I very, very nearly didn t make it to DebConf this year, I had a bad cold/flu for a few days before I left, and after a negative covid-19 test just minutes before my flight, I decided to take the plunge and travel.
This is just everything in chronological order, more or less, it s the only way I could write it.
DebCamp
I planned to spend DebCamp working on various issues. Very few of them actually got done, I spent the first few days in bed further recovering, took a covid-19 test when I arrived and after I felt better, and both were negative, so not sure what exactly was wrong with me, but between that and catching up with other Debian duties, I couldn t make any progress on catching up on the packaging work I wanted to do. I ll still post what I intended here, I ll try to take a few days to focus on these some time next month:
Calamares / Debian Live stuff:
#980209 installation fails at the install boot loader phase
#1021156 calamares-settings-debian: Confusing/generic program names
#681025 Put old themes in a new package named desktop-base-extra
#941642 desktop-base: split theme data files and desktop integrations in separate packages
The Egg theme that I want to develop for testing/unstable is based on Juliette Taka s Homeworld theme that was used for Bullseye. Egg, as in, something that hasn t quite hatched yet. Get it? (for #1038660)
Debian Social:
Set up Lemmy instance
I started setting up a Lemmy instance before DebCamp, and meant to finish it.
Migrate PeerTube to new server
We got a new physical server for our PeerTube instance, we should have more space for growth and it would help us fix the streaming feature on our platform.
Loopy:
I intended to get the loop for DebConf in good shape before I left, so that we can spend some time during DebCamp making some really nice content, unfortunately this went very tumbly, but at least we ended up with a loopy that kind of worked and wasn t too horrible. There s always another DebConf to try again, right?
So DebCamp as a usual DebCamp was pretty much a wash (fitting with all the rain we had?) for me, at least it gave me enough time to recover a bit for DebConf proper, and I had enough time left to catch up on some critical DPL duties and put together a few slides for the Bits from the DPL talk.
DebConf
Bits From the DPL
I had very, very little available time to prepare something for Bits fro the DPL, but I managed to put some slides together (available on my wiki page).
I mostly covered:
A very quick introduction of myself (I ve done this so many times, it feels redundant giving my history every time), and some introduction on what it is that the DPL does. I declared my intent not to run for DPL again, and the reasoning behind it, and a few bits of information for people who may intend to stand for DPL next year.
The sentiment out there for the Debian 12 release (which has been very positive). How we include firmware by default now, and that we re saying goodbye to architectures both GNU/KFreeBSD and mipsel.
Debian Day and the 30th birthday party celebrations from local groups all over the world (and a reminder about the Local Groups BoF later in the week).
I looked forward to Debian 13 (trixie!), and how we re gaining riscv64 as a release architecture, as well as loongarch64, and that plans seem to be forming to fix 2k38 in Debian, and hopefully largely by the time the Trixie release comes by.
I made some comments about Enterprise Linux as people refer to the RHEL eco-system these days, how really bizarre some aspects of it is (like the kernel maintenance), and that some big vendors are choosing to support systems outside of that eco-system now (like CPanel now supporting Ubuntu too). I closed with the quote below from Ian Murdock, and assured the audience that if they want to go out and make money with Debian, they are more than welcome too.
Job Fair
I walked through the hallway where the Job Fair was hosted, and enjoyed all the buzz. It s not always easy to get this right, but this year it was very active and energetic, I hope lots of people made some connections!
Cheese & Wine
Due to state laws and alcohol licenses, we couldn t consume alcohol from outside the state of Kerala in the common areas of the hotel (only in private rooms), so this wasn t quite as big or as fun as our usual C&W parties since we couldn t share as much from our individual countries and cultures, but we always knew that this was going to be the case for this DebConf, and it still ended up being alright.
Day Trip
I opted for the forest / waterfalls daytrip. It was really, really long with lots of time in the bus. I think our trip s organiser underestimated how long it would take between the points on the route (all in all it wasn t that far, but on a bus on a winding mountain road, it takes long). We left at 8:00 and only found our way back to the hotel around 23:30. Even though we arrived tired and hungry, we saw some beautiful scenery, animals and also met indigenous river people who talked about their struggles against being driven out of their place of living multiple times as government invests in new developments like dams and hydro power.
Photos available in the DebConf23 public git repository.
Losing a beloved Debian Developer during DebConf
To our collective devastation, not everyone made it back from their day trips. Abraham Raji was out to the kayak day trip, and while swimming, got caught by a whirlpool from a drainage system.
Even though all of us were properly exhausted and shocked in disbelief at this point, we had to stay up and make some tough decisions. Some initially felt that we had to cancel the rest of DebConf. We also had to figure out how to announce what happened asap both to the larger project and at DebConf in an official manner, while ensuring that due diligence took place and that the family is informed by the police first before making anything public.
We ended up cancelling all the talks for the following day, with an address from the DPL in the morning to explain what had happened. Of all the things I ve ever had to do as DPL, this was by far the hardest. The day after that, talks were also cancelled for the morning so that we could attend his funeral. Dozens of DebConf attendees headed out by bus to go pay their final respects, many wearing the t-shirts that Abraham had designed for DebConf.
A book of condolences was set up so that everyone who wished to could write a message on how they remembered him. The book will be kept by his family.
Today marks a week since his funeral, and I still feel very raw about it. And even though there was uncertainty whether DebConf should even continue after his death, in hindsight I m glad that everyone pushed forward. While we were all heart broken, it was also heart warming to see people care for each other in all of this. If anything, I think I needed more time at DebConf just to be in that warm aura of emotional support for just a bit longer. There are many people who I wanted to talk to who I barely even had a chance to see.
Abraham, or Abru as he was called by some people (which I like because bru in Afrikaans is like bro in English, not sure if that s what it implied locally too) enjoyed artistic pursuits, but he was also passionate about knowledge transfer. He ran classes at DebConf both last year and this year (and I think at other local events too) where he taught people packaging via a quick course that he put together. His enthusiasm for Debian was contagious, a few of the people who he was mentoring came up to me and told me that they were going to see it through and become a DD in honor of him. I can t even remember how I reacted to that, my brain was already so worn out and stitching that together with the tragedy of what happened while at DebConf was just too much for me.
I first met him in person last year in Kosovo, I already knew who he was, so I think we interacted during the online events the year before. He was just one of those people who showed so much promise, and I was curious to see what he d achieve in the future. Unfortunately, we was taken away from us too soon.
Poetry Evening
Later in the week we had the poetry evening. This was the first time I had the courage to recite something. I read Ithaka by C.P. Cavafy (translated by Edmund Keely). The first time I heard about this poem was in an interview with Julian Assange s wife, where she mentioned that he really loves this poem, and it caught my attention because I really like the Weezer song Return to Ithaka and always wondered what it was about, so needless to say, that was another rabbit hole at some point.
Group Photo
Our DebConf photographer organised another group photo for this event, links to high-res versions available on Aigar s website.
BoFs
I didn t attend nearly as many talks this DebConf as I would ve liked (fortunately I can catch up on video, should be released soon), but I did make it to a few BoFs.
In the Local Groups BoF, representatives from various local teams were present who introduced themselves and explained what they were doing. From memory (sorry if I left someone out), we had people from Belgium, Brazil, Taiwan and South Africa. We talked about types of events a local group could do (BSPs, Mini DC, sprints, Debian Day, etc. How to help local groups get started, booth kits for conferences, and setting up some form of calendar that lists important Debian events in a way that makes it easier for people to plan and co-ordinate. There s a mailing list for co-ordination of local groups, and the irc channel is #debian-localgroups on oftc.
If you got one of these Cheese & Wine bags from DebConf, that s from the South African local group!
In the Debian.net BoF, we discussed the Debian.net hosting service, where Debian pays for VMs hosted for projects by individual DDs on Debian.net. The idea is that we start some form of census that monitors the services, whether they re still in use, whether the system is up to date, whether someone still cares for it, etc. We had some discussion about where the lines of responsibility are drawn, and we can probably make things a little bit more clear in the documentation. We also want to offer more in terms of backups and monitoring (currently DDs do get 500GB from rsync.net that could be used for backups of their services though). The intention is also to deploy some form of configuration management for some essentials across the hosts. We should also look at getting some sponsored hosting for this.
In the Debian Social BoF, we discussed some services that need work / expansion. In particular, Matrix keeps growing at an increased rate as more users use it and more channels are bridged, so it will likely move to its own host with big disks soon. We might replace Pleroma with a fork called Akkoma, this will need some more home work and checking whether it s even feasible. Some services haven t really been used (like Writefreely and Plume), and it might be time to retire them. We might just have to help one or two users migrate some of their posts away if we do retire them. Mjolner seems to do a fine job at spam blocking, we haven t had any notable incidents yet. WordPress now has improved fediverse support, it s unclear whether it works on a multi-site instance yet, I ll test it at some point soon and report back. For upcoming services, we are implementing Lemmy and probably also Mobilizon. A request was made that we also look into Loomio.
More Information Overload
There s so much that happens at DebConf, it s tough to take it all in, and also, to find time to write about all of it, but I ll mention a few more things that are certainly worth of note.
During DebConf, we had some people from the Kite Linux team over. KITE supplies the ICT needs for the primary and secondary schools in the province of Kerala, where they all use Linux. They decided to switch all of these to Debian. There was an ad-hoc BoF where locals were listening and fielding questions that the Kite Linux team had. It was great seeing all the energy and enthusiasm behind this effort, I hope someone will properly blog about this!
