Christian, this is the percentage of your blog entries concerning translation ratios in the last two weeks. I am sure you can do better

Aurelien Jarno asked me to add another arm port to Buildd.Net, namely armel - a new ABI version for newer little endian based arm boxes. Read more about that new arch in the Debian Wiki.Anyway, here it is: armel page on Buildd.Net - have fun!

Welcome to this 6th issue of the DeFuBu contest, the monthly (even if I'm late) championship of the funniest bug reported to the Debian BTS. The challengers

• G rkan Seng n with #270877 (wmaker: I can't swallow windows)
• Christoph Berg with #402976 (espdiff: useless manpage)
• Cyril Brulebois with #403379 (mplayer: segfault while reading an mpeg file)
• Sune Vuorela with #405464 (qt3-dev-tools: QMAKE_INCDIR_QT is wrong in qmake.conf files)

How the vote has been done Three Debian related people voted for these bugs, Mohammed Adn ne Trojette, Pierre Habouzit and Florent Bayle Full ranking Bugs

• #403379 (mplayer: segfault while reading an mpeg file) (6 points)
• #402976 (espdiff: useless manpage) (5 points)
• #405464 (qt3-dev-tools: QMAKE_INCDIR_QT is wrong in qmake.conf files) (4 points)
• #270877 (wmaker: I can't swallow windows) (3 points)

Challengers

• Cyril Brulebois (6 points with 1 bug)
• Christoph Berg (5 points with 1 bug)
• Sune Vuorela (4 points with 1 bug)
• G rkan Seng n (3 points with 1 bug)

The winners

• Bug: #403379 (mplayer: segfault while reading an mpeg file) (6 points)
• Challenger: Cyril Brulebois
• Bug reporter: Aurelien Jarno
• Voter: Florent Bayle with the full good order !

Notes To participate, simply drop me an email with a bug number. About DeFuBu

I am really upset by the way the ARM build daemons are managed. The packages are not uploaded regularly, with sometimes three days between two uploads. Well it should not be a problem, if packages that have failed to build due to some packages not uploaded fast enough (see for example python-gnome, or rkward) were requeued, but that’s actually not the case. Also last week, the build daemon named “cats” stopped to upload packages, despite it continued to build them. 11 days later, nothing has changed even after a mail to arm@buildd.debian.org. And I do not speak about build daemons building nothing. All of that resulted in ARM being the slowest architecture to build packages. It looks like the ARM build daemon maintainer does not know the excellent page made by Jeroen. As arm@buildd.debian.org is everything but responsive (well if you can assign a level of responsiveness to /dev/null), I have decided to act. I have installed QEMU on an 8-way Opteron machine, and created 8 emulated ARM machines, which 256MB of RAM and 10GB of disk for each, all running buildd + sbuild. Altogether those 8 emulated ARM machines should be faster than all the Debian ARM build daemons. I have setup a wanna-build database on my server. During the day it has built around 100 packages. Yes I agree that real machines would be better, but I don’t have a stack of fast ARM machines at home. Anyway when you see random segfaults on the build daemons, or strange failures (that happen for weeks) on the build daemon named “netwinder“, you may think to that again. Unfortunately the machine I use for that is only available for a few months, and I will have to stop the emulated machine then. I just hope that the situation with respect to the build daemons will improve, so that I can stop them even before.

The NEW queue is almost empty with 7 packages only. Thanks a lot Joerg.

According to Aurelien Jarno, it's possible to run Debian/ARM and both Debian/MIPS platforms inside an emulator that itself is packaged and runs on Debian. Since fairly recently (about a month or two, I guess), the same is true for Debian/m68k. Granted, the emulator you need to install isn't called "qemu", but with ARAnyM (short for 'Atari Running on Any Machine') it is now possible to run Debian/m68k. And it's fairly easy to do, too:

• Download the installer images for Debian/m68k
• Install the aranym package
• Run aranym once. This will create a directory .aranym with a default config file.
• create a file to be used as a disk image: dd if=/dev/zero of=./disk.img bs=1k seek=2M count=1.
• Edit the configuration file. The important bits are the section [IDE0] and [LILO]. It's pretty self-explanatory.
• Run aranym-mmu -N -l.

