Ben Armstrong opened an ITP for the ATL1E NIC driver, which is found on some Asus EeePC laptops. So, as suggested by Maximilian Attems, I provided a clean patch for this driver, made from a cherry-pick from the linux-netdev 2.6.27 tree. It has been commited into the 2.6.26-1 Debian kernel, which will be furnished with Lenny. What's fun, is that in the mean time, I got a new computer at work. Wait, it's not fun yet. Because what I did not know is that it's made of an Asus P5Q motherboard which runs a NIC needing the ATL1E driver (and now you see it's fun). So I've just upgraded to 2.6.26-1-amd64 and I'm glad that my own work is useful to me (and will be probably be to others as well).

I was pleased to learn through Christer Edwards of the existence of a sister project in Ubuntu to our Debian Eee PC project. I followed up on his invitation to drop in on their irc channel and introduce myself. I’ve been looking over the bugs listed on their TODO to see if any are applicable to Debian. Already I have filed #479217 based on the corresponding bug in Ubuntu, and have encouraged them to check out ours as well. I look forward to sharing more with them in the future so we can benefit from each other’s work.

Installing Debian on your Eee PC is even easier now, as the option to install over wireless is now present in our custom debian-installer image. Also, the new installer automates installation of many more things than prior releases, so wireless, acpi hotkeys and suspend all ‘just work’ out of the box. Two barriers remain to including wireless support for the Eee in Debian main. The first is the lack of wireless support in the official d-i installer. The second is the dependency on the non-free madwifi driver. I have no illusions about this being ready for Lenny, but I hope in Lenny + 1 this will be realized. The good news is that Nick Kossifidis is working on getting support for the Eee into ath5k. For patches, see: http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/mickflemm. I have created a stub page FreeYourEee in our wiki about making a completely DFSG free install of Debian on the Eee. I encourage anyone going this route to contribute.

From the start of the DebianEeePC project, we have used a combination of the irc channel and our wiki site to our great advantage. The DebianEeePC/HowTo/Install document has been actively maintained as we go, serving not only as a good reference for new users, but also for existing users and developers to see where improvements are being made and what is left to work out. Recently, we’ve started using the wiki for task management as well. Patterned after DebianInstaller/Bugs, we now have DebianEeePC/Bugs where we link to reports on the BTS for packages we maintain and our own usertags on packages we don’t maintain. As well, we are keeping a DebianEeePC/Todo to manage our tasks. I see from a search through the wiki that lots of other Debian subprojects keep Todo lists, but most of them have little more structure than point-form lists. A few, though, have structured these pages a bit more carefully. For instance, some of these use tables listing who each task is assigned to, when it was assigned, and when it is completed. Our point-form list is a bit more free-form regarding task assignments. Participants can register their interest in a given task and what they are doing as a subpoint of the task. As for state changes over time, we rely on the revision history on “info” page for people to be able to see state changes for particular Todo items. When something is done, it just gets dropped from the list. I haven’t exhaustively reviewed everyone’s Todo page, but from my brief survey I haven’t seen a couple of things I’ve added to try to help people choose what to do next. The first is to tag items with six difficulty/importance pairs, rating each actionable item from Easy/Urgent to Hard/Wishlist. The second is to state dependencies between items using anchors. It would be nice to see any of you are doing something similar and hear about whether it has worked out well for you. I’m happy with how the irc/wiki combination has helped with project management. In the past with a different project I’ve made an abortive attempt to use the task management system at Alioth, but it just seemed too cumbersome and nobody ended up using it. With the wiki, it appears barriers to participation in task management are sufficiently lowered that everyone is willing to help keep it up. And with irc, we can keep on top of defining and assigning (or more usually volunteering to do) various tasks, and making sure the wiki is kept completely up to date. It takes a bit of discipline to do, but after the habits are established, it gets easier, and the rewards are well worth it.

