I recently got access to several ProLiant m400 ARM64 servers at work. Since Debian is currently working on the migration to GCC 5, I thought it would be nice to rebuild the Debian archive on ARM64 to see if GCC 5 is ready. Fortunately, I found no obvious compiler errors. During the process, I noticed several areas where ARM64 support can be improved. First, a lot of packages failed to build due to missing dependencies. Some missing dependencies are libraries or tools that have not been ported to ARM64 yet, but the majority was due to the lack of popular programming languages on ARM64. This requires upstream porting work, which I'm sure is going on already in many cases. Second, over 160 packages failed to build due to out-of-date autoconf and libtool scripts. Most of these bugs have been reported over a year ago by the ARM64 porters (Matthias Klose from Canonical/Ubuntu and Wookey from ARM/Linaro) and the PowerPC porters, but unfortunately they haven't been fixed yet. Finally, I went through all packages that list specific architectures in debian/control and filed wishlist bugs on those that looked relevant to ARM64. This actually prompted some Debian and upstream developers to implement ARM64 support, which is great!

Day trip on the Olympic Peninsula TL;DR: drove many kilometres on very nice roads, took lots of pictures, saw sunshine and fog and clouds, an angry ocean and a calm one, a quiet lake and lots and lots of trees: a very well spent day. Pictures at http://photos.k1024.org/Daytrips/Olympic-Peninsula-2014/. Sometimes I travel to the US on business, and as such I've been a few times in the Seattle area. Until this summer, when I had my last trip there, I was content to spend any extra days (weekend or such) just visiting Seattle itself, or shopping (I can spend hours in the REI store!), or working on my laptop in the hotel. This summer though, I thought - I should do something a bit different. Not too much, but still - no sense in wasting both days of the weekend. So I thought maybe driving to Mount Rainier, or something like that. On the Wednesday of my first week in Kirkland, as I was preparing my drive to the mountain, I made the mistake of scrolling the map westwards, and I saw for the first time the Olympic Peninsula; furthermore, I was zoomed in enough that I saw there was a small road right up to the north-west corner. Intrigued, I zoomed further and learned about Cape Flattery ( the northwestern-most point of the contiguous United States! ), so after spending a bit time reading about it, I was determined to go there. Easier said than done - from Kirkland, it's a 4h 40m drive (according to Google Maps), so it would be a full day on the road. I was thinking of maybe spending the night somewhere on the peninsula then, in order to actually explore the area a bit, but from Wednesday to Saturday it was a too short notice - all hotels that seemed OK-ish were fully booked. I spent some time trying to find something, even not directly on my way, but I failed to find any room. What I did manage to do though, is to learn a bit about the area, and to realise that there's a nice loop around the whole peninsula - the 104 from Kirkland up to where it meets the 101N on the eastern side, then take the 101 all the way to Port Angeles, Lake Crescent, near Lake Pleasant, then south toward Forks, crossing the Hoh river, down to Ruby Beach, down along the coast, crossing the Queets River, east toward Lake Quinault, south toward Aberdeen, then east towards Olympia and back out of the wilderness, into the highway network and back to Kirkland. This looked like an awesome road trip, but it is as long as it sounds - around 8 hours (continuous) drive, though skipping Cape Flattery. Well, I said to myself, something to keep in mind for a future trip to this area, with a night in between. I was still planning to go just to Cape Flattery and back, without realising at that point that this trip was actually longer (as you drive on smaller, lower-speed roads). Preparing my route, I read about the queues at the Edmonds-Kingston ferry, so I was planning to wake up early on the weekend, go to Cape Flattery, and go right back (maybe stop by Lake Crescent). Saturday comes, I - of course - sleep longer than my trip schedule said, and start the day in a somewhat cloudy weather, driving north from my hotel on Simonds Road, which was quite nicer than the usual East-West or North-South roads in this area. The weather was becoming nicer, however as I was nearing the ferry terminal and the traffic was getting denser, I started suspecting that I'll spend a quite a bit of time waiting to board the ferry. And unfortunately so it was (photo altered to hide some personal information): . The weather at least was nice, so I tried to enjoy it and simply observe the crowd - people were looking forward to a weekend relaxing, so nobody seemed annoyed by the wait. After almost half an hour, time to get on the ferry - my first time on a ferry in US, yay! But it was quite the same as in Europe, just that the ship was much larger. Once I secured the car, I went up deck, and was very surprised to be treated with some excellent views: The crossing was not very short, but it seemed so, because of the view, the sun, the water and the wind. Soon we were nearing the other shore; also, see how well panorama software deals with waves :P! And I was finally on the "real" part of the trip. The road was quite interesting. Taking the 104 North, crossing the "Hood Canal Floating Bridge" (my, what a boring name), then finally joining the 101 North. The environment was quite varied, from bare plains and hills, to wooded areas, to quite dense forests, then into inhabited areas - quite a long stretch of human presence, from the Sequim Bay to Port Angeles. Port Angeles surprised me: it had nice views of the ocean, and an interesting port (a few big ships), but it was much smaller than I expected. The 101 crosses it, and in less than 10 minutes or so it was already over. I expected something nicer, based on the name, but Anyway, onwards! Soon I was at a crossroads and had to decide: I could either follow the 101, crossing the Elwha River and then to Lake Crescent, then go north on the 113/112, or go right off 101 onto 112, and follow it until close to my goal. I took the 112, because on the map it looked "nicer", and closer to the shore. Well, the road itself was nice, but quite narrow and twisty here and there, and there was some annoying traffic, so I didn't enjoy this segment very much. At least it had the very interesting property (to me) that whenever I got closer to the ocean, the sun suddenly disappeared, and I was finding myself in the fog: So my plan to drive nicely along the coast failed. At one point, there was even heavy smoke (not fog!), and I wondered for a moment how safe was to drive out there in the wilderness (there were other cars though, so I was not alone). Only quite a bit later, close to Neah Bay, did I finally see the ocean: I saw a small parking spot, stopped, and crossing a small line of trees I found myself in a small cove? bay? In any case, I had the impression I stepped out of the daily life in the city and out into the far far wilderness: There was a couple, sitting on chairs, just enjoying the view. I felt very much intruding, behaving like I did as a tourist: running in, taking pictures, etc., so I tried at least to be quiet . I then quickly moved on, since I still had some road ahead of me. Soon I entered Neah Bay, and was surprised to see once more blue, and even more blue. I'm a sucker for blue, whether sky blue or sea blue , so I took a few more pictures (watch out for the evil fog in the second one): Well, the town had some event, and there were lots of people, so I just drove on, now on the last stretch towards the cape. The road here was also very interesting, yet another environment - I was driving on Cape Flattery Road, which cuts across the tip of the peninsula (quite narrow here) along the Waatch River and through its flooding plains (at least this is how it looked to me). Then it finally starts going up through the dense forest, until it reaches the parking lot, and from there, one goes on foot towards the cape. It's a very easy and nice walk (not a hike), and the sun was shining very nicely through the trees: But as I reached the peak of the walk, and started descending towards the coast, I was surprised, yet again, by fog: I realised that probably this means the cape is fully in fog, so I won't have any chance to enjoy the view. Boy, was I wrong! There are three viewpoints on the cape, and at each one I was just "wow" and "aah" at the view. Even thought it was not a sunny summer view, and there was no blue in sight, the combination between the fog (which was hiding the horizon and even the closer islands), the angry ocean which was throwing wave after wave at the shore, making a loud noise, and the fact that even this seemingly inhospitable area was just teeming with life, was both unexpected and awesome. I took here waay to many pictures, here are just a couple inlined: I spent around half an hour here, just enjoying the rawness of nature. It was so amazing to see life encroaching on each bit of land, even though it was not what I would consider a nice place. Ah, how we see everything through our own eyes! The walk back was through fog again, and at one point it switched over back to sunny. Driving back on the same road was quite different, knowing what lies at its end. On this side, the road had some parking spots, so I managed to stop and take a picture - even though this area was much less wild, it still has that outdoors flavour, at least for me: Back in Neah Bay, I stopped to eat. I had a place in mind from TripAdvisor, and indeed - I was able to get a custom order pizza at "Linda's Woodfired Kitchen". Quite good, and I ate without hurry, looking at the people walking outside, as they were coming back from the fair or event that was taking place. While eating, a somewhat disturbing thought was going through my mind. It was still early, around two to half past two, so if I went straight back to Kirkland I would be early at the hotel. But it was also early enough that I could - in theory at least - still do the "big round-trip". I was still rummaging the thought as I left On the drive back I passed once more near Sekiu, Washington, which is a very small place but the map tells me it even has an airport! Fun, and the view was quite nice (a bit of blue before the sea is swallowed by the fog): After passing Sekiu and Clallam Bay, the 112 curves inland and goes on a bit until you are at the crossroads: to the left the 112 continues, back the same way I came; to the right, it's the 113, going south until it meets the 101. I looked left - remembering the not-so-nice road back, I looked south - where a very appealing, early afternoon sun was beckoning - so I said, let's take the long way home! It's just a short stretch on the 113, and then you're on the 101. The 101 is a very nice road, wide enough, and it goes through very very nice areas. Here, west to south-west of the Olympic Mountains, it's a very different atmosphere from the 112/101 that I drove on in the morning; much warmer colours, a bit different tree types (I think), and more flat. I soon passed through Forks, which is one of the places I looked at when searching for hotels. I did so without any knowledge of the town itself (its wikipedia page is quite drab), so imagine my surprise when a month later I learned from a colleague that this is actually a very important place for vampire-book fans. Oh my, and I didn't even stop! This town also had some event, so I just drove on, enjoying the (mostly empty) road. My next planned waypoint was Ruby Beach, and I was looking forward to relaxing a bit under the warm sun - the drive was excellent, weather perfect, so I was watching the distance countdown on my Garmin. At two miles out, the "Near waypoint Ruby Beach" message appeared, and two seconds later the sun went out. What the I was hoping this is something temporary, but as I slowly drove the remaining mile I couldn't believe my eyes that I was, yet again, finding myself in the fog I park the car, thinking that asking for a refund would at least allow me to feel better - but it was I who planned the trip! So I resigned myself, thinking that possibly this beach is another special location that is always in the fog. However, getting near the beach it was clear that it was not so - some people were still in their bathing suits, just getting dressed, so it seems I was just unlucky with regards to timing. However, I the beach itself was nice, even in the fog (I later saw online sunny pictures, and it is quite beautiful), the the lush trees reach almost to the shore, and the way the rocks are sitting on the beach: Since the weather was not that nice, I took a few more pictures, then headed back and started driving again. I was soo happy that the weather didn't clear at the 2 mile mark (it was not just Ruby Beach!), but alas - it cleared as soon as the 101 turns left and leaves the shore, as it crosses the Queets river. Driving towards my next planned stop was again a nice drive in the afternoon sun, so I think it simply was not a sunny day on the Pacific shore. Maybe seas and oceans have something to do with fog and clouds ! In Switzerland, I'm very happy when I see fog, since it's a somewhat rare event (and seeing mountains disappearing in the fog is nice, since it gives the impression of a wider space). After this day, I was a bit fed up with fog for a while Along the 101 one reaches Lake Quinault, which seemed pretty nice on the map, and driving a bit along the lake - a local symbol, the "World's largest spruce tree". I don't know what a spruce tree is, but I like trees, so I was planning to go there, weather allowing. And the weather did cooperate, except that the tree was not so imposing as I thought! In any case, I was glad to stretch my legs a bit: However, the most interesting thing here in Quinault was not this tree, but rather - the quiet little town and the view on the lake, in the late afternoon sun: The entire town was very very quiet, and the sun shining down on the lake gave an even stronger sense of tranquillity. No wind, not many noises that tell of human presence, just a few, and an overall sense of peace. It was quite the opposite of the Cape Flattery and a very nice way to end the trip. Well, almost end - I still had a bit of driving ahead. Starting from Quinault, driving back and entering the 101, driving down to Aberdeen: then turning east towards Olympia, and back onto the highways. As to Aberdeen and Olympia, I just drove through, so I couldn't make any impression of them. The old harbour and the rusted things in Aberdeen were a bit interesting, but the day was late so I didn't stop. And since the day shouldn't end without any surprises, during the last profile change between walking and driving in Quinault, my GPS decided to reset its active maps list and I ended up with all maps activated. This usually is not a problem, at least if you follow a pre-calculated route, but I did trigger recalculation as I restarted my driving, so the Montana was trying to decide on which map to route me - between the Garmin North America map and the Open StreeMap one, the result was that it never understood which road I was on. It always said "Drive to I5", even though I was on I5. Anyway, thanks to road signs, and no thanks to "just this evening ramp closures", I was able to arrive safely at my hotel. Overall, a very successful, if long trip: around 725 kilometres, 10h:30m moving, 13h:30m total: There were many individual good parts, but the overall think about this road trip was that I was able to experience lots of different environments of the peninsula on the same day, and that overall it's a very very nice area. The downside was that I was in a rush, without being able to actually stop and enjoy the locations I visited. And there's still so much to see! A two nights trip sound just about right, with some long hikes in the rain forest, and afternoons spent on a lake somewhere. Another not so optimal part was that I only had my "travel" camera (a Nikon 1 series camera, with a small sensor), which was a bit overwhelmed here and there by the situation. It was fortunate that the light was more or less good, but looking back at the pictures, how I wish that I had my "serious" DSLR So, that means I have two reasons to go back! Not too soon though, since Mount Rainier is also a good location to visit . If the pictures didn't bore you yet, the entire gallery is on my smugmug site. In any case, thanks for reading!

