NeuroDebian: NeuroDebian@HBM2011.ca
NeuroDebian@HBM2011.ca
On June 26-30 the annual meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping
(HBM2011) took place in Quebec City, Canada. Encouraged by our positive
experience at last year s SfN in San Diego and
enthusiasm of our scientific adviser, James V. Haxby, we hosted another
NeuroDebian booth. The setup was pretty much the same as last year: Some chairs
and tables, lots of people, our tri-fold flyers, a Debian mirror and some
virtual machine images to show Debian in action. This time we also had an LCD
display attracting visitors with the package swarm, some demos, and our recent paper. We had
many curious people have their first exposure to Debian, long-time users
expressing their gratitude to Debian, and our upstream developers getting
together to discuss various topics. Having registered the booth as
NeuroDebian , we had the additional pleasure of explaining visitors the
concept of a project inside Debian, in contrast to a derived distribution.
But that is nothing new really, so let s talk about the differences from last
year s booth.
First of all, we had more people at the booth. Dominique Belhachemi volunteered
to help us out and that was very much appreciated. Although HBM has only
about a tenth of the attendees that SfN has, we had significantly more traffic.
While last year people were primarily interested in knowing about the project,
this time many of them wanted to give it a try immediately. People came with
their laptops, got the VM images and started playing with Debian. After a day
or so, some came back and asked for recommendations on particular software
after having been exposed to the wealth of the Debian archive.
What also had increased was the number of developers, or rather research labs
developing neuroimaging software that came to the booth to discuss how to get
their software into Debian and how to arrange ongoing maintenance of these
future Debian packages. As we have our plates already quite full, we have been spending some time
on mentoring interested developers to learn the art of Debian packaging and
making them familiar with Debian s procedures and standards (e.g. working on
#609820 with Yannick Schwartz, upstream, at the booth).
Two promising new developments need to be mentioned. First, we were approached
by companies that develop hardware for brain-imaging and psychophysics
research. They were curious to learn about Debian as an integrated platform
that offers free software solutions that an increasing amount of their
customers demands (e.g. PsychoPy). Apparently, the movement towards open
research software has finally made it into the business plans of companies, as
they seem to start perceiving compatibility with free software systems as a
competitive advantage. We explained how software gets into Debian, and how its
release cycle is managed. To foster their motivation we also pointed them to
the existing open-source software that is already available or even present in
Debian. Let s see whether we see more Debian-certified research products in
the future.
Lastly, we started talking with folks from the INCF to explore possibilities of
collaborating on INCF projects using Debian as the integration and development
platform. The INCF is an OECD-funded organization that develops collaborative
neuroinformatics infrastructure and promotes the sharing of data and computing
resources to the international research community. At least one INCF project is
already relying on the efforts of the NeuroDebian project. We are going to continue
this discussion during a workshop in September. A report will follow...
Two promising new developments need to be mentioned. First, we were approached
by companies that develop hardware for brain-imaging and psychophysics
research. They were curious to learn about Debian as an integrated platform
that offers free software solutions that an increasing amount of their
customers demands (e.g. PsychoPy). Apparently, the movement towards open
research software has finally made it into the business plans of companies, as
they seem to start perceiving compatibility with free software systems as a
competitive advantage. We explained how software gets into Debian, and how its
release cycle is managed. To foster their motivation we also pointed them to
the existing open-source software that is already available or even present in
Debian. Let s see whether we see more Debian-certified research products in
the future.
Lastly, we started talking with folks from the INCF to explore possibilities of
collaborating on INCF projects using Debian as the integration and development
platform. The INCF is an OECD-funded organization that develops collaborative
neuroinformatics infrastructure and promotes the sharing of data and computing
resources to the international research community. At least one INCF project is
already relying on the efforts of the NeuroDebian project. We are going to continue
this discussion during a workshop in September. A report will follow...
Debian people at the booth (f.l.t.r): Michael Hanke, Yaroslav Halchenko, Stephan Gerhard, Dominique Belhachemi. Not shown: Swaroop Guntupalli.
Acknowledgments
This booth has been made possible by the generous support of Prof.
James V. Haxby (Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA).
Hi, been offline for a while and now after my mid-term exams I m glad to tell that I ll be working on this year s GSoC project called: Compute Clusters Integration for Debian Development and Building . The main idea for this project is to give Debian developers and downstream developers a set of tools for helping them to leverage the power of a cloud-based infrastructure for their development duties. This is specially targeted to porters, multi-arch and cross-development, So I ll ask such teams for feedback on the subject over the next days.