In the past few months in the Debian-EeePC team, a number of interesting things have been happening. Progress has been made to ensure the Eee’s drivers get merged upstream. Chris Snook from Red Hat has taken over atl2 upstream and has started merging it with the atl1 driver to make a unified atlx driver that will be suitable for inclusion in the kernel. As well, there is continued progress on the madwifi driver, with a patch now included to support version 2.6.24 of the Linux kernel. In the meantime, the Debian Eee PC Install HowTo has been under constant revision, even gaining recently the beginnings of translations in French and German. ACPI, another important piece of infrastructure for the Eee, is now supported in lenny and sid through Eric Cooper’s eeepc-acpi kernel module. This is a fork of the asus-acpi module renamed so that it won’t conflict with the in-tree version. It turns out that asus-acpi is deprecated, having been replaced by asus-laptop. Eric has been in touch with the asus-laptop maintainer to ensure the Eee-specific bits are merged so that we can eventually retire our forked version. There still remains at the top of our Todo list the issue of ACPI scripts to go with the kernel module. Having at first considered patching acpi-support, we have decided instead to start with Eric’s own scripts which will be packaged shortly for Debian. This gives us more freedom to tinker before considering submitting patches to more general laptop support packages like acpi-support. Finally, after Brendan M. had to send his Eee back to Asus for repairs, work stopped for a while on the custom debian-eeepc installer. Fortunately, he just got his system back from the shop as good as new and has returned with renewed vigor to that task. He has produced a new version of the installer which we are now testing. Thanks to the efforts of numerous users and developers who are being added to our ranks daily, we expect by the time Lenny releases we will be well on our way to providing a pure Debian solution for the Eee. Whether or not everything needed for the Eee is in Lenny at that time remains to be seen. We need to allow for how long it takes to get new drivers into the kernel. But if we miss the release, we will certainly provide backports and look forward to full support in the following release.

As I wrote earlier, I bought an Eee PC to use on the bus. Initially, I only used it offline to do some Debian packaging and blogging, but I soon discovered that I could do a few things online on the many open networks on my daily commute. While the connections are normally brief in good traffic conditions, even a few seconds here and there is enough to participate in irc discussions. Manually connecting to each got old very quickly. So, to automate those connections I settled on wpa_supplicant, (wpasupplicant is the Debian package name,) which is quite easy to set up in roaming mode, as outlined in /usr/share/doc/wpasupplicant/README.modes.gz. All you need is the following in /etc/network/interfaces:

allow-hotplug ath0
iface ath0 inet manual
        wpa-driver wext
        wpa-roam /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

Then create your wpa_supplicant.conf as follows:

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
network= 
     key_mgmt=NONE
 

That’s it. You can now roam from one open network to the next and the supplicant will connect you to each one in turn. I have used this to reconnect to my screen session each time the bus slows down for a stop or gets stuck in traffic to carry on conversations on irc for the whole length of the commute. If you also connect to networks requiring authentication, you’ll need to add a “network” clause for each network. See /usr/share/doc/wpasupplicant/examples/ for help with that, particularly the annotated conf file, README.wpa_supplicant.conf.gz. For finer control over the process, I use sudo wpa_cli so i can:

• keep an eye on what networks are around: scan, then scan_results,
• disconnect from a network once I know it’s out of range
• and reassociate as needed.

The only things that I haven’t figured out how to do yet are to make the process of switching from one network to the next a bit faster (it normally takes about a minute; precious seconds of online time are lost when the bus is in motion,) and to blacklist certain essids, e.g. commercial hotspots that make you pay before they’ll route your packets to the Internet. For the first problem, I have already tweaked my dhcp settings, which helps a bit. For the second, I tried adding network blocks for specific networks and setting them to a lower priority, but that doesn’t work because then the ‘catch all’ open network block kicks in and picks them up anyway.

Atheros has released a AR5007EG chipset patch that makes wifi work for Debian on the Eee PC. I have used the instructions in the ticket to build and install the patched driver. As noted in the comments, you’ll need the snapshot, not the latest release source for the patch to apply cleanly.

