So I don't forget it, since recent sudo package resets
environment even for $HOME, the working sudoers (5) for me is:
Cmnd_Alias PBUILDER = /usr/sbin/pbuilder,
/usr/sbin/cowbuilder
Defaults!PBUILDER env_keep+=HOME
You may have to adjust the commands, YMMV.
For some reasons, I had to create some slides, and it's been
some time I wanted to do some latex/beamer, so I jumped in and
created them using vim (hating latex/beamer a few times in the
process, but that's expected. At least, I didn't have to hate
OpenOffice this time).
Now, when presentation time comes, I started missing the nice
Presenter
Console extension for OpenOffice. It's a nice extension
which (a bit like Keynote) (and maybe other) enables you to
seperate the beamer and laptop screens. So you put on the beamer
the presentation itself, and on the laptop one you can put you
notes, the next slide preview, a nice countdown etc. Really useful,
but it's only for OpenOffice (or PowerPoint) slides, not for pdf
ones.
So I started looking at PDF readers which could do that, and
found multiple solutions:
). More on this as soon as the advantages will turn
potentiality into reality.
To conclude ... drum roll ... please join me in
cherishing this week new
RCBW participant, welcome on board Tim!
Ok, so following the trend, I created some time ago a new GPG
key, which I'm now transitioning too. I've set up a transition
document, available at http://molly.corsac.net/~corsac/key-transition.txt.
It's signed by both the old and the new keys and is reproduced
below:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: RIPEMD160,SHA512
Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:44:05 +0100
I've recently set up a new RSA-based GPG key, and will be transitioning away
from my old DSA-based one. The old key will be revoked soon, so I prefer all
future correspondence to use the new one. I would also like to ensure that
this new key is well-integrated into the web of trust. This message is signed
by both keys to certify the transition.
The old DSA key was:
pub 1024D/C5C05BAE 2004-11-11
Key fingerprint = DE26 2FC4 7097 FFC6 DE2C D8C0 4D44 C020 C5C0 5BAE
The new RSA key is:
pub 4096R/71EF0BA8 2009-05-06
Key fingerprint = 4510 DCB5 7ED4 7040 60C6 6476 3055 0F78 71EF 0BA8
If you already know my old key, you can verify that the new key is
signed by the old one:
gpg --check-sigs 71EF0BA8
If you don't already know my old key, or if you're extra-paranoid, you
can check the fingerprint against the one given above:
gpg --fingerprint 71EF0BA8
If you have previously signed my old DSA key, and if you're satisfied
that you've got the correct new RSA key, then I'd appreciate it if you
would sign my new key as well:
caff 71EF0BA8
The caff program is in the signing-party package in Debian. Please be careful
to generate signatures that don't rely on the weakening SHA-1 hash algorithm,
which requires some careful configuration even if you've already configured
gpg correctly. See http://www.gag.com/bdale/blog/posts/Strong_Keys.html for
the gory details.
Thanks,
- --
Yves-Alexis Perez
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux)
iEYEAREDAAYFAkr6sqQACgkQTUTAIMXAW64HiACeIyabQueDHAeiAX8EkIeApiDj
++UAn2z7YkjHx0lQh0+s5WdhikG0YztiiQIcBAEBCgAGBQJK+rKkAAoJEDBVD3hx
7wuodUcQAKMbG9Rehxz+uZ6fST99cHt5Fjnv9TorY4hQaQK+85ZgiwPaHMHfYM1G
5hcrXI+JFUpz8j40deZuaWuspOdHBHwnHNQril8MqT0CJgtB6HFTo+w/7Lmmui5M
DDMMed39UJl7bF73hV9ywGecxPpeh+dtoVnh0VT16uK2xTvW6ICEZgaPw1xfPUHS
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AH6KhC4rpNQdJVMX20SG8PybL/AipN3Y8N/63VkoqVC2heRlaQ69HjsuqIAkIyan
hHnqmJH8Q+TDTbdKZvOQv6jcd4o3VSibz0T9MwnOfqQ0uRYyTpaXC0vLUH6lXaC4
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j5FN8ug15MWysaS+FQ/EqzHmT7BGBWaTPv3yGlHKUjx0w4bPEpbH7y3fwHAcmOFf
xFRzvZFQ03zeer06yAqTVNuwr77HZgrCzgyQVgIkegAg6iUPiZcs
=CBT+
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Ok so there were some reactions to the Call for
help post. I had three
direct offers for help in pkg-xfce, not sure if other
teams had such propositions.
Some people asked me to correct various number for the
active contributors . Basically, the numbers are what
the feeling I got from people working in those team.
Julien Cristau wants me to correct the number of
debian-x active contributors to 0. (yes,
zero, that means nobody, nadie, personne). Basically he
doesn't have time anymore, and Brice Goglin can't really keep up.
