I have this bunch of Dell R610, with iDrac6 Express management cards. I used these, among other things, for developing IPMI support in NUT and working on Infrastructure & Cloud power management. But that's the topic of another post (still, if you're interested in, check this and that). The thing is that this "IPMI" monitoring development has been limited to local support (Ie, power supplies can't be monitored remotely by the nut-ipmipsu driver), due to an issue : any attempt to enable IPMI access over the network was miserably failing! Well, these attempts were limited to a couple of 15 minutes runs, without plain motivation, almost a year ago. The various firmwares were up to date (iDrac 1.70, ...) , everything was running and configured fine, locally. But still... no IPMI available through the network! Looking on the Net, I've learned that many Dell customers with iDrac Express cards, were having the same issue. Dell support seems to have replaced tons of motherboards! There, I switched to other things, and time has passed.... A good year later (last week), I decided that it was time to get back on this. And I've found the solution there Incredible: this was due to a 'bug' in the Broadcom NetXtreme II LoM (LAN on Motherboad) firmware! I've not had time to dig this issue in depth, but here is a base explanation, for what it's worth: Some LoM initial self tests are failing. Thus, the LoM are not switched to the managed mode, and can't actually be available for BMC management (thus no IPMI over the network). In my case, the tests were wrongly failing at 'A07', a test which tries to establish a Gigabit connection! Strangely, all these servers are connected on a Gb switch! Not a fully satisfactory answer, but that said, there is a solution, and I've not much time to pour into this investigation (comments may always change my mind though!). So here is a comprehensive procedure to fix this, from your Linux system, and using FreeDOS:

• Get a USB key, at least 1,44 Mb (damn!), but a good old 32Gb will also do the trick
• Open a terminal and format the USB key (WARNING: this will ERASE all data on the key! You've been warned. Really!)

$ mkfs.msdos /dev/sdX1

Note: 'X' is to be replaced by the exact name of your USB key. An hint: call 'tail -f /var/log/syslog" and unplug / replug your USB key. You will see some entries like "...sdb Attached SCSI removable disk". So, there, it's "sdb".

• Download a FreeDOS image
• Now use qemu to create the DOS boot disk on your USB key (replace 'X' again!):

$ qemu -boot a -fda balder10.img -hda /dev/sdX A:\> sys c: A:\> xcopy /E /N a: c:

Note that you will need "root" privileges.

• (Optional) You can check the bootability with:

$ qemu -hda /dev/sdX

• Download Broadcom DOS utilities there
• Unzip this archive (self extract)

$ unzip Bcom_LAN_14.2.x_DOSUtilities_A03.exe

• Copy only 'Userdiag/NetXtremeII/uxdiag.exe' to your USB key.
• Plug the key in your server, and reboot it
• Press F11 to enter the BIOS boot sequence,
• Select the default entry, and press Enter. Once the system is booted, type:

c:\ uxdiag -t abcd mfw 1

• Reboot your system, and enjoy your *working* IPMI access over the network

For what it's worth (again), I just hope that it will be useful to others... I will now prepare another post using using FreeIPMI to manage your servers, the GNU way... cheers,
-- Arno Thanks to Jordi Clariana, his enlightening post, Daniel for this one, Aur lien was motivating me again in solving this iDrac Express issue and Al Chu (FreeIPMI project leader) for all his invaluable help on IPMI.

I ve pushed up some code (named familytree) to my GitHub, which lets folks browse the social connections that make up Debian. Many thanks to the number of people who gave me feedback (arno, luca, algernon (at least!)) Y all rock! I ve taken the dump of information from nm.debian.org, and rendered it out into four datasets.

• Advocations for a person
• People who one has advocated
• If the person is a Debian Developer Emeritus
• Who a person has AMd for

Mashing this up with an example d3 page, I ve come up with what I m calling debgraph . Here are some notable examples that I think are rad :) By the way - green lines indicate sponsorship, black lines indicate sponsors, and dashed lines indicate AM-ing. Tan nodes are DD-emeritus, and blue is active. I don t think this handles MIA correctly. Anyway, here it is: Me! (paultag) Algernon tbm (OK, this one is massive, I ve scaled it down a skitch old computer warning, it ll peg your CPU!) zack

Yay, so we made it: s390x got added as a release architecture. What this means:

• If the package already exists on that architecture and fails to build, that issue is deemed RC. You can debug the issue on the porterbox (zelenka), chroot sid_s390x. Build dependencies are installed by a team, just follow the request guidelines.
• If your package is not installable on s390x, it will not migrate to testing anymore. So if a package does not exist on s390x, you need to make sure not to generate a dependency on it or prevent your package from building on s390x (by e.g. build-depending on a package that's not available on s390x or by getting it into Packages-arch-specific).

This will also help other 64bit big-endian ports (like powerpc64 and sparc64) to enter the archive more easily, as most issues left are indeed related to endianness, not to specialities of the System z hardware.

Many thanks go to Aur lien Jarno, without whom this would not have been possible. I also want to take this opportunity to thank all our s390(x) machine sponsors: ZIVIT, IIC@KIT and Marist College. There are not many mainframe owners who let free software projects work on their machines.

tl;dr: Version 1.0 of Obnam, my snapshotting, de-duplicating, encrypting backup program is released. See the end of this announcement for the details. Where we see the hero in his formative years; parental influence From the very beginning, my computing life has involved backups. In 1984, when I was 14, my father was an independent telecommunications consultant, which meant he needed a personal computer for writing reports. He bought a Luxor ABC-802, a Swedish computer with a Z80 microprocessor and two floppy drives. My father also taught me how to use it. When I needed to save files, he gave me not one, but two floppies, and explained that I should store my files one one, and then copy them to the other one every now and then. Later on, over the years, I've made backups from a hard disk (30 megabytes!) to a stack of floppies, to a tape drive installed into a floppy interface (400 megabytes!), to a DAT drive, and various other media. It was always a bit tedious. The start of the quest; lengthy justification for NIH In 2004, I decided to do a full backup, by burning a copy of all my files onto CD-R disks. It took me most of the day. Afterwards, I sat admiring the large stack of disks, and realized that I would not ever do that again. I'm too lazy for that. That I had done it once was an aberration in the space-time continuum. Switching to DVD-Rs instead CD-Rs would reduce to the number of disks to burn, but not enough: it would still take a stack of them. I needed something much better. I had a little experience with tape drives, and that was enough to convince me that I didn't want them. Tape drives are expensive hardware, and the tapes also cost money. If the drive goes bad, you have to get a compatible one, or all your backups are toast. The price per gigabyte was coming down fast for hard drives, and it was clear that they were about to be very competitive with tapes for price. I looked for backup programs that I could use for disk based backups. rsync, of course, was the obvious choice, but there were others. I ended up doing what many geeks do: I wrote my own wrapper around rsync. There's hundred, possibly thousands, of such wrappers around the Internet. I also got the idea that doing a startup to provide online backup space would be a really cool thing. However, I didn't really do anything about that until 2007. More on that later. The rsync wrapper script I wrote used hardlinked directory trees to provide a backup history, though not in the smart way that backuppc does it. The hardlinks were wonderful, because they were cheap, and provided de-duplication. They were also quite cumbersome, when I needed to move my backups to a new disk the first time. It turned out that a lot of tools deal very badly with directory trees with large numbers of hardlinks. I also decided I wanted encrypted backups. This led me to find duplicity, which is a nice program that does encrypted backups, but I had issues with some of its limitations. To fix those limitations, I would have had to re-design and possibly re-implement the entire program. The biggest limitation was that it treated backups as full backup, plus a sequence of incremental backups, which were deltas against the previous backup. Delta based incrementals make sense for tape drives. You run a full backup once, then incremental deltas for every day. When enough time has passed since the full backup, you do a new full backup, and then future incrementals are based on that. Repeat forever. I decided that this makes no sense for disk based backups. If I already have backed up a file, there's no point in making me backup it again, since it's already there on the same hard disk. It makes even less sense for online backups, since doing a new full backup would require me to transmit all the data all over again, even though it's already on the server. The first battle I could not find a program that did what I wanted to do, and like every good NIHolic, I started writing my own. After various aborted attempts, I started for real in 2006. Here is the first commit message:

revno: 1
committer: Lars Wirzenius <liw@iki.fi>
branch nick: wibbr
timestamp: Wed 2006-09-06 18:35:52 +0300
message:
  Initial commit.