People at Eucalyptus has been very helpful and willing to cooperate with us to make this project a success. We expect to get them involved on the packaging and probably as Debian contributors, if not developers, also. Next week is the official coding phase start, but I ve been talking and working together with my mentor Steffen and the Eucalyptus people already. We ll be starting working on the qemu ARM images, reusing and resuming the job did by Dominique Belhachemi in the past GSoC.
Of course I welcome as much feedback as you might find useful. I plan to post a project update every two weeks.
I d like to extend a warm welcome to our selected students for the 2010 Debian Google Summer of Code!
They should pop up on Debian Planet soon and you re welcome to come talk to them on #debian-soc on irc.debian.org
Aptitude Qt
by Piotr Galiszewski, mentored by Sune Vuorela
Qt GUI for aptitude. Currently, KDE users need to use Aptitude via the console interface, or install the newly developed GTK frontend, which does not fit well into KDE desktop. Making Qt frontend to Aptitude would solve this problem and bring an advanced and fully Debian-compliant graphical package manager to KDE.
Content-aware Config Files Upgrading
by Krzysztof Tyszecki, mentored by Dominique Dumont
When a package deliver configuration files, the problem of merging user data with new configuration instructions will arise during package upgrades on users systems. Sometimes merging can be done with 3 way merge, but this process does not insure that the resulting file is correct or even legal. This project intends to create standards, tools an heuristics to make the scary config file conflict resolution debconf prompt a thing of the past.
Debbugs Bug Reporting and Manipulation API
by David Wendt Jr., mentored by Bastian Venthur
Currently debbugs supports a SOAP interface for querying Debian s Bug Tracking System. Unfortunately this operation is read-only. This project would create an API for debbugs which supports sending and manipulating bug reports, without having to resort to email. This project does not intend to replace email as mean to manipulate the BTS but rather to enhance the BTS to allow other means of bug creation and manipulation.
Debian High Performance Computing on Clouds
by Dominique Belhachemi, mentored by Steffen Moeller
The project paves a way to combine the demands in high performance computing with the dynamics of compute clouds with Debian. Combining the Eucalyptus cloud computing infrastructure with the TORQUE resource manager and preparing the components for dynamically added and removed instances provides the user with a attractive high performance computing environment. Such a system allows users to share resources with large compute centers with minimal changes in their workflow and scripts.
Debian-Installer on Neo FreeRunner and Handheld Devices
by Thibaut Girka, mentored by Gaudenz Steinlin
This project aims to improve the installation experience of Debian on handheld devices by replacing ad-hoc install scripts by a full-blown and adapted Debian-Installer. The Neo FreeRunner is used as it is the most convenient and open device from a development standpoint, but other devices will also be explored.
Hurd port and de-Linux-ization of Debian-Installer
by J r mie Koenig, mentored by Samuel Thibault
The primary means of distributing the Hurd is through Debian GNU/Hurd. However, the installation CDs presently use an ancient, non-native installer. The goal of this project is to port the missing parts of Debian-Installer to Hurd. To achieve this, all problematic Linux-specific code in Debian-Installer will be replaced by less or non-kernel dependent code, paving the way for better support of other non-Linux ports of Debian.
Multi-Arch support in APT
by David Kalnischkies, mentored by Michael Vogt
Hardware like 64bit processors are perfectly able to execute 32bit opcode but until now this potentiality is disregard as the infrastructure tools like dpkg and APT are not able to install and/or solve dependencies across multiple architectures. The project therefore focuses on enabling APT to work out good solutions in a MultiArch aware environments without the need of hacky and partly working biarch packages currently in use.
Package Repository Analysis and Migration Automation
by Ricardo O Donell, mentored by Neil Williams
Emdebian uses a filter to select packages from the main Debian repositories that are considered useful to embedded devices, excluding the majority of packages. The results of processing the filter are automated but maintaining the filter list is manual. This project seeks to automate certain elements of the filtering process to cope with specific conditions. This project will also generalize to more elaborate and intelligent algorithms to improve the transitions of the main Debian archives.
Smart Upload Server for FTP Master
by Petr Jasek, mentored by Joerg Jaspert
Making packages upload smarter, more interactive and painless for uploaders by switching from anonymous FTP and Cron jobs to a robust protocol and modern package checking and processing daemon. This daemon would test early and report early, saving developers time.