Search Results: "bali"

4 May 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: first week in Stretch cycle

Debian Jessie has been released on April 25th, 2015. This has opened the Stretch development cycle. Reactions to the idea of making Debian build reproducibly have been pretty enthusiastic. As the pace is now likely to be even faster, let's see if we can keep everyone up-to-date on the developments. Before the release of Jessie The story goes back a long way but a formal announcement to the project has only been sent in February 2015. Since then, too much work has happened to make a complete report, but to give some highlights: Lunar did a pretty improvised lightning talk during the Mini-DebConf in Lyon. This past week It seems changes were pilling behind the curtains given the amount of activity that happened in just one week. Toolchain fixes We also rebased the experimental version of debhelper twice to merge the latest set of changes. Lunar submitted a patch to add a -creation-date to genisoimage. Reiner Herrmann opened #783938 to request making -notimestamp the default behavior for javadoc. Juan Picca submitted a patch to add a --use-date flag to texi2html. Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes of their build dependencies: apport, batctl, cil, commons-math3, devscripts, disruptor, ehcache, ftphs, gtk2hs-buildtools, haskell-abstract-deque, haskell-abstract-par, haskell-acid-state, haskell-adjunctions, haskell-aeson, haskell-aeson-pretty, haskell-alut, haskell-ansi-terminal, haskell-async, haskell-attoparsec, haskell-augeas, haskell-auto-update, haskell-binary-conduit, haskell-hscurses, jsch, ledgersmb, libapache2-mod-auth-mellon, libarchive-tar-wrapper-perl, libbusiness-onlinepayment-payflowpro-perl, libcapture-tiny-perl, libchi-perl, libcommons-codec-java, libconfig-model-itself-perl, libconfig-model-tester-perl, libcpan-perl-releases-perl, libcrypt-unixcrypt-perl, libdatetime-timezone-perl, libdbd-firebird-perl, libdbix-class-resultset-recursiveupdate-perl, libdbix-profile-perl, libdevel-cover-perl, libdevel-ptkdb-perl, libfile-tail-perl, libfinance-quote-perl, libformat-human-bytes-perl, libgtk2-perl, libhibernate-validator-java, libimage-exiftool-perl, libjson-perl, liblinux-prctl-perl, liblog-any-perl, libmail-imapclient-perl, libmocked-perl, libmodule-build-xsutil-perl, libmodule-extractuse-perl, libmodule-signature-perl, libmoosex-simpleconfig-perl, libmoox-handlesvia-perl, libnet-frame-layer-ipv6-perl, libnet-openssh-perl, libnumber-format-perl, libobject-id-perl, libpackage-pkg-perl, libpdf-fdf-simple-perl, libpod-webserver-perl, libpoe-component-pubsub-perl, libregexp-grammars-perl, libreply-perl, libscalar-defer-perl, libsereal-encoder-perl, libspreadsheet-read-perl, libspring-java, libsql-abstract-more-perl, libsvn-class-perl, libtemplate-plugin-gravatar-perl, libterm-progressbar-perl, libterm-shellui-perl, libtest-dir-perl, libtest-log4perl-perl, libtext-context-eitherside-perl, libtime-warp-perl, libtree-simple-perl, libwww-shorten-simple-perl, libwx-perl-processstream-perl, libxml-filter-xslt-perl, libxml-writer-string-perl, libyaml-tiny-perl, mupen64plus-core, nmap, openssl, pkg-perl-tools, quodlibet, r-cran-rjags, r-cran-rjson, r-cran-sn, r-cran-statmod, ruby-nokogiri, sezpoz, skksearch, slurm-llnl, stellarium. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which did not make their way to the archive yet: Improvements to reproducible.debian.net Mattia Rizzolo has been working on compressing logs using gzip to save disk space. The web server would uncompress them on-the-fly for clients which does not accept gzip content. Mattia Rizzolo worked on a new page listing various breakage: missing or bad debbindiff output, missing build logs, unavailable build dependencies. Holger Levsen added a new execution environment to run debbindiff using dependencies from testing. This is required for packages built with GHC as the compiler only understands interfaces built by the same version. debbindiff development Version 17 has been uploaded to unstable. It now supports comparing ISO9660 images, dictzip files and should compare identical files much faster. Documentation update Various small updates and fixes to the pages about PDF produced by LaTeX, DVI produced by LaTeX, static libraries, Javadoc, PE binaries, and Epydoc. Package reviews Known issues have been tagged when known to be deterministic as some might unfortunately not show up on every single build. For example, two new issues have been identified by building with one timezone in April and one in May. RD and help2man add current month and year to the documentation they are producing. 1162 packages have been removed and 774 have been added in the past week. Most of them are the work of proper automated investigation done by Chris West. Summer of code Finally, we learned that both akira and Dhole were accepted for this Google Summer of Code. Let's welcome them! They have until May 25th before coding officialy begins. Now is the good time to help them feel more comfortable by sharing all these little bits of knowledge on how Debian works.

