Search Results: "Julien Valroff"

22 November 2009

Julien Valroff: Converted my packages to 3.0 (quilt) source format

I have now finished converted most of the packages I maintain (part of the official archive or not) to the new 3.0 (quilt) source format. I first had to switch from dpatch or cdbs simple-patchsys to quilt, which was easy thanks to Romain Francoise s old blog post. Also note this quick adaptation for cdbs:

for i in $(ls debian/patches/*.patch); do \
    I=$(basename $i   sed 's/.patch$//'); \
    quilt import -P $I.diff $i; \
done

The rest was much easier than what I thought, thanks to the related page on the wiki. I have already tried uploading a package to my personal repository, and reprepro just worked as expected.

25 October 2009

Julien Valroff: Start compiz (or any non-default WM) automatically with GNOME

I have just noticed the latest gnome-session package doesn t use compiz as default WM if installed. I have had to found the right way starting it for my session, anf finally found the following was the easiest and cleanest solution:

echo export WINDOW_MANAGER=/usr/bin/compiz >> ~/.gnomerc

Writing it here so that I can find it again

26 September 2009

Julien Valroff: HADOPI II law adopted

The HADOPI II law was finally adopted on September the 15th by the Assembl e Nationale. Guess what? My local representative, who wrote recently a very nice letter against this project, voted in favor of this law. This is not a real surprise, as it has also happened with the HADOPI I law last May, but this time, I will take the time to write him a letter to express my feelings.

12 May 2009

Julien Valroff: HADOPI law finally voted by my local representative

As expected, the French HADOPI law was voted earlier today by the Assembl e Nationale. As expected, my local representative voted in favour of this law. I had however kept a secret hope that he would abstain for this vote, following to the email I have received from his assistant following to our meeting. Mr Vannson planned to take the floor during the finale discussions. He had sent me for review the text they wrote, which perfectly matched my arguments, and even referred to the law as a Rube Goldberg machine ( Ma conviction est que nous avons mont une usine gaz in the original version). This text also stated that he was netiher convinced nor satisfied by the law.

His speech planned for the final discussions of the law never happened, and was replaced by a single line question to the Minister, during a meeting of the Law Commission.
This question was even technically incorrect as he refers to firewall, whereas I had (with a great help from other members of APRIL) amended this part of the text to refer to usage control software :

M. Fran ois Vannson. Les logiciels pare-feu ne risquent-ils pas, madame la ministre, de nuire aux logiciels libres ?
Mme la ministre. Il n y a aucune menace sur les logiciels libres, qui peuvent tout fait accepter des logiciels de s curisation.

From: http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/13/rapports/r1626.asp Which could be approximately translated as follows:

M. Fran ois Vannson. Mrs Minister, aren t firewall a threat on Free Software?
Mrs Minister. There is no threat on Free Software who can accept well accept securisation software.

I must hence express my real disappointment.
Now, let s hope this law won t be applicable, following the idea of most of its opponents. I won t write to my local representative, as I think it is totally hopeless. I guess he will get the pingbacks from this blog post, as his own political weblog runs on Free Software!

8 May 2009

Julien Valroff: Renewing my GnuPG keys

Following to the recent announce of a serious possible attack against the SHA-1 digest algorithm, I have just generated new GPG keys. My personal key 9F71D449 will hence be progressively replaced by my new key: 290D20C5
Its fingerprint is:

092F 4CB5 5F19 E006 1CFD  B489 D32B 8D66 290D 20C5

The old key will continue to be valid for some time (at least until the new one get signed by a Debian Developer, in order to be included in the DM keyring), but I prefer all future correspondence to come to the new one. Transition statement signed by both keys is available at: http://www.kirya.net/~julien/GPG-key-transition_20090508.txt They key used for my personal package repository (FBABB737) has already been revoked and replaced by E435C74B, with the following fingerprint:

D17A A78F 7992 A07D 9D85  517C C3E1 8B20 E435 C74B

You have to make apt-key aware of this change:

wget -O - http://packages.kirya.net/Kirya.netDebianpackagesVerificationKey.asc   apt-key add -

Transition statement signed by both keys is available at: http://packages.kirya.net/GPG-key-transition_20090508.txt Also note I have generated the key with ID 90A9E71B and got it sent to public servers by mistake. I do not own the private key hence I cannot revoke it: make sure you do not use it!

