Experimental 2.6.33 will do the switch to UUID based root args, if you haven't switched already. Please test it out and report bugs on it, before we add the libata switch to squeeze 2.6.32. 2.6.32-9 includes 2.6.32.9 and several other fixes. For the following 2.6.32-10 Ben Hutchings pulled in newer drm for lots of intel fixes: Status of kernel X drivers. It also features radeon and nouveau KMS modules. Current 2.6.32 is stabilizing well and we are seeing lots of external patches lining up. Update: Sorry due to jet lag got aboves version number wrong. You might want also to checkout: The season I have mostly been building kernels.

When you just read the following sentence: "usage of a software, that can only be used together with the Internet Explorer". You already know the consequence that several hundreds Wienux boxes are gone.
Heavily disgusted by the waste of community money. The online local newspaper has a comment that seems quite to the point to me: "If as sysadmin you introduce Linux you'll be accounted for eventual failures, while with softies people just accept the shortcomings and won't blame you."
German source: Wiener Inkompetenz in IT Managment. P.S.: Wienux got setup by inexerienced people having no prior exposure to Open Source. The project setup included a calculated failure from the start.

In September, the Debian GRUB maintainers took a step further in the long way of deprecating grub in favour of grub2. From my personal point of view, grub2 is not the way to go. Mostly because of these reasons:

• I don't have systems using a non-ext 3,4 filesystems.
• I don't have use for any of the grub2 advanced features.
• I don't want to wait another few seconds until grub2 has been loaded.
• I don't want to learn yet another theme-ing mechanism for bootloader splashes and menu structures.
• I don't want to use a different bootloader project, regardless from which media I boot (iso, usb-hdd, netboot).

Back in Juli, when I was listening to the talk of Giacomo Catenazzi at DebConf 9 about bootloaders in Debian (high (618MB), low (110MB)), I was reminded that I really should getting EXTLINUX splittet out of Debians syslinux packaging and made available as an alternative bootloader within Debian. Last week I hacked together an initial working version and uploaded it to experimental. Note that the two comands extlinux-install and update-extlinux do not have all the safety belts yet, the theme-ing mechanisms are not integrated yet (I'll upload a syslinux-themes-debian soon), and that the layout of the generation of the config files in /boot/extlinux may could change (debian-wise, not upstream-wise). For me, it works already well though, I'm using it on my main desktop and notebook. If you want to help finding bugs or submitting wishlist bugs for additional stuff to be added, and recovering from an unbootable system is not a problem for you, you're welcome to try it out:

	# apt-get install -t experimental extlinux syslinux-common
	# sed -i -e 's ^postinst_hook =.*$ postinst_hook = update-extlinux ' \
		-e 's ^postrm_hook =.*$ postrm_hook = update-extlinux ' \
		/etc/kernel-img.conf
	# mkdir -p /boot/extlinux
	# update-extlinux
	# extlinux-install DEVICE

Update: Rather than having /etc/kernel-img.conf modified by users, bootloader packages should add symlinks to their update scripts to /etc/kernel/postinst.d and /etc/kernel/postrm.d. Uploaded new version to experimental. Thanks maks for mentioning it.

I love the fact that phones are ready to get a decent OS. I bought the phone for better connectivity and to get GPS goodness. 90 days later seems a good time to review the pros and cons:

Pros:
• The phone sees updates (Android 1.6 has recent 2.6.29 build with much nicer battery status and search box).
• Easy to pick google calender together with useful gmail integration.
• Often use the phone for a quick websearch (cinema programs on the run, news, shop opening times, ..) - to lazy to power up real laptop.
• The touchscreen interface isn't too bad, but missed the nice resize effect seen on other touchscreens OS.
• Connectbot is a half decent ssh client.
• The consumed data is very low - never managed to touch the 1GB download bandwith limit.
• gmaps is fun to look up and helpful in finding directions.
• Last but not least important phone functions as easy dialing and good voice transmission are working.

Cons:
• The worst omission is a decent pdf reader. No way to read latest papers on arXiv.org.
• The next big missing thing that worked since years with mobile phones is bluetooth file sending and receiving out of the box.
• A more minor bugger - but still quite annoying: contacts sent to you as vCard don't get easily imported in contacts.
• The camera from the HTC magic is not really pleasant.