wibbr was the placeholder name for Obnam until we came up with something better. We was myself and Richard Braakman, who was going to be doing the backup startup with me. We eventually founded the company near the end of 2006, and started doing business in 2007. However, we did not do very much business, and ran out of money in September 2007. We ended the backup startup experiment. That's when I took a job with Canonical, and Obnam became a hobby project of mine: I still wanted a good backup tool. In September 2007, Obnam was working, but it was not very good. For example, it was quite slow and wasteful of backup space. That version of Obnam used deltas, based on the rsync algorithm, to backup only changes. It did not require the user to do full and incremental backups manually, but essentially created an endless sequence of incrementals. It was possible to remove any generation, and Obnam would manage the deltas as necessary, keeping the ones needed for the remaining generations, and removing the rest. Obnam made it look as if each generation was independent of each other. The wasteful part was the way in which metadata about files was stored: each generation stored the full list of filenames and their permissions and other inode fields. This turned out to be bigger than my daily delta. The lost years; getting lost in the forest For the next two years, I did a little work on Obnam, but I did not make progress very fast. I changed the way metadata was stored, for example, but I picked another bad way of doing it: the new way was essentially building a tree of directory and file nodes, and any unchanged subtrees were shared between generations. This reduced the space overhead per generation, but made it quite slow to look up the metadata for any one file. The final battle; finding cows in the forest In 2009 I decided to leave Canonical and after that, my Obnam hobby picked up in speed again. Below is a table of the number of commits per year, from the very first commit (bzr log -n0 awk '/timestamp:/ print $3 ' sed 's/-.*//' uniq -c awk ' print $2, $1 ' tac):

2006 466
2007 353
2008 402
2009 467
2010 616
2011 790
2012 282

During most of 2010 and 2011 I was unemployed, and happily hacking Obnam, while moving to another country twice. I don't recommend that as a way to hack on hobby projects, but it worked for me. After Canonical, I decided to tackle the way Obnam stores data from a new angle. Richard told me about the copy-on-write (or COW) B-trees that btrfs uses, originally designed by Ohad Rodeh (see his paper for details), and I started reading about that. It turned out that they're pretty ideal for backups: each B-tree stores data about one generation. To start a new generation, you clone the previous generation's B-tree, and make any modifications you need. I implemented the B-tree library myself, in Python. I wanted something that was flexible about how and where I stored data, which the btrfs implementation did not seem to give me. (Also, I worship at the altar of NIH.) With the B-trees, doing file deltas from the previous generation no longer made any sense. I realized that it was, in any case, a better idea to store file data in chunks, and re-use chunks in different generations as needed. This makes it much easier to manage changes to files: with deltas, you need to keep a long chain of deltas and apply many deltas to reconstruct a particular version. With lists of chunks, you just get the chunks you need. The spin-off franchise; lost in a maze of dependencies, all alike In the process of developing Obnam, I have split off a number of helper programs and libraries:

• genbackupdata generates reproducible test data for backups
• seivot runs benchmarks on backup software (although only Obnam for now)
• cliapp is a Python framework for command line applications
• cmdtest runs black box tests for Unix command line applications
• summain makes diff-able file manifests (md5sum on steroids), useful for verifying that files are restored correctly
• tracing allows run-time selectable debug log messages that is really fast during normal production runs when messages are not printed

I have found it convenient to keep these split off, since I've been able to use them in other projects as well. However, it turns out that those installing Obnam don't like this: it would probably make sense to have a fat release with Obnam and all dependencies, but I haven't bothered to do that yet. The blurb; readers advised about blatant marketing The strong points of Obnam are, I think:

• Snapshot backups, similar to btrfs snapshot subvolumes. Every generation looks like a complete snapshot, so you don't need to care about full versus incremental backups, or rotate real or virtual tapes. The generations share data as much as possible, so only changes are backed up each time.
• Data de-duplication, across files, and backup generations. If the backup repository already contains a particular chunk of data, it will be re-used, even if it was in another file in an older backup generation. This way, you don't need to worry about moving around large files, or modifying them.
• Encrypted backups, using GnuPG.

Backups may be stored on local hard disks (e.g., USB drives), any locally mounted network file shares (NFS, SMB, almost anything with remotely Posix-like semantics), or on any SFTP server you have access to. What's not so strong is backing up online over SFTP, particularly with long round trip times to the server, or many small files to back up. That performance is Obnam's weakest part. I hope to fix that in the future, but I don't want to delay 1.0 for it. The big news; readers sighing in relief I am now ready to release version 1.0 of Obnam. Finally. It's been a long project, much longer than I expected, and much longer than was really sensible. However, it's ready now. It's not bug free, and it's not as fast as I would like, but it's time to declare it ready for general use. If nothing else, this will get more people to use it, and they'll find the remaining problems faster than I can do on my own. I have packaged Obnam for Debian, and it is in unstable, and will hopefully get into wheezy before the Debian freeze. I provide packages built for squeeze on my own repository, see the download page. The changes in the 1.0 release compared to the previous one:

• Fixed bug in finding duplicate files during a backup generation. Thanks to Saint Germain for reporting the problem.
• Changed version number to 1.0.

The future; not including winning lottery numbers I expect to get a flurry of bug reports in the near future as new people try Obnam. It will take a bit of effort dealing with that. Help is, of course, welcome! After that, I expect to be mainly working on Obnam performance for the foreseeable future. There may also be a FUSE filesystem interface for restoring from backups, and a continous backup version of Obnam. Plus other features, too. I make no promises about how fast new features and optimizations will happen: Obnam is a hobby project for me, and I work on it only in my free time. Also, I have a bunch of things that are on hold until I get Obnam into shape, and I may decide to do one of those things before the next big Obnam push. Where; the trail of an errant hacker I've developed Obnam in a number of physical locations, and I thought it might be interesting to list them: Espoo, Helsinki, Vantaa, Kotka, Raahe, Oulu, Tampere, Cambridge, Boston, Plymouth, London, Los Angeles, Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Portland, New York, Edinburgh, Manchester, San Giorgio di Piano. I've also hacked on Obnam in trains, on planes, and once on a ship, but only for a few minutes on the ship before I got seasick. Thank you; sincerely

• Richard Braakman, for helping me with ideas, feedback, and some code optimizations, and for doing the startup with me. Even though he has provided little code, he's Obnam's most significant contributor so far.
• Chris Cormack, for helping to build Obnam for Ubuntu. I no longer use Ubuntu at all, so it's a big help to not have to worry about building and testing packages for it.
• Daniel Silverstone, for spending a Saturday with me hacking Obnam, and rewriting the way repository file filters work (compression, encryption), thus making them not suck.
• Tapani Tarvainen for running Obnam for serious amounts of real data, and for being patient while I fixed things.
• Soile Mottisenkangas for believing in me, and helping me overcome periods of despair.
• Everyone else who has tried Obnam and reported bugs or provided any other feedback. I apologize for not listing everyone.

SEE ALSO

• Obnam home page
  • tutorial
  • support
  • NEWS
  • README
  • manual page
  • design documents
  • Debian QA package page
  • bugs
  • bugs in Debian
• Other projects of mine (many are dependencies of Obnam)


# dpkg --add-architecture kfreebsd-amd64
# dpkg -i libc0.1-dev_2.13-32_kfreebsd-amd64.deb
Selecting previously unselected package libc0.1-dev.
(Reading database ... 446113 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking libc0.1-dev (from libc0.1-dev_2.13-32_kfreebsd-amd64.deb) ...
dpkg: error processing libc0.1-dev_2.13-32_kfreebsd-amd64.deb (--install):
trying to overwrite '/usr/include/_G_config.h', which is also in package libc6-dev 2.13-32
dpkg-deb: error: subprocess paste was killed by signal (Broken pipe)
Errors were encountered while processing:
libc0.1-dev_2.13-32_kfreebsd-amd64.deb
Before multiarch the bug was not existing, and of course none of libc6-dev and libc0.1-dev are marked as Multi-Arch: something. People wanting to delay the release of Wheezy, I am sure you can find much more RC bugs like that.

