Dear Lazyweb, does anyone know how to run gnome applets in KDE? I m talking about byzanz which is a software to record your desktop in an animated gif, ogg or Flash format. It provides a command line and a gnome applet, which apparently only works under Gnome. Is there a workaround to make gnome applets run under KDE as well?

I d like to extend a warm welcome to our selected students for the 2010 Debian Google Summer of Code! They should pop up on Debian Planet soon and you re welcome to come talk to them on #debian-soc on irc.debian.org Aptitude Qt by Piotr Galiszewski, mentored by Sune Vuorela Qt GUI for aptitude. Currently, KDE users need to use Aptitude via the console interface, or install the newly developed GTK frontend, which does not fit well into KDE desktop. Making Qt frontend to Aptitude would solve this problem and bring an advanced and fully Debian-compliant graphical package manager to KDE. Content-aware Config Files Upgrading by Krzysztof Tyszecki, mentored by Dominique Dumont When a package deliver configuration files, the problem of merging user data with new configuration instructions will arise during package upgrades on users systems. Sometimes merging can be done with 3 way merge, but this process does not insure that the resulting file is correct or even legal. This project intends to create standards, tools an heuristics to make the scary config file conflict resolution debconf prompt a thing of the past. Debbugs Bug Reporting and Manipulation API by David Wendt Jr., mentored by Bastian Venthur Currently debbugs supports a SOAP interface for querying Debian s Bug Tracking System. Unfortunately this operation is read-only. This project would create an API for debbugs which supports sending and manipulating bug reports, without having to resort to email. This project does not intend to replace email as mean to manipulate the BTS but rather to enhance the BTS to allow other means of bug creation and manipulation. Debian High Performance Computing on Clouds by Dominique Belhachemi, mentored by Steffen Moeller The project paves a way to combine the demands in high performance computing with the dynamics of compute clouds with Debian. Combining the Eucalyptus cloud computing infrastructure with the TORQUE resource manager and preparing the components for dynamically added and removed instances provides the user with a attractive high performance computing environment. Such a system allows users to share resources with large compute centers with minimal changes in their workflow and scripts. Debian-Installer on Neo FreeRunner and Handheld Devices by Thibaut Girka, mentored by Gaudenz Steinlin This project aims to improve the installation experience of Debian on handheld devices by replacing ad-hoc install scripts by a full-blown and adapted Debian-Installer. The Neo FreeRunner is used as it is the most convenient and open device from a development standpoint, but other devices will also be explored. Hurd port and de-Linux-ization of Debian-Installer by J r mie Koenig, mentored by Samuel Thibault The primary means of distributing the Hurd is through Debian GNU/Hurd. However, the installation CDs presently use an ancient, non-native installer. The goal of this project is to port the missing parts of Debian-Installer to Hurd. To achieve this, all problematic Linux-specific code in Debian-Installer will be replaced by less or non-kernel dependent code, paving the way for better support of other non-Linux ports of Debian. Multi-Arch support in APT by David Kalnischkies, mentored by Michael Vogt Hardware like 64bit processors are perfectly able to execute 32bit opcode but until now this potentiality is disregard as the infrastructure tools like dpkg and APT are not able to install and/or solve dependencies across multiple architectures. The project therefore focuses on enabling APT to work out good solutions in a MultiArch aware environments without the need of hacky and partly working biarch packages currently in use. Package Repository Analysis and Migration Automation by Ricardo O Donell, mentored by Neil Williams Emdebian uses a filter to select packages from the main Debian repositories that are considered useful to embedded devices, excluding the majority of packages. The results of processing the filter are automated but maintaining the filter list is manual. This project seeks to automate certain elements of the filtering process to cope with specific conditions. This project will also generalize to more elaborate and intelligent algorithms to improve the transitions of the main Debian archives. Smart Upload Server for FTP Master by Petr Jasek, mentored by Joerg Jaspert Making packages upload smarter, more interactive and painless for uploaders by switching from anonymous FTP and Cron jobs to a robust protocol and modern package checking and processing daemon. This daemon would test early and report early, saving developers time. More details coming soon on http://wiki.debian.org/gsoc Congratulations everyone and have a fruitful summer!

This year again, I m proposing a project for this year s Summer of Code. Very much like my last year s proposal, it is about adding submit- and manipulation capabilities to debbugs SOAP interface. The idea for this project is to add another way to communicate with our bug tracking system than email. Since we already have a read-only SOAP interface, it seems natural to add write-capabilities. Libraries like python-debianbts would adopt those features and end user applications like reportbug or reportbug-ng could use it to enhance usability. One student has already applied. Others are also very welcome but be quick, the deadline for student applications is April 9th at 19:00 UTC.