Of course Android still seems like an alien sandboxed Linux, but I must say that the average usage capability of the mobile phone is very nicely enhanced. P.S. Using allmost daily also Google Talk, Ultimate Stopwatch & Timer, Finance, GPS Status and the ultra cool Google Sky Map.

planet.teilchen.at is a shiny new selected blog roll of prominent Particle Physics blogs. Reading it should keep you updated on progress at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) as well as on new discoveries in High Energy Physics, Astrophysics, Cosmology, advances in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), String Theory, Black Holes and many other hot physics topics. Most posts should be readable for scientifically interested public. Enjoy a daily read. www.teilchen.at is the Austrian outreach site of Austrian particle and nuclear physicists. Authors are leading austrian scientists. The site just got relaunched with new features including some socialweb goodies (planet, share links on the bottom, better readability, noframes, ..). Happy if you send corrections or suggestions to mattems@teilchen.at.

Vincent Sanders took notes during all our meetings at the Portland Linux Plumbers Conference: Debian Kernel Group Meeting. The condensed form has been posted today as Bits from the kernel team. In the case of feedback I'd highly recommend to bring the Debian Kernel Mailinglist into the loop. The meeting decisions were done by the team as entity. Responding to the deprecation of some external patches (Vserver, Xen Dom0): None of above patches have an upstream that supported the Lenny released version. Both have troublesome bugs in Lenny and thus are not in a condition one would expect from a stable release. If you want to help and have continued release of those beyond squeeze the answer is easy: Get them merged upstream. Openvz supports Lenny linux-2.6 version actively and promised to keep up with their work for Squeeze. It has been a very productive meeting with lots of problems^Witems discussed. Interesting tracks for better cooperation between distributions, heavy technical tracks and loud BOFS. Quite some work has already been picked up since (Bug scripts, 2.6.31 experimental uploads, DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=parallel=N support, package descriptions improvements, piuparts install fix, DFSG firmware clean, preempt, ..). So thanks a lot to Steve McIntyre (Debian Project Leader) for pushing the meeting, to Steve Langasek for setting it up on site and of course to everyone who contributed. Read aboves report for the full picture. :-)

Latest Tasmanian Devil Linux 2.6.29 adds quite a lot of new features: Kernelnewbies 2.6.29 Overview. Thanks a lot to the FTP Master Team for making possible the same day upload. Big thanks also for the regular testers of the rcX trunk snapshots.

Today got asked by a colleague, who wanted to throw away the early history of his repo. git allows you easily to rewrite the history start with:

echo $FIRST_SHA >> .git/info/graft
git filter-branch -f

Then with interactive git rebase you can rewrite this important initial commit. Of course you have to define $FIRST_SHA and your repo shouldn't be dirty.

I first played World of Goo on the Wii. I loved it. Great stuff, reminded me a little of Lemmings, but way way better. Today I found out it s also available for Linux, and I immediately downloaded it. I was pleased to see a .deb available and thought I d dig into the binary a little to see how it was put together. I m hugely excited to see that it looks like the game was built on Ubuntu Intrepid for both the .deb and .tar.gz packages:

$ strings -a WorldOfGoo.bin grep -i gcc
...
GCC: (Ubuntu 4.3.2-1ubuntu12) 4.3.2


The bundled libraries appear to come from Gentoo:

$ strings -a libs/libogg.so.0 grep -i gcc
...
GCC: (GNU) 4.2.3 (Gentoo 4.2.3 p1.0)


OpenSSL (and libpng?) from Gentoo seem to have been statically linked into the binary:

$ strings -a WorldOfGoo
...
GCC: (GNU) 4.2.3 (Gentoo 4.2.3 p1.0)
_x86_AES_encrypt
...


What I m so very excited about is that third party software producers are using Ubuntu for their releases. This means they get all the security and code-quality improvements that are built into the Ubuntu compiler for free:

$ objdump -CR WorldOfGoo.bin grep _chk
...
084043f0 R_386_JUMP_SLOT __memcpy_chk


Many thanks to Maks Verver for doing the porting. I m really enjoying the demo. Also, I can see your devel path! :)

$ strings -a WorldOfGoo.bin grep openssl
OPENSSLDIR: "/home/maks/Projects/wog/libs/openssl-0.9.8j-linux-i386/ssl"
...


