It has been nearly six years with a netbook and five since I last wrote about wifi roaming from the bus to stay on irc without a costly celluar link during the daily commute. Since then, some readers have asked me to share my refinements to the method in a followup post. So here it is. The software On the server:

• openssh-server
• screen
• irssi

On the client:

• screen
• wpasupplicant
• isc-dhcp-client
• openssh-client
• openbox
• sudo & gksudo (optional)
• urxvt
• wavemon (optional)
• three shell scripts (provided below)

Putting it together: on the client Make sure if you have a wireless manager installed (such as NetworkManager) it is configured to skip your wireless interface, disabled entirely, or if possible, removed. Set up /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf and /etc/network/interfaces for roaming, as per the instructions in /usr/share/doc/wpasupplicant/README.modes.gz. Don t forget to add yourself to the netdev group if you are not in it already. In /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf, list common names of open networks. Normally the catch-all network that associates with any essid, i.e. the first stanza below, works well. However, occasionally the strongest signal is neither one of the common networks nor an easily accessible network (e.g. web portals), so having a list of common open networks helps to quickly select from among those instead. The more you travel, the more of these will discover and add. Just use reconfigure from wpa_cli to reload your edited list each time you add a new one.

ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
network= 
        key_mgmt=NONE
 
network= 
        ssid="default"
        key_mgmt=NONE
 
network= 
        ssid="linksys"
        key_mgmt=NONE
 
...

Since you ll be using ssh repeatedly to connect and it has to be fast, make sure your server is set up to accept your key and use ssh-add so that you only have to enter your ssh key password once. You can tweak isc-dhcp-client to make connections faster. In /etc/dhcp/dhclient.conf, use:

backoff-cutoff 1;
initial-interval 1;

Here are a few scripts I wrote to facilitate quick roaming from one open AP to another and reconnect to irssi running in screen, to break a connection and try the next one, and to recover from occasional lockups (more about that later). ~/bin/screen_reconnect This is a script to reconnect continuously via ssh to a screen session:

#!/bin/sh
reset
while ! ssh -t 10.9.8.7 'screen -UDr' 2>/dev/null ; do echo -n "." ; sleep .1 ; done

Just substitute the IP of your own server here. Using an IP instead of domain name makes the connection faster because a DNS lookup is not required. ~/bin/wifi_reassociate This script closes any open ssh sessions and informs wpa_supplicant to attempt to connect again.

#/bin/sh
/sbin/wpa_cli rea
killall ssh >/dev/null 2>&1

~/bin/wifi_killall This optional, somewhat ugly script addresses an issue I hope you never have. On my ASUS Eee PC 1001PX, occasionally scanning stops. When this happens, and I have never figured out why, apparently ACPI events are blocked. At this point wifi becomes unusable and ACPI sleep is inhibited. By trial and error I found that if you bring down the interface, kill all network-related processes, and bring it up again, ACPI events are unblocked and wifi is usable once more (and any pending request to sleep will finally happen). The script requires sudo, and to use the openbox key binding, gksudo.

#/bin/sh
sudo ifdown wlan0
# in case any of these are hung
sudo killall dhclient3
sudo killall wpa_cli
sudo killall wpa_action
sudo killall wpa_supplicant
# in case any of these are *really* hung
sleep 1
sudo killall -9 dhclient3
sudo killall -9 wpa_cli
sudo killall -9 wpa_action
sudo killall -9 wpa_supplicant
sudo dhclient -r
sudo ifup wlan0

Openbox Since certain actions need to be performed repeatedly and quickly, it is useful to have hotkeys bound in your window manager to the scripts. In ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml, key bindings for <alt>-r to reassociate and <alt>-d to disconnect a hung connection would look like:

  
<keyboard>
  <!-- My keybindings -->
  <keybind key="A-R">
    <action name="Execute">
        <execute>/home/synrg/bin/wifi_reassociate</execute>
    </action>
  </keybind>
  <keybind key="A-D">
    <action name="Execute">
        <execute>gksudo /home/synrg/bin/wifi_killall</execute>
    </action>
  </keybind>
</keyboard>

Putting it together: on the server There is very little to do here. Just start screen, and start irssi in screen. Running screen on the client as well as the server means you should either bind the screen meta keys to a different key sequence on each system, or else learn to press meta twice to pass through meta to the server screen as needed. I use the latter approach. Alternatively, you could use a tabbed terminal on the client, or separate terminals per client process instead of screen. This is a matter of personal taste. Ready to roam Here is a typical setup for roaming on the bus: In a terminal (I use urxvt), first ssh-add, then start screen with these three processes running in separate virtual terminals:

• /sbin/wpa_cli
• screen_reconnect
• wavemon (optional)

March of the dots Most of the commute, just enjoy watching the dots march by, waiting for a new connection. If you estimate a connection is unusable, press <alt>-r to reassociate immediately, giving the next network a chance. If the connection is already firmly established, this might not work on the first try. If the dots don t resume immediately, wait a bit and press it again. This might take a few tries. Changing selected networks on the fly Use wpa_cli when you need to do some fine-tuning of network selections on the fly. While normally you can just watch the march of the dots until a connection is acquired, sometimes you can improve your chances of connecting to a good network by manually controlling the selected candidate networks here. For example, by watching the speed of the bus relative to known good APs, you can predict which networks are more likely to succeed. Rather than connect to any arbitrary network, you might select a specific one by id, and then later when it goes out of range, revert to the original configuration, e.g.

> select_network 5
...
> reconfigure

You can use tab-completion in wpa_cli to type these commands quickly or else just abbreviate the commands. Another common scenario is when you pass through a business area with many captive portal hotspots. These rarely make good choices because they either require a password not known to you or else you can t click through I agree in time before the bus moves on. In this case, you might just disable the catch-all stanza and let the common open network stanzas you listed ( default , linksys , etc.) do the work:

> disable_network 1

Become a type ahead wizard While running, a continuous stream of periods fills the screen, which provides you with a highly visible cue that no available APs are in range. When the movement stops, you know a connection is being attempted. While waiting to connect, you can type ahead any comments you want to make in the current irssi window (taking care to remember which one you are in!) While having periods interspersed in what you type may be disorienting at first, you get used to it. There is a point when a connection is first established and ssh is accepting input, but anything you type can no longer be seen while you re typing. Depending on whether the connection was completely successful or not, what you type now may or may not finally be sent. For best results, only type ahead before the dots stop moving. Eventually you can become skilled enough at this to type ahead a comment in one channel, switch channels with /win # and continue typing ahead in the new channel, all buffered until the next few seconds (or even fraction of a second) of connection time. Fine-tune antenna direction with wavemon When the bus has come to a standstill, you may find wavemon useful to pull in a weak signal. Because wavemon has continuously updated signal level and link quality bars, you can use it to fine-tune the antenna position. Just turn your laptop until the bars are at their maximum. Captive portals I have not figured out how to do any automation for this, so it really is a crapshoot, as it is likely the bus has moved on by the time you ve managed to manually navigate the login through a captive portal. But in rush hour, you may have the luxury of time to connect to these as you pass them. I have recently learned about the CoovaFX Firefox plugin which automates logins to captive portals. I m going to give it a try to see if it helps. Update: I can t recommend this plugin, as it is not compatible with Iceweasel >= 23.0. Also, the standard it is based on, WISPr, appears to have an uncertain future. That, coupled with the fact that the plugin appears to not be open source means I m still looking for alternatives. Summary If all of this sounds a bit nuts to you, well, it probably is. But after half a decade enjoying free access to irc from the bus, it all seems perfectly natural to me! If you try this method and like it, please let me know in the comments. Likewise, if you have any improvements to the process or scripts, please share them!

