The binary code, although necessary for major social and technological developments, is annihilating the Homo Technologicus, stifling his innate freedom for analog connections.

The first widespread use of the binary code was the Morse code alphabet. For decades, this communication system allowed to transmit information over long distances, between ships in the ocean and the mainland, between one continent and another, and today its use is still active in emergency situations. In its disarming simplicity (connect or interrupt two electrical wires), this system proved to be the shortest way to transcribe an alphabet.

Then, the Boolean algebra (binary) represented the language of communication between humans and computers, enabling the translation of instructions and commands towards the processing unit (microprocessor / CPU). This determined the Big Bang of the computers and the technological era

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As well as the simple reading of a musical score is sufficient to an experienced musician to recognize the most velvety harmonic variations of an orchestral piece, so the apparent coldness of a fragment of program code can stimulate emotions of ecstatic contemplation in the developer.

Don t be misled by the simplicity of the laconic definition of the code as a sequence of instructions to be given to a computer to solve a specific problem. Generally, a problem has multiple solutions, the most simple and fast to implement, the most economical from the point of view of machine cycles or memory, the elegant solution and the makeshift one.

However, there is always a poetic solution, the one that has a particular and unusual beauty and that is always generated by the inexhaustible forge of the human intuition .

[Read More ]

A problem of interpretation?

December 14th, 1900 is known as the date of birth of quantum physics. In fact, that day Max Planck presented his report to the German Physical Society in Berlin, in which he argued that the exchange of energy in the phenomena of emission and absorption of electromagnetic radiation occurs in discrete form, not in continuous form as claimed by electromagnetic classic theory.

It was like opening a door to a new universe, that of subatomic particles. In a few decades it was learned that the basis of the strength of the real world around us (people, objects, plants, animals, etc.) is a joyful swarm of tiny particles distributed in clouds of probability, essentially surrounded by empty space. A shocking and apparently incomprehensible reality for the man of the 900: how could that still solid rock actually contain billions of microscopic objects in motion?

With the passing of the years, the road was covered deeper and deeper, revealing ever smaller particles for which new unknown names were coined: Leptons, Gluons, Quarks, Neutrinos, Fermions, Bosons, and so on until

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They are filling old bottles with new wine! This is what the physicist Werner Heisenberg heard exclaiming by his friend and colleague Wolfgang Pauli who, criticizing the approach of the scientists of the time, believed that they had been forcibly glued the notion of quantum on the old theory of the planetary-model of Bohr s atom. Faced with the huge questions introduced by quantum physics, Pauli instead began to observe the new findings from a different point of view, from a new level of reality without the constraints imposed by previous theories.

Newton himself, once he theorized the law of the gravitational field, failing to place it in any of the physical realities of the time, he merely

<Read More...>

List all posts by Authors, nested Categories and Titles is a WordPress Plugin I wrote to fix a menu issue I had during a complex website development. It has been included in the official WordPress Plugin repository. The Plugin is particularly suitable to all multi-nested categories and multi-authors websites handling a large number of posts and complex nested category layout (i.e.: academic papers, newpapers articles, etc). This plugin allows the user to place a shortcode into any page and get rid of a long and nested menu/submenu to show all site s posts. A selector in the page will allow the reader to select grouping by Category/Author/Title. You can also manage to install a tab plugin (i.e.: Tabby Responsive Tabs) and arrange each group on its specific tab. Output grouped by Category will look like:

CAT1
    post1                       AUTHOR
    SUBCAT1
        post2                   AUTHOR
        post3                   AUTHOR
        SUBCAT2
            post4               AUTHOR
            ...
            ...

while in the Author grouping mode, it is:

AUTHOR1
  post1               [CATEGORY]
  post2               [CATEGORY]
AUTHOR2
  post1               [CATEGORY]
  post2               [CATEGORY]
.....

The plugin installs a new menu ACT List Shortcodes in Admin->Tools. The tool is a helper to automatically generate the required shortcode. It will parse the options and display the string to be copied and pasted into any page. The Plugin is holding a GPL2 license and it can be downloaded from its page on WP Plugins.

The elections for the new OpenStack board are coming closer
and this time the Open Source community has a great
opportunity of representation: Giuseppe Patern is standing as a candidate for the board.
Although Giuseppe is considered by HP and Forrester Research
among the top talented consultants in the world,
Gippa (as he s largely known in the industry) is still one of us ,
a nerd that grew up with a keyboard on his hands.
As he s one of the candidates of the OpenStack board,
Fabio Marzocca wishing to know more has interviewed him.

[FM] The hard question. You re a techie. Why the hell are you running for the board?

[GP] This is indeed a good question It all started as a challenge from some clients and friends that are working in the OpenStack project. The truth is that the board and most of the management of the foundation are from vendors. I m not questioning here if they do a good job or not, it is very likely that they tend to protect their own interests. In my opinion it lacks some community spirit that have fostered Linux development such as Debian and Ubuntu. That s why I m running for it, to bring the community where it should be.

[FM] Back to Debian and Ubuntu, could you tell us your story with Linux?

[GP] I discovered Linux in 1994, but only in 1996 things were serious. By the time I just finished high school and I applied for a job in a local Internet Service Provider. At 15 years I was well known in the local community as I was installing and maintaining several BBSes, so it wasn t hard to get the job. I can say it was love at first sight. I started with Slackware (was the first distro), but I moved into redhat first and then debian. When I was working for the IBM Linux Technology Center, I was in charge of helping porting Linux to PowerPC and backporting LVM to make it similar to AIX. Sun was also a good playground as they acquired Cobalt, a hardware appliance based on debian. Then I shifted more towards Enterprise Linux adoption with 6 years in RedHat and then I went to Canonical. I was happy to go back to Debian and Ubuntu community, because I still believe that Ubuntu Developer Summits (UDS) were the real spirit of a Linux community.

