docbook2odf is a toolkit that automatically converts DocBook to OASIS OpenDocument (ODF, the ISO standardized format used for texts, spreadsheets and presentations). Conversion is based on a XSLT which makes it easy to convert DocBook->ODF, ODT, ODS and ODP as all these documents are XML based. This piece of software is pretty rocking for example if you write your docs in AsciiDoc and want to provide a document for use within OO:

% cp /usr/share/doc/asciidoc/examples/website/manpage.txt .
% a2x -f odt manpage.txt
% ooffice manpage.odt

Just to get an idea how the result looks like in OpenOffice: Just ‘apt-get install docbook2odf’ if you are using Debian/unstable, thanks to the work of formorer we could include the toolchain in the upcoming grml release.

As formorer mentioned already we have new release candidates of grml: grml 1.0-rc1 with codename Meilenschwein is available as well as grml-small 0.4-rc1 with codename Springinkerl. We are proud to be able to present a 64bit version of grml as well: grml 64 0.1-rc1 with codename LiveShell which is based on the amd64 port of Debian. New features? Tons of new features. So what are you waiting for? Ah, that the mirrors are getting in sync, right. So grab the ISOs in the meanwhile from the master or the slave or even better use bittorrent (torrents for: grml, grml64 and grml-small) instead. We are waiting for your bug reports.

We did it again! The GRML Team proudly presents the first release candidates for the GRML 1.0 branch. This includes the brand new GRML64 and also the GRML-Small Live CD. This release includes several new features, here a small selection:

• updated to X.org 7.3
• updated to libc6 2.5
• use of UTF-8 as default encoding
• ?LaTeX: switch from tetex to texlive
• grml-x: use of evdev (dropped options -nousb and -nops2, added -ps2 and -usb instead), improved error handling and execution
• grml-autoconfig: dropped userspace/powernowd stuff in cpufrequeny scaling in favour of the ondemand-governor
• integrated grml-quickconfig within zsh-login
• got rid of grml-sysvinit, using plain sysvinit from Debian without any hacks now
• support basic rescanning in live-cd initrd
• grml-debootstrap (install plain Debian fast and easy)
• grml-quickconfig: get fast access to some basic grml-scripts
• Kernel 2.6.20

And much more. Please help us testing and get your copy from our development mirror:

Release	Codename
grml 1.0-rc1	Meilenschwein
grml-small 0.4-rc1	Release Codename: Springginkerl
grml64 0.1-rc1	LiveShell

• Please report any issues via our bts.
• If you have any feedback join us via IRC in #grml@freenode

yeah :) I’m accepted for google’s summer of code :) (Thanks to formorer & Joey Hess :)) I will develop an latex plugin for ikiwiki so that you will be able to use mathe formulas and chemistry stuff in ikiwiki, (furthermore I will add the feature to export the website into a pdf(tex) file. /me is now looking forward for the summer ;-)

The Linuxtag Orga offered us a Debian track so I asked for submissions, but for now we only have 3 submissions. This won't be enough for a track, so this is my last call for papers for the Debian Track. If you plan to attend to the Linuxtag and want to talk about Debian, use the VCC to submit a talk there. Additionally my request for help had nearly 0 feedback. If you want to have a Debian Booth at the Linuxtag its now the time to get in touch with me...

Last year I was the organizer of the Debian booth at the FrOSCon in St.Augustin, Germany and I was so happy with the conference that I decided to take part in the second invocation of the conference. So I took over some tasks and here I am. The next FrOSCon takes place on August, 25th and 26th 2007 in St. Augustin, near Bonn, Germany. And will again be hosted by the faculty of computer science of the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in collaboration with the student body and the Linux/Unix User Group St. Augustin. Yesterday the Call for Papers started that will end on June 4th. Everybody is invited to take part and we are happy if we would get flooded by as many Papers as possible to make an even better FrOSCon as last year :).