I learned about the VGLUG Foundation, who are doing a tremendous job at promoting GNU/Linux in the country. They are also training up 50 people a year to be able to provide tech support for Debian.
I came across the booth for Mostly Harmless, they liberate old hardware by installing free firmware on there. It was nice seeing all the devices out there that could be liberated, and how it can breathe new life into old harware.
Some hopefully harmless soldering.
Overall, the community and their activities in India are very impressive, and I wish I had more time to get to know everyone better.
Food
Oh yes, one more thing. The food was great. I tasted more different kinds of curry than I ever did in my whole life up to this point. The lunch on banana leaves was interesting, and also learning how to eat this food properly by hand (thanks to the locals who insisted on teaching me!), it was a fruitful experience? This might catch on at home too less dishes to take care of!
Special thanks to the DebConf23 Team
I think this may have been one of the toughest DebConfs to organise yet, and I don t think many people outside of the DebConf team knows about all the challenges and adversity this team has faced in organising it. Even just getting to the previous DebConf in Kosovo was a long and tedious and somewhat risky process. Through it all, they were absolute pro s. Not once did I see them get angry or yell at each other, whenever a problem came up, they just dealt with it. They did a really stellar job and I did make a point of telling them on the last day that everyone appreciated all the work that they did.
Back to my nest
I bought Dax a ball back from India, he seems to have forgiven me for not taking him along.
I ll probably take a few days soon to focus a bit on my bugs and catch up on my original DebCamp goals. If you made it this far, thanks for reading! And thanks to everyone for being such fantastic people.
On Sunday 17 September 2023, the annual Debian Developers and Contributors
Conference came to a close.
Over 474 attendees representing 35 countries from around the world came
together for a combined 89 events made up of Talks, Discussons, Birds of a
Feather (BoF) gatherings, workshops, and activities in support of furthering
our distribution, learning from our mentors and peers, building our community,
and having a bit of fun.
The conference was preceded by the annual
DebCamp hacking session held September 3d
through September 9th where Debian Developers and Contributors convened to
focus on their Individual Debian related projects or work in team sprints
geared toward in-person collaboration in developing Debian.
In particular this year Sprints took place to advance development in
Mobian/Debian, Reproducible Builds, and Python in Debian. This year also
featured a BootCamp that was held for newcomers staged by a team of
dedicated mentors who shared hands-on experience in Debian and offered a
deeper understanding of how to work in and contribute to the community.
The actual Debian Developers Conference started on Sunday 10 September 2023.
In addition to the traditional 'Bits from the DPL' talk, the continuous
key-signing party, lightning talks and the announcement of next year's
DebConf4, there were several update sessions shared by internal projects and
teams.
Many of the hosted discussion sessions were presented by our technical
teams who highlighted the work and focus of the Long Term Support (LTS),
Android tools, Debian Derivatives, Debian Installer, Debian Image, and the
Debian Science teams. The Python, Perl, and Ruby programming language teams
also shared updates on their work and efforts.
Two of the larger local Debian communities, Debian Brasil and Debian India
shared how their respective collaborations in Debian moved the project
forward and how they attracted new members and opportunities both in
Debian, F/OSS, and the sciences with their HowTos of demonstrated community
engagement.
The schedule
was updated each day with planned and ad-hoc activities introduced by
attendees over the course of the conference. Several activities that were
unable to be held in past years due to the Global COVID-19 Pandemic were
celebrated as they returned to the conference's schedule: a job fair, the
open-mic and poetry night, the traditional Cheese and Wine party, the group
photos and the Day Trips.
For those who were not able to attend, most of the talks and sessions were
videoed for live room streams with the recorded videos to be made available
later through the
Debian meetings archive website.
Almost all of the sessions facilitated remote participation via IRC
messaging apps or online collaborative text documents which allowed remote
attendees to 'be in the room' to ask questions or share comments with the
speaker or assembled audience.
DebConf23 saw over 4.3 TiB of data streamed, 55 hours of scheduled talks,
23 network access points, 11 network switches, 75 kb of equipment imported,
400 meters of gaffer tape used, 1,463 viewed streaming hours, 461 T-shirts,
35 country Geoip viewers, 5 day trips, and an average of 169 meals planned
per day.
All of these events, activies, conversations, and streams coupled with our
love, interest, and participation in Debian annd F/OSS certainly made this
conference an overall success both here in Kochi, India and On-line around
the world.
The DebConf23 website
will remain active for archival purposes and will continue to offer
links to the presentations and videos of talks and events.
Next year, DebConf24 will be held
in Haifa, Israel. As tradition follows before the next DebConf the local
organizers in Israel will start the conference activites with DebCamp with
particular focus on individual and team work towards improving the
distribution.
DebConf is committed to a safe and welcome environment for all
participants. See the
web page about the Code of Conduct in DebConf23 website
for more details on this.
Debian thanks the commitment of numerous sponsors
to support DebConf23, particularly our Platinum Sponsors:
Infomaniak,
Proxmox,
and Siemens.
We also wish to thank our Video and Infrastructure teams, the DebConf23 and
DebConf commitiees, our host nation of India, and each and every person who
helped contribute to this event and to Debian overall.
Thank you all for your work in helping Debian continue to be "The Universal
Operating System".
See you next year!
About Debian
The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly free
community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of the
largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
volunteers from all over the world work together to create and maintain
Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a huge range
of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal operating system.
About DebConf
DebConf is the Debian Project's developer conference. In addition to a
full schedule of technical, social and policy talks, DebConf provides an
opportunity for developers, contributors and other interested people to
meet in person and work together more closely. It has taken place
annually since 2000 in locations as varied as Scotland, Argentina, and
Bosnia and Herzegovina. More information about DebConf is available from
https://debconf.org/.
About Infomaniak
Infomaniak is a key player in the
European cloud market and the leading developer of Web technologies in
Switzerland. It aims to be an independent European alternative to the web
giants and is committed to an ethical and sustainable Web that respects
privacy and creates local jobs. Infomaniak develops cloud solutions (IaaS,
PaaS, VPS), productivity tools for online collaboration and video and radio
streaming services.
About Proxmox
Proxmox develops powerful, yet easy-to-use
open-source server software. The product portfolio from Proxmox, including
server virtualization, backup, and email security, helps companies of any
size, sector, or industry to simplify their IT infrastructures. The Proxmox
solutions are based on the great Debian platform, and we are happy that we
can give back to the community by sponsoring DebConf23.
About Siemens
Siemens is technology company focused on
industry, infrastructure and transport. From resource-efficient factories,
resilient supply chains, smarter buildings and grids, to cleaner and more
comfortable transportation, and advanced healthcare, the company creates
technology with purpose adding real value for customers. By combining the
real and the digital worlds, Siemens empowers its customers to transform
their industries and markets, helping them to enhance the everyday of
billions of people.
Contact Information
For further information, please visit the DebConf23 web page at
https://debconf23.debconf.org/ or send
mail to press@debian.org.
Inspired by the fine Debian Local Groups all over the world, I ve long since wanted to start one in Cape Town. Unfortunately, there s been many obstacles over the years. Shiny distractions, an epidemic, DPL terms these are just some of the things that got in the way.
Fortunately, things are starting to gain traction, and we re well on our way to forming a bona fide local group for South Africa.
We got together at Woodstock Grill, they have both a nice meeting room, and good food and beverage, also reasonably central for most of us.
Cake
Starting with the important stuff, we got this Debian cake made that ended up much bigger than we expected, at least we all got to take some home too! (it tasted great too)
Yes, cake.
Talk
This event was planned very last minute, so we didn t do any kind of RSVP and I had no idea who exactly would show up, so I went ahead and prepared one of my usual introduction to Linux and Debian talks, and how these things are having an impact on the world out there. I also talked a bit about the community and how we intend to grow our local team here in South Africa. It turned out most of the audience were already experienced Linux users, but I was happy to see that they were very enthusiastic about the local group concept!
While reading through some material to find some inspiration for this talk, I came across an old quote from the original Debian Manifesto that I found very poignant again, so I feel compelled to share (didn t use it in my talk this time though since I didn t cover much current events):
The time has come to concentrate on the future of Linux rather than on the destructive goal of enriching oneself at the expense of the entire Linux community and its future. Ian Murdock, 1994
Debian-ZA logo
Tammy spent some time creating a whole bunch of logo concepts, that she presented to us. They aren t meant as final logo choices, but as initial concepts, and they worked well to invoke a very lively discussion about logos and design!
Here are just some of her designs that I cherry picked since they were the most discussed. We still haven t decided if it will be Debian ZA or Debian-ZA or Debian South Africa, although the latter will probably cause least confusion internationally.
Personally, the last one on this image that I referred to as the carpet is my personal favourite :-)
Happy Birthday Song
John and Heila wrote a happy birthday song. After seeing the lyrics (and considering myself an amateur lyricist) I thought it was way too tacky and I told John to put it away. But when the cake came out, someone said we should sing! and the lyrics quickly re-emerged and was handed out to everyone. It s also meant to be a loopy clip for the upcoming DebConf23. I ll concede that it worked out alright in the end! You judge for yourself:
Mousepads
People still use mousepads? That was my initial reaction when Heila told me that she was going to make some commemorative 30 year Debian mousepads for our birthday event, and they ended up being popular. It s probably a safer surface to put dev boards on than on my desk directly, so at least I do have a use for one!