[FM] Another hard question. We know you re somehow involved in the rebellion of Devuan.org. What is your opinion about systemd?

[GP] Let me tell you that it s not totally black/white and let s see the two sides here. Something like systemd was indeed needed. Each distro has its own way of init ing the system and for a package maintainer or commercial software maker, maintaining different init behaviour is insane. And as an init replacement it totally makes sense. However, IMHO systemd went too far away, incorporating into its code something that should not happen. A DHCP client into an init system, seriously? I doubt it was in the spirit of the Unix and Linux system
However, in the real world of pets vs cattle , where application matters more than systems, having a systemd as it is, doesn t change that much.

[FM] OpenStack was incubated in Ubuntu and the roots are quite clear. Is there something else that you would like to see from Debian and Ubuntu in OpenStack?

[GP] Stability, if I can name just one. Currently OpenStack is released every 6 months, which was probably the best choice to speed up the development. However, this is now becoming a weakness, as enterprise customers can t upgrade their critical infrastructures every 6 months. Traditionally Debian is maniacally focused on given a bullet-proof distribution, this is something that in my opinion is missing from OpenStack.

[FM] Gippa, tell us just 2 or 3 topics you will bring to action in case of election

[GP] I d like to introduce an OpenStack LTS process, following the Ubuntu approach: while releasing every 6 months is fair enough for development and testing environments, having a stable release every 2-3 years can give enterprise customers the peace of mind they need while running production environments.
I d also love to see a consolidation of the core (Nova/Neutron/Cinder/Swift): vendors and developers are introducing new features and projects while I d love to see for example- a more stable and scalable Neutron and a more stable connection to Oslo (in particular rabbitmq).
In general, I would encourage more attention to who is actually deploying, integrating and using OpenStack every day. I would also try to foster the ecosystem of ISVs in order to release and certify their software for OpenStack. And last but not least- to see interoperation between regional datacenters: I dream of a world where companies in a given territory can work together , and this is only possible through standards. I hope that OpenStack can represent this standard.

[FM] When are the elections and how can we vote?

[GP] Individual Member Director elections for the 2016 Board will be held online from Monday January 11, 2016 to Friday January 15, 2016. More informations on the website.

Recent article by professors Karim Lakhani and Marco Iansiti on the Harvard Business Review, Digital Ubiquity: How Connection, Sensors and Data are Revolutionizing Business , gave me the opportunity for interesting insights and considerations.

Digital technology evolution and the development of modern Internet of Things devices are introducing huge transformative effects within social inter-relationships and its business models. These effects can not be ignored if we want to perceive with the right clarity and meaning the innovation process that inevitably comes with it.

The three fundamental properties of digital technology

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In a world far away, in the dark Land of Digitos only populated by machines and computers, the evil Mister Woo was ruling over all. Over time, this terrible dictator was becoming a horrendous fire-eyed giant, walking the whole day by vibrating the heavy steps into his Kingdom, leaving behind him a trail of smoke and terror. Mr. Woo always wore a long, shabby and dirty top hat that had once been white, so old and ragged that he could not even keep it up straight on his head. Throughout the Land of Digitos, the inhabitants computers were scattered, each <Read more >

The pressure of the post-modernism is establishing its bases on our general lack of ability to overcome a number of dualisms that have become ingrained in the modern way of thinking[1]. This is mainly due to the strong influence of past centuries scientific Reductionism , which postulated that any system to be understood had to be reduced to its minimum component elements.

However, a so defined system is a closed system, which does not interact with the surrounding environment and it can exist (not always) only in a reality-isolated laboratory. The logic of Complexity , instead, takes into account the open systems and all the interconnections and influences of the system itself with the world around it, in every physical, social, psychological and symbolic aspect

<Read more >

The Big Data phenomenon has reached a reality that is often baffling to the amount of information to be managed, and what for us today is called Big it will not be anymore in 5 years, from where it will be necessary to coin other terminologies and corresponding analysis technologies .

The scientific and technological world is thus in ferment in a general rush towards finding the most appropriate tools to get the answers to these extensive masses of data. Big Data represents a paradigm shift: from the Society of network and connection the approach is increasingly leaning towards information and database .

<Read more >

A week ago, we concluded our biggest DebConf ever! It was a huge success. We are overwhelmed by the positive feedback, for which we re very grateful. We want to thank you all for participating in the talks; speakers and audience alike, in person or live over the global Internet it wouldn t be the fantastic DebConf experience without you! Many of our events were recorded and streamed live, and are now available for viewing, as are the slides and photos. To share a sense of the scale of what all of us accomplished together, we ve compiled a few statistics:

• 555 attendees from 52 countries (including 28 kids)
• 216 scheduled events (183 talks and workshops), of which 119 were streamed and recorded
• 62 sponsors and partners
• 169 people sponsored for food & accommodation
• 79 professional and 35 corporate registrations