So, for those who care about shiny X effects, and
stuff like that, you help would be gladly appreciated (and no, you
don't have to own each and every chipset in the world to give some
time).
Aurelien Jarno wants me to add that at the moment there are 2
(two) active libc contributors, plus one on
GNU/Hurd and one on kfreebsd.
Frans Pop wants me to add that there are ~85 people working on
d-i and that the problems the team might face aren't
only related to the lack of manpower (and I don't really want to
enter politics)
Finally, it seems that some people (well, only one at the
moment, but it's enough for to feel the need to precise) though the
numbers previously given would dismiss contributions for the active
contributors. That wasn't my intention, so I apologize if you
are an active contributor in one of that team
and thought I dismissed your contribution. If it wasn't clear
enough, my point is to show that quite some teams
are lacking manpower (some team miss other
things too, like leadership, coordination or whatever) and users
shouldn't be scared to contribute to them. Those are core teams,
without them Debian wouldn't work at all (not to mention
derivatives), so it's a good idea to join them.
Now, what if you do want to help, but don't know
how. On the previous post I gave links to teams website, wiki page
or QA page. You should be able to find a mailing list or contact
mail you should be able to write to. Just write that you want to
offer some help, that you don't know how and where to start. Add
what you're interested in, what you find fun, and your technical
knowledge. Don't be shy, and you don't need to be a Debian
Developer (nor even a Debian Maintainer) to
contribute.
Thanks!
So yesterday we had a really nice meeting with few french Debian
folks. Luk and Ralf were visiting us, so we went at Prosper's for
some meat and wine (and Aberlour). We were a bit too much to be
able to speak to everybody (so mainly there were two 6-packs of
people), but it was fine anyway.
Though, the main point of the evening was that some (most?)
teams in Debian are really (*really*) understaffed, and it might
become problematic in the near future (like now).
For example, from what I understood:
I don't know the state of other teams, but it doesn't really
look fine for the incoming freeze. So if you want to give some
help, even if you're not yet technical enough, feel free to offer
it to the teams above. Usually, starting with just using the
package is enough. If you use it, you want it well-maintained, and
there _are_ stuff to do to which don't require large technical
knowledge, and the (few) active contributor will be happy to have
some help and point you to what you can do.
If you want to give some time to Debian, before filing some ITPs
(even if you'd really like to have that package you use everyday),
check if you can't do something for those above teams (and others
which might need help too, like release team or kernel).
Oh, and don't be scared, working on Debian
is fun. It's time consuming, but it's
rewarding. Don't let it become not fun.
Since we uploaded Xfce 4.6 into Debian Sid, last week, not much
have happened to most people. We had some bug reports, but mostly
from amd64 users, because i386 and ppc packages are not yet
available. The aren't all built at the moment. You can follow the
build status
here if you want. Most packages are built now, but
xfce4-settings is waiting for libcanberra which
is not installable because of a transition and a package waiting in
NEW. It's quite painful to have this upload a bit harmed by this,
but there's not much we could do.
We already passed NEW when uploading to experimental to minimize
the delay where unstable would be unusable, but we can't do that
for packages we don't maintain but depend on. I'm wondering if, for
Xfce 4.6.1 (which is supposed to be out this weekend but won't
because of some problems on the release manager box), I won't
disable the sound settings in xfce4-settings and thus get rid of
the libcanberra build-dep.
If you have keyboard (layout and shortcuts) related bugs, make
sure to re-assign the shortcuts correctly, and re-set the keyboard
model and layout in the keyboard settings. There was a quite large
xorg update at the same time, which now use hal and
console-setup stuff. So you may have problems with that and it can
be a bit hard to know what's going wrong (settings migrations from
Xfce 4.4 to Xfce 4.6, bugs in Xfce 4.6, configuration problems,
conflicts, bugs in xorg etc.)
But all in all, for amd64 users, it seems the transition is well
received and not that bugs have been reported yet (I'm expecting
bug reports to come more when i386 users begin upgrading).
Following the ACCEPT on packages on NEW during my vacations and
the ack from the release team, I've just uploaded all Xfce 4.6
packages to unstable. Packages for your architectures should arrive
on your mirror along the weekend.
the NEWS.Debian (which will be displayed if you use
apt-listchanges (which is a good idea)) will warn you about some
upgrade precautions to take. I'm reproducing it here:
xfce4 (4.6.0.1) unstable; urgency=low
Xfce 4.6 includes multiple changes which are not directly
visible to the
user but might cause problems in rare cases.
Settings management have been moved from the old MCS Manager
to the xfconf
system. User settings will be migrated automatically at
first Xfce 4.6
startup using the
/usr/lib/xfce4/xfconf-migration/xfconf-migration-4.6.pl
script contained in xfce4-utils. Once those settings have
been migrated,
the automatic run will be disabled but the script will stay
(for future
users).