There, you have a free m68k development machine! Note, however, that there might be issues with the network interface; the NIC in the emulated machine is unlike any real, actual Atari hardware. There is a driver for Linux, but I'm not 100% sure whether it's been integrated in the Debian kernels yet. I'm sure Christian will kick me awake on this, though ;-)

In addition to the ARM platform, it is now possible to emulate a MIPS (big endian) or MIPSEL (little endian) machine running Debian under QEMU. It could be used as a cheap MIPS/MIPSEL development machine to test your packages, provided that you have a not to slow i386, AMD64 or PowerPC computer. Running on an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ the emulated system is around 10% faster than my SGI Indy R4400SC 200MHz and possibly with much more RAM (my emulated system has 512 MB of RAM). Also for the ones who know about the Indy SCSI controller, the transfer rate is around 13 MB/s on the emulated system. I have written a small howto explaining how to install Debian Etch on such an emulated MIPS or MIPSEL machine, using Debian-Installer RC1, which has just been released. Thanks to Daniel Jacobowitz who has recently improved QEMU/MIPS a lot, and to Thiemo Seufer who has started the integration of the MIPS QEMU platform in Debian-Installer and in the Debian kernel. Note 1: I have written this howto very quickly, so there are probably some mistakes. Comments are welcome.
Note 2: I have updated the ARM howto to take in account improvements from Debian-Installer RC1

Martin, I can’t let you say that experimental is autobuilt. I have uploaded a few versions of the glibc to experimental in the last few months and only arm, hppa and alpha have tried to build them. Before the summer mips and mipsel also have tried to build the experimental glibc. And the last version has not been tried on alpha, despite the fact it includes a fix and should now build correctly on this architecture.

Hopefully I have most Debian architectures at home, but alpha, m68k and ia64, so I can build the glibc on my own machines. For m68k and ia64, I can use debian.org machines. Concerning alpha, the debian porting machine, ie escher.debian.org, is locked down since the compromise about 4 months ago. And no answer to my mail to debian-admin… Hopefully a user kindly gave me an access on his machine, thanks. The glibc 2.5 is now building correctly on this machine, but I can’t upload the package because I can’t trust the machine. That really sucks. What about removing alpha from the release architectures? After all, it fails to comply with the etch candidate release architecture criteria for months. Update: Some build daemons had glibc in “weak-no-autobuild”. Thanks Martin for fixing that.

Directed by jd & adn Genre: Action / Adventure / Sci-Fi / Thriller / Horror / Drama / Humor
Runtime: several weeks
Country: A lot
Language: English
Color: Color (Technicolor, QT, GTK and ncurses) Tagline: They stole their project, now they want it back. Plot Outline: In September 2006, a group of developpers from the Debian planet rise against the corruption leading the government.
User Comments: Great action, great suspense, great cultural satire, and a great mind-bender. Awards: Waiting for nomination. Quotes:

• Bah, if you don't want to read me, just don't , Sven Luther
• Oh my. , Clint Adams
• Or maybe I'm withdrawing my support because I'm busy with my chainsaw. , Josselin Mouette
• "I'm withdrawing my support because the developers might agree with AJ rather than me"? Come on. , Matthew Garett
• OH NO YOU DON'T. This thread is _not_ about you, it is _not_ about Frans Pop, and it is _not_ about debian-installer. , Peter Samuelson

Cast overview

	Anthony Towns (aj), as the Debian Project Leader		Denis Barbier (bouz), as The Recaller
	Aurelien Jarno (aurel32), as one Seconder		Clint Adams (schizo), as one Seconder
	MJ Ray (mjr), as one Seconder		Pierre Habouzit (madcoder), as one Seconder
	Martin Schulze (joey), as one Seconder		Marc Dequ nes (duck), as one Seconder

You want a cheap ARM development machine to test your packages? You can actually have one for free (both as in beer and as in speach ) provided that you have a not to slow i386, AMD64 or PowerPC computer. The solution is called QEMU, a generic and open source processor emulator which can emulate i386, x86_64, ARM, MIPS, PowerPC and Sparc systems. Running an Athlon 64 3800+ the emulated system is around 20% faster than the popular NSLU2 and possibly with much more RAM (my emulated system has 256 MB of RAM). I have written a small howto explaining how to install Debian Etch on such an emulated ARM machine. Note: I have written this howto very quickly, so there are probably some mistakes. Comments are welcome.

