In practice for me, this that I finally had to setup stable buildd chroots for armel (ya!). This makes the Debian the first general purpose distribution to release with a ARM EABI port. Thanks for everyone who made this happen, even when the naysayers were claiming that Debian would be too inflexible for another arm port! The list of people who made this possible is simply too long to include in a blog post, and I'm afraid I would still forget someone...

For squeeze, I hope we can keep the name as the release theme and squeeze minimal Debian install into smaller disk and memory than what it takes with lenny :) For more specific squeeze plans on the armel port, we are looking at least into providing optimized versions of various libs (using HWCAP feature) and extending the amount of hardware supported. Not ARM-related directly, but I'd really like to see #206684 fixed finally.

Here s for the second installment of my review of this past year s Summer of Code at Debian. See the previous part here: Debian Summer of Code 08 : Where are they now (part 1/3). I apologize for being so late at getting this second part out but I have been very busy. Still, I ll get the last part out before FOSDEM. Those of you who ever had to write a Java compiler (ok, Java subset, but the OOP part was here ) in brainfucking Ada will understand what I went through working on two of my most loathed languages. Debian NAS, improve support of Debian on NAS devices Presentation There is a large range of inexpensive Network storage devices available on the market. For some of them, such as Linksys NSLU-2 and Thecus N2100, we have added support, but there is many many more devices we could support. For this summer we look forward at supporting multiple Marvell Orion based devices (as outlined in Martin Michlmayr s talk Running Debian on Inexpensive Network Storage Devices), such as Revogear Kuro Box Pro, Buffalo Linkstation, QNAP TS-109+, If you don t have old computers lying around to turn into NAS servers, you need to sleep at night without the soothing sound of computer fans or if you actually pay your own electricity bill, you might want to have a look at standalone NAS devices. They re cheap and can be made vastly more capable by slapping a Debian on it. If you ever heard of DD-WRT, you know the spirit. The project was mentored by Riku Voipio, with help from Martin Michlmayr. The project proposal (sorry, Google cache) was introduced by Martin, who did a presentation about it the previous year at FOSDEM. Student Per Andersson was a 24 year old student working towards a MSc in computer science at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. He had been looking for ways to join Debian but with school still being priority one, he didn t find time to dive in. Result This project was successful. The Kurobox Pro is now supported and several useful tools were packaged to make life easier with these NAS devices. Martin Michlmayer is still working on Debian NAS related stuff. Per was happy to be invited to the Emdebian work session in Extremadura and has been active within debian, maintaining the packages he created during the Summer of Code. Cran2deb, generate Debian packages from R packages Presentation GNU R has become the preeminent platform for computing with data . The CRAN archives contain over 1300 source packages of very high-quality, and BioConductor has again almost as many focuses on bioinformatics. We want more of these in Debian, and going beyond the 50+ packages we currently have suggests more scripting and automation. R is a pretty big among statisticians and all of them they wasted no time writing their own package to work on particular research subject. It s a lot like Perl with CPAN or LaTeX with CTAN. It s always a pain to discovery that a particular R package is not wihtin Debian and having to resort to unmanaged installation of said packages. The project was mentored by Dirk Eddelbuetel. The project proposal (which is nowhere to be found but seemed to be good) was introduced by Dirk, along with another proposal he did for R. Student Charles Blundell is a research student at.. hum.. didn t do my homework about that. Anyway, you can find him around R related projects. Result This project was successful. Cran2deb is happilly turning more than 1400 of the ~1500 CRAN R packages, all with correct dependencies. The work has since been moved to R-Forge. It s working, we re almost there. We just need it to be polished and we ll get a whole bunch of new packages into Debian. Charles pinged me about the status of Cran2Deb after the previous post. He admits that he hasn t done much about cran2deb recently because of his new position as a research student but hopes to commit again to it soon. I do encourage him to get these R packages into Debian. I had to manually install some packages myself when I had to