran being in the Axis of Evil, how is Iran supplying weapons to Hezbollah fundamentally any different to the US supplying weapons to Israel? Oh, and is anyone allowed to criticise Jewish people without being called anti-Semitic? Since when is invading a neighbouring country considered okay? I am so glad Australia is an island nation. These countries with land borders, sheesh... Anyway, back to alternative energy. I'm a greenie, (with a lowercase "g") so I'm open to nuclear power, but it does frighten the willies out of me, with things like Chernobyl. I'd never heard of a Pebble Bed Modular Reactor until Paul wrote of it. It certainly sounds safer than previous methods of nuclear reaction. But of alternatives. Wind, for example, doesn't need to be big and arguably ugly. These guys in the UK have made a very sexy and quiet wind turbine. I don't know how it stacks up in terms of cost or output to the traditional three-bladed wind turbines like what I've photographed in Southern California, but they're supposed to be quiet, which is apparently one of the (many) arguments that landowners like farmers have against wind generation in general. This Australian company has come up with a very small, but less sexy wind turbine, that I believe to be fairly cheap. Finally, in terms of generation, and I've written about this before, but I find the Tower of Power to be a fascinating concept in natural energy generation. Where am I going with this ramble? No idea. I do think rapidly developing countries like China should completely leapfrog over the era of oil and move to renewably generated electricity. Maybe they can get the manufacturing costs down of the equipment, and it'll be less of a big deal in terms of cost for the rest of the world to adopt it. Whew. What a ramble. Don't start me on flushing toilets with drinking water.

Today I reached another milestone in the development of upstart, the packages in universe can now replace the existing sysvinit package. Before trying this, make sure your installation is up to date as we’ve had to split out some parts of sysvinit into a new sysvutils package. If you’re up to date, and want to try it out, install the upstart and upstart-compat-sysv packages from universe. Note that the first reboot after you’ve installed the packages (from sysvinit to upstart) will be a little tricky… use reboot -f. If your system boots and shuts down normally, everything’s working just fine. Note that both will be somewhat more quiet than you’re used to, unless you have usplash running. Throughout the rest of this entry, I’ll try to answer some of the questions and comments that I’ve received since the last post. Events As I talked about previously, upstart is an event-based init daemon. Events are the primary force for having your services and tasks started and stopped at the appropriate time and in the appropriate order. So what are events and where do they come from? (Note that this part is under development, so may change in later releases). Events are just simple strings that may be sent by any process when something it is tracking the state of changes. They have no state or longevity, and if, when queued, they do not cause any job state changes, then they have no effect unless they are sent again. Jobs can list which events cause them to be started if they are not already running and which events cause them to be stopped if they are running. Multiple start and stop events may be listed, in which case the first to occur changes the job until the next one occurs. upstart itself generates the following system events:

• “startup”, on system boot.
• “shutdown”, when the system is about to be shut down.
• “stalled”, when there are no jobs running and no events in the queue.

The shutdown tool included in the package also causes one of the following events to be sent once the “shutdown” event has been handled:

• “reboot”,
• “halt”,
• “poweroff”,
• “maintenance” (aka. going into “single user” mode),
• any user-defined event with shutdown -e event.

Jobs also generate events whenever they change state, this is the primary source of events for ordering:

• “jobname/start”, when the job is first started.
• “jobname/started”, once the job is running.
• “jobname/stop”, when the job is first stopped.
• “jobname/stopped”, once the job has stopped.
• “jobname”, for services this is generated once it is running; for tasks this is generated once it has finished.

And as mentioned, any other process on the system may send events through the control socket or just by using initctl trigger EVENT. For now this is just the event string, however it’s intended that the event may include other details including environment variables and even file descriptors. Typical example To clarify how it all hangs together, here’s an example (using fictional names) of how the tasks and events can be arranged to provide race-free mounting of filesystems.

• “udev” service started on the “startup” event.
• udev daemon is configured to send a “new-block-device” event whenever a new block device is added to the system.
• “checkfs” task is started on the “new-block-device” event to check the filesystem.
• “mountfs” task is started when the “checkfs” task has finished and mounts the filesystem if listed in /etc/fstab
• “filesystem-mounted” event is generated whenever a filesystem is mounted.
• “fstab” task is started on the “filesystem-mounted” event, it checks the list of mounted filesystems against /etc/fstab and if all are mounted, generates the “writable-filesystem” event.
• other services and tasks would be started on the “writable-filesystem” event.