Group Photo
The group photo, complete with disco ball! We should ve taken this earlier because it was already getting late and some people had to head back home. Lesson learned for next time!
30th Birthday Interview with The Changelog
I also did an interview with The Changelog for Debian s 30th birthday. It was late, and I haven t had a chance to listen to it yet, so I hope their producers managed to edit something coherent out of my usual Debian babbling:
More later
There s so much more I d like to say about Debian, the last 30 years, local groups, the eco-system that we find ourselves in. And, Lemmy! But I ll see if I can get an instance up over the weekend and will then talk about that some more another time.
Over 30 years ago the late Ian Murdock
wrote
to the comp.os.linux.development newsgroup about the completion of a brand-new
Linux release which he named "The Debian Linux Release".
He built the release by hand, from scratch, so to speak. Ian laid out
guidelines for how this new release would work, what approach the release
would take regarding its size, manner of upgrades, installation procedures; and
with great care of consideration for users without Internet connection.
Unaware that he had sparked a movement in the fledgling F/OSS community, Ian
worked on and continued to work on Debian. The release, now aided by volunteers
from the newsgroup and around the world, grew and continues to grow as one of
the largest and oldest FREE operating systems that still exist today.
Debian at its core is comprised of Users, Contributors, Developers, and
Sponsors, but most importantly, People. Ians drive and focus remains
embedded in the core of Debian, it remains in all of our work, it remains in
the minds and hands of the users of The Universal Operating System.
The Debian Project is proud and happy to share our anniversary not exclusively
unto ourselves, instead we share this moment with everyone, as we come together
in celebration of a resounding community that works together, effects change,
and continues to make a difference, not just in our work but around the world.
Debian is present in cluster systems, datacenters, desktop computers, embedded
systems, IoT devices, laptops, servers, it may possibly be powering the web
server and device you are reading this article on, and it can also be found in
Spacecraft.
Closer to earth, Debian fully supports projects for accessibility:
Debian Edu/Skolelinux - an operating system
designed for educational use in schools and communities,
Debian Science - providing free
scientific software across many established and emerging fields,
Debian Hamradio - for amateur
radio enthusiasts,
Debian-Accessibility - a
project focused on the design of an operating system suited to fit the
requirements of people with disabilites, and
Debian Astro - focused on supporting
professional and hobbyist astronomers.
Debian strives to give, reach, embrace, mentor, share, and teach with
internships through many programs internally and externally such as the Google
Summer of Code, Outreachy, and the Open Source Promotion Plan.
None of this could be possible without the vast amount of support, care, and
contributions from what started as and is still an all volunteer project.
We celebrate with each and every one who has helped shape Debian over all of
these years and toward the future.
Today we all certainly celebrate 30 years of Debian, but know that Debian
celebrates with each and every one of you all at the same time.
Over the next few days Celebration parties are planned to take place in
Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, France, Germany
(CCCcamp), India, Iran, Portugal, Serbia, South Africa, and Turkey.
You are of course, invited to join us!
Check out, attend, or form your very own
DebianDay 2023 Event.
See you then!
Thank you, thank you all so very much.
With Love,
The Debian Project
Debian Project Bits
Volume 1, Issue 1August 05, 2023
Welcome to the inaugural issue of Debian Project Bits!
Those remembering the Debian Weekly News (DwN) will recognize some of the sections here which served as our inspiration.
Debian Project Bits posts will allow for a faster turnaround of some project
news on a monthly basis. The Debian Micronews
service will continue to share shorter news items, the Debian Project News
remains as our official newsletter which may move to a biannual archive format.
News
Debian Day
The Debian Project was officially
founded by Ian Murdock on August 16,
1993. Since then we have celebrated our Anniversary of that date each year with
events around the world. We would love it if you could join our revels
this very special year as we have the honor of turning 30!
Attend or organize a local Debian Day
celebration. You're invited to plan your own event: from Bug Squashing parties
to Key Signing parties, Meet-Ups, or any type of social event whether large or
small. And be sure to check our Debian reimbursement How
To if you need such
resources.
You can share your days, events, thoughts, or notes with us and the
rest of the community with the #debianday tag that will be used across most
social media platforms. See you then!
Events: Upcoming and Reports
Upcoming
Debian 30 anos
The Debian Brasil Community is organizing the
event Debian 30 anos to
celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Debian Project.
From August 14 to 18, between 7pm and 22pm (UTC-3) contributors will talk
online in Portuguese and we will live stream on
Debian Brasil YouTube channel.
DebConf23: Debian Developers Camp and Conference
The 2023 Debian Developers Camp (DebCamp) and Conference
(DebConf23) will be hosted this year in
Infopark, Kochi, India.
DebCamp is slated to run from September 3 through 9, immediately followed by
the larger DebConf, September 10 through 17.
If you are planning on attending the conference this year, now is the time to
ensure your travel documentation, visa
information,
bursary submissions, papers and relevant equipment are prepared. For more
information contact: debconf@debconf.
MiniDebConf Cambridge 2023
There will be a
MiniDebConf
held in Cambridge, UK, hosted by ARM for 4 days in November: 2 days for a
mini-DebCamp (Thu 23 - Fri 24), with space for dedicated development / sprint /
team meetings, then two days for a more regular MiniDebConf (Sat 25 - Sun 26)
with space for more general talks, up to 80 people.
Reports
During the last months, the Debian Community has organized some Bug Squashing Parties:
Tilburg, Netherlands. October 2022.
St-Cergue, Switzerland. January 2023
Montreal, Canada. February 2023
In January, Debian India hosted the MiniDebConf Tamil Nadu in Viluppuram, Tamil Nadu, India (Sat 28 - Sun 26).
The following month, the MiniDebConf Portugal 2023 was held in Lisbon (12 - 16 February 2023).
These events, seen as a stunning success by some of their attendees, demonstrate the vitality of
our community.
Debian Brasil Community at Campus Party Brazil 2023
Another edition of Campus Party Brazil
took place in the city of S o Paulo between July 25th and 30th. And one more
time the Debian Brazil Community was present. During the days in the available
space, we carry out some activities such as:
Gifts for attendees (stickers, cups, lanyards);
Workshop on how to contribute to the translation team;
Workshop on packaging;
Key signing party;
Information about the project;
For more info and a few photos, check out the organizers'
report.
MiniDebConf Bras lia 2023
From May 25 to 27, Bras lia hosted the MiniDebConf Bras lia
2023. This gathering was composed of
various activities such as talks, workshops, sprints, BSPs (Bug Squashing
Party), key signings, social events, and hacking, aimed to bring the community
together and celebrate the world's largest Free Software project: Debian.
For more information please see the
full report
written by the organizers.
Debian Reunion Hamburg 2023
This year the annual Debian Reunion Hamburg
was held from Tuesday 23 to 30 May starting with four days of
hacking followed by two days of talks, and then two more days of hacking. As
usual, people - more than forty-five attendees from Germany, Czechia, France,
Slovakia, and Switzerland - were happy to meet in person, to hack and chat
together, and much more. If you missed the live streams, the
video recordings
are available.
Translation workshops from the pt_BR team
The Brazilian translation team, debian-l10n-portuguese, had their first workshop
of 2023 in February with great results. The workshop was aimed at beginners,
working in DDTP/DDTSS.
For more information please see the full
report
written by the organizers.
And on June 13 another workshop took place to translate
The Debian Administrator's Handbook). The main
goal was to show beginners how to collaborate in the translation of this
important material, which has existed since 2004. The manual's translations
are hosted on
Weblate.
Releases
Stable Release
Debian 12 bookworm was released on
June 10, 2023. This new version
becomes the stable release of Debian and moves the prior Debian 11
bullseye release to
oldstable status. The Debian
community celebrated the release with 23
Release Parties all around the
world.
Bookworm's first point release 12.1
address miscellaneous bug fixes affecting 88 packages, documentation, and
installer updates was made available on July 22,
2023.
RISC-V support
riscv64 has recently been added to the
official Debian architectures for support of 64-bit little-endian
RISC-V hardware running the Linux kernel. We expect
to have full riscv64 support in Debian 13 trixie. Updates on bootstrap,
build daemon, porterbox, and development progress were recently shared by the
team in a Bits from the Debian riscv64 porters
post.
non-free-firmware
The Debian 12 bookworm archive now includes non-free-firmware; please be
sure to update your apt sources.list if your systems requires such components
for operation. If your previous sources.list included non-free for this
purpose it may safely be removed.
apt sources.list
The Debian archive holds several components:
main: Contains
DFSG-compliant packages,
which do not rely on software outside this area to operate.
contrib:
Contains packages that contain DFSG-compliant software, but have dependencies
not in main.
non-free:
Contains software that does not comply with the DFSG.
non-free-firmware: Firmware that is otherwise not part of the Debian system
to enable use of Debian with hardware that requires such firmware.
For more information and guidelines on proper configuration of the apt
source.list file please see the Configuring Apt Sources -
Wiki page.
Inside Debian
New Debian Members
Please welcome the following newest Debian Project Members:
Marius Gripsgard (mariogrip)
Mohammed Bilal (rmb)
Emmanuel Arias (amanu)
Robin Gustafsson (rgson)
Lukas M rdian (slyon)
David da Silva Polverari (polverari)
To find out more about our newest members or any Debian Developer, look
for them on the Debian People list.
Security
Debian's Security Team releases current advisories on a daily basis.