The Taskwarrior Team has just started a blog, kicking it off with a series of articles about development of Taskwarrior itself. Go, team! Almost from the moment I started using Taskwarrior (thanks to Jakub WIlk for an excellent job maintaining this) I knew I had finally found the todo system that I could love. Right away, I started hanging out with the Taskwarrior community at #taskwarrior @ irc.freenode.net and found out what an awesome bunch of people they are, both developers and users alike. I have plunged in with bug reports and feature requests, and am helping get more Taskwarrior-related things into Debian. In NEW right now I have uploaded several of the dependencies needed by my ITP of taskwarrior-web. It s looking like I ll have that finished later this month or early next month. Also, I have uploaded a wheezy backport of Taskwarrior itself (aka task ) which, if all goes well, enters the archive next week.

As of wheezy, Debian no longer offers for download any prebuilt hdd (formerly known as usb-hdd) live images, which, in squeeze, were necessary if you wanted to use persistence. The good news is, since the new wheezy iso-hybrid images use xorisso, you can copy an image to a USB key and repartition it to add a persistence partition. Unfortunately, the filesystem itself is read-only, so you have to manually append the persistence boot parameter each time you boot the image. If that doesn t bother you, you can skip this whole tutorial and just follow the instructions in live-manual for adding a persistence partition and you re all set. This tutorial explains how to extract the contents of a wheezy iso-hybrid live image to a USB key and modify it to boot with this parameter permanently enabled. I am writing it solely as a workaround and do not endorse this as a means to customize Debian Live images in general. I would love to help make a more convenient, supported way to accomplish the same thing for a future release. Meanwhile, the supported and recommended way to make any change to a Debian Live image is to build it from scratch using live-build, as described in live-manual. A simplified Debian Live Images Autobuilder web service is available that works well for many common customizations, if you prefer. Please use one of these methods if you want to do this, or other customizations in the supported way. Otherwise, read on. Prerequisites

• You need to download a Debian iso-hybrid live image. For this tutorial, I will use the Debian live wheezy amd64 LXDE image:
  • http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current-live/amd64/iso-hybrid/debian-live-7.0.0-amd64-lxde-desktop.iso
• Note the size of the image. With ls -lh debian-live-7.0.0-amd64-lxde-desktop.iso you can see the image size for this example is 854M. Later, you will use this size plus 5% for the size of the partition to receive its contents.
• You need a USB key large enough for both the image itself and your persistence partition. For this image, you could even use a 1G key, although that would leave very little space for persistence. In this tutorial, the test key is 8G, leaving lots of room on the key for growth.
• I assume for this example you are preparing the key on a Debian or other Linux system that automounts media when they are plugged in, a fairly normal configuration.
• This tutorial also uses the following tools, which you will need to install if you don t have them already:
  • parted
  • mbr
  • dosfstools
  • p7zip
  • syslinux

Identify the USB key device Caution: Always double-check the device you are writing to is the correct one to avoid losing precious data. There are two things to do to protect yourself. The first is, don t write the USB key as root. The second is, first use ls -l /dev/disk/by-id to identify which device is the target USB key.

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  9 Jun 22 11:58 
usb-SanDisk_Cruzer_Contour_0000184CA87406BC-0:0 -> ../../sdb

As you can see, my SanDisk Cruzer Countour is /dev/sdb. For the rest of the tutorial, I ll be referring to this device as /dev/sdX to avoid unfortunate cut-and-paste disasters. When you follow along, make sure you substitute the correct device for your USB key on your system. Initialize the USB key Start by plugging in the key and unmounting any automounted partitions to ensure nothing is accessing the device, e.g.

$ umount /dev/sdX1

Now make changes to the partition table. Use parted because it may be run as an ordinary user and has some advanced capabilities beyond more basic tools like fdisk.

$ /sbin/parted
WARNING: You are not superuser.  Watch out for permissions.
GNU Parted 2.3
Using /dev/sdX
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) print devices
/dev/sdX (8221MB)
(parted) select                                                           
New device?  [/dev/sdX]?                                                  
Using /dev/sdX
(parted)

Note that when run as an ordinary user, if you only have one removable drive (which may include mp3 players, cameras, e-readers) plugged in, parted immediately selects that device. But just to be sure, use print devices to list the devices and select to if you need to select a different one, as shown above. Repartition the USB key Once you ve verified you have the correct device, start repartitioning. Write a new partition table with mklabel msdos to wipe out all of the old partitions on it. You may skip this step and adapt the remaining instructions if there are partitions you need to keep. This is your last chance to bail if the device is wrong, so make sure it is the correct one before proceeding.

(parted) mklabel msdos
Warning: The existing disk label on /dev/sdX will be destroyed and all data
on this disk will be lost. Do you want to continue?
Yes/No? y
Error: Partition(s) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 on
/dev/sdX have been written, but we have been unable to inform the kernel of
the change, probably because it/they are in use.  As a result, the old
partition(s) will remain in use.  You should reboot now before making further
changes.
Ignore/Cancel? i
(parted)

The error is normal, and appears when you run parted as an ordinary user, so it is OK each time it appears to press i to ignore it. For the rest of this tutorial I will omit these errors from the output for brevity. Make three partitions, a fat32 partition for the image itself that is 5% larger than the size of the ISO, a 1G ext4 partition for persistence, and an extra fat32 partition for the rest of the space. Put the extra partition first so that other OSes you might use the key with will be able to use it. Use relative positioning from the end of the device to make it easy to put all of the rest of the space in the first partition. Finally, flag the live image partition bootable.

(parted) mkpart primary fat32 1 -1897M
(parted) mkpart primary ext4 -1897M -897M
(parted) mkpart primary fat32 -897M -0
(parted) set 3 boot on
(parted) quit
Information: You may need to update /etc/fstab.

Unplug the USB key and plug it in again so that the kernel will re-read the updated partition table. If there were old filesystems on the key that were automounted, unmount them again. Now we re ready to make the new filesystems.

$ umount /dev/sdX1
$ /sbin/mkdosfs -nEXTRA /dev/sdX1
mkdosfs 3.0.16 (01 Mar 2013)
$ /sbin/mkfs.ext4 -q -Lpersistence /dev/sdX2
$ /sbin/mkdosfs -nLXDE /dev/sdX3
mkdosfs 3.0.16 (01 Mar 2013)

Make the USB key bootable Use install-mbr to install an MBR on the key and syslinux to install the bootloader to boot into your live image partition.

$ /sbin/install-mbr /dev/sdX
$ syslinux -i /dev/sdX3

Mount the partitions Unplug the key and plug it in again so the new partitions will be automounted. Observe where the partitions are mounted with df.

$ df
...
/dev/sdX1        6204568         4   6204564   1% /media/EXTRA
/dev/sdX3         831888         4    831884   1% /media/LXDE
/dev/sdX2         944120      1204    894124   1% /media/persistence

Extract the ISO contents to the key To continue preparing this key as an unprivileged user, use p7zip to extract the ISO. You may alternatively mount the ISO loopback and extract it that way, but you must be root to do that.

$ cd /media/LXDE
$ 7z x ~/debian-live-7.0.0-amd64-lxde-desktop.iso
...
Extracting  live/filesystem.packages-remove
...

When live/filesystem.squashfs is extracted (right after live/filesystem.packages-remove) it will take the longest time of all of the files to extract, as it contains the whole live filesystem. Be patient and eventually it and all other files on the image will finish extracting.

