Search Results: "Mike Gabriel"

15 September 2020

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, August 2020

A Debian LTS logo Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In August, 237.25 work hours have been dispatched among 14 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation August was a regular LTS month once again, even though it was only our 2nd month with Stretch LTS.
At the end of August some of us participated in DebConf 20 online where we held our monthly team meeting. A video is available.
As of now this video is also the only public resource about the LTS survey we held in July, though a written summary is expected to be released soon. The security tracker currently lists 56 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 55 packages needing an update. Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that recently joined are in bold.

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5 September 2020

Mike Gabriel: My Work on Debian LTS (August 2020)

In August 2020, I have worked on the Debian LTS project for 16 hours (of 8 hours planned, plus another 8 hours that I carried over from July). For ELTS, I have worked for another 8 hours (of 8 hours planned). LTS Work ELTS Work Other security related work for Debian References

28 August 2020

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, July 2020

A Debian LTS logo Like each month, albeit a bit later due to vacation, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In July, 249.25 work hours have been dispatched among 14 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation July was our first month of Stretch LTS! Given this is our fourth LTS release we anticipated a smooth transition and it seems everything indeed went very well. Many thanks to the members of the Debian ftpmaster-, security, release- and publicity- teams who helped us make this happen!
Stretch LTS begun on July 18th 2020 after the 13th and final Stretch point release. and is currently scheduled to end on June 30th 2022. Last month, we asked you to participate in a survey and we got 1764 submissions, which is pretty awesome. Thank you very much for participating!. Right now we are still busy crunching the results, but we already shared some early analysis during the Debconf LTS bof this week. The security tracker currently lists 54 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 52 packages needing an update. Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold.

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11 August 2020

Mike Gabriel: No Debian LTS Work in July 2020

In July 2020, I was originally assigned 8h of work on Debian LTS as a paid contributor, but holiday season overwhelmed me and I did not do any LTS work, at all. The assigned hours from July I have taken with me into August 2020. light+love,
Mike

24 July 2020

Mike Gabriel: Ayatana Indicators / IDO - Menu Rendering Fixed with vanilla GTK-3+

At DebConf 17 in Montreal, I gave a talk about Ayatana Indicators [1] and the project's goal to continue the by then already dropped out of maintenance Ubuntu Indicators in a separate upstream project, detached from Ubuntu and its Ubuntu'isms. Stalling The whole Ayatana Indicators project received a bit of a show stopper by the fact that the IDO (Indicator Display Object) rendering was not working in vanilla GTK-3 without a certain patch [2] that only Ubuntu has in their GTK-3 package. Addressing GTK developers upstream some years back (after GTK 3.22 had already gone into long term maintenance mode) and asking for a late patch acceptance did not work out (as already assumed). Ayatana Indicators stalled at a level of 90% actually working fine, but those nice and shiny special widgets, like the calendar widget, the audio volume slider widgets, switch widgets, etc. could not be rendered appropriately in GTK based desktop environments (e.g. via MATE Indicator Applet) on other distros than Ubuntu. I never really had the guts to sit down without a defined ending and find a patch / solution to this nasty problem. Ayatana Indicators stalled as a whole. I kept it alive and defended its code base against various GLib and what-not deprecations and kept it in Debian, but the software was actually partially broken / dysfunctional. Taking the Dog for a Walk and then It Became all Light+Love Several days back, I received a mail from Robert Tari [3]. I was outside on a hike with our dog and thought, ah well, let's check emails... I couldn't believe what I read then, 15 seconds later. I could in fact, hardly breathe... I have known Robert from earlier email exchanges. Robert maintains various "little" upstream projects, like e.g. Caja Rename, Odio, Unity Mail, etc. that I have looked into earlier regarding Debian packaging. Robert is also a Manjaro contributor and he has been working on bringing Ayatana Indicators to Manjaro MATE. In the early days, without knowing Robert, I even forked one of his projects (indicator-notification) and turned it into an Ayatana Indicator. Robert and I also exchanged some emails about Ayatana Indicators already a couple of weeks ago. I got the sense of him maybe being up to something already then. Oh, yeah!!! It turned out that Robert and I share the same "love" for the Ubuntu Indicators concept [4]. From his email, it became clear that Robert had spent the last 1-2 weeks drowned in the Ayatana IDO and libayatana-indicator code and worked him self through the bowels of it in order to understand the code concept of Indicators to its very depth. When emerging back from his journey, he presented me (or rather: the world) a patch [5] against libayatana-indicator that makes it possible to render IDO objects even if a vanilla GTK-3 is installed on the system. This patch is a game changer for Indicator lovers. When Robert sent me his mail pointing me to this patch, I think, over the past five years, I have never felt more excited (except from the exact moment of getting married to my wife two-to-three years ago) than during that moment when my brain tried to process his email. "Like a kid on Christmas Eve...", Robert wrote in one of his later mails to me. Indeed, like a "kid on Christmas Eve", Robert. Try It Out As a proof of all this to the Debian people, I have just done the first release of ayatana-indicator-datetime and uploaded it to Debian's NEW queue. Robert is doing the same for Manjaro. The Ayatana Indicator Sound will follow after my vacation. For fancy widget rendering in Ayatana Indicator's system indicators, make sure you have libayatana-indicator 0.7.0 or newer installed on your system. Credits One of the biggest thanks ever I send herewith to Robert Tari! Robert is now co-maintainer of Ayatana Indicators. Welcome! Now, there is finally a team of active contributors. This is so delightful!!! References P.S. Expect more Ayatana Indicators to appear in your favourite distro soon...