I would probably not yet worthy of the admiration Emerson was alluding to but I do like to make things. As anyone who has read previous posts knows I have pretty much embraced the "do things, tell people" idea.

One small wrinkle is doing things needs somewhere to work. Since moving myself and the family to rented accommodation in Cambridge (swampy 3,500 year old English city, not the one in Massachusetts) I have been lacking space to do practical projects.

To fix this lack I have joined the cambridge makespace which, in addition to somewhere I can work gives me access to some tools I was previously unable to afford. The space gives practical training on the more complex machines (any tool can be dangerous if you do not use it correctly) which recently allowed my induction on the CNC router.

My instructor , Mark Mellors, who was good enough to give up some of his valuable making time to train me (and accidentally get his car stuck in a car park overnight by staying late) suggested that it was a good idea to have a design to try.

I decided to use this opportunity to actually create something useful (though now I re-read Marks message it did suggest a simple design...oopsy). I had been working at the electronics bench in previous weeks and been uncomfortable using the existing stools and chairs as they were either a bit high or unable to be adjusted high enough for the 80cm tall benches. I decided to design a 60cm tall stool for use at this workbench.

My initial idea was for a simple three leg stool, round top, three legs, how hard could it be? Initial research showed that showed that above 30cm the legs needed to be braced to each other. This is because the leg to seat joints simply cannot handle the stress caused by leverage which longer legs introduce.

I looked at the structure of several stools online and was initially drawn towards creating something like the IKEA Dalfred bar stool. It was discovered that the design would be easier to realise if it were made from sheet material which give a smaller challenge to a naive operator of a CNC router. Because of this simpler designs were researched and I eventually found a simple design I liked.