Some recently released advisories concern these packages:
trafficserver
Several vulnerabilities were discovered in Apache Traffic Server, a
reverse and forward proxy server, which could result in information
disclosure or denial of service.
asterisk
A flaw was found in Asterisk, an Open Source Private Branch Exchange. A
buffer overflow vulnerability affects users that use PJSIP DNS resolver.
This vulnerability is related to CVE-2022-24793. The difference is that
this issue is in parsing the query record parse_query(), while the issue
in CVE-2022-24793 is in parse_rr(). A workaround is to disable DNS
resolution in PJSIP config (by setting nameserver_count to zero) or use
an external resolver implementation instead.
flask
It was discovered that in some conditions the Flask web framework may
disclose a session cookie.
chromium
Multiple security issues were discovered in Chromium, which could result
in the execution of arbitrary code, denial of service or information
disclosure.
Other
Popular packages
gpgv - GNU privacy guard
signature verification tool. 99,053 installations.
gpgv is actually a stripped-down version of gpg which
is only able to check signatures. It is somewhat smaller than the fully-blown
gpg and uses a different (and simpler) way to check that the public keys used
to make the signature are valid. There are no configuration files and only a
few options are implemented.
dmsetup - Linux Kernel Device
Mapper userspace library. 77,769 installations.
The Linux Kernel Device Mapper is the LVM (Linux
Logical Volume Management) Team's implementation of a minimalistic kernel-space
driver that handles volume management, while keeping knowledge of the
underlying device layout in user-space. This makes it useful for not only LVM,
but software raid, and other drivers that create "virtual" block devices.
sensible-utils - Utilities
for sensible alternative selection. 96,001 daily users.
This package provides a number of small utilities which
are used by programs to sensibly select and spawn an appropriate browser,
editor, or pager. The specific utilities included are: sensible-browser
sensible-editor sensible-pager.
popularity-contest -
The popularity-contest package. 90,758 daily users.
The popularity-contest package sets up a cron job that
will periodically anonymously submit to the Debian developers statistics about
the most used Debian packages on the system. This information helps Debian
make decisions such as which packages should go on the first CD. It also lets
Debian improve future versions of the distribution so that the most popular
packages are the ones which are installed automatically for new users.
New and noteworthy packages in unstable
Toolkit for scalable simulation of distributed applications
SimGrid is a toolkit that provides core
functionalities for the simulation of distributed applications in heterogeneous
distributed environments. SimGrid can be used as a Grid simulator, a P2P
simulator, a Cloud simulator, a MPI simulator, or a mix of all of them. The
typical use-cases of SimGrid include heuristic evaluation, application
prototyping, and real application development and tuning. This package
contains the dynamic libraries and runtime.
LDraw mklist program
3D CAD programs and rendering programs using the LDraw
parts library of LEGO parts rely on a file called parts.lst containing a list
of all available parts. The program ldraw-mklist is used to generate this list
from a directory of LDraw parts.
Open Lighting Architecture - RDM Responder Tests
The DMX512 standard for Digital MultipleX is used for
digital communication networks commonly used to control stage lighting and
effects. The Remote Device Management protocol is an extension to DMX512,
allowing bi-directional communication between RDM-compliant devices without
disturbing other devices on the same connection. The Open Lighting
Architecture (OLA) provides a plugin framework for distributing DMX512 control
signals. The ola-rdm-tests package provides an automated way to check protocol
compliance in RDM devices.
parsec-service
Parsec is an abstraction layer that can be used to
interact with hardware-backed security facilities such as the Hardware Security
Module (HSM), the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), as well as firmware-backed and
isolated software services. The core component of Parsec is the security
service, provided by this package. The service is a background process that
runs on the host platform and provides connectivity with the secure facilities
of that host, exposing a platform-neutral API that can be consumed into
different programming languages using a client library. For a client library
implemented in Rust see the package librust-parsec-interface-dev.
Simple network calculator and lookup tool
Process and lookup network addresses from the command
line or CSV with ripalc. Output has a variety of customisable formats.
High performance, open source CPU/GPU miner and RandomX benchmark
XMRig is a high performance, open source, cross
platform RandomX, KawPow, CryptoNight, and GhostRider unified CPU/GPU miner and
RandomX benchmark.
Ping, but with a graph - Rust source code
This package contains the source for the Rust gping
crate, packaged by debcargo for use with cargo and dh-cargo.
Once upon a time in Debian:
2014-07-31 The Technical committee choose
libjpeg-turbo
as the default JPEG decoder.
2010-08-01
DebConf10 starts New York City, USA
2007-08-05
Debian Maintainers approved by vote
2009-08-05 Jeff Chimene files bug
#540000 against
live-initramfs.
Calls for help
The Publicity team calls for volunteers and help!
Your Publicity team is asking for help from you our readers, developers, and
interested parties to contribute to the Debian news effort. We implore you to
submit items that may be of interest to our community and also ask for your
assistance with translations of the news into (your!) other languages along
with the needed second or third set of eyes to assist in editing our work
before publishing. If you can share a small amount of your time to aid our
team which strives to keep all of us informed, we need you. Please reach out
to us via IRC on #debian-publicity
on OFTC.net, or our public mailing list,
or via email at press@debian.org for sensitive or
private inquiries.
On Sunday 24 July 2022, the annual Debian Developers and
Contributors Conference came to a close.
Hosting 260 attendees
from 38 different countries over a combined 91 event talks, discussion
sessions, Birds of a Feather (BoF) gatherings, workshops, and
activities, DebConf22 was a large
success.
The conference was preceded by the annual DebCamp held 10 July to 16
July which focused on individual work and team sprints for in-person
collaboration towards developing Debian. In particular, this year there
have been sprints to advance development of Mobian/Debian on mobile,
reproducible builds and Python in Debian, and a BootCamp for newcomers,
to get introduced to Debian and have some hands-on experience with using
it and contributing to the community.
The actual Debian Developers Conference started on Sunday 17 July 2022.
Together with activities such as the traditional 'Bits from the DPL'
talk, the continuous key-signing party, lightning talks
and the announcement of next year's DebConf
(DebConf23 in Kochi, India),
there were several sessions related to programming language teams such as
Python, Perl and Ruby, as well as news updates on several projects and
internal Debian teams, discussion sessions (BoFs) from many technical
teams (Long Term Support, Android tools, Debian Derivatives, Debian
Installer and Images team, Debian Science...) and local communities
(Debian Brasil, Debian India, the Debian Local Teams),
along with many other events of interest regarding Debian and free software.
The schedule
was updated each day with planned and ad-hoc activities introduced by attendees
over the course of the entire conference. Several activities that couldn\'t be
organized in past years due to the COVID pandemic returned to the
conference\'s schedule: a job fair, open-mic and poetry night, the
traditional Cheese and Wine party, the group photos and the Day Trip.
For those who were not able to attend, most of the talks and sessions were
recorded for live streams with videos made,
available through the
Debian meetings archive website.
Almost all of the sessions facilitated remote participation via IRC messaging
apps or online collaborative text documents.
The DebConf22 website
will remain active for archival purposes and will continue to offer
links to the presentations and videos of talks and events.
Next year, DebConf23 will be held in Kochi, India,
from September 10 to September 16, 2023.
As tradition follows before the next DebConf the local organizers in India
will start the conference activites with DebCamp (September 03 to September 09, 2023),
with particular focus on individual and team work towards improving the distribution.
DebConf is committed to a safe and welcome environment for all
participants.
See the web page about the Code of Conduct in DebConf22 website
for more details on this.
Debian thanks the commitment of numerous sponsors
to support DebConf22, particularly our Platinum Sponsors:
Lenovo,
Infomaniak,
ITP Prizren
and Google.
About Debian
The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly free
community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of the
largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
volunteers from all over the world work together to create and maintain
Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a huge range
of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal operating system.
About DebConf
DebConf is the Debian Project's developer conference. In addition to a
full schedule of technical, social and policy talks, DebConf provides an
opportunity for developers, contributors and other interested people to
meet in person and work together more closely. It has taken place
annually since 2000 in locations as varied as Scotland, Argentina, and
Bosnia and Herzegovina. More information about DebConf is available from
https://debconf.org/.
About Lenovo
As a global technology leader manufacturing a wide portfolio of
connected products, including smartphones, tablets, PCs and workstations
as well as AR/VR devices, smart home/office and data center solutions,
Lenovo understands how critical open systems
and platforms are to a connected world.
About Infomaniak
Infomaniak is Switzerland\'s largest
web-hosting company, also offering backup and storage services,
solutions for event organizers, live-streaming and video on demand
services. It wholly owns its datacenters and all elements critical to
the functioning of the services and products provided by the company
(both software and hardware).
About ITP Prizren
Innovation and Training Park Prizren intends
to be a changing and boosting element in the area of ICT, agro-food and
creatives industries, through the creation and management of a
favourable environment and efficient services for SMEs, exploiting
different kinds of innovations that can contribute to Kosovo to improve
its level of development in industry and research, bringing benefits to
the economy and society of the country as a whole.
About Google
Google is one of the largest technology companies
in the world, providing a wide range of Internet-related services and
products such as online advertising technologies, search, cloud
computing, software, and hardware.
Google has been supporting Debian by sponsoring DebConf for more than
ten years, and is also a Debian partner sponsoring parts of
Salsa's continuous integration
infrastructure within Google Cloud Platform.