23 July 2020

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, June 2020

A Debian LTS logo Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In June, 202.00 work hours have been dispatched among 12 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation June was the last month of Jessie LTS which ended on 2020-06-20. If you still need to run Jessie somewhere, please read the post about keeping Debian 8 Jessie alive for longer than 5 years.
So, as (Jessie) LTS is dead, long live the new LTS, Stretch LTS! Stretch has received its last point release, so regular LTS operations can now continue.
Accompanying this, for the first time, we have prepared a small survey about our users and contributors, who they are and why they are using LTS. Filling out the survey should take less than 10 minutes. We would really appreciate if you could participate in the survey online! On July 27th 2020 we will close the survey, so please don t hesitate and participate now! After that, there will be a followup with the results. The security tracker for Stretch LTS currently lists 29 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 44 packages needing an update in Stretch LTS. Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold. We welcome CoreFiling this month!

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2 July 2020

Mike Gabriel: My Work on Debian LTS (June 2020)

In June 2020, I have worked on the Debian LTS project for 8 hours (of 8 hours planned). LTS Work Other security related work for Debian References

24 June 2020

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, May 2020

A Debian LTS logo Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In May, 198 work hours have been dispatched among 14 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation In May 2020 we had our second (virtual) contributors meeting on IRC, Logs and minutes are available online. Then we also moved our ToDo from the Debian wiki to the issue tracker on salsa.debian.org.
Sadly three contributors went inactive in May: Adrian Bunk, Anton Gladky and Dylan A ssi. And while there are currently still enough active contributors to shoulder the existing work, we like to use this opportunity that we are always looking for new contributors. Please mail Holger if you are interested.
Finally, we like to remind you for a last time, that the end of Jessie LTS is coming in less than a month!
In case you missed it (or missed to act), please read this post about keeping Debian 8 Jessie alive for longer than 5 years. If you expect to have Debian 8 servers/devices running after June 30th 2020, and would like to have security updates for them, please get in touch with Freexian. The security tracker currently lists 6 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 30 packages needing an update. Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold. With the upcoming start of Jessie ELTS, we are welcoming a few new sponsors and others should join soon.

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1 June 2020

Mike Gabriel: My Work on Debian LTS (May 2020)

In May 2020, I have worked on the Debian LTS project for 14.5 hours (of 14.5 hours planned). LTS Work Other security related work for Debian Credits References

23 May 2020

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, April 2020

A Debian LTS logo Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In April, 284.5 work hours have been dispatched among 14 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation In April we dispatched more hours than ever and another was new too, we had our first (virtual) contributors meeting on IRC! Logs and minutes are available and we plan to continue doing IRC meetings every other month.
Sadly one contributor decided to go inactive in April, Hugo Lefeuvre.
Finally, we like to remind you, that the end of Jessie LTS is coming in less than two months!
In case you missed it (or missed to act), please read this post about keeping Debian 8 Jessie alive for longer than 5 years. If you expect to have Debian 8 servers/devices running after June 30th 2020, and would like to have security updates for them, please get in touch with Freexian. The security tracker currently lists 4 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 25 packages needing an update. Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold.