Our very own designer Valessio Brito made a lovely video of impressions and images of the conference. We re collecting impressions from attendees as well as links to press articles, including Linux Weekly News coverage of specific sessions of DebConf. If you find something not yet included, please help us by adding links to the wiki. We tried a few new ideas this year, including a larger number of invited and featured speakers than ever before. On the Open Weekend, some of our sponsors presented their career opportunities at our job fair, which was very well attended. And a diverse selection of entertainment options provided the necessary breaks and ample opportunity for socialising. On the last Friday, the Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour was screened, with some introductory remarks by Jacob Appelbaum and a remote address by its director, Laura Poitras, and followed by a long Q&A session by Jacob. DebConf15 was also the first DebConf with organised childcare (including a Teckids workshop for kids of age 8-16), which our DPL Neil McGovern standardised for the future: it s a thing now, he said. The participants used the week before the conference for intensive work, sprints and workshops, and throughout the main conference, significant progress was made on Debian and Free Software. Possibly the most visible was the endeavour to provide reproducible builds, but the planning of the next stable release stretch received no less attention. Groups like the Perl team, the diversity outreach programme and even DebConf organisation spent much time together discussing next steps and goals, and hundreds of commits were made to the archive, as well as bugs closed. DebConf15 was an amazing conference, it brought together hundreds of people, some oldtimers as well as plenty of new contributors, and we all had a great time, learning and collaborating with each other, says Margarita Manterola of the organiser team, and continues: The whole team worked really hard, and we are all very satisfied with the outcome. Another organiser, Martin Krafft adds: We mainly provided the infrastructure and space. A lot of what happened during the two weeks was thanks to our attendees. And that s what makes DebConf be DebConf. Our organisation was greatly supported by the staff of the conference venue, the Jugendherberge Heidelberg International, who didn t take very long to identify with our diverse group, and who left no wishes untried. The venue itself was wonderfully spacious and never seemed too full as people spread naturally across the various conference rooms, the many open areas, the beergarden, the outside hacklabs and the lawn. The network installed specifically for our conference in collaboration with the nearby university, the neighbouring zoo, and the youth hostel provided us with a 1 Gbps upstream link, which we managed to almost saturate. The connection will stay in place, leaving the youth hostel as one with possibly the fastest Internet connection in the state. And the kitchen catered high-quality food to all attendees and their special requirements. Regional beer and wine, as well as local specialities, were provided at the bistro. DebConf exists to bring people together, which includes paying for travel, food and accomodation for people who could not otherwise attend. We would never have been able to achieve what we did without the support of our generous sponsors, especially our Platinum Sponsor Hewlett-Packard. Thank you very much. See you next year in Cape Town, South Africa!

What happened about the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes

• Brendan O'Dea uploaded help2man/1.47.1 which adds support setting SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH for the date for the generated pages.
• Emmanuel Bourg uploaded maven-debian-helper/1.6.12 which sets the locale to en_US when generating the javadoc.
• Emmanuel Bourg uploaded javatools/0.51 which sets the locale to en_US when generating the javadoc.
• Joachim Breitner uploaded haskell-devscripts/0.9.10 which will always run sorts in LC_ALL=C.

Andreas Henriksson has improved Johannes Schauer initial patch for pbuilder adding support for build profiles. Packages fixed The following 12 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: collabtive, eric, file-rc, form-history-control, freehep-chartableconverter-plugin , jenkins-winstone, junit, librelaxng-datatype-java, libwildmagic, lightbeam, puppet-lint, tabble. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• acorn/0.12.0-1 uploaded by Bas Couwenberg, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• avarice/2.13+svn347-3 by Tobias Frost.
• br.ispell/3.0~beta4-19 by Agustin Martin Domingo.
• cpp-netlib/0.11.1+dfsg1-3 by Ximin Luo.
• device3dfx/2013.08.08-3 by Guillem Jover.
• dnsmasq/2.73-1 uploaded by Simon Kelley, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• eigen3/3.2.5-4 by Anton Gladky.
• eo-spell/3.0~beta4-19 by Agustin Martin Domingo.
• espa-nol/3.0~beta4-19 by Agustin Martin Domingo.
• firejail/0.9.26-1 by Reiner Herrmann.
• gcc-mingw-w64/15.2 by Stephen Kitt.
• geoip-database/20150616-1 uploaded by Patrick Matth i, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• ikiwiki-hosting/0.20150614 by Simon McVittie.
• inkscape/0.91-5 by Mattia Rizzolo.
• jtreg/4.1-b12-1 by Emmanuel Bourg.
• libfile-scan-perl/1.43-3 uploaded by gregor herrmann, original patch by Niko Tyno.
• libgpiv/0.6.1-4.2 by akira.
• libnet-twitter-lite-perl/0.12006-4 by Niko Tyni.
• mingw-w64/4.0.2-5 by Stephen Kitt.
• oslo.messaging/1.8.3-3 uploaded by Thomas Goirand, original patch by Juan Picca.
• seabios/1.8.2-1 by Michael Tokarev. Suggested fix by Lunar based on recent upstream changes.
• thuban/1.2.2-7 uploaded by Bas Couwenberg, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• tiptop/2.2-3 by Tomasz Buchert.
• ucl/1.03+repack-3 by Robert Luberda.

Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them:

• amsynth/1.5.1-2 uploaded by Alessio Treglia, original patch by Dhole.
• brickos/0.9.0.dfsg-12 uploaded by Michael Tautschnig, original patch by akira.
• cucumber/2.0.0-1 by C dric Boutillier; currently FTBFS.
• netbeans/8.0.2+dfsg1-2 by Markus Koschany.
• pyopencl/2015.1-2 uploaded by Tomasz Rybak, original patch by Tomasz Rybak.

Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #788747 on 0xffff by Dhole: allow embedded timestamp to be set externally and set it to the time of the debian/changelog.
• #788752 on analog by Dhole: allow embedded timestamp to be set externally and set it to the time of the debian/changelog.
• #788757 on jacktrip by akira: remove $datetime from the documentation footer.
• #788868 on apophenia by akira: remove $date from the documentation footer.
• #788920 on orthanc by akira: set HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.
• #788955 on rivet by akira: set HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.
• #789040 on liblo by akira: set HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.
• #789049 on mpqc by akira: remove $datetime from the documentation footer.
• #789071 on libxkbcommon by akira: set HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.
• #789073 on libxr by akira: remove $datetime from the documentation footer.
• #789076 on lvtk by akira: set HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.
• #789087 on lmdb by akira: pass HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO to Doxygen.
• #789184 on openigtlink by akira: remove $datetime from the documentation footer.
• #789264 on openscenegraph by akira: pass HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO to Doxygen.
• #789308 on trigger-rally-data by Mattia Rizzolo: call dh_fixperms even when overriding dh_fixperms.
• #789396 on libsidplayfp by akira: set HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.
• #789399 on psocksxx by akira: set HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.
• #789405 on qdjango by akira: set HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.
• #789406 on qof by akira: set HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.
• #789428 on qsapecng by akira: pass HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO to Doxygen.

reproducible.debian.net Bugs with the ftbfs usertag are now visible on the bug graphs. This explain the recent spike. (h01ger) Andreas Beckmann suggested a way to test building packages using the funny paths that one can get when they contain the full Debian package version string. debbindiff development Lunar started an important refactoring introducing abstactions for containers and files in order to make file type identification more flexible, enabling fuzzy matching, and allowing parallel processing. Documentation update Ximin Luo detailed the proposal to standardize environment variables to pass a reference source date to tools that needs one (e.g. documentation generator). Package reviews 41 obsolete reviews have been removed, 168 added and 36 updated this week. Some more issues affecting packages failing to build from source have been identified. Meetings Minutes have been posted for Tuesday June 16th meeting. The next meeting is scheduled Tuesday June 23rd at 17:00 UTC. Presentations Lunar presented the project in French during Pas Sage en Seine in Paris. Video and slides are available.

It s no secret that OpenStack is becoming the de-facto standard for private cloud and a way for telecom operators to differentiate against big names such as Amazon or Google.
OpenStack has already been adopted in some specific projects, but the wide adoption in enterprises is starting now, mostly because people simply find it difficult to understand. VMWare is still something to compare to, but OpenStack and cloud is different. While cloud implies virtualization, virtualization is not cloud. Cloud is a huge shift in your organization and will change forever your way of working in the IT projects, improving your IT dramatically and cutting down costs. In order to get the best of OpenStack, you need to understand deeply how cloud works. Moreover, you need to understand the whole picture beyond the software itself to provide new levels of agility, flexibility, and cost savings in your business. Giuseppe Paterno , leading European consultant and recently awarded by HP, wrote OpenStack Explained to guide you through the OpenStack technology and reveal his secret ingredient to have a successful project. You can download the ebook for a small donation to provide emergency and reconstruction aid for Nepal. Your donation is certified by ZEWO , the Swiss federal agency that ensures that funds go to a real charity project. but hurry up, the ebook is in a limited edition and it ends on July 2015. Donate & Download here: https://life-changer.helvetas.ch/openstack

In May, the DebConf15 Team held a competition to design the logo for DebConf15, which will take place in Heidelberg, Germany. We received many great entries, and after a week-long voting period, this logo by Valessio Brito was selected: The lion depicted is the Kurpf lzer L we , which makes up Heidelberg s coat of arms. Valessio is Brazilian, graduated in Communication and Advertising, and specialised in Free Software Development. He is currently a consultant to UI Design of the Secretariat-General of the Presidency of the Republic, living in Brasilia, Brazil. He has been a Debian user since 2000, contributing to local communities, Inkscape and the Debian project. Valessio has a tattoo of the red spiral! His personal website is valessiobrito.com.br (pt_BR). He invites you to visit www.DebianArt.org to discover the work of other artists and designs that contribute to the Debian project. Thanks very much Valessio for your great contribution!

I ve many distributed Linux instances across several clouds, be them global, such as Amazon or Digital Ocean, or regional clouds such as TeutoStack or Enter. Probably many of you are facing the same issue: having a consistent UNIX identity across all multiple instances. While in an ideal world LDAP would be a perfect choice, letting LDAP open to the wild Internet is not a great idea. So, how to solve this issue, while being secure? The trick is to use the new NSS module for SecurePass. While SecurePass has been traditionally used into the operating system just as a two factor authentication, the new beta release is capable of holding extended attributes , i.e. arbitrary information for each user profile. We will use SecurePass to authenticate users and store Unix information with this new capability. In detail, we will:

• Use PAM to authenticate the user via RADIUS
• Use the new NSS module for SecurePass to have a consistent UID/GID/ .

SecurePass and extended attributes The next generation of SecurePass (currently in beta) is capable of storing arbitrary data for each profile. This is called Extended Attributes (or xattrs) and -as you can imagine- is organized as key/value pair. You will need the SecurePass tools to be able to modify users extended attributes. The new releases of Debian Jessie and Ubuntu Vivid Vervet have a package for it, just:

# apt-get install securepass-tools

ERRATA CORRIGE: securepass-tools hasn t been uploaded to Debian yet, Alessio is working hard to make the package available in time for Jessie though.