use R for school because they weren t into Debian and it s not pretty. Mergemaster, interactively merge changes in configuration files Presentation FreeBSD has a shellscript called mergemaster which is used to interactively merge changes in configuration files, based on 3-way diffs. Debian s approach to configuration file differences is much more primitive: either keep the original file, or blow it away (including all local changes) and use the Debian-provided file. It would be nice to get a system such as mergemaster into Debian. Important is to remember that Debian contains two often-used configuration file management systems: ucf, and conffiles; porting mergemaster in such a way that it will be used in both cases would be great. The handling of configuration files during upgrades has always been a little.. brutal, with the user being asked at gunpoint to make a good decision, lest the upgrade won t continue or configuration files get borked (ever tried automerging nagios configuration files?). Having a less stressful upgrade experience is a good thing since the point of Debian is to make package management a stressless thing. The project was mentored by, hum, Manoj Srivastava. I have no idea who came up at first with the proposal. UPDATE: Wouter Verhelst mailed to say that he made the original proposal. Student Max Wiehle was a physics student at the University of Heidelberg. He did a Summer of Code stint (Archive.org copy..) as a student for Beagle Project in 2006 which, I suppose, was successful. He s been active in the past with Gnome and desktop related projects. Result This project was somewhat successful. He posted an update one month into the program with repositories with code to test. Last commit to the mergecf branch of project was September 19th but it was never merged in. According to Steve McIntyre, it s dead, Jim. I couldn t find any further public involvement of Max within Debian. PAS NSS Debian Installer, improve support of PAM and NSS at install-time Presentation It would be very important for the Debian allowing the user to configure additional PAM and NSS modules (eg. LDAP, NIS) during the installation process inside the Debian Installer. To do this, we have to provide tools and helpers to modify /etc/nsswitch.conf and /etc/pam.d/common-*, as well as changing the maintainer scripts for the packages libpam-* and libnss-* to apply the required changes at install time using debconf and these helpers. To be honest, I will probably never use this. I don t do that many coordinated installs in the same place to warrant doing funny authentication with PAM and NSS, and if I did, I would probably use a more elaborate tool to personalize the install, like FAI. On the other hand, I can see the appeal of being done with authentication mechanisms before the first boot. The project was mentored by Fabio Tranchitella. The proposal came from the student. Student Juan Luis Belmonte was a computer science student. He worked in a couple of companies in the area of Sarragossa. He is now founding debug_mode=ON. Result This was quite a disappointement after seemingly good work. Although Juan was satisfied with the project, the PAM package maintainer (Steve Vorlon Langasek) was not. He was never asked about this project (but didn t intervene timely either when the accepted projects were announced though). In his words, it was the wrong solution to the problem . You can find his lenghty rationale on the wontfix bug report that resulted from the project. It really was a problem of communication with the Debian developpers since Juan could certainly have done the right work if pointed to it. Juan didn t ask thoroughly for existing work and Steve didn t publicize his (enough). That s all for now. The information is quite fragmented I admit. Most of it was pulled from Google, mailing lists, commit logs, blogs, whatever. If some projects are lacking in information here, it s because I couldn t find it readily (which is an issue in itself!). In my next post, I ll try to give a student point of view of the Summer of Code in general, and more specifically, at Debian. It will be post 2.5/3 since it s getting a little longer than I planned. Release early, release often, as the say.
If you re a student or a mentor mentioned above, feel free to fill any of the blanks in my report. It s much appreciated. You re not a student or mentor mentioned above and have an opinion on how to improve the next Debian Summer of Code ? Feel free to comment.

Sorry Bastian, but that marthyrdon thing doesn't work. Debian has no shortage of talkers, GR-proposers, etc. We have shortage of people of actually doing stuff. Therefor it's only fair that people not bothering fixing bugs get criticized too. And not to mention that there is enough RC bugs open that you could *easily* fix one of them before making another blog post.

