Search Results: "Otavio Salvador"

30 September 2006

Otavio Salvador: GRUB legacy is frozen

During this week, Robert (one of maintainers of grub), proposed on the mailing list to freeze it. We won’t do a hard freeze but we’ll only accept patches that:

Fix bugs
Were accepted upstream
Adds a feature that’s need to a lot of people

Besides, he did a lot of good work on GRUB2. All new developments, improvements and refactorings are focused on GRUB2 now. We intend to move to it as soon as Etch goes out and ’cause of that we engourage everyone to make a test and report his/her results to us. I also want to ask to everyone who did previous work on grub and that wasn’t merged until now, try to convert it to grub2 and coordenate with us how we can integrate it better with grub2.

21 August 2006

Gustavo Franco: 7th International Free Software Forum

I'll be in Porto Alegre, Brazil <a href="http://fisl.softwarelivre.org/7.0/www/?q=en">for the event</a> (FISL, in portuguese) from 19 may until 22, the last day. There will be some interesting Debian related activities there: Debian stand We will have a stand in the event, and there we plan to coordinate a Key Signing Party (KSP) and a Bug Squashing Party (BSP). Since we will have many DDs and NMs there, it sounds promising. If you want to join us in the BSP, keep an eye at debian-qa mailing list and irc.freenode.net - #debian-bugs. Sacix I will talk about a CDD called <a href="http://www.sacix.org/">Sacix</a>, that aims to be the default choice for telecentres and counts with more than 15000 end-users in Brazil right now. The project wasn't a CDD until i jumped in and released with a team the 5.11 (November, last year). The next release is scheduled to May and will be Sarge based again, but with a interesting telecentre management system developed in PHP, some "in house made" backports and stuff from backports.org. Stay tuned or just go there and watch my talk. Debian-BR-CDD Unlike Sacix, <a href="http://cdd.debian-br.org/">Debian-BR-CDD</a> has no clear goal in terms of audience and in its first release ships the most user-friendly GNU/Linux desktop for Portuguese speakers until now. The 1.0 announcement was made, but the release party and Otavio Salvador (DD and Debian-BR-CDD starter) talk will happen during the event. I'm sure that i will have some time to keep uploading <a href="http://python-modules.alioth.debian.org">python-modules</a> and meet with Otavio to talk about some new stuff for LTSP package and discuss it with <a href="http://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-ltsp">pkg-ltsp</a> members. Hopefully i'll be more involved in GNOME too, due to the evil <a href="http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=guilherme.pastore@terra.com.br">Guilherme</a> influence, that just received his account. Isn't it cool when you see a 15yr old hacker joining the project ? That's the real "fresh blood" we need.

18 August 2006

Otavio Salvador: New grub2 packages uploaded to unstable

I’m glad to upload a new grub2 package to unstable that had a lot of collaboration from Robert Millan who ported update-grub to it. That release is far more usable then any previous release we ever had and I would like if people could test and report bug upstream and on BTS too. Thanks Robert!

10 August 2006

Martin F. Krafft: Through with XFS

I am through with XFS, once and for all. Well, at least for laptops. I still think it's a good filesystem when you can ensure that the power never goes, and your hardware is reliable, but it's just not adequate for laptops or even desktops. I ran into some serious problems a while ago, but managed to recover. Two nights ago, however, three XFS filesystems on my laptop decided to blow up and left my system thoroughly broken. I guess as the hibernate maintainer, I should really start doing my tests somewhere else than my main system... It all started out with a dist-upgrade and this output:

dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/dpkg_1.13.22_i386.deb
(--unpack): unable to make backup link of
'./usr/share/man/man1/dpkg-deb.1.gz' before installing new version: Unknown
error 990

Looking at /usr/share/man/man1, I started to anticipate the apocalypse:

# ls -l /usr/share/man/man1
total 7956
?????????? ? ? ?    ? ? ? 7zr.1.gz
?????????? ? ? ?    ? ? ? 822-date.1.gz
?????????? ? ? ?    ? ? ? CA.pl.1ssl.gz
?????????? ? ? ?    ? ? ? Defoma::Common.1.gz

So I look at the log, and amidst kernel oops notices, there's this lovely cookie:

Filesystem "hda6": Corruption of in-memory data detected.  Shutting down
filesystem: hda6