20 April 2015

B lint R czey: Hot upgrading Erlang applications using tools in Debian

Erlang lets you write applications supporting zero downtime by switching one live system to another running a different application version converting the application s state on the fly to the new representation. Debian packages however can have only one installed version on a system which prevents using Erlang s hot-upgrade feature easily. Engineers at Yakaz (Jean-S bastien P dron) came up with a nice solution by creating separate directories for each application release and creating .deb packages for managing the transitions. I had to solve the same problem recently and found that the erlsvc Perl application they created needed a few patches to be usable with latest Erlang and other packages and with the changes it worked perfectly. Yakaz was not interested in accepting the patches and developing it further, but let me continue the maintenance. Please find the updated erlsvc application under my GitHub account and feel free to submit patches if you find something to fix in it. I have also packaged erlsvc as an official Debian package and it is waiting in the NEW queue for being accepted. When it enters unstable you will have to make very little effort to make your applications hot-upgradeable on Debian!

6 January 2015

B lint R czey: Kodi from Debian

The well known XBMC Media Center has been renamed to Kodi with the 14.0 Helix release and following upstream s decision the xbmc packages are renamed to kodi as well. Debian ships a slightly changed version of XBMC using the XBMC from Debian name and following that tradition ladies and gentlemen let me introduce you Kodi from Debian :
Kodi from Debian main screen

Kodi from Debian main screen

As of today Kodi from Debian uses the FFmpeg packages instead of the Libav ones which have been used by XBMC from Debian. The reason for the switch was upstream s decision of dropping the Libav compatibility code and FFmpeg becoming available again packaged in Debian (thanks to Andreas Cadhalpun). It is worth noting that while upstream Kodi 14.0 downloads and builds FFmpeg 2.4.4 by default, Debian ships FFmpeg 2.5.1 already and FFmpeg under Kodi will be updated independently from Kodi thanks to the packaging mechanism. The new kodi packages are uploaded to the NEW queue and are waiting for being accepted by the FTP Masters who are busy with preparing Jessie for the release (Many thanks to them for their hard work!), but in the meantime you can install kodi from https://people.debian.org/~rbalint/ppa/xbmc-ffmpeg/. Happy recovery from the holidays! :-)

25 October 2014

B lint R czey: XBMC (from Debian) running on MIPS CI20 dev board

XBMC on CI20 MIPS dev board

Imagination Tech kindly offered many developers (including me) a CI20 development board which let me play with XBMC on it a bit and patching it alive. The OpenGL GUI works smoothly, but video can t be played due to crashes in FFmpeg/Libav/libva (I ll submit the bug reports soon.).
The patches needed are sent to upstream and the latest Debian package already ships them.

Big part of the credits go to Cory Fields who created the first MIPS patches I found and updated for latest XBMC code. Thanks!

23 October 2014

Alessio Treglia: Bits from the Debian Multimedia Maintainers

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: 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: 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: 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 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: 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

10 September 2014

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s first report about Debian Long Term Support