Today in bug report #369411:

“I do oppose an NMU as you haven’t actually explained why this patch is
necessary. Ubuntu doesn’t have this patch and yet has been building
32-bit alsa for several releases without problems.”

While Ubuntu has this patch included for 3 weeks now. I have written this patch to fix an RC bug in Debian…

As you may have read it in the latest DWN, Xen is now (almost) supported by Debian. Actually, it is currently stucked in the NEW queue since yesterday. The packages are also available on our Alioth webspace.
Special flavor of glibc, libc6-xen, is also upcoming, thanks to Aurelien Jarno ! Err, what else to say ?
That the Xen upstream sources are not very clean for now. There's still a lot of tools not needed that are furnished, the sources are a mess, and there is no stable API for now. You may have seen Xen kernels in experimental, but the kernel team has removed them for now. It will probably not be possible to distribute Xen-enabled kernels as long as Xen won't be more stabilized. I really wish that it will be integrated in kernel vanilla sources, since this could calm down a bit big changes, and help having a more stable version. Just see that between 3.0.1 and 3.0.2 version, the way used to compile Xen kernels changed from a special arch xen to a subarch xen. That's better, for sure, but such important changes in the same major branch are quite disappointing. Finally, I would say that Xen is now usable with Debian. I use it for more than 6 months now, and it is quite stable, no huge bug. You will just have to wait that #346387 is fixed to compile your own kernels with patches we provide.

I gave a talk about Debian GNU/kFreeBSD at FOSDEM 2006. It tooks me time, but I finally have made the slides available.

Two hours after I blogged about having no camera I got one :-) Being hit by #350333 I had to reboot another kernel anyway, so I decided to try a newer one, namely 2.6.16-rc5, to see if that bug is fixed there. It is, but I got hit by yaird bug #352010 when I installed it. Fun :-) Especially because Jonas provided a fixed yaird quickly...

Oh Shock and horror! The videos show ugly artefacts! The grabbed files and on the cameras lcd, though they disappear on the lcd, when I unplugg the firewire cable. Strange! p2-mate suggested electrical interference as the cause and was right. Using different power-outlets for the notebook and the camera made the artefacts go away. Oh joy!

To end a long story quickly: Here they are!

For yet unknown reasons these ogg theora files play well in vlc, kaffeine, xine and totem, but not so in (my version of) mplayer.

Better quality oggs are being encoded and uploaded atm, followed by xvid files (highest quality) and mpeg2s (for producing a video DVD).

The forth talk, "The Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port" by Aurelien Jarno was recorded in HDV and will be released soon... Due to circumstances beyond our control, the video team failed in recording "Women in Free Software: Findings from FLOSSPOLS"... Luckily an audio recording was made, which hopefully can be made available once the study quoted by Halla Wallach is published.

Currently only four out of ten slides are available. Pointers welcome!

My other notices about FOSDEM still need to published :-) When (or if?) I find time...

And finally, I succeeded in producing my first video DVD, yay! The DVD contains all videos from the debian-edu/skolelinux gathering in January in Erkelenz. Since it was made with webdvd, which Ben Hutching wrote after producing the debconf5 videos, I think I can have reasonable good confidence that this DVD will also work in most standalone DVD players.

Now I'll take a break and go out to enjoy the snow landscape in mid march :-) Even though I'm real busy atm (video was only number three of my current priorities) it's important to take a break and relax once in a while.

Yesterday I have setup a kfreebsd-amd64 (ie GNU/kFreeBSD on an amd64 CPU) build daemon. Its name is shockley.aurel32.net (all my machines are named related to electronics), and it has Sempron 2600+ CPU. As you can see on the photo, it is still missing a decent case. There are actually two machines on the the photo, the motherboard in the case is maxwell’s one (one of the kfreebsd-i386 build daemon), while the one on the top front is shockley’s one. That’s a bit strange, but the amd64 motherboard needs a power supply with a P4 connector, while the other one only needs a small power supply. Thanks to Ingo Juergensmann, the kfreebsd-amd64 architecture is now listed on http://buildd.net. As you can see on the graph, this machine is very fast (it only runs for 24 hours!).

