When Marvell originally released the first plug computer, they created their own version of u-boot with support for their new devices. Unfortunately, this version of u-boot is fairly out of date nowadays compared to mainline u-boot and has several problems. Support for plug computers (such as SheevaPlug and GuruPlug) have been integrated into the mainline u-boot (also known as DENX u-boot) in the meantime and Clint Adams has packaged it for Debian. I finally found the time to test Clint's u-boot binary on my devices and have updated the SheevaPlug installation guide accordingly. If you're have installed Debian to a SheevaPlug according to my instructions, I suggest you upgrade. If you boot from a MMC/SD card, you should be aware that the mmcinit command has been renamed to mmc init in order to be consistent with the naming of other commands. You'll therefore have to update your bootcmd_mmc variable in u-boot like this:

Martin Michlmayr is a Debian developer since 2000 and I share quite a few things with him, starting with his age and involvement in the quality assurance team. He managed to be elected Debian Project Leader in 2003 and 2004. He s no longer as active as he used to be but his input is always very valuable and he continues to do very interesting things in particular concerning the support of NAS devices. Read on for the details. Raphael: Who are you? Martin: I m Martin Michlmayr. I m 32, originally from Austria, and currently living in the UK. I ve contributed to various free software projects over the years but Debian is without doubt the one I m most passionate about. I joined Debian in 2000 when I was a student. I worked on Debian more or less full time for a few years while I was pretending to study. Later I started a PhD to do research about quality and management aspects of volunteer free software projects. I investigated the release process in several free software projects, in particular looking at time-based releases. After finishing my PhD in 2007, I joined Hewlett-Packard. I m part of HP s Open Source Program Office and work on various free software and open source activities, both internally and within the community. Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? Martin: I first used Debian in the days of 0.93R6, some time around the end of 1995. The 0.93R6 release was still based on a.out but I needed an ELF-based system for some application, so I moved to Slackware. I then quickly moved to Red Hat Linux where I stayed for several years. I rediscovered Debian in 2000 and quickly decided to join the project. I cannot recall how I rediscovered Debian but when I did, it was clear to me that Debian was the ideal project for me: I could identify with its philosophy, I liked the volunteer nature of the project, and I found the size and diversity of Debian interesting since a large project offers a lot of different challenges and opportunities. I remember how many new things there were to learn and back then the documentation and other resources for new contributors were nowhere as good as they are today. My application manager, Julian Gilbey, was a great help he was incredibly friendly and passionate about Debian. I also remember meeting up with Peter Palfrader (weasel) for key signing when we were both in the New Maintainer queue. I was incredibly lucky with my New Maintainer process and soon became an official Debian Developer. Because there was a shortage of application managers, my first major contribution in Debian was to become an application manager myself and help other people join the project. Debian is a large project with a long history and a rich culture, so new contributors should expect that it will take some time to become familiar with everything. Fortunately, there are many resources, such as documentation and the debian-mentors list, for new contributors. Another great way to become familiar with the way things are done in Debian is to subscribe to various Debian mailing lists and ideally to read some mailing list archives. It s also a great idea to attend the Debian Conference or other conferences since meeting people in real life is a great way to integrate. I remember attending Debian Conference 1 in Bordeaux where I gave my first public talk. Finally, new contributors should find an area where they can make a unique contribution. Most people in Debian maintain packages but there are so many other ways to contribute. For example, most of my contributions were not technical but were about coordination and other organizational activities. Raphael: What s your biggest achievement within Debian? Martin: I m particularly proud of a number of achievements:

• New Maintainer: I helped a lot of people join Debian. It s great to help someone join the project and then see how they contribute. Of course, some people join Debian and then quickly become inactive or retire you never know in advance how it will work out. But I had the pleasure to help some truly outstanding contributors to join Debian.
• Quality Assurance: I helped improve QA processes within Debian. In particular, I realized a few years ago that a lot of packages had maintainers who were inactive and that nobody did anything about it. I started to write to those maintainers to see what could be done. It s hard because you don t know the circumstance of someone they may be inactive because of an illness or for other good reasons so you have to be friendly, but yet persistent. Fortunately, most maintainers I contacted were truly inactive and so they couldn t complain when I took their packages away.
• DPL: I acted as the Debian Project Leader for two years. I m particularly proud of this because Debian is a great project and it was an honour to represent it. I performed important organizational and coordination tasks. I also traveled to a lot of conferences and had the pleasure to meet many Debian Developers as well as users of Debian. It s very motivating to meet users and to hear how they use Debian and how we can further improve it.
• Debian on NAS: Debian is without the doubt the Linux distro with the best support for NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices. I was always impressed by what the OpenWRT folks have done to support wireless routers and wanted to do something similar for Debian. Unfortunately, wireless routers just don t have enough storage for a full distro. But then NAS devices came along and they obviously have enough space since they are meant for storage.