The design could not however be used directly as it was for imperial sized material which is not available in europe. I selected the QCAD open source CAD package and recaptured the design adjusting for the available 12mm plywood sheet material. This resulted in an imperial measurement design for metric materials.

Mark helped me transfer the DXF into the CAM software (vcarve pro 7, after I discovered the demo version of this software generates files which cannot be imported into the full edition!) and generate toolpaths for our machine. Once the toolpaths are saved to a USB stick (no modern conveniences like direct upload here) the job can be run on the machine.

Here I ran into reality, turns out that tolerances in imperial combined with lack of understanding how plywood reacts resulted in excessive play in the joints. This resulted in an unusable stool, which simply tried to rotate around its central axis and become flatpack. I had successfully turned 10 worth of plywood into some sawdust and a selection of useless shapes. On the other hand I did become competent with the router workflow so it was not a complete failure.

I was determined to make the design work so I decided to start from scratch with a similar design but entirely in metric. I performed some material research both online and practically (why yes i did spend an informative hour in several cambridge DIY shops with digital calipers, why do you ask?) it turns out that generally available 12mm thick plywood actually ranges between 11.9 and 12mm thick.

I did some test slot cuts of varying width and determined that the available stock can be "persuaded" to fit into a 11.8mm wide slot. This Interference fit joint is strong and removes the need for adhesive in most cases.

The sheet plywood material is readily available with a width of 1220mm and a height of 606mm (a full sheet is 2440mm long which is cut into four with a 4mm wide saw blade) so making the legs fit within a sheet and be close to the 60cm target should be possible.

I selected a suitable seat radius (175mm) and from that determined the minimal gap to the base ring with a 6mm end mill tool (20mm for two toolpaths and some separation) and hence the minimum suitable width of the base ring (50mm) giving a total radius of 245mm.

For the legs allowance was made for two joints of 30mm with 30mm separation between them the legs come out at 90mm width. If a 6mm space and a 6mm toolpath top and bottom of the sheet is accounted for a 582mm height (606 - 24) is available in which to fit the legs. The top of the leg which fits into the seat is 12mm tall leaving 570mm total leg height.

At this point I selected some arbitrary values for the leg positioning and angle (30mm from seat centre and 15 ) using a right angle triangle triganometry this produced a stool with a base of around 550mm or 100mm outside the radius of the seat. This seemed a pleasing shape and when the values for the holding ring were calculated it is at 104mm height which also seems to work out well.

This design was cut on the machine, lightly finished with some sandpaper and assembled. The legs slotted into the ring first and then the legs eased into the seat slots, the whole thing flipped and the seat hammered home onto the legs.

Success! It physically fit together and if you were brave enough you could sit on it. Unfortunately the plywood seemed to flex around the central axis of rotation in a rather alarming way, fine if you are under 70 kilos but not giving the impression of security most people want from their seating.

Ok, lets try with five legs instead of three (at least we can reuse the existing three legs)...nope still not good enough and another 10 gone.

The others in the space suggested a few ideas to improve matters and the one I selected was to use 18mm plywood instead of 12mm, this should improve rigidity. There was a brief pause in proceedings to discover 18mm sheet is actually 17.7mm and needs a 17.5mm slot to make the interference fit work.

A swift redesign later altering the seat radius, gap, ring width and leg height to accommodate the new material and we have version 4 and it works without caveat. Tested up to 150Kg load without trouble, there is a small amount of flex still but nothing that feels worrying.

I finished the stool by rounding the seat top edge with a ball bearing rounding bit in a manual router and applying a couple of coats of gloss acrylic varnish. Finished stool is now doing service at the space.

In conclusion the final design allows someone with a CNC router to create a useful 580mm high fixed stool for 7.50 in timber plus cutter wear and varnish so maybe 8.50 total.

You can actually get five legs and a seat/ring out of a 1220x606 sheet and with intelligent arrangement a single 1220x2440 sheet will probably yield five or possibly six stools in total

I am making the design files of the proven 18mm version available (heck they are all there...but you have been warned, none of the other solutions produce a satisfactory result) under the MIT licence so anyone can reproduce. More pretty pictures are also available.

Longtime Debian Developer Martin Michlmayr was named as one of 6 winners of the 2013 O Reilly Open Source Awards. This Award recognize individual contributors who have demonstrated exceptional leadership, creativity, and collaboration in the development of Open Source Software. Martin received the award for his investment in Debian where he served as Debian Project Leader for two terms between 2003 and 2005. Congratulations tbm!

Debian 7.0 (wheezy) has been released. Here are some notes if you're running Debian on an ARM-based NAS device or plug computer and are planning to upgrade. First of all, if you're running Debian on a plug computer, such as the SheevaPlug, make sure that you have u-boot version 2011.12-3 (or higher). If you're using an older version, the Linux kernel in wheezy will not boot! You can read my u-boot upgrade instructions on how to check the version of u-boot and upgrade it. Second, check your /etc/kernel-img.conf file. If it still contains the following line, please remove this line. This postinst_hook directive was needed in the past but flash-kernel is called automatically nowadays whenever you install a new kernel. Now you're almost ready to start with your upgrade. Before you start, make sure to read the release notes for Debian 7.0 on ARM. This document contains a lot of information on performing a successful upgrade. During the kernel upgrade, you'll get the following message about the boot loader configuration: On ARM-based NAS devices and plug computers, you can simply ignore this warning. We put the root device into the ramdisk so it will be updated automatically. There are no other issues I'm aware of, so good luck with your upgrade and have fun with Debian wheezy!

Hallowed fornicating k lusk tur, Chiroptera Sapiens Sapiens! Look at that corrected bug count... It seems week 16, or even week 15, will really be the week of the penguin! The UDD bugs interface currently knows about the following release critical bugs:

• In Total: 704
  • Affecting wheezy: 50 That's the number we need to get down to zero before the release. They can be split in two big categories:
    • Affecting wheezy and unstable: 24 Those need someone to find a fix, or to finish the work to upload a fix to unstable:
      • 6 bugs are tagged 'patch'. Please help by reviewing the patches, and (if you are a DD) by uploading them.
      • 3 bugs are marked as done, but still affect unstable. This can happen due to missing builds on some architectures, for example. Help investigate!
      • 15 bugs are neither tagged patch, nor marked done. Help make a first step towards resolution!
    • Affecting wheezy only: 26 Those are already fixed in unstable, but the fix still needs to migrate to wheezy. You can help by submitting unblock requests for fixed packages, by investigating why packages do not migrate, or by reviewing submitted unblock requests.
      • 16 bugs are in packages that are unblocked by the release team.
      • 10 bugs are in packages that are not unblocked.

How do we compare to the Squeeze release cycle?

