Lenny well supported We re pleased that Lenny released with good support for the Eee PC and are now turning our efforts to make Squeeze even better, while continuing to provide support for our Lenny user base. The standard Lenny installer can install Debian on all models of Eee and our custom installer provides the ability to install over wireless for almost every model (more about this later) from a very small image. The latter continues to be our recommended install method, since in addition to being wireless-ready, the custom installer also handles a few other small eee-specific configuration chores to make as much as possible just work right after the install. Solid mainstream support We ve made good on our promise to make Debian work on the Eee PC, not a derivative, many of which use a custom kernel instead of the stock kernel as we do and use a special desktop instead of our users favourites. While we agree that some intriguing things can be done in these areas, it is no substitute for mainstream support. Our users are better served by a solid foundation than specialised modifications that limit their choices. We want them to be able to enjoy the freedom to mold Debian, the universal OS, into whatever suits them best. Squeeze support started Work is well underway on supporting all Eee models in Squeeze. For months, several team members have been experimenting with new kernels, producing support for them in eeepc-acpi-scripts. The current release of this key package (version 1.1.0) supports Linux 2.6.29 and contains enhancements for wifi, sound hotkeys, bluetooth, external displays and OSD. Squeeze will support wired & wifi on all current models With the appearance of 2.6.29 in Sid, all ethernet and wifi cards used in all models of Eee today are supportable without the need for out-of-kernel or non-free drivers. Madwifi is replaced by the free ath5k driver, the non-free rt2860 package is replaced by mainstream kernel support, (though it still requires non-free firmware provided separately,) rtl8187se is included, making it possible now for us to support the model 701SD, and ath9k is included, making full support for newer models such as the 1000HE possible. Lenny backports and live demo All of these changes can be enjoyed today by Lenny users. Just add Daniel Baumann s Lenny kernel backport repository and then install the 2.6.29 kernel and an updated acpid. See our upgrade howto for details. You can try a small (less than 256M) demo of this configuration by downloading beta 2 of our Live USB image. Accessibility Late last year, we discussed how to make it easier for the blind to install Debian unassisted on their Eee PCs. As it was a simple change, we now include brltty in the custom installer, but we understand that some users also need software synthesized text-to-speech, something for which there is no support yet in the standard Debian-installer. We understand this isn t an easy thing to fix, but hope someone will rise to the challenge. Growing team of developers We welcome Darren Salt and Raphael Geissert to the team this year. Both have been actively making contributions to the eeepc-acpi-scripts package over the past months, fixing some outstanding bugs and readying it to handle changes in more recent kernel releases. Moved eeepc.debian.net to new hosting Nico Golde, who hosted eeepc.debian.net for the first year development, has turned his focus to other areas of Debian. Glenn Saberton has stepped in to provide a new home for it. We thank them both for their efforts and for a smooth, uneventful transition from one host to the other. Size of user community Speaking of the move, earlier this year, Glenn shared with us some interesting archive traffic statistics that give us a rough idea how many users we have. For the months of December and January, after factoring out bot hits, we were seeing about 300,000 hits from 15,000 unique users per month. The site handles roughly 60G of traffic per month, most of that from thousands of downloads of our custom installer image. It s hard to draw any firm conclusions about the size of our user base from these stats, as many users may be on dynamic IP numbers, inflating the numbers, but we can conservatively say we have at least 5000 users. Other interesting statistics are that we have anywhere up to 80 users at any given time on our irc channel and over 250 users on the mailing list. Help wanted The Asus Eee PC line continues to expand, with 24 models listed so far. It is a challenge to keep up support for all of them. We re encouraged to see Asus choose a new b/g/n wifi chipset for their 1002HA that is supported by a DFSG free driver ath9k in this case. It appears that the new Atom N280-based 1000HE uses the same chipset as well (though be careful: I know of at least one user who bought a 1000HE in Argentina expecting it to have this chipset and was disappointed to find it had the Ralink chipset instead, we guess because of availability). If this trend continues, we ll be that much closer to our goal of full support for Squeeze main. As it stands, we re already as close as we can get given the state of rt2860 and no prospect on the horizon for replacing the non-free firmware. If you would like to help us out in any way, whether by testing, debugging, patching, or improving our documentation, get in touch with our team. We rely on your feedback to keep Lenny in good shape and work towards making Squeeze even better for all users of Debian on the Eee PC.