Raphael: Speaking about NAS devices: what exactly are you doing on this topic and how can people help? Martin: There are plenty of instructions on the Internet to install Linux distributions on NAS or various embedded devices by connecting a serial console and then typing in hundreds of commands. What I found is that such instructions significantly limit the user base because they are way too complicated for most users. There are just too many steps that can go wrong. So instead, in Debian, we provide a solution that just works: usually, you download a firmware image for your NAS device from Debian and when you upgrade you get the Debian installer. You connect to the installer via SSH and perform a normal installation. The installer knows about the device and will prepare everything for you automatically for example, it knows if the device has requirements for the partition layout and it will install the kernel where the device expects to find it; unfortunately, NAS devices are not like PCs, so the requirements are different for almost every device and therefore you need special code to support a new device. Finally, there are detailed installation guides and we provide help on our mailing lists. There are a number of technical areas for improvement. The installation could be made even easier, and it would be nice to support new platforms and devices. A bigger problem is that while we ve implemented a great solution for NAS devices, we haven t really extended this work to support other classes of devices. For example, tablets and mobile phones are getting incredibly popular and we don t have a compelling solution for such devices, mostly because of the lack of an appropriate GUI. Raphael: What are your plans for Debian Wheezy? Martin: I ve recently been asked by Stefano Zacchiroli, our current Debian Project Leader, to coordinate the care-taking of Debian finances. Debian, as a volunteer project, relies on donations and in-kind gifts (e.g. hardware) to maintain its infrastructure and to support various development efforts, such as funding sprints and other developer gatherings. Debian s money and other assets are held by affiliate organizations around the world. My responsibility will be to keep track of money and other assets (e.g. hardware and trademarks), work with the DPL to establish procedures related to the use of Debian s assets, and make sure that the procedures are followed. Finally, we want to publish public statements so our donors know how we use their donations to further improve Debian. I just started working on this and this will be my main activity in Debian in the coming months. Raphael: Speaking of money, I plan to run a fundraising to get the Debian book I wrote with Roland Mas translated (cf. http://debian-handbook.info). Is this something Debian should support? Martin: First of all, I should make it clear that I don t decide how Debian spends its money. This is up to the DPL to decide together with the project at a whole. I ll just make sure that procedures are followed and expenses tracked and reported properly. Having said that, in my opinion, it s unlikely that Debian as a project will fund this effort. It would be inconsistent with the position of the project not to fund work directly (only some related expenses, such as travel costs to allow Debian teams to organize face-to-face meetings). Whether Debian should support the fundraising effort by helping to promote it is another question and that s probably not as clear cut. It looks like a worthwhile effort, but on the other hand it would be unfair for authors of other Debian books for Debian to put its weight behind one and there are many other efforts that are worth promoting if you promote one, where do you stop? So while it sounds worthwhile, it s probably better for Debian to stay out of it. But somehow related to this, I sometimes worry about the fact that there are so few paid opportunities around Debian. If you contribute to the Linux kernel for a while, you have an excellent chance to get hired by someone and to work on the kernel full time. The kernel may be an extreme example but there are a lot of projects that have more paid opportunities than Debian, e.g. Mono, GNOME, OpenOffice/LibreOffice and KDE. Obviously, there are some Debian Developers who can spend some time on Debian as part of their job. I know that some Canonical employees contribute to Debian, that support companies like credativ improve Debian as part of their work, and that system administrators fix bugs or package new software as they deploy Debian. But I think this is a minority of contributors and even they don t work full time on Debian. Instead what I see is that a lot of people leave university, get a job and then no longer have time for Debian or people start a family and no longer have time. I can take myself as an example since I don t have nearly as much time as I did in the past when I was a student. I guess there are different ways to deal with this problem one would be to create more paid opportunities around Debian outside the project, another one might be to make it easier for new volunteers to join the project. I don t have the answers to these questions but it s something I wonder about, and I also wonder whether pure volunteer projects can still keep up with projects with a lot of full time contributors. Raphael: What motivates you to continue to contribute year after year? Martin: Debian is a great project with a great mission, goals and people. I contribute to make Debian a better solution and to promote the free software philosophy. Finally, the community around Debian provides a lot of motivation. It s amazing how much I ve learned about other cultures because of my involvement in Debian and how many friends I ve made over the years all around the world. Raphael: Do you have wishes for Debian Wheezy? Martin: Not really. I m pretty happy with the way things are going at the moment. We have made a lot of organizational changes in the last few years from which the project has greatly benefited. I m particularly pleased about the plans to adopt a time-based freeze. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Martin: There are many people I admire greatly. I d like to mention Joey Hess because he s a great example to follow. He doesn t get involved in politics, is easy to work with and does great technical work. In fact, he has made not one but several contributions that have completely changed Debian (debconf, debhelper, and debian-installer). Furthermore, Debian has a lot of contributors who have done great work over the years but who are not very vocal about it. People like Colin Watson or Peter Palfrader. Debian has many unique contributors and the list of people I admire is much longer than the few people I just mentioned.

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Thank you to Martin for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. He raised some interesting questions. Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook.

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Out of curiosity, and because it is Sunday morning and I have a cold and can't get my brain to do anything tricky, I counted the number of candidates in each year's DPL elections.

Year	Count	Names
1999	4	Joseph Carter, Ben Collins, Wichert Akkerman, Richard Braakman
2000	4	Ben Collins, Wichert Akkerman, Joel Klecker, Matthew Vernon
2001	4	Branden Robinson, Anand Kumria, Ben Collins, Bdale Garbee
2002	3	Branden Robinson, Rapha l Hertzog, Bdale Garbee
2003	4	Moshe Zadka, Bdale Garbee, Branden Robinson, Martin Michlmayr
2004	3	Martin Michlmayr, Gergely Nagy, Branden Robinson
2005	6	Matthew Garrett, Andreas Schuldei, Angus Lees, Anthony Towns, Jonathan Walther, Branden Robinson
2006	7	Jeroen van Wolffelaar, Ari Pollak, Steve McIntyre, Anthony Towns, Andreas Schuldei, Jonathan (Ted) Walther, Bill Allombert
2007	8	Wouter Verhelst, Aigars Mahinovs, Gustavo Franco, Sam Hocevar, Steve McIntyre, Rapha l Hertzog, Anthony Towns, Simon Richter
2008	3	Marc Brockschmidt, Rapha l Hertzog, Steve McIntyre
2009	2	Stefano Zacchiroli, Steve McIntyre
2010	4	Stefano Zacchiroli, Wouter Verhelst, Charles Plessy, Margarita Manterola
2011	1	Stefano Zacchiroli (no vote yet)

Winner indicate by boldface. I expect Zack to win over "None Of The Above", so I went ahead and boldfaced him already, even if there has not been a vote for this year. Median number of candidates is 4.