Menus are now managed using a dedicated library, used by
various Xfce
components (including xfdesktop4 and the menu panel plugin).
This library
tries to support the freedesktop.org specifications, but is
not totally
complete and thus lacks the support for some items, like
.
This renders useless the menu editor previously shipped with
Xfce 4.4.
Solutions for menu editing can be found at the following
address:
http://wiki.xfce.org/howto/customize-menu
As the upgrade is pretty invasive, it is recommended to quit
Xfce before
doing so, but it's not required and upgrades have been made
from the
desktop environment without problems. In that case, be sure
to quit Xfce
not long after the upgrade.
-- Yves-Alexis Perez <corsac@debian.org> Thu, 02
Apr 2009 21:19:53 +0200
The xfce4-goodies will be updated soon to match the new goodies
present for Xfce 4.6, and the desktop task (the
standard install when you choose desktop=xfce in the
installer) will be updated too (there's an ongoing discussion on
pkg-xfce mailing list to select which packages should be part of
that install).
Have a good upgrade!
As some people may have noticed (especially people in
#debian-xfce and other Xfce fans), Xfce 4.6.0 has just been released.
Packages are already prepared, since the packaging is done in
parallel with the release cycle.
I don't really plan to upload anything to my repository, now that Lenny is
released and we can break unstable. That being said, I won't upload
to unstable directly, as we have some packages which need
to go through NEW. NEW is quite
huge this days, so
those packages won't leave it soon, and for consistency I'd prefer
not breaking unstable completely, with a mix of 4.4 and
4.6.
So first uploads targeted at experimental, and then
when all packages are out of NEW, unstable. In the
meantime, I already uploaded a new desktop-base version with config
files useful for the new configuration system in 4.6. One
of theses files will conflict with one in xfce4-session.
Yeah, I shipped that file in xfce4-session when it was private, now
it's time to go official. So yes, this morning you may have a
conflict with desktop-base. It's not a problem in
desktop-base (you don't need to report a bug). Just an
inconsistency with an un-official, un-supported repository package,
and an official package from main. Just force the overwrite or
something like that. Or hold the upgrade until xfce4-session is
available.
As I already said, no special dependencies informations will be
used in packages uploaded to Debian, so it may break your system at
upgrade. The best solution would be to clean the packages from my
repository before trying to upgrade to the ones in Debian (but it
should not be too broken, in the end). For the
record, besides the desktop-base / xfce4-session
conflict, I didn't have any problem upgrading to the packages I
should upload to experimental.
More on this when things have settle down and we start uploading
to unstable.
Hey hey, look what I had in my mailbox this morning:
Just in time for Lenny release, here are my precious cookies for
BugSprint. Thanks Franklin!
Hey,
Xfce 4.6 Beta 2 Hopper has just been released and,
guess what, packages are already available. Still not in unstable
(or even experimental), that will wait post-lenny. You can install
it from my repository, and,
as usual, there's no Debian support on them.
The known_issue page
is currently quite empty, and this beta looks really quite
polished. Packages currently available are i386 and amd64, powerpc
will be available when I have time to put the mac at build.
This beta features mostly bug fixing, and some features too:
The first Xfce beta for 4.6 (codenamed
“Fuzzy”) has just been release.
As usual, it's available in my private repository, for early
testers. As usual, be warned, this is a beta, not supported by
Debian in any way.
Bugs can and should be reported to Xfce Bugzilla. The known issues
wiki page has been updated, please look at it before any test, to
see what's supported and what isn't, see the various problems you
may encounter etc.
Some stuff has changed since Pinkie so some
settings aren't valid anymore. Migration script from 4.4 has been
updated,but not for alpha users.
I cooked some script to migrate those settings from an
alpha:
#! /bin/sh
for prop in $(xfconf-query -c xfce4-keyboard-shortcuts -l grep -v
provider grep -v command )
do
value=$(xfconf-query -c xfce4-keyboard-shortcuts -p $prop
tail -n1)
newprop="/commands/custom$ prop "
echo "prop=$ prop , newprop=$ newprop ,
value=$ value "
xfconf-query -c xfce4-keyboard-shortcuts -n -p $ newprop -s
"$ value " -t string
xfconf-query -c xfce4-keyboard-shortcuts -r -p $ prop
done
Enjoy!
Upstream just
announced the release of Xfce 4.6 Alpha (codenamed
“Pinkie”). I've already prepared some packages, which I
won't upload to experimental yet, because the packaging is not yet
ready for upload (mainly copyright stuff) and because it's alpha
quality, and as we are in testing freeze period, and about (:) to
release Lenny, I don't want to mess with that.
So, in case you'd like to test them, they are available from my
personal repository. As usual,
be advised there won't be any official support for those packages.
Don't report bugs on Debian BTS, and report
software bugs on Xfce
bugzilla.