Filesystem hda6 is /usr, so at that time I figured "it could have been worse", booted to single user, and remade the filesystem with the intention to simply reinstall all packages... when I found /var/lib/dpkg/info to be in similar condition. The rest of /var seemed fine, but I resolved then that there was no hope in reviving this system. Fortunately I brought an external drive that had just enough free space to hold my /home and some other stuff, but since USB is really slow when it comes to shifting large amounts of data, I decided to do something productive in the mean time and to answer some outstanding mails. It wasn't difficult to get SSH back up, so I started to work on a remote machine and used the time efficiently. Some time later, though, I got confused in the mist of screen sessions and was browsing my home directory on the laptop, thinking I was elsewhere (my home directories are mostly synchronised), when I noticed a directory in similar condition as the above. Oh shit. Imagine my pain and fear as I first thought my remote machine was also dying, imagine the sigh when I found out I was on the local filesystem, and imagine the shock when I realised that /home was also affected by the XFS breakage... A glance around /var confirmed that the XFS breakage was actually spreading and had now affected three filesystems on this machine. Fortunately, by that time, I had copied everything to the external drive, and decided to put my laptop and myself to sleep. I woke the next morning to the task of reinstalling the thing and decided to be optimistic about it. After all, a reinstall would mean I could finally try partman-crypto and encrypt my laptop's data to protect against leaking sensitive stuff in the case of loss or theft of my laptop. The installation was not as painless as I had hoped, but that was mainly because I ran into a known problem with the graphical installer and partman-crypto, which does not allow to set up volumes with random encryption keys (e.g. swap; see the forthcoming announcement for the beta3 release of the installer), and a bunch of smaller bugs. I had to restart the installation with the traditional frontend to get what I wanted, but other than that, I was very impressed with what our installer development team has accomplished! And a special round of gratitude to Frans Pop for not losing his patience while helping me on several occasions throughout the process. Now, 24 hours after the incident, I am back to normal with a fresh laptop and no data lost (except for one directory which I pulled from a mirrored remote machine; it had no local modifications (so why did XFS screw it up anyway?)). The fonts are all jaggy, so there's something I have to figure out. All things considered, I am sad to have lost 24 hours, but I can also relax more now, without fear of further XFS breakage or loss of private data. Update: Oh, and despite this, I did choose ext3 for all my laptop's filesystems. JFS was really cumbersome and slow last time I tried it, and I surely would not touch RazorFS after experiencing serious data loss on numerous occasions. Update: Two responses so far. Full ack for Julien (except for him laughing at me), Ingo's post warrants a reply though. First, ext3 is also journaled, and if you're about to say "yeah, but it's a hack on top of ext2, well... ext2 is damn mature, and journaling isn't really rocket science, so that "hack" isn't going to be too complicated. In fact, I like the idea of journaling being an option rather than a built-in feature. Second, of course you're supposed to keep backups. But since you keep backups, my top requirement of a filesystem is not "how to get the data back", but "how to ensure it does not break. If it breaks, I can reinstall and restore from backup, but that's a certain amount of time lost. If it doesn't break, well, that's like stealing a little something back from death then, isn't it? Third, I do follow the linux-xfs mailing list, but so what? I did not have write cache enabled, and I was running the 2.6.17.7 kernel at the time of the mishap. Lastly, you point to "excellent tools" to recover the filesystem. I am not sure how excellent xfs_repair really is when it reports "bad magic number 0x0 on dir inode 4696727" during the run, claims to have fixed it, I mount the filesystem, unmount it, run xfs_repair again and get the same message. No filesystem is perfect, and as we know from Biella's problems (among many others, ext3 is no exception. But we did get her data off! So then it's really an open field again, crap filesystem against crap filesystem. I guess at this point it helps to know that ext3 actually follows VFS semantics, while on XFS, a completed sync() syscall does not actually mean it has written the data to disk (see e.g. #317479). And then there are bugs like #239111... ext3 it is for now. If that let's me down, I'll try JFS. If that fails and noone has actually implemented a proper filesystem, I might have a go myself. Haha. Update: Alceste Scalas adds:

Ingo is right when he says that every filesystem has bugs --- but bugs apart, the design of Ext3 (i.e. its physical-block journaling) makes it a far more reliable choice for desktop and laptop PCs, expecially for people without an UPS. An Ext3 filesystem could only crash because of a bug or an hardware failure, while an XFS filesystem can be trashed even without bugs or hardware failures, due to the unavoidable consequences of a power loss on PC-class hardware.

He also alerted me to this mailing list post, which compares data=ordered journaling of ext3 (which almost noone does for performance reasons) with XFS and RazorFS. Update: You may also be interested in this post. Update: Otavio Salvador points me to this FAQ entry, which SGI must have added very lately. It explains how to deal with the directory corruption that was part of my problem. I guess I would have liked to know earlier, but I consider the outcome with dm-crypt + ext3 a win anyhow.

26 July 2006

Otavio Salvador: Splashy uploaded to unstable

Today I did an upload of Splashy to unstable. That means that it should be available in Etch. I would like to reask to anyone interested to help us to improve the Debian theme since I would like to make it default in package. If anyone is interested to help, contact me. Thanks to Guillem by uploading the new and fixed version of directfb to unstable

24 July 2006

Otavio Salvador: New GRUB packages has Xen kernel detection support

Today will hit unstable the new GRUB package version. This version has a new and very interesting feature: Xen kernel detection. Until now, every Xen user needed to change the menu.lst byhand to have it suitable to boot the dom0 and that’s a very error prone way of to do that. Currently, like any other image on menu.lst, you can change the Xen dom0 kernel options and they will be use to write down the kernel entries. Very nift. Thanks by all Xen Packaging Team for their work on it.