When we setup Freexian s offer to bring together funding from multiple companies in order to sponsor the work of multiple developers on Debian LTS, one of the rules that I imposed is that all paid contributors must provide a public monthly report of their paid work. While the LTS project officially started in June, the first month where contributors were actually paid has been July. Freexian sponsored Thorsten Alteholz and Holger Levsen for 10.5 hours each in July and for 16.5 hours each in August. Here are their reports: It s worth noting that Freexian sponsored Holger s work to fix the security tracker to support squeeze-lts. It s my belief that using the money of our sponsors to make it easier for everybody to contribute to Debian LTS is money well spent. As evidenced by the progress bar on Freexian s offer page, we have not yet reached our minimal goal of funding the equivalent of a half-time position. And it shows in the results, the dla-needed.txt still shows around 30 open issues. This is slightly better than the state two months ago but we can improve a lot on the average time to push out a security update To have an idea of the relative importance of the contributions of the paid developers, I counted the number of uploads made by Thorsten and Holger since July: of 40 updates, they took care of 19 of them, so about the half. I also looked at the other contributors: Rapha l Geissert stands out with 9 updates (I believe that he is contracted by lectricit de France for doing this) and most of the other contributors look like regular Debian maintainers taking care of their own packages (Paul Gevers with cacti, Christoph Berg with postgresql, Peter Palfrader with tor, Didier Raboud with cups, Kurt Roeckx with openssl, Balint Reczey with wireshark) except Matt Palmer and Luciano Bello who (likely) are benevolent members of the LTS team. There are multiple things to learn here:
  1. Paid contributors already handle almost 70% of the updates. Counting only on volunteers would not have worked.
  2. Quite a few companies that promised help (and got mentioned in the press release) have not delivered the promised help yet (neither through Freexian nor directly).
Last but not least, this project wouldn t exist without the support of multiple companies and organizations. Many thanks to them: Hopefully this list will expand over time! Any help to reach out to new companies and organizations is more than welcome.

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29 June 2014

Ritesh Raj Sarraf: Fibre Channel over Ethernet

Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is a computer network technology that encapsulates Fibre Channel frames over Ethernet networks. This allows Fibre Channel to use 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks (or higher speeds) while preserving the Fibre Channel protocol. The specification was part of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards T11 FC-BB-5 standard published in 2009 (As descripted on Wikipedia) I just orphaned the FCoE packages for Debian. I don't really have the time and enthusiasm to maintain FCoE any more. The packages may not be in top notch shape, but FCoE as a technology, itself did not see many takers. The popcon stats are low. In case anyone is interested to takeover the maintenance, there is a pkg-fcoe group on alioth. There are 4 packages that build the stack: lldpad, libhbaapi, libhbalinux and fcoe-utils.

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19 June 2014

B lint R czey: Run Wireshark on Android using Lil Debi!

Running Wireshark for Android has been an dream for a long time. Now it became a reality!
Wireshark running on Android using Lil'Debi

Wireshark running on Android using Lil Debi

You only need a rooted Android device with ~2GB free space, Internet connectivity and some patience to follow the steps below.
  1. Install Lil Debi from Google Play or F-Droid. Lil Debi will install a Debian root file system in a loop device separately from the Android file system allowing us running Debian side-by-side to the Android apps.
  2. Start Lil Debi and create the Debian system with 2000 MB image size. We will need some space for Wireshark, the graphical interface Wireshark depends on and for the capture files.
  3. Start the newly created Debian system and log in to it. You will see the error message bash: [: : integer expression expected , but you can continue.
  4. Now run the following commands at the command line to install all the packages Wireshark will need: 
    # some important directories are missing from the PATH by default
export PATH=/sbin:/usr/sbin/:$PATH
# we will start an X server later
export DISPLAY=127.0.0.1:0
# install wireshark an a few things to make it nicer
apt-get install openbox gnome-themes-standard tshark wireshark
# gnome-settings-daemon depends on plenty of packages we don't need now,
# but we need gnome-settings-daemon for the GNOME theme to be applied
apt-get install --no-install-recommends gnome-settings-daemon
  5. To run graphical applications from the Debian chroot we need to set up an X server on Android because Android uses a different method for presenting the GUI. XServer XSDL is available from Google Play and from SourceForge. Install and start it. It will show the display it is serving which will most probably end with :0, so the DISPLAY environment variable we set before is correct. (If there is an other number after the : , fix your DISPLAY variable.)
  6. Start the openbox window manager, gnome-settings-daemon and finally wireshark in capturing mode: 
    openbox &
# if you would like to have bigger menu fonts skip starting gnome-settings-daemon
gnome-settings-daemon &
wireshark -k -i wlan0
  7. Switch to the X server to see wireshark starting up, close the warning dialogs start capturing traffic!
I tested the tests above using a Nexus 7 (Asus 2013 version) running CyanogenMod M7, thus root access was granted by default, Lil Debi 0.4.7, and XServer XSDL 1.11.14.

