Alexander Wirt wrote it to our mailinglist already, there's a etch-backports suite on backports.org since a while. Please read his mail and check the mailinglist archive before contacting me or the mailinglist. Happy backporting. On a related note, I started working on a GNOME 2.18 backport for etch, but didn't find the time to finish it yet.

Bar.

During the last days I prepared a GNOME 2.16 backport for etch. My primary goal was to provide the gnome-desktop-environment meta-package and all of it's dependencies. The only outstanding problem is that you have to put the packages libeel2-data and libvte-common on hold before upgrading from GNOME 2.14 to GNOME 2.16. Beside the dependencies of the gnome-desktop-environment meta-package I also added up-to-date backports of pam-keyring, seahorse, gossip, xchat-gnome and liferea.

After the discussion about the upcoming non-free license change of the ion3 window manager, I decided to take a closer look at GNOME again. Last week I installed GNOME 2.14 from etch on my laptop, upgraded to 2.16 (which was a pain at that time), and found that I could actually make use of it. Meanwhile I also use GNOME 2.16 on my workstations at work and at home.

Today I got accepted as Debian Developer. I would like to thank the following people (in random order) for their involvment in my NM, mentoring and sponsoring uploads.

Philipp Kern, Michael Schiansky, Daniel Baumann, H ctor Garc a, Norbert Tretkowski, Werner Heuser, Marc Brockschmidt, Lars Wirzenius, Christoph Berg, J rg Jaspert, James Troup, Martin Krafft (feel yourself added if I forgot you, hopefully not)

Oh and congratulations Holger.

After this bugreport from Tuomo Valkonen (upstream of the ion window manager) against the ion3 Debian package and a personal discussion with him by mail, I'm no longer interested in maintaining the ion2, ion3, ion3-mod-ionflux and ion3-scripts packages. Drop me a mail when you're interested in taking over these packages. Update: The ion3 packages have been removed from etch yesterday, and I filed RFAs (#414362, #414363, #414364 and #414378) against the ion2 and ion3 packages.

After this bugreport from Tuomo Valkonen (upstream of the ion window manager) against the ion3 Debian package and a personal discussion with him by mail, I'm no longer interested in maintaining the ion2, ion3, ion3-mod-ionflux and ion3-scripts packages. Drop me a mail when you're interested in taking over these packages.

While talking about the ICQ transport on jabber.lusc.de... if you're still using ICQ, please take a look at their Acceptable Use Policy, it contains an important clause: You agree that by posting any material or information anywhere on the ICQ Services and Information you surrender your copyright and any other proprietary right in the posted material or information. You further agree that ICQ Inc. is entitled to use at its own discretion any of the posted material or information in any manner it deems fit, including, but not limited to, publishing the material or distributing it. I don't think it's necessary to comment this.

While talking about the ICQ transport on jabber.lusc.de... if you're still using ICQ, please take a look at their Acceptable Use Policy, it contains an important clause: You agree that by posting any material or information anywhere on the ICQ Services and Information you surrender your copyright and any other proprietary right in the posted material or information. You further agree that ICQ Inc. is entitled to use at its own discretion any of the posted material or information in any manner it deems fit, including, but not limited to, publishing the material or distributing it. I don't think it's necessary to comment this.

During the last two weeks I spent some time to add a few new features to jabber.lusc.de, the Jabber server of our local Linux User Group. The new features are ICQ, AIM, MSN and IRC transports and a file transfer proxy. Just use the discover service function of your Jabber client to use them. Still on my TODO list are pubsub, pyrss, a user directory and multi user chats.

There was an article on Debian Times about a problem with apt 0.6 from backports.org and the key which was used to sign the new release. Beside the fact that I still don't know why this article was published without informing me about the actual problem, I fixed it yesterday in the afternoon by providing updated backports of apt and debian-archive-keyring. Solution: Upgrade to the latest backports of apt 0.6.46.4~bpo.1 and debian-archive-keyring 2006.11.22~bpo.2.

After using BitlBee as Jabber client during the last years, I recently switched to Gajim, a Jabber client written in pygtk2. It supports some important Jabber features which I really miss in BitlBee, for example group chat, gpg encrypted messages and priority adjusting according to the current status. After some tweaking of my ion3 setup (floating winprop for Gajim windows, getting trayer started in the dock to catch the Gajim trayicon, some additional keybindings for gajim-remote (which unfortunately requires dbus)), it's perfectly usable in my environment.

If you upgraded to slrn 0.9.8.1pl1-22 or newer and now realize that you see question marks instead diacritical chars (e.g. german umlauts) in the subject and/or in the authors name when looking at the article overview, please read #406210 before filing yet another bugreport. This is not a bug in slrn, but a bug in the newsreader which was used to write the corresponding article. Update: 0.9.8.1pl1-25 contains a workaround for this problem, see NEWS.Debian.gz for details.

Using SLES10 as a mailserver is a bad idea, especially when you want to use virtual users and domains with postfix, courier and mysql. Why? SLES10 ships neither a courier-authlib-mysql package, nor a postfix-mysql package, nor a maildrop package. I really wonder what the 'E' in SLES stands for...

Today a small parcel for me arrived in the office. It was a free OpenSuSE 10.2 box, which I got from Novell for actively testing the new release. I was a bit surprised, because I never tested the new release. What I really did was reporting problems in their previous release OpenSuSE 10.1 and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 to their Bugzilla, and looking at the bugreports now, most of them are indeed fixed in the new release. Thanks Novell for my first Christmas present this year.

With the uploads of slrn 0.9.8.1pl1-23 and ion3-scripts 20061214-1 this evening I nearly finished my TODO list for etch. The only pending issue is a problem in the alpha smp kernel which was discussed on the debian-alpha mailinglist, but unfortunately there's no working solution yet.

tretkowski@rollcage:~% dog http://planet.debian.org/ grep -c -i ubuntu
28
tretkowski@rollcage:~% dog http://planet.debian.org/ grep -c -i canonical
12

People keep asking me why installing kernel-images from backports.org fails, and what's the workaround. The reason why installing the packages fails is a broken yaird backport. Because nobody seems interested in fixing it, I just removed yaird from the backports.org archive. Use initramfs-tools instead, it works fine.

Thanks to my new employer (for those who didn't notice, I left Teamix and work for IP Exchange since September), this server has a native IPv6 connection since I moved it to it's new colocation about two weeks ago.

Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'.   -- somewhere on IRC today