Contact Information
For further information, please visit the DebConf22 web page at
https://debconf22.debconf.org/ or send mail to press@debian.org.
On Saturday 28 August 2021, the annual Debian Developers
and Contributors Conference came to a close.
DebConf21 has been held online for the second time, due to the coronavirus
(COVID-19) disease pandemic.
All of the sessions have been streamed, with a variety of ways of participating:
via IRC messaging, online collaborative text documents,
and video conferencing meeting rooms.
With 740 registered attendees from more than 15 different countries and a
total of over 70 event talks, discussion sessions,
Birds of a Feather (BoF) gatherings and other activities,
DebConf21 was a large success.
The setup made for former online events involving Jitsi, OBS,
Voctomix, SReview, nginx, Etherpad, a web-based
frontend for voctomix has been improved and used for DebConf21 successfully.
All components of the video infrastructure are free software, and configured through the
Video Team's public ansible repository.
The DebConf21 schedule included
a wide variety of events, grouped in several tracks:
Introduction to Free Software and Debian,
Packaging, policy, and Debian infrastructure,
Systems administration, automation and orchestration,
Cloud and containers,
Security,
Community, diversity, local outreach and social context,
Internationalization, Localization and Accessibility,
Embedded and Kernel,
Debian Blends and Debian derived distributions,
Debian in Arts and Science
and other.
The talks have been streamed using two rooms, and several of these activities
have been held in different languages: Telugu, Portuguese, Malayalam, Kannada,
Hindi, Marathi and English, allowing a more diverse audience to enjoy and participate.
Between talks, the video stream has been showing the usual sponsors on the loop, but also
some additional clips including photos from previous DebConfs, fun facts about Debian
and short shout-out videos sent by attendees to communicate with their Debian friends.
The Debian publicity team did the usual live coverage to encourage participation
with micronews announcing the different events. The DebConf team also provided several
mobile options to follow the schedule.
For those who were not able to participate, most of the talks and sessions are already
available through the
Debian meetings archive website,
and the remaining ones will appear in the following days.
The DebConf21 website
will remain active for archival purposes and will continue to offer
links to the presentations and videos of talks and events.
Next year, DebConf22 is planned to be held
in Prizren, Kosovo, in July 2022.
DebConf is committed to a safe and welcome environment for all participants.
During the conference, several teams (Front Desk, Welcome team and Community team)
have been available to help so participants get their best experience
in the conference, and find solutions to any issue that may arise.
See the web page about the Code of Conduct in DebConf21 website
for more details on this.
Debian thanks the commitment of numerous sponsors
to support DebConf21, particularly our Platinum Sponsors:
Lenovo,
Infomaniak,
Roche,
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
and Google.
About Debian
The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and
supporting a huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the
universal operating system.
About DebConf
DebConf is the Debian Project's developer conference. In addition to a
full schedule of technical, social and policy talks, DebConf provides an
opportunity for developers, contributors and other interested people to
meet in person and work together more closely. It has taken place
annually since 2000 in locations as varied as Scotland, Argentina, and
Bosnia and Herzegovina. More information about DebConf is available from
https://debconf.org/.
About Lenovo
As a global technology leader manufacturing a wide portfolio of connected products,
including smartphones, tablets, PCs and workstations as well as AR/VR devices,
smart home/office and data center solutions, Lenovo
understands how critical open systems and platforms are to a connected world.
About Infomaniak
Infomaniak is Switzerland's largest web-hosting company,
also offering backup and storage services, solutions for event organizers,
live-streaming and video on demand services.
It wholly owns its datacenters and all elements critical
to the functioning of the services and products provided by the company
(both software and hardware).
About Roche
Roche is a major international
pharmaceutical provider and research company dedicated to personalized
healthcare. More than 100.000 employees worldwide work towards solving some
of the greatest challenges for humanity using science and technology. Roche
is strongly involved in publicly funded collaborative research projects with
other industrial and academic partners and have supported DebConf since 2017.
About Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the world's
most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform,
offering over 175 fully featured services from data centers globally
(in 77 Availability Zones within 24 geographic regions).
AWS customers include the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises
and leading government agencies.
About Google
Google is one of the largest technology companies in the
world, providing a wide range of Internet-related services and products such
as online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, software, and hardware.
Google has been supporting Debian by sponsoring DebConf for more than
ten years, and is also a Debian partner sponsoring parts
of Salsa's continuous integration infrastructure
within Google Cloud Platform.
Contact Information
For further information, please visit the DebConf21 web page at
https://debconf21.debconf.org/
or send mail to press@debian.org.
28 today. In a video call for Debian day earlier on, I was reminiscing about the earliest distributions: MCC Interim Linux gave instructions to turn it's final version into Debian. Debian is the second oldest Linux distribution, just behind Slackware.Debian 1.2 was my first Debian: my latest is, obviously, Debian Bullseye. Debian is like a family - often discordant, sometimes dysfunctional but always full of people that care and are cared for. I wish that some of my friends and colleagues no longer with us could be here to see just how well we're doing.This is something that's been with me for so long that I can't imagine life without it: software, obscure hardware but above all friends closer than family. The biggest software project anywhere, potentially, and it's all for free - and 95.7% independently reproducible. Thanks to all my colleagues and co-workers who've become friends over the years without whom none of this would be possible. Oh, and thanks to Ian Murdock - I never got to meet him but I did get to email him when he was in charge of Progeny. Without him, none of this would even have started.
On Saturday 29 August 2020, the annual Debian Developers
and Contributors Conference came to a close.
DebConf20 has been held online for the first time, due to the coronavirus
(COVID-19) disease pandemic.
All of the sessions have been streamed, with a variety of ways of participating:
via IRC messaging, online collaborative text documents,
and video conferencing meeting rooms.
With more than 850 attendees from 80 different countries and a
total of over 100 event talks, discussion sessions,
Birds of a Feather (BoF) gatherings and other activities,
DebConf20 was a large success.
When it became clear that DebConf20 was going to be an online-only
event, the DebConf video team spent much time over the next months to
adapt, improve, and in some cases write from scratch, technology that
would be required to make an online DebConf possible. After lessons
learned from the MiniDebConfOnline in late May, some adjustments were
made, and then eventually we came up with a setup involving Jitsi, OBS,
Voctomix, SReview, nginx, Etherpad, and a newly written web-based
frontend for voctomix as the various elements of the stack.
All components of the video infrastructure are free software, and the
whole setup is configured through their public
ansible repository.
The DebConf20 schedule included
two tracks in other languages than English: the Spanish language MiniConf,
with eight talks in two days,
and the Malayalam language MiniConf, with nine talks in three days.
Ad-hoc activities, introduced by attendees over the course of the entire conference,
have been possible too, streamed and recorded. There have also been several
team gatherings to sprint on certain Debian development areas.
Between talks, the video stream has been showing the usual sponsors on the loop, but also
some additional clips including photos from previous DebConfs, fun facts about Debian
and short shout-out videos sent by attendees to communicate with their Debian friends.
For those who were not able to participate, most of the talks and sessions are already
available through the
Debian meetings archive website,
and the remaining ones will appear in the following days.
The DebConf20 website
will remain active for archival purposes and will continue to offer
links to the presentations and videos of talks and events.
Next year, DebConf21 is planned to be held
in Haifa, Israel, in August or September.
DebConf is committed to a safe and welcome environment for all participants.
During the conference, several teams (Front Desk, Welcome team and Community team)
have been available to help so participants get their best experience
in the conference, and find solutions to any issue that may arise.
See the web page about the Code of Conduct in DebConf20 website
for more details on this.
Debian thanks the commitment of numerous sponsors
to support DebConf20, particularly our Platinum Sponsors:
Lenovo,
Infomaniak,
Google
and
Amazon Web Services (AWS).
About Debian
The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and
supporting a huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the
universal operating system.
About DebConf
DebConf is the Debian Project's developer conference. In addition to a
full schedule of technical, social and policy talks, DebConf provides an
opportunity for developers, contributors and other interested people to
meet in person and work together more closely. It has taken place
annually since 2000 in locations as varied as Scotland, Argentina, and
Bosnia and Herzegovina. More information about DebConf is available from
https://debconf.org/.
About Lenovo
As a global technology leader manufacturing a wide portfolio of connected products,
including smartphones, tablets, PCs and workstations as well as AR/VR devices,
smart home/office and data center solutions, Lenovo
understands how critical open systems and platforms are to a connected world.
About Infomaniak
Infomaniak is Switzerland's largest web-hosting company,
also offering backup and storage services, solutions for event organizers,
live-streaming and video on demand services.
It wholly owns its datacenters and all elements critical
to the functioning of the services and products provided by the company
(both software and hardware).
About Google
Google is one of the largest technology companies in the
world, providing a wide range of Internet-related services and products such
as online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, software, and hardware.
Google has been supporting Debian by sponsoring DebConf for more than
ten years, and is also a Debian partner sponsoring parts
of Salsa's continuous integration infrastructure
within Google Cloud Platform.
About Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the world's
most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platforms,
offering over 175 fully featured services from data centers globally
(in 77 Availability Zones within 24 geographic regions).
AWS customers include the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises
and leading government agencies.
Contact Information
For further information, please visit the DebConf20 web page at
https://debconf20.debconf.org/
or send mail to press@debian.org.
DebConf4
This tshirt is 16 years old and from DebConf4. Again, I should probably wash it at 60 celcius for once...