2 June 2014

B lint R czey: I Can Hear Music again (thanks to forked-daapd/Debian)

When I started looking for a lightweight solution of serving a music library over LAN I did not expect so many complications. I expected it not to be a unique need to have something running on a SheevaPlug straight from the Debian repository. Apparently it kind of was. Debian used to have mt-daapd (popcon: 165), but now it is available from oldstable only and upstream is dead. There is tangerine (popcon: 98) with its Mono dependencies and GUI which seemed to me overkill and more like a demo of a networked application written in Mono than a music library server. The most promising candidate was forked-daapd (popcon: 220) but it was far from being a true winner. First, it had a series of dead upstreams. At the beginning it was forked from mt-daapd (hence the name) by Julien Blache who also served as the prior Debian maintainer. Then the code base was forked and converted to use Grand Central Dispatch. Then the GCD fork died off slowly as well a few years ago. When I found the package it had been unmaintained for a few years and was based on the GCD branch which prevented building it on many architectures and the server itself was crashing or quitting occasionally. Luckily there still existed a fork thanks to Espen J rgensen which was well maintained and could serve as a way out but examining it closely it turned out that it had switched to libevent from GCD but to a version (1.4) which is present only in oldstable! And some say Debian s software versions are ancient ;-). Moreover it was not simply libevent 1.4-based, but it included some heavily patched parts of it. Espen also liked the idea of packaging his version in Debian and we extracted the patches to libevent and slowly got them accepted to libevent s master. Forked-daapd s master works best with libevent 2.1.4-alpha, but thanks to Espen the development branch now also works with libevent 2.0.x giving up some performance and a little feature. This was a long journey, but finally Espen s forked-daapd became ready for being used as a new upstream of the Debian package thus please welcome 20.0+git20140530+gc740e6e-1, the first version of forked-daapd building on all architectures for a very long time and a prime candidate for being the music library server in Jessie (and wheezy-backports, soon)! Testing, bug reports are always welcome! From the package description: 
 forked-daapd is an iTunes-compatible media server, originally intended
 as a rewrite of Firefly Media Server (also known as mt-daapd).
 It supports a wide range of audio formats, can stream video to iTunes,
 FrontRow and other compatible clients, has support for Apple's Remote
 iPhone/iPod application and can stream music to AirTunes devices like
 the AirPort Express.
 It also features RSP support for Roku's SoundBridge devices.
 Built-in, on-the-fly decoding support enables serving popular free music
 formats like FLAC, Ogg Vorbis or Musepack to those clients that do not
 otherwise support them.

9 May 2014

B lint R czey: XBMC 13.0 Gotham entered Debian

XBMC v13.0 Gotham

XBMC v13.0 Gotham

Thanks to the great work of the XBMC Team XBMC 13.0 Gotham has been released last Sunday and now XBMC from Debian can be downloaded from experimental to Jessie and Sid systems. It will take some time to enter unstable since it is blocked by the Libav 10 transition, but that will happen, too, eventually. I have also set up a separate repository at http://people.debian.org/~rbalint/ppa/xbmc-ffmpeg/ based on the Debian packages in main but using XBMC s internal copy of FFmpeg because I received several request asking for this variant. The packages there can be used on Wheezy (stable), Jessie (testing) and Sid (unstable) but are not part of Debian. Update 1: For the interested parties the XBMC 13 Libav compatibility patches are available from a git branch in the packaging repository.