With Kel Modderman’s help, we now have a working atl2 driver for the Eee PC. This brings the Debian-eeepc project one step closer to providing a pure Debian replacement for the Xandros OS that ships with the unit. Now that Asus has released the GPLed source that was missing before, we now just have to ensure both the atl2 and asus_acpi modules get merged upstream. The driver for the wifi in the Eee isn’t under the GPL, however, and therefore only works on the Xandros kernel provided with the default OS. Since I really can’t live without wifi and it is not my first choice to buy replacement hardware, in the interim, I’m living with using the Xandros kernel and modules on Debian. I can learn from studying the Xandros components in action, but it’s not a solution I’m happy with in the long term. The Debian-eeepc project’s goal is to produce a pure Debian solution, at least as far as that is possible given the hardware present in an unmodified system. On that front, I think the best bet is for ath5k to support the particular Atheros chip in the Eee. (Yes, I know about ndiswrapper, but for both technical and philosophical reasons I won’t use it.)

The search for the ideal mobile text editing device is over. While the price was well over my original budget, we’ve since gone ahead and splurged on two new Eee PCs: one for me, one for my wife. In the end, I think it will be worth it because these systems are capable of far more than just editing text. Now comes the challenging part. Xandros is the default OS and we want Debian on it instead. I have started supplementing the system with packages from Etch and Etch-backports using apt pinning, but already I have noticed some cracks beginning to develop: with pure Xandros, an SD card was automounted when it was inserted. Now it fails. Also, the Network utility no longer launches. I can work around these glitches for now, but it is plain that in the long term this Xandros/Etch hybrid is going to be more grief than it is worth. To that end, enter Debian-eeepc. Building on the work started by timbobsteve and drawing from the collective experience of the Eeeuser.com community we will make a debian-live cd + debian-installer to install Debian (as pure as possible—obviously the kernel is going to be our most contentious issue) on the device. So stay tuned for more articles on that work-in-progress. And how does my new toy shape up for mobile text editing so far? I’m delighted! For starters, this article was drafted on the bus home from work. The keyboard, while small, is still quite usable for touch-typing, the display is crisp and bright, and the size is just perfect for the cramped quarters of a public transit bus seat. But beyond just editing text, I have loaded up the system with all of the tools that go around it: subversion, git, ruby, gcc, meld, etc. I’ll be able to manage a fair amount of development on the bus, with the exception being really large builds that will continue to be done on remote build systems.

For some time I have ignored my blog so I did not notice that when my co-admin upgraded our system from etch to lenny, it broke. When I found some time to look at it, it turned out to be because the blog was no longer running in production mode, so it pointed at the empty development database. This caused every URL to redirect to the login page, but since I didn’t have a valid user for that db, I couldn’t login. This, in turn, was due to the upgrade of mod_fcgid from the old 1.10 version in Etch to 2.1. Apparently, this used to work. Note the name of the module:

<IfModule mod_fastcgi.c>
   <Directory /var/www/vir/syn.theti.ca/typo>
    FastCgiIpcDir /tmp/fcgi_ipc/
    FastCgiServer /var/www/vir/syn.theti.ca/typo/public/dispatch.fcgi -initial-env RAILS_ENV=production -processes 15 -idle-timeo
ut 60
   </Directory>
</IfModule>

It’s strange that the section is called mod_fastcgi.c, not mod_fcgid.c. Either that was done to make it a “drop in” replacement for fastcgi, and later changed in the next release, or else this config was not actually used, but somehow my blog started in production mode before the upgrade anyway. In any case, the blog is back in production node with the new fcgid with the following module section (based on this one from the mod_fcgid home page).

<IfModule mod_fcgid.c>
   DefaultInitEnv RAILS_ENV production
   <Directory /var/www/vir/syn.theti.ca/typo>
     FCGIWrapper "/var/www/vir/syn.theti.ca/typo/public/dispatch.fcgi" .fcgi
   </Directory>
</IfModule>

Hope this is helpful to others making the upgrade.

Ben Armstrong commented:

"When trying to pin down the exact date when I joined, the keyring changelog is no help. First entry for me is in 2000, which is 3 years later. The web archive is no good, as I joined too late in 1997. Searching for me in the PTS shows my first changelog entry 6 Nov 1997, but that's a bit sloppy because that datestamp was added when the packaging process started. It doesn't reflect when the package was finally uploaded. Mailing list posts are little help. But the first file on master is Dec 8 1997 .Xauthority. So I know it was between November 6th and Dec 8th. Not too bad, but I'd love to know the exact day."