By breaking this job into these small tasks, we can see how the pieces fit together. Because everything is now done on events, there are no race conditions; we know that any filesystem listed in /etc/fstab will be checked and mounted. The only reason they wouldn’t be is if there’s an error of some kind, and that means you have larger problems anyway and the system administrator would have a shell to fix it. Of course, the moment they finish checking the filesystem and mount it, the boot process would carry on. There’s no reason that any of these events need to be generated by the upstart daemon itself, it can receive them from any other daemon on the system such as udev, acpid, etc. This keeps the focus of the init daemon narrow. A large part of the future development will be working out exactly what kinds of events we want init itself to generate, what kinds we want to come from elsewhere, and what the contents of an event can be. Getting Involved If you want to get involved with trying to nudge the direction of upstart development, you can join the upstart-devel mailing list at http://lists.netsplit.com/ Or if you just want to grab the source code, tarballs are published at http://people.ubuntu.com/~scott/software/upstart/ and the bzr archive is at http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~keybuk/upstart/main

I had the pleasure this morning of attending a baby naming ceremony. Aside from being at the thoroughly crazy hour of 07h30, it was a very cool experience.

The Shaar Zion Synagogue is in Hampstead, about 8km from our appt. I was running a touch late because I worked for about an hour before setting off and got caught in conversation. It turned out this was a good idea, since Mount Royal is between there and my place, and I was otherwise planning on biking.

In the search for the entrance I met one of the relatives, who explained how to put one of the skull caps on and we found the sanctuary together. I think as part of the comparative religions bits in YRUU I might've visited a temple before, but I couldn't remember what the customs were. I found a place to sit that was out of the way about the time that they called everyone to worship. They asked people to turn to a page in a book that I didn't have, so I ran out and got one. I was glad I did: The group of teenagers in the row ahead of me didn't and looked mostly bored. The service was sung/chanted/spoken in Hebrew, but the book had both and Hebrew and English texts in it.


The service was quite unlike what I'm used to, and tolerated a fair amount of shuffling around, hugs, greetings and children running around. From what I can tell, the service was the standard morning prayers with the baby naming inserted in the middle. Some other time, I'd love to get a guided tour of what I saw so that I could understand what was happening. The whole occasion seemed so rich with tradition, but at the same time wasn't stuffy or boring.

When the service was done, I joined the group in the basement for breakfast. It was vaguely ironic that when I'm shopping, I usually look for Kosher symbols to help me tell if there's hidden dairy in things, but that breakfast consisted of largely non-vegan items (fish, eggs). I got to meet Glen and Sharlene's wonderful families and am very glad I went.

But it does feel like the attack of the baby things has truly started =)

Thanks for a nice metaphor, Gunnar. Not very impressive, I know, except if you consider the "City Rail" icon there ;-) I'm also not very sure about the Paris one; it could've been the RER one instead. But hey, it was over six years ago. Additionally, Helsinki isn't there, even though I've been to that city; but then I haven't been in the metro there. (occasionally, the logo for the M nchen U-bahn is on that site, all down the bottom)

Once in a while, I come upon a web page that :

1. Doesn’t offer an RSS/Atom feed.
2. Doesn’t change very often.
3. I would like to be warned when it’s updated.

I would like to be automatically warned when such pages change. websec does this :

Description: Web Secretary - Web page monitoring software
A visual Web page monitoring software. However, it goes
beyond the normal functionalities offered by such software. Not only
does it detect changes based on content analysis (instead of date/time
stamp or simple textual comparison), it will email the changed page to
you with the new content highlighted.