15 April 2014

B lint R czey: Proposing amd64-hardened architecture for Debian

Facing last week s Heartbleed bug the need for improving the security of our systems became more apparent than usually. In Debian there are widely used methods for Hardening packages at build time and guidelines for improving the default installations security. Employing such methods usually come at an expense, for example slower code execution of binaries due to additional checks or additional configuration steps when setting up a system. Balancing between usability and security Debian chose an approach which would satisfy the most users by using C/C++ features which only slightly decrease execution speed of built binaries and by using reasonable defaults in package installations. All the architectures supported by Debian aims using the same methods for enhancing security but it does not have to stay the same way. Amd64 is the most widely used architecture of Debian according to popcon and amd64 hardware comes with powerful CPU-s. I think there would be a significant amount of people (being one of them :-)) who would happily use a version of Debian with more security features enabled by default sacrificing some CPU power and installing and setting up additional packages. My proposal for serving those security-focused users is introducing a new architecture targeting amd64 hardware, but with more security related C/C++ features turned on for every package (currently hardening has to be enabled by the maintainers in some way) through compiler flags as a start. Introducing the new architecture would also let package maintainers enabling additional dependencies and build rules selectively for the new architecture improving the security further. On the users side the advantage of having a separate security enhanced architecture instead of a Debian derivative is the potential of installing a set of security enhanced packages using multiarch. You could have a fast amd64 installation as a base and run Apache or any other sensitive server from the amd64-hardened packages! I have sent the proposal for discussion to debian-dev, too. Please join the discussion there or leave a comment here. Update: Many of you wondered if amd64-hardened could have prevented the exploitation of the Heartbleed vulnerability. I have posted a proof of concept to show that using -fsanitize=address and disabling custom freelist would have protected systems against stealing data using the exploits. Disabling the custom freelist-like solutions and enabling-fsanitize=address would be part of amd64-hardened to make memory protection techniques work effectively thus I think if we had this architecture ready at the beginning of April, it would have been immune to Heartbleed.

8 April 2014

B lint R czey: Move friends from XP to Linux days


Today Microsoft ends support for Windows XP. To keep my friends PC-s currently running XP secure I announce the the Move friends from XP to Linux days . If you are my friend feel free to contact me and we find some time to install Ubuntu on your machine keeping your Windows installation bootable as long as you want. Ubuntu is a Debian derivative Linux distribution which is easy to use. Hungarian version

23 March 2014

Gregor Herrmann: RC bugs 2013/49 - 2014/12

since people keep talking to me about my RC bug fixing activities, I thought it might be time again for a short report. to be honest, I mostly stopped my almost daily work at some point in december, partly because the overall number of RC bugs affecting both testing & unstable is quite low (& therefore the number of easy-to-fix bugs), due to the auto-removal policy of the release team (kudos!). but I still kept track about RC bugs I worked on, & here's the list; as you can see, mostly pkg-perl bugs ps: the how-can-i-help package is a nice tool for finding RC bugs in packages you care about. install it if you haven't so far!

20 January 2014

B lint R czey: XBMC 12.3 Frodo has arrived to Debian Wheezy, Jessie and Sid

Q: How to install latest XBMC on Debian?
A: Just run apt-get install xbmc Well, it actually installs XBMC from Debian and to get the 12.3 you also have to enable backports on Wheezy, but I guess you can forgive me for those nuances. :-) Many thanks to the Debian Multimedia team, Modestas Vainius and Ron Lee who kindly backported XBMC s dependencies and also many thanks to the XBMC Developers for XBMC itself! The package is well tested on amd64, i386 and armhf, and it is now built on powerpc and armel, too. If you would like to see your favorite architecture running XBMC, please check the build logs and submit a patch fixing the build to the BTS. Happy hacking!

23 December 2013

B lint R czey: Introducing XBMC from Debian

available from unstable, and hopefully soon from testing, too! The longer story: The xbmc package has been uninstallable and unbuildable in Debian unstable for quite some time. Mainly due to differing preferences of the XBMC project and Debian. Original XBMC source includes several embedded libraries, some patched to work with XBMC perfectly and to provide the best user experience the XBMC project prefers building XBMC with those libraries. In Debian, on the other hand, the recommended practice is not embedding libraries, but using the packaged versions instead to reduce the amount of security updates in case a library needs a security related fix, to save space on mirrors and to avoid divergence between the embedded versions of the libraries. One consequence of using externally packaged libraries is the need for making XMBC work with newer versions of the external libraries even when the embedded one would still work perfectly or (in some cases) there are even breakages due to changing APIs or new bugs in the library. XBMC depends on many libraries and the changes to them in Debian used to break one or another XBMC use case from time to time. The XBMC project received many direct bug reports from users of the Debian-shipped XBMC package which were harder than necessary to handle due to the lack of clear differentiation from the .deb packages provided directly by
them and using the embedded libraries. To help both users and developers the xbmc package starts using the XBMC from Debian name on the main screen and in the logs, the version number used inside the application is set to the Debian package s version, and README.Debian directs users of the package to Debian s BTS instead of XBMC s forums. The most notable difference between XBMC and XBMC from Debian is that XBMC uses
its embedded patched FFmpeg, while XBMC from Debian uses libav. If movies play too slow, too fast, without sound or too loud, you should definitely check BTS first. ;-) Happy Holidays and don t stay too much in front of the screen if XBMC from Debian happens to work for hours without any crash! :-)