20 April 2009

Julien Valroff: HADOPI - meeting with my local representative

Following to the email sent regarding the French law known as HADOPI (I blogged about it a few weeks ago), I had a meeting this afternoon with my local representative. This half an hour meeting allowed me to explain my fears regarding this firewall which could be set up on French citizens computers to enable them to prove their non-culpability (provided their computer runs a popular proprietary OS). My representative kindly listened to me and his assistant understood the situation very well. I was even impressed that they have worked a lot on this law before the meeting. They both proposed to raise this issue to Christine Albanel, the current French Minister for Culture and Communication, who is at the origin of this law. They agreed to say that this wouldn t be changed for the next lecture (planned for the end of the month), as this particular chapter was meant to be detailed in further texts. They also admitted that this law had little chance to be really applied as is, as they consider some aspects to be anti-constitutional - they hence think that the French Constitutional Council will prevent this law to be applied, at least as it is when writing this post.
My representative also admitted that this law was somewhat outdated (even if not yet voted!). Actually, this kind of law will ever be outdated I kindly thank my representative for his time and his frankness (even if on the bad side for this law, he was very open to my thoughts). Good to know France is still a real Democracy!

19 April 2009

Julien Valroff: Xorg input hotplug

I had written a few weeks ago about my new (almost) empty xorg.conf file and explained how I had to edit an HAL .fdi file to change my keyboard layout and define my compose key. The Debian Xstrike Force have written a complete guide on the Debian wiki explaining this input hotplug system. I have found that there is no need to edit .fdi files, just set the following options at the end of /etc/default/console-setup:

XKBMODEL="pc105"
XKBLAYOUT="fr"
XKBVARIANT="latin9"
XKBOPTIONS="compose:lwin"

Even better, they should now be automatically grabbed from your existing xorg.conf when upgrading!

22 March 2009

Julien Valroff: Switched to Pulseaudio

Following to an issue with esound not playing GNOME system sounds, I have decided to give Pulseaudio a try. Installing the pulseaudio package pulled all necessary dependencies, including the esound compatibility plugin. I have added local users to the pulse-rt group, as recommended. After this, all worked perfectly except the main channel was muted and its volume set to 0% after rebooting. I have found that not loading the module-device-restore does fix this issue, strangely. If you encounter the same problem, try and comment out the line load-module module-device-restore in /etc/pulse/default.pa.

10 March 2009

Julien Valroff: On the essential role of translations in free software - GCompris in Portugal

The recent problem of the Portuguese translation of GCompris shows how important a good translation is, especially as far as free software are concerned.
I have not been able to find any news in English relating this story, and think it is essential to spread it so that people better appreciate the role translators play in the free software development process. The Portuguese Magalh es Project lead to provide 300,000 netbooks to Portuguese children aged of 6 to 10, for a fee varying from 0 to 50 , depending on the earnings of the family. These netbooks have a dual boot, with Windows and Linux (a distribution based on Mandriva called Caixa M gica - Magic Box in English).

The problem has begun when some opponents to this project pointed out that the Portuguese translation of GCompris, a free educational software for children from 2 to 10, contained some grammar, syntax and spelling faults, and did not reach the level of quality expected to be distributed to Portuguese children. This story was even published by some major Portuguese newspaper, which is a very bad publicity not only for GCompris, but also for free software in general. Caixa M gica Software have also published a press release explaining the situation. The Portuguese Government have even published a document explaining how to uninstall GCompris, whereas work for correcting the translation was running, and automatic updates being set up on all Magalh es netbooks. The GNOME Portuguese translation team have made some hard work during the week-end to review and correct the existing translation, following to a call for help raised by GCompris lead developer. The new version released yesterday already include an updated Portuguese translation. I have noticed that this problem was already reported on launchpad 2 years ago, but people got lost as the translation was not made through Rosetta (a closed source platform for open source application translation). This should have been reported upstream or at least to the main translator! I take the occasion to thank all translators, l10n and i18n coordinators of the various free software projects I enjoy using in French!