But :

1. It sends emails. Generating an RSS feed would be much better.
2. It sends HTML emails. OK, you can use AsciiMarker to view the changes with a text MUA, but still…

Anybody knows of another piece of software I could use ?

b3co wrote an interesting tool which I refound thanks to ion, where you can select logos for all subway systems you’ve ridden. World metros I have taken: So, Helsinki (Finland), Madrid (Spain), Porto Alegre (Brazil), Mexico City (Mexico), Caracas (Venezuela), Guadalajara (Mexico) and Valencia (Spain). I guess people living in countries where it’s easier to travel between each other, may have caught more metros

So finally I got my card reader running on Linux. It was not that hard, but the main problem was caused by the proprietary Linux driver I installed. Thanks to Ludovic Rousseau's Generic CCID driver the reader is able to run just fine with only Free Software. It works even with libchipcard2, but a tiny fix to udev was necessary to fix a permission problem (you might need to adapt the vendor and product id to your local card reader, as shown by lsusb):

/etc/udev/rules.d/smart_card.rules:
BUS=="usb", SYSFS idVendor =="04e6", SYSFS idProduct =="5116", GROUP="chipcard", MODE="0664"

With this tiny fix chipcardd2 correctly opens the card as a non-privileged user. My thanks also go to Thomas Viehmann, who provides an HBCI branch of Gnucash on Alioth. Apart from the application crashing a bit too often, the HBCI part works fine with my card and PIN. The only problem left is the sudden disconnect of the reader when it's not used for a few minutes. Only a restart of chipcardd2 and gnucash resolves the problem temporarily. All my homebanking activities are now properly signed, and the retrieval of transactions works just fine. To credit my bank a bit, I am a customer of 1822direkt, a subsidiary of the Frankfurter Sparkasse, since a few weeks. They provided me with a free checking account, together with a free(!) HBCI card. Transactions are mailed just-in-time (checked for hourly during working hours) PGP-encrypted. (Yes, they are running PGP5i on OS/2. I needed to create a RSA key using PHP5i/Unix without a passphrase. The public key output of PGP5i had to be sent to the bank, and after an import of the resulting public and private key into my GPG instance I was able to read the statements correctly. The mail interface did not cope with GPG-generated keys.)

To infinity, and beyond! -- Buzz

[Debian]

I should write about this a few days ago but didn't have the time. Sorry. Well, these are great news (at least for me), a few days ago I sent the second part of my T&S and already got approved. My AM (Hi Cl ment) also pointed out a few changes that were needed in my packages that are already fixed and uploaded; Cl ment already sent the report and considering that, I'm now waiting for the Front Desk to review my application (and after that, DAMnation. I'm happy! I also finish the adoption of xless and levee. I still have to finish the MyPasswordSafe adoption, but before I have to fix a RC bug related to the use of sudo as the gain-root command (instead of fakeroot) in the alpha buildd. Thanks neuro that already give me a few tips on how to solve it.

Following the random ideas season:

• Next week, Extremadura will host the i18n Debian people, the idea is to discuss lots of ideas, specially i18n Infrastructure, but not only discuss, also code a lot!
• I do not like the idea to have sourceless firmware in main and I really like Don Armstrong proposal on that subject.
• I still have to finish the desproxy, tuxfrw and thumbs packaging work to get it in time for etch.
• I'm wondering how a tally sheet with more than 10 choices looks like

[Anti-SPAM season]

Like a lot of people already did, in the last two weeks I've been fighting SPAM in my company and also on the server of Free Software Projects that I'm part of the System Administration Team. In most cases I'm using postfix with clamscan and postgrey, but I will switch to amavisd-new to use SpamAssassin (with razor/pyzor). But I'm still studying the various alternatives in a Debian Sarge system.

Hey silva, thank you! (Journeyer certification).

So appart from being happy just by being awake, these three last days have also brought a lot of surprises. I’ll mention a couple. First, my mind is with a mental activity level quite high, not unknown to me, but never experienced with this intensity and duration combined. I now need tools to accommodate to this. My gut feeling is that ikiwiki and maybe vim-outliner are going to suite me perfect. If that’s finnally the case, Joey Hess gets my gratitude for both (author, referrer). Secondly, I’m running an experiment with my sleep patterns that I was planning on not talking here about until at least a week from starting. But the details have changed a bit, and IRC just gave me the chance to reduce my two planned paragraphs description with a two-line one, so I’ll take it:

  [dato] it's 22pm, I'm about to have dinner, and the fact that the sun is rising
         doesn't bother me at all