2 September 2013

B lint R czey: Faketime gets nanosecond timestamps, speeds up games, testing

I was playing with faketime the last few days mainly to implement features needed by ReproducibleBuilds, which is an initiative in Debian for providing binary packages that can be regenerated with the exact same content. Some build steps place timestamps in the resulting binaries, thus we may have to make time perceived by the build process move at a deterministic rate starting from a predetermined point in time.
This is why faketime got support for advancing time with each time(), gettimeofday(), etc. call. Another approach would be recording timestamps perceived by the first build and replaying them in the same order to successive builds. If the build is deterministic apart from the timestamps, this should result in the same binary package for each build.
While playing with faketime I could not resist implementing a few things which may not have been absolutely important for reproducible builds, but were so much fun. The nanosecond resolution of timestamps made games playable at slower or faster speeds making very hard games easier or easy games harder. Jump n'bump just became insanely funny at 200% speed:

jumpnbump-video-screen

faketime -f "+0 x2" jumpnbump Speeding up sleep()-s can also be useful in daily work. If your application calls sleep() often it may significantly slow down testing, but faketime is now able to shorten sleeps, too, speeding up testing such applications!

11 August 2013

B lint R czey: Heading to DebConf!

I m heading to DebConf! Hooray! :-) Going to DebConf13!

31 July 2013

B lint R czey: Meld drops support for Arch, Codeville and RCS

The latest Meld development snapshot 1.7.4 stopped supporting Arch, Codeville and RCS version control systems due to the lack of interest in maintaining it. Kai Willadsen has already called for help in May to keep support for more exotic VCS-s alive, but no one stepped up for the three dropped ones. If you would like to use Meld with Arch, Codeville or RCS in the future, it is Your time to step up and help!

17 May 2013

Russell Coker: Effective Conference Calls

I ve been part of many conference calls for work and found them seriously lacking. Firstly there s a lack of control over the call, so when someone does something stupid like putting an unmuted phone handset near a noise source there s no way to discover who did it and disconnect them. Another problem is that of noise on the line when some people don t mute their phones, which is related to the lack of control as it s impossible to determine who isn t muting their phone. Possibly the biggest problem is how to determine who gets to speak next. When group discussions take place in person non-verbal methods are used to determine who gets to speak next. With a regular phone call (two people) something like the CSMACD algorithm for network packets works well. But when there are 8+ people involved it becomes time consuming to resolve issues of who speaks next even when there are no debates. This is more difficult for multinational calls which can have a signal round trip time of 700ms or more. I think that we need a VOIP based conference call system for smart phones to manage this. I think that an ideal system would be based on the push to talk concept with software control that only allows one phone to transmit at a time. If someone else is speaking and you want to say something then you would push a button to indicate your desire but your microphone wouldn t go live while the other person was speaking. The person speaking would be notified of your request and one of the following things would happen: Did I miss any obvious ways for the system to react to a talk request? Is there any free software to do something like this? A quick search of the Google Play store didn t find anything that seems to match.
Related posts:
  1. Globalisation and Phone Calls I just watched an interesting TED talk by Pankaj Ghemawat...
  2. Phone Calls and Other Distractions Harald Welte has written about the distraction of phone calls...
  3. Talking Fast My previous post about my LCA mini-conf talk received an...

12 March 2013

Eddy Petrișor: Herbalife, a detailed analysis

You might remember that a while ago I mentioned I got involved in skepticism to the point I even co-host a podcast, Skeptics in Romania (in Romanian).

Among the subjects we tackle there are claims about various miracle fruits, shady dietary advice, various nonscientific health products, and even scams. We try to inform or listeners about ways to identify themselves such dangerous/fake products and how they can inform themselves about the claims they might encounter, what questions they should ask before considering buying (into) such things.

One sensitive subject is the so called multilevel marketing, especially for people involved in such businesses.

This is a sensitive subject because many of these schemes are actually pyramidal schemes, also known as Ponzi schemes. These are illegal in many countries, since they are, in fact scams designed to lure people with supposed high profits and little work.

One such pyramidal system... well you can judge yourselves (note that the presentation contains many slides, but it's really captivating):

http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-ackmans-herbalife-presentation-2012-12?op=1j

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