Maximilian, along with the other members of the Debian kernel team, has the overwhelming job of maintaining the Linux kernel in Debian. It s one of the largest package and certainly one where dealing with bug reports is really difficult as most of them are hardware-specific, and thus difficult to reproduce. He s very enthusiastic and energetic, and does not fear criticizing when something doesn t please him. You ll see. My questions are in bold, the rest is by Maximilian. Who are you? My name is Maximilian Attems. I am a theoretical physicist in my last year of PhD at the Technical University of Vienna. My main research area is the early phase of a Quark-Gluon Plasma as produced in heavy ion collisions at the LHC at CERN. I am developing simulations that take weeks on the Vienna Scientific Cluster (in the TOP 500 list). The rest of the lab is much less fancy and boils down to straight intel boxes without any binary blobs or external drivers (although lately we add radeon graphics for decent free 3D). Mathematica and Maple are the rare exceptions to the many dev tools of Debian (LaTeX, editors, git, IDE s, Open MPI, ..) found at the institute, as those are unfortunately yet unmatched in Free Software for symbolic computations. The lab mostly runs a combination of Debian stable (testing starting from freeze) for desktops and oldstable/stable for servers. Debian is in use for more than 10 years. So people in the institute know some ups and downs of the project. Newcomers like my room neighbors are always surprised how functional a free Debian Desktop is. What s your biggest achievement within Debian? Building lots and lots of kernels together with an growing uptake of the officially released linux images. I joined the Debian kernel team shortly after Herbert Xu departed. I had been upstream Maintainer of the linux-2.6 janitor project for almost a year brewing hundreds of small cleanups with quilt in a tree named kjt for early linux-2.6. In Debian we had lots of fun in sorting out the troubles that the long 2.5 freeze had imposed: Meaning we were sitting on a huge diverging monolithic semi-good patchset. It was great fun to prepare 2.6.8 for Sarge with a huge team enthusiastic in shipping something real close to mainline (You have to imagine that back then you had no stable or longterm release nor any useful free tools like git. This involved passing patches around, hand editing them and seeing what the result does.) From the Sarge install reports a common pattern emerged that the current Debian early userspace was causing lots of boot failures. This motivated me to develop an alternative using the new upstream initramfs features. So I got involved in early userspace. Thanks to large and active development team initramfs-tools got a nice ecosystem. It still tries to be as generic and flexible as possible and thus gains many nice features. Also H. Peter Anvin (hpa) gave me the official co-maintenance of klibc. klibc saw uptake and good patches from Google in the last 2 years. I am proud that the early userspace is working out fairly well these days, meaning you can shuffle discs around and see your box boot. Later on we focused on 2.6.18 for Etch, which turned out to a be good release and picked up by several other distributions. Only very much later we would see such a sync again. With 2.6.26 for Lenny we got somehow unlucky as we just missed the new longterm release by one release. We also pushed for another update very late (during freeze) in the release cycle, which turned out to semi-work as too much things depend on linux-2.6. For Squeeze 2.6.32 got picked thanks to discussions at Portland Linux Plumbers and it turned out to be a good release picked up by many distributions and external patchsets. The long-term support is going very well. Greg KH is doing a great job in collecting various needed fixes for it. Somehow we had hoped that the Squeeze freeze would start sooner and that the freeze duration would be shorter, since we were ready for a release starting from the actual freeze on. The only real big bastard on the cool 2.6.32 sync is Red Hat. Red Hat Enterprise 6.0 is shipping the linux-2.6 2.6.32 in obfuscated form. They released their linux-2.6 as one big tarball clashing with the spirit of the GPL. One can only mildly guess from the changelog which patches get applied. This is in sharp contrast to any previous Red Hat release and has not yet generated the sharp and snide comments in press it deserves. Red Hat should really step back and not make such stupid management moves. Next to them even the semi-maintained Oracle Unbreakable 2.6.32 branch looks better: It is git fetchable. What are your plans and those of the kernel team for Debian Wheezy? Since 2.6.32 many of the used patches landed upstream or are on the way (speakup, Kbuild Debian specific targets, ..). The proper vfs based unionfs is something we d be looking forward. We haven t yet picked the next upstream release we will base Wheezy on, so currently we can happily jump to the most recent ones. There are plans for better interaction with Debian Installer thanks to generating our udebs properly in linux-2.6 source itself. Also we are looking forward to using git as tool of maintenance. We d hope that this will also allow for even better cross distribution collaboration. Concerning early userspace I plan to release an initramfs-tools with more generic userspace for the default case and finally also a klibc only for embedded or tuning cases. What do you like most in Debian? For one thing I do like the 2 year release cycle. It is not too long to have completely outdated software and on the other hand it gives enough time to really see huge progress from release to release. Also at my institute the software is is recent enough without too much admin overhead. For servers the three years support are a bit short, but on the manageable side. I do enjoy a lot the testing distribution. For my personal use it is very stable and thus I mainly run testing on my desktop and work boxes. (Occasionally mixing in things from sid for unbreaking transition or newer security fixes). Debian is independent and not a commercial entity. I think this is its main force and even more important these days. I enjoy using the Debian platform a lot at work thus in return this motivates me to contribute to Debian itself. I also like the fact that we strive for technical correctness. Is there some recurrent problem that hinders the progress of Debian? The New Maintainer process is a strange way to discourage people to contribute to Debian. It is particularly bureaucratic and a huge waste of time both for the applicant and his manager. It should be completely thrown overboard. One needs a more scalable approach for trust and credibility that also enhances the technical knowledge for coding and packaging of the applicant. NM is currently set in stone as any outside critics is automatically rejected. Young and energetic people are crucial for Debian and the long-term viability of the project, this is the reason why I d consider the New Maintainer process as Debian s biggest problem. Note from Rapha l Hertzog: I must say I do not share this point of view on the New Maintainer process, I have witnessed lots of improvements lately thanks to the addition of the Debian Maintainer status, and to the fact that a good history of contribution can easily subsume the annoying Tasks & Skills questionnaire. Another thing I miss is professional graphics input both for the desktop theme and the website. I know that effort has been done there lately and it is good to see movement there, but the end result is still lacking. Another trouble of Debian is its marketing capabilities. It should learn to better sell itself. It is the distribution users want to run and use not the rebranded copies of itself with lock-in sugar . Debian is about choice and it offers plenty of it: it is a great default Desktop. Linus Torvalds doesn t find Debian (and/or Ubuntu) a good platform to hack on the kernel. Do you know why and what can we do about this? The Fedora linux-2.6 receives contributions from several Red Hat employed upstream sub-Maintainers. Thus it typically carries huge patches which are not yet upstream. As a consequence eventual userland troubles get revealed quite quickly and are often seen there first. The cutting edge nature of Fedora rawhide is appealing for many developers. The usual Debian package division of library development files and the library itself is traditionally an entry barrier for dev on Debian. Debian got pretty easily usable these days, although we could and should again improve a lot more in this sector. Personally I think that Linus hasn t tried Debian for years. I have the feeling that the implication of the Debian Kernel team in LKML has been on the rise. Is that true and how do you explain this? Ben Hutchings is the Nr.1 contributor for 2.6.33. He also is top listed as author of patches on stable 2.6.32. Debian is not listed as organization as many send their linux-2.6 patches from their corporate or personal email address and thus it won t be attributed to Debian. There is currently no means to see how many patches get forwarded for the stable tree, but I certainly forwarded more then fifty patches. I was very happy when Greg KH personally thanked me in the 2.6.32.12 release. In the Squeeze kernel, the firmwares have been stripped and moved into separate packages in the non-free section. What should a user do to ensure his system keeps working? There is a debconf warning on linux-2.6 installation. It is quite clear that the free linux-2.6 can t depend on the firmware of the non-free archive (also there is no strict dependency there technically). On the terminal you d also see warnings by update-initramfs on the initramfs generation for drivers included in the initramfs. The debconf warning lists the filename(s) of the missing firmware(s). One can then apt-cache search for the firmware package name and install it via the non-free repository. The check runs against the current loaded modules. The match is not 100% accurate for special cases as the one where the device might be handled well by this driver without firmware, but is accurate enough to warrant the warning. The set of virtualization technologies that the official Debian kernel supports seems to change regularly. Which of the currently available options would you recommend to users who want to build on something that will last? KVM has been a smooth ride from day zero. It almost got included instantly upstream. The uptake it has is great as it sees both dev from Intel and AMD. Together with libvirt it s management is easy. Also the performance of virtio is very good. The linux containers are the thing we are looking forward for enhanced chroots in the Wheezy schedule. They are also manageable by libvirt. Xen being the bad outside boy has an incredible shrinking patchset, thus is fair to expect to see it for Wheezy and beyond. For many it may come a bit late, but for old hardware without relevant CPU it is there. Many tend to overstate the importance of the virtualization tech. I d be much more looking forward to the better Desktop support in newer linux-2.6. The Desktop is important for linux and something that is in heavy use. The much better graphics support of the radeon and nouveau drivers:

• For Nouveau in 32 with 33 drm we could only deliver a first taste meaning something better then rusty nv.
• For Radeon the support for Evergreen and newer is only been shaping now.

The performance optimizations thanks to dcache scalability work and the neat automatic task-grouping for the CPU scheduler are very promising features for the usability of the linux desktop. Another nice to have feature is the online defrag of ext4 and its faster mkfs. Even cooler would be better scalability in ext4 (This side seems to have seen not enough effort lately). Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Hans Peter Anvin and Ted Tso are a huge source of deep linux-2.6 knowledge and personal wisdom. I do enjoy all sorts of interactions with them. Christoph Hellwig with Matthew Wilcox and also William Irwin for setting up the Debian kernel Team. Several Debian leaders including the previous and the current one for their engagement, which very often happens behind the scene. The Debian Gnome Team work is great, also the interactions have always been always easy and a pleasure. Martin Michlmayr and previously Thiemo Seufer do an incredible job in porting Debian on funny and interesting ARM and MIPS boxes. Debian has a lot of upcoming potential on this area. I m looking forward to other young enthusiastic people in that area. Colin Watson is bridging Debian and Ubuntu, which is an immense task. Michael Prokop bases on Debian an excellent recovery boot CD: http://www.grml.org. I d be happy if any Debian Developer would work as carefully coding and working.

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Thank you to Maximilian for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook.