With the new kernel-package hitting Sid today, and the fact that it no longer does symlink handling by default, I thought it was time that we had an example script that shows how to do that. This is a fairly full featured script, feel free to cull down to use just what you want. I ll post a couple of ther scripts, if there is interest in this. BTW, this script does far more than the old kernel-package postisnt script ever did. Have fun.

    1  #!/bin/sh -
    2  #                               -*- Mode: Sh -*- 
    3  # 
    4  # This is an example of a script that can be run as a postinst hook,
    5  # and manages the symbolic links in a manner similar to the kernel
    6  # image default behaviour, except that the latest two versions (as
    7  # determined by ls -lct) are kept. You can modify this script 
    8  # 
    9  # Copyright 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 Manoj Srivastava
   10  # Copyright 2009 Darren Salt
   11  
   12  set -e
   13  
   14  # The dir where symlinks are managed
   15  SYMLINKDIR=/
   16  
   17  if [ $# -ne 2 ]; then
   18      echo Usage: $0 version location
   19      exit 2
   20  fi
   21  
   22  version="$1"
   23  vmlinuz_location="$2"
   24  vmlinuz_dir="$(dirname "$2")"
   25  
   26  cd $SYMLINKDIR   exit 1
   27  
   28  if [ -n "$DEB_MAINT_PARAMS" ]; then
   29      eval set -- "$DEB_MAINT_PARAMS"
   30  fi
   31  
   32  if [ -z "$1" ]   [ "$1" != "configure" ]; then
   33      exit 0;
   34  fi
   35  
   36  rm -f vmlinuz vmlinuz.old vmlinuz-rd vmlinuz-rd.old initrd.img initrd.img.old 
   37  
   38  # Create a temporary file safely
   39  if [ -x /bin/tempfile ]; then
   40      outfile=$(tempfile -p outp -m 0600);
   41  else
   42      set -e
   43      mkdir /tmp/kernel-image-$version-$$
   44      outfile=/tmp/kernel-image-$version-$$/output
   45  fi
   46  
   47  (cd "$vmlinuz_dir" && ls -ct vmlinuz-*) > $outfile
   48  
   49  STD="$(head -n 1 $outfile               sed 's/vmlinuz-//')" 
   50  OLD="$(head -n 2 $outfile   tail -n 1   sed 's/vmlinuz-//')" 
   51  
   52  if [ "X$STD" = "X" ]; then
   53      exit 0;
   54  fi
   55  
   56  # If you want version-specific links, here's how to start
   57  STD24="$(grep vmlinuz-2.4 $outfile   head -n 1   sed 's/vmlinuz-//')"   true
   58  OLD24="$(grep vmlinuz-2.4 $outfile   head -n 1   tail -n 1   sed 's/vmlinuz-//')"   true
   59  
   60  STD25="$(grep vmlinuz-2.5 $outfile   head -n 1   sed 's/vmlinuz-//')"   true
   61  OLD25="$(grep vmlinuz-2.5 $outfile   head -n 1   tail -n 1   sed 's/vmlinuz-//')"   true
   62  
   63  echo Booting $STD, old is $OLD
   64  
   65  if [ -f "$vmlinuz_dir/"initrd.img-$STD ] ; then 
   66     ln -s "$vmlinuz_dir/"initrd.img-$STD initrd.img
   67     ln -s "$vmlinuz_dir/"vmlinuz-$STD vmlinuz-rd
   68  else
   69     ln -s "$vmlinuz_dir/"vmlinuz-$STD vmlinuz
   70  fi
   71  
   72  if [ "X$OLD" != "X" ]; then
   73      if [ -f "$vmlinuz_dir/"initrd.img-$OLD ] ; then
   74      ln -s "$vmlinuz_dir/"initrd.img-$OLD initrd.img.old
   75      ln -s "$vmlinuz_dir/"vmlinuz-$OLD vmlinuz-rd.old
   76      else
   77      ln -s "$vmlinuz_dir/"vmlinuz-$OLD vmlinuz.old
   78      fi
   79  fi
   80  
   81  # if [ "X$STD24" != "X" ]; then
   82  #     if [ -f "$vmlinuz_dir/"initrd.img-$STD24 ] ; then 
   83  #     ln -s "$vmlinuz_dir/"initrd.img-$STD24 initrd24.img
   84  #     ln -s "$vmlinuz_dir/"vmlinuz-$STD24 vmlinuz24-rd
   85  #     else
   86  #     ln -s "$vmlinuz_dir/"vmlinuz-$STD24 vmlinuz24
   87  #     fi
   88  # fi
   89  # if [ "X$OLD24" != "X" ]; then
   90  #     if [ -f "$vmlinuz_dir/"initrd.img-$OLD24 ] ; then
   91  #     ln -s "$vmlinuz_dir/"initrd.img-$OLD24 initrd24.img.old
   92  #     ln -s "$vmlinuz_dir/"vmlinuz-$OLD vmlinuz24-rd.old
   93  #     else
   94  #     ln -s "$vmlinuz_dir/"vmlinuz-$OLD vmlinuz24.old
   95  #     fi
   96  # fi
   97  
   98  # Run boot loaders here.
   99  #lilo
  100  
  101  rm -f $outfile 
  102  if [ -d /tmp/kernel-image-$version-$$ ]; then
  103      rmdir /tmp/kernel-image-$version-$$
  104  fi
  105  
  106  exit 0