DebConf4 was my 2nd DebConf and took place in Porto Alegre, Brasil.
Like many DebConfs, it was a great opportunity to meet people:
I remember sitting in the lobby of the venue and some guy asked me what I did in Debian and I told
him about my little involvements and then asked him what he was doing, and he told me he wanted to
become involved in Debian again, after getting distracted away. His name was Ian Murdock...
DebConf4 also had a very cool history session in the hallway track (IIRC, but see below) with
Bdale Garbee, Ian Jackson and Ian Murdock and with a young student named Biella Coleman busy writing notes.
That same hallway also saw the kickoff meeting of the Debian Women project, though sadly
today http://tinc.debian.net ("there's no cabal") only shows an apache placeholder page and not
a picture of that meeting.
DebCon4 was also the first time I got a bit involved in preparing DebConf, together with
Jonas Smedegaard I've set up some computers there, using FAI. I had no idea that this was
the start of me contributing to DebConfs for text ten years.
And of course I also saw some talks, including one which I really liked, which then in turn made
me notice there were no people doing video recordings, which then lead to something...
I missed the group picture of this one. I guess it's important to me to mention it because
I've met very wonderful people at this DebConf... (some mentioned in this post, some not. You know
who you are!)
Afterwards some people stayed in Porto Alegre for FISL,
where we saw Lawrence Lessing present Creative Commons to the world for the first time. On the flight
back I sat next to a very friendly guy from Poland and we talked almost the whole flight and then
we never saw each other again, until 15 years later in Asia...
Oh, and then, after DebConf4, I used IRC for the first time. And stayed in the #debconf4 IRC channel
for quite some years
Finally, DebConf4 and more importantly FISL, which was really big (5000 people?) and after that,
the wizard of OS conference in Berlin
(which had a very nice talk about Linux in different places in the world, illustrating the
different states of 'first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win'),
made me quit my job at a company supporting Windows- and Linux-setups as I realized I'd better
start freelancing with Linux-only jobs. So, once again, my life would have been different
if I would not have attended these events!
Note: yesterdays post about DebConf3 was thankfully corrected twice. This might well happen
to this post too!
Things mostly went very well, and we've released Debian 9 this
weekend past. Many many people worked together to
make this possible, and I'd like to extend my own thanks to all of
them.
As a project, we decided to dedicate Stretch to our late founder
Ian Murdock. He did much of the early work to get Debian going, and
inspired many more to help him. I had the good fortune to meet up with
Ian years ago at a meetup attached to a Usenix conference, and I
remember clearly he was a genuinely nice guy with good ideas. We'll
miss him.
For my part in the release process, again I was responsible for
producing our official installation and live images. Release day
itself went OK, but as is typical the process ran late into Saturday
night / early Sunday morning. We made and tested lots
of different images, although numbers were down from previous releases
as we've stopped making the full CD sets now.
Sunday was the day for the release party in Cambridge. As is
traditional, a group of us met up at a local hostelry for some
revelry! We hid inside the pub to escape from the ridiculouly hot
weather we're having at the moment.
Due to a combination of the lack of sleep and the heat, I nearly
forgot to even take any photos - apologies to the extra folks who'd
been around earlier whom I missed with the camera... :-(
Congratulations to everyone who has played a part in the creation of Debian GNU/Linux 9.0! It s a great release, I ve installed the pre-release versions for friends, family and colleagues and so far the feedback has been very positive.
This release is dedicated to Ian Murdock, who founded the Debian project in 1993, and sadly passed away on 28 December 2015. On the Debian ISO files a dedication statement is available on /doc/dedication/dedication-9.0.txt
Here s a copy of the dedication text:
Dedicated to Ian Murdock
------------------------
Ian Murdock, the founder of the Debian project, passed away
on 28th December 2015 at his home in San Francisco. He was 42.
It is difficult to exaggerate Ian's contribution to Free
Software. He led the Debian Project from its inception in
1993 to 1996, wrote the Debian manifesto in January 1994 and
nurtured the fledgling project throughout his studies at
Purdue University.
Ian went on to be founding director of Linux International,
CTO of the Free Standards Group and later the Linux
Foundation, and leader of Project Indiana at Sun
Microsystems, which he described as "taking the lesson
that Linux has brought to the operating system and providing
that for Solaris".
Debian's success is testament to Ian's vision. He inspired
countless people around the world to contribute their own free
time and skills. More than 350 distributions are known to be
derived from Debian.
We therefore dedicate Debian 9 "stretch" to Ian.
-- The Debian Developers
During this development cycle, the amount of source packages in Debian grew from around 21 000 to around 25 000 packages, which means that there s a whole bunch of new things Debian can make your computer do. If you find something new in this release that you like, post about it on your favourite social networks, using the hashtag #newinstretch or look it up to see what others have discovered!
Congratulations to everyone who has played a part in the creation of Debian GNU/Linux 9.0! It s a great release, I ve installed the pre-release versions for friends, family and colleagues and so far the feedback has been very positive.
This release is dedicated to Ian Murdock, who founded the Debian project in 1993, and sadly passed away on 28 December 2015. On the Debian ISO files a dedication statement is available on /doc/dedication/dedication-9.0.txt
Here s a copy of the dedication text:
Dedicated to Ian Murdock
------------------------
Ian Murdock, the founder of the Debian project, passed away
on 28th December 2015 at his home in San Francisco. He was 42.
It is difficult to exaggerate Ian's contribution to Free
Software. He led the Debian Project from its inception in
1993 to 1996, wrote the Debian manifesto in January 1994 and
nurtured the fledgling project throughout his studies at
Purdue University.
Ian went on to be founding director of Linux International,
CTO of the Free Standards Group and later the Linux
Foundation, and leader of Project Indiana at Sun
Microsystems, which he described as "taking the lesson
that Linux has brought to the operating system and providing
that for Solaris".
Debian's success is testament to Ian's vision. He inspired
countless people around the world to contribute their own free
time and skills. More than 350 distributions are known to be
derived from Debian.
We therefore dedicate Debian 9 "stretch" to Ian.
-- The Debian Developers
During this development cycle, the amount of source packages in Debian grew from around 21 000 to around 25 000 packages, which means that there s a whole bunch of new things Debian can make your computer do. If you find something new in this release that you like, post about it on your favourite social networks, using the hashtag #newinstretch or look it up to see what others have discovered!
Today it is 23 years ago since Ian Murdock published his intention to
develop a new Linux distribution, Debian. It also about 20 years since
I became a Debian developer and made my first package upload.
In the time since:
I've retired a couple of times, to pursue other interests, and then
un-retired.
I've maintained a bunch of different packages, most importantly the
PGP2 software in the 90s. (I now only maintain software for which
I'm also upstream, in order to make jokes about my upstream being an
unco-operative jerk, and my packager being unhelpful in the
extreme.)
Got kicked out from the Debian mailing lists for insulting another
developer. Not my proudest moment. I was allowed back later, and
I've tried to be polite ever since. (See also
rules 6.)
I've been to a few Debconfs (3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 15). I'm looking
forward to going to many more in the future. It's clear that seeing
many project members at least every now and then has a very big
impact on project cohesion.
I had a gig where I was paid to improve the technical quality of
Debian. After a few months of bug fixing (which isn't my favourite
pastime), I wrote piuparts in order to find new bugs. (I gave that
project away many years ago, but it seems to still be going strong.)
I've almost ran for DPL twice, but I'm glad I didn't actually. I've
carefully avoided any positions of power or responsibility in the
project. (I live in fear that someone decides to nominate me for
something where I'd actually have make important decisions.)
Not being responsible means I can just ignore the project for a
while when something annoying happens. (Or retire again.) With such
a large project, eventually something really annoying does happen.
Came up with the DEP process with Zack and Dato. I also ran the
second half of the DEP5 process to get the debian/copyright machine
readable format accepted. (I'm no longer involved, though, and I
don't think DEP is much now.)
I've taught several workshops about Debian packaging, including
online for Debian-Women. It's always fun when others "get" how easy
packaging really is, despite all the efforts of the larger variety
in tooling and random web pages go to to obscure the fundamental
simplicity.
Over the years 've enjoyed many of the things developed within
Debian (without claiming any credit for myself):
the policy manual, perhaps the most important technical
achievement of the project
the social contract and Debian free software guidelines,
unarguably the most important non-technical achievements of the
project
the whole package management system, but especially apt
debhelper's dh, which made the work of packaging simple cases so
easy it's nearly a no-brainer
d-i made me not hate installing Debian (although I think
time is getting ripe to replace d-i with something new; catch me in
a talkative mood at party to hear more)
Debian-Women made an almost immediate improvement to the culture
of the larger project (even if there's still much too few women
developers)
the diversity statement made me a lot happier about being a
project member.
I'd like to thank everyone who's worked on these and made them
happen. These are important milestones in Debian.
I've opened my mount in a lot of places over the years, which means
a lot of people know of me, but nobody can actually point at
anything useful I've actually done. Which is why when I've given
talks at, say, FOSDEM, I get introduced as "the guy who shared an
office with Linus Torvalds a long time ago".
I've made a number of friends via participation in Debian. I've
found jobs via contacts in Debian, and have even started a side
business with someone.
It's been a good twenty years. And the fun ain't over yet.
More than 6months since I am Debian Developer and I m learning new things every day and trying to organize my time better to accomplish all the things I would like to do.