Julien Valroff: Controversial Internet and creation French law

I wasn t sure to really understand this project of law until I read a lot about it during the past days. As some of you might already know, this law, called Internet et Cr ation , but mainly referred as HADOPI law ¹, is a Three Strikes scheme to fight against illegal downloads proposed before the last summer by the French government, and then voted in the Autumn by the S nat (the first of the two French houses of Parliament). Not that I am in favor of illegal downloads of movies and music, but the way this law plans to fight against them is a real threat for French free software developers and users. I won t explain here all the details of this law, but to sum up, it plans to suspend the Internet access to people downloading illegal files from the peer-to-peer network, after 2 notices. Here are the problems I have noticed, as far as I am personally concerned, besides more general aspects this law implies (user freedom etc.):

Some private actors, indirectly working for French leisure and cultural companies, will be in charge of controlling the French Internet. They will only base their accusations on the IP addresses, which I do not think to be a proof alone.
An Internet user, accused to have illegally downloaded movies or music will have to prove by his own means he has not done it - ie. his Internet connection could have been hacked, but he needs to prove it! This is totally contrary to the way justice normally works in France, where you are supposed to be innocent until the contrary is proved. A large majority of French Internet users do not have the necessary technical skills to secure their wireless network and hence their Internet connection. And even with good skills, all of them do not own a wireless router supporting eg. WPA2, which creates a real discrimination towards French Internet users.
A chapter of the project of law plans the possibility to set up a kind of firewall on the computers connected to the Internet - they will allow Internet users to prove their sincerity. This causes however a big issue for free software users: I doubt such a piece of software will be available for free operating systems (such as GNU/Linux, FreeBSD etc.). Even if it is, it won t be opensource - if it was, anybody could amend it and/or disable it, hence no real possibility for the user to prove it was running when the illegal download was noticed.
This law doesn t take into account the fact that an increasing part of the peer-to-peer exchanges are encrypted, or run anonymously. More over, other technical ways of downloading are not considered (streaming, direct downloads especially when the websites are hosted abroad).

The law should be discussed at the Assembl e Nationale from today (the second house of Parliament), I hence contacted my local representative last week in order to propose a meeting allowing me to expose my concerns. Until now, I have received no answer, despite the fact he accepted to commit in favor of free software when running for being re-elected in june 2007 (he signed the Pacte des logiciels libres from the APRIL association). I guess I will receive an answer once the law is voted!

HADOPI is the name of the possible future new institution created after the law enters in action

20 February 2009

Julien Valroff: GNOME leaves a lot of useless files

I have been cleaning my ~/ and noticed a lot of files in ~/.metacity/sessions/ and ~/.config/metacity/sessions/ (800+) and in ~/.nautilus/ (600+). Nautilus and Metacity are to balem for these behaviours. Bugs have already been reported in the Debian BTS[1][2] and upstream [3][4]. I hope this will be fixed shortly.

15 February 2009

Julien Valroff: Lenny

Well, I am sure all of you have already read the announcement: Lenny (aka Debian 5.0) is out! I have been using Debian on all my machines since at least mid 2003, when Woody was stable. Sarge was then released in 2005, then Etch the year after. I have updated my personal repository of unofficial packages for this new stable release. I have let etch packages available (under oldstable), but will remove them in a while. This repository is mainly mainly composed of backported or patched packages for my own use, but can be used by anyone (but I do not guarantee anything ;-)).