Feel free to pass on #debian-xfce on freenode if you need some
help, but be prepared to front problems :)
Basically there are some new packages:
(this is an english repost from the original french one, for
planet debian)
Ok, this is just a procedure, which worked for me, for french taxes declaration. The
french governement only allows on Linux configurations with i386
architectures, and firefox.
This solutions works (at the date of the post) on a Debian Sid
amd64, but should work on every x86/amd64 Debian, because we use a
clean i386 chroot.
Let's go:
# get the packages
corsac@hidalgo: sudo aptitude -R install cdebootstrap chroot
# create the i386 chroot:
corsac@hidalgo: sudo cdebootstrap -a i386 sid chroot
http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian
# bind-mount /tmp for Xorg in the chroot:
corsac@hidalgo: sudo mount -o bind /tmp debian/chroot/tmp
# Entering chroot:
corsac@hidalgo: sudo chroot debian/chroot /bin/bash
# configure apt:
root: echo "deb http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian/ sid main contrib
non-free" > /etc/apt/sources.list
root: aptitude update
# installing packages:
root: aptitude -R install iceweasel sun-java5-plugin
# no need to run iceweasel as root:
root: adduser corsac
# done for inside the chroot
We now need two things in the chroot:
corsac@hidalgo: cp ~/.Xauthority debian/chroot/home/corsac/ Time to re-enter the chroot:
corsac@hidalgo: sudo chroot debian/chroot
/bin/bash
root: su - corsac
# we export the DISPLAY to use host X
corsac: export DISPLAY=:0.0
# ready to go
corsac: iceweasel
Now you should be able to go to the website and declare. No need
for symbolic link or LD_LIBRARY_PATH hack. I failed to use
sun-java6-plugin.
Don't hesitate to purge your chroot and restart from a clean
one. You can also clean the folder where the shared lib is stored,
in ~/.TaoUSign.
Hope that helps.
I'm still ill with quite heavy fever, I feel like doing nothing, I'm even to weak to walk the dog properly... but he copes well and is great as usual :-) Using Xfce on your laptop running Debian? The battery plugin is
unusable? Don't panic, we're aware of this.
Basically, the situation is a mess, for some reasons:
In the end, I just bought a
Brother HL-5250DN. Yeah I know, it wasn't in the list, but in
the end, the lexmark one (which had postcript+duplex) wasn't
available at a nice price, but I thought duplex printing was still
a good idea. So I had to decide between a
Samsung and a Brother. The Samsung had official Postscript
while the Brother supported IPv6.
I ended choosing the Brother one, and it's a good idea. The
printer indeed support IPv6, but postscript too. Choosing
“Postscript generic driver” in cups works pretty
fine.
IPv6 works too, but I faced two (linked) problems:
I'm currently looking for a printer. I want a Laser printer,
black & white should be enough, but color may be ok too if not
too expensive (especially toner). I guess I prefer a network one,
even if I don't really understand the way everything should
work.
As I understand it, a network printer just listens on a defined
port (9100/jetdirect or ipp/63), and prints jobs sent by a spooler.
There is no integrated spooler, so there are two solutions:
UI fonts of OpenOffice.org Writer and XFCE thunar are really not the same
... years of seeing this ugly font and being force to scale the OpenOffice.org UI display to 80%.
I just found the solution!
All his related to a X settings: Xft.dpi. People are suggesting around to set it to 96 or something like that. I just decide to use the one i can find xdpyinfo (does it make sense?) and send the result to X settings using xrbd.
Here is the script $HOME/bin/xfce4-xft.sh:
#!/bin/sh xrdb -query Xft.dpi grep Xft.dpi > /dev/null && exit 0 RESOLUTION= xdpyinfo grep resolution sed "s/.* \\([0-9][0-9]*\\)x.*/\\1/" TMP= mktemp trap "rm -f $TMP" EXIT echo "Xft.dpi: $RESOLUTION" > $TMP xrdb -merge $TMPCopy/paste/chmod a+x this file. And then add a file $HOME/.config/autostart/xfce4-xft.desktop to autostart the previous script:
[Desktop Entry] Encoding=UTF-8 Type=Application Name=XFCE-XFT Comment=Fix XFCE Xft.dpi settings Exec=/home/gildor/bin/xfce4-xft.sh StartupNotify=false Terminal=false Hidden=false(replace /home/gildor/ by your own home directory) Thats it. Your Xft.dpi will be fixed depending on the configuration of your X server. This allow you to have a laptop and a desktop with different screen resolution. I am waiting the email from bugzilla.xfce.org to submit this script to XFCE bug tracking. Enjoy. Update: Following the comment of this entry, another better solution is to use openoffice.org-gtk which works out-of-the-box with a clean UI. I don't even have to force OO to gnome style. Thanks to Dan Callahan, Vasilis and Corsac for their suggestion.
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