In September I became publicity delegate (and we joined Press+Publicity into the Publicity team). We continued discussing how the team works, and hopefully revitalizing it.
I became more active in the IRC channel, installed quassel in my home server and then I could read all the backlog too.
I ve tried to contribute more to Debian Project News (less than I d like), to bits.debian.org and to the social networks (Pump.io and GNU Social).
Since November I ve been failing to call for meeting but finally on 2016/02/29 we had it. I hope to resume semi-regular meetings each 1-2 months.
At the beginning of the year I helped to handle all the news and announcements about the loss of Ian Murdock. It has been hard work but I feel that I could turn some of the sadness into something useful for others. There is still work to be done: parse the condolence emails and setup a website to publish them.
About bits.debian.org, DPN and announcements, I ve learned how to perform the parts of the work that require membership permissions (building the blog, actually publishing the announcement, sending the DPN/announcement mail to the corresponding lists). Not without mistakes, but I guess no matter how much you care, sometimes things happen, and then you learn and then things get better and you too.
Some things I discovered
Installing quassel server and clients and getting addicted to IRC It s not that I chat so much, but I read the backlog of the channels where I am, and it s hard for me to leave a channel once I join, even if I joined just to ask something and they already answered.
Writing (correct) English is harder for me than what I imagined. Not here or by mail or in IRC, but when I have to create some news for DPN or bits, it takes much time and I doubt in many cases. I trust in the reviews by debian-l10n-english team, and thank them very much, but I also feel a bit ashamed of my broken English. OTOH, note that we have few native English speakers in the Publicity (and website) team. Please consider joining (Publicity or L10n-English) and helping with the reviews! That helps not only to get good quality content in Debian, that also helps non-English speakers to contribute more ideas or paragraphs, because we can trust in somebody reviewing our work.
It s hard for me to call for meetings, proposing dates/times. We are very dispersed geographically so I usually come up with long tables with lots of days and times proposed, and I think it does not help. OTOH setting a fixed time can systematically leave out people from certain timezones, and I feel that s very sad. I suppose I need to try to offer few options and if I see no agreements, then extend.
Some clarifications
I ve written hard word 4 times in this post (well, 5 now!) but that does not mean I don t want to do those tasks. I feel going out of my comfort zone and that s ok, needed to learn and experience. I m having a good time in Debian in the last months, as always!
We re 4 people delegated and more team members and contributors, so anybody could think: Publicity is well covered, let s go to do other things in Debian . It s perfectly ok if you want to do other things in Debian, but please consider combining your contributions with some minutes for the publicity team. Aiming to be the universal operating system, our community and target audience is big and diverse and we d like to show that diversity to the world. The more we are, the merrier!
It's that time of the year where I go to FOSDEM (Free and Open Source
Software Developers' European Meeting). The keynotes and the maintracks are
very good, with good presentations and contents.
It's very dificult to choose what talks to see, what talks to see later in
video and what talks to loose. What I leave here is my selection of talks. This
selection is representative of my tastes, not of the quality of the
presentations. I will give links for material that is available now. I will do
periodic updates when the new material is available: video or slides.
Would you like to hike a mountain? That question caught me by surprise. It was early in 2000, and I had flown to Tucson for a job interview. Ian Murdock was starting a new company, Progeny, and I was being interviewed for their first hire.
Well, I thought, hiking will be fun. So we rode a bus or something to the top of the mountain and then hiked down. Our hike was full of well, everything. Ian talked about Tucson and the mountains, about his time as the Debian project leader, about his college days. I asked about the plants and such we were walking past. We talked about the plans for Progeny, my background, how I might fit in. It was part interview, part hike, part two geeks chatting. Ian had no HR telling him you can t go hiking down a mountain with a job candidate, as I m sure HR would have. And I am glad of it, because even 16 years later, that is still by far the best time I ever had at a job interview, despite the fact that it ruined the only pair of shoes I had brought along I had foolishly brought dress shoes for a, well, job interview.
I guess it worked, too, because I was hired. Ian wanted to start up the company in Indianapolis, so over the next little while there was the busy work of moving myself and setting up an office. I remember those early days Ian and I went computer shopping at a local shop more than once to get the first workstations and servers for the company. Somehow he had found a deal on some office space in a high-rent office building. I still remember the puzzlement on the faces of accountants and lawyers dressed up in suits riding in the elevators with us in our shorts and sandals, or tie-die, next to them.
Progeny s story was to be a complicated one. We set out to rock the world. We didn t. We didn t set out to make lasting friendships, but we often did. We set out to accomplish great things, and we did some of that, too.
We experienced a full range of emotions there elation when we got hardware auto-detection working well or when our downloads looked very popular, despair when our funding didn t come through as we had hoped, being lost when our strategy had to change multiple times. And, as is the case everywhere, none of us were perfect.
I still remember the excitement after we published our first release on the Internet. Our little server that could got pegged at 100Mb of outbound bandwidth (that was something for a small company in those days.) The moment must have meant something, because I still have the mrtg chart from that day on my computer, 15 years later.
We made a good Linux distribution, an excellent Debian derivative, but commercial success did not flow from it. In the succeeding months, Ian and the company tried hard to find a strategy that would stick and make our big break. But that never happened. We had several rounds of layoffs when hoped-for funding never materialized. Ian eventually lost control of the company, and despite a few years of Itanium contract work after I left, closed for good.
Looking back, Progeny was life compressed. During the good times, we had joy, sense of accomplishment, a sense of purpose at doing something well that was worth doing. I had what was my dream job back then: working on Debian as I loved to do, making the world a better place through Free Software, and getting paid to do it. And during the bad times, different people at Progeny experienced anger, cynicism, apathy, sorrow for the loss of our friends or plans, or simply a feeling to soldier on. All of the emotions, good or bad, were warranted in their own way.
Bruce Byfield, one of my co-workers at Progeny, recently wrote a wonderful memoriam of Ian. He wrote, More than anything, he wanted to repeat his accomplishment with Debian, and, naturally he wondered if he could live up to his own expectations of himself. That, I think, was Ian s personal tragedy that he had succeeded early in life, and nothing else he did with his life could quite measure up to his expectations and memories.
Ian was not the only one to have some guilt over Progeny. I, for years, wondered if I should have done more for the company, could have saved things by doing something more, or different. But I always came back to the conclusion I had at the time: that there was nothing I could do a terribly sad realization.
In the years since, I watched Ubuntu take the mantle of easy-to-install Debian derivative. I saw them reprise some of the ideas we had, and even some of our mistakes. But by that time, Progeny was so thoroughly forgotten that I doubt they even realized they were doing it.
I had long looked at our work at Progeny as a failure. Our main goal was never accomplished, our big product never sold many copies, our company eventually shuttered, our rock-the-world plan crumpled and forgotten. And by those traditional measurements, you could say it was a failure.
But I have come to learn in the years since that success is a lot more that those things. Success is also about finding meaning and purpose through our work. As a programmer, success is nailing that algorithm that lets the application scale 10x more than before, or solving that difficult problem. As a manager, success is helping team members thrive, watching pieces come together on projects that no one person could ever do themselves. And as a person, success comes from learning from our experiences, and especially our mistakes. As J. Michael Straczynski wrote in a Babylon 5 episode, loosely paraphrased: Maybe this experience will be a good lesson. Too bad it was so painful, but there ain t no other kind.
The thing about Progeny is this Ian built a group of people that wanted to change the world for the better. We gave it our all. And there s nothing wrong with that.
Progeny did change the world. As us Progeny alumni have scattered around the country, we benefit from the lessons we learned there. And many of us were different , sort of out of place before Progeny, and there we found others that loved C compilers, bootloaders, and GPL licenses just as much as we did. We belonged, not just online but in life, and we went on to pull confidence and skill out of our experience at Progeny and use them in all sorts of ways over the years.
And so did Ian. Who could have imagined the founder of Debian and Progeny would one day lead the cause of an old-guard Unix turning Open Source? I run ZFS on my Debian system today, and Ian is partly responsible for that and his time at Progeny is too.
So I can remember Ian, and Progeny, as a success. And I leave you with a photo of my best memento from the time there: an original unopened boxed copy of Progeny Linux.
This version 0.1 of Twitterwatch is dedicated to Ian Murdock, Debian project Founder.
If you use an automated system like Feed2tweet in order to feed your Twitter account from your website of any RSS feed, it is of the utmost important to know when this system is broken, because you are losing traffic because of this malfunction.
At the Journal du hacker, a French-speaking FOSS website where people contribute weblinks like Hacker News or Lobste.rs, every new contribution is sent through the RSS feed to the Twitter account of the Journal du hacker. A lot of our readers only follow the news on Twitter. So if the link breaks, our readers are not fed any more :)
To be alerted to this issue, I wrote a small self hosted and documented app. I m proud to introduce Twitterwatch !
The most difficult part is now complete. To launch Twitterwatch, just launch the following command:
$ twitterwatch /path/to/twitterwatch.ini
Whenever no more new tweet is sent from your Twitter account during 60 minutes, you ll receive the following mail (here the user is @journalduhacker):
Title: Twitter stream of journalduhacker has stopped
Body: Twitter stream of journalduhacker has stopped since 23/12/2015 - 14:49:23
It is still pretty rough, but it does the job. New features will come whenever I need them (or if you require/open bugs/submit push requests ;) ). Write a comment to tell me what you think of it or why you use it!