This post has been brought to you by fixing #508781 and #496104. (Can I has a meme plz?)

ps, that said, pretending reaching 0 RC bugs means we have a perfect release is delusional. Bugs are found at constant rate. If we fixed bugs faster and reached 0 RC bugs a month a go, the released lenny would now have all the RC bugs found during this month. Therefor it would make much more sense to align the release schedule based on something else, such as d-i schedule and fix any RC bugs left at that point with stable release updates. update: As noted by Dato, the release update essentially says the same.

As the continued freeze of lenny has driven lots of interesting uploads to experimental, it was finally time to setup a armel buildd for lenny. It' now approximately half away done, and with the current rate it should be building the last package of the queue (openoffice) in the end of this week.

After a brief look at the market, I decided to keep using my sturdy X40. Looking at what could be done to improve the 4 years old workhorse, three things came to mind:

* new battery (old one dies in 45min, new one lasts easily 5+h)
* replace the hard drive (preemptively before it breaks)
* more ram (from 512MB -> 1.5G)



The only one worth detailing is the hard drive upgrade, since I decided to go SSD. less moving parts, less heat, less power consumption. I followed the Thinkwiki CompactFlash boot howto. This basically involves getting a CF-IDE adapter (from ebay, around $5) and any CF card. The first CF-IDE adapter $2.99, but it didn't work. After some research it was concluded that the SMT soldering was bad. The second adapter bought worked fine, and as a bonus the dimensions match the X40 HD perfecty:

In order to minimize writing to flash:

* Make sure root filesystem is mounted noatime,nodiratime (see /etc/fstab)
* make /tmp a tmpfs partition
* disable swap
* more tips can been seen at Linux on Flash guide

Generally I'm very happy with the results of the upgrade. X40 is now most of the time completly silent, without the spinning and clicking HD. Fan turns on less often than previously. The cheapo compactflash is fast enough on reading, and the REALLY slow write speed is usually not a problem thanks to the loads of RAM. Ofcourse, the exception is when a application uses fsync() ... which leads to.

FIREFOX SUCKS GOAT BALLS WHEN RAN FROM A SLOW SSD

Seriously. It's like watching snail cross a tarpit. That's what happens when you fsync() a 30MB places.sqlite on a 6MB/s write speed flash media every fucking time a page has finished loading (and seeming every now and then too). Now here's a really simple workaround: make ~/.mozilla tmpfs and rsync it to/from a backup dir every time you log in/out.

* /etc/fstab: tmpfs /home/user/.mozilla tmpfs size=100m,user 0 0
* and two helper scripts:

aardvark:~$ cat bin/mozilla-mount
#!/bin/sh
mount /home/$USER/.mozilla
rsync -av /home/$USER/.mozilla-safe/ /home/$USER/.mozilla/
aardvark:~$ cat bin/mozilla-umount
#!/bin/sh
rsync -av /home/$USER/.mozilla/ /home/$USER/.mozilla-safe/
umount /home/$USER/.mozilla

It does what mozilla should be doing in the first place - write to temporary files when running and on exit synchronize to the real database and fsync(). With this hack, suddenly the web browser UI doesn't freeze every time a page has finished loading.

You'll also want to disable the urlclassifier anti-forgery tool, which can grow to a over 50MB sqlite database which also gets fsynced all the time...

Per Andersson ported the Debian installer to the Kurobox Pro this summer as part of a Google Summer of Code project. Along with Riku Voipio, I acted as Per's mentor and gave him advice while he was trying to figure out all the details that were needed to get Debian running on the device. Since I spent the summer in Israel and didn't have my Kurobox Pro with me, I never performed an installation on my own though. Yesterday I finally found time to play with my Kurobox Pro. Per did a great job and the installation worked without any problems. I also investigated how the recovery mode works and added various new information to my Debian on the Kurobox Pro pages. The Kurobox Pro seems like a nice machine, but I hope we'll add full support for the Linkstation Pro and Live soon since these devices are much more easily available. It shouldn't take too much work since these devices are quite similar to the Kurobox Pro.