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My first ever Linux installation was done in the late nineties 1998 or thereabouts but was a RedHat 4.5 installation rather than a Debian one. The reason for that was fairly simple: the Infomagick sixpack CD set that I'd bought contained RedHat, Debian, and Slackware, but the RedHat installation was the only one that could be installed directly from CD the other two required me to write floppies and boot from those to start the installation, and I wasn't very fond of that idea. It was only a few years and a few broken RedHat upgrades later that I saw the light and considered trying out this Debian thing that some of my classmates were talking about. The fact that I'd just bought my own computer (rather than having to compete for time with my siblings on my parents' computer) was a good reason to do a fresh Linux installation. I'd been planning to install Linux From Scratch, but as what was still known as the LFS HOWTO told me you'd need a working Linux installation to do that, I considered my options. Since I'd developed a strong dislike of RedHat, I wasn't interested in doing another RedHat anymore. So, I downloaded the most recent version of Debian at the time (Potato Test Cycle III), wrote it to a CD, and installed. I've probably still got the CD lying around somewhere. A few months later, I found these "Linux Gazette" packages in the archive, with the latest packaged issue being 47, but the latest upstream version being much higher. Trying to figure out what was going on, I mailed the maintainer, Adrian Bridgett, who encouraged me to take over maintenance. Thus began my life of actively contributing to Open Source software. In November 2000, I applied to become a Debian Developer. In January 2001, Martin Michlmayr was assigned to be my AM. And in early February 2001, now just over ten years ago, I'd become a Debian Developer. Yes, that was fast, and no, I probably wasn't really ready yet, at the time. Originally, I only cared much about these Linux Gazette packages. But, as time went on, I started looking around, too. A friend passed me an old Macintosh Centris 610. As I tried to install Debian on it, I found that it didn't actually run very well. This turned out to be due to it having a broken 68LC040 processor, so I bought me another m68k-based mac, one with a full 68040 processor (a Centris 650). Thus I became involved in the m68k port and buildd maintenance. As these old machines came with 80MB or 250MB SCSI hard disks of which I had none laying around, and a then-recent Debian installation had minimum requirements of about 200MB, I was in need of network storage to be able to do anything useful with the mac. NFS didn't work as expected; the RTC implementation on m68k mac hardware was reverse engineered and didn't work too well at the time, which meant that the clock would run slower if the machine was under load, and that in turn would mean that make would get confused about timestamps, since they would suddenly appear to originate from the future (in NFS, it's the server that assigns time stamps, not the client). There was a simple solution, however; Pavel Macheck had written this neat 'Network Block Device', which would let the client do its own filesystem on network storage. Only it wasn't packaged; but then, that was easy to fix. Thus I started maintaining the single piece of software that I've worked the most on, to date. A few years later, Pavel lost interest in maintaining NBD, and handed over upstream maintenance to me and maintenance of the kernel side to Paul Clements. Thus began my life in upstream work. And while I originally joined Debian with the intent of using it as a learning experience and stepping stone on my way to more "important" free software, I found that it wasn't as satisfying as was my work for Debian. Over the years, there's been this duality where I've felt like I was doing too much and not enough at the same time. Too much, because the things I was doing would eat up much of my spare time, leaving little time left for other hobbies. Not enough, because I witnessed other people doing much more for Debian than I did, and I wanted to make a difference. As the years passed by, many things have changed. Not only in Debian, but also besides it. I became an independent contractor, focusing mostly on supporting people in using Debian (although I support them with other distributions, too). The importance of a port went from 'something which these weird porter people are doing, and that we should probably help them with if it doesn't work, but is their problem really' to 'something that I really really really have to make sure works for my packages', and back for the port that I cared about most. After several years of trying, I finally managed to explain to my parents what this Debian thing is, why it matters, and what my role in the whole thing is. We did a few releases, some taking longer than I would've liked. People joined the project, and left again. Some of my friends died. My fame in the project rose, even though I wasn't aware of it initially; and thus I was rather surprised when someone asked me whether I was "the Wouter Verhelst" at a key signing party. Recently, I've started looking back, and considered the things which Debian has meant to me. Ten years ago, I was 22, still in college, and had way too much spare time on my hands. I'd recently gotten my first Internet installation, and all these online communities were very new to me. Yes, that was all probably rather late. Debian has changed my life in many ways; it has allowed me to meet various kinds of people, both online and in meatspace. I've been to Helsinki, Edinburgh, Mar del Plata, C ceres, and New York City, places that I might otherwise not have visited. Each of these trips was an incredible experience that I have fond memories of; and while the most fond ones originate from Helsinki, I cherish the memories of each of these trips as some of the best trips I've ever done. Working on Debian has forced me to learn about the inner workings of a Linux-based system, which is knowledge that has helped me tremendously professionally, too. And finally, working on Debian has given me a unique perspective on this whole FOSS community, which has helped shape my ethics and my view of the world. While I believe that I would've subscribed to most of that ideology at any rate, I'm not sure that the details of my beliefs and understanding would've been exactly the same. And while I don't agree on every position that the project subscribes to as a whole, I do believe that the philosophies that lie at the core of this project contain just the right mix of pragmatism and ideology that makes it possible for our project to thrive in a changing world of not only a growing group of people who subscribe unconditionally to the free software ideals, but also business people who care mostly about money. Over the years, somehow I moved from "one of the recent batch of new Debian Developers" to "someone who's been with the project longer than most". It still feels weird to see people shut up because you've built up a reputation in some area, and you give your gut opinion on some subject without researching it too much. I try not to let that happen too often. Today, ten years and just over a week ago, my life as a Debian Developer started, and it would change the way I looked at the world, the things I would do in my spare time, and the people I would meet. I wouldn't have it any other way. Thanks, Debian, for what's been a blast; may the next ten years be as inspiring to me and everyone as the past ten!

Debian 6.0 (squeeze) has been released. Here are some notes if you're running Debian on an ARM-based NAS device or plug computer and are planning to upgrade. First of all, make sure to read the release notes for Debian 6.0 on ARM. This document contains a lot of information on performing a successful upgrade. Second, during the kernel upgrade, you'll get the following message about the boot loader configuration: On ARM-based NAS devices and plug computers, you can simply ignore this warning. We put the root device into the ramdisk so it will be updated automatically. Finally, after doing the upgrade and before rebooting your system, make sure to run flash-kernel to activate the new kernel.

I received a number of questions as to how the boot process of the SheevaPlug running Debian works. I've now published an explanation of how u-boot loads the Debian kernel and ramdisk in order to boot Debian.