For other distributions or previous releases, there s a python package (PIP) available. Make sure that you have pycurl installed and then:

# pip install securepass-tools

While SecurePass tools allow local configuration file, we highly recommend for this tutorial to create a global /etc/securepass.conf, so that it will be useful for the NSS module. The configuration file looks like:

[default]
app_id = xxxxx
app_secret = xxxx
endpoint = https://beta.secure-pass.net/

Where app_id and app_secrets are valid API keys to access SecurePass beta. Through the command line, we will be able to set UID, GID and all the required Unix attributes for each user:

# sp-user-xattrs user@domain.net set posixuid 1000

While posixuid is the bare minimum attribute to have a Unix login, the following attributes are valid:

• posixuid UID of the user
• posixgid GID of the user
• posixhomedir Home directory
• posixshell Desired shell
• posixgecos Gecos (defaults to username)

Install and Configure NSS SecurePass In a similar way to the tools, Debian Jessie and Ubuntu Vivid Vervet have native package for SecurePass:

# apt-get install libnss-securepass

For previous releases of Debian and Ubuntu can still run the NSS module, as well as CentOS and RHEL. Download the sources from: https://github.com/garlsecurity/nss_securepass Then:

./configure
make
make install (Debian/Ubuntu Only)

For CentOS/RHEL/Fedora you will need to copy files in the right place:

/usr/bin/install -c -o root -g root libnss_sp.so.2 /usr/lib64/libnss_sp.so.2
ln -sf libnss_sp.so.2 /usr/lib64/libnss_sp.so

The /etc/securepass.conf configuration file should be extended to hold defaults for NSS by creating an [nss] section as follows:

[nss]
realm = company.net
default_gid = 100
default_home = "/home"
default_shell = "/bin/bash"

This will create defaults in case values other than posixuid are not being used. We need to configure the Name Service Switch (NSS) to use SecurePass. We will change the /etc/nsswitch.conf by adding sp to the passwd entry as follows:

$ grep sp /etc/nsswitch.conf
 passwd:  files sp

Double check that NSS is picking up our new SecurePass configuration by querying the passwd entries as follows:

$ getent passwd user
 user:x:1000:100:My User:/home/user:/bin/bash

$ id user
 uid=1000(user)  gid=100(users) groups=100(users)

Using this setup by itself wouldn t allow users to login to a system because the password is missing. We will use SecurePass authentication to access the remote machine. Configure PAM for SecurePass On Debian/Ubuntu, install the RADIUS PAM module with:

# apt-get install libpam-radius-auth

If you are using CentOS or RHEL, you need to have the EPEL repository configured. In order to activate EPEL, follow the instructions on http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL Be aware that this has not being tested with SE-Linux enabled (check off or permissive). On CentOS/RHEL, install the RADIUS PAM module with:

# yum -y install pam_radius

Note: as per the time of writing, EPEL 7 is still in beta and does not contain the Radius PAM module. A request has been filed through RedHat s Bugzilla to include this package also in EPEL 7 Configure SecurePass with your RADIUS device. We only need to set the public IP Address of the server, a fully qualified domain name (FQDN), and the secret password for the radius authentication. In case of the server being under NAT, specify the public IP address that will be translated into it. After completion we get a small recap of the already created device. For the sake of example, we use secret as our secret password. Configure the RADIUS PAM module accordingly, i.e. open /etc/pam_radius.conf and add the following lines:

radius1.secure-pass.net secret 3
radius2.secure-pass.net secret 3

Of course the secret is the same we have set up on the SecurePass administration interface. Beyond this point we need to configure the PAM to correct manage the authentication. In CentOS, open the configuration file /etc/pam.d/password-auth-ac; in Debian/Ubuntu open the /etc/pam.d/common-auth configuration and make sure that pam_radius_auth.so is in the list.

auth required   pam_env.so
auth sufficient pam_radius_auth.so try_first_pass
auth sufficient pam_unix.so nullok try_first_pass
auth requisite  pam_succeed_if.so uid >= 500 quiet
auth required   pam_deny.so

Conclusions Handling many distributed Linux poses several challenges, from software updates to identity management and central logging. In a cloud scenario, it is not always applicable to use traditional enterprise solutions, but new tools might become very handy. To freely subscribe to securepass beta, join SecurePass on: http://www.secure-pass.net/open
And then send an e-mail to info@garl.ch requesting beta access.

This brief announcement was released yesterday to the debian-devel-announce mailing list. Ciao! The Debian Multimedia Maintainers have been quite active since the Wheezy release, and have some interesting news to share for the Jessie release. Here we give you a brief update on what work has been done and work that is still ongoing. Let s see what s cooking for Jessie then. Frameworks and libraries Support for many new media formats and codecs. The codec library libavcodec, which is used by popular media playback applications including vlc, mpv, totem (using gstreamer1.0-libav), xine, and many more, has been updated to the latest upstream release version 11 provided by Libav. This provides Debian users with HEVC playback, a native Opus decoder, Matroska 3D support, Apple ProRes, and much more. Please see libav s changelog for a full list of functionality additions and updates. libebur128 libebur128 is a free implementation of the European Broadcasting Union Loudness Recommendation (EBU R128), which is essentially an alternative to ReplayGain. The library can be used to analyze audio perceived loudness and subsequentially normalize the volume during playback. libltc libltc provides functionalities to encode and decode Linear (or Longitudinal) Timecode (LTC) from/to SMPTE data timecode. libva libva and the driver for Intel GPUs has been updated to the 1.4.0 release. Support for new GPUs has been added. libva now also supports Wayland. Pure Data A number of new additional libraries (externals) will appear in Jessie, including (among others) Eric Lyon s fftease and lyonpotpourrie, Thomas Musil s iemlib, the pdstring library for string manipulation and pd-lua that allows to write Pd-objects in the popular lua scripting language. JACK and LADI LASH Audio Session Handler was abandoned upstream a long time ago in favor of the new session management system, called ladish (LADI Session Handler). ladish allows users to run many JACK applications at once and save/restore their configuration with few mouse clicks. The current status of the integration between the session handler and JACK may be summarized as follows:

• ladish provides the backend;
• laditools contains a number of useful graphical tools to tune the session management system s whole configuration (including JACK);
• gladish provides a easy-to-use graphical interface for the session handler.