Samuel Thibault is a French guy like me, but it took years until we met. He tends to keep a low profile, even though he s doing lots of good work that deserves to be mentioned. He focuses on improving Debian s accessibility and contributes to the Hurd. Who said he s a dreamer? Checkout his interview to have some news of Wheezy s status on those topics. Raphael: Who are you? Samuel: I am 30 years old, and live in Bordeaux, France. During the workday, I teach Computer Science (Architecture, Networking, Operating Systems, and Parallel Programming, roughly) at the University of Bordeaux, and conduct researches in heterogeneous parallel computing. During the evening, I play the drums and the trombone in various orchestra (harmonic/symphonic/banda/brass). During the night, I hack on whatever fun things I can find, mainly accessibility and the Hurd at the moment, but also miscellaneous bits such as the Linux console support. I am also involved in the development of Aquilenet, an associative ISP around Bordeaux, and getting involved in the development of the network infrastructure in Bordeaux. I am not practicing Judo any more, but I roller-skate to work, and I like hiking in the mountains. I also read quite a few mangas. Saturday mornings do not exist in my schedule (Sunday mornings do, it s Brass Band rehearsal ). Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? Samuel: Bit by bit. I have been hacking around GNU/Linux since around 1998. I installed my first Debian system around 2000, as a replacement for my old Mandrake installation (which after all my tinkering was actually no longer looking like a Mandrake system any more!). That was Potato at the time, which somebody offered me through a set of CDs (downloading packages over the Internet was unthinkable at the time with the old modems). I have been happily reading and hacking around documentation, source code, etc. provided on them. Contribution things really started to take off when I went to the ENS Lyon high school in 2001: broadband Internet access in one s own student room! Since sending a mail was then really free, I started submitting bugs against various packages I was using. Right after that I started submitting patches along them, and then patches to other bugs. I did that for a long time actually. I had very little knowledge of all packaging details at the time, I was just a happy hacker submitting reports and patches against the upstream source code. At ENS Lyon, I met a blind colleague with very similar hacking tastes (of course we got friends) and he proposed me, for our student project, to work on a brlnet project (now called brlapi), a client/server protocol that lets applications render text on braille devices themselves. Along the way, I got to learn in details how a blind person can use a Unix system and the principles that should be followed when developing Accessibility. That is how I got involved in it. We presented our project at JDLL, and the Hurd booth happened to be next to our table, so I discussed with the Hurd people there about how the Hurd console could be used through braille. That is how I got into the Hurd too. From then on, I progressively contributed more and more to the upstream parts of both accessibility software and the Hurd. And then to the packaging part of them. Through patches in bug reports first, as usual, as well as through discussions on the mailing lists. But quickly enough people gave me commit access so I could just throw the code in. I was also given control over the Hurd buildds to keep them running. It was all good at that stage: I could contribute in all the parts I was caring about. People however started telling me that I should just apply for being a Debian Developer; both from accessibility and Hurd sides. I had also seen a bunch of my friends going through the process. I was however a bit scared (or probably it was just an excuse) by having to manage a gpg key, it seemed like a quite dangerous tool to me (even if I already had commit access to glibc at the time anyway ). I eventually applied for DM in 2008 so as to at least be able to upload some packages to help the little manpower of the Accessibility and Hurd teams. Henceforth I had already a gpg key, thus no excuse any more. And having it in the DM keyring was not enough for e.g. signing the hurd-i386 buildd packages. So I ended up going through NM in 2009, which went very fast, since I had already been contributing to Debian and learning all the needed stuff for almost 10 years! I now have around 50 packages in my QA page, and being a DD is actually useful for my work, to easily push our software to the masses So to sum it up, the Debian project is very easy to contribute to and open to new people. It was used during discussions at the GNU Hackers Meeting 2011 as an example of a very open community with public mailing lists and discussions. The mere fact that anybody can take the initiative of manipulating the BTS (if not scared by the commands) without having to ask anybody is an excellent thing to welcome contributions; it is notable tha the GNU project migrated to the Debbugs BTS. More generally, I don t really see the DD status as a must, especially now that we have the DM status (which is still a very good way to drag people into becoming DDs). For instance, I gave a talk at FOSDEM 2008 about the state of accessibility in Debian. People did not care whom I was, they cared that there was important stuff going on and somebody talking about it. More generally, decisions that are made through a vote are actually very rare. Most of the time, things just happen on the mailing lists or IRC channels where anybody can join the discussion. So I would recommend beginners to first use the software, then start reporting bugs, then start digging in the software to try fix the bugs by oneself, eventually propose patches, get them reviewed. At some point the submitted patches will be correct already most of the time. That s when the maintainers will start getting bored of just applying the patches, and simply provide with commit access, and voil , one has become a main contributor. Raphael: You re one of the main contributors to the Debian GNU/Hurd port. What motivates you in this project? Samuel: As I mentioned above, I first got real contact with the Hurd from the accessibility point of view. That initially brought me into the Hurd console, which uses a flexible design and nice interfaces to interact with it. The Hurd driver for console accessibility is actually very straightforward, way simpler than the Windows or Linux drivers. That is what caught me initially. I have continued working on it for several reasons. First, the design is really interesting for users. There are many things that are natural in the Hurd while Linux is still struggling to achieve them, such as UID isolation, recently mentioned in LWN. What I really like in the Hurd is that it excels at providing users with the same features as the administrator s. For instance, I find it annoying that I still can not mount an ISO image that I build on e.g. ries.debian.org. Linux now has FUSE which is supposed to permit that, but I have never seen it enabled on an ssh-accessible machine, only on desktop machines, and usually just because the administrator happens to be the user of the machine (who could as well just have used sudo ) For me, it is actually Freedom #0 of Free Software: let the user run programs for any purpose, that is, combining things together all the possible ways, and not being prevented from doing some things just because the design does not permit to achieve them securely. I had the chance to give a Hurd talk to explain that at GHM 2011, whose main topic was extensibility , I called it GNU/Hurd AKA Extensibility from the Ground, because the design of the Hurd is basically meant for extensibility, and does not care whether it is done by root or a mere user. All the tools that root uses to build a GNU/Hurd system can be used by the user to build its own GNU/Hurd environment. That is guaranteed by the design itself: the libc asks for things not to the kernel, but to servers (called translators), which can be provided by root, or by the user. It is interesting to see that it is actually also tried with varying success in GNU/Linux, through gvfs or Plash. An example of things I love being able to do is: $ zgrep foo ~/ftp://cdn.debian.net/debian/dists/sid/main/Contents-*.gz On my Hurd box, the ~/ftp: directory is indeed actually served by an ftpfs translator, run under my user uid, which is thus completely harmless to the system. Secondly and not the least, the Hurd provides me with interesting yet not too hard challenges. LWN confirmed several times that the Linux kernel has become very difficult to significantly contribute to, so it is no real hacking fun any more. I have notably implemented TLS support in the Hurd and the Xen and 64bit support in the GNU Mach kernel used by the Hurd. All three were very interesting to do, but were already done for Linux (at least for all the architectures which I actually know a bit and own). It happens that both TLS and Xen hacking experience became actually useful later on: I implemented TLS in the threading library of our research team, and the Xen port was a quite interesting line on my CV for getting a postdoc position at XenSource Lastly, I would say that I am used to lost causes My work on accessibility is sometimes a real struggle, so the Hurd is almost a kind of relief. It is famous for his vapourware reputation anyway, and so it is fun to just try to contribute to it nevertheless. An interesting thing is that the opinion of people on the Hurd is often quite extreme, and only rarely neutral. Some will say it is pure vapourware, while others will say that it is the hope of humanity (yes we do see those coming to #hurd, and they are not always just trolls!). When I published a 0.401 version on 2011 April 1st, the comments of people were very diverse, and some even went as far as saying that it was horrible of us to make a joke about the promised software Raphael: The FTPmasters want to demote the Hurd port to