Hello fellow developers, The summer is over but I m happy to announce that this year s Summer of Code at Debian has been better than ever! This is indeed the 4th time we had the privilege of participating in the Google Summer of Code and each year has been a little different. This year, 8 of our 10 students succeeded in our (very strict!) final evaluations, but we have reasons to believe that they will translate into more long-term developers than ever, all thank to you. The highlight this year has been getting almost all of our students at DebConf10. Thanks again this year to generous Travel Grants from the Google Open Source Team, we managed to fly in 7 of our students (up from 3!). You certainly saw them, presenting during DebianDay, hacking on the grass of Columbia, hacking^Wcheering our Debian Project Leader throwing the inaugural pitch of a professional baseball game or hacking^Wsun-tanning on the tr s kitsch Coney Island beach. Before I give the keyboard to our Students, I d like to tell you that it will be the pleasure and honor of Obey Arthur Liu (yours truly, as Administrator) and Bastian Venthur (as Mentor) to represent Debian at the Summer of Code 2010 Mentors Summit on 23-24 October 2010, at the Google Headquarters in Mountain View. Like last year, we expect many other DDs to be present under other hats. We will be having 2 days of unconference on GSoC and free software related topics. We all look forward to reporting from California on Planet and soc-coordination@l.a.d.o! All of our students had a wonderful experience, even if they couldn t come to DebConf, that is best shared in their own voice, so without further ado, our successful projects: Multi-Arch support in APT by David Kalnischkies, mentored by Michael Vogt apt-get install MultiArch does mostly work now as most code is already merged in squeeze, but if not complain about us at deity@l.d.o! Still, a lot left on the todo list not only in APT so let us all add MultiArch again to the Release Goals and work hard on squeezing it into wheezy. Debbugs Bug Reporting and Manipulation API by David Wendt Jr., mentored by Bastian Venthur Hello, I m David Wendt, and I went to Debconf10 to learn more about the development side of Debian. Having used it since the 9th grade, I ve been intimately familiar with many of Debian s internals. However, I wanted to see the developers and other Debian users. At DebConf, I was able to see a variety of talks from Debian and Ubuntu developers. I also got to meet with my mentor as well as the maintainer of Debbugs. Content-aware Config Files Upgrading by Krzysztof Tyszecki, mentored by Dominique Dumont Config::Model is now capable of manipulating files using shorter and easier to write models. Thanks to that, packagers may start experiment with creating upgrade models. Further work is needed to support more complicated config files Dominique Dumont is working on DEP-5 parser, I ll shortly start working on a cupsd config file parser.
The best thing about DebConf10 is that every person I talked with knew what I was doing. I had a mission to get some feedback on my project. Everybody liked the idea of making upgrades less cumbersome. On the other side, it was my first visit to United States, so I decided to go on a daytrip on my own (instead of staying inside the building, despite heat warnings). I had a chance to visit many interesting places like Ground Zero, the UN headquarters, Grand Central Terminal, Times square and Rockefeller Center that was a great experience. Hurd port and de-Linux-ization of Debian-Installer by J r mie Koenig, mentored by Samuel Thibault Debconf10 was great! Among other people working on the installer, I met Aur lien Jarno from the Debian/kFreeBSD team and we worked together on a cross-platform busybox package. Besides, the talks were very interesting and I ve filled my TODO-list for the year.
For instance I learned about the Jigsaw project of OpenJDK, and how Debian would be the ideal platform to experiment with it. More generally, some people think Debian could push Java 7 forward and I d like to see this happen. Smart Upload Server for FTP Master by Petr Jasek, mentored by Joerg Jaspert I must say that it was great time for me in NY, I ve met and talked and coded with people from ftp-master team like Torsten Werner who helped me to push the project a bit further and with some other people who were looking forward to release of the tool which I hope they will use quite soon. Everybody interested, everybody excited, really cool place and time. And I can t forget the Coney Island beach and stuff, lot of fun, lot of sun;) Aptitude Qt by Piotr Galiszewski, mentored by Sune Vuorela Currently, development branches support full features searching, viewing extended package s informations, performing cache and packages operations. Code and GUI still require a lot of work which will be continued. Informations about further progress could be found on aptitude mailing list and repository rss channel. Debian-Installer on Neo FreeRunner and Handheld Devices by Thibaut Girka, mentored by Gaudenz Steinlin For me, DebConf 10 started at the airport, where Sylvestre Ledru (whom I didn t know of before) was wearing a GSoC 2007 t-shirt, that is, given the circumstances, almost equivalent to say I m a hacker, I m going to DebConf 10 .
I ve spent my time at the conference attending various talks, hacking, meeting DDs and other hackers (amongst others, my co-mentor Per Andersson, Paul Wise, Julien Cristau, Christian Perrier, Cyril Brulebois, Martin Michlmayr, Colin Watson and Otavio Salvadores who I have to thank for his patience while dealing with my questions), chatting, cross-signing keys, rushing to finish eating before 7pm, getting sunburnt, sightseeing (thanks, Arthur, for the lightning-fast tour of Manhattan!), and so on. Debian Developers and community, we count on you. See you next year! (cross-posted to debian-devel-announce@l.d.o and soc-coordination@l.a.d.o)

The next 4th of September, the Portuguese Debian community will gather at the University of Aveiro for the third edition of the DebianDayPT

There will be several talks about about Debian/Free Software in Portuguese and as special guest, Martin Michlmayr will deliver a couple of talks titled Contributing to Debian and Project Management in Free Software . Like last year, there will be DVDs with Debian Live so people can discover, try and install upcoming Debian stable Squeeze .

You can find more information of the event and information of how to arrive at: http://debiandaypt.debianpt.org/.

Even though I am late with this post, it is nice to say that I am writing here from this year s DebConf10, in NYC. Today (well, yesterday) was the day of the Cheese and Wine party and I think that it was cool, at least for the moments that I were there. This post, though, isn t technical in any sense. I only talks shortly about my impressions of the community, as this is my first DebConf ever (despite the fact that I have been using Debian since the late nineties). I was very pleased to have met Bdale Garbee. I saw him the other day arriving with Keith Packard, but I just didn t want to disturb them at that point. We only talked for, say, 2 minutes, and his was one of the nicest receptions that I had here. And there were some other people that were equally easy to approach, nice to talk with and, to my surprise, knew my name after some brief moments (yes, this does make a difference, especially when you are in a strange country, when you don t know anybody with whom you have worked for some years). Being involved in the organization stuff, one would think that Jimmy Kaplowitz would be so busy, but he was so kind. I had longer conversations with T ssia Cam es, Tiago Vaz (as always) and some other people that I had not yet had the pleasure of meeting in person. In particular, Daniel Baumann (who apparently is now crazy about our FISL and wants to drink all Guaran that he can get ), Chris Lamb and Ot vio Salvador and his mom. Those people are so cool and it is nice to discuss some legal issues among different continents in the lounge of their building at late night. Too bad that I am allocated to the other building. I am forgetting many other people (hey, it is 2 am here in NYC), but I would feel guilty if I had not mentioned at least three people more: Martin Michlmayr, Phil Hands, and Reinhard Tartler (who is uploading lame to the debian repository, as the patents regarding it are expiring or expired already). Thanks! P.S.: I just created an account on flickr that I hope to populate with some photos that I took here. And even with a nice squirrel.