...
Everything is Ok
Folders: 245
Files: 370
Size:       892183367
Compressed: 895483904

Modify the bootloader configuration files The syslinux bootloader configuration directory and files within it are named isolinux when installed on an ISO. You need to rename the directory and two files changing isolinux to syslinux so the bootloader will find them on your fat32 live image partition.

$ mv isolinux syslinux
$ mv syslinux/isolinux.cfg syslinux/syslinux.cfg
$ mv syslinux/isolinux.bin syslinux/syslinux.bin

Enable full persistence Next, append persistence to the live boot parameters and turn on full persistence by putting / union in a persistence.conf file in the persistence partition.

$ sed -i 's/\(append boot=.*\)$/\1 persistence/' syslinux/live.cfg
$ cd /media/persistence
$ echo / union > persistence.conf

Reboot into the live system Now your USB key is ready to boot with full persistence enabled. Have fun!

This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (102.70 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. Debian France Work on Galette. I spent quite some time on Debian France s galette installation (the web application handling its member database), first converting its Postgres database to UTF-8, then upgrading to 0.7.4 while working-around many known problems. I also created Debian packages of three Galette plugins that we have been using (galette-plugin-paypal, galette-plugin-admintools, galette-plugin-fullcard). But every time I use galette, I tend to find something to report. This month I filed 5 tickets:

• #588: galette should offer a way to send a test mail while setting up the mail notifications
• #589: CSV export page contains an invalid download link
• #590: confirmation page of a successful PayPal payment contains empty fields
• #591: problem with the selection of recipients of a mailing
• #595: galette should put a proper recipient in the To: field of automatically generated mails.

I tested quite some fixes prepared by the upstream author (3 of the above bugs are already fixed) and this lead to the 0.7.4.1 bugfix release. Preliminary work on new bylaws. I have setup a git repository to make it easier to collaborate on new versions of our bylaws and internal rules. The goal is to make Debian France a trusted organization of Debian and to update everything to be compliant with the association 1901 law (we currently have a special statute reserved to associations from Alsace/Moselle). Kali Linux Improve accessibility support in Debian Wheezy. Offensive Security wanted Kali Linux to be fully accessible to disabled people. Since Wheezy was suffering from some serious regressions in that area, we hired Emilio Pozuelo Monfort to fix #680636 and #689559 in gdm3. On my side, I updated debian-installer s finish-install to correctly pre-configure the system when you make an install with speech synthesis (patch submitted in #705599).
Thanks to accommodating release managers, this work has already been integrated in Wheezy and won t have to wait the first point release. Fix bugs in Debian s live desktop installer. We also wanted to enable the desktop installer in the Kali live DVD. While our first tries a few months ago failed, this time it worked almost out of the box (thanks to Ben Armstrong who fixed it). I still identified a few issues that I fixed in debian-installer-launcher s git repository. Packaging and misc Debian work

• I reviewed the work of Charles Plessy who drafted an important update of the Debian Policy to document dpkg triggers (see #582109)
• I reviewed the libwebsockets package prepared by Peter Pentchev (ITP 697671)
• I discovered Tanglu and joined their mailing list because I want to watch its evolution (and maybe use it as a test-bed for some future infrastructure developments).
• I reviewed and committed a patch of Robert Spencer on debian-cd (see #703431).
• I packaged version 3.3 of cpputest (in experimental). I tested a new upstream snapshot converted to autotools.

I also spent a significant number of hours to answer questions of students who want to participate in Google s summer of code and who are interested by the rewrite of the Package Tracking System with Python and Django. Some of the discussions happened on debian-qa@lists.debian.org. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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I ve been using this process for debugging the installer while launched from a Debian Live desktop. Having a full live environment at your disposal during install is a boon to debugging because you don t have to work within the constraints normally imposed upon you by the limited debian-installer environment. Caveat: running debian-installer from the debian-installer-launcher still has one or two unresolved issues, so unless you re specifically working on live integration issues like I am, compare with a conventional d-i image install to gain the added confidence the install is the same in both environments. There are no longer active maintainers working on debian-installer-launcher and live-installer, and I think it s really important for wheezy to release with solid support for live installs, so I ve been using this setup to try to solve #702335. So far, progress is slow because I m new to this. If anyone is interested in collaborating in this work, give me a shout. I am SynrG @ irc.oftc.net and can be found on #debian-live and #debian-boot if you would like to drop in. Overview:

1. Use images/lxde-desktop config from live-images.git and build your own image with live-build >=3.0.1-1. Just add -b hdd in auto/config before starting your build, as having a read/writable image is handy for this exercise.
2. Boot the live medium. You may prefer to do this in a VM for convenience, having prepared a blank virtual disk image as your target in advance.
3. Make any small changes you want to the installer before launching it. A quick hack I ve used is to sudo vi /usr/sbin/debian-installer-launcher and near the end on the line after prepare right before run , open a new line and add bash so an interactive shell will be opened after the installer is extracted but before it is launched. For larger changes (e.g. inclusion of updated udebs, etc.) add them to your live image configuration before building as described in live-manual.
4. Open two root terminals and do debian-installer-launcher -t debug in one and tail -f /lib/live/installer/var/log/syslog in the other. If you ve added the hack from step 3, don t forget to exit the interactive shell after making changes. Now you can watch debug output as you go through the steps of the installer. If you like, you may append additional boot prompt parameters (e.g. preseeds) to the debian-installer-launcher command.
5. During the install, you may modify other parts of the unpacked installer under /lib/live/installer (e.g. to add set -x to some scripts) prior to executing steps that would call them.

Do you wish, like I do, you could edit collaboratively in Vim? This feature is number 10 on the Vim voting page, so it seems I m not alone. How about Pentadactyl coupled with any of the existing web-based collaborative editors, such as Etherpad? OK, so it s not quite Vim, and there are some rough edges to this particular pairing, but I m finding it s good enough for my needs. It even gives me a Vim-like editing experience while other participants use the default Etherpad editor. Yes, I know about whiteboard.debian.net, but for the past three years I have been using a single instance of Etherpad with my family to maintain a shopping list to which we all make contributions. First of all, that s not a Debian activity, so to make the switch, I d need to make a personal clone of the service for our personal use. But more importantly, we find Etherpad features such as colours for different participants and the timeline are just too useful to give up on. On the other hand, the less the web editor interferes with your web browser s default textarea behaviour, the easier time Pentadactyl is going to have. Indeed, I asked on #pentadactyl @ irc.oftc.net about some problems I was having and I was told flat out that Pentadactyl does not work with graphical web editors. So, you may wish to use another web-based collaborative editor for this reason. That being said, I did learn a few things about helping Pentadactyl get along better with Etherpad, so if you would like to try it yourself, read on. The key to getting started was to enter text edit mode within the textarea with <C-t>. For the most part, this behaves like Vim normal mode . I am still learning, but many basic motion and editing keys behave just as they would in Vim. Fantastic! However, the moment I tried to :undo I hit my first problem. Using the latest release version of Pentadactyl (1.0rc1 at time of writing), pressing "u" to :undo produced no visible result. I tried the latest daily build as well, and only saw a marginally more helpful "Node not found" error message displayed in the status area. But it turns out you can use passthrough mode to use the textarea s own undo. Just :tmap u <C-v><C-z> and we re back in business again. I m still experimenting with this setup, so the jury s still out on whether I ll stick with it, or whether the remaining incompatibilities between Pentadactyl and Etherpad will drive me nuts. But it looks promising. Clearly, judicious use of :autocmd to always start in text edit mode and bind that undo key whenever I enter the site will help make the experience even better. If you try it out yourself, I d love to hear how things went for you. Or if you have found an even better solution that works for you, do share.