22 July 2006

Otavio Salvador: Splashy should hit unstable next week

Today I did a new upload of Splashy to experimental. If all goes fine, I will upload a new package moving it to unstable. This version is basically a bugfixing version. There’s some issues to solve before it hits Etch but we’re doing a great job solving its bugs fast and I believe that we’ll be able to make it. Would be great if any artist might get our current Debian theme and improve it. There’s some small issues to solve there. Next upload will set it as default theme too.

21 May 2006

Christian Perrier: Debconf - day 7

This Saturday was my talk's (shared with Javier Fernandez) day so, obviously, everything was mostly centered on it for me of course. The point is for sure arriving in condition at the talk's moment (16:00, ie the very last formal talk of the Debconf). I first went to Mark's Ubuntu Q&A; session. Pretty live session and interesting confirmaiton by Mark that, even though Rosetta/Launchpad still remains non free software, we could in the future collaborate with WordForge to allow building networks of i18n resources. I quickly ran to the Google Summer of Code BOF to be able to give news about our i18n infrastructure project. I have been delighted to see that the project got ranked very high and we're really likely to have it accepted (I hope this can be leaked this way...:-))). Running again to the Lightning Talks BOF by Joey, I just arrived to be able to show that I can indeed pronounce Jeroune vanne ouolfelaaaaaar very well. Then I attended Erinn and Anthony talk about debugging, which was pretty informative for me, one of the very few who raised their hand when Erinn asked for people who have never used "strace". Thanks, Erinn and Anthony. The fun photo was a good occasion to relax down and forget about my worrying of "where the hell is my cotalker".... We then jumped in the pool and formed this nice swirl (yes, it was nice, Aigars!). The french dudes later began a very entertaining ballet at the diving platforms, all jumping together, lalala. Ido have nice pictures (by the way, everything is uplaoded now). The next hours were spent doing what's usually recommended when giving a talk: last minutes changes with Javier, up to the VERY last minute, where I of course added my beloved SpongeBob Square Pants picture in the slides. About the talk, well, from my point of view it went well. I would have preferred seeing more package maintainers in the audience but, hey, this was the last Debconf formal talk so many were probably tired..:-). Anyway, the world map are still a good fun and, yes, Frans, next time I'll try to be a little less slow (but, hey, everybody has seen me blogging abou tpeople who speak way to fast....). This time, my slowlyness and habit to speak as clearly as possible were in high contrast with Javier's high speed debit..:-) Good positive feedback anyway and good vibrations for me. Thanks to the audience. Coming back at the hacklab we used Javier Sola's last minutes in Mexico up to the end. A very constructive meeting along with Otavio Salvador, Nicolas Fran ois, Aigars Mahinovs, Javier himself and Rapha l Hertzog (who's involved in the GSoC stuff). We finally concluded about the task we can assign to the GSoC student if the project is accepted. This was a good meeting and a good way to reach an agreement between people who do not always agree. The remaining of the evening and night has been spent coping up with my mail backlog and doing a few hacking, l10n commits and various small stuff which accumulated during the previous days. As it happened since 3 days, I was happy enough to have Elizabeth online before going to bed and then we shared some love over the ocean. I even had the plan to send my "je t'aime" during the talk (she was listening, or trying to)....but it would have sounded silly. But anyway, I love her, fellows. The next day will be the last day....yet another "hug" day, I think...not the happiest but....see you at Debconf7!

23 March 2006

Gustavo Franco: Debian everywhere using LTSP.

I'm actually working on a CDD that uses LTSP - Linux Terminal Server Project to provide a complete desktop for thin-clients with more than 15000 end users in Brazil. It's really interesting if you consider that those users are living in areas with the lowest HDI (Human Development Index) here. Wait, are you teaching poor people what can be done with a computer, using Debian in a server/thin-client environment in a distributed network (with integrated authentication) across one of the biggest countries in the planet? Yes!

Well, of course i want to see more projects using our CDD (we support multiple profiles and all that) or more CDDs focused on thin-client solutions, whatever comes first. But what makes me happier with all this is that it benefits both end users, and the Debian project. Have you heard about pkg-ltsp?
?

pkg-ltsp history started in the end of the last year when i met with Otavio Salvador that already knew Petter and Vagrant - the LTSP folks in Debian at that point. I was already talking with Oliver Grawert (edubuntu fame) about cooperation, so it was just a matter of time put everything together, organize a online meeting and do the first upload under the group name. We jumped direct from 0.58debian4 (Nov) to 0.82debian1 (Mar), basically due to our organization as a group, and the work done by ogra, pere and vagrantc and some others (including me) in these four months.

If you're using ltsp and feels that you can contribute, join us. Hopefully we'll have more interesting stuff in the pkg-ltsp camp to announce before Etch, stay tuned...