As I mentioned to some of the folks at Steve's Barbie, we're currently starting the planning for next season's geekski. (oh and thanks Steve, the barbie was better than ever :-) Geekski is an annual holiday, which (so far) always goes to Tux (well, given the name, we have to really). We're just in the throws of organising next year's trip, so if you're interested, please feel free to subscribe to the mailing list Despite the name, Geekski is more focused on skiing (and boarding) than geeking, so while people do occasionally get laptops out, more time in the evenings is spent socialising than hacking. Also, people of all standards turn up, so it's fine if you've never skied before. If there is a taste that's not really catered to, it's off-piste powder hounds, since the main resort is at glacier level, so going off-piste runs a heavy risk of ending up in a crevasse. On the other hand, being on a glacier does guarantee something to ski on, whatever the state of global warming this year, and we have had thigh deep powder on the pistes on occasion. We're currently settling on a date (3rd-10/11th March seems likely) and will be booking places in the next 2-3 weeks, so get on the list, and get organised now if you want to come along next year.

Another year, another party bigger than last year's. By my count, we had 56 people (and a dog) in my house and garden at the peak on Saturday evening. It was excellent to see people from all over: .fi, .nl, .no, .be, .it, .ch. And .uk, of course. Even the gods of weather were kind to us and held off on the rain that was forecast for Saturday. As far as I could tell, everybody enjoyed themselves; I know I definitely did! Same time, same place next year I guess... :-)

I am not a good coder. In my mind a coder is determined by how much he loves C (or, in clinical cases, assembler). I hate C and avoid it whenever I can, because I am always off-by-one, and often even in more then one place, which make debugging even more .. fun. Currently I am coding an application that is centred around use of artificial neural networks (more precisely a multilayer perceptron). The NN part must be done in C for speed and memory usage (imagine adding and multiplying hundreds of millions of floating values just for one operation .. and having to do that for 10 000 times for training .. while holding the whole data set in RAM, because you access every single value of it every second). With that in mind I engineered my system in such a way that the C part can be reduced to a couple simple operations that I can adapt from examples of the NN library. And still I barely wrote those pieces. Working with MySQL in C is pure pain, for example. The rest of the system is in Python and I must say that Python is a godsend by itself, without even comparing it to C. I am now so used to Python when I was debugging my C program, I automatically wrote a chunk of Python into it and was very surprised when it did not work. With that in mind, to ease the pain for further generations of neural network researchers, I will (someday) find some time and write Python wrappers for the nice and cool Lightweight Neural Network C library that I am currently using here. BTW: I found that SourceForge is packed full with great software projects, but it is very hard to find those projects in Google. Morale - seeking for good free software? wajig (or apt-get) it! then sourceforge it! then freshmeat it! and only then google it.

I resigned from Debian today.

It wasn't actually any one thing. But over the past few weeks (months? Years?) it's become clear to me that Debian doesn't really seem to know who or what it's for. Arguments erupt over whether something is a deeply held principle or an accident of phrasing on the website; whether we should release more often or less often; whether free software is more important than our users having functional hardware. And, depressingly, these debates generally seem to turn into pedantic point scoring and insults and yes, I'm probably as guilty as many others in this respect. But it's got to the point where social interaction with Debian-the-distribution makes me want to stab people, even though I've just spent a lovely weekend with Debian-the-people. Perhaps worse, I occasionally find mails I've sent that make me want to stab me.

So it's got to the point where I find myself reading things written by people I respect, and deciding that I'd be generally happier if I didn't read them. I could just unsubscribe from all the mailing lists, except that part of the fun of being involved in Debian was being part of a community. I don't want my only form of communication with the rest of the project to be limited to bug reports, especially when I find the development IRC channels as bad as the mailing lists.

It's interesting to compare Debian to Ubuntu in this respect, though the different ages of the projects make it difficult to draw any firm conclusions. The fairly rigidly enforced Ubuntu code of conduct probably helps a great deal in ensuring that discussions mostly remain technical. The distinction between core-dev and MOTU is a pretty explicit acknowledgment that not all developers are equal and some are possibly more worth listening to than others. And, at the end of the day, having one person who can make arbitrary decisions and whose word is effectively law probably helps in many cases.

There's a balance to be struck between organisational freedom and organisational effectiveness. I'm not convinced that Debian has that balance right as far as forming a working community goes. In that respect, Ubuntu's an experiment - does a more rigid structure and a greater willingness to enforce certain social standards result in a more workable community? In a few years, we ought to have an answer. I look forward to finding out.