Week	Squeeze	Wheezy	Diff
43	284 (213+71)	468 (332+136)	+184 (+119/+65)
44	261 (201+60)	408 (265+143)	+147 (+64/+83)
45	261 (205+56)	425 (291+134)	+164 (+86/+78)
46	271 (200+71)	401 (258+143)	+130 (+58/+72)
47	283 (209+74)	366 (221+145)	+83 (+12/+71)
48	256 (177+79)	378 (230+148)	+122 (+53/+69)
49	256 (180+76)	360 (216+155)	+104 (+36/+79)
50	204 (148+56)	339 (195+144)	+135 (+47/+90)
51	178 (124+54)	323 (190+133)	+145 (+66/+79)
52	115 (78+37)	289 (190+99)	+174 (+112/+62)
1	93 (60+33)	287 (171+116)	+194 (+111/+83)
2	82 (46+36)	271 (162+109)	+189 (+116/+73)
3	25 (15+10)	249 (165+84)	+224 (+150/+74)
4	14 (8+6)	244 (176+68)	+230 (+168/+62)
5	2 (0+2)	224 (132+92)	+222 (+132/+90)
6	release!	212 (129+83)	+212 (+129/+83)
7	release+1	194 (128+66)	+194 (+128/+66)
8	release+2	206 (144+62)	+206 (+144/+62)
9	release+3	174 (105+69)	+174 (+105/+69)
10	release+4	120 (72+48)	+120 (+72/+48)
11	release+5	115 (74+41)	+115 (+74/+41)
12	release+6	93 (47+46)	+93 (+47/+46)
13	release+7	50 (24+26)	+50 (+24/+26)
14	release+8
15	release+9
16	release+10
17	release+11
18	release+12

Graphical overview of bug stats thanks to azhag:

We are searching a motive for a painting or a painting itself for a quite while now. This should find it's place in our living room. Unfortunately we didn't found one, which matched our both prospect and/or wasn't compatible with the rest of our living room. Yesterday we stumbled upon a motive which was quite nice, but was too small and it was neighter possible to get it in a bigger size nor to find out who was the origin painter of the picture. Now we are searching for the name of the picture and/or the painter. Any hints appreciated at 'blog - at - waja - dot - info'. A photo with higher resolution can be found here Update: Okay ... an unknown people (many thanks) hinted me, that google image search is the tool that could be very usefull. Google revealed that the painter is Inna Panasenko. P.S. Is it noticeable that I'm in vacation mode? ;)

I ve pushed up some code (named familytree) to my GitHub, which lets folks browse the social connections that make up Debian. Many thanks to the number of people who gave me feedback (arno, luca, algernon (at least!)) Y all rock! I ve taken the dump of information from nm.debian.org, and rendered it out into four datasets.

• Advocations for a person
• People who one has advocated
• If the person is a Debian Developer Emeritus
• Who a person has AMd for

Mashing this up with an example d3 page, I ve come up with what I m calling debgraph . Here are some notable examples that I think are rad :) By the way - green lines indicate sponsorship, black lines indicate sponsors, and dashed lines indicate AM-ing. Tan nodes are DD-emeritus, and blue is active. I don t think this handles MIA correctly. Anyway, here it is: Me! (paultag) Algernon tbm (OK, this one is massive, I ve scaled it down a skitch old computer warning, it ll peg your CPU!) zack

Karen Tse gave an interesting TED talk about how to stop police torture as an investigative tool [1]. Mostly it s about training and empowering public defenders. Phil Plait gave an interesting TED talk about how to defend the Earth from asteroids [2]. Julian Baggini wrote an interesting article for the Financial Times about the persecution of Atheists in the US [3]. Charlie Todd of Improv Everywhere gave an amusing TED talk about Improv events that he has run [4]. He is most famous for organising people to wear blue shirts and khaki pants in Best Buy, but he s done lots of other funny things. Paul Zak gave an interesting TED talk about trust, morality, and oxytocin [5]. One of the many interesting fact that he shared is that oxytocin levels can significantly increase when using social networking sites. So people who use Facebook etc are likely to be more trustworthy as well as more trusting. The Occupy the Judge Rotenberg Center movement aims to stop the torture of Autistic children in the US [6], Anonymous is involved in that too. Paul Lewis gave an insightful TED talk about the use of crowdsourced data in news reporting [7]. A lot of the analysis of citizen journalism is based on comparing bloggers with full-time paid journalists, but Paul describes how professional full-time journalistic work can be greatly assisted by random people filming and photographing things that seem noteworthy. Make sure your next phone has the best possible camera phone cameras will never be great but the quality of the camera you have with you is what matters. Sam Harris published an interesting interview with Tim Prowse who is a Baptist minister who faked belief for two years after becoming an atheist [8A]. He also references The Clergy Project a support group for atheists who are current or former members of the clergy [8B]. Cracked has an insightful article about 6 things that rich people need to stop saying [9]. How do the 1% not understand these things? Barack Obama and Nichelle Nichols (who played Lt Uhura in the original Star Treck) give the Vulcan Salute in the White-House [10]. Gabriel Arana wrote an insightful article about his experiences with the ex-gay movement [11]. The therapist who hurt him so much is still doing the same to other victims. S#!T Ignorant People Say To Autistics is an interesting youtube video about ignorant and annoying people [12]. Strangely I ve received little of that myself, I wonder whether women on the Autism Spectrum get a lot more of that than men. At GManCaseFile an ex-FBI agent has written an informative post about how the TSA is failing [13]. The Nieder Family has an interesting article about how patents are being used to prevent the creation of assisted communication (AAC) devices for children [14]. Apparently the company that has the patents wants all AAC devices to be really expensive and profitable for them. This is yet another example of patents doing harm not good. Renew Economy has an informative article by Giles Parkinson about the affect that solar power generation will have on power prices [15]. In short as solar systems produce power when it s most needed (during the day and at the hottest time of the day for warm climates) it will dramatically reduce the auction price for wholesale power. That will hurt the business of the power companies and also allow lower prices on the retail market.

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/karen_tse_how_to_stop_torture.html
• [2] http://www.ted.com/talks/phil_plait_how_to_defend_earth_from_asteroids.html
• [3] http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d2239780-4d4e-11e1-8741-00144feabdc0.html
• [4] http://www.ted.com/talks/charlie_todd_the_shared_experience_of_absurdity.html
• [5] http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_zak_trust_morality_and_oxytocin.html
• [6] https://sites.google.com/site/occupythejudgerotenbergcenter/
• [7] http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_lewis_crowdsourcing_the_news.html
• [8A] http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/life-without-god
• [8B] http://clergyproject.org/
• [9] http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-things-rich-people-need-to-stop-saying/
• [10] http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/04/nichelle_nichols_throws_vulcan_signs_with_obama_in_the_oval_office.html
• [11] http://prospect.org/article/my-so-called-ex-gay-life
• [12] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fTBM_3sdwE
• [13] http://gmancasefile.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/tsa-fail.html
• [14] http://niederfamily.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/goliath-v-david-aac-style.html
• [15] http://reneweconomy.com.au/2012/why-generators-are-terrified-of-solar-44279

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Q: How much wood would a Richuck chuck if a Richuck could chuck wood? A: Quite a bit. The few times in the past when I was able to get my hands onto a tree or three, I thoroughly enjoyed turning them into firewood. It's good workout, you get fresh air, and you can actually see what you accomplished with your hands. Back then, I had access to a hatchet, a felling axe and a single wedge. Splitting anything larger than 20 or 30 cm in diameter was tedious work, though still enjoyable. Two weeks ago, I was presented with several cubic meters of spruce; log diameters ranging in between 10 and 50 cm, pre-cut to two meters in length. Plus, access to a chainsaw. Yay. After some research, I ordered two helicoidal splitting wedges (they turn themselves when driven into wood), a splitting axe and a splitting maul. The rest of the equipment handed to me is probably older than I am, but still working perfectly fine. You have to admire the simple yet efficient design of the cant hook. Something I could not find an English name for is the German Sapie, in itself loosely defined as "any tool you can use to pick up, turn, drag or otherwise move logs". There's a surprising variety of these tools, but then, moving wood around has been a necessity of life for millennia so people are bound to come up with good designs. Last weekend, the chainsaw wasn't running very smoothly or much at all, resulting in hours spent coaxing it to cut at least enough for some hacking (the wood, not the computer kind). Other than our chainsaw troubles, that weekend was very pleasant and I ended up splitting tons of logs. We had the chainsaw overhauled and resharpened during the week and picked it up again on Friday, planning to resume cutting early Saturday, a plan that was spoiled by torrential downpour and hail. In the afternoon, I started splitting some left-overs around the house and used a short break from the rain to head out into the woods to where the logs are piled. The place I chose for splitting is somewhat exposed and even though the mix of rain, sleet, snow, hail, and everything in between resumed soon enough turns out you simply stop caring at some point. While temperatures were around freezing, I ended up being drenched in sweat in no time at all. There is something primordial and deeply satisfying about simply working away at these logs, ending with piles and piles of firewood. Of course, using my favourite new toy, 4.6 kg of forged stainless steel fuck you, increased said satisfaction immensely. Between the two wedges and that maul, splitting any middle-European conifers is a breeze. Add in the splitting axe for slim trunks and splitting will take less than 60 seconds per cut, no matter how many branch knots or pockets of shock-absorbing partially decayed wood you encounter. If only I've had those tools a decade and a half ago... While I am feeling muscles I forgot I had, I am planning to pursue this new-found old hobby for at least the foreseeable future. Especially since I sourced more logs and a few trees, already.