Glad it was some use. I have my suspicions that the only way to find the exact date is to get all the keyring maintainers from that time and regress them under hypnosis. Do you think we can arrange that as a BOF at Debconf next week? The "Cracking Open Minds to Discover Debian Developer Joining Dates BOF"?

Who are the next generation of Debianists? Are they all still coming to us out of different OS backgrounds, or do we now have the significant beginnings of a home grown generation, born and raised in Debian-using families and now making their voices heard? I hope that Debian Jr. will encourage this kind of generational growth of the project. When recently I rewrote the guiding principles of Debian Jr., my vision was a Debian that children would identify as their own. I expect they will be eager to add their own ideas as they grow up with it. It was pointed out to me today that there is some evidence that this is already happening (thanks for the link, Matthew Wilcox). As for my own kids, ages 16, 15, 12, 9 and 5, only the oldest have ever used some system at home other than Debian¹. They all comfortably use our Debian systems daily, discussing regularly with me what they need. This leads to filing bugs and patches on their behalf², and inspires further development of the Debian Jr. project. So, in at least this sense, the children of Debian are already contributing members of Debian, if not voting members. The ideas of families are improving Debian for everyone. As the project grows, I expect the ways in which families will change Debian will be more significant, not only technically but also in Debian’s character.

¹ Before we started using Debian in 1995, the family system was a VT-420 terminal connected to the Solaris system running our community freenet. At that time our kids would sit in my lap and play at typing into pico for their amusement.

² For instance, I was pleased to discover the other day that my egoboo patch was accepted. That was a direct result of my kids asking me to make it work for them.

A little remembered fact is that the Debian Jr. project had a directory in the subversion repository of the CDD project at Alioth. Aside from Andreas Tille’s experimental conversion of Debian Jr. to use cdd-dev¹, there was nothing else there until today. While I was in the process of populating this directory with the junior-* metapackages and adding an external reference to the live CD config, it seemed to me that it would be better to move the whole thing to our own repository at Alioth, which I promptly did. So now you can check it out:

$ svn co svn://svn.debian.org/debianjr

As well, I registered Debian Jr. at http://cia.vc/ and configured svn so that the CIA bot will report on the #debian-jr channel at irc.debian.org for every commit. And finally, I applied for the creation of a debian-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org list. As soon as the list is created, I will hook it up to the repository so you can subscribe to commit emails.

¹ Although this seemed like a good idea at the time, for various reasons I ended up sticking with the single metapackage per category model Debian Jr. uses to this day. But I have retained this experiment in the repository under svn://svn.debian.org/debianjr/branches/EXP-cdd-dev in case we ever reverse that decision.

I have long recognized that to be usable by young kids, xjig really needs a better user interface. So I wrote a launcher, xjig-menu to address the problem. It adds a file open dialog (via zentiy) and support for more file formats (via imagemagick). Update

I have put this script in subversion and added a man page. Check it out:

  $ svn co svn://svn.debian.org/pkg-games/people/synrg/xjig

or browse the repository.

Now that live-helper¹ has superceded live-package I have a config for the junior livecd work-in-progress in the debian-live repository:

sudo apt-get install live-helper
svn co svn://svn.debian.org/debian-live/configs/junior
sudo make-live --root junior &>make-live.log

This will build a usb image for the gnome-junior package list. If you want a regular iso image or want to try the kde-junior or xfce-junior lists, just make the appropriate changes in config. I have tested the usb image on a 1G usb key. At this point I’m not layering on customizations, but am focusing on basic usability issues: X autoconfiguration, sound, menus, etc. Once I’m happy with these I’ll move on to the kinds of customizations we’d like to make for children.