Another point release for Etch has been done; now it's the time for the CD team to roll out new images after the next mirror pulse. The official announcements (prepared by Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, thanks!) will follow shortly afterwards. FTP master of the day was Joerg Jaspert, who did his first point release since Woody, as he told us on IRC. We appreciate your work and you spending your time that shortly before going to Argentina. This point release includes the etchnhalf update introducing a new kernel image (based on 2.6.24) and some driver updates. Additionally the infamous openssl hole will be fixed for good, even for new installs. Again I want to present you a list of people who contributed to this release. It cannot be complete as I got the information out of the Changed-by fields of the uploads.

• akira yamada
• Alexander Sack
• Alexander Schmehl
• A Mennucc1
• Andrea De Iacovo
• Andres Salomon
• Aurelien Jarno
• Charles Plessy
• Christian Perrier
• Christian Welzel
• Colin Watson
• dann frazier (indefatigable kernel worker, most sourceful uploads)
• Darren Salt
• Devin Carraway (3rd place of sourceful uploads, due to security work)
• Emmanuel Lacour
• Eric Dorland
• Fabio Tranchitella
• Faidon Liambotis
• Fathi Boudra
• Florian Weimer
• Francesco Paolo Lovergine
• Francois Marier
• Frank Lichtenheld
• Frans Pop (thanks for your d-i work!)
• Frederic Peters
• Gregory Colpart
• Holger Levsen
• Jan Wagner
• Jay Berkenbilt
• J r my Bobbio
• Joey Hess
• Joey Schulze
• Josselin Mouette
• Julien Cristau
• Kai Hendry
• Kurt Roeckx
• LaMont Jones
• Laszlo Boszormenyi
• Martin Pitt
• maximilian attems
• Michael Biebl
• Michael Koch
• Mike Hommey
• Moritz Muehlenhoff
• Noah Meyerhans
• Ola Lundqvist
• Otavio Salvador
• Patrick Matth i
• Petter Reinholdtsen
• Philipp Kern
• Pierre Habouzit
• Raphael Hertzog
• Rene Engelhard
• Robert Millan
• Roberto Lumbreras
• Roland Mas
• Romain Beauxis
• Russ Allbery
• Sean Finney
• Stefan Fritsch
• Steffen Joeris
• Stephen Gran
• Steve Kemp
• Sune Vuorela
• Thijs Kinkhorst (2nd place of sourceful uploads, due to security work)
• Thomas Viehmann
• Toni Mueller
• Tzafrir Cohen

From the Release Team we had dann frazier (who drove the important kernel part of etchnhalf), Luk Claes, Neil McGovern, Andreas Barth, Martin Zobel-Helas and me working on it. ;-)

We escorted Sarge to its last home. 3.1r8 is done, thanks to all the people who made it possible. A big thanks goes to James Troup, our ftpmaster of the day doing all the grunt work of getting a new point release out of the door. To bring in a more personal feeling of who makes this all possible, here is a list of people contributing uploads to 3.1r8 (mostly people from our fabulous Security Team):

• Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta
• dann frazier
• Darren Salt
• Devin Carraway
• Florian Weimer
• Gregory Colpart
• Julien Cristau (who is glad that he finally got rid of xfree86)
• Luk Claes
• Martin Pitt
• Michael Koch
• Moritz Muehlenhoff
• Noah Meyerhans
• Patrick Schoenfeld
• Roland Mas
• Russ Allbery
• Sean Finney
• Steffen Joeris
• Thijs Kinkhorst

I would also like to thank dann frazier, Luk Claes, Martin Zobel-Helas and Neil McGovern for helping with the preparation of the point release.