The eSATA SheevaPlug is supported by the Debian installer and by Debian now. I've updated the install guide accordingly. If you're already running Debian on your eSATA SheevaPlug but you installed as a regular SheevaPlug to USB or SD and you'd like to use the eSATA, then make sure you're the latest kernel from Debian squeeze: Reboot and type this in u-boot: Your machine will then be recognized as an eSATA SheevaPlug and eSATA will work. Thanks to John Holland for working on SheevaPlug eSATA support.

I recently discovered that there are two variants of the recovery mode used on QNAP TS-11x/TS-21x (and possible TS-41x) devices and that one has a different behaviour than what my documentation claims. While this issue should hopefully affect few users (but please take a moment and check if you're affected), it has implications to all Debian users on TS-11x/TS-21x. My install guide originally told users to create backup of some mtd partitions only but from now on you need a copy of all partitions in order to use the recovery mode. Therefore, please take a moment now to create a backup of the remaining partitions: (You should have copies of mtd1, mtd2 and mtd3 already if you following my guide.) Make sure to copy the files to another machine and add them to your backup.

We added support for Marvell's Kirkwood platform to the Debian installer a few months ago and a lot of people have installed Debian testing (squeeze) on devices such as the SheevaPlug and QNAP TS-11x/TS-21x. While this works great, some people would prefer to run Debian stable (lenny). Until recently, I thought we wouldn't be able to support lenny in the installer since the kernel in stable doesn't have support for Kirkwood. However, some work by Frans Pop showed me that it would be quite trivial to change the installer so it would install Debian stable plus the kernel from an alternative repository. So from now on, it's possible to install Debian stable (lenny) on the SheevaPlug, QNAP TS-11x/TS-21x and OpenRD. This installation mechanism uses the squeeze installer to install Debian lenny (stable) plus the kernel from a repository I maintain. This repository usually contains the kernel from Debian testing (although I sometimes add the kernel from unstable if it has some important features). Since some users might be wondering which version to install, here is an overview of the benefits and downsides of each version. Debian lenny (stable): it is the current stable version of Debian (version 5.0).

• lenny has security support (note that this does not apply to the kernel, which we take from squeeze).
• lenny is stable (i.e. it doesn't change, except for security and other important updates).
• The software in lenny is older (since lenny was released in February 2009).

Debian squeeze (testing): it is currently under development and will be the next stable version of Debian (version 6.0).

• squeeze changes every day, with new software coming in.
• squeeze has fairly new software.
• While there is some security support for testing (squeeze), the security support for stable is better.

The following article was contributed by John Cass. Note that John's instructions will also work on other NAS machines running Debian, such as QNAP devices. I had a problem upgrading my Debian kernel to 2.6.32 on the D-Link DNS-323. The upgrade looked like it worked but on reboot I had a hung machine. I tried taking the disk out, putting it in my main machine and remaking the links in /boot to the previous kernel and initrd.img but it turns out that on the DNS-323 both kernel and initrd are actually stored in flash memory (the /boot disk files are where they are built and a useful archive but are not used during the boot process). So I was stuck, and had to make a serial cable in order to find out what was going on. The instructions here and here were very useful and the CA-42 clone cost me 4 GBP on eBay and arrived within a couple of days. A delicate bit of soldering (and installing ckermit on my main machine) and I had a serial connection - I could finally see what was was happening. The upshot was, during the boot process the DNS-323 failed to mount my root partition. This was because the partition was formatted ext3 and the initrd.img had not included the ext3 module. It probably did this because I had deliberately forced mounting it as ext2 in the /etc/fstab (in an attempt to limit the write access to the disk, I want it to stay in standby for a long time but that's another post). (Remark by Martin: this is a known issue with initramfs-tools.) Anyway, having seen this, Martin was able to guide me to getting it fixed:

• First of all, I issued modprobe ext2 to get the ext2 module loaded (luckily this was included in initrd.img).
• Then you can mount the root partition on /root: mount -t ext2 /dev/sda2 /root - it will complain a bit but will work fine.
• Then run /scripts/init-bottom/udev - this moves /dev to within the new root directory.
• chroot /root /bin/sh - shift the root around so we are working from the proper root disk
• mount -t proc none /proc - mount the proc tree
• mount -t sys none /sys - and the sys tree
• nano /etc/fstab - edit this to change ext2 back to ext3 for the root partition
• mount -t ext2 /dev/sda1 /boot - mount the boot partition if it's a different device (mine is)
• Edit /etc/initramfs-tools/modules and add both ext2 and ext3 - this will force their inclusion in the updated initrd.img
• run update-initramfs -u to regenerate the kernel and initrd.img - this will rebuild the files in /boot and it will use flash-kernel to put them into the flash memory
• umount /proc /sys /dev /boot - unmount filesystems
• exit - leave the chroot
• umount /root - unmount the root partition
• reboot

And it should all be working!

Every once in a while someone asks how they can use the Debian installer to access their system on disk to run commands, for example to write the kernel and ramdisk to flash again. This is particularly useful on headless NAS devices. So here's how to do it:

1. Start the Debian installer.
2. Remove the SSH key from ~/.known_hosts because the installer will always generate a new key.
3. Connect to the installer with SSH: ssh installer@...
4. Follow the installer until you reach the partitioner, then choose "go back".
5. Open a shell (look for Execute a shell towards the end of the menu).
6. Run the commands below (the example assumes that /boot is /dev/sda1 and / is /dev/sda2.

The Debian installer team today announced the alpha1 version of the installer for Debian squeeze (6.0). This release adds a lot of new features but I just wanted to highlight the ARM related enhancements. With this release, Marvell's Kirkwood platform is supported. Specifically, the installer supports the following devices: QNAP TS-110 and TS-119, QNAP TS-210, TS-219 and TS-219P, SheevaPlug and OpenRD. In addition to Kirkwood support, Wouter Verhelst added support for the Intel Storage System SS4000-E.