The Debian/Ubuntu games team recently organised a half-day screenshots party for creating screenshots for all the games that are available in Debian/Ubuntu. Unfortunately, only 5 people participated in the screenshots party, I had hoped that we would get more folks turn up. Only one of those was not already involved in the games team and that one person found out via our spam on the #debian-mentors IRC channel. This means that most of our promotion of the event was ineffective. Hopefully for future games parties we can improve this, please let us know if you have any ideas about that. We also had 7 other people on the channel during the party lurking, discussing and or working on other things, in particular Ben Armstrong was working on a games live CD. Over the 7 hours of the party, we uploaded 100 screenshots for 40 different packages. Of the packages, 2 are available only in Debian (auralquiz, cutechess), one is available only in Ubuntu (plasma-widget-tictactoe) and the rest are available in both. I think we got quite a bit done for such a small group. Some of us could not resist filing some bugs on packages that had issues preventing or delaying us from taking screenshots. I also suggested to one maintainer that his package (acm4) be removed from Debian, since it is obsoleted by acm and unusable. If you want to play some games, check out goplay, which is a tool for browsing available games using debtags that displays screenshots from the games-thumbnails package, which has just been updated with the screenshots created during the party. goplay needs some more development, if you would like to help out with that, you would be most welcome. If you are interested to see our screenshots, they are all on the screenshots.debian.net website and the packages are auralquiz, cardstories, londonlaw, cube2font, ardentryst, cutechess, pianobooster, emacs-chess, xye, flare, tmw, garden-of-coloured-lights, flight-of-the-amazon-queen, geekcode, glpeces, fofix, unknown-horizons, klickety, polygen, tictactoe, xscreensaver-screensaver-dizzy, goban-original-games, xjokes, mudlet, xabacus, xtux-client, connectagram, crystalspace, pescetti, purity-ng, qstat, slashem, sudoku, minetest, xscavenger, plasma-widget-tictactoe, xbomb, xfrisk, xpilot-ng and xsok.

Right now I am sitting in the train to the airport for going to DebCamp/DebConf 11 in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina. During DebCamp amongst other things I am going to work on finishing up the last bits on getting daily/weekly Debian Live autobuilds back for wheezy. This spring Jimmy Kaplowitz offered to help with the task of overseeing the debian-live autobuilder and to coordinate necessary bits with cdimage.debian.org. Having them on cdimage.d.o became recently possible as Steve McIntyre offered to make a VM available for us (live-build requires root privileges, and naturally, you would not want to let that run on the host system itself, that is why in the past it was not possible to build them on cdimage.d.o). The remaining issues are, and this is why the autobuilds are not yet back since spring, that live-build still needs two things: a couple of tweeks for wheezy, and the autobuild stuff need to be properly integrated into live-build itself. That will happen as an additional binary package live-build-cron with a bunch of debconf questions, so that everyone and his dog can setup a debian-live autobuild server on his own machine. The initial upload (which will not yet work, do not bother to try) was uploaded to experimental this week and cleared the new queue, now looking forward to get this all finished up and resulting in a live-build uploaded to unstable by the end of the week. In the second week, Jimmy arrives, I will be introducing him to live-build and the various little things to watch for and hopefully manage to persuade him to take over the autobuilds maintenance. Having all images that are based on packages solely from the stable/testing/unstable archives moved to cdimage.d.o is freeing up ressources on live.debian.net which did the job in the past since etch. Ben Armstrong volunteered to help with overseeing the live.d.n instance of live-build-cron that will build more then once per day images for si, with the only difference that they will not use live-* from the archive but the latest snapshots from our git snapshots repository. This will be a big help for the development as eventually we will be autotesting these images for various things. Last but not least, thanks to both Jimmy and Ben for all your kindness, patience and help with this during the last couple of months. We have interesting times ahead.

Some months ago I wished for a tool to create virtual disk images, something similar to debootstrap except it would create a disk image instead of a directory. It would be used like this:

sudo ./vmdebootstrap --image test.img --size 1G \
--log test.log --mirror http://mirror.lan/debian/

debootstrap is wonderful for creating a basic Debian system for use with chroot. In the modern world, something similar but for virtual machines (such as KVM) would be nice to have, I thought. Particularly if it is something that is not tied to a particular virtualization technology, and does not require running in an actual virtual machine (for speed and simplicity). I could imagine using a tool like this for automatically building appliance-like system images, for example for FreedomBox. Being able to do that in a fully automatic manner would make development simpler and more easy for others to reproduce, and would allow for things like automatic integration testing: build image, boot it in a virtual machine, run automatic tests, report results. There are a bunch of tools that almost do this, but not quite. For example, live-build builds a disk image, but it's one that is aimed for live CDs and such. This brings in some limitations. By default, the image is not persistent. You can make a persistent image, but that requires you to provide a second partition (or disk) that holds the modified parts, using copy-on-write. It also means that if the bootloader or initramfs needs to be updated, then the read-only image needs to be updated. That's fine for live CDs, but not so good if you want a real installed system that you can upgrade to all future releases of Debian. (Ben Armstrong kindly helped me use live-build the right way. Thanks!) There's also grml-debootstrap which seems to work on a real system, but not installing onto a virtual disk image (and the difference is crucial to me). Based on feedback I received back then, and some experimentation I've done the past couple of days, I wrote a very rudimentary version of the tool I want. The code is on gitorius. (You need my cliapp library to run it.) Be warned: it really is a very rudimentary version. For example, it provides not flexibility in choice of partitioning, filesystem type, what packages get installed, etc. It does not configure networking, and the root password is disabled. Some of that flexibility would be quite easy to add. It also uses extlinux as the bootloader, since I utterly failed to get grub2 to install onto the virtual disk. (I did, however, manage to overwrite my develpment machine's bootloader.) The command above works, and results in a RAW format disk image that boots under KVM. It might boot off a hard disk or USB flashdrive too, but I haven't tried that. I now have several questions:

• Does something like this already exist?
• Does anyone else find this useful?
• Is another approach better? Perhaps running a fully preseeded debian-installer in a virtual machine might be better.
• If no other tool exists for the same job, what should I do next with vmdebootstrap?