the debian-ports.org archive if it doesn t manage a stable release with wheezy. We re now at 2 months of the freeze. How far are you from being releasable ? Samuel: Of course, I can not speak for the Debian Release team. The current progress is however encouraging. During Debconf11, Michael Banck and I discussed with a few Debian Release team members about the kind of goals that should be achieved, and we are near completion of that part. The Debian GNU/Hurd port can almost completely be installed from the official mirrors, using the standard Debian Installer. Some patches need some polishing, but others are just waiting for being uploaded Debian GNU/Hurd can start a graphical desktop and run office tools such as gnumeric, as well as the iceweasel graphical web browser, KDE applications thanks to Pino Toscano s care, and GNOME application thanks to Emilio Pozuelo Monfort s care. Of course, general textmode hacking with gcc/make/gdb/etc. just works smoothly. Thanks to recent work on ghc and ada by Svante Signell, the archive coverage has passed 76%. There was a concern about network board driver support: until recently, the GNU Mach kernel was indeed still using a glue layer to embed the Linux 2.2 or even 2.0 drivers (!). Finding a network board supported by such drivers had of course become a real challenge. Thanks to the GSoC work of Zheng Da, the DDE layer can now be used to embed Linux 2.6.32 drivers in userland translators, which was recently ACCEPTed into the archive, and thus brings way larger support for network boards. It also pushes yet more toward the Hurd design: network drivers as userland process rather than kernel modules. That said, the freeze itself is not the final deadline. Actually, freeze periods are rests for porters, because maintainers stop bringing newer upstream versions which of course break on peculiar architectures. That will probably be helpful to continue improving the archive coverage. Raphael: The kfreebsd port brought into light all the packages which were not portable between different kernels. Did that help the Hurd port or are the problems too different to expect any mutual benefit? Samuel: The two ports have clearly helped each other in many aspects. The hurd-i386 port is the only non-Linux one that has been kept working (at least basically) for the past decade. That helped to make sure that all tools (dpkg, apt, toolchain, etc.) were able to cope with non-Linux ports, and keep that odd-but-why-not goal around, and evidently-enough achievable. In return, the kFreeBSD port managed to show that it was actually releasable, at least as a technological preview, thus making an example. In the daily work, we have sometimes worked hand in hand. The recent porting efforts of the Debian Installer happened roughly at the same time. When fixing some piece of code for one, the switch-case would be left for the other. When some code could be reused by the other, a mail would be sent to advise doing so, etc. In the packaging effort, it also made a lot of difference that a non-Linux port is exposed as released architecture: people attempted by themselves to fix code that is Linuxish for no real reason. The presence of the kFreeBSD is however also sometimes a difficulty for the Hurd: in the discussions, it sometimes tends to become a target to be reached, even if the systems are not really comparable. I do not need to detail the long history of the FreeBSD kernel and the amount of people hacking on it, some of them full-time, while the Hurd has only a small handful of free-time hackers. The FreeBSD kernel stability has already seen long-term polishing, and a fair amount of the Debian software was actually already ported to the FreeBSD kernel, thanks to the big existing pure-FreeBSD hackerbase. These do not hold for the GNU/Hurd port, so the expectations should go along. Raphael: You re also very much involved in the Debian Accessibility team. What are the responsibilities of this team and what are you doing there? Samuel: As you would expect it, the Debian Accessibility team works on packaging accessibility-related packages, and helping users with them; I thus do both. But the goal is way beyond just that. Actual accessibility requires integration. Ideally enough, a blind user should be able to just come to a Debian desktop system, plug his braille device, or press a shortcut to enable speech synthesis, and just use the damn computer, without having to ask the administrator to install some oddly-named package and whatnot. Just like any sighted user would do. He should be able to diagnose why his system does not boot, and at worse be able to reinstall his computer all by himself (typically at 2am ). And that is hard to achieve, because it means discussing about integration by default of accessibility features. For instance, the Debian CD images now beep during at the boot menu. That is a precious feature that has been discussed between debian-boot and debian-accessibility for a few weeks before agreeing on how to do it without too much disturbance. Similarly, my proposition of installing the desktop accessibility engines has been discussed for some time before being commited. What was however surprisingly great is that when somebody brought the topic back for discussion, non-debian-accessibility people answered themselves. This is reassuring, because it means things can be done durably in Debian. On the installation side, our current status is that the stable Debian installer has a high contrast color theme, and several years ago, I have pushed toward making standard CD images automatically detect braille devices, which permits standalone installation. I have added to the Wheezy installer some software speech synthesis (which again brought discussion about size increase vs versatility etc.) for blind people who do not have a braille device. I find it interesting to work on such topic in Debian rather than another distribution, because Debian is an upstream for a lot of distributions. Hopefully they just inherit our accessibility work. It at least worked for the text installer of Ubuntu. Of course, the Accessibility team is looking for help, to maintain our current packages, but also introduce new packages from the TODO list or create some backports. One does not need to be an expert in accessibility: tools can usually be tested, at least basically, by anybody, without particular hardware (I do not own any, I contributed virtual ones to qemu). For new developments and ideas, it is strongly recommended to come and discuss on debian-accessibility, because it is easy to get on a wrong track that does not bring actual accessibility. We still have several goals to achieve: the closest one is to just fix the transition to gnome3, which has been quite bad for accessibility so far :/ On the longer run, we should ideally reach the scenario I have detailed above: desktop accessibility available and ready to be enabled easily by default. Raphael: What s the biggest problem of Debian? Samuel: Debian is famous for its heated debian-devel discussions. And some people eventually say this no fun any more . That is exemplified in a less extreme way in the debian-boot/accessibility discussions that I have mentioned above. Sometimes, one needs to have a real stubborn thick head to continue the discussion until finding a compromise that will be accepted for commit. That is a problem because people do not necessarily have so much patience, and will thus prefer to contribute to a project with easier acceptance. But it is also a quality: as I explained above, once it is there, it is apparently for good. The Ubuntu support of accessibility in its installer has been very diverse, in part due to quite changing codebase. The Debian Installer codebase is more in a convergence process. Its base will have almost not changed between squeeze and wheezy. That allowed the Debian Accessibility team to continue improving its accessibility support, and not have to re-do it. A wiki page explains how to test its accessibility features, and some non-debian-accessibility people do go through it. A problem I am much more frightened by is the manpower in some core teams. The Debian Installer, grub, glibc, Xorg, gcc, mozilla derivatives, When reading the changelogs of these, we essentially keep seeing the same very few names over and over. And when one core developer leaves, it is very often still the same names which appear again to do the work. It is hard to believe that there are a thousand DDs working on Debian. I fear that Debian does not manage to get people to work on core things. I often hear people saying that they do not even dare thinking about putting their hands inside Xorg, for instance. Xorg is complex, but it seems to me that it tends to be overrated, and a lot of people could actually help there, as well as all the teams mentioned above. And if nobody does it, who will? Raphael: Do you have wishes for Debian Wheezy? Samuel: That is an easy one Of course I wish that we manage to release the hurd-i386 port. I also wish that accessibility of gnome3 gets fixed enough to become usable again. The current state is worrying: so much has changed that the transition will be difficult for users already, the current bugs will clearly not help. I also hope to find the time to fix the qt-at-spi bridge, which should (at last!) bring complete KDE accessibility. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Samuel: Given the concerns I expressed above, I admire all the people who do spend time on core packages, even when that is really not fun everyday. Just to alphabetically name a few people I have seen so often here and there in the areas I have touched in the last few years: Aur lien Jarno, Bastian Blank, Christian Perrier, Colin Watson, Cyril Brulebois, Frans Pop, J rg Jaspert, Joey Hess, Josselin Mouette, Julien Cristau, Matthias Klose, Mike Hommey, Otavio Salvador, Petr Salinger, Robert Millan, Steve Langasek. Man, so many things that each of them works on! Of course this list is biased towards the parts that I touched, but people working in others core areas also deserve the same admiration.