For a few weeks now, aptitude is really slow updating the package list downloading the lists is actually fast as normal but it always waits for a minute or so with a 99% [Warten auf Kopfzeilen] (Waiting for headers) message. I tried apt-get update same problem. Now the funny thing is: LANG=C apt-get update or LANG=C aptitude -u works just fine! I also tested with LANG=de_DE, it_IT, fr_FR and even en_US always slow, so it looks it always occurs when LANG is not set to C? Anyone else noticed this problem? I skimmed through the bug reports of apt, but didn t find a similar bug. Update: Looks like google-chrome is the problem! Commenting out the content of /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list, as Jaime suggested in the comments, everything worked fine again.

Today I finally found the reason why the table in reportbug-ng was not always sorted correctly. The fix was trivial and I m happy it s finally corrected. As announced last week, reportbug-ng now also can optionally hide closed bugs, which makes reportbug-ng together with the complex queries a great tool for finding easy NMU candidates. To play around with those new features, I also did 5 lazy NMUs today. Most of them where fixes for FTBFS/RC bugs which had already a patch in the BTS.

Until today you could only use reportbug-ng to query the BTS with simple queries like packagename , bugnumber , tag:patch , etc. But the BTS actually supports composite queries like severity:grave tag:patch which returns bugreports with severity grave and a patch. The underlying Python library python-debianbts also supported this right from the start, but reportbug-ng did not make use of it. Last weekend I finally had the time to fix that and the result is on it s way to unstable. Composite queries provide a very convenient way to find cheap NMU candidates: the query "severity:critical severity:grave severity:serious tag:patch" will return release critical bugs which have a patch. Now you can just go through this list, pick an open bug, test the patch and do what s necessary to release Squeeze in time. Next item on my list is an option to hide closed bugs, maybe next weekend.

If you re using KDE and upgraded to Thunderbird 3 lately you might have the problem that links in emails don t open in a browser anymore. For my case that happened even without a user visible error message. If that sounds familiar for you, check the error console (Tools/Error-Console). If there is an error like:

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure
code: 0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE)
[nsIExternalProtocolService.loadUrl]   nsresult:  0 80004005
(NS_ERROR_FAILURE)   location:  JS frame ::
chrome://communicator/content/contentAreaClick.js :: openLinkExternally
:: line 188   data: no]

Then Thunderbird just (silently) fails to launch the browser. Guido pointed me to gconftool. gconftool -R / grep url-handlers told me that some components of gnome still had Firefox configured as http-handler (which is strange since it was rebranded to iceweasel ages ago). Resetting them solved the problem for me. The sad part of the story: x-www-browser, sensible-browser and KDE s http handler where all correctly configured and pointed to iceweasel. All applications behaved correctly only Icedove used a (for me) hidden setting pointing to firefox.

In desperate need to organize my collection of scientific papers, I had a look at various tools which could help me organizing them. Probably one of the best out there is Mendeley. Mendeley seems to be a very good tool to keep your massive collection of pdfs under control. Unfortunately a very basic function, namely looking up a newly imported paper in Google Scholar to get attributes like: Authors, Year, etc. right, is bundled with a Mendeley account. I guess that s their way of forcing the user to participate to their community stuff, since without the Google Scholar lookup Mendeley is pretty useless unless you want to fill all the attributes manually. So I decided to write my own tool to make the lookup. Unfortunately Google does not really want to give away that precious data: they don t provide an API and even block certain User-Agents from accessing the page. Then, there is also the problem of scraping the results page to get the right data. The first problem can be trivially solved by setting a common User-Agent string, the second one can be elegantly circumvented by using the bibtex files provided in the search results. The bibtex entries are however only showed if you enabled them in the settings, which are stored in a cookie. After a few tries, I figured that the CF attribute (citation format?) controls which bibliography format should be offered in the results page and CF=4 corresponds to bibtex. Generating a fake cookie is easy, but you have to know what must be included. In this case it looks like a 16 digit hex as ID and the CF attribute is sufficient. The ID is probably supposed to be your id, but a randomly generated one also works like a charm. The resulting cookie looks like this: GSP=ID=762a112b5c765732:CF=4 All you have to do now is to query Google Scholar using the user string and the cookie:

...
# fake google id (looks like it is a 16 elements hex)
google_id = hashlib.md5(str(random.random())).hexdigest()[:16]
GOOGLE_SCHOLAR_URL =  http://scholar.google.com 
HEADERS =  User-Agent  :  Mozilla/5.0 ,
         Cookie  :  GSP=ID=%s:CF=4  % google_id  
def query(searchstr):
     "Return a list of bibtex items. " 
    searchstr =  /scholar?q= +urllib2.quote(searchstr)
    url = GOOGLE_SCHOLAR_URL + searchstr
    request = urllib2.Request(url, headers=HEADERS)
    response = urllib2.urlopen(request)
    html = response.read()
    # grab the bibtex links
     

And Google Scholar will offer you links to the bibtex files of the results. Getting those links is easy since they all start with "/scholar.bib". Just search for those and download the targets. The complete code is available on github. It can be used as a python library or a standalone application, you just call it like this: gscolar "some author or title" and it will print the first ten results in bibtex to stdout.

