Now some skk packages are orphaned because maintainer Mr.Kawamura is marked as MIA. 'skk' is obsolete and is disconnected from upstream, but 'ddskk' upstream still be developing very active. I take over ddskk for myself.

I found a thread at debian-arm mailinglist. Although this machine is sold at Japan only, GLAN Tank (pet name "gratin") looks nice ARM machine. It contains XScale 400MHz, 128MB memory, Intel gigabit Ethernet, IDE controller, USB2.0 x 4. Plus, Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 Sarge is pre-installed. From the specification, it uses Linux kernel 2.6.10. The price without a hard-disk is 24,800 yen =~ $210. AFAIK Junichi are planning to bring it Debconf6.

My pleasure, liw :-) And I'm very glad to see Roland and Daniel are inspired from my HCL and are trying to make more brilliant things. My hcl system is stored in my personal SVN. Anybody can see and take components from http://kmuto.jp/svn/hcl/trunk. Although I've extra time to develop at this time, I'd like to improve codes in the future, at least around updating existent data.

Lars Wirzenius kindly added some visibility to Kenshi Muto’s Debian GNU/Linux hardware compatibility list, and had the interesting idea of mentioning live-cds in the same post. That gave me an idea: why not prepare a minimal live-cd dedicated to hardware compatibility testing? It could automatically open a browser on that check page, try multiple screen resolutions and sound systems and report the results, run glxgears, etc. Just boot on that CD in the computer shop, wait for a few moments, and see in big, easily readable letters, whether a configuration actually works with free software. Don’t forget to exclaim loudly if the shop attendant told you it would work and the tests show it doesn’t. I’m told there’s a tool to automate the creation of live-cds. Any takers for that task?

I'm still busy on some business projects... I feel overworked. Thankfully my new router gave me another problem. Argh... A few weeks ago, I got small machine named "OpenMicroServer" for new router of our office. MIPSel Alchemy CPU, 128MB real memory, 16MB flash ROM, CF socket, 2 USB ports, RJ45 style serial port, 2 gigabit and one 100base+POE... very very cool. There was SSD/Linux, vendor's original NetBSD like distribution, as pre-installed OS. But of course, I replaced it by Debian Sarge soon :) Except of some tricks, it was easier than I thought. The installation was easy... But after I put it on the operation environment, it started to make me crazy. Although there wasn't any sign in console, it often hung up. There wasn't any ordinality. I tried and tried to find a problem. Decreasing network traffics, verbose logging, etc... solve nothing. Well, finally I gave up to use it at this time. In this early morning I got to the office and changed the network topology to it used to. Sigh. I'll leave it on original SSD/Linux mode to check this is OS problem or broken hardware.

Someone may be interested in this... You can take it from here. (144134144 bytes, MD5: 7cdd166ae9b33d29acd42bffda8bc020)

• Took Linux 2.6.15 kernel-image from current Debian unstable. Please take kernel-headers package from unstable repository when you need it.
• Fixed around loading sata_mv (although I've already fixed in 2.6.14 image.)
• Backported newer udev, hotplug, initramfs-tools, and selinux. Take care when you upgrade this environment to testing or unstable.
• No support, no warranty :)

When I updated my blog system, I didn't care rss format would be changed. I'm sorry about sending my old articles to Debian.planet...

Yesterday I connected PCI HCL checker to Wiki. There are still many homework, but this connection is a big step for me :) It's really easy to add information of your machine, and is helpful for everyone who owns/plans to buy same machine. (Currently wiki page is editable by only system and me.)

I often heard one of biggest Debian problem is that Debian doesn't provide HCL - Hardware Compatibility List. It's too hard work to maintain it as same as Microsoft does, but indeed HCL is useful for normal users who won't love troubleshooting hardware compatibility. :) As 1st step I made PCI/driver matching database, http://kmuto.jp/debian/hcl/. You can test by putting your "lspci -n" to the box. Currently this database gathers informations from pci.ids of pciutils, modules.pcimap of kernel 2.6.14-686-smp, discover1-data, and alsa-common.

I was invited MOSS, Medical Free/Open Source Software Council, on last weekend. My speech was about the risk management of Debian. I believe we should more consider risks of FLOSS (at least as same as we choose proprietary commercial software) when we use FLOSS on business scene.

I tried it on yesterday. ISO image is here (131534848 bytes (125MB), MD5: 6c3d5dae6da770e1ef1c8868e72db0e0). To install linux-image-2.6.14 of sid correctly, I needed to tweak some packages and backport some components from sid.

I noticed some skk packages had maintained by Kawamura-san were orphaned because he became MIA. Unfortunately I dunno why he became such a status, but his packages, especially skk is very important for me and many users. It's hard and painful for me to input Japanese without SKK backend system (I'm using ddskk on Emacs and uim-skk on X as a frontend). So I picked up skk packages from orphan sea with Junji Yamashita-san and improved some parts of them. BTW I uploaded new CUPS 1.2 snapshot, svn r4841 to experimental.

At first I'd like to say 'thank you' to organizer. Totally the quality of event couldn't satisfy me and maybe most participants, but this was first challenge step, so we'll be able to do more better next time if we have a chance. BTW, I've another speech schedule on November. I try to do more better.

vorlon announced 'Bits from the release team: the plans for etch'. Yay, let's try to keep a promise about schedule :) Another good news is aba becomes Relase Manager (although he has already worked as same as release manager :) ) My personal TODO for Etch is to find and solve problems around a transition from EUC-JP to UTF-8 on Japanese environment. Most parts are done by Debian people and other distro such as FedoraCore, but I'd like to clarify problems again and try to solve them. Yesterday I changed my LANG to ja_JP.UTF-8.