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13 May 2020

Mike Gabriel: Q: Remote Support Framework for the GNU/Linux Desktop?

TL;DR; For those (admins) of you who run GNU/Linux on staff computers: How do you organize your graphical remote support in your company? Get in touch, share your expertise and experiences. Researching on FLOSS based Linux Desktops When bringing GNU/Linux desktops to a generic folk of productive office users on a large scale, graphical remote support is a key feature when organizing helpdesk support teams' workflows. In a research project that I am currently involved in, we investigate the different available remote support technologies (VNC screen mirroring, ScreenCasts, etc.) and the available frameworks that allow one to provide a remote support infrastructure 100% on-premise. In this research project we intend to find FLOSS solutions for everything required for providing a large scale GNU/Linux desktop to end users, but we likely will have to recommend non-free solutions, if a FLOSS approach is not available for certain demands. Depending on the resulting costs, bringing forth a new software solution instead of dumping big money in subscription contracts for non-free software is seen as a possible alternative. As a member of the X2Go upstream team and maintainer of several remote desktop related tools and frameworks in Debian, I'd consider myself as sort of in-the-topic. The available (as FLOSS) underlying technologies for plumbing a remote support framework are pretty much clear (x11vnc, recent pipewire-related approaches in Wayland compositors, browser-based screencasting). However, I still lack a good spontaneous answer to the question: "How to efficiently software-side organize a helpdesk scenario for 10.000+ users regarding graphical remote support?". Framework for Remote Desktop in Webbrowsers In fact, in the context of my X2Go activities, I am currently planning to put together a Django-based framework for running X2Go sessions in a web browser. The framework that we will come up with (two developers have already been hired for an initial sprint in July 2020) will be designed to be highly pluggable and it will probably be easy to add remote support / screen sharing features further on. And still, I walk around with the question in mind: Do I miss anything? Is there anything already out there that provides a remote support solution as 100% FLOSS, that has enterprise grade, that up-scales well, that has a modern UI design, etc. Something that I simply haven't come across, yet? Looking forward to Your Feedback Please get in touch (OFTC/Freenode IRC, Telegram, Email), if you can fill the gap and feel like sharing your ideas and experiences. light+love
Mike

30 April 2020

Mike Gabriel: My Work on Debian LTS (April 2020)

Due to sickness I was not able to complete my 8 hours of work on Debian LTS as planned. I only worked 1.5 hours this month, moving the remaining 6.5 hours over to May. LTS Other security related work for Debian

16 April 2020

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, March 2020

A Debian LTS logo Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In March, 252 work hours have been dispatched among 14 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation March was a strange month for many people all over the globe. Here we ll just express our hopes that you are and will be well! LTS gained a new contributor in March, Anton Gladky, however he then decided to become active later this year. Similarly Hugo Lefeuvre notified us that he ll be inactive in April. In case you missed it (or missed to act), please read this post about keeping Debian 8 Jessie alive for longer than 5 years. If you expect to have Debian 8 servers/devices running after June 30th 2020, and would like to have security updates for them, please get in touch with Freexian. Hurry up: the end of Jessie LTS is coming in less than three months! The security tracker currently lists 25 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 23 packages needing an update. Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold.

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2 April 2020

Mike Gabriel: Q: RoamingProfiles under GNU/Linux? What's your Best Practice?