I wrote a while back about the "fun" Jo and I were having with her Acer Aspire One 751 netbook, a machine that was "blessed" with Intel's integrated GMA500 graphics. It was a PITA to set the machine up and the final installation of Ubuntu Jaunty was anything but reliable, locking up frequently. Well, there's more to the story. In the comments on that blog entry, Ben Armstrong pointed me at some very useful information from the Debian EeePC team: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC/Model/1101HA, specifically notes on how to use grub2 and the fbdev X driver to get native resolution on a 1366x768 screen. A couple of weeks back I finally managed to steal the laptop from Jo for a few minutes and try that setup. The results are very promising - X performance is perfectly acceptable and the X lockups have totally gone away. So (shock!) it looks like the crappy binary drivers were to blame. Jo is over the moon that finally her Linux laptop is happy and she has specifically asked me to blog again and thank Ben for his help. Thanks! I'm also hoping that this post will help other people searching for useful information on this nasty hardware and how to make it work as well as possible.

and the newbies are ... A long time ago, in a couple of blog posts far far away, we have introduced the DebConf Newbies initiative. I'm hereby happy to announce the actual DebConf newbies and I'm looking forward to meet them at the forthcoming DebConf10 in New York City:

• Jonathan Wiltshire
• Jon Bernard
• Arnaud Fontaine
• Ben Armstrong
• Arthur Loiret
• Serafeim Zanikolas
• Andreas B. Mundt

Now, folks, please be kind with them, they (still) don't know how crazy we can be(come) during DebConf. Above all: do not harm them (too much) at Mao. In exchange, they have already promised that they will fix all RC bugs that will still be open at the beginning of DebConf10 (or maybe I've just read that in their minds, I don't quite remember ...). Does that mean that DebConf10 travel sponsoring is completely OK as of now? No, not really. This initiative was specifically targeting DebConf newbies, but several DebConf "regulars" are planning to attend too. For some of them the amazing DebConf sponsoring team has already found enough resources to secure their travel sponsorship, for quite some others it is not the case yet. This is a pity, because we know from the past that having more Debian folks at DebConf means more hacking, a better distribution, and a better community, ultimately it means a better Debian. Some of the readers of this blog post will be in the condition to improve the situation: it is as simple as donating to Debian or, better, becoming a DebConf10 sponsor by simply mailing the sponsoring team.

ACOSS, the Atlantic Canada Open Source Showcase, interviewed me this month. I talked about the Debian Eee PC project.

In November 2007, we bought two of the first Eee PC netbooks available in North America: the model 4G in pearl white, one for me, and one for my wife. My plan was to start the Debian Eee PC project and get Debian working on them both which, thanks to the work of everyone on the team, has been a great success. Fast forward to February 2010, and they are still serving us well. Here is a list of hardware enhancements and issues over the past two years of continuous use: Battery life Asus claims 3.5hrs for the model 4G, though I don t think we ever experienced anything better than 2.5 hrs with wifi in operation. Today, I m down to something short of 2 hrs. If you consider the Lithium ion battery article on Wikipedia to be accurate, it is typical to permanently lose 20% capacity per year, so this sounds about right for the age of the battery. Touchpad The touchpad itself is fine. The buttons are not. They are hard to push and prone to become less responsive after a while, or to fail entirely. I now really have to bear down hard on my left button to make it work. Because the buttons are soldered to the motherboard, they would be hard to replace. Configuring the synaptics driver for tap-to-click is an acceptable workaround. Also, one of the first purchases we made was the Logitech VX Nano, one for each Eee, so most of the time now, we use our mice, falling back to the touchpad only when using a mouse is inconvenient due to space constraints (e.g. on the bus). Keyboard After two years of continuous use, both of our keyboards needed replacing. Some of the keys had been pounded flat and needed surgery (rubber springs sliced out of a scavenged Acer netbook keyboard and grafted on) to make them usable again. And aesthetically, the keyboards have really suffered, with a good percentage of the markings on the keycaps partially or completely eroded off. Fortunately, for $3 plus $10 shipping each, new keyboards can be ordered from a Chinese e-Bay seller. But with the new keyboards, there is still the problem with excessive flex in the keyboard making some keys less responsive than others. I m considering trying this hack to solve the problem. Display I have no complaints about the matte finish displays of either Eee. Both have stood up well. People tell me they don t care for a 7 display, but I find it bright, crisp and easy to get along with, so long as you maximize windows and increase font size as needed (e.g. for reading PDF books and magazines). When I really need the extra real estate, I just hook up an external monitor. Fan Some people complain about the noise of the fan, from the otherwise silent 4G (due to the lack of a hard drive) and seek ways to limit the amount of time the fan runs. We ve never had that problem. However, if any plastic bits break off inside the Eee, they will eventually find their way to your fan and get wedged. This has happened twice: once in my wife s Eee, and once in mine. Disassembly of the Eee to clear the blockage and get the fan running again was relatively painless both times. Plastic bits About those plastic bits: In my wife s case, I think the bit was some extruded plastic from the molding that had broken off. In my case, it was a deteriorating plastic post which was holding the hinge in place. More about this later. Sound Unfortunately, the integrated sound seems to be particularly sensitive to heat. During both fan failures, sound cut out. On my wife s system, it never fully recovered, and now only works on alternate Tuesdays, whereas on mine, after I unwedged the fan and brought the heat down, sound has functioned properly ever since. (Update: see my comments below on power adapters for an alternate theory about what killed sound.) We are waiting now for the delivery of a cheap ($1.42 including shipping, again from China) 3D Sound USB device which is reported to work on Linux. While some users complain about hum with this device, we re cautiously optimistic that on the Eee it won t be an issue. If it is, oh well, a buck and a half is a small gamble. Display hinge The plastic posts that hold the anchors for the machine screws for the hinge are fragile. Three out of four of these posts in my Eee have shattered, leaving the left hinge to float freely. For the past two days I was distressed about how I could fix this. Based on some helpful suggestions from #eeepc @ irc.freenode.net, I had worked out a plan to rebuild one of the posts with two-part epoxy, sand it and the fractured stub of the post, and use cyanoacrylate glue to affix it to the case. It sounded like fiddly work for which I didn t hold much hope of success. But this morning, I realized that the plastic in the bottom of the case was still sound, and that I could drop a screw into that hole, and with pliers, line up the anchor on the other side. This appears to work! I ll handle that hinge with care, but it should do me until I eventually repurpose the machine to some daily use that is less stressful on the hinge than daily travel on the bus. SSD and SDHC Some people were initially worried that the limited write life an SSD meant that you needed to take special measures to avoid its premature death, which I have always regarded as a myth. Our 4G SSDs each have no swap space, and ext3 filesystems. At the two year point, there are no problems. I expect our SSDs to outlast the other components. We did, however, eventually find the 4G to be a bit on the small side. We now each have Kingston 4G micro-SDHC cards for a bit of extra capacity for large media files and for some extra space for the apt cache. I recently priced the Lexan version of this card at $19 for a two-pack at Wal-mart, and these seem to work in the model 4G just as well (which seems to be an issue with this model not all SDHC cards work). Memory We found the 512M that came with the 4G somewhat constraining. Without any swap space (so we could maximize the space available on the small SSD) we decided our systems really needed a memory upgrade. At the time, 2G didn t seem overly expensive (though I no longer remember the exact price) so we splurged on 2G for each system, even though that was probably more than we needed. Power adapter When I first wrote this article, I forgot to mention the power adapter. The model 4G uses an unusual 9.5V power adapter for which it is hard to find a generic replacement. This unit is prone to fail in two places: in rare cases, (one out of 6 units that I have in some way assisted with: 3 of them mine, 3 belonging to others,) it will break at the wall plug end. The plug swivels into the unit for easy storage, but this adds a point of failure. More commonly, (in 3 out of six of the units,) the wires at the netbook plug end will fray due to stress on the non-angled cord, leading either to no connect, or to a short. In fact, since in the case of my wife s adapter, the netbook end of the cable shorted, making the cable heat up and the system spontaneously shut down after a little while, we can t say for sure whether the overheating of the Eee took out integrated sound, or whether this short did. On the one hand, I know for certain my own system, which never suffered a short, has responded to overheating by making the sound flaky, but it has never taken out sound completely. On the other hand, shorting the power cable can t be very good for the Eee, so who knows, maybe that s what ultimately killed my wife s Eee s sound. This is where it helps to have soldering skills, or a friend who can do the repair for you. In my case, it was the latter. While I was waiting for a replacement adapter I had ordered, we also found on eeeuser.com part#s for replacement plugs and sleeves from Digikey, total cost $20 including shipping, 10 pieces each. Cutting off the bad plugs on three units and attaching the new was a quick, straightforward operation, and succeeded in two out of three cases. Having carefully checked the failed repair, we deduced that the failure in that unit was at the wall end, and we judged there was nothing further we could do to try to save it. Even the unit that had previously shorted was returned to perfect health and has been in operation trouble-free ever since. Conclusion After over two years of continuous use, the model 4G has held up well for a $400 system. We definitely feel we have received our money s worth of value over that time. All of the problems we ve experienced so far have been fixable at very little expense, and we expect them to last at least another year before we seriously consider replacing them. In the next several months, I plan to order a high capacity 8-cell 10400mAh battery for my own system so that I can enjoy a 5-6 hr run time. The purchase will be roughly $55 including shipping, the most expensive purchase for my system to date, but still well worth it to extend the 4G s lifespan for another year or more.