Since security support for Woody ceased recently, and with Kazehakase I’ve found a reasonable successor in Sarge for Galeon 1.2.x, I’ve dist-upgraded my 10 years old Pentium I ThinkPad bijou to Sarge this weekend. Even the XFree86 4, which made so much hassles in Woody by not regcognising nor configuring the graphics card correctly, worked fine from scratch. Well, at least after installing xfonts-base and xfonts-75dpi — the -transcoded versions somehow gave only the error message “default font ‘fixed’ not found”. So goodbye Galeon, goodbye GNU Emacs 20, goodbye XFree86 3.3. I hope, I won’t miss you. Only my desktop gsa at home still runs Woody, but will be dist-upgraded soon, too. What though still stayed on my laptop from Woody is Siag Office, since there is no adequate replacement for such a nice office suite with such a low resource footprint. But it has also an impact on the talks I hold. I held all talks with a patched version of lynx (e.g. with LSS support) as presentation tool on that laptop because initially I didn’t get X running on that box. What started as a makeshift became my hallmark… But I didn’t manage to get Sarge’s lynx patched so that it gives me the same output as my old version did. So either I would have to reoptimise the layout of my talks for a new lynx version or just start with something new. Madduck recently showed me python-docutils, which he uses for presentations. Maybe I’ll use that although I have a severe aversion against Python. So it may also be that I’ll stick with WML, but get some new ideas from python-docutils how to use HTML for presentations. Update: Found out that the interesting part of his presentation technic wasn’t python-docutils but S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System which in entirely written in XHTML, CSS and JavaScript. S5 is really cool stuff, one of the first cases of useful use of JavaScript, and will surely be used for my next presentation — with Debian Sarge and Kazehakase on a Pentium I ThinkPad. ;-)

I started using Linux in 1993. I initially used it only in text-mode as I didn't have enough RAM to run XFree86 on my Linux machine. I ran text-mode Linux server machines from 1993 to 1998. In 1998 I purchased my first laptop and installed Linux with KDE on it. I chose KDE because it had the greatest similarity to OS/2 which I had used as my desktop OS prior to that time. At the same time I purchased an identical laptop for my sister and gave her an identical configuration of Linux and KDE.<br /><br />Running a Linux laptop in 1998 was a lot harder for a non-technical person than it is today. There was little compatability with MS file formats and few options for support for Internet connections and third-party hardware and software (most things worked but you needed to know what to do). One advantage of using Linux in this regard is that the remote support options have always been good, I was able to fix my sister's laptop no matter which country she was in and which country I was in. Her laptop kept working for more than 5 years without the need for a reinstall (try that on Windows).<br /><br />It was when VMWare first became available (maybe 2000) that I converted my parents to using Linux. At first they complained a bit about it being different and found VMWare less convenient than the OS/2 <span style="font-style: italic;">Dos box</span> for running their old DOS programs. But eventually they broke their dependence on DOS programs and things ran fairly smoothly. There were occasions when they complained about not having perceived benefits of Windows (such as the supposed ability to plug in random pieces of hardware and have things all work perfectly). The fact that using OS/2 and then Linux has given them 14 years of computer use with no viruses and no trojans tends to get overlooked.<br /><br />Of recent times the only problem that my parents have experienced is when they bought a random cheap printer without asking my advice. The printer in question turned out to not work with Fedora Core 4, but when Fedora Core 5 came out the printer worked. Waiting 6 months for a printer upgrade isn't really a serious problem (the old printer which had worked 6+ years was still going strong).<br /><br />My parents and my sister now have second-hand P3 desktop machines running Fedora. P3 CPUs dissipate significantly less heat than P4 and Athlon CPUs, this significantly reduces the risk of hard drives dying when machines are left on in unairconditioned rooms as well as saving money on electricity. For the typical home user who doesn't play 3D games there is no real need for a CPU that's more powerful than a 1GHz P3. This of course means that there is less need for me to reinstall on newer hardware which also means more reliability.<br /><br />I always find it strange when people claim that Linux isn't ready for the desktop. I provide all the support for three non-technical users of Linux on the desktop and it really doesn't take much work because things just work. Corporate desktops are even easier, in a company you install what people need for their work and don't permit them to do anything different.<br /><br />It seems to me that Linux has been ready for the desktop since 1998.