All this said, it may be that they re actually only compiling pieces (like the Open Dynamics Engine, which seems to contain the bulk of the *_chk calls) on Ubuntu (or using .a files from a distro-compiled library that enables hardening only in builds RedHat, SuSE), but doing the .deb and .tar.gz project linking on Ubuntu (which is why the compiler name shows up in the resulting binary). The RPM shows the *_chk functions too actually the disassembly is identical between deb and RPM, which would imply that only final linking was done on the native distros but compiled elsewhere. I d love to hear more details if Maks stumbles on this blog. :)

initramfs-tools design principle is to ship a generic initramfs. The design explicitly allows lots of customization through hook and boot scripts. A previous post focused on the history of initramfs-tools. Several contributors enhanced initramfs-tools since the Debian Etch release so the non exclusive new feature list:

• The initramfs contains all drivers/ ata,block,ide,mmc,scsi modules instead of a stupid hard coded list. This gives bonus points for getting more future proof.
• Configurable small initramfs: The MODULES=dep mode walks /sys/ for the needed drivers of the specific box. This was the most wanted feature and is the new default for some Debian-Installer embedded architectures. The code seems in between well tested even if some corner cases might still emerge. The smaller initramfs is needed for specific bootloaders and helps on slow target boxes.
  For a even smaller initramfs you can kick busybox if you don't have an lvm2 root or don't need it's debugging tools.
• Quicker initramfs build: The update-initramfs command uses dpkg trigger and thus not every postinst update-initramfs(8) call leads to a new initramfs build. Also the build time got improved.
• Improved panic message (yes users need to be handhold at this point :).
• Potential debug log is visible after call to init(8) inside /dev/.initramfs/.
• update-initramfs got hardened against failure on update or ro partitons.
• The klibc utilities got worked on: chroot, fstype, ipconfig, mount, nfsmount sync.
• Fixed various bugs in NFS and networking setup due to incorrect option parsing.
• Allow to blacklist modules on boot by cmdline bootarg blacklist=modulename.
• Allow non root usage of mkinitramfs.

As bonus to some cleanup and docs update we have also seen a Ubuntu sync and are not too diverged.

This time crushing for goooood voices across really different styles:

• Agoria - Think Different
• Ellen Allien - Rej (Feat. Ame)
• Trentemøller - Moan (Trentemøller Vocal Remix)
• DJ Brace - slammed preview
• p.tah - rasterpunkt
• Spiral Tribe - Breach The Peace
• Larry Heard presents Mr. White - The Sun Can't
• Groove Armada - But i feel good
• Modeselektor - The White Flash (Trentemøller Remix)
• Mono & Nikitaman - Fresse Halten - Selber Machen

double *bounce* triple *bounce*
For the youngsters among you who missed out Spiral Tribe there tunes still kick ass. Mono & Nikitaman were the best at the Viennese Donauinselfestival and should be seeeen life. Only the Dj Brace track is not yet released. p.tah is the mastermind of B Seiten Sound. Enjoy ;)

Thanks to the Virtuzzo developers for forward porting the OpenVZ patch to 2.6.26. It uses a lot of the already merged namespace features (For interested peoples linux-next carries interesting sysfs patches). The openvz upstream merge statistic is impressive. The namespace solution allows low overhead, while still running multiple Linux distributions in individual containers on the same box. Control over the network vitalisation is gained as a resource management for CPU power, I/O bandwidth and disk space. Live migration including snapshotting is possible too. The Debian 2.6.26 Linux images will feature not only better Xen vitalisation support, kvm port to new archs, but also an opvenvz flavour. Please don't forget to install proper vzctl userspace support as the correct dependencies have not yet been added. Supported archs will start with both x86 and the ia64 archs. Tomorrows linux-2.6 Debian trunk snapshots will already build openvz. Thanks for your feedback. P.S.: 2.6.26 is the targeted kernel for Lenny, we hope to convince Debian installer people to pick it up soonest - 2.6.25 is a not so bad backup plan as release hasn't fully approved 2.6.26 before extensive unstable testing.

If you haven't read yet: Linux Graphics, a Tale of Three Drivers. The hard data is based on reports thanks to kerneloops.org. It matches quite evenly our bug experience on the Debian Linux images. As already stated "Open Source Graphic Drivers - They don't kill kittens". The unnamed company claims no need for open drivers. Hardware vendors need not to forget that they don't get revenues from the drivers side. The conclusion is to buy hardware, where the vendor cares about Linux support. That means documents the hardware and enhances current free xorg with all needed goodies of enhanced power support and last but not least 3D acceleration support.