The Chemnitzer Linux-Tage are over and I'm back home. Again it was an outstanding event. Starting from the overall organisation to the social event (and their quiz) to the catering... I'm still stuffed with the buffet of the social event :) The first thing in the morning I did a workshop about Debian package building. It was very well visited; only two seats were left empty. The visitors were very good; understood most very fast and corrected me a couple of times, when I did copy'n paste mistakes. It was fun to do that, and I got good feedback. BTW: If you need a small example to show someone how to create a Debian package, you might want to take a look an gnujump. The templates created by dh_make work nearly out of the box (so you can concentrate on explaining what is done, instead of fixing stuff to get it working), while the resulting package has still place for improvements (.menu and .desktop files; splitting the package into a arch dependent and an arch independent; etc.) And most important: It is compiles quite fast, while you still have something to show, so your visitors will see, that you indeed did something. Talking about the feedback I got after the workshop: One guy asked me about a way to check for conflicting packages, and we all wondered, that there's nothing scripted available, yet. So I promised to hack something together to at least check for conflicting files. The result is available at conflict finder (and later an svn.schmehl.info, as soon as I find out how to setup webdav/svn to allow read access to some repositories and not others). To check for packages your package should conflict with, you need to first build your package (or we won't know which files are in your package) and give the path to the resulting .deb as the first parameter to the script. If you have a Contents-foo.gz file somewhere on your hard disc, you can specify the path to that file as the second parameter (if you use apt-file or have a local mirror, it'll try to find it; if everything fails the script will try to download one). Then the script will check for each file of your Debian-Package if there is any other package having the same file. Sounds cool, but is damn slow; the repeated zgrep over the Contents-File is quite time consuming. For a quite small package (xdialog) it took nearly 15 minutes to complete. Wow, when I hacked it together, I wouldn't have thought it would be that slow. As far as I know Alexander Wirt is already working on an improved version using some kind of database (and perl).

The countdown is running… On 3rd and 4th of March 2007 the Chemnitzer Linux Days will take place. We’ll present grml (Linux Live-CD for sysadmins / texttool-users / geeks) at a booth there! If everything works as intented we will have a demo system as well as CDs of a special grml release named “Dioptrienotto @ clt07″: Several grml developers will be there and I’m looking forward to meet formorer for the first time in RL. Hope to see you there!

One of my hobbys is my Nikon D50 and I have written a small perl script to simplify my life when I have to copy the pictures from my camera to my pc. The script is able to copy or move pictures from a directory, select the pictures by date (like "only the pictures of the last week") based on filedate or exif date, doing autorotate based on exifautotran from the libjpeg-progs package. It also allow automatic renaming based on templates to allow automatic filename generation. The tool is still in an early state, but should work without destroying your harddisc or camera. It available from my website. If you have any feedback/bugs or feature request please drop me a mail to: formorer@formorer.de.

Today I managed to move my personal website to ikiwiki, so I'm now a new, happy ikiwiki user! The move went more or less smoothly, beside of some UTF8 trouble (bug #410134), but that is not really the problem of ikiwiki but of me.

I'll put it here, so I'll hopefully find it again, without asking förmchen again: Instead of running some formail / procmail foo, you can simply use mutt's T~=& to tag duplicated mails in a mailbox. Then just remove them with ;d. Thanks; saved my day! Update: You can skip the taging and directrly delete them with D~=. Thanks, Marius!

This one has progressed a bit already, thanks to formorer, and IMHO it would be really cool to see it in etch. Currently, the shlibs file maps library name and soname version to a dependency specification that is added to shlibs:Depends. However, some libraries have more fine-grained version information than the one in the soname, in their symbol version table, which basically allows us to create less strict dependency relationships for versioned libraries. If a program only requires symbols versioned GLIBC_2_0, we know that the minimum required version is the one that has all of these symbols, which is probably some pre-sarge version. Incidentally, the libraries where a version bump in the shlibs file is most annoying, namely libc, libstdc++ and libdb, are already versioned, and no changes are required in the application packages, so there is an instant win here (and the main reason I want to see this in etch is that we can use it afterwards)

One thing that got some momentum in Vienna was the idea of using symbol versioning information to generate less strict dependencies with the shlibs mechanism. I had done a bit of work on this a long time ago, but didn't know enough perl (well, I still don't), so I was glad to see that formorer picked up on it. The concept itself is pretty simple: for each symbol version in the library, there is an entry in the shlibs file, and we just emit all of the dependencies for the versions that are used, compacting them in the end to the strictest that we need. Since the most important libraries are versioned already, there is an instant win, plus library authors are of course encouraged more to add symbols to their own libraries.