This post is an open question to the wide range of GNU/Linux site admins out there. Possibly some of you have the joy of maintaining GNU/Linux also on user endpoint devices (i.e. user workstations, user notebooks, etc.), not only on corporate servers. TL;DR; In the context of a customer project, I am researching ways of mimicking (or inventing anew) a feature well known (and sometimes also well hated) from the MS Windows world: Roaming User Profiles. If anyone does have any input on that, please contact me (OFTC/Freenode IRC, Telegram, email). I am curious what your solution may be. The Use Case Scenario In my use case, all user machines shall be mobile (notebooks, convertibles, etc). The machines maybe on-site most of the time, but they need offline capabilities so that the users can transparently move off-site and continue their work. At the same time, a copy of the home directory (or the home directory itself) shall be stored on some backend fileservers (for central backups as well as for providing the possibility to the user to login to another machine and be up-and-running +/- out-of-the-box). The Vision Initial Login Ideally, I'd like to have a low level file system feature for this that handles it all. On corporate user logon (which must take place on-site and uses some LDAP database as backend), the user credentials get cached locally (and get re-mapped and re-cached with every on-site login later on), and the home directory gets mounted from a remote server at first. Shortly after having logged in everything in the user's home gets sync'ed to a local cache in the background without the user noticing. At the end of the sync a GUI user notification would be nice, e.g. like "All user data has been cached locally, you are good to go and leave off-site now with this machine." Moving Off-Site A day later, the user may be travelling or such, the user logs into the machine again, the machine senses being offline or on some alien (not corporate) network, but the user can just continue their work, all in local cache. Several days later, the same user with the same machine returns back to office, logs into the machine again, and immediately after login, all cached data gets synced back to the user's server filespace. Possible Conflict Policies Now there might be cases where the user has been working locally for a while and all the profile data received slight changes. The user might have had the possibility to log into other corporate servers from the alien network he*she is on and with that login, some user profile files probably will have gotten changed. Regarding client-server sync policies, one could now enforce a client-always-wins policy that leads to changes being dropped server-side once the user's mobile workstation returns back on-site. One could also set up a bi-directional sync policy for normal data files, but a client-always-wins policy for configuration files (.files and .folders). Etc.pp. Request for Feedback and Comments I could go on further and further with making up edges and corner cases of all this. We had a little discussion on this some days ago on the #debian-devel IRC channel already. Thanks to all contributors to that discussion. And again, if you have solved the above riddle on your site and are corporate-wise allowed to share the concept, I'd be happy about your feedback. Plese get in touch! light+love
Mike (aka sunweaver on the Fediverse and in Debian)

1 April 2020

Mike Gabriel: My Work on Debian LTS (March 2020)

In March 2020, I have worked on the Debian LTS project for 10.25 hours (of 10.25 hours planned). LTS Work Other security related work for Debian Credits A very big thanks goes to Utkarsh Gupta, a colleague from the Debian LTS team, who sponsored all my uploads and who sent the DLA mails on my behalf, while I was (and still am) in self-induced GPG lockdown (I forgot to update my GPG public key in Debian's GPG keyring). Thanks, Utkarsh! References

30 March 2020

Mike Gabriel: UBports: Packaging of Lomiri Operating Environment for Debian (part 02)

Before and during FOSDEM 2020, I agreed with the people (developers, supporters, managers) of the UBports Foundation to package the Unity8 Operating Environment for Debian. Since 27th Feb 2020, Unity8 has now become Lomiri. Recent Uploads to Debian related to Lomiri Over the past 7-8 weeks the packaging progress has been slowed down due to other projects I am working on in parallel. However, quite a few things have been achieved: The packages qtsystems, qtfeedback, and qtpim are no official Qt5 components, and so I had to package Git snapshots of them; with all implicit consequences regarding ABI and API compatibilities, possibly Debian-internal library transitions, etc. Esp. packaging qtsystems was pretty tricky due to a number of failing unit tests when the package had been built in a clean chroot (like it is the case on Debian's buildd infrastructure). I learned a lot about DBus and DBus mocking while working on all those unit tests to finally pass in chrooted builds. Unfortunately, the Lomiri App Launch component still needs more work due to (finally only) one unit test (jobs-systemd) not always passing. Sometimes, the test gets stucks and then fails after having reached a time out. I'll add it to my list of those unreproducible build failures I have recently seen in several GTest related unit test scenarios. Sigh... Credits A great thanks goes to Lisandro Perez Meyer from the Debian KDE/Qt Team for providing an intro and help on Qt Debian packaging and an intro on symbols handling with C++ projects. Another big thanks goes to Dmitry Shachnev from the Debian KDE/Qt Team for doing a sponsored upload [1] of qtpim (and also a nice package review). Also a big thanks goes to Marius Gripsgard for his work on forking the first Lomiri components on the UBports upstream side. Previous Posts about my Debian UBports Team Efforts References