Note that ladish uses the D-Bus interface to the jack daemon, therefore only Jessie s jackd2 provides support for and also cooperates fine with it. Plugins: LV2 and LADSPA Debian Jessie will bring the newest 1.10.0 version of the LV2 technology. Most changes affect the packaging of new plugins and extensions, a brief list of packaging guidelines is now available.
A number of new plugins and development tools too have been made available during the Jessie development cycle: LV2 Toolkit LVTK provides libraries that wrap the LV2 C API and extensions into easy to use C++ classes. The original work for this was mostly done by Lars Luthman in lv2-c++-tools. Vee One Suite The whole suite by Rui Nuno Capela is now available in Jessie, and consists of three components:

• drumkv1: old-school drum-kit sampler synthesizer
• samplv1: polyphonic sampler
• synthv1: analog-style 4-oscillator substractive synthesizer

All three are provided in both forms of LV2 plugins and stand-alone JACK client. JACK session, JACK MIDI, and ALSA MIDI are supported too. x42-plugins and zam-plugins LV2 bundles containing many audio plugins for high quality processing. Fomp Fomp is an LV2 port of the MCP, VCO, FIL, and WAH plugins by Fons Adriaensen. Some other components have been upgraded to more recent upstream versions:

• ab2gate: 1.1.7
• calf: 0.0.19+git20140915+5de5da28
• eq10q: 2.0~beta5.1
• NASPRO: 0.5.1

We ve packaged ste-plugins, Fons Adriaensen s new stereo LADSPA plugins bundle. A major upgrade of frei0r, namely the standard collection for the minimalistic plugin API for video effects, will be available in Jessie. New multimedia applications Advene Advene (Annotate Digital Video, Exchange on the NEt) is a flexible video
annotation application. Ardour3 The new generation of the popular digital audio workstation will make its very first appearance in Debian Jessie. Cantata Qt4 front-end for the MPD daemon. Csound Csound for jessie will feature the new major series 6, with the improved IDE CsoundQT. This new csound supports improved array data type handling, multi-core rendering and debugging features. din DIN Is Noise is a musical instrument and audio synthesizer that supports JACK audio output, MIDI, OSC, and IRC bot as input sources. It could be extended and customized with Tcl scripts too. dvd-slideshow dvd-slideshow consists of a suite of command line tools which come in handy to make slideshows from collections of pictures. Documentation is provided and available in /usr/share/doc/dvd-slideshow/ . dvdwizard DVDwizard can fully automate the creation of DVD-Video filesystem. It supports graphical menus, chapters, multiple titlesets and multi-language streams. It supports both PAL and NTSC video modes too. flowblade Flowblade is a video editor like the popular KDenlive based on the MLT engine, but more lightweight and with some difference in editing concepts. forked-daapd Forked-daapd switched to a new, active upstream again dropping Grand Central Dispatch in favor of libevent. The switch fixed several bugs and made forked-daapd available on all release architectures instead of shipping only on amd64 and i386. Now nothing prevents you from setting up a music streaming (DAAP/DACP) server on your favorite home server no matter if it is based on mips, arm or x86! harvid HTTP Ardour Video Daemon decodes still images from movie files and serves them via HTTP. It provides frame-accurate decoding and is main use-case is to act as backend and second level cache for rendering the
videotimeline in Ardour. Groove Basin Groove Basin is a music player server with a web-based user interface inspired by Amarok 1.4. It runs on a server optionally connected to speakers. Guests can control the music player by connecting with a laptop, tablet, or smart phone. Further, users can stream their music libraries remotely.
It comes with a fast, responsive web interface that supports keyboard shortcuts and drag drop. It also provides the ability to upload songs, download songs, and import songs by URL, including YouTube URLs. Groove Basin supports Dynamic Mode which automatically queues random songs, favoring songs that have not been queued recently.
It automatically performs ReplayGain scanning on every song using the EBU R128 loudness standard, and automatically switches between track and album mode. Groove Basin supports the MPD protocol, which means it is compatible with MPD clients. There is also a more powerful Groove Basin protocol which you can use if the MPD protocol does not meet your needs. HandBrake HandBrake, a versatile video transcoder, is now available for Jessie. It could convert video from nearly any format to a wide range of commonly supported codecs. jack-midi-clock New jackd midiclock utility made by Robin Gareus. laborejo Laborejo, Esperanto for Workshop , is used to craft music through notation. It is a LilyPond GUI frontend, a MIDI creator and a tool collection to inspire and help music composers. mpv mpv is a movie player based on MPlayer and mplayer2. It supports a wide variety of video file formats, audio and video codecs, and subtitle types. The project focuses mainly on modern systems and encourages developer activity. As such, large portions of outdated code originating from MPlayer have been removed, and many new features and improvements have been added. Note that, although there are still some similarities to its predecessors, mpv should be considered a completely different program (e.g. lacking compatibility with both mplayer and mplayer2 in terms of command-line arguments and configuration). smtube SMTube is a stand-alone graphical video browser and player, which makes YouTube s videos browsing, playing, and download such a piece of cake.
It has so many features that, we are sure, will make YouTube lovers very, very happy. sonic-visualiser Sonic Visualiser Application for viewing and analysing the contents of music audio files. SoundScapeRenderer SoundScapeRenderer (aka SSR) is a (rather) easy to use render engine for spatial audio, that provides a number of different rendering algorithms, ranging from binaural (headphone) playback via wave field synthesis to higher-order ambisonics. Videotrans videotrans is a set of scripts that allow its user to reformat existing movies into the VOB format that is used on DVDs. XBMC XBMC has been partially rebranded as XBMC from Debian to make it clear that it is changed to conform to Debian s Policy. The latest stable release, 13.2 Gotham will be part of Jessie making Debian a good choice for HTPC-s. zita-bls1 Binaural stereo signals converter made by Fons Adriaensen zita-mu1 Stereo monitoring organiser for jackd made by Fons Adriaensen zita-njbridge Jack clients to transmit multichannel audio over a local IP network made by Fons Adriaensen radium-compressor Radium Compressor is the system compressor of the Radium suite. It is provided in the form of stand-alone JACK application. Multimedia Tasks With Jessie we are shipping a set of multimedia related tasks.
They include package lists for doing several multimedia related tasks. If you are interested in defining new tasks, or tweaking the current, existing ones, we are very much interested in hearing from you. Upgraded applications and libraries

