Search Results: "Ian Murdock"

22 August 2024

Debian Brasil: Debian Day 2024 em Natal/RN - Brasil

por Allythy O Debian Day um evento anual que celebra o anivers rio do Debian, uma das distribui es GNU/Linux mais importante do Software Livre, criada em 16 de Agosto de 1993, por Ian Murdock. No ltimo s bado (17/08/2024) no Sebrae-RN comemoramos os 31 anos Debian em Natal, no Rio Grande do Norte. A celebra o, foi organizada pela PotiLivre(Comunidade Potiguar de Software Livre), destacou os 31 anos de hist ria do Debian. O evento contou com algumas palestras e muitas discuss es sobre Software Livre. Tivemos 70 inscri es, 40 estiverem presentes. O Debian Day em Natal foi uma ocasi o para celebrar a trajet ria do Debian e refor ar a import ncia do Software Livre. Palestrantes Agradecemos imensamente a Isaque Barbosa Martins, Eduardo de Souza Paix o, Fernando Guisso,que palestraram nessa edi o! Obrigado por compartilhar tanto conhecimento com a comunidade. Esperamos ver voc s novamente em futuros encontros! foto da palestra conhecendo projeto Debian Link dos slides do Debian Day Participantes Um grande obrigado tamb m a todos os participantes, n s fazemos isso por voc s! Esperamos que tenham aprendido, se divertido e feito novas conex es entre a comunidade Participantes do Debian Day Natal-RN Essa edi o do Debina Day Natal foi organizada por: Allythy, Clara Nobre, Gabriel Damazio e Marcel Ribeiro.

10 August 2024

Bits from Debian: DebConf24 closes in Busan and DebConf25 dates announced

DebConf24 group photo - click to enlarge On Saturday 3 August 2024, the annual Debian Developers and Contributors Conference came to a close. Over 339 attendees representing 48 countries from around the world came together for a combined 108 events made up of more than 50 Talks and Discussions, 37 Birds of a Feather (BoF informal meeting between developers and users) sessions, 12 workshops, and activities in support of furthering our distribution and free software (25 patches submitted to the Linux kernel), 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 July 21st through July 27th 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. This year featured a BootCamp that was held for newcomers with a GPG Workshop and a focus on Introduction to creating .deb files (Debian packaging) 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 July 28 2024. In addition to the traditional 'Bits from the DPL' talk, the continuous key-signing party, lightning talks and the announcement of next year's DebConf25, there were several update sessions shared by internal projects and teams. Many of the hosted discussion sessions were presented by our technical core teams with the usual and useful meet the Technical Committee and the ftpteam and a set of BoFs about packaging policy and Debian infrastructure, including talk about APT and Debian Installer and an overview about the first eleven years of Reproducible Builds. Internationalization and localization have been subject of several talks. The Python, Perl, Ruby, and Go programming language teams, as well as Med team, also shared updates on their work and efforts. More than fifteen BoFs and talks about community, diversity and local outreach highlighted the work of various team involved in the social aspect of our community. This year again, Debian Brazil shared strategy and action to attract and retain new contributors and members and opportunities both in Debian and F/OSS. The schedule was updated each day with planned and ad-hoc activities introduced by attendees over the course of the conference. Several traditional activities took place: a job fair, a poetry performance, 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 broadcast live and recorded and the videos made available through a link in their summary in the schedule. 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. DebConf24 saw over 6.8 TiB (4.3 TiB in 2023) of data streamed, 91.25 hours (55 in 2023) of scheduled talks, 20 network access points, 1.6 km fibers (1 broken fiber...) and 2.2 km UTP cable deployed, more than 20 country Geoip viewers, 354 T-shirts, 3 day trips, and up to 200 meals planned per day. All of these events, activities, conversations, and streams coupled with our love, interest, and participation in Debian and F/OSS certainly made this conference an overall success both here in Busan, South Korea and online around the world. The DebConf24 website will remain active for archival purposes and will continue to offer links to the presentations and videos of talks and events. Next year, DebConf25 will be held in Brest, France, from