7 February 2009

Julien Valroff: My new xorg.conf

~$ [ -s /etc/X11/xorg.conf ] ; echo $?
1

Yes, it is an empty file! I have just upgraded xorg to the experimental packages. hal does its job, and all devices are automatically detected and configured.
This is actually a great improvement, especially for those who had to fight against the XFree86 configuration file just to get a graphical session working, back in the late 90 s.

The only thing I had to do is creating an /etc/hal/fdi/policy/10-keymap.fdi file with the following contents, so that GDM has a correct keyboard layout (French in my case):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <!-- -*- SGML -*- -->
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>
    <match key="info.capabilities" contains="input.keymap">
      <append key="info.callouts.add" type="strlist">hal-setup-keymap</append>
    </match>
 
    <match key="info.capabilities" contains="input.keys">
      <merge key="input.xkb.rules" type="string">base</merge>
 
      <!-- If we're using Linux, we use evdev by default (falling back to
           keyboard otherwise). -->
      <merge key="input.xkb.model" type="string">keyboard</merge>
      <match key="/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/computer:system.kernel.name"
             string="Linux">
        <merge key="input.xkb.model" type="string">evdev</merge>
      </match>
 
      <merge key="input.xkb.layout" type="string">fr</merge>
      <merge key="input.xkb.variant" type="string">latin9</merge>
      <merge key="input.xkb.options" type="string">compose:lwin</merge>
  </match>
  </device>
</deviceinfo>

17 January 2009

Julien Valroff: Counting Debian source packages #2

Thanks to Joerg for pointing out pkg-nums. I was pretty sure such a tool already existed but could not find it. At least, my script (with Thomas amendments) allow distinctions between sections (free, contrib, non-free)

And thanks to pkg-nums, I was able to check the results.

Julien Valroff: IPv6: Miredo link to HE Tunnel endpoint

As announced a few weeks ago, my website should now be accessible through IPv6. The connectivity is made thanks to Hurricane Electric IPv6 tunnel service as recommended on Linode wiki. At home, I use Miredo, an open-source Teredo IPv6 tunneling software for GNU/Linux and BSD. This works great with many websites. I can ping6 servers I know, like ipv6.google.com or www.debian-administration.org.
However, I cannot ping6 my Linode server until I have established a link from the linode to home. But after a while (a quarter or so), the link is dead, and I have to ping my home address again from the linode to make it alive.

Here are some results which might help: From home to linode when not working:

$ traceroute6 2001:470:1f06:ccf::2
traceroute to 2001:470:1f06:ccf::2 (2001:470:1f06:ccf::2), 30 hops max, 80 byte packets
 1  2001:0:53aa:64c:2c29:6807:a37d:37e2 (2001:0:53aa:64c:2c29:6807:a37d:37e2)  0.066 ms !H  0.060 ms !H  0.059 ms !H

From Linode to home:

$ traceroute6 2001:0:53aa:64c:2c29:6807:a37d:37e2
traceroute to 2001:0:53aa:64c:2c29:6807:a37d:37e2 (2001:0:53aa:64c:2c29:6807:a37d:37e2), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
 1  JulienV-1.tunnel.tserv4.nyc4.ipv6.he.net (2001:470:1f06:ccf::1)  17.205 ms  19.652 ms  22.253 ms
 2  gige-g3-8.core1.nyc4.he.net (2001:470:0:5d::1)  23.290 ms  23.270 ms  23.272 ms
 3  10gigabitethernet1-2.core1.lon1.he.net (2001:470:0:3e::2)  91.743 ms  91.868 ms  91.846 ms
 4  10gigabitethernet1-1.core1.ams1.he.net (2001:470:0:3f::2)  99.611 ms  99.681 ms  99.659 ms
 5  amsix-501.xe-0-0-0.jun1.kelvin.network.bit.nl (2001:7f8:1::a501:2859:2)  100.223 ms  100.351 ms  100.330 ms
 6  teredo.bit.nl (2001:7b8:3:27:87:251:43:68)  100.347 ms  80.329 ms  95.304 ms
 7  2001:0:53aa:64c:2c29:6807:a37d:37e2 (2001:0:53aa:64c:2c29:6807:a37d:37e2)  375.204 ms  379.675 ms  382.140 ms