• I needed to convert filenames written in EUC-JP to UTF-8.
• Programs using GTK+2 and Qt work well.
• GTK+1 applications (such as xmms) have Mojibake. I took beep-media-player instead of xmms. :)
• Some of double width characters (box, arrow, and so on) of EUC-JP are displayed as single narrow width on X terminal (mlterm, gnome-terminal, and konsole). I found I can avoid this on mlterm by enabling 'Enable variable width'.
• zsh couldn't allow to input and complement UTF-8 characters. zsh-beta allows partially.

Yukiharu Yabuki <yabuki at good-day.co.jp> announced Japan Debian Mini Conf 2005 at some computer mailing lists.

• Name: Japan Debian Mini Conf 2005
• Date: 28th Oct 2005 - 29th Oct 2005
• Place: Business Innovation Center Osaka (Sangyou Souzou Kaikan), Osaka city, Japan
• Host: Japan Debian Mini Conf executive committee

I have a session on 28th to talk about overview of Debian GNU/Linux Sarge and Debian Project as 'Welcome to the Debian world, Get ready!' Your well-known people tbm, Ukai, Gotom, and Junichi have a session also. Web page doesn't say well, but Yabuki is trying to assign translator to translate Japanese to English. Furthermore I'm a coordinator of key sign party at this conference. If you'd like to participate, please see KeySignParty.html.en and send your public key of GnuPG to me. We'll do CAcert.org assurance party at there also. ... Now I'm freezing in front of OpenOffice.org Impress :)

I uploaded new development snapshot of CUPS 1.2 -- cupsys 1.1.99.b1.r4748 -- to experimental. This version has many interesting changes for fearless people.

• New debconf questions about port/listen and browsing
• IPv6
• Improved backends, especially lpd
• Reformed Web interface
• Etc... See /usr/share/doc/cupsys/CHANGES.txt.

I'm administering two mail servers (Debian Sarge) and uw-imapd were running on both servers. As you know uw-imapd is reference model and may become very slow when user has a huge mbox. I use "mobileimap" to see my IMAP from cellphone, but huge mbox sometimes causes bad timeout. Courier-imapd is dropped from the choice, because I don't want to migrate other formats. My friend Kitame and Mutsumi recommended 'dovecot-imapd'. Yeah, this is what I want. Install was very smooth, but there was one problem. I'd like to use CRAM-MD5 for authentication mechanism, but I couldn't find a way to create its hashed value to write password file. After asking Google and checking unstable dovecot-common, finally I found "dovecotpw" utility and succeeded to get correct hashed value by using this utility on other Debian Sid machine. Now dovecot works well on my two servers. Speed is more faster than I imagined.

My recent thought and challenging is how I can improve CUPS configuration by using debconf. The primary CUPS configuration file - cupsd.conf has some important directives which should be configured by debconf.

• Port/Listen: Default is "Port 631". This means cupsd listens port 631 of all interface, all incoming. Listen is host-based value, such as "Listen 127.0.0.1:631", "Listen kmuto.jp:413". Port and Listen can coexist, and multiple Port or Listen can do also. Handling these values are needed by many users.
• Browsing: Default is "on". This means cupsd broadcasts its information and checks new printer from network periodically. This feature is useful for LAN, but is unwelcome for some users. Handling this value by debconf may be easy.
• BrowseAddress/BrowseAllow/BrowseDeny: These values are related with Browsing. And they accept various values. It's hard to parse and evaluate values of debconf...
• Location: Location defines mainly each authentications. Root directory, jobs directory, and admin directory are defined by default. It's better to be able to handle these values by debconf, but to parse and to evaluate aren't so easy.
• FileDevice: Default is "off". If FileDevice is set "on", cupd allows file:// URI (printout job to local file for debug or something. Of course this feature invites a risk). This question should be low priority, but perhaps this is useful.
• ServerName/ServerAdmin: Like Apache. Although these values aren't meaningful for CUPS :).
• Include: cupsd.conf allows this directive like Apache. So I'm thinking to create /etc/cups/conf.d/ directory and set files to compose main cupsd.conf at there.

Another headache is that next coming CUPS 1.2 will change its configuration formats and default values. I should count it.

I didn't know why, but I couldn't encourage myself to work for Debian/OSS recent weeks. I was concentrating my business work at office and was only watching TV or listening musics at home in these days. ...Well, maybe I needed a time to refresh the motivation against hacking/maintaining OSS. Now my feeling isn't so perfect still, but at least I'm ready to see a big pile of mail :-). All of I could do on today was to upload new mlterm package with CVS fixes and to reply to some mails. I'd like to work for CUPS, d-i, and apt-howto-ja in this week if I can.

Some days ago, I did dist-upgrade to Sid on my Let's Note Y2. Sarge was pretty nice and stable for this machine, but I wanted more challenging :)
dist-upgrade was really smooth because all transitions for my environment had been done.
Now I get new X.Org (some parts are from experimental), KDE, and OpenOffice.org2 (from experimental). By modifing xorg.conf and replacing i810_drv.so, I succeeded to use semitransparent window and dropping shadow with hardware acceleration. Cool!