I was not a part of the devrooms team this year (like the last two years), Pascal did all the job! I was just a simple visitor and it’s a very cool position. Mark already bloged about the Classpath’s presentations, so you can find some interresting slides there. Saturday (25th February 2006) RMS Excellent talk about the patent. As always, Richard Stallman has great images to explain complex things. I still can’t understand all the GPL3 changes but I’ll try to read some more articles about it. Putting ‘Free’ into JFreeChart The presentation from David Gilbert was very cool. I did not know JFreeChart and it is really cool! This is a very big project and it makes very beautiful charts. I’d like to find some charts to do just to use it! Eclipse for GNU Classpath Development Tom Tromey did a fantastic presentation again. I already saw his presentations past years and it was still excellent. He already tried to explain me how to set up this Eclipse/GNU Classpath setup on IRC but I missed the “Don’t build automatically” hack. Everything should be on the Classpath’s wiki. Xen A presentation by Ian Pratt, leader of the Xen Source project. I heard about this project but I didn’t know that you could move an instance from a machine to another one! Amazing! Sunday (26th February 2006) I met Wouter in the bus but he lost his voice and asked me to introduce the speakers of the Debian room. I’m sorry for the three speakers I announced if it was not just as good as if Wouter did it. I wanna intend to the two conferences anyway. Women in Free Software I already wanna be at the talk of last year but I was in the Classpath devroom. Hanna M Wallach did a fantastic talk. I learned a lot of things and I know now that there really is a need of the debian-women project. I proposed her to put a phrase or a logo or something on the Debian-Java projects web pages and she seems to be pleased. Tonight, I went on #debian-women and it seems I did not understand nothing . So maybe I’d better do nothing about this unless I understand what I could do to help. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port After the talk of Hanna, I introduced the kFreeBSD talk of Aurelien Jarno. I wanna listen to this talk because I completely don’t know *BSD… I’m sorry but I don’t know more. And I still don’t know the difference with Linux and don’t know why I should, as a simple user change to some *BSD port? Debian-Java Meeting After the kFreeBSD talk, I introduced the SLIND talk in the Debian Room, told Wouter that I go to the Classpath Devroom… and listen to the end of the talk of Christian Thalinger (CacaoJVM — the site was down when I tried). Sorry Christian, I just don’t understant these thing During the talk (or was this just after the talk of Robert about JamVM?), I went eating with Wolfgang Baer. We went back during the Christian’s talk. Then we had a Debian-Java talk (I should be writing down the summary of this meeting instead of blogging)… I’ll send an email about the meeting, don’t worry Future of Classpath It is the time when Mark ask everybody: What do you do? How can we help you? It’s a great social/technical time when everybody listen carrefully to everybody. It’s wonderful. Maybe it’s the part I prefer in free software. I must say that I read some mailing lists before joining some project and the ‘Classpath’ (and friends) projects were the one I prefer because of that respect. Then came the camera… A team came in the room to film us. They claim they were making a movie about Free Software. Funny I discussed a little bit with the woman that seems to be the director and she asked for my email (no, Hanna, it was not because she felt I am sexy , nobody tells me 100 times I’m sexy ). I told her I was not one of the main contributor but she just wanna talk about free software and understand how it works. Closing Talk: The Challenge of the GNU/Linux Desktop by Jeff Waugh Jeff Waugh is an excellent speaker, I really enjoyed the presentation. A lot of humour, a lot of facts, it was really an excellent presentation. But Jeff, I still do not understand the Ubuntu business plan. I’m not a native english speaker and I did not understand a lot of jokes and some responses. Back! I messed up with my GSM, lost my PIN number or someting I don’t know (I did it a thousand times!), I went to the shop today (Feb. 28) to be able to call again. I also went to the office and the alarm was on… I asked for the security guard (I did not want to take risks the day of my birthday: February 28th)… we found nobody but someone tryied to enter on Sunday. I’ll try to prepare some report about Debian-Java tomorrow. The report will be reviewed by Wolfgang and Michael and I’ll send it on the debian-java list on Saturday or on Sunday.

Holidays is going down... Tomorrow I must come back to work, and it's not my preference in this moment. I've been enjoying my wife and sons. I must think in work again. In this hollidays, I've did:

- Packaged pngwriter for Debian. Nice person Paul Blackburn, the upstream. I've added to my contacts on messenger.
- Packaged a new version for acx100 driver (0.2.0pre8+44-1).
- I'm translating a d-i document to catalan (long)
- I'm translating FET to catalan (long looong)
- I have been working in correct RC bugs in Debian (none corrected, one I found was a false bug, and the another one is not a package bug, it was a kernel bug!).
- I offered me as a co-maintainer for cdrtools.