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Thank you to Samuel for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Note that older interviews are indexed on wiki.debian.org/PeopleBehindDebian.

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When we added s390x to the main archive, coming from Debian Ports, we were unlucky. A new glib release had assumptions that weren't true on 64bit big endian architectures and it entered the archive just a few days before we made the initial import. This weekend we finally got a new major release into Debian unstable that fixed these issues. So we're almost on par with s390 now. It all untangled quite nicely after glib-networking was able to complete its testsuite. Only one build-dependency loop between nautilus and tracker had to be broken manually.

So what's left? There's a bunch of usertagged bugs (with both general FTBFSes and arch-specific issues; kudos to Aur lien Jarno providing a lot of patches) and we still need to file some, like iceweasel segfaulting during its build. That's important because another bunch of packages needs it to build (well, mozjs and/or xulrunner, or some package that needs those).

Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2002 18:22:10 +0000
From: James Troup <troup@samosa.debian.org>
To: Aurelien Jarno <aurelien@aurel32.net>
Cc: da-manager@debian.org
Subject: New Debian maintainer Aurelien Jarno [ This is a long (automatically-generated) mail, but it contains
important information, please read it all carefully. ] Dear Aurelien Jarno! An account has been created for you on developer-accessible machines with username aurel32 . The password for this account can be found encrypted with your PGP or GPG key and appended to this message. A list of machines available to Debian developers can be found at <URL:http://db.debian.org/machines.cgi>. Please take a minute now to familiarize yourself with the Debian Machine Usage Policy, available at <URL:http://www.debian.org/devel/dmup> You have been subscribed to the debian-private mailing list as <aurel32@debian.org>. Please respect the privacy of that list and don t forward mail from it elsewhere. E-mail to <aurel32@debian.org> will be forwarded to <aurelien@aurel32.net>. To change this, please see <URL:http://db.debian.org/forward.html> Also, please subscribe to debian-devel-announce, if you haven t done so already. We strongly suggest that you use your aurel32@debian.org address for the maintainer field in your packages, because that one will be valid as long as you are a Debian developer, even if you change jobs, leave university or change Internet Service providers. If you do so, please add that address to your PGP/GPG key(s) (using gpg edit-key YOUR USER ID ) and send it to the keyring server at keyring.debian.org with gpg keyserver keyring.debian.org send-keys YOUR USER ID . You can find more information useful to developers at <URL:http://www.debian.org/devel/> (in particular, see the subsection titled Debian Developer s reference ). We suggest that you subscribe to debian-mentors@lists.debian.org. This list is for new maintainers who seek help with initial packaging and other developer-related issues. Those who prefer one-on-one help can also post to the list, and an experienced developer may volunteer to help you. You can get online help on IRC, too, if you join the channel #debian-devel on irc.debian.org. Take a look at the support section on www.debian.org in order to find out more information. You should have read these documents before working on your packages. o The Debian Social Contract
<URL:http://www.debian.org/social_contract.html> o The Debian Policy Manual
<URL:http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/> If you have some spare time and want to contribute it to Debian you may wish to take a look at the Work-Needing and Prospective Packages for Debian GNU/Linux also known as WNPP that can be found at <URL:http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/> If you plan to make a Debian package from a not yet packaged piece of software you *must* announce your intention on the debian-devel mailing list to make sure nobody else is working on them. The machine ftp-master.debian.org is our main archive server. Every uploaded package finds it s way there (except for Packages covered by US crypto laws which go to non-us.debian.org) eventually. master.debian.org is the home of our bug tracking system. Project web pages and CVS archives are hosted on klecker.debian.org (aka cvs/www.debian.org), klecker is also our general shell server. Web pages should be placed in public_html on klecker and refered to by http://people.debian.org/~aurel32 You should use ssh to log into the machines instead of regular telnet or rlogin. Our LDAP directory is able to share ssh RSA keys among machines, please see <URL:http://db.debian.org/doc-mail.html> Otherwise when you first login a ~/.ssh directory will be created with the appropriate permissions. Please be aware of the security implications of using RSA authentication and ssh agents. Finally, please take a minute to visit <URL:http://db.debian.org/>.
Login using the password information appended to this email, and update your personal information. The information is used to maintain your accounts on various Debian machines, and also to allow other developers and general users to find out more about you. Many of the fields are only visible to other registered Debian developers. This is also the only way to change your password. The passwd program does not yet work. Welcome to the project!
The Debian New Maintainer Team

If you met Ana, you ll easily remember her. She has a great and pronounced Spanish accent I m glad that the existence of the Debian Women project helped her to join Debian because she has been doing a great job. From KDE packaging to publicity/marketing work, her interests shifted over the years but this allowed her to stay very involved. As she explains it very well, Debian is big enough so that you can stop doing something which is no longer fun for you, and still find something new to do in another part of Debian! Read on to learn more about Ana, the KDE team, Debian s participation to the Google Summer of Code, and more. Raphael: Who are you? Ana: I m Ana Guerrero L pez and I m in my early 30s. I was born and raised in the wonderful city of Sevilla, Spain and I live in Lyon, France. I share my life with another Debian Developer and my paid work is doing Debian support and integration, so you won t be surprised to read that Debian is a big part of my life. Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? Ana: Although I knew about the existence of Linux since 1997 or so, I didn t really start using Linux until the summer 2001 when I finally got a computer on my own and an Internet link at home. In the beginning, I was using Mandrake in a dual boot with Windows and later around 2003, I happily moved to only using Debian and ditching the Windows partition. Once settled as a Debian user, I knew anybody could help improve the distribution but I hesitated to join mostly due to two reasons, my perception of Debian was the one of a very elitist and aggressive club and who wants to join this kind of cult^wproject? And even if I wanted to join, I did not know how to get started. By the summer of 2004, the Debian Women project started, it made me seeing Debian as a more welcoming project, and I started maintaining my first packages. The following summer 2005, I attended akademy 2005 (the annual KDE conference) where I had the pleasure to meet there some of the people from the KDE team and this really made a difference for me. Christopher Martin and Adeodato Sim , with the help of other people, have started the maintenance of KDE as a team a few months before and by that time most of the KDE modules where under the maintenance umbrella of the team. This was a very good move since it allowed easily to share the KDE maintenance in a more coordinated way and also eased having non-DDs, like me at that time, to join in and help.

The Debian Women project started, it made me seeing Debian as a more welcoming project.

Raphael: You re part of the Debian KDE team. What s your role in the team and what are your plans for Wheezy? Ana: Nowadays, I am not as active in the KDE team as I used to be in the past. The KDE 3 to KDE 4 transition was quite tiring and changes on the KDE side like the successive marketing renames, the shorter 6 months schedule (it used to be at least 9) or the uncoordinated KDE releases mostly burnt me out. Currently, I am mostly working in helping others to get started within the team, some small fixes here and there, and helping with the uploads: an upload of the full KDE suite to the archive requires some building power and upload bandwidth not everybody have. For Wheezy, with the tentative freeze date in June, the plan is to try to ship the latest possible point release of the KDE 4.8 series. The first release of the series, 4.8.0 was released a couple of weeks ago and while writing these lines, the packaging work for 4.8 hasn t started yet. The next move for the team is getting 4.7.4 in unstable, currently sitting in experimental.

For Wheezy, [ ] the plan is to try to ship the latest possible point release of the KDE 4.8 series.

