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This is my fourth CLT
report and they surely are becoming repetitive! But every good event
deserves a good report, so here goes:
Contrary to previous years we already arrived on Friday this year. Since
we were also not up for another stint with the gym (Aaah the sissifying
effects of marriage!) we booked a room with a nice little guesthouse about
15 bus-minutes from the venue.
The conference was great as ever:
Hey Meike,
a new edition is planned, but first I need to finish my research and submit my
thesis. Then I will immediately turn to the book, which I will
update for lenny , and to which I will add a lot of content. My
goal is to provide enough of a reason for everyone to buy the new
edition, I do not want to disappoint those who have bought the
first edition.
Stay tuned over at the book s
website or the
book s announcement list.
NP:
The Penguin Cafe Orchestra: The Penguin Cafe
Orchestra
Hey Martin, I think you better
get that new edition finished real quick!
Translation:
Dear all, I am currently assembling a talk that discusses if and how the
principles of free software can be applied to topics beyond operating
systems and software. The first things that come to mind are surely the Creative Commons, free music, free
films, free books etc. but I am sure that there is more, also even beyond
the digital world.
I already know a couple projects but I am looking for many many more!
So, what examples do you know for applications of the free software
philosophy that go beyond the usual software/OS area? I'd be happy for any
hints, urls, projects, authors, bands, names etc. that come to your mind!
To contact me, simply drop me an e-mail or prod me on irc
(alphascorpii on OFTC and freenode).
In response to Lior:
How to know you're dating a free software guy?
You can recognize you're dating a free software guy by:
Here's one more post for my own little "advertising section", where I
introduce gender-related projects that I think are a good idea but deserve
some more publicity. So, last time we had geekspeakr.com,
this time I'd like to introduce to you the Eleonore Digital
Project.
In a nutshell they are organising a project where groups of students all
over Europe work together in creating an educational 3D computer game that
deals with the life of Eleanor of
Aquitaine. Each team is assigned an episode or a certain aspect of
Eleonore's life and they will research this, draft a concept and finally
create their respective part or episode of the game. Doing this they will
only work with free software, namely Debian as the Operating System, OOo,
Blender etc. A longer (and better) description of what they want to do
and the motivation behind all of this can be found in their project
description or on the Eleonore Project site
itself.
In my opinion the project seems to be a really good idea and I wish them
the best of luck! What I like most about it is that it is not exclusively
for girls, so that it does not create a kind of "artificial biotope" for
girls to work in. Instead it aims to rise the girls ratio by means of a
project topic that (so I assume) mostly appeals to girls. And I am
especially happy that when looking for a topic that appeals to girls they
came up with something better than fan homepages, foto love stories, and
what else you find in "girls IT projects" these days. I am pretty sure that
reading and researching on the life of one of the most influential women in
European history is going to do them much more good that creating
princess-themes webpages! I am also quite happy that they picked Debian as
their operating system. I think Debian being used in a school project is a
nice example that it is in fact not as "user-unfriendly" as it is often
claimed to be! I've also introduced the project to the Debian Women Project and Miriam
had the very good idea to also forward it to the Debian Games Team, so I
hope we'll get some good cooperation here.
As September is traditionally the "conference month" I'll be travelling
all around Germany within the next weeks. So, inspired by Matthew, here's a short
list of events I'll attend in September 2008. If anyone's up for a coffee,
keysigning or something let me know!
If you happen to be near Bremen, Germany around the 5.-7. September 2008
and have an interest in solidary economy, free software, renewable energies
and the like you might want to stop by at the 3rd Congress on
Solidary Economy (German website).
I haven't been at the first two of these congresses but I was invited as
a speaker for this one, so I'll be around at least on Saturday and probably
also on Sunday. I'll mainly be on a panel on free and open source software
which will take place on Saturday evening at 20:00. (Prime Time :)) But
I've also let myself be talked into joining another panel at 17:00 which is
somehow ubuntu-related (Communtu). I am not yet sure if I'll have much to
contribute there, I am neither a ubuntu specialist nor particularly fond of
it, but the organiser said he wouldn't mind and he'd welcome critical
remarks just as much, so, we'll see.
I am really looking forward to being a speaker on an event again! Ever
since I started my PhD I've been much too busy to attend (leave alone
prepare talks for) as many events as I'd have liked. I hope the situation
will improve next year when things get rolling with my PhD. (Currently
still in a "topic orientation/find a project/write proposals" state
...)
On August 16th 2008 the Debian
Project, joy and burden of my geek life, has turned 15 years of age.
Congratulations! There have been celebrations all around the world, and
we've also had a little party at our home, complete with nice unhealthy
food, red wine and chocolate and strawberries for dessert.
For a GNU/Linux distribution 15 years is quite a lot. We're almost the only
distribution of such old age (Hi Slackware!) and there've been many,
many others that didn't make it half as long. That said I am quite proud of
this little project of ours and hope for many happy returns!
Artwork by Andre L.R.Ferreira, source: debianart.org
(whose lack of thumbnails is still immensely annoying)
It's more or less four months since I proposed to
resurrect our
newsletter. We already released eight issues of the Debian Project
News and work for the ninth issue has already started. So I guess it's
time for a small "state of the DPN" speech, but since I'm not attending
DebConf, you will have to read this mail instead ;)
After having a rough start (and in fact missing some self-set deadlines
and completely underestimating how much work is involved in such a kind
of newsletter) we finally developed a - more or less - working flow of
work (Which is by the way documented here).
Speaking of the current state sadly means to confess, that our hopes to
draw a lot of help from the community by using a system for drafting the
news with a low entry barrier were not fulfilled. We actually had a
good start, with good participation, but due to (I assume) the
aforementioned initial difficulties participation in the creation of the
DPN dropped considerably. Currently the workload of creating our
bi-weekly newsletter is shared by only two people (that being Meike
Reichle and myself), which is barely enough :(
While we at least get a hint from time to time, what we should mention
in the next issue, it rarely happens, that someone contributes by
drafting a text -- which is the real work. (At this point a
BIG "Thank
You" to those who did! (See list bellow.) It's much
appreciated!)
We suffer especially, since although we are a two people team, we have
in fact no redundancy, since real live issues affecting one of us will
most likely affect the other one, too.
Therefore we mostly concentrated our work on creating the next issues
and getting them out in time, and didn't have time to answer all mails
considering suggestions for changes and improvements (yet?). We are
sorry, but at least we tried to read them briefly and keep them in mind
when drafting the next issue. As a result of this we re-added the list
of DSAs, WNPP and new and noteworthy packages due to popular demand.
There are still a lot of unanswered mails not dealing with content, but
with workflow issues / proposals (including changing from
wiki.debian.org to a special ikiwiki instance). We are sorry, that we
couldn't yet act on them and take appropriate measures, but be assured,
they are not forgotten.
Other issues the DPN currently have are "unwritten guidelines" regarding
editorial choices of DSAs to be published and which packages to list in
the "new and noteworthy package" section. Both is more or less done by
our gut feeling.
Speaking of problems the DPN are facing, we also need to mention
translations of the DPN. The current workflow makes it difficult for
translators of the DPN, since we often fail to get the final draft of
the DPN ready in time to give translators a "head start" so the
translated DPNs can be released together with (or at least with a as
small as possible delay to) the English DPN.
So here is a big call for help! We really need your help writing the
DPN. (Monitoring lists and newstickers we don't monitor ourselves would
be nice, too, but only add more work to us if you only give us
pointers.)
We will both be very busy with our real live the upcoming month, and are
not sure how much time we can dedicate to the DPN. So please help us!
The current draft for the next issue of the DPN is always available
here .
There should already be a todo list with pointers to interesting
topics, which need to be written out. Some guidelines about style and
content are available here.
Last but not least, we would like to thank the following people who have
contributed to the DPN so far:
Today, two friends of mine (and friends of many readers of Planet
Debian) are getting married.
Too far away from here, indeed, but I send them all the best for this day and wish them the best for the upcoming dozens of years.
The Debian community is anything but a virtual community and they're proving it today.
Gl ckw nsche, Meike und Alex
Finally, here's the looong overdue second post on the
Open Source Census. Very shortly after my initial
post on my experiences with the Open Source Census I got an e-mail from
one of their engineers adressing the points I had made in my post. So here
are a few additions to my first post:
Meike
wonders about Open Source Census and
their 45 MB tarball (and several other strange things).
The good news is: There is a 270KB ruby
thingy which seems to do the same, and even while marked as Expert User Onlyit seems to run just fine... I think; I lost patience after it scanned my /home for 6 minutes, and I didn't found a possibility to tell it not to scan my /home (which I don't wont him to scan) or /srv (which just contains a lot of files where it won't find anything usefull). BTW: While we are at complaining at them: Please make the system so, that I don't need to register to send you my data. Thanks.
I recently read about the Open
Source Census and thought it would be a nice thing to also put my vote
in and make sure my operating system of
choice was properly represented (currently it doesn't seem to
be). After creating an account there, downloading a 45M tgz
including among other things a complete java runtime environment, starting
the scan tool that takes neither a -h nor a --help parameter and watching
it hog 70% CPU for over 20 minutes I lost patience and killed the script.
Somehow this whole thing is not exactly inspiring confidence and I start
getting an idea why there are currently (Thu Apr 24 12:47:57 CEST 2008)
only 53 Debian users who submitted their data. Although it's a pity Debian
is (and will probably continue to be) so underrepresented there, I can't say
I blame anyone for not taking part.
I spent the entire week at the SambaXP conference in G ttingen, Germany. The conference is the annual conference of the community of developers, contributors and users of Samba. I general call it "my annual german pilgrimage" as I attended all seven editions of the conference, the only FLOSS conference I attend on my work time, as my daily work involves quite a lot of uses of samba.
This year featured a workshop or training session held by John Terpstra, longstanding FLOSS evangelist and member of the Samba Team for over 10 years, and Karolin Seeger, the brand new release manager of Samba.
This has indeed been an incredible opportunity to have discussions with them about the packaging work for Samba. Actually, the work we did in the last 3 years to bring Samba Debian packages in a very good shape (when I don't screw up) is much appreciated. I think these days have been another opportunity to keep that link very closed.
I have been impressed by the promising work of Karolin with respect to the preparation of the release and the very serious way she has to do that work....as well as her very friendly, while still discreet approach to technical discussion.
Some work was done on Samba package bugs, though less than usually (the remaining ones are harder and harder to tackle!). I mostly work on Debian packages as well as .deb packages prepared by Sernet (the services company that organises the conference and employer of some Samba Team members), as these could some day become the packages provided by the Samba Team.
Talks at the conference were pretty interesting, to keep connected with Samba 3.2 and 4.0 development. News from Andrew Tridgell about exchanges with Microsoft (yes, The Evil) and access to MS documentation, are very promising. The collaboration between Samba developers and Microsoft enginneers is now working well again, at the engineers level (as Tridge says: "lawyers are away, now, we can talk at the engineers level and restore the link that existed in the early 90's").
I also could measure the progress of the Openchange project whose ultimate aim is to provide a complete Microsoft Exchange replacement solution. They currently have working MAPI libraries and an Evolution plugin for Exchange is under development, while the bricks to build a server are patiently being put together. Good discussions with Julien Kerihuel, the lead (and French) developer and manager of the project.
Jelmer Vernooij and I also settled the final plans to get Samba4 packages in Debian. I proposed to make a first upload to experimental, but quite soon to upload to unstable, the point being a largest as possible exposure of that code, so that upstream developers (Jelmer himself, Andrew Bartlett and a few others...) get as much feedback as possible. That upload will not be targeted for lenny (we'll block it from entering testing). For that reason and also because Samba 3 and 4 will certainly coexist for years, the source package will be named "samba4". Expect more news quite soon.
And final conclusion of that week: I've also been delighted to be able to visit Alex and Meike in Hildesheim, as well as Andreas in Wernigerode. It's always a great pleasure to see longstanding Debian friends. At the beginning of the week, I planned to see *two DD and finally, at the end of the week, I can tell I've seen *three* Debian developers, finally!
Yay! A big fat thank you to:
Next.