¹ live-helper is still in NEW at the moment. I’ve been checking it out from svn and building the package myself, though you can also get Daniel’s packages from his site. My config should work with a2-1 or later.

update For the time being it is best to stick with live-helper from svn, as my configs are being developed to work with trunk, which is still in flux (e.g. config variables are renamed without notice, etc.)

svn co svn://svn.debian.org/debian-live/dists/trunk/live-helper
cd live-helper ; debuild -us -uc

Ever since I started working towards a Debian Jr. livecd back in November, I’ve played off and on with qemu, approx and debian-live. Yesterday, I took another kick at the can. Being frustrated with make-live’s inability to combine two package lists, Daniel Baumann came to my rescue, promptly commiting and then releasing live-package 0.99.23-1 with three new package lists for Debian Jr.

• gnome-junior
• kde-junior
• xfce-junior

So now we have something to play with. Try it out. Install live-package 0.99.23-1 or later, configure /etc/make-live.conf to set LIVE_MIRROR to your favourite mirror (I use the apt caching proxy approx to avoid re-downloading the same packages from one run to the next) and pick an image and type to build, e.g.

$ sudo make-live -t usb -p gnome-junior

This makes a ./debian-live/binary.img that can be put on a 1G usb key flashdrive. We have more work to do to polish this. Particularly, since the GNOME and KDE flavours are larger than a 700M CD, some fat could be trimmed. If you’ve tried it, I’d love to hear your ideas on debian-jr@lists.debian.org.

In my first article about testing tuxpaint with xautomation, I mentioned that I wasn’t happy with hardwiring button positions. But before I could proceed, I discovered a bug in xautomation that prevented me from using visgrep to search for the “Yes” button in tuxpaint screenshots. Fortunately, the fix was straightforward enough after reading the libpng man page. At the same time, I also decided to borrow an idea from the example scripts in the xmacro package. Running the test script on the tester’s own display may be fine for developing the script, but it is nice to be able to run it on a virtual display after the kinks are worked out. For one thing, the test doesn’t get in the way of other things when you’re waiting for it to finish. For another, it is much easier to control the test environment. Xvfb is perfect for this. The resulting script requires tuxpaint, Xvfb, xautomation with the above patch applied, xbase-clients and Imagemagick.

In response to Home video hub on a shoestring, Justin asked, “Why not just stream the media over cifs/nfs/sshfs?” Why indeed? Well, as my fellow amateur Internet broadcaster Justin Zeigler (coincidentally of the same first name) observed, “some people mistake the unix way as doing things the oldest way possible.” There are niceties streaming video solutions provide that are much better suited to solving my particular problem. Streaming puts the burden of handling different codecs and providing material at a bitrate the client systems can handle on the server. Remember, I said my client system is underpowered and the network I’m delivering across is wireless B. These constraints make streaming video the ideal solution. Now, if I only wanted to stream the music videos and other material designed to deliver over the Internet, I’d be fine with a remote filesystem. But DVDs and mythtv recordings are too demanding on my little laptop’s resources to work at all. But, just to make sure, I tried both sshfs and nfs today. Sure enough, I could stream a Quicktime music video from sshfs just fine. However, neither sshfs nor nfs could deliver the material from a mythtv recording fast enough for the client to keep up. I tried both vlc and mplayer, and both were so stuttery they were unplayable. I gave mplayer a larger buffer (32K) which cleaned up the first few seconds of play while the player read from the buffer, but after that, it started stuttering again. And this was with only one floor of separation between the WAP and the laptop, to make sure I had a solid connection. Clearly, Videolan’s ability to transcode on the fly and stream over the network is a great convenience to me. I suppose I could do a file-to-file transcode and then read the resulting file from sshfs, but I don’t find that nearly as handy as the streaming solution. So I’m sticking with Videolan, as I find it the easiest to use, most elegant solution to delivering a broad range of video material from our powerful hub system to our less powerful client system.

Scripting a gui tester for Tuxpaint with xautomation was fun and quite useful too, but really only appeals to developers. Today I found use for xautomation that will appeal to sys admins and users: hacking around a user interface that refuses to work the way it ought to. I wanted to add another mythgame player, this time for the pcsx-df Playstation emulator. Unfortunately, I couldn’t pass it a CD image from the command line. It seems to know only how to do two things: run a game file, or run a real CD. My best guess is that it doesn’t know its plugins until the GUI starts, so it is unaware that it ought to be able to use the cdrmooby plugin to load the specified image when it is parsing the command line. After a brief and fruitless grep through the source, it dawned on me that I could put xautomation to work for me to do the job in much less time. Here is the resulting startpcsx script, which sucessfully operates as my pcsx mythgame player.