• Aeolus: 0.9.0
• Aliki: 0.3.0
• Ams: 2.1.1
• amsynth: 1.4.2
• Audacious: 3.5.2
• Audacity: 2.0.5
• Audio File Library: 0.3.6
• Blender: 2.72b
• Bristol: 0.60.11f
• C* Audio Plugin Suite: 0.9.23
• Cecilia: 5.0.9
• cmus: 2.5.0
• DeVeDe: 3.23.0-13-gbfd73f3
• DRC: 3.2.1
• EasyTag: 2.2.2
• ebumeter: 0.2.0
• faustworks: 0.5
• ffDiaporama: 1.5
• ffms: 2.20
• gmusicbrowser: 1.1.13
• Hydrogen: 0.9.6.1
• IDJC: 0.8.14
• jack-tools: 20131226
• LiVES: 2.2.6
• mhWaveEdit: 1.4.23
• Mixxx: 1.11.0
• mp3fs: 0.91
• MusE: 2.1.2
• Petri-Foo: 0.1.87
• PHASEX: 0.14.97
• QjackCtl: 0.3.12
• Qtractor: 0.6.3
• rtaudio: 4.1.1
• Rosegarden: 14.02
• rtmidi: 2.1.0
• SoundTouch: 1.8.0
• stk: 4.4.4
• streamtuner2: 2.1.3
• SuperCollider: 3.6.6
• Synfig Studio: 0.64.1
• TerminatorX: 3.90
• tsdecrypt: 10.0
• Vamp Plugins SDK: 2.5
• VLC: Jessie will release with the 2.2.x series of VLC
• XCFA: 4.3.8
• xwax: 1.5
• xjadeo: 0.8.0
• x264: 0.142.2431+gita5831aa
• zynaddsubfx: 2.4.3

What s not going to be in Jessie With the aim to improve the overall quality of the multimedia software available in Debian, we have dropped a number of packages which were abandoned upstream:

• beast
• flumotion
• jack-rack
• jokosher
• lv2fil (suggested replacement for users is eq10q or calf eq)
• phat
• plotmm
• specimen (suggested replacement for users is petri-foo fork of specimen)
• zynjacku (suggested replacement for users is jalv)

We ve also dropped mplayer, presently nobody seems interested in maintaining it.
The suggested replacements for users are mplayer2 or mpv. Whilst the former is mostly compatible with mplayer in terms of command-line arguments and configuration (and adds a few new features too), the latter adds a lot of new features and improvements, and it is actively maintained upstream. Please note that although the mencoder package is no longer available anymore, avconv and mpv do provide encoding functionality. For more information see avconv s manual page and documentation, and mpv s encoding documentation. Broken functionalities rtkit under systemd is broken at the moment. Activity statistics More information about team s activity are available. Where to reach us The Debian Multimedia Maintainers can be reached at pkg-multimedia-maintainers AT lists.alioth.debian.org for packaging related topics, or at debian-multimedia AT lists.debian.org for user and more general discussion.
We would like to invite everyone interested in multimedia to join us there. Some of the team members are also in the #debian-multimedia channel on OFTC. Cheers! Alessio Treglia
on behalf of the Debian Multimedia Maintainers

(This is a reproduction of the mail sent to -announce for the planet readers) Aloha, hackers, As some of you notice from the slamn default background in wheezy, (BTW;
a round of applause for Adrien Aubourg for creating Joy!) we ask
for contributions to the debian-desktop team in the form of themeing. This is the official call for proposals for the Jessie cycle. Please
look on the wiki (thank you, Valessio Soares de Brito for creating
the page!) So, if you d like (or know someone who d like) to create a desktop look
and feel that will be seen by trillions of people, be sure to send in
your artwork ASAP! Breaking with tradition, I d like to have the re-themed desktop in place
well before freeze, to ensure we have time to properly integrate it. I m picking the arbitrary deadline of Feb 5th (subject to change) for
artwork to be submitted. I know this isn t a lot of time, but we can
iterate as we integrate. The artwork is usually picked based on which theme looks the most:
- Debian (I m not defining this since I think everyone has their own take
of what Debian means to them) - plausible to integrate without patching core software (As much as I love some of the insanely hot looking themes, some
would require heavy GTK+ theming and patching GDM/GNOME.) - clean / well designed (without becoming something that gets annoying to look at a
year down the road - I think Joy does a good job of this)
This year, do keep in mind the Debian logo *is* freely licensed, so feel
free to use it in your theme.