And then from home to Linode when working (ie just after the previous traceroute6):

$ traceroute6 2001:470:1f06:ccf::2
traceroute to 2001:470:1f06:ccf::2 (2001:470:1f06:ccf::2), 30 hops max, 80 byte packets
 1  teredo.bit.nl (2001:7b8:3:27:87:251:43:68)  298.818 ms  298.804 ms  298.789 ms
 2  teredo-gw.jun1.kelvin.network.bit.nl (2001:7b8:3:27::2)  349.530 ms  349.522 ms  349.510 ms
 3  linx.he.net (2001:7f8:4::1b1b:1)  371.854 ms  371.847 ms  371.835 ms
 4  10gigabitethernet2-3.core1.nyc4.he.net (2001:470:0:3e::1)  491.051 ms  491.041 ms  491.029 ms
 5  1g-bge0.tserv4.nyc4.ipv6.he.net (2001:470:0:5d::2)  349.111 ms  346.930 ms  344.158 ms
 6  nix.kirya.net (2001:470:1f06:ccf::2)  351.527 ms  140.178 ms  142.217 ms

Is there anything else I could try to understand which is the faulty side (before I contact both Linode s and tunnelbroker s supports or report a bug against Miredo)?

Julien Valroff: Counting Debian source packages

Following to Kushal s post about counting total number of Debian packages, he concluded that sid currently has more than 30,000 binary packages (free, contrib & non-free). IMHO it is more relevant to count source packages. I couldn t find any existing way of doing it, I have hence written a short bash script. Script updated thanks to Thomas advice - now checking source packages directly from the mirror s Sources.gz file

#/bin/bash
 
if [ $# -lt 1 ]; then
  echo "Please add at least one distribution as argument"
  echo "Exiting"
  exit 1
fi
 
for arg in $*
do
 
  echo "Number of source packages in $arg: "
  for dist in main contrib non-free; do
    echo -n "  $dist: "
    wget -q -O - ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/$arg/$dist/source/Sources.gz   zgrep -c '^Package: '
  done
 
done

The results as of today:

Number of source packages in etch:
  main: 10221
  contrib: 126
  non-free: 211
Number of source packages in lenny:
  main: 12176
  contrib: 180
  non-free: 241
Number of source packages in sid:
  main: 13032
  contrib: 158
  non-free: 275

Which means we are quite far from the 18,733+ available packages, proudly announced on Debian homepage. Update: I had misread the figure advertised on Debian homepage which is a count of the binary packages available (which is currently much higher that what is stated there)

6 January 2009

Julien Valroff: DSPAM-Community - first RC: call for testing

I was happy to receive Dov Zamir s email announcing the creation of a fork of the DSPAM anti-spam filter, called dspam-community. I have been using DSPAM for a while now, and am very happy with it, but was quite anxious that the project is left out by Sensory Networks (the company took over DSPAM in May 2007). ~~I give all my confidence in the fork as the original author, Jonathan Zdziarski, is part of the new development team!~~ I have prepared EXPERIMENTAL packages of the first RC of DSPAM-Community.

These are only meant for testing and should not be used in a production environment! I haven t tested these packages in depth (only tested installation or upgrade from previous official/unofficial packages).
There might still be problems due to the new names. I have built packages for i386 and amd64 architectures. They are built against current unstable distribution. They might be used on Ubuntu, but I haven t tested this yet. I have setup a quick page for these packages. All the applied patches are available for review and possible merge into git: http://packages.kirya.net/dspam-community/debian-patches/ To use these packages, add these lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://packages.kirya.net/dspam-community/ experimental main
deb-src http://packages.kirya.net/dspam-community/ experimental main

The repository uses secure-apt, you can hence check packages integrity thanks to my dedicated GPG key:

gpg --keyserver wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net --recv-keys FBABB737
gpg --export -a FBABB737   apt-key add -

wget -O - http://packages.kirya.net/Kirya.netDebianpackagesVerificationKey.asc   apt-key add -

Fingerprint: 97A0 69D9 A150 687E 599F F168 EEFB 43B2 FBAB B737 Feel free to test the packages and the first DSPAM-Community RC.
Any comment is welcome! To the official DSPAM packaging team: feel free to take these packages as a basis for your work in case you are interested in packaging DSPAM-Community!