Lenny well supported We re pleased that Lenny released with good support for the Eee PC and are now turning our efforts to make Squeeze even better, while continuing to provide support for our Lenny user base. The standard Lenny installer can install Debian on all models of Eee and our custom installer provides the ability to install over wireless for almost every model (more about this later) from a very small image. The latter continues to be our recommended install method, since in addition to being wireless-ready, the custom installer also handles a few other small eee-specific configuration chores to make as much as possible just work right after the install. Solid mainstream support We ve made good on our promise to make Debian work on the Eee PC, not a derivative, many of which use a custom kernel instead of the stock kernel as we do and use a special desktop instead of our users favourites. While we agree that some intriguing things can be done in these areas, it is no substitute for mainstream support. Our users are better served by a solid foundation than specialised modifications that limit their choices. We want them to be able to enjoy the freedom to mold Debian, the universal OS, into whatever suits them best. Squeeze support started Work is well underway on supporting all Eee models in Squeeze. For months, several team members have been experimenting with new kernels, producing support for them in eeepc-acpi-scripts. The current release of this key package (version 1.1.0) supports Linux 2.6.29 and contains enhancements for wifi, sound hotkeys, bluetooth, external displays and OSD. Squeeze will support wired & wifi on all current models With the appearance of 2.6.29 in Sid, all ethernet and wifi cards used in all models of Eee today are supportable without the need for out-of-kernel or non-free drivers. Madwifi is replaced by the free ath5k driver, the non-free rt2860 package is replaced by mainstream kernel support, (though it still requires non-free firmware provided separately,) rtl8187se is included, making it possible now for us to support the model 701SD, and ath9k is included, making full support for newer models such as the 1000HE possible. Lenny backports and live demo All of these changes can be enjoyed today by Lenny users. Just add Daniel Baumann s Lenny kernel backport repository and then install the 2.6.29 kernel and an updated acpid. See our upgrade howto for details. You can try a small (less than 256M) demo of this configuration by downloading beta 2 of our Live USB image. Accessibility Late last year, we discussed how to make it easier for the blind to install Debian unassisted on their Eee PCs. As it was a simple change, we now include brltty in the custom installer, but we understand that some users also need software synthesized text-to-speech, something for which there is no support yet in the standard Debian-installer. We understand this isn t an easy thing to fix, but hope someone will rise to the challenge. Growing team of developers We welcome Darren Salt and Raphael Geissert to the team this year. Both have been actively making contributions to the eeepc-acpi-scripts package over the past months, fixing some outstanding bugs and readying it to handle changes in more recent kernel releases. Moved eeepc.debian.net to new hosting Nico Golde, who hosted eeepc.debian.net for the first year development, has turned his focus to other areas of Debian. Glenn Saberton has stepped in to provide a new home for it. We thank them both for their efforts and for a smooth, uneventful transition from one host to the other. Size of user community Speaking of the move, earlier this year, Glenn shared with us some interesting archive traffic statistics that give us a rough idea how many users we have. For the months of December and January, after factoring out bot hits, we were seeing about 300,000 hits from 15,000 unique users per month. The site handles roughly 60G of traffic per month, most of that from thousands of downloads of our custom installer image. It s hard to draw any firm conclusions about the size of our user base from these stats, as many users may be on dynamic IP numbers, inflating the numbers, but we can conservatively say we have at least 5000 users. Other interesting statistics are that we have anywhere up to 80 users at any given time on our irc channel and over 250 users on the mailing list. Help wanted The Asus Eee PC line continues to expand, with 24 models listed so far. It is a challenge to keep up support for all of them. We re encouraged to see Asus choose a new b/g/n wifi chipset for their 1002HA that is supported by a DFSG free driver ath9k in this case. It appears that the new Atom N280-based 1000HE uses the same chipset as well (though be careful: I know of at least one user who bought a 1000HE in Argentina expecting it to have this chipset and was disappointed to find it had the Ralink chipset instead, we guess because of availability). If this trend continues, we ll be that much closer to our goal of full support for Squeeze main. As it stands, we re already as close as we can get given the state of rt2860 and no prospect on the horizon for replacing the non-free firmware. If you would like to help us out in any way, whether by testing, debugging, patching, or improving our documentation, get in touch with our team. We rely on your feedback to keep Lenny in good shape and work towards making Squeeze even better for all users of Debian on the Eee PC.

My message Intent to package a Debian control file grepper to WNPP and debian-devel is today a decade old. Apparently, the message predates the invention of the acronym ITP for Intent to Package (the first instance I can find is from May 1999). The changelog reveals that the first upload was on March 1st, 1999. There is unfortunately no record of when the package hit unstable the first time, since dinstall did not send Installed (or even the later Accepted) mails to an archived mailing list at that time. I suppose I might have it in some old private email archive, but more likely it s just gone. Similarly, the first fixed bug (#35527) predates BTS archiving and is now lost. The grep-dctrl program came out of repeated awkward grepping of the dpkg available and status files. Eventually I decided there must be a better way, and failed to find any canned solutions (I was later pointed to sgrep, which didn t look useful enough, and even later to dpkg-awk, but I had already committed to my own solution by then). I wrote a simple C program that processed these files as a sequence of records and did simple substring searches in each record. I rapidly added support for field selection, regular expressions and output field selection. By version 1.3a of March 2000 (which was released with Debian 2.2 potato ), the program was as good as it was going to get with one exception. Make disjunctive searches possible, said my TODO file those days. Conjunctive searches (that is, AND-searches) were possible even then by using more than one grep-dctrl command in a pipeline. Disjunctive (OR) was not possible. The problem was not so much that it would be hard to program (although the program s internal structure wasn t very good, to be honest, making extensive changes difficult), it was more a problem of coming up with a good command line syntax. Another thing that bothered me with the old grep-dctrl was how to implement Ben Armstrong s feature request. Again, the programming part wasn t the problem, the problem was coming up with a good, clean semantics for the feature. It was finally the appearance of ara in 2003 that got me moving again. Ara s author proudly compared eir program to grep-dctrl, claiming that my program did not do disjunctive searches while ara does. Competition being good for the soul, I took it as a challenge. In April 2003 I announced a complete rewrite of grep-dctrl, which was completed in January 2004 (the 2.0 release). The rewrite changed the way the command line was handled even though the usual Unix switch style is still used, the command line is regarded as a language with a parser (first an operator-precedence parser, then a recursive-descent one). The command line is transformed into an interpreted stack-based language which drives the actual grepping. The rewrite also generalised the internal data structures into an internal library which could be used to write other tools. The first such tool was sort-dctrl (introcuded in 2.7, June 2005), which was soon followed by tbl-dctrl (2.8, July 2005). The later appearance of join-dctrl (2.11, August 2007) finally allowed me to close Ben Armstrong s longstanding feature request mentioned above. The unpronounceable part of the names, dctrl , is an abbreviation for Debian control , which I decided to call the file format used by dpkg. Some people call it a RFC-822 format, but that really is a misnomer, since the differences between dctrl and RFC-822 outweigh the mainly superficial similarities (and the historical connection). I did consider calling my program dpkg-grep, but I didn t feel like I had the right to invade the dpkg namespace. The later rename to dctrl-tools reflects the fact that there are now several tools, grep-dctrl being just the oldest. I have several plans for the dctrl-tools suite, but my time and energy are mostly claimed by other responsibilities. The suite is currently team-maintained, but unfortunately the team is not very active. I would love it if I weren t the most active one with my busy schedule! Feel free to pop in on the dctrl-tools-devel mailing list, and to look at the Git repository and the todo list. If you decide to participate, please follow the rules.