Besides the KDE packages, there is some software which users perceive as KDE, such as amarok, digikam, etc., which are not part of KDE but fall under its umbrella. These other programs have their own maintainers and their updates depend greatly in the availability of them. For the KDE office suite, we have right now KOffice in the archive. KOffice got a fork some time ago named Calligra and we should replace KOffice by Calligra in the archive before the release of Wheezy. Sadly there isn t yet a final release of Calligra to use. My personal goal for Wheezy was to finish the removal of all the remaining packages depending on KDE 3 and Qt 3 that Squeeze still contained. The removal of the KDE 3 libraries and all the packages using them was quickly achieved after the release of Squeeze. The removal of Qt 3 soon showed that it was task harder than expected since some popular packages (sometimes not in the Debian archive, e.g. third-party scientific software) depend on it, and also Qt 3 is a requirement for LSB compatibility. Right now, Qt 3 has been orphaned for 9 months and nobody has shown any interest in adopting it. Raphael: KDE, much like GNOME, has been forked by people who were unhappy by the direction that the project has taken since version 4 (cf Trinity). What s your personal opinion on KDE 4.x and what s the position of the Debian KDE team concerning this fork? Ana: I use KDE 4 on my laptop and I think it is a solid desktop environment and platform. However I am finding it less and less attractive for me. On one side, my usage of the computer has been slightly changing and on the other side, I do not like how the new developments in KDE are evolving, things like plasmoids or activities are not attractive for me. I have switched my other 2 systems to awesome although I continue to use mainly a bunch of KDE applications: dolphin, konsole, kate, juk, kmix, etc. So you might say my desktop environment is an awesome KDE. Regarding the Trinity project, a lot of users complained very loudly when KDE 3 got replaced by KDE 4 in testing/unstable, so I find quite laudable the decision of some users to act instead and try to continue with a forked development of KDE 3. However the Trinity team seems to be about 3 persons (funny for a project named Trinity ) while KDE 3 is big. In perspective, it does not look that big because KDE 4 is even larger, but it is still too much for such small team. In addition those developers need to maintain Qt3 that has been end-of-lifed years ago by Nokia/Trolltech . So my guess is that sooner or later the project will fade away. Nobody from the KDE team is interested in Trinity and in case someone wants to package it for Debian, they would have to make a new team. For the reasons mentioned above: Qt3 maintenance and reduced upstream group, this would be a bad idea. My advice if you do not like KDE 4 and you miss KDE 3, would be taking a look at razor-qt based on Qt4 and quite similar to KDE 3. I read they have plans to port it to Qt4, but frankly that could take some years same it took to the KDE project for KDE 4.0.0 Raphael: You used to maintain news.debian.net, a WordPress blog dedicated to Debian, but you stopped a while ago. A few months later you started to maintain a Debian page on Google+. Why did you stop the blog and what s your goal with the Google+ page? Ana: I blogged about the reasons I started news.debian.net. In short, I thought Debian needed a better system to publish news, something like a blog. I first tried to suggest the idea to the press/publicity team but they weren t interested, so I started the project alone. IMHO the blog worked quite well and I was feeling like it should be made official. I talked about this with some people but at the time I wasn t pushing it because I had other priorities and I knew pushing it to become official would need some extra time and energy. Stefano decided to start the discussion about making news.debian.net official (that s moving it to a debian.org domain) in its own initiative. After the public discussion and some private exchange of emails with DSA, the situation became frustrating and I decided to close news.debian.net after the release of Squeeze. Later, during DebConf, an officer from the press team announced they were launching a blog and I asked Stefano if he could try to have a discussion about this to see if it could still somehow fit my ideas, and maybe contributing myself, but nobody from the press team answered Stefano s email and the blog hasn t started yet either. Irony that communication didn t work when wanting to improve communication. About the Google+ page, everyday I follow what is going in Debian and quite often I find things I want to share. I do not want to clutter my own profiles with Debian stuff or have people following me because of that, so I decided to create the Debian page when Google+ made them available. I like the fact that people can follow that without having an account in Google+ although they can not comment anonymously. I am not happy about the fact that Google+ is a closed platform but hopefully the data will become easier to export in the near future. Right now, there are some services that provides RSS feeds of Google+ pages if you want to follow the page and you are not in Google+ (or I could setup one if several people ask me). Raphael: Last year you helped to manage Debian s participation to the Google Summer of Code. How did it went? Is there something that you can improve for this year? Ana: I think last year we managed to have people in Debian more aware about what the students were doing. That also helped students to get more feedback and therefore get to know more people in the project and get more integrated. Students were sending periodic public reports available to everybody interested in the status of the projects and some of them also held their own sessions in DebConf. We still failed to start looking for mentors early enough and to give them information about how the GSoC worked and how they could have a successful project. Having good projects in Debian is harder than in other projects because the GSoC mostly promotes having students started in Open Source *coding* for a project, while Debian is more a project about integrating software and we overall do not have so many parts that has to be coded. My personal goal for this year is to try getting the projects earlier to attract good students from the very beginning, even if that means we have less projects than in other years. Raphael: What motivates you to continue to contribute year after year? Ana: Three things. I like improving the OS I use, I like the friends I have made while working in Debian through the years and because I have fun. Also Debian is quite a big project, so if you become tired or burn out working in some area, you always can easily find interesting things to do somewhere else. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Ana: Adeodato Sim , he is now in a long leave from the project, but it is one of those persons who made a difference in the project in his job in the release team some years ago. Aur lien Jarno because of his tireless work in (e)glibc and porting of several architectures. I also have special admiration for all those people who have been very active in the project for more than 7-8 years because I know it is not always easy to combine it with real life.

---

Thank you to Ana for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading her answers as I did. Note that older interviews are indexed on wiki.debian.org/PeopleBehindDebian.

Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Google+, Twitter and Facebook .

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Fresh from the oven, monthly report of what I've been working on as DPL during January 2012.

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Dear Developers,
here is another monthly report of what happened in DPL-land, this time for January 2012. There's quite a bit to report about --- including an insane amount of legal-ish stuff --- so please bear with me. Or not. Legal stuff

• Webmaster heroes have decided to tackle the long standing issues of copyright and licensing of the Debian website. I've accepted to help them out in reaching consensus with license choice and I'm happy to report that we've managed to pick a DFSG-free license (BSD-ish) for future contributions. Webmasters will soon contact contributors to re-license old contributions (or get rid of them), so hopefully will have a DFSG-free website RSN. Many thanks go to David Pr vot for successfully tackling such a can of worms.
• I've sought a second legal advice on the constraints that trademarks (might) impose on the work-flow of a distro like Debian. Luckily, it is coherent with one I've sought in the past so I'm now in condition to wrap up the "trademark vs DFSG" thread on -project with the missing legal information. Hopefully, I'll find time to do that sometime next week.
• I've restarted discussions with the Debian France association so that they can become a Debian Trusted Organization (as per Constitution 9.3). Members of the board of the association seem to be interested and I'm positive it could happen fairly soon. The importance of this is that we could use a back-up association in Europe to hold Debian assets, to complement the services that FFIS are already offering us.
• Thanks to the contributions of Benjamin Mako Hill and SPI lawyers, I've now what I consider a final draft of a trademark policy for Debian trademarks. Before proposing it to you, I'm waiting for some feedback from another umbrella organization for Free Software projects, that is working on a trademark policy for all their associated projects. As many Free Software projects are seeking trademark protection these days, I see benefits in having uniform (and sane!) policies. I hope to be able to gather the feedback I still miss this week-end at FOSDEM, and let you know shortly after that. Once this is done, we'll also be able to (finally!) relicense all kinds of Debian logos under a DFSG-free license. On this front, I've also updated http://www.debian.org/trademark with the information needed to contact us about trademark usage; hopefully it'll reduce the burden of answering to such inquiries.
• With the help of Kenshi Muto, Fumitoshi Ukai, Ishikawa Mutsumi, Shuzo Hatta, and Yasuhiro Araki we've started the process to move the Debian trademark in Japan from individuals (who are present or past members of the Debian JP association) to SPI. That would help dealing with these matters, as well as ensure that important Debian assets are held by Debian Trusted Organizations.
• I remind you that we've an ongoing complaint with the current registrant of debian.eu, domain that we believe Debian should legitimately own. Lawyers at SPI has now formally contacted the current owner and hopefully we'll be able to solve the issue amicably in the next months.
• Some of the past legal advice I sought for PPA came handy in a discussion on the legal risks of running a service like mentors.debian.net, hopefully addressing part of the issues in turning that into mentors.debian.org
• Patent policy for the Debian archive is now ready as well and I also have a patch for the website ready to be merged. I'm just waiting for the final blessing from SPI (lawyers) to go ahead and publish it.