Mike Gabriel: Mailman3 - Call for Translations (@Weblate)

TL;DR; please help localizing Mailman3 [1]. You can find it on hosted Weblate [2].The next component releases are planned in 1-2 weeks from now. Thanks for your contribution! If you can't make it now, please consider working on Mailman3 translations at some later point of time. Thanks! Time has come for Mailman3 Over the last months I have found an interest in Mailman3. Given the EOL of Python2 in January 2020 and also being a heavy Mailman2 provider for various of my projects and also for customers, I felt it was time to look at Mailman2's successor: Mailman3 [1]. One great novelty in Mailman3 is the strict split up between backend (Mailman Core), and the frontend components (django-mailman3, Postorius, Hyperkitty). All three are Django applications. Postorius is the list management web frontend whereas Hyperkitty is an archive viewer. Other than in Mailman2, you can also drop list posts into Hyperkitty directly (instead of sending a mail to the list). This makes Hyperkitty also some sort of forum software with a mailing list core in the back. The django-mailman3 module knits the previous two together (and handles account management, login dialog, profile settings, etc.). Looking into Mailman3 Upstream Code Some time back in midst 2019 I decided to deploy Mailman3 at a customer's site and also for my own business (which still is the test installation). Living and working in Germany, my customers' demand often is a fully localized WebUI. And at that time, Mailman3 could not provide this. Many exposed parts of the Mailman3 components were still not localized (or not localizable). Together with my employee I put some hours of effort into providing merge requests, filing bug reports, request better Weblate integration (meaning: hosted Weblate), improving the membership scripting support, etc. It felt a bit like setting the whole i18n thing in motion. Call for Translations Over the past months I had to focus on other work and two days ago I was delighted that Abhilash Raj (one of the Mailman3 upstream maintainers) informed me (via closing one of the related bugs [3]) that Mailman3 is now fully integrated with the hosted Weblate service and a continous translation workflow is set to go. The current translation stati of the Mailman3 components are at ~ 10%. We can do better than this, I sense. So, if you are a non-native English speaker and feel like contributing to Mailman3, please visit the hosted Weblate site [2], sign up for an account (if you don't have one already), and chime in into the translation of one of the future mailing list software suites run by many FLOSS projects all around the globe. Thanks a lot for your help. As a side note, if you plan working on translating Mailman Core into your language (and can't find it in the list of supported languages), please request this new language via the Weblate UI. All other components have all available languages enabled by default. References:

25 March 2020

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, February 2020

A Debian LTS logo Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In February, 226 work hours have been dispatched among 14 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation February began as rather calm month and the fact that more contributors have given back unused hours is an indicator of this calmness and also an indicator that contributing to LTS has become more of a routine now, which is good. In the second half of February Holger Levsen (from LTS) and Salvatore Bonaccorso (from the Debian Security Team) met at SnowCamp in Italy and discussed tensions and possible improvements from and for Debian LTS. The security tracker currently lists 25 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 21 packages needing an update. Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold.

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18 March 2020

Mike Gabriel: #FlattenTheCurve

Today's address to the public by the German chancellor. I am totally chiming in with here. Please all across the world, help to #FlattenTheCurve:
https://www.tagesschau.de/multimedia/video/video-676493.html light+love & sei gesund!
Mike

17 March 2020

Mike Gabriel: Time for home office! Time for X2Go?

Most of us IT people should be in home office by now. If not, make sure you'll arrange that with your employers, cooperation partners, contractors, etc. Please help flatten the curve. X2Go as your Home Office solution If your computer at work runs a GNU/Linux desktop and you can SSH into it, then it might be time for you to try out X2Go [1]. Remote desktop access under GNU/Linux. Free Support for simple Client-Server Setups If your daily work is related to health care, municipal work, medical research, etc. (all those fields that are currently working under very high demands), please join the #x2go IRC channel on Freenode [2] and I'll do my very best to help you with setting up X2Go. Professional Support for Large Scale Setups If you run a business and need X2Go support site-wide, brokerage support, etc. please consider asking for professional support [3]. References

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