(including English!) The string freeze of Debian Installer officially ended at 23:59 yesterday (Sept. 20th). Indeed, this was extended a bit to today, with agreement by Otavio Salvador who I thank for this. That allowed Zak to "save" Tagalog and also the Welsh and Latvian translators to polish their work. We now have to decide about some of these languages: those that failed to meet the release criteria but were formerly activated in D-I. There are four such languages: Amharic, Welsh, Estonian and Northern Sami. Please find below the mail I just sent to debian-i18n and debian-boot. I promised that this discussion would happen in public. It will (but it will be short as we can't delay the release of the installer for ages....and I think that my proposals are reasonable!)

First of all, the numbers as of Sunday Sept. 21st 09:32 UTC (date of
the last commit with an l10n update):
Languages meeting the release criteria: 59
------------------------------------------
Already activated and complete for level 1: 51
 Arabic, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Bosnian, Catalan, Czech, Danish,
 German, Dzongkha, Greek, Esperanto, Spanish, Basque, Finnish, French,
 Galician, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Croatian, Hungarian, Indonesian,
 Italian, Japanese, Georgian, Khmer, Korean, Lithuanian, Latvian,
 Macedonian, Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian Bokm l, Nepali, Dutch,
 Norwegian Nynorsk, Punjabi, Polish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese,
 Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Albabian, Swedish, Tamil, Thai, Turkish,
 Vietnamese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese
Already activated and complete for sublevels 1 and 2: 6
Bengali, Kurdish, Slovenian, Tagalog, Ukrainian, Wolof
Not yet activated languages complete for sublevels 1 and 2: 2
 (the mail in -i18n and -boot says 3 but this is an error by me)
Irish, Serbian
Languages failing to meet the release criteria: 15
--------------------------------------------------
Activated languages: 4
Amharic, Welsh, Estonian, Northern Sami
Not yet activated languages: 11
Afrikaans, Persian, Armenian, Icelandic, Kazakh, Kannada,
Malagasy, Malay, Telugu, Urdu, Xhosa
Discussion
----------
(careful people will notice that I moved Welsh down to "failed to meet
the release criteria" as this is what is technically correct)
Nothing to discuss for the 57 already activated languages that meet
the defined criteria. They'll be kept or first activated in the RC1
release of Debian Installer.
Similarly, nothing to discuss for the 11 languages that were not
activated and haven't made it. They will remain unactivated.
Two languages should be activated as they have met the release
criteria for the first time during the string freeze: Irish and Serbian.
This adds more load (and size changes) to D-I but I really don't see
any reason to not follow our own rules there.
The discussion comes for the 4 languages that fail to meet the release
criteria. Here are my proposals with some rationale:
Amharic: 
  I would really dislike deactivating Amharic because it's highly
  symbolic to have the language of Ethiopia activated. We have so few
  African languages. Also, the translation is nearly complete and the
  translator was well coping with updates until July. The missing
  stuff for Amharic in sublevels 1 and 2 are messages about loading
  drivers or firmware from removable media, the rescue mode stuff for
  the graphical installer and some messages that briefly appear during
  finish-install. A little bit more important is the message warning
  that the boot partition is not ext2 or ext3, added in August by
  tbm. I think this is not enough to drop out one year of efforts for
  the translator
  As a consequence, I propose to KEEP Amharic.
Welsh:
  Only five strings are missing in sublevels 1 and 2 because of the
  small experience of PO files by the person who completed the
  translation during last week. One will make the regular user login
  name screen to be in English and others will make the GRUB password
  screen to be in English as well, that's all.
  Additionnally, we can safely assume that all potential users of
  Welsh have good skills in English...and will therefore very easily
  cope with these screens.
  As a consequence, I propose to KEEP Welsh.
Estonian:
  The translation had NO update since Etch. The last update is dated
  back to Feb. 17th 2007. I haven't got any sign of life from the
  translator and no Estonian users have volunteered to maintain the
  translation.
  Missing strings are in many places, including several screens that
  appear in default installs. Even though one can assume that the
  skills of the average Linux user in Estonia is fairly good, I think
  this is not enough to throw users in a big mix of English and
  Estonian.
  As a consequence, I propose to DROP Estonian.
Northern Sami:
  The translation is very incomplete. With about any other language,
  that would be a reason to drop the translation.
  However, a few reasons make me suggest keeping it:
   - Northern Sami is mostly used in Norway and D-I will fall back
     to Norwegian Bokm l which is understood by all potentials users
     as it is teached in all Norwegian schools. 
   - Users will be warned, *in Sami*, about this situation
   - The choice of Sami will be kept in localechooser even if the
     translations are dropped. This is on request of Debian Edu
     developers to avoid them to develop a special boot floppy
     to offer the choice of Sami (a requirement for Norwegian
     schools). I personnally think this is a reward to Debian Edu and
     its ancestor Skolelinux for their initial involvement in the
     development of D-I
  As a consequence, I propose to KEEP Northern Sami.
I understand that these choices may be debatable and some may sound
slightly subjective. I however think this is the best way to be fair
with translators' efforts without compromising the quality of D-I.
Please note that the final word on this will be by D-I release
managers...but advices are very much welcomed.

Tim pointed out that it's worth travelling simply for the new timezone in your debian/changelog entries. We can use AptFs to work out who has collected the most so far:

14 timezone(s):
 * Bdale Garbee <bdale@gag.com> (-0800, -0700, -0600, -0500, -0400, -0300,
   +1300, +1100, +1030, +0900, +0300, +0200, +0100, +0000)
12 timezone(s):
 * Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> (-1000, -0900, -0800, -0700, -0500, -0400,
   -0300, -0200, +0300, +0200, +0100, +0000)
11 timezone(s):
 * Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> (-0400, -0300, +1300, +1100, +1000, +0930,
   +0900, +0800, +0200, +0100, +0000)
9 timezone(s):
 * Barak A. Pearlmutter <bap@debian.org> (-0700, -0600, -0500, -0400, +0500,
   +0300, +0200, +0100, +0000)
 * Martin Michlmayr <tbm@cyrius.com> (-1000, -0700, -0300, +1100, +1000,
   +0300, +0200, +0100, +0000)
 * Martin Pitt <mpitt@debian.org> (-0800, -0700, -0600, -0500, -0400, +0300,
   +0200, +0100, +0000)
 * Sam Hocevar (Debian packages) <sam+deb@zoy.org> (-0700, -0500, -0400, -0300,
   +0930, +0300, +0200, +0100, +0000)

Full output. However, something tells me we aren't going to see widespread gamification of Debian development.