(You can Follow or Tweet about this blog on Twitter)
Over the last week, people have been saying a lot about the wonderful life of Ian Murdock and his contributions to Debian and the world of free software. According to one news site, a San Francisco police officer, Grace Gatpandan, has been doing the opposite, starting a PR spin operation, leaking snippets of information about what may have happened during Ian's final 24 hours. Sadly, these things are now starting to be regurgitated without proper scrutiny by the mainstream press (note the erroneous reference to SFGate with link to SFBay.ca, this is British tabloid media at its best).
The report talks about somebody (no suggestion that it was even Ian) "trying to break into a residence". Let's translate that from the spin-doctor-speak back to English: it is the silly season, when many people have a couple of extra drinks and do silly things like losing their keys. "a residence", or just their own home perhaps? Maybe some AirBNB guest arriving late to the irritation of annoyed neighbours? Doesn't the choice of words make the motive sound so much more sinister? Nobody knows the full story and nobody knows if this was Ian, so snippets of information like this are inappropriate, especially when somebody is deceased.
Did they really mean to leave people with the impression that one of the greatest visionaries of the Linux world was also a cat burglar? That somebody who spent his life giving selflessly and generously for the benefit of the whole world (his legacy is far greater than Steve Jobs, as Debian comes with no strings attached) spends the Christmas weekend taking things from other people's houses in the dark of the night? The report doesn't mention any evidence of a break-in or any charges for breaking-in.
If having a few drinks and losing your keys in December is such a sorry state to be in, many of us could potentially be framed in the same terms at some point in our lives. That is one of the reasons I feel so compelled to write this: somebody else could be going through exactly the same experience at the moment you are reading this. Any of us could end up facing an assault as unpleasant as the tweets imply at some point in the future. At least I can console myself that as a privileged white male, the risk to myself is much lower than for those with mental illness, the homeless, transgender, Muslim or black people but as the tweets suggest, it could be any of us.
The story reports that officers didn't actually come across Ian breaking in to anything, they encountered him at a nearby street corner. If he had weapons or drugs or he was known to police that would have almost certainly been emphasized. Is it right to rush in and deprive somebody of their liberties without first giving them an opportunity to identify themselves and possibly confirm if they had a reason to be there?
The report goes on, "he was belligerent", "he became violent", "banging his head" all by himself. How often do you see intelligent and successful people like Ian Murdock spontaneously harming themselves in that way? Can you find anything like that in any of the 4,390 Ian Murdock videos on YouTube? How much more frequently do you see reports that somebody "banged their head", all by themselves of course, during some encounter with law enforcement? Do police never make mistakes like other human beings?
If any person was genuinely trying to spontaneously inflict a head injury on himself, as the police have suggested, why wouldn't the police leave them in the hospital or other suitable care? Do they really think that when people are displaying signs of self-harm, rounding them up and taking them to jail will be in their best interests?
Now, I'm not suggesting this started out with some sort of conspiracy. Police may have been at the end of a long shift (and it is a disgrace that many US police are not paid for their overtime) or just had a rough experience with somebody far more sinister. On the other hand, there may have been a mistake, gaps in police training or an inappropriate use of a procedure that is not always justified, like a strip search, that causes profound suffering for many victims.
A select number of US police forces have been shamed around the world for a series of incidents of extreme violence in recent times, including the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, shooting Walter Scott in the back, death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore and the attempts of Chicago's police to run an on-shore version of Guantanamo Bay. Beyond those highly violent incidents, the world has also seen the abuse of Ahmed Mohamed, the Muslim schoolboy arrested for his interest in electronics and in 2013, the suicide of Aaron Swartz which appears to be a direct consequence of the "Justice" department's obsession with him.
What have the police learned from all this bad publicity? Are they changing their methods, or just hiring more spin doctors? If that is their response, then doesn't it leave them with a cruel advantage over those people who were deceased?
Isn't it standard practice for some police to simply round up anybody who is a bit lost and write up a charge sheet for resisting arrest or assaulting an officer as insurance against questions about their own excessive use of force?
When British police executed Jean Charles de Menezes on a crowded tube train and realized they had just done something incredibly outrageous, their PR office went to great lengths to try and protect their image, even photoshopping images of Menezes to make him look more like some other suspect in a wanted poster. To this day, they continue to refer to Menezes as a victim of the terrorists, could they be any more arrogant? While nobody believes the police woke up that morning thinking "let's kill some random guy on the tube", it is clear they made a mistake and like many people (not just police), they immediately prioritized protecting their reputation over protecting the truth.
Nobody else knows exactly what Ian was doing and exactly what the police did to him. We may never know. However, any disparaging or irrelevant comments from the police should be viewed with some caution.
The horrors of incarceration
It would be hard for any of us to understand everything that an innocent person goes through when detained by the police. The recently released movie about The Stanford Prison Experiment may be an interesting place to start, a German version produced in 2001, Das Experiment, is also very highly respected.
The United States has the largest prison population in the world and the second-highest per-capita incarceration rate. Many, including some on death row, are actually innocent, in the wrong place at the wrong time, without the funds to hire an attorney. The system, and the police and prison officers who operate it, treat these people as packages on a conveyor belt, without even the most basic human dignity. Whether their encounter lasts for just a few hours or decades, is it any surprise that something dies inside them when they discover this cruel side of American society?
Worldwide, there is an increasing trend to make incarceration as degrading as possible. People may be innocent until proven guilty, but this hasn't stopped police in the UK from locking up and strip-searching over 4,500 children in a five year period, would these children go away feeling any different than if they had an encounter with Jimmy Saville or Rolf Harris? One can only wonder what they do to adults.
What all this boils down to is that people shouldn't really be incarcerated unless it is clear the danger they pose to society is greater than the danger they may face in a prison.
What can people do for Ian and for justice?
Now that these unfortunate smears have appeared, it would be great to try and fill the Internet with stories of the great things Ian has done for the world. Write whatever you feel about Ian's work and your own experience of Debian.
While the circumstances of the final tweets from his Twitter account are confusing, the tweets appear to be consistent with many other complaints about US law enforcement. Are there positive things that people can do in their community to help reduce the harm?
Sending books to prisoners (the UK tried to ban this) can make a difference. Treat them like humans, even if the system doesn't.
Recording incidents of police activities can also make a huge difference, such as the video of the shooting of Walter Scott or the UK police making a brutal unprovoked attack on a newspaper vendor. Don't just walk past a situation and assume everything is under control. People making recordings may find themselves in danger, it is recommended to use software that automatically duplicates each recording, preferably to the cloud, so that if the police ask you to delete such evidence, you can let them watch you delete it and still have a copy.
Can anybody think of awards that Ian Murdock should be nominated for, either in free software, computing or engineering in general? Some, like the prestigious Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering can't be awarded posthumously but others may be within reach. Come and share your ideas on the debian-project mailing list, there are already some here.
Best of all, Ian didn't just build software, he built an organization, Debian. Debian's principles have helped to unite many people from otherwise different backgrounds and carry on those principles even when Ian is no longer among us. Find out more, install it on your computer or even look for ways to participate in the project.
It is with great sadness that I learned of the passing of Ian Murdock. I have never had the chance to meet him. Several persons testify for his kindness and talent. We will always remember him. His legacy influences our lives everyday!
Looking at his latest blog posts, he seemed a bitnostalgic about Debian and still very proud of it.
Later, he wrote about how he came to find Linux and the importance of telling the story of hackers of his generation. In his memory, I'll reread Stephen Levy s Hackers for the nth time too.
I very, very nearly didn t make it to DebConf this year, I had a bad cold/flu for a few days before I left, and after a negative covid-19 test just minutes before my flight, I decided to take the plunge and travel.
This is just everything in chronological order, more or less, it s the only way I could write it.
If you got one of these Cheese & Wine bags from DebConf, that s from the South African local group!
Some hopefully harmless soldering.
DebConf4
This tshirt is 16 years old and from DebConf4. Again, I should probably wash it at 60 celcius for once...
Finally, DebConf4 and more importantly FISL, which was really big (5000 people?) and after that,
the 
Things mostly went very well, and we've released Debian 9 this
weekend past. Many many people worked together to
make this possible, and I'd like to extend my own thanks to all of
them.
As a project, we decided to dedicate Stretch to our late founder
Ian Murdock. He did much of the early work to get Debian going, and
inspired many more to help him. I had the good fortune to meet up with
Ian years ago at a meetup attached to a Usenix conference, and I
remember clearly he was a genuinely nice guy with good ideas. We'll
miss him.
For my part in the release process, again I was responsible for
producing our official installation and live images. Release day
itself went OK, but as is typical the process ran late into Saturday
night / early Sunday morning. We made and tested lots
of different images, although numbers were down from previous releases
as we've stopped making the full CD sets now.
Sunday was the day for the release party in Cambridge. As is
traditional, a group of us met up at a local hostelry for some
revelry! We hid inside the pub to escape from the ridiculouly hot
weather we're having at the moment.
Due to a combination of the lack of sleep and the heat, I nearly
forgot to even take any photos - apologies to the extra folks who'd
been around earlier whom I missed with the camera... :-(
Today it is 23 years ago since Ian Murdock published his intention to
develop a new Linux distribution, Debian. It also about 20 years since
I became a Debian developer and made my first package upload.
In the time since:
It is with great sadness that I learned of the passing of Ian Murdock. I have never had the chance to meet him. Several persons testify for his kindness and talent. We will always remember him. His legacy influences our lives everyday!