Dear Lazyweb, since yesterday s daily update, my laptop runs really sluggish. Is there a way to list all packages which where updated or installed yesterday to track down the problem?

Git bisect, ccache and cowbuilder: a combination made in heaven! Tracking down a commit which introduced an ugly bug with those tools was a breeze. Git bisect is very useful finding a commit which introduced a bug very quickly, ccache massively reduces compiling time. Compiling icedove (thunderbird) on my laptop using cowbuilder takes roughly 30 minutes. Using cowbuilder with ccache, it only takes 10 minutes, where most of the time is spent setting up the build environment.

One idiot ignites a bomb, others immediately scream for security scanners. Apparently Terrorism works pretty well for countries with increased security needs.

Funny coincidence that David writes how well Linux and Printers go together for 12 years, while it is apparently impossible to print something with CUPS in unstable since a week

Looking at the sorry state of Python in Debian, makes me wonder if we shouldn t enforce team maintainance of packages above a certain popularity/importance/whatever threshold. People worked hard in the last months to fix any bugs that would prevent Python2.6 to land in unstable and yet nothing happens. Time passes by and we will eventually end up with Squeeze having a horribly outdated Python version.

Dear Lazyweb, do you know how to theme Tk apps? In the default setting, Tk apps running on my KDE4 desktop, cause spontanous eye cancer: there must be a way to theme them to look like the Qt or at least GTK apps, or not?

Getting python2.6 as the default ASAP is currently the #1 priority for the Python modules team. I also consider it very important and tried to help with it, but it is starting to get depressing. The plan is to fix all packages in unstable to be compatible with python2.6 first. This would be easy if there hadn t been a very badly planned change in the installation paths that came together. Because of it, quite a number of packages have to be fixed. Two months ago, I filed a lot of bugs in that order. I missed a number of issues, but overall, almost all packages have been fixed, thanks to Kumar Appaiah, Bastian Venthur and everyone else who sent patches and NMUs. One of the biggest issues, though, comes from python-central. Since it doesn t handle some of the new paths that were introduced (which is somehow ironic, since the python-central maintainer, Matthias Klose, is also the python maintainer who did this change), a large number of packages FTBFS when built against python2.6. In Ubuntu, it turned out to be a giant mess, most packages using python-central needing changes, and we wanted to avoid that. This is why Piotr O arowski sent a NMU for python-central that fixes these issues for good. Guess what happened? Matthias Klose uploaded a new version that does not include the python2.6 fixes, completely discarding the work that has been done. And of course, making the upload of python2.6 to unstable, which was ready to be done in a few days, impossible. I think it s fine if Ubuntu maintainers don t have the time to handle their packages in Debian. But it is clearly not acceptable to hold back development in Debian, nor to treat it as a garbage dumpster where you can send all the crappy software solutions that were badly designed in Ubuntu to duplicate them in Debian. This is what Matthias has been doing for several years. For how long are we going to tolerate such behavior? For how long will we leave such a critical package in the hands of a single person with no interest in Debian?

Matthias Ettrich, the founder of KDE earned the Bundesverdienstkreuz (Federal Cross of Merit) last Friday for his engagement in open source. How cool is that? Congratulations Matthias and thank you (and all the others) for the K Desktop Environment!

Today s work: 5 lazy NMUs (thanks again Kumar). Leaves us with only five open python2.6 blockers to fix and a whopping 62 of closed ones.

After having ported reportbug-ng from PyQt3 to PyQt4 over a year ago, reportbug-ng lost it s localization, since the gettext based translations where incompatible with Qt4 s translation system. This weekend I finally had the time to have a closer look at this problem. To make a long story short: I have ported the gettext based system to Qt4 s system. All the old .po files where converted to .ts files, but almost all strings are marked as obsolete so that they don t appear in the translated program. But since they are still available in the .ts file, it is easy to get the translations up-to-date. So far only English and German are complete, but eventually other translations will be added. PyQt4 makes it by the way really hard to get non-Qt strings translated.

Amarok 2.2 is probably the only audio application on the market unable connect properly to the IPod. It is impossible to copy podcasts within Amarok to the IPod since Amarok 2.x. This functionality simply disappeared during the 1.x to 2.x version jump. You can download and listen to podcasts, you can connect your IPod, but you cannot drag the podcast to the IPod. A few weeks ago you could help yourself if you know where Amarok stores the podcasts (~/.kde/share/apps/amarok/podcasts): just navigate to this directory and drag the audio file to the IPod, but looks this rake was also disabled within the last versions, since Amarok now only segfaults if you dare to do this. Great.

Today I NMUed over a dozen of Python packages with bugs which blocked the Python 2.6 transition. I really want to thank Kumar Appaiah for his work. He provided patches for all the bugs I NMUed today and lots more. I really did not much more than applying, testing and uploading his patches, but Kumar probably invested days of labor to create the patches and test them. Thanks to his effort, the number of 2.6-blockers shrinked considerably so that we now have like ~15 open blockers and ~50 closed ones!