Most of the above wouldn't have been possible without the precious help of folks at SFLC working for SPI and Debian. Be sure to thank SFLC for what they're doing for us and many other Free Software projects. Coordination Nobody stepped up to coordinate the artwork collection for Wheezy I've mentioned last month, so I've tried to do a little bit of that myself. The -publicity team is now preparing the call for artwork and hopefully we'll send it out RSN. In case you want to help, there is still a lot of room for that; just show up on the debian-desktop mailing list. Sprints A Debian Med sprint has happened in January, and Andreas Tille has provided a nice and detailed report about it. Some more sprints are forthcoming this spring, how about yours? Money

• We got from SPI a prepaid and rechargeable credit card that we can use for expenses or other kind of guarantees. Many thanks to Michael Schulteiss, SPI treasurer, for his help with that. Using it, we've redeemed 10k$ of credits offered to us by Amazon, that (thanks to ongoing work by Lucas Nussbaum) we're going to use to make our QA rebuilds independent from the underlying computing infrastructure.
• Thanks to the help of Luca Capello, we advanced quite a bit on forming the Debian Event Box kit that should make it easier to set up Debian booth at FOSS events. We bought the machine for it (for about ~755 CHF) and the box to contain it will soon be on its way as well. If you're at FOSDEM, tend to the Debian booth to check it out (and possibly help out with the technical setup).
• We've got quite a bit of donations during the December holidays. I've took the chance to thank donors, discuss what we do with donations and the status of publishing periodic Debian budgets.
• Pinged by Yves-Alexis Perez, I've now properly documented the fact that DDs are welcome to apply for hardware sponsoring, in case the hardware can be used to help/improve their Debian work. As suggested by Yves-Alexis, you can also advocate other DDs for hw sponsoring.
• Given hardware invariably age and that we can afford it, I've prodded DSA to prepare a general hardware replacement plan for our machines. Planning will go on this week-end and FOSDEM (thanks to Martin Zobel-Helas and Faidon Liambotis for their presence here) and I hope to have an approved machine replacement plan well before the end of the current DPL term (although I'm usually optimist...).

Important stuff going on Other important stuff has been going on in various area of the project in January. I'd like to point your attention to a couple of things:

• People active on debian-mentors have proposed an improved work-flow to deal with sponsoring/mentoring requests, based on the usage of a new pseudo package "sponsorship-requests". Thanks to Ansgar Burchardt, Jakub Wilk, Arno T ll, and Gregor Herrmann for working on this.
• Raphael Hertzog has kickstarted work on DEP-2, as a way to rationalize the flow of package-related information that (co-)maintainers get. Discussion about the idea are ongoing on the debian-qa mailing list.

Miscellanea

• Work has further progressed in reaching out to companies with an interest in giving support for, and contributing to Debian. Thanks to Alexander Wirt the technical work is now done and some sort of governance policy has been decided. Further step for me is to announce it properly hoping to reach out to as many interested companies as possible. I hope to finalize that in the next month. (If you're working for such a company and you happen to read this, feel free to reach out to me already.)
• I've completed an old todo item setting up and documenting titanpad.debian.net, service that has been requested for collaborative work during various kinds of online events. Help is welcome to help administering the service (see doc).
• SPI has clarified the role of project representatives and, as a consequence of that, I (as DPL) no longer receive SPI board discussions addressed to board@spi. That is good not only for the sanity of my inbox, but also because it puts all projects affiliated to SPI at the same level of communication within SPI. Thanks to Robert Brockway for his work on this.

In the unlikely case you've read thus far, thanks for your attention! Happy Debian hacking.

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PS as usual, the boring day-to-day activity log is available at master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.*

Sometimes life throws little curves at you to see if you are still awake, today has been one of those days. fglrx is (apparently) fixed I ve had a long-running problem with fglrx on my laptop. The problem stems from ATI closed-source drivers with one of those laptops that has an ATI and Intel driver. It means I am basically using the slow Intel chip only. This morning I had enough and backed up my home and started to rebuild the laptop with debian 6.0.3. So I kicked off the very very slow process of reformatting the crypto drive (it has taken 5 hours and still going) let it gurgle on its merry way and started to read my email. One of the emails was that my bug about fglrx not working is closed, apparently it is fixed. If I had read that 10 minutes earlier, a simple apt-get install fglrx-driver would of perhaps fixed it; oh well. My problem is now is do I move to the latest driver and hope their fix is my fix or leave it with some ancient version? My preference is the former; I only hope it works! psmisc 22.15 and buffer overflows psmisc has a program called pstree which prints the set of processes in a tree fashion. It hasn t changed much for quite a while. I released version 22.15 and the Debian package 22.15-1. 22.15-1 I also adopted the harden CFLAGS as suggested for procps. I was a little surprised that I received an important bug. The report was saying I had a buffer overflow introduced in 22.15-1, but no relevant code had changed. The compiler options had done their job and stopped a buffer being overflowed. But where exactly was the overflow? Running gdb on pstree quickly showed that it was line 267 of pstree.c which uses strcpy(). That function set off warning bells. The relevant code is: Now comm is the short command name you find in /proc//stat. It is fixed in the kernel at 16 characters. The PROC structure has this field as 17 characters long, one extra for the NUL. I went and checked the Linux source and yes, it is still 16 characters long. The clue was in the name of the program that it died on.

#6  new_proc (comm=0x6111b0 " console-kit-dae ", pid=1571, uid=0)
  at pstree.c:267

That string is 17 characters long. The problem is that 16 characters is for the name only. If the name is in brackets or braces, then that 16 character limit doesn t apply. The buffer overflow bug has been there for a long time, but only with the compiler flags did it become visible. Given you need to read names out of the /proc filesystem and if someone can fiddle with that you have bigger problems it doesn t seem to be too much of an issue. It should be (and is in Debian 22.15-2) fixed but is a nice example of the compiler catching bad things.

Related articles

• Detecting security problems using static analysis to catch them early and less expensively (blogs.windriver.com)
• A Textbook Buffer Overflow: A Look at the FreeBSD telnetd Code (thexploit.com)
• Exploit the buffer Buffer Overflow Attack (alitarhini.wordpress.com)
• Aurelien Jarno: Performances of open-source Radeon driver (aurel32.net)

I am the happy owner of a new netbook with an AMD Fusion E-450 APU, which includes a Radeon graphics card. I am using the open-source driver on it, that is a 3.2-rc7 kernel for KMS, and xserver-xorg-video-radeon package from sid. I have to say I am not really happy about the performances. No I don t speak about the graphical performances that are pretty good (especially compared to my Intel Atom N450 based previous netbook) but about the power consumption. With this setup and with the original battery I get 2h30 of autonomy. Switching to UMS and adding some power management options in xorg.conf improves it to 2h40, but breaks suspend to ram/disk (a pity for a netbook) and switch between VT. I then tried the non-free fglrx driver, it also suffers from the suspend to ram/disk issue, in addition to crashing xorg when playing videos On the other hand I get an impressive 3h30 of autonomy, and additionally a silent netbook (contrary to the open-source driver, the fan doesn t spin at idle). I have tried plenty of options, ranging from adding some power management options to xorg.conf, to passing dynclks=1 to the radeon module, including setting /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_method to dynpm. Right now I have worked around the issue by buying a bigger battery which brings me 5h30 of autonomy, but I would really appreciate any software way to improve it with the open-source driver.

I am the happy owner of a new netbook with an AMD Fusion E-450 APU, which includes a Radeon graphics card. I am using the open-source driver on it, that is a 3.2-rc7 kernel for KMS, and xserver-xorg-video-radeon package from sid. I have to say I am not really happy about the performances. No I don t speak about the graphical performances that are pretty good (especially compared to my Intel Atom N450 based previous netbook) but about the power consumption. With this setup and with the original battery I get 2h30 of autonomy. Switching to UMS and adding some power management options in xorg.conf improves it to 2h40, but breaks suspend to ram/disk (a pity for a netbook) and switch between VT. I then tried the non-free fglrx driver, it also suffers from the suspend to ram/disk issue, in addition to crashing xorg when playing videos On the other hand I get an impressive 3h30 of autonomy, and additionally a silent netbook (contrary to the open-source driver, the fan doesn t spin at idle). I have tried plenty of options, ranging from adding some power management options to xorg.conf, to passing dynclks=1 to the radeon module, including setting /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_method to dynpm. Right now I have worked around the issue by buying a bigger battery which brings me 5h30 of autonomy, but I would really appreciate any software way to improve it with the open-source driver.