I must to thank to my sponsor Aurelien Jarno for sponsor me for my new maintained package pngwriter.

By request: Here's a list of people who've confirmed they're going to give a talk in the Debian Devroom at the next FOSDEM. This list isn't final yet (there are some more people who've asked for a time slot but did not confirm yet; and I didn't assign slots yet, either) but it might be interesting for those who are coming to have a preview of the subjects that will be available. Well then.

Lars Wirzenius: Nobody expects the Finnish Inquisition: Confessions of a package torturer

Piuparts tests that .deb packages can be installed, upgraded, and removed without problems. Lars uses it to torture all the packages he can get his hands on. This talk will explain how to use it on your packages before uploading them, and thus improving their quality and not having them suffer in Lars's hands.

Martin Zobel-Helas: Debian-Volatile - behind the scenes

This talk will give an overview of how packages are handled for Debian-volatile; what changes are allowed, how security is handled.

Martin F. Krafft: Improving workflow in Debian through process integration

This talk will be about the same subject as Martin's doctorate thesis. The abstract for that is:
This research paper/project details the technical challenges the Debian project faces as it continues its tremendous growth in size and popularity. It describes a research endeavour designed to increase the use of version control within the project for improved coordination of globally distributed teams of volunteers working on the software packages that make up the system. The research primarily focuses on the integration and consolidation of the involved processes. With tools already available for some parts of these processes as well as the coordination of teams, the goal is not to reinvent the wheel, but rather to reuse and improve these tools, to better integrate them, and to make them more accessible by providing abstraction wrappers with interfaces intuitive to Debian developers. It is further the intent for these tools to be optional and fully compatible to existing practices, thus not forcing developers to adapt. The research starts with process analysis and studies of the work habits on the side of the developers, and targets the final output of tools, which implement improved workflow in Debian package management through meaningful integration of existing (and proven) methods

Enrico Zini: Debtags, and what you can do with it today

This talk will introduce the Debtags project, what it has accomplished so far and the wonderful advanced tools that are now available, using debtags, to make sense of the huge package archive.

Bill Allombert: Inside the Debian menu system

The debian menu system transparently keeps the menus in sync with the list of installed applications; so transparently, in fact, that a lot of developers do not know how the system really works. This talk will detail the various components of the system, what the technical challenges are and how they are solved.

Frans J. Pop: Debian Installer internals

An introduction to the inner workings of Debian Installer. Starting with what happens when the installer boots, the talk will go on to discuss how the dynamic menu structure allows the installer to be adapted for different architectures and installation methods. Other subjects will include the special nature of udebs, the contents of a D-I initrd, how cdebconf knits everything together and allows the use of different frontends, preseeding and the use of hooks. If time allows, a short introduction into the build system and CD building may be provided. Some knowledge of Debian package management (like priorities and dependencies) is assumed in this talk.

Aurelien Jarno: The Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port

Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is a port of Debian using the FreeBSD kernel and a GNU libc library. It is currently the most advanced non-Linux port in terms of packages ported.
This talk gives an overview of GNU/kFreeBSD, and a quick comparison between the FreeBSD and the Linux kernel, to give users the necessary information to let them find how the FreeBSD kernel could fill their needs. It then describes the status of the port and the choices made concerning the architecture of the port (libc, threading library, etc.). It will continue by giving the various ways to try out this port and to give help, giving pointers to useful documentation and some useful hints.
Best portability practices are also covered, for both the Debian packaging and the upstream code. It will be based on real examples of non-portable code, and will show the best way to change it into portable code.

Summing the times that people gave me, I'll have anywhere between 5h25 and 6h00 of talks already, and two more people who've shown real interest in doing something in the Debian devroom (but who haven't sent me the information I ask for to be able to confirm their talk; please do so!). I'll probably get 9 hours in all (10 if I squeeze a little bit; but then I might have some issues with the key signing party, which I'm also co-organizing), so there is still some time left for interested parties. However, if you're interested in giving a talk, you shouldn't wait too long anymore!