When Marvell originally released the first plug computer, they created their own version of u-boot with support for their new devices. Unfortunately, this version of u-boot is fairly out of date nowadays compared to mainline u-boot and has several problems. Support for plug computers (such as SheevaPlug and GuruPlug) have been integrated into the mainline u-boot (also known as DENX u-boot) in the meantime and Clint Adams has packaged it for Debian. I finally found the time to test Clint's u-boot binary on my devices and have updated the SheevaPlug installation guide accordingly. If you're have installed Debian to a SheevaPlug according to my instructions, I suggest you upgrade. If you boot from a MMC/SD card, you should be aware that the mmcinit command has been renamed to mmc init in order to be consistent with the naming of other commands. You'll therefore have to update your bootcmd_mmc variable in u-boot like this:

average sprint speed: 1 sprint/month I've proposed a DebConf11 BoF on Debian sprints and, more generally, on how we have been using Debian money in the past 1.3 years. As part of the BoF preparation, I've taken the time to review the last 16 months of sprints and check how the Debian Sprint Program which we've recently streamlined and "marketed" quite a bit is going. In particular, I've finally done the homework of preparing the big table of sprints and their costs, in order to evaluate how sustainable the sprint program is. Without further ado, here is the table:

Debian sprints held from April 2010 to June 2011

No	Sprint	When (month)	Where	Attendees	Debian cost (EUR)
1	groupware (report)	04/2010	de	4	240
2	FAI (report)	06/2010	de	7	570
	(DebConf10)	08/2010	us
3	ftpmaster (report)	09/2010	de	3	350
4	DSA (report)	09/2010	de	3	400
5	release team (report)	10/2010	fr	6	0
6	kernel team (report)	10/2010	fr	3	120
7	www team	12/2010	at	5	1430
8	debian med	01/2011	de	25	460
9	security team	01/2011	de	7	1000
10	emdebian	02/2011	uk	17	0
11	ftpmaster	03/2011	de	5	2000
12	groupware	04/2011	de	6	300
13	alioth	05/2011	uk	4	500
14	debian edu	06/2011	de	9	760
15	release team	06/2011	be	5	1640
	(DebConf11)	07/2010	ba
Total	15 sprints	16 months			9770

To better understand the table, several comments are in order:

• numbers are approximate in various ways. In particular, 2010 costs predate a protocol I've agreed upon with the Debian auditors to do proper accounting, hence it is possible that some costs are slightly overestimated
• costs are Debian's costs and do not include reimbursements for non-Debian people that might have attended the sprint. This also explains why some sprints have been at 0 cost: they have been entirely sponsored by other entities interested in supporting Debian, such as companies or institutions.
• where needed, costs have been normalized to Euro
• we have streamlined the sprint process around October 2010 (you can find the underlying rationales in an old RFC). Sprints happened before that data had a different way of being announced and of reporting back to the project.
• the above data are not detailed enough to properly estimate per-person costs, as we lack a breakdown of Debian vs non-Debian attendees
• no costs for DebConf-s are included, as they have their own budgets which aims to be amortized 0 cost in the long run

Please note that the purpose of the table is not to be precise and transparent about Debian finances and how we use them. That is a (very!) worthwhile goal and I do think Debian should do much better in informing its community about how donated money are used to further Debian goals. But that is a broader topic on which the auditors are working; it is not up to me to discuss it here. If you are interested in that topic though, you might want to follow tbm's BoF at DebConf11. The purpose of the table is rather to find out some general figures about Debian sprints held in the recent past:

• we have had a total of 15 sprints in 16 months (about 1 sprint/month)
• we have spent about 10'000 EUR for sprints, for an average per-sprint cost of about 650 EUR
• all sprints have been held in Europe
  (given DD geographical distribution, I find quite surprising that no group of US-based Debian hackers have asked for sprint sponsoring)
• about half of the sprints have been held in Germany
  (probably thanks to DD-density there and also to the welcoming attitude of friendly venues such as the Linux Hotel)
• the variance of per-person costs is high: there are very cheap sprints (e.g. when people travel within Europe by train and stay at friends') and quite expensive sprints (e.g. when one or more of the participant needs to be flown oversea which has happened only once, up to now)

I'm personally quite happy about those figures. Enabling volunteer developers to meet and hack together in person is possibly the most valuable way of using donated money. Having 1 sprint/month is not bad, but in a project the size of Debian is quite possibly a minimum. Doing more than that is highly desirable. It is also financially sustainable, especially if we will be able to show by actually having more sprints and being transparent about them that we can put into good use donated money. Another, more subtle, aspect of sustainability is that related to sprint management. Processing sprint requests and ensuring that transparency guidelines are actually followed by the organizers is still quite some work. I've been mostly doing that myself up to now, which is all fine and well, but does not necessarily scale. Other organizations (such as KDE e.V.) have realized that to the point of having hired people specifically to manage sprints in an otherwise volunteer community. In Debian we are quite keen of maintaining the project running on a volunteer basis. At the same time I feel we should have more room for scalability in the number of sprints we could run. So if you are looking for a management task to help Debian with, think about becoming, err, "sprint master", and contact me. If otherwise you want to focus on Debian hacking, what are you waiting for? Check the guidelines and propose your sprint! To know more about sprints, Debian money, and how you could help with all that, be sure not to miss the Sprint and money BoF.

Martin Michlmayr is a Debian developer since 2000 and I share quite a few things with him, starting with his age and involvement in the quality assurance team. He managed to be elected Debian Project Leader in 2003 and 2004. He s no longer as active as he used to be but his input is always very valuable and he continues to do very interesting things in particular concerning the support of NAS devices. Read on for the details. Raphael: Who are you? Martin: I m Martin Michlmayr. I m 32, originally from Austria, and currently living in the UK. I ve contributed to various free software projects over the years but Debian is without doubt the one I m most passionate about. I joined Debian in 2000 when I was a student. I worked on Debian more or less full time for a few years while I was pretending to study. Later I started a PhD to do research about quality and management aspects of volunteer free software projects. I investigated the release process in several free software projects, in particular looking at time-based releases. After finishing my PhD in 2007, I joined Hewlett-Packard. I m part of HP s Open Source Program Office and work on various free software and open source activities, both internally and within the community. Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? Martin: I first used Debian in the days of 0.93R6, some time around the end of 1995. The 0.93R6 release was still based on a.out but I needed an ELF-based system for some application, so I moved to Slackware. I then quickly moved to Red Hat Linux where I stayed for several years. I rediscovered Debian in 2000 and quickly decided to join the project. I cannot recall how I rediscovered Debian but when I did, it was clear to me that Debian was the ideal project for me: I could identify with its philosophy, I liked the volunteer nature of the project, and I found the size and diversity of Debian interesting since a large project offers a lot of different challenges and opportunities. I remember how many new things there were to learn and back then the documentation and other resources for new contributors were nowhere as good as they are today. My application manager, Julian Gilbey, was a great help he was incredibly friendly and passionate about Debian. I also remember meeting up with Peter Palfrader (weasel) for key signing when we were both in the New Maintainer queue. I was incredibly lucky with my New Maintainer process and soon became an official Debian Developer. Because there was a shortage of application managers, my first major contribution in Debian was to become an application manager myself and help other people join the project. Debian is a large project with a long history and a rich culture, so new contributors should expect that it will take some time to become familiar with everything. Fortunately, there are many resources, such as documentation and the debian-mentors list, for new contributors. Another great way to become familiar with the way things are done in Debian is to subscribe to various Debian mailing lists and ideally to read some mailing list archives. It s also a great idea to attend the Debian Conference or other conferences since meeting people in real life is a great way to integrate. I remember attending Debian Conference 1 in Bordeaux where I gave my first public talk. Finally, new contributors should find an area where they can make a unique contribution. Most people in Debian maintain packages but there are so many other ways to contribute. For example, most of my contributions were not technical but were about coordination and other organizational activities. Raphael: What s your biggest achievement within Debian? Martin: I m particularly proud of a number of achievements:

• New Maintainer: I helped a lot of people join Debian. It s great to help someone join the project and then see how they contribute. Of course, some people join Debian and then quickly become inactive or retire you never know in advance how it will work out. But I had the pleasure to help some truly outstanding contributors to join Debian.
• Quality Assurance: I helped improve QA processes within Debian. In particular, I realized a few years ago that a lot of packages had maintainers who were inactive and that nobody did anything about it. I started to write to those maintainers to see what could be done. It s hard because you don t know the circumstance of someone they may be inactive because of an illness or for other good reasons so you have to be friendly, but yet persistent. Fortunately, most maintainers I contacted were truly inactive and so they couldn t complain when I took their packages away.
• DPL: I acted as the Debian Project Leader for two years. I m particularly proud of this because Debian is a great project and it was an honour to represent it. I performed important organizational and coordination tasks. I also traveled to a lot of conferences and had the pleasure to meet many Debian Developers as well as users of Debian. It s very motivating to meet users and to hear how they use Debian and how we can further improve it.
• Debian on NAS: Debian is without the doubt the Linux distro with the best support for NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices. I was always impressed by what the OpenWRT folks have done to support wireless routers and wanted to do something similar for Debian. Unfortunately, wireless routers just don t have enough storage for a full distro. But then NAS devices came along and they obviously have enough space since they are meant for storage.

Raphael: Speaking about NAS devices: what exactly are you doing on this topic and how can people help? Martin: There are plenty of instructions on the Internet to install Linux distributions on NAS or various embedded devices by connecting a serial console and then typing in hundreds of commands. What I found is that such instructions significantly limit the user base because they are way too complicated for most users. There are just too many steps that can go wrong. So instead, in Debian, we provide a solution that just works: usually, you download a firmware image for your NAS device from Debian and when you upgrade you get the Debian installer. You connect to the installer via SSH and perform a normal installation. The installer knows about the device and will prepare everything for you automatically for example, it knows if the device has requirements for the partition layout and it will install the kernel where the device expects to find it; unfortunately, NAS devices are not like PCs, so the requirements are different for almost every device and therefore you need special code to support a new device. Finally, there are detailed installation guides and we provide help on our mailing lists. There are a number of technical areas for improvement. The installation could be made even easier, and it would be nice to support new platforms and devices. A bigger problem is that while we ve implemented a great solution for NAS devices, we haven t really extended this work to support other classes of devices. For example, tablets and mobile phones are getting incredibly popular and we don t have a compelling solution for such devices, mostly because of the lack of an appropriate GUI. Raphael: What are your plans for Debian Wheezy? Martin: I ve recently been asked by Stefano Zacchiroli, our current Debian Project Leader, to coordinate the care-taking of Debian finances. Debian, as a volunteer project, relies on donations and in-kind gifts (e.g. hardware) to maintain its infrastructure and to support various development efforts, such as funding sprints and other developer gatherings. Debian s money and other assets are held by affiliate organizations around the world. My responsibility will be to keep track of money and other assets (e.g. hardware and trademarks), work with the DPL to establish procedures related to the use of Debian s assets, and make sure that the procedures are followed. Finally, we want to publish public statements so our donors know how we use their donations to further improve Debian. I just started working on this and this will be my main activity in Debian in the coming months. Raphael: Speaking of money, I plan to run a fundraising to get the Debian book I wrote with Roland Mas translated (cf. http://debian-handbook.info). Is this something Debian should support? Martin: First of all, I should make it clear that I don t decide how Debian spends its money. This is up to the DPL to decide together with the project at a whole. I ll just make sure that procedures are followed and expenses tracked and reported properly. Having said that, in my opinion, it s unlikely that Debian as a project will fund this effort. It would be inconsistent with the position of the project not to fund work directly (only some related expenses, such as travel costs to allow Debian teams to organize face-to-face meetings). Whether Debian should support the fundraising effort by helping to promote it is another question and that s probably not as clear cut. It looks like a worthwhile effort, but on the other hand it would be unfair for authors of other Debian books for Debian to put its weight behind one and there are many other efforts that are worth promoting if you promote one, where do you stop? So while it sounds worthwhile, it s probably better for Debian to stay out of it. But somehow related to this, I sometimes worry about the fact that there are so few paid opportunities around Debian. If you contribute to the Linux kernel for a while, you have an excellent chance to get hired by someone and to work on the kernel full time. The kernel may be an extreme example but there are a lot of projects that have more paid opportunities than Debian, e.g. Mono, GNOME, OpenOffice/LibreOffice and KDE. Obviously, there are some Debian Developers who can spend some time on Debian as part of their job. I know that some Canonical employees contribute to Debian, that support companies like credativ improve Debian as part of their work, and that system administrators fix bugs or package new software as they deploy Debian. But I think this is a minority of contributors and even they don t work full time on Debian. Instead what I see is that a lot of people leave university, get a job and then no longer have time for Debian or people start a family and no longer have time. I can take myself as an example since I don t have nearly as much time as I did in the past when I was a student. I guess there are different ways to deal with this problem one would be to create more paid opportunities around Debian outside the project, another one might be to make it easier for new volunteers to join the project. I don t have the answers to these questions but it s something I wonder about, and I also wonder whether pure volunteer projects can still keep up with projects with a lot of full time contributors. Raphael: What motivates you to continue to contribute year after year? Martin: Debian is a great project with a great mission, goals and people. I contribute to make Debian a better solution and to promote the free software philosophy. Finally, the community around Debian provides a lot of motivation. It s amazing how much I ve learned about other cultures because of my involvement in Debian and how many friends I ve made over the years all around the world. Raphael: Do you have wishes for Debian Wheezy? Martin: Not really. I m pretty happy with the way things are going at the moment. We have made a lot of organizational changes in the last few years from which the project has greatly benefited. I m particularly pleased about the plans to adopt a time-based freeze. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Martin: There are many people I admire greatly. I d like to mention Joey Hess because he s a great example to follow. He doesn t get involved in politics, is easy to work with and does great technical work. In fact, he has made not one but several contributions that have completely changed Debian (debconf, debhelper, and debian-installer). Furthermore, Debian has a lot of contributors who have done great work over the years but who are not very vocal about it. People like Colin Watson or Peter Palfrader. Debian has many unique contributors and the list of people I admire is much longer than the few people I just mentioned.

---

Thank you to Martin for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. He raised some interesting questions. Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook.

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I'm someone who sometimes has a beard, and sometimes doesn't. Today, I'm someone with a fairly long beard, although it's not (yet?) one of the likes of andrew or maddog. I don't think it looks very well on me, but you can blame the government (or lack thereof) in Belgium. How?! What?! Yes, the government. A while back, a movie critic working for the RTL (a Francophone Belgian TV station) decided to keep his beard until the Belgian government took the oath of office. He was quickly joined by an actor, and then by a Flemish radio presenter (dutch, with pictures). And then by a whole bunch of people. I didn't join them, initially. But after a while, when my beard was starting to get long again, people started asking me, 'is that for the government?' And initially I said no. But people kept asking. Since it seemed like a good excuse for not having shaven that long, after a while I just decided to say 'yes' for the heck of it. And now, after having said so for quite a while, I've kindof grown to the idea. Which, I guess, means that if the impossible happens, and someone back home manages to form a government that will take the oath while I'm still in Bosnia and Herzegovina, I'll have to go out and buy some razor equipment. But I don't expect that to happen. Today, exactly 400 days after the previous election (yes, it's really been that long), it still doesn't look as if there's going to be an agreement on anything. I wish there was something positive or funny that I could report on in this whole thing, but it doesn't look like it. Sigh.