Some days ago I moved to Aberdeen, Scotland, and I m still experiencing some issues with my Internet connection, so I m not yet able to come back to work on packaging stuff as usual. So please, have some patience, I ll be right back soon

Already chilled by Wheezy freeze? It s been a long ride since the release of Squeeze, and your beloved FTP Team tried to assist our tireless developers and contributors at its best. Here are some hot stats to give you a figure about what happened behind the scenes. Since the release of Squeeze, 7462 .changes files with NEW components were processed by dak, with an average of 14.660 NEW packages per day. On the FTP Team side, we had 6877 accepts (13.511 per day), 641 rejects (1.259 per day) and 280 comments to maintainers (0.550 per day). This table represents the activity by single team member:

Login	Accepts	Rejects	Comments
ansgar	407 accepts (0.800 per day)	71 rejects (0.139 per day)	53 comments (0.104 per day)
dak	12 accepts (0.024 per day)	1 rejects (0.002 per day)	0 comments (0.000 per day)
dktrkranz	4319 accepts (8.485 per day)	381 rejects (0.749 per day)	104 comments (0.204 per day)
joerg	100 accepts (0.196 per day)	12 rejects (0.024 per day)	1 comments (0.002 per day)
mhy	214 accepts (0.420 per day)	14 rejects (0.028 per day)	5 comments (0.010 per day)
stew	67 accepts (0.132 per day)	16 rejects (0.031 per day)	7 comments (0.014 per day)
tolimar	1480 accepts (2.908 per day)	93 rejects (0.183 per day)	84 comments (0.165 per day)
twerner	278 accepts (0.546 per day)	53 rejects (0.104 per day)	26 comments (0.051 per day)

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Who were the most prolific maintainers who got a NEW processing? Here is our special top ten:

1. Debian Perl Group (559 accepts)
2. Debian Haskell Group (491 accepts)
3. Debian Ruby Extras Maintainers (285 accepts)
4. Debian Java Maintainers (257 accepts)
5. Debian Med Packaging Team (164 accepts)
6. Debian Multimedia Maintainers (160 accepts)
7. Debian Fonts Task Force (156 accepts)
8. Debian Javascript Maintainers (137 accepts)
9. Debian Python Modules Team (129 accepts)
10. Debian Qt/KDE Maintainers (98 accepts)

That doesn t reflect the real developers, though. Here s our Changed-By top ten:

1. Clint Adams (216 accepts)
2. Jonas Smedegaard (208 accepts)
3. Ben Hutchings (203 accepts)
4. Joachim Breitner (153 accepts)
5. TANIGUCHI Takaki (112 accepts)
6. Alessio Treglia (101 accepts)
7. David Paleino (95 accepts)
8. Nicholas Bamber (76 accepts)
9. Mathieu Parent (68 accepts)
10. Jeff Breidenbach (63 accepts)

Clint rocks with tons of Haskell packages, followed by Jonas (mostly Perl packages), and Ben (kernel uploads). Italian cabal stands still, with Alessio and David respectively at 6th and 7th place

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How long does a package stay in NEW? Some more, some less, but the average is 3 days, 15 minutes and 21 seconds. Now go and check your dak mails to see whether you had a fast processing or not liblog4ada 1.2-1 surely had, as it was accepted after 30 seconds! gsoap 2.7.17-1 was not so lucky, it took 103 days, 8 hours, 20 minutes and 43 seconds to clear NEW, but then made its way to the archive. Better late than never

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FTP Team is not just accepting NEW packages, but also removing obsolete ones. Here are some details about this task:

• Source packages removed: 2159
• Binaries for architecture all: 8773
• Binaries for architecture alpha: 3646
• Binaries for architecture amd64: 14653
• Binaries for architecture arm: 3
• Binaries for architecture armel: 13283
• Binaries for architecture armhf: 3423
• Binaries for architecture hppa: 1418
• Binaries for architecture hurd-i386: 6923
• Binaries for architecture i386: 15655
• Binaries for architecture ia64: 12365
• Binaries for architecture kfreebsd-amd64: 10972
• Binaries for architecture kfreebsd-i386: 10998
• Binaries for architecture mips: 12478
• Binaries for architecture mipsel: 12479
• Binaries for architecture powerpc: 13945
• Binaries for architecture s390: 12374
• Binaries for architecture s390x: 3884
• Binaries for architecture sparc: 12295

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FTP Team also took care of override changes:

• Number of priority changes: 853
• Number of section changes: 975

During the last month I worked as upstream maintainer of LADI Tools and now I m happy to introduce the first stable release! So, to answer the usual question What s new? , here is a short description of the changes introduced (taken from the NEWS file included in the release tarball): Laditools 1.0 Lady O Apart from wladi and g15ladi, most of ladi* tools have been renamed:

• ladicontrol -> ladi-control-center
• ladilog -> ladi-system-log
• laditray -> ladi-system-tray

Moreover, a new component has joined the LADI Tools suite: ladi-player. LADI Player is a convenient, graphical VLC-style application providing an all-in-one control interface to start, stop and monitor JACK as well as the session handler. It also provides basic controls for managing studios. Goodbye PyGTK! All the code was ported to GTK+ 3 and the new GObject Introspection mechanism. Code refactoring and cleanup The code has been reorganized in order to allow the use of Python objects by 3rd party applications. To start writing code using the classes provided by laditools, simply do the following: from laditools import * Two-in-one solution for LADI System Tray Formerly laditray was an implementation of GtkStatusIcon to put a nice right-clickable icon into the system tray to allow users access JACK controls easy way. It s been mostly rewritten and now it shows an AppIndicator icon (if the library is available), or fall back to the Freedesktop.org s old-fashioned System Tray Protocol Spec-compliant icon. Project s new homepage The project s homepage is now hosted by Launchpad.net, the code is hosted by repo.or.cz and it s available here for browsing.
Please use the following links to contact the development team:

• Bugs and patches
• Translations

New up-to-date packages will hit both Debian and Ubuntu soon!