In collaborative work of Alexander Wirt, Marc Brockschmidt, Julien Danjou and me there is now a public list of packages which are in proposed-updates and await moderation currently. The backlog in that queue is currently decreasing drastically, thanks to AJ. Builds of the new D-I for Sarge r3 should start as soon as all needed packages are now spread to all mirrors. Update: Ooops, perhaps i should also add the link to that page.

Its sunday morning and I'm trying to get back into life with some coffeine. I had a really nice time yesterday, the Froscon was excellent organized, even WLAN worked all the time. I had to talks yesterday, one about backports.org and one about spam. The first one had 5 persons or so, but most of them were developers and they were really interested so it really nice. In the spam talk were round about 30-40 persons and we had some very good discussions, so that I ran out of time at last. The feedback of both talks was very positive.
In the evening I managed the KSP, which went mostly well, even if I was too tired to organize it the way I normally prefer to do.
TODO: create some video/animation about how KSPs work. (any volunteers?)

I organized to get some pretzels that looked like debian swirls, Sven Guckes has some pictures of it.

Social Event was also pretty nice, much Wheat Bear and Food .


Thanks to all who made this happen and I really hope that it will happen next year too.
And now I'll get prepared for day II.

Small Comment:
Madduck asked me about taking the slides online, here

I uploaded Xfce to Debian Backports. After having a small problem, it works perfectly now. Thanks to nobse, formorer, and Ganneff for providing the service.

I'm very sad how things went with Thomas NM application. And I know that I have done some things wrong, but I had a hard time in work and real life in the last time which left me back with to less time for debian stuff, especially NM stuff. I told that to my NMs and I hadn't a clue that Thomas was thinking like that. If I had a clue that Thomas wants to step back from his application I would tried to find the time to write his report sooner. It was sheduled before christmas by me, but now its too late. This could all be prevented if I had be informed by his step before.

But what is really sad is that there are some people complaining in their blogs, again without talking to me before, that don't really know whats happened, telling people wrong or half true things. And even if they got a mail from me they don't have the integrity to answer the mail or take things right in their blog. Thats even more sad than the whole thing.


Thomas: As I told you I'm still interested in getting you into Debian, so I won't remove you from the queue in the next time. If you are interested I can also give you a phone call and we can talk about that things.

As it looks like blogging is now the preferred way of sharing your thoughts, I guess I'll have to answer in my own blog to the problems starting with Thomas Hood post about withdrawing from the NM process.

Some people have replied to this and I think I should present my position, as I'm the most active of the unresponsive NM Front Desk, yaddayaddayadda.

Until Thomas blogged, I did not know that he considered the missing report as an issue.

To clear up the situation: Thomas completed all stages of the AM checks after he was reassigned to Alexander (formorer) this spring.
When Alex wanted to prepare the reported, he noted that some mails from the conversation between Madkiss (the old AM) and Thomas were missing. No problem, FD to the rescue, I still had those mails in my archive. After these initial problems, Alex' daytime job needed a lot of attention, so he didn't write the application report. I kicked him on a regular basis to do so, but it needs time and is not really very interesting, so it got delayed.

OK, that delay is not a good thing, but Alex told me that he planned to do the report on Saturday. Yes, this delay is quite annoying if you worked so hard and always had to wait for your AM to check your stuff and blabla. Now, the problem I have is that in this case, it's simply not true. Madkiss was assigned as AM to Thomas for 18 months - of these 18 months, 15 were spent waiting on a reply from Thomas to the usual NM questions.

Thomas, I can understand if you don't like the templates and think that they're boring, useless and whatever. But don't blame other people for time you have lost.

I seriously tried to persuade Thomas Hood to revoke his withdrawal from NM, but he made it official now. According to him, both his current (formorer aka Alexander Wirt) and his former AM seem to have lost the AM correspondence with him. So we just lost another NM due to Debian’s bureaucracy. Normally he should have contacted the Front Desk to just get a new AM, but this already was his second.