#!/bin/bash
slowtype ()  
   echo "$@"   sed -re 's/(.)/\"str \1\"\n\"usleep 15\"\n/g'
 
pcsx &
xte "sleep 2" "keydown Control_R" "key o" "keyup Control_R" "sleep 1" 
slowtype "$@"   xargs xte
xte "key Return" 

The hard part was that pcsx is afflicted by one of my pet peeves, a typeahead find that cannot be disabled. As a result, if you make xte type at full speed into the open file dialog, the filepath comes out all jumbled up. This happens because the filepath is constantly being redrawn as xte types characters, so the cursor isn’t always at the end of the line. The usleep 15 allows the cursor to reach the end of the line before typing the next character. Of course, this is truly a hack, subject to variations in timing between systems, so if you use it, you may have to tweak the sleep and usleep values. But it works well enough as a workaround until pcsx-df is fixed to accept a CD image on the command line.

In our family, we have centralized all our best entertainment technology in a single system, a white box amd64 with PVR, 3D graphics, 1G, a 21” monitor, DVD burner and VCR. A number of older, far less capable systems have always surrounded this “hub”. A K6-2/400 with a less-than wonderful ATI Rage IIc graphics card presently serves as my wife’s system, and my PII/300 laptop roams the house on wireless B. This has always been the model for our home network, dating back to the late 90’s when the hub in our cramped apartment was a P/100 delivering sound through a $30 pawn-shop stereo to two main rooms, and the satellite node in the family room was a DEC VT-420 on a long serial cable. So, house-wide delivery of sound has always been possible. But doing the same for video remained unsolved until just this weekend. Kudos to the Videolan team for making it possible. A number of years ago, I recognized their vlc player was ideal for playing DVDs on my K6-2, handling the job with less CPU and less frame drop than other alternatives at the time. Not too long afterwards, though, we upgraded our hardware so saving CPU cycles was no longer an issue, and switched to other players to take advantage of features they offered over vlc. But a recent email from a friend brought me back. This friend asked if I had seen a certain Linux documentary video he had found. I hadn’t, and was intrigued. But since the hub was tied up by the kids at that moment, I figured I’d try watching on the old PII laptop. I didn’t really think it would work, but remembering how well vlc did on my other old hardware, I gave it a try. It worked! No frame drop at all. Buoyed by that victory, I recalled that I had downloaded the Debconf 6 DVD ISOs some days ago, but had not yet been able to watch them. You probably can guess why … yup, the single hub system, the only one really capable of doing a good job displaying video, was pretty much always tied up by various other family members. Now, I knew there was no way I could get those DVDs onto the laptop, as it has no drive and only a 4G hdd. Nor was I willing to go to the bother of ripping individual tracks to transcode and send over one at a time. But I then recalled that vlc, as well as being an excellent standalone player, is primarily the client for a streaming video system. So I set out to learn how to stream video. Back when I was first introduced to Videolan, I knew there was a server program, vls. I had a quick look at that and was overwhelmed by the wide variety of possible MRLs and codecs, and a bit mystified as to which magic spells were needed to make it stream to the laptop. It then occurred to me I had probably plunged in too quickly, and should back off and go look for more docs than just the man pages. Sure enough, they have plenty of excellent docs, leading to the discovery that the vlc gui itself has easy to use Wizard and Open dialogs to set up streaming. With that sorted out, I was streaming in no time. At this point, I was delighted to discover that I could successfully stream a 1024 kbps mp4 stream across wireless B form the basement to any other room of our two-story semi. And ever since then, I’ve been having great fun with the family, trying a wide variety of other video sources lying around: music videos, home videos made by friends, TV shows recorded from the PVR, DVDs direct from disc, and yes, finally, those Debconf 6 ISOs. I tell you, it’s like Christmas come early! Thanks, Videolan. You’ve made my week.