RCBW - #18 ... and RCBW is back! Here is this week squashes:

• bug #544879 - clutter - resurrect -doc package, fix gtk-doc related FTBFS
• bug #504980, bug #560513 - cryptonit - add missing #include for gcc 4.4 (bonus point: misc QA fixes)
• bug #504901 - dibbler - no longer valid gcc FTBFS
• bug #504869 - scim-bridge - closed (w maintainer) as unreproducible an already fixed gcc 4.4 bug
• bug #505390 - traverso - add missing #include for gcc 4.4
• bug #562846 - flim - drop Recommends on metamail (now gone)
• bug #526207 - jaula - closed as unreproducible a gcc 4.4 bug (recent flex adds cstdio by itself)

Most of the actually fixed missing include bugs above have benefited from patches by Martin Michlmayr, thanks! Also, this week squashing has benefited from a huge list of bugs which Luk has given me, some of the not-yet-fixed bugs there are a bit trickier than usual (e.g. missing #include bugs which got intertwined over time with const char * conversions bugs, which in turn require some far reaching code changes due to the propagation of function prototypes in unexpected code parts). Since I'll be leaving tomorrow morning for the BSP in M nchengladbach, I'll have a bit of time there to dive a bit more into the issues. Actually, what I fear most now is buying train tickets from Cologne to Moenchengladbach and back, since I'm totally unable to pronounce the name of the latter city (my German sucks, actually there is no such "my German" at all). Luckily, I've been told they've wonderful ticket-selling machines in Cologne See you there, and happy RC squashing!

a short update on my RC-bug squashing activities:

• #526210 scim-kmfl-imengine: "FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include"
  apply patch from the BTS, upload to DELAYED/2
• #531715 gcin: "FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include"
  add comment to BTS, later NMU'd by zack
• #534600 spatialindex: "spatialindex: FTBFS with GCC 4.4"
  apply patch from the BTS, upload to DELAYED/2
• #539543 hubbub: "FTBFS with GCC 4.4: 'cptr' may be used uninitialized"
  apply patch from the BTS, upload to DELAYED/2
• #546386 fam: "FTBFS with gcc4.4"
  apply patch from the BTS, upload to DELAYED/2
• #549223 chuck: "fails to build with gcc-4.4/newer eglibc"
  apply patch from the BTS, upload to DELAYED/2
• #550115 gbgoffice: "FTBFS: invalid const conversion"
  apply patch from the BTS, upload to DELAYED/2
• #553706 glob2: "FTBFS with GCC 4.4: 'class GAGCore::StreamBackend' has no member named 'getc'"
  apply patch from the BTS, upload to DELAYED/2

remarks:

• to be honest, these were all easy bugs, I just grabbed existing patches (by Martin Michlmayr, peter green, & several Ubuntu folks).
• reactions so far: one "thank you" mail, no other comments.

RCBW - week #16 ... and here are christmas (for those who care) RC squashes, by yours truly (for those who care too):

• bug #530527 - ipsec-tools - gcc 4.4 strict-aliasing, patch by peter green
• bug #539010 - opensrs-client - stop using deprecated Perl module MD5, patch by Ansgar Burchardt
• bug #539542 - libnsgif - gcc 4.4 strict-aliasing, patch by peter green
• bug #531715 - gcin - gcc 4.4 missing include, patch by Martin Michlmayr (+ lintian overrides for appropriate use of rpath)
• bug #504873 - im-sdk - gcc 4.4 missing include, patch by Martin Michlmayr (bonus: package orphaning, misc QA, kfreebsd patches applied)
• bug #540681 - beast - cast to volatile pointer, patch by Jakub Wilk
• bug #560499 - beast - gcc 4.4 missing includes

and here are the usual notes:

• most of them come from Luk, which this week provided me with a looong list (and of course I was not able to empty it) ...
• ... that list has probably entered the radar of others: let's thank Christoph Egger, gregor hermann, and David Paleino, which contributed quite a lot of RC-fixing NMUs in the past few days (probably others did too, but these 3 got into my way the most )
• I got annoyed by bug #562518 (zlibg b0rkage) for a while: while my main system got saved by apt-listbugs, my cowbuilder environment was not that lucky
• I've tried following a wise advice to speed up pkg building, but it does not work w/ cowbuilder, which insists in creating hard links and hence fail due to cross-device linking. I need to investigate whether this can be fixed without loosing APT cache sharing with the host system
• "thanks" to im-sdk, I discovered yet another patch management system: dbs: how many others are still out there?
• how dumb is a BTS instance which is not accessible by default w/o registration even for read-only purposes?

Hint/request of the week: please add +pending when you do DELAYED/ NMUs, that way filtering out already taken care of bugs gets easier and refreshing a bug log page in the browser will immediately show the new tag at the top.
(Yes, I agree that nmudiff should offer that when passed --delay, I intend to propose a patch for that, but feel free to beat me at it :-P) In other news, christmas vacations are awesome to catch up with books you planned to finish reading months ago ... Update: the patch for nmudiff I've mentioned has been kindly provided by gregor hermann, thanks!

Just had some time in the last two days, and here's the list of uploaded NMUs. So far, I had only one maintainer complaining (again, sorry!), but I must admit that on Sunday I just didn't follow the correct NMU procedure Anyhow, here's what I have:

1. #504824 [libnids] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: #elif used instead of #else
2. #504864 [omnievents] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
3. #504871 [bookmarkbridge] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
4. #504902 [libofa] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
5. #504943 [libassa] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
6. #504963 [libfcgi] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
7. #504970 [italc] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
8. #504973 [libspiff] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
9. #505021 [passepartout] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
10. #505078 [codeine] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
11. #505333 [gloox] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
12. #505372 [bobot++] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
13. #505420 [esteidutil] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
14. #510759 [log4cxx] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
15. #526151 [openmovieeditor] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
16. #551107 [fusecompress] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
17. #551718 [eboard] eboard: FTBFS with latest eglibc and gcc 4.4

Some highlights Most of these bugs, if not all, already had a patch attached. Thanks to Martin Michlmayr for his work on this! Regarding fusecompress, after my upload to DELAYED/2, the maintainer promptly replied asking for sponsorship of a package he already had. So this does not really count If you want to participate in this great game too, and improve our loved distribution, you can have a look at this list of possibly easy bugs to fix. Have fun!