Giving up on a position within a free software project when you know you re no longer managing to do an effective job is a wonderfully liberating experience. Now that I have started to talk with Miriam Ruiz about handing over the Debian Jr. project, I can stop worrying about the leadership task and just have fun with it. I can always count on Miriam for recommendations for games in Debian my kids may enjoy, as she has a passion for finding good games to package for Debian, and in particular, games for children. Over the past few weeks we ve had some fun with her picks. At the same time, I always have Debian Jr. in mind. How can we ensure kids can have the most fun with this? How do we equip their guides to help them? What we ve done with each new piece of software is to find a quiet time when one or more of the children can start playing with it on their own while we watch, offering such guidance as they need, but for the most part just letting them loose with it. Each wrinkle of the brow, each impetuous thump of the mouse, every illuminated grin and exclamation of delight is noted. We try to see what frustrates or pleases our kids and discuss it both with them and the Debian maintainers and upstream developers. This is an excercise we ve managed to pull off without being overly intrusive and the results have been well worth the effort. Using a few of Miriam s picks we tried this week, we were able to draw their play into the free software development process. Here s a brief summary of those sessions: Platinum Arts Sandbox puts into children s hands the ability to role play in a 3D world and edit that world using simplified controls. The expressions on the faces of our kids as they played were priceless: both the ups and the downs. I wanted to capture this on video and share it. After having established a rapport with upstream, we took a 20 minute clip of one of our play sessions and gave a copy to them to use to help further their work. Here is the edited result. They were very pleased to have that kind of feedback and found the video valuable for determining where the software still needed improvement and to notice which aspects particularly pleased the children. I happen to know that Hex-a-hop is one of Miriam s personal favourites. We have a household full of puzzle-lovers so this puzzle game was an instant hit. While on irc on #debian-jr with Miriam we relayed in real-time some of the reactions as they played this and a handful of her other picks. This gave her some confirmation of areas she knew needed work as well as inspiration for upcoming releases of these packages. During this play session, which also included StegaVorto, kartofel, Anagramarama, Funny Boat and Vodovod, my youngest girl, age 7, plunked down on the couch next to me as her 10-year-old sister played. Then she started to notice I was typing what people in the livingroom were saying and doing on irc. She took a mild affront to me copying her own words and actions, so I decided it would be better to let her participate so she would feel included. At this point, I started playing secretary for her, typing what she dictated to me while she read the responses from the display. Later, I just handed her the keyboard so she could type and read the responses on her own. She was still at it long past bedtime and it was with some reluctance that she finally gave up the keyboard. We all had a lot of fun and look forward to doing this again. We are particularly careful with privacy, taking care to share pictures, videos, and other personal details only so far as we believe it does not put our children at risk. Also, we need to ensure we observe in a way that is welcome and doesn t interfere with their enjoyment. But with a little bit of prudence and a practiced eye and ear for what increases or diminishes enjoyment of the software, we can involve our children directly in the free software development process. I commend to anyone who has the privilege to share free software with children to use this method to communicate with maintainers and developers, increasing your own enjoyment of the software in the process and that of children and their guides everywhere.

This is the follow-up on my Asus EEE PC configuration. Next on my TODO list was to make the webcam work, and as Ben Armstrong had pointed it worked fairly well, proving to be a non-issue. After that, I decided it would be a good thing if the presence of my bluetooth-enabled cellphone were tested, so that if I walk away from the PC, it called xscreensaver -lock. After some googling, I found a tool that did just that: BlueProximity. It really seemed a good idea, except that my cellphone (a Palm Treo 650) kept warning me about a connection going on, which was quite unpleasant. This happens because BlueProximity tests the RSSI of a bluetooth connection Beautiful, but a little overkill for what I wanted: I just wanted to know if it is there or not. First I tested the bluetooth discovery with hcitool scan, but for that I would have to keep my cellphone Discovery On, which is not a smart thing to do So I tested other things, and found out that hcitool name XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX only returned the name of my cellphone if it were around. So that was what I used. This is treo-presence.sh script:

#!/bin/bash
TREO='XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX'
NAME='name_of_my_cellphone'
CMD="/usr/bin/hcitool name $TREO" 
if [ " $CMD " = "$NAME" ]; then
  exit 1
fi
exit 0

It returns 0 or 1 if the TREO device is absent or present, respectively. I use it from the following cron script:

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/w   /bin/grep $LOGNAME > /dev/null 2>&1
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
  # Running user is not logged in
  exit 1
fi
CMD="/usr/local/bin/treo-presence.sh" 
LOCK_CMD="/usr/bin/xscreensaver-command -lock" 
FILE="/tmp/no-treo-lock.txt" 
TMPFILE= /bin/tempfile 
/bin/touch $FILE
/usr/bin/tail -2 $FILE > $TMPFILE
$CMD; echo $? >> $TMPFILE
/bin/mv $TMPFILE $FILE
/bin/rm -f $TMPFILE
for line in  cat $FILE ; do
  if [ "$line" = "1" ]; then
    exit 1
  fi
done
# Got here: all 3 lines are not 1
$LOCK_CMD > /dev/null 2>&1
exit 0

This is run from the user crontab file every minute, recording the last 3 runs in a file in /tmp. If all 3 runs indicates the absence of my cellphone, xscreensaver -lock is called. Simple enough and doesn t give me connection warnings in my Treo. Other approaches are surely possible. Also, I am not sure treo-presence.sh would work for other devices This is just what works for me

Preface: legal stuff Depending on where you live, use of random open wifi networks might be considered illegal. Although I know of no law in my country against doing this, where you live, things may be different, so educate yourself before following my example. Wifi roaming on the move For the past year I have used my Eee PC on the metro transit bus, as it is the perfect size for this. When I can, I take advantage of open networks to connect back home. In this article I will show how you can actually use such access, will recommend which software works best and will explain how to set it up. So, what can I really do with the net while in motion? How about irc? No kidding! This shell one-liner does the job:

while ! ssh -t 10.9.8.7 'screen -UDr' 2>/dev/null ; do echo -n "." ; sleep .1 ; done

We’re concerned about privacy and security on other people’s networks, so we use ssh. Inside that screen session, keep irssi running for a continuous irc presence. Every 10th of a second, the script tries to resume your session. Once a the net passes by, typing “[Enter]~.” drops you back out to retry again. The row of dots serves as a progress bar. If you want to get fancy, you could replace that with an ASCII ‘spinner’. I leave that as an exercise for the reader. :) Come on, is that really usable? Certainly. As the good folks on #eeepc at irc.freenode.net and #debian-eeepc at irc.oftc.net can attest, even a half dozen brief connections can be enough to provide tech support, rough out some development ideas, or just carry on some friendly chat. If your spouse or housemate is online too, it can even help you make some last-minute grocery-list changes. :) While the script is working, enjoy some offline things such as blogging, reading a cached Planet Debian feed or a PDF book. OK, so what else do I need to make it work? Well, you’ve seen so far we need on a server:

• openssh-server
• screen
• irssi

On the Eee, you should also have:

• openssh-client
• wpasupplicant
• gnome-terminal

But what do I need wpasupplicant for if I only use open networks? Well, wpasupplicant is really handy for fast control of networks in Roaming Mode (as per /usr/share/doc/wpasupplicant/README.modes.gz). A GUI is just too slow. For example, you may need to filter out ‘junk’ open wifi nets: pay-per-use hotspots or nets that hide their name. You’ll not only want a “catch-all” stanza for any open network, but also a number of the most commonly found default network names, e.g.