People don't seem to get that once you load a 1MB binary blob into your kernel you are no longer running a free operating system. There is no way to fix it. No way to see what is going wrong. Fedora 9 is shipping the latest xorg Release. It features major improvements for the Intel and Radeon drivers. The well known randr features got pushed even more. Plus gaining better 2D and 3D effects and important power saving improvements. Thanks to all the xorg hackers! Big blame on a unnamed company that can't keep up with latest Linux (Xen gained paravirt_ops support in 2.6.24 - oh yeah but we are still on 2.6.18 state). To truly support Linux you'd have to first release your specs and then help existing xorg hackers. Even Via seem to have got the message lately after years of no transparence.

We've had two serious bugs on the NSLU2 recently that both caused the system not too boot anymore. The first one was related to initramfs-tools. Kevin Price reported that after upgrading to initramfs-tools 0.92 the system would hang during boot waiting for the root filesystem. When I booted my NSLU2 and looked at the output, I noticed that no root device was set. When I mentioned this to maks, the maintainer of the initramfs-tools package, he immediately knew what was wrong and uploaded a fix. On the NSLU2, the boot loader doesn't pass a root device to the kernel so we set one in the initramfs itself. The code that loads this config variable is not used by many devices so nobody noticed that this got broken in 0.92 until the package moved to testing. The second problem, reported on Saturday by Paul Collins and diagnosed today with some help from Kevin Price is also related to the strange way the NSLU2 boots. The NSLU2 has 6 MB available for the ramdisk but due to a bug in APEX (the second stage loader used on the NSLU2 by Debian) only 4 MB are actually used. When you write a ramdisk that is larger than 4 MB but smaller than 6 MB, flash-kernel will happily write the full image, but APEX will only tell the kernel about the first 4 MB. As it turns out, everything works fine on arm with 2.6.25, but on armel some additional SCSI modules are enabled that result in the ramdisk becoming too large. The short term solution is to disable these modules, but really APEX should finally be fixed (patches have been available for quite a while thanks to Gordon Farquharson). Fortunately 2.6.25 hasn't moved to testing yet and this problem only occurs on armel, so few people were impacted. The nice thing about the NSLU2 is that you can write a new flash image via the network, so you can flash a good image in case your machine no longer boots. Nevertheless, we have to make sure such serious bugs don't occur in the future or that they are at least caught very early. Special thanks go to testers like Kevin Price.

To cater the impressive number of Debian users who cannot use the Debian kernels in sid and lenny, I have decided to provides packages which just one change: the old firewire enabled. That means, one has to blacklist one or the other and one can continue to use Debian kernels even if one has to do video work or anything else with firewire. Win!

It's true, the new firewire stacks needs testing, bug reports and fixing. I believe we get more of this, if users keep using Debian kernels and are not forced to rebuild the kernel, to be able to use the hardware.

The wiki page about the Juju migration explains how to blacklist one stack. You probably will have to blacklist the modules already in the initrd image (or not include all modules in them)...

Packages for amd64, i386 and powerpc are available with apt from this repo: deb http://layer-acht.org/debian sid 1394kerel

Source is there as well, just replace deb with deb-src as usual. The version number is higher than the current one in sid, but - by using a tilde - lower than the next upload.

I intend to provide those packages, updated whenever there is a new version in sid, as long as firewire in Debian sid is fundamentally broken. And I hope this won't be long! :-)

After discussing this with maks he suggested to provide the old stack via the linux-modules-extra-2.6 package. And then there is also the option that Juju is finally getting usable. One or the other will happen eventually ;-)