24 December 2008

Julien Valroff: IPv6 available on this site

Thanks to a recent article published on debian-administration.org, I have managed to get an IPv6 connectivity at home, and have hence decided to make this website available through IPv6. I have used Hurricane Electric IPv6 tunnel service as recommended on Linode wiki, and everything seems to be working. This was a really simple process (both at home and on my Linode!). The AAAA DNS records have been set up.
While the propagation is being processed, you can still test using the IP 2001:470:1f06:c0f::2 (I now really understand why DNS have been created!). You can use ping6 or telnet -6 or even use your browser. While browsing www.kirya.net using IPv6, you should get a message in the header (just below the links to RSS feeds) confirming your request have been served using IPv6. Note that I haven t yet set up all Apache virtual hosts to answer on IPv6, which might lead to some web pages being redirected to the defaut vhost. More over, the HTTP server will only answer to IPv6 request on port 80 (no SSL at the moment).

2 November 2008

Julien Valroff: Laptop as desktop computer replacement

I am currently studying the possibility to change my current desktop computer for a laptop. This is the first time I am looking at these powerful laptops, as I now only use cheap laptops for small office use (email, web etc.) when traveling. My aim is now to use a laptop for my daily tasks: picture editing, small development, multimedia etc.

Ideal features would be:

Large screen (18,4″)
Large disk space (at least 250Gb)
Separate numpad
At least 2Ghz CPU (dual core)
4Gb RAM
Wifi 802.11g, ethernet 100 connections
At least 3 USB and 1 firewire port
Built-in memory card reader with Compact Flash support
DVD burner

I do not care about the weight, as it would mainly stay on my desktop. I currently have a desktop computer with 2Go RAM, an Intel 4400 Dual Core CPU (@ 2Ghz) with 200Gb hard disk - though it is enough at the moment, I would prefer the laptop to be more powerful in order to be able to run smoothly with future applications which will be released in 2 or 3 years! Ideally, it would be around 1,000 (obviously, the cheaper the better, but I want something reliable for a few years if possible). Last but not least, it needs to be 100% compatible with GNU/Linux (Debian in particular) - I do not care about compiling kernel modules, but would rather prefer they are free (as in free speech). Do you have any experiences with such laptops?
What would be your recommendations? Is my idea something totally weird (I mean, should I keep my current desktop computer)?!

27 October 2008

Julien Valroff: Ubuntu 8.10 as a guest in VirtualBox

Though I only use Debian on all my machines, I like playing with new Ubuntu releases, just in case I have to set it up on someone else’s machine. I use VirtualBox for testing. When trying the upcoming new Ubuntu 8.10 release, and after installing the VirtualBox clients on the guest, I had the following issues: First, the video driver refused to give me more than a 800×600 resolution. This can be worked around by adding the following lines in the xorg.conf file:

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Configured Video Device"
        Driver          "vboxvideo"
EndSection
 
Section "Monitor"
        Identifier      "Configured Monitor"
EndSection
 
Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "Default Screen"
        Monitor         "Configured Monitor"
        Device          "Configured Video Device"
EndSection

A second issue was the mouse grabbing which did not work at all. Adding the following lines in the xorg.conf file has fixed the issue:

Section "InputDevice"
   Identifier   "Configured Mouse"
   Driver       "vboxmouse"
   Option       "CorePointer"
EndSection

You need to restart Xorg after amending the file so that the changes are taken into account. Both issues are due to the fact Xorg 7.4 is supposed to automagically recognize the hardware - but it seems like this is not always the case (or it refuses to use it, not sure what’s happening in that particular case).

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