I actually think it's a bit of an insult if people think of Motorola's EZX or MAGX (and now Android) phones as "Linux phones". Because all the freedoms of Linux (writing native applications against native Linux APIs that Linux developers know and love, being able to do Linux [kernel] development) are stripped.

-
http://laforge.gnumonks.org/weblog/2008/10/23/#20081023-android">
http://laforge.gnumonks.org/weblog/2008/10/23/#20081023-android">
http://laforge.gnumonks.org/weblog/2008/10/23/#20081023-android">Harald Welte

This is something that has worried me too for quite a while. For years we have now had Linux phones available in form or another (well, mostly in far away countries you happen not to be at). Yet with the exception of openmoko none of them allow native application development. Yet all the same time you can go to the nearest phone shop and grab HTC windows CE phone or a Nokia Symbian phone, which actually give you the freedom to writing and running your own software on them.

Now we have the situation that HTC's most locked device* is their only Linux device - The Android G1.

Incidentally, you can install Debian/armel on T-mobile G1, but only until Google engineers manage to fix the hole that gives you r00t.

*The only one that doesn't allow native app development.

What we are having here is a quite non-typical ARM based motherboard. It features a pre-production version of Marvell 78x00 series ARM SoC, clocked at 1GHz. It features multiple on-board sata and gigE connectors, as well as pci-e slots and DDR2 ram slots. Fairly "meh" in x86 world, but on the ARM world most systems are designed mainly for low power consumption, tiny size and low cost. Which, while creating allows creating many exciting devices, makes finding meaty buildd's tricky. When we intruduced armel port, the security people rose the concern that arm buildd's are too slow. Especially from the security Point of view, where getting security fixes out fast is important - every second of waiting for security builds to finish someone could be exploited!

Luckily, some people from Marvell had heard about our need and arranged to donate a developer board for us!

So far, the build speed improvement, compared to our current (Thecus N2100) buildd's is very promising. When looking at build times of some slow-building packages which likely will see security uploads:

Package     Thecus   MV78100   HPPA    MIPS
linux-2.6   39h      11h       6h      17h
webkit      17h      5h        3h      4h
qt4-x11     59h      17h       7h      13h
xulrunner   14h      4h        1.5h    3h

We see that with a Marvell board we are more in the line with other architectures. And the production hardware is going to be even faster! There is a dual-core version as well, but it's not SMP. Both cores are independent, and would basically both run their own Linux image. If manage to find a easy way to implement and manage that, we could run two theoretically run two independent buildd instances on the same board.

See the Linux Devices article for more details about the MV78x00 in general.

Otavio has updated kernel-wedge in SVN to 2.6.26, so I updated ARM and MIPS today. The udebs built after minor modifications and I can also build installer images after having fixed some bugs in the build process. I tested a 2.6.26 based image on the QNAP TS-409 (armel) as well as in QEMU (mipsel). 2.6.26 will bring major improvements on ARM. Orion support is much better and our 2.6.26 has a number of patches from Marvell that help with performance on Orion. Our 2.6.26 also has Riku Voipio's LED driver for Thecus N2100 which has been accepted for the 2.6.27 mainline kernel. I haven't actually uploaded the udebs yet because I'm waiting for the go-ahead as well as for the new version of the 2.6.26 kernel package to build. But at least we're getting closer to having 2.6.26 as the kernel for lenny.

Netgear has jumped the bandwagon and released Open Source Wireless-G Router (WGR614L). Like the earlier Linksys WRT54GL, it's an existing model with a Linux "L" added to end. It does not really add any hardware to make it community friendly, the "open source" part feels like just a marketing gimmick.

With just a couple of small features, these devices could really become community friendly:

• Serial port. A kingdom for a router or NAS with a proper serial port! Or at least a pre-solder the serial headers and provide a cable with a TTL shifter.
  
• Unbrickable bootloader. Alternatively, a relatively hard to brick bootloader like Linksys NSLU-2 has.
  