(This blog post is in Latvian and is about a public discussion that the capital of Latvia, Riga is having about where to put new bicycle racks in the center of the city. In the post I point to an article describing where to send in suggestions, point out a few possible locations for such racks and suggest installing racks with build-in locks that would require inserting a refundable coin to remove the key locking a bike in place) R gas dome v c ierosin jumus par jaunu velost vvietu novietojumu R gas centr . Es tur nos t ju sekojo us ieteikumus, parosieties ar j s. Vislab k velovietnes b tu izvietot t d viet , kas b tu p rredzama no ce iem, pa kuriem iet daudz cilv ku un ar kur b tu novietotas dro bas nov ro anas kameras, lai minimiz tu z dz bu risku. Viena vietne var tu atrasties Str lnieku laukum vai t tuvum , jo tur ir viegla piek uve no Krasta ielas. Vieta starp RTU ku Ka u 1 un
Krasta ielu var tu b t oti piem rota. Tas ar ierosin s studentus lietot velotransportu pa ce am uz lekcij m Ka u iel . Alberta laukuma var tu atrasties vieta velosip du novieto anai - vieta ir viegli pieejama no Stacijas puses un ir tuvu vair k m viesn c m. Ja ir pl ni izveidot Pay&Ride autom tisko velosip du nomu, tad is var tu b t par vienu no vislab kajiem punktiem dai iecerei. Pils laukums ir viegli sasniedzams no P rdaugavas pa Van u tiltu. Ja tur izveidotu velost vvietu, tad tas iev rojami atvieglotu iesp ju atbraukt ar velosip du pa J rmalas veloceli u p ri Van u tiltam, nogriezties pa labi un uzreiz dro i noparkoties. T pat l dzu apv rt ideju pielietot velovietnes ar ieb v tu atsl gu, lai neb tu nepiecie ams vest l dzi savu sl dzeni. Katrai vietai var tu b t sava sl dzene (bieza un pietieko i gara cietmet la trose) un atsl ga. Atsl gu var tu iz emt no sl dzenes tikai tad, kad sl dzene ir aiztais ta un sl dzenes meh nism ir ielikta 1 Ls mon ta. Atsl dzot sl dzeni ar atsl gu mon ta tiktu atdota atpaka . Tas nodro in s pret vand lismu, kad vienk r i vis m sl dzen m tiktu iz emtas atsl gas un aizmestas prom. Ta u jebkur gad jum j b t vieglam veidam k aizvietot nozaud t s atsl gas gan gad jumos kad velosip da pa nieks to pieprasa (tas var aiz emt vair kas dienas un pras t 5-10 Ls un iesnieguma uzrakst anu) vai ar kad velosip ds ir pamests piesl gt st vokl . Jaunas atsl gas izgatavo anai nevajadz tu pras t vair k k 1 Ls no pils tas bud eta, tad tas 1 Ls sl dzen os izdevumus atmaks s.

2.6.24 has been uploaded on Saturday and passed NEW on Monday. It will be soonest available for all archs. If we don't get enough test coverage or things go bad 2.6.22 will be the fallback for Etch+half. The images install in Lenny/testing just fine. So please give it a spin. Known Issues are still missing VServer and Xen images, bnx2 + snd-cs46xx disabled due to firmware issue and ACPI userland still relying on old interfaces (for example #462305). For more adventurous souls the kernel buildserver will continue to track latest Linus git daily snapshot (enhanced ext4 should land soon). 2.6.24 will also soon be pushed to Testing. I repeat this is not the real Etch+half kernel yet as there will be some config changes for it, but it is pretty close. Thanks for your 2.6.24-rc7 feedback.

2.6.24-rc7 is available on 5 architectures (amd64, i386, powerpc, s390, sparc). Please add the following line to your Lenny or Sid box sources.list and report back:

deb http://kernel-archive.buildserver.net/debian-kernel trunk main

This is not yet the real Etch + 1/2 kernel, but comes pretty close. According to our initial testing and user feedback 2.6.24 promises to be a great release. It will help Etch to have proper hardware support for newer hardware, has better power efficiency due to tickless kernel, enhanced wireless card support, the CFS scheduler and much more... It is a Debian novelty to provide an supported optional Linux kernel upgrade for a stable release. This is not the final as due to incompatible user interface the Etch build will have the old firewire stack. Once aboves land in Sid and got broader coverage will announce the Etch snapshots. So please give it a shot on your Testing/Unstable boxes.

I just wanted to say, that it is great when someone writes you just because they have good news and want to share them with you. Last night that happened to me again — an old friend of mine, Jemima, IM’d me. So thank you Jemima for that, what I said, I really meant. And let me wish you (and your little one) all good again — it cannot hurt. (And this all made me think that I have again somewhat lost contact with some of the people that are very dear to me — yes, I mean you Bart, Alex, Kevin and also you, Maks, even if you probably do not think of me that way (or you do?) … whom have I forgotten this time? Maybe Enrico — you are far away as well, these days. I just hope all of you are doing well.) (Ah, and I also miss one further person, who I have known as Helielf and met her or IRCNet very long time ago — if you read this, thanks to some bizarre coincidence, please mail me, or something… I have lost all contacts to you and I miss you. Wondering if you even remember me — who knows what nick I have used at that time? I have noticed you used the name Haruka for a while, but have no idea if that is still true. But if we never meet again, it has been a beautiful mandala, thank you.)