# Catch-all; associates with any open network:
network= 
     key_mgmt=NONE
 
# Commonly found default network names:
network= 
     ssid="default" 
     key_mgmt=NONE
 
network= 
     ssid="linksys" 
     key_mgmt=NONE
 
# etc. by watching scan_results closely you'll find several more

While the connect script is running, keep a separate tab open in gnome-terminal for wpa_cli. Use ‘disable_network 0’ to drop the catch-all and let the other stanzas kick in and ‘enable_network 0’ after filtering is no longer needed. Isn’t it really slow to get connected? Without some tweaks, yes. But here are a few things I have found by trial and error that help. One issue is that dhclient takes too long to retry, so you drop the delay between retries back to 1 second in /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf:

backoff-cutoff 1;
initial-interval 1;

If the signal is very weak, you’ll want the transmit power turned up to the maximum value for your hardware. For the Eee PC 4G this is 50mW, so you set this in /etc/network/interfaces for ath0, your wireless interface:

wireless-txpower 50mW

Finally, while you’re in motion you are constantly leaving no-longer-usable access points behind. The driver needs to discard them as quickly as possible and scan for new ones. So again in /etc/network/interfaces for ath0, you bring the default scanvalid 60 seconds down to 10 with:

pre-up /sbin/iwpriv ath0 scanvalid 10

Conclusion The netbook has changed how we use the net. Now that we can take it everywhere, we either pay through the nose for expensive cell network access or else use the patchy wifi coverage blanketing most urban areas. A few lucky cities have such things as municipal wifi nets, but the rest of us have to scrape what access we can wherever we go. You are now equipped to try this out on the bus. If you find any other tips that can help, I’d love to hear from you.

Some brief highlights of the last three months of Debian Eee PC development. Thermal and ACPI breakage resolved in 2.6.26-7 We’re pleased to see that in the upload to Sid of linux-image-2.6.26-1-686 version 2.6.26-7, the pair of 2.6.26 bugs we’ve been tracking that have made it difficult for Eee users to upgrade their systems have been resolved. Since then 2.6.26-8 has been uploaded and is expected to enter Lenny this week due to a freeze exception. Once the new kernel has migrated we will move quickly to build and release a new installer that includes it. Ath5k wifi works on Eee PC in Linux 2.6.27 Jean-Christophe reports that ath5k works in Linux 2.6.27 on the Eee PC 701, and just needs a small patch to work with our eeepc-acpi-scripts package. This is good news for those of us with models 701, 900, 900A and 1000HD who have been wanting to get off of the non-free Madwifi drivers and onto DFSG free drivers. New Eee PC model 701SD wifi support in the works Users of the new Eee PC Model 701SD have just started showing up looking for support in mainstream Linux distros. Martin Filtenborg confirmed using our Eee PC Live image with the GPL’d rtl8187se driver from Realtek that we can at least use it to connect to an unencrypted AP, get an IP address and ping other hosts. Of course, it is one thing to have a working vendor-supplied driver and quite another to have mainstream support. We’ll make do with what we have now, but will be seeking a mainstream solution as soon as possible. We’re seeking more testers and developers to work on this. To date, an ITP has not been filed, as it is not yet clear who is going to carry this work forward. Chasing the 5 second boot An interesting discussion on Arjan van de Ven and Auke Kok’s work to get an Eee 901 to boot in 5 seconds took place this month. While the Debian Eee PC team is not making work on this a priority, we’ll keep an eye on it to see if Debian can incorporate some or all of the techniques they used so that our users can benefit without making radical changes to their systems. Working towards mainstream support for rt2860 Our filing of an ITP for rt2860 (the wifi driver for models 901, 1000 and 1000H) was followed by discussion about how to separate out the GPL’d driver from the embedded non-free firmware so that it can at least go into contrib. Glenn Saberton has been working on rewriting the build system around kbuild and separating out the firmware. Numerous improvements to ACPI scripts Since my last progress report, there have been numerous improvements to the eeepc-acpi-scripts package to deal with all of the various models we now support and make the scripts more robust and flexible. Check out the changelog for details.

As always, we’re doing lots of interesting and significant things and have more good ideas than we have people to do the work.  If you have an Eee PC or are planning to get one, or are otherwise interested in our work, some of which has uses beyond just the Eee, here are some highlights: Earliest Eee models supported in Lenny Lenny will release with the atl2 ethernet driver and the non-free madwifi-source now works with the earliest Eee models as well, so our patched version is no longer needed.  This means Lenny will work with all of the earliest models of the Eee PC: 701 (2G and 4G surf, 4G, 8G) and 900! All we need now for full support in Lenny is to replace the non-free wireless driver with the free ath5k driver when it is ready. Free drivers Nick Kossifidis has submitted patches on linux-wireless supporting the Eee models currently supported only by the non-free madwifi in ath5k.  This means we’ll soon realize our goal of a completely DFSG free system for the earliest models of the Eee.  By 2.6.27, or at the latest 2.6.28, these models will be supported.  Then we will see about making a patch to support whichever kernel makes it into Lenny. New models Model 901, 1000 and 1000H users are now able to install using the atl1e ethernet driver from eeepc.debian.net.  Support for wireless and other aspects of the new hardware will follow soon.  The debian-kernel team was prompt to add atl1e to 2.6.26 which has just been uploaded to sid.  We hope 2.6.26 makes it into Lenny. Wireless installer Glenn Saberton has been doing an upstanding job adding wireless support to our custom Debian-installer.  We have supported WEP authentication for several releases, now, and a beta version supports WPA.  Glenn is also making progress with these patches upstream so that non-Eee Debian users will benefit from our work. LXDE is in Lenny LXDE has entered Lenny, thanks to Andrew Lee.  It is a quite lightweight desktop environment that is made with the Eee PC in mind. Live images Two flavours of Debian-live USB images are available: a demo of the LXDE desktop and a minimal console-only image for rescue/backup.  The images are still in alpha stage of development.  If you’d like to help, give us a shout.

More interesting things are planned for the future that benefit Debian as a whole.  With a small amount of work patching live-helper, anyone will be able to make a live image that includes a customized Debian-installer. Mobile device initiative This month on debian-devel, there was some interesting discussion about Debian support for the Intel Atom processor and a possible mobile net device initiative.  That’s something we could get behind, if anything comes of it. Wiki translation Robert Epprecht has been keeping the German wiki translation in good shape, but we could always use some more help with any of the translations. New members welcome If you’d like to join us, check out our site at http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC and drop us a note on our list or join our irc channel and talk to us about what you’d like to do.