I am the happy owner of a new netbook with an AMD Fusion E-450 APU, which includes a Radeon graphics card. I am using the open-source driver on it, that is a 3.2-rc7 kernel for KMS, and xserver-xorg-video-radeon package from sid. I have to say I am not really happy about the performances. No I don t speak about the graphical performances that are pretty good (especially compared to my Intel Atom N450 based previous netbook) but about the power consumption. With this setup and with the original battery I get 2h30 of autonomy. Switching to UMS and adding some power management options in xorg.conf improves it to 2h40, but breaks suspend to ram/disk (a pity for a netbook) and switch between VT. I then tried the non-free fglrx driver, it also suffers from the suspend to ram/disk issue, in addition to crashing xorg when playing videos On the other hand I get an impressive 3h30 of autonomy, and additionally a silent netbook (contrary to the open-source driver, the fan doesn t spin at idle). I have tried plenty of options, ranging from adding some power management options to xorg.conf, to passing dynclks=1 to the radeon module, including setting /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_method to dynpm. Right now I have worked around the issue by buying a bigger battery which brings me 5h30 of autonomy, but I would really appreciate any software way to improve it with the open-source driver.

On Saturday evening I started talking with M nica about Bug Squashing Parties and how they work. I am not sure how it happened, we started doing one. Then it was too fun to stop :P NMUs by M nica:

• t1lib #646470 This one had a patch by Colin Watson and Lo c Minier
• torcs: #646469 and 636009
• slsqlite: #646487
• webdruid: #646499
• vilistextum: #646501

Funny, there were a couple of NMUs by others uploading patchs by M nica. NMUs by Ana:

• uw-imap: #646481 This one had a patch by Aur lien Jarno.
• remind: #643466
• sipcalc: #646502
• libcsoap: #643420
• tuxpaint: #556509 With patch by Georgios M. Zarkadas.

I also closed #646449 (libosip2) that has been fixed in a new release upload, sponsored a NMU to Sven Joachim who had a patch sitting in the BTS for a month NMU-fixing #646147 (lie), sponsored dbus-c++ and reviewed for sponsoring a new version inspircd.

During Debconf 11, I got access to a fast s390 machine, and I have started to work on a Debian s390x port, the 64-bit version of the s390 port. One of my goal was to help the SPARC64 port, as some of the issues are the same: both are 64-bit big-endian, don t support unaligned access and behave differently between -fpic and -fPIC. Why such a port? When talking about 64-bit ports, we usually hear: 4GB is enough, handling 64-bit takes more memory . This really sounds like 640K ought to be enough for anybody . The s390 port is actually 31-bit from the address point of view (one bit is reserved for address space extension from 24 to 31 bits), so each process is limited to 2GB only. Nowadays applications which need more than 2GB are not that uncommon, especially on mainframes. Actually the 2GB limit already causes some problem in Debian: in some cases it s not possible to build haskell applications or even C applications using GCC. On the other hand, we already require a 64-bit kernel on the s390 port (only the userland is 32-bit), and applications are handling more and more 64-bit or greater values (files offset, time counters, uid, etc.). What is the status? Bootstrapping the architecture was not really easy (as for any other new architectures), due to a huge amount of dependencies and build-dependencies loops, as explained by Wookey during Debconf11. Now that this part is mostly done, an autobuilder has been started and currently more than 65% of the packages are built. The s390x port is hosted on debian-ports.org. Unfortunately it is not yet deboostrapable, though that should happen in the next few days (only a few packages are missing). The main issues are currently packages which fail to build from source due to linker, gcc-4.6 and curl changes, or due to the libjpeg and multiarch transitions, and thus are not directly related to s390x. If your package is in this case, it would be a good idea to fix it. Otherwise if it has a lot of reverse dependencies and the bug is opened for a while, just expect an NMU (as allowed by the 0-day NMU policy). Of course for a few packages s390x specific fixes are needed, some of them are already in the BTS. How you can help? The list of bugs blocking the s390x port is available through the s390x usertag, fixing these bugs (a lot of them are general FTBFS) would help a lot. Alternatively if you have access to an s390x machine you can take a look at the packages failing to build. Update: Fixed the explanation about the 32th bit, thanks to Bastian Blank for the comment.

I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the story of a great surprise and a big moment for me. All this started when my wife Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early March or something (I don't yet have all the details). Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many languages as possible. Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday. Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible, poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in the Perrier's genes! And they were doing all this without me noticing. As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift. Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of Christian" album? But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book? But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil, then Joey doing on the following pages? And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards (one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all around the world. All this in a wonderful album. I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and emotion was really really intense. Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated and some were indeed much much much appreciated. Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!). Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto, Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall, Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux' Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu), Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi, Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach, Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs (finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition" Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza, Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor" Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer" Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i , Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier, Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky" Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su, Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero, Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent, Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello. Let's say it gain:

• Danke
• Thank you
• (RTL or not?) / toda
• Gracias
• / arigat
• / n ndi
• Obrigado
• Grazie
• C m n
• Kadin chey la
• / Efharisto
• Dank je wel
• Tak
• D ngge
• Merci
• Kiitos
• Tika hoki
• / dhanyavaadhamulu
• Thank you and God save the Queen
• Mul umesc
• Tack
• / didi madloba
• Gr cies
• Dakujem
• / Aabhar
• / Dhanyavadagalu
• Paldies
• / kop khun krap
• Terima kasih
• Hvala (hr)
• / Dhanyavad
• / Hvala (sr)
• Hvala (sl)
• / Akun
• / Sukriya
• Takk
• / Nandri
• Maki biyen jianbakik
• D kuji
• / Xiexie
• / Aabhari aahe
• Faleminderit
• / Kam sah ham ni da
• / Blagodaram
• / Xiexie
• Hvala (bs)

I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the story of a great surprise and a big moment for me. All this started when my wife Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early March or something (I don't yet have all the details). Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many languages as possible. Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday. Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible, poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in the Perrier's genes! And they were doing all this without me noticing. As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift. Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of Christian" album? But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book? But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil, then Joey doing on the following pages? And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards (one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all around the world. All this in a wonderful album. I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and emotion was really really intense. Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated and some were indeed much much much appreciated. Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!). Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto, Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall, Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux' Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu), Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi, Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach, Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs (finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition" Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza, Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor" Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer" Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i , Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier, Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky" Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su, Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero, Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent, Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello. Let's say it gain:

• Danke
• Thank you
• (RTL or not?) / toda
• Gracias
• / arigat
• / n ndi
• Obrigado
• Grazie
• C m n
• Kadin chey la
• / Efharisto
• Dank je wel
• Tak
• D ngge
• Merci
• Kiitos
• Tika hoki
• / dhanyavaadhamulu
• Thank you and God save the Queen
• Mul umesc
• Tack
• / didi madloba
• Gr cies
• Dakujem
• / Aabhar li> / Dhanyavadagalu
• Paldies
• / kop khun krap
• Terima kasih
• Hvala (hr)
• / Dhanyavad
• / Hvala (sr)
• Hvala (sl)
• / Akun
• / Sukriya
• Takk
• / Nandri
• Maki biyen jianbakik
• D kuji
• / Xiexie
• / Aabhari aahe
• Faleminderit
• / Kam sah ham ni da
• / Blagodaram
• / Xiexie
• Hvala (bs)

Archos confirmed to me that they don't have source code for their RK2818-based models at the moment, which means the 7" home tablet (version 2) and the Arnova range all appear to be infringing. For a company that is actually on the better end of the scale for compliance, that's somewhat disheartening. My understanding is that the Arnova and "home tablet" ranges (as opposed to the "internet tablet" range) are subcontracted or rebadging exercises, so there's probably less corporate oversight than for the internally developed hardware. This is, obviously, not an excuse.

Has anyone tried to obtain the kernel source for the Archos 7 home tablet V2 or the Arnova range (ie, anything Archos is shipping that's based on the RK2818 rather than the RK2808)? If so, what was the response? The source from their site only appears to be for the RK2808 devices.