Debian 6.0 (squeeze) has been released. Here are some notes if you're running Debian on an ARM-based NAS device or plug computer and are planning to upgrade. First of all, make sure to read the release notes for Debian 6.0 on ARM. This document contains a lot of information on performing a successful upgrade. Second, during the kernel upgrade, you'll get the following message about the boot loader configuration: On ARM-based NAS devices and plug computers, you can simply ignore this warning. We put the root device into the ramdisk so it will be updated automatically. Finally, after doing the upgrade and before rebooting your system, make sure to run flash-kernel to activate the new kernel.

I received a number of questions as to how the boot process of the SheevaPlug running Debian works. I've now published an explanation of how u-boot loads the Debian kernel and ramdisk in order to boot Debian.

After a bit of work, I got the sheeva plug working the way I wanted it to. First of all, I grabbed a spare 1G USB flash disk I had laying around and installed Debian squeeze to it by following tbm s instructions here: http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/sheevaplug/install.html After debian was installed to the USB disk, I removed it from the plug and used dd on my laptop to create an image of the filesystem. I mounted the filesystem as a loopback device and created a jffs2 partition image from it after doing a bit of minor tweaking. I placed the USB disk back in the plug and booted to it. Using this intermediate filesystem and the mtd-tools package, I wrote the new jffs2 image to the NAND mtd device. I then modified the uboot environment to suit, saved, and now have a working setup. Detailed instructions are below. pre-requisites Connect the plug to your network with the rj-45/cat5 cable. Connect a USB flash drive to the plug. I used a 1G drive, but 512M should be sufficient. Install the tftpd package on a machine on your network. You ll also need screen on the machine that you use to connect to the plug s serial terminal. I ll assume these are the same host. You need the IP address of the tftp server. In this example, we will assume that the IP is 192.168.1.2 and that you will assign 192.168.1.200 to the plug. $ sudo apt-get install tftpd screen Place uImage, uInitrd, and uBoot in the /srv/tftp directory: $ sudo wget -O /srv/tftp/uImage http://www.cyrius.com/tmp/beta1/marvell/sheevaplug/uImage
$ sudo wget -O /srv/tftp/uInitrd http://www.cyrius.com/tmp/beta1/marvell/sheevaplug/uInitrd
$ sudo wget -O /srv/tftp/uBoot http://wp.colliertech.org/cj/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/07/uboot.bin Connecting to the serial console We are now ready to boot the plug. Note that you have to be quick with the screen command. I recommend you type it out and get ready to press the enter key. You have to interrupt the bootloader in order to enter the u-boot console. Attach the power and immediately enter the following command: $ screen -S sheeva /dev/ttyUSB0 cs8,ixoff,115200 If you did this right, you should see a prompt like this: Marvell>> update uboot As per tbm s instructions, you can now update the uboot if needed. Instructions for that are here: http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/sheevaplug/uboot-upgrade.html I ll put them inline here for completeness.

Marvell>> setenv serverip 192.168.1.2 # IP of your TFTP server
Marvell>> setenv ipaddr 192.168.1.200 # IP of the plug
Marvell>> bubt uboot.bin

be sure to answer n to the question about env parameters. Now reset the device. Don t forget to interrupt the bootloader so we can get back to the prompt:

Marvell>> reset

Let the device know that you will be running a mainline kernel and set the arcNumber:

Marvell>> setenv mainlineLinux yes
Marvell>> setenv arcNumber 2097
Marvell>> saveenv
Marvell>> reset

Install Debian to the USB disk Interrupt the boot process once more. We are now ready to run the debian installer. I ll leave the details as an exercise for the reader. The following should put you into the installer, which you are probably quite familiar with by now. NB: I will assume that you will use a single ext3 partition for the entire system. This will make it easier to build a jffs2 image out of the resultant partition on the USB disk.

Marvell>> setenv serverip 192.168.1.2
Marvell>> setenv ipaddr 192.168.1.147
Marvell>> tftpboot 0x01100000 uInitrd
Marvell>> tftpboot 0x00800000 uImage
Marvell>> setenv bootargs console=ttyS0,115200n8 base-installer/initramfs-tools/driver-policy=most
Marvell>> bootm 0x00800000 0x01100000

build a jffs2 image Once the installation has completed, power down the plug and remove the USB disk. Put the USB disk in the machine you used to get the console on the plug and note what device the kernel assigns to it. In my case, it was given sdc, so debian is installed to /dev/sdc1. I will use these values for this example. If the filesystem was automatically mounted, unmount it. Create a disk image of the partition and mount it as a loopback device.

$ sudo umount /dev/sdc1
$ dd if=/dev/sdc1 of=/tmp/debian.img
$ mkdir /tmp/mnt
$ sudo mount -o loop /tmp/debian.img /tmp/mnt

You can now remove the USB disk and return it to the plug. Modify the /etc/fstab file. The root filesystem will be /dev/mtdblock2 and of fs type jffs2. My fstab file looks like the following:

proc            /proc           proc    defaults        0       0
/dev/mtdblock2 /               jffs2    errors=remount-ro 0       1

We can now create a jffs2 image from the mounted and altered fresh install:

$ sudo mkfs.jffs2 -l \
  -e 0x20000 \
  -X zlib \
  --eraseblock=128KiB \
  --pad \
  --output=/tmp/rootfs.jffs2 \
  --compression-mode=priority \
  -n \
  --squash \
  -r /tmp/mnt

write jffs2 to nand Now that we have an image to flash to the NAND, let s boot off of the USB disk. It should now be attached to the plug. Power on the plug and use screen to get a console. Interrupt the bootloader and enter the following commands:

Marvell>> setenv bootargs_console console=ttyS0,115200
Marvell>> setenv bootcmd_usb 'usb start; ext2load usb 0:1 0x01100000 /boot/uInitrd; ext2load usb 0:1 0x00800000 /boot/uImage'
Marvell>> setenv bootcmd 'setenv bootargs $(bootargs_console); run bootcmd_usb; bootm 0x00800000 0x01100000'
Marvell>> run bootcmd

Log in as root with the credentials you configured during the install. You will need to install a few packages in order to complete the nand flash. You can then ssh to the host on which you created the jffs2 image and cat it to stdout, piping this to nandwrite:

$ sudo apt-get install mtd-utils
$ ssh user@192.168.1.2 cat /tmp/rootfs.jffs2   sudo nandwrite /dev/mtd2 -p -

You now have a jffs2 image on the nand. Configure u-boot One more reboot to set u-boot s environment, and you will be done. Power down and remove the USB disk. Power on and get the serial console using screen. Break into the bootloader and enter the following commands:

Marvell>> setenv bootargs_console console=ttyS0,115200
Marvell>> setenv mtdpartitions mtdparts=orion_mtd:0x400000@0x100000(uImage),0x1fb00000@0x500000(rootfs)
Marvell>> setenv bootargs_root root=/dev/mtdblock2 rw rootfstype=jffs2
Marvell>> setenv bootcmd 'setenv bootargs $(bootargs_console) $(mtdpartitions) $(bootargs_root); nand read.e 0x00800000 0x00100000 0x00400000; bootm 0x00800000'
Marvell>> saveenv
Marvell>> reset

You should now be good to go.

The eSATA SheevaPlug is supported by the Debian installer and by Debian now. I've updated the install guide accordingly. If you're already running Debian on your eSATA SheevaPlug but you installed as a regular SheevaPlug to USB or SD and you'd like to use the eSATA, then make sure you're the latest kernel from Debian squeeze: Reboot and type this in u-boot: Your machine will then be recognized as an eSATA SheevaPlug and eSATA will work. Thanks to John Holland for working on SheevaPlug eSATA support.