• Mainlined kernel. No "Linux 2.4.22 + binary drivers" crap, like this netgear device.
  
• Widespread availability. The community is around the world.
  
• Documentation.
  

Not as necessary, but nice to have features for a community-oriented product:

• JTAG. So one gets to unbrick it in case bootloader went bonkers. Also allows the community to develop the bootloader.
  
• Extensibility. Just adding a USB port gives any device huge amount of extra possible uses. A SD slot would give loads of storage space. etc..
  
• Contacts with engineers and developers from the manufacturer. Don't just market to the community, be part of the community :)
  

You know what the problem is? Webbrowser developers think they're developing the most important application for any computer. -Wouter

Weeelll.. Looking at the the long posts you and others on planet.d.o have written about a browser, one might get the opposite conclusion :) Considering the amount of work and daily business (online banks, shops, news, other services), browser is the most important application after email - and even for email many people use a browser...

Users are good at noticing usability problems. However, their proposed solutions are usually unreliable.

I'm just as annoyed as the next planet writer about the new self-signed SSL dance of FF3. But I do not pretend to know the correct solution. When dealing with security issues, knee-jerk fixes can lead to disasters. Likewise in UI design, the first idea that gets into mind probably isn't the best one.

While I have your Attention, one of the most interesting ARM projects at the moment: beagleboard . There is _huge_ variety of ARM developer boards available, but this one has a couple of really interesting bits

• Powered by OMAP 3530, a 600MHz ARM Cortex A8 + kitchen sink chip. Most boards are either expensive or have a "bottom-of-line" cpu.
  
• Didn't I complain that TI isn't open enough? Well, since then TI now has released thousands of pages documentation for OMAP3, made omap 35xx available or purchase for anyone, and is even working to get DSP and 3D bits of OMAP3 available. And they go further - beagleboard documentation (link at bottom of elinux wikipage for boeagleboard) has everything including schematics.
  

Buch of quickies:

• First, I'm moving from livejournal to blogger. Mainly because blogger allows me to email pictures/videos from my cellphone and automatically converts them to blog entries. To avoid spamming planet with unnecessary entries, only postings tagged with "Debian" be syndicated to p.d.o.
  
• Was invited to UDS and Prague. Quite different from conferences where I've been before (debconf, FOSDEM). Less time spent with one person presenting and rest of room listen, more time people discussing the topic of session. Atleast this was the case in the Mobile track I mostly followed.
  
• Testing scripts now consider Armel a Release architecture. \o/. The armel debian-installer should also be part of debian-installer beta2 really soon(tm) . Only getting testing-security running properly is tricky at the moment...
• fuck I'm old now.
  

Last weekend I was at FOSSCamp. Since I live in Prague I wanted to go to Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) each day, but unfortunately I had some exams, so I only went on Wednesday and Friday.

On Wednesday I first met Lars Wirzenius:


we agreed to go to pub in the evening. Then I did a little work, there was quite a nice view from the window (Prague castle on the horizon):



and I went to the #ubuntu-devel-summit IRC channel and pinged Scott Kitterman, whom I new from the Debian Python Modules Team (DPMT), but didn't know how he looks like. We met and once I knew Scott, it was easy to get around, so he introduced me to Steve Langasek (pronounced Lang ek). We agreed to go to pub as well. Steve lives in Portland, OR, where I spent the summer 2005 and Scott is from Baltimore where I spent the summer 2006.
Then I also met Riku Voipio, Martin B hm, Christian Reis (whom I asked if it's possible to support Debian unstable on Ubuntu Personal Package Archives and he said that it will probably happen, so that's really cool -- I also offered my help with this) and others, so in the end, there were 14 of us going to the pub, so I chose again the same pub as with the FOSSCamp people and it seems it tasted good again:




Notice the sv kov na smetan above, my favourite meal. Good choice Scott. :)





Ok, that was on Wednesday. On Friday I arrived at around 3pm, looked at the schedule table and noticed that Matthias Klose should be at UDS too, so I started IRC and pinged him. Fortunately, Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, whom I know from DPMT as well, replied first so we met, it was cool and he showed where Matthias is. I am very glad I met him, so we discussed python-central and python-support packages and why we have them both, also with Scott later on.

When I was waiting for Matthias, I sat next to Nicolas Valc rcel, started my laptop and begun looking at some SymPy bugs and Nicolas noticed that and said -- "You are developing SymPy?", I said "Yes.", flattered. And he showed me a bug with plotting and Compiz, so we immediately reported that to pyglet.

In the evening people continued to some kind of a party, but unfortunately, I was already going to some other pub.

Overall, even though I was there for only two afternoons, it was just awesome and I utterly enjoyed meeting all the people I knew from mailinglists and IRC.

Approximately one year ago danske bank swallowed the second-largest Finnish bank, Sampopankki. Last weekend, the perfectly fine working web-bank was flushed down the toilet and replaced with Danske Banks infrastructure. So far the results are quite horrific:

• People are reporting missing/too much money been shown in their accounts.
  
• Standard ssl/html based frontend has been replaced by a java applet. Worse, it needs a JNI library. Apparently to sniff your PC configuration. Surprisingly they provide a (ia32) Linux JNI lib as well. Compile once, run to the hills...
  
• The new webbank has security holes. url's that show a competing banks login prompt instead of sampo/danske bank are circulating on IRC. Apparently the danish website has the same bug too. The bank representative has (so far) refused to acknowledge there is a security hole.
  

A surprising number people have dismissed the whole issue as "IT business as usual, why complain?". Sure, we all *know* that most IT projects deliver late, fail to work until the first service pack, fail to import data properly from previous versions or simply fail completely. But is that something we should just accept as part of life? Even for banks that are (were) holding our money?

Riku Voipio just sent a "bits from armel porters" in debian-devel-announce (sorry, no link: I'm offline while writing this). I just want to point out that the success of armel becoming an official architecture is also due to the very clever and efficient way the porters interacted with maintainers. As a very small example, Riku recently sent a bug report about samba for armel-related issues and this bug report was full of useful and precise information. Even without Steve Langasek endorsing the fixes, I would have applied the suggested changes even though I don't understand a single bit of it: just because it was so obvious that Riku knew what he was talking about. As Riku points in his announce mail: this is a great succes and this also demonstrate that good interaction between package maintainers in Debian can still happen, despite some general perception that maintainers are "grumpy".

Texas Instruments (TI) joins Linux foundation. Congrats.

TI will help foster the growth of the Linux platform and collaborate with industry leaders who define both technical and operational best practices around open source software. .... TI will further ensure that its customers have the necessary tools to create innovative and differentiated Linux-based mobile devices that use the OMAP platform and DaVinci technology.

How about starting with

• Releasing the OMAPx TRM (Technical Reference Manuals) available to Linux community
  
• Documenting your DSPs and providing a OSS bios for them (compilable with a OSS toolchain)
  
• Release drivers for _all_ parts of OMAP chips, such as the AES accelerator, Jazelle java acceleration, powerVR 3d and so on.
  

If you continue providing documentation only for "high volume customers", your membership in Linux Foundation is a PR stunt at best.

accepted: dpkg_1.14.16.6_armel.changes

AKA: ftp-master is now accepting armel packages

Thanks AJ!

current todo item: populating the archive cleanly

Sune asked where debian/armel is. Inspired by the blog, I posted a status update to debian-arm mailing list.

Other random updates

1) apt-get install recommends has now been enabled by default. This bites sbuild and pbuilder (#448562). In your buildd chroots set APT::Install-Recommends "false"; and be aware that you pbuilder build results might not be as pristine as we all have got used to..

2) I blame the rapidly growing kittens here for distracting me...

Sneak preview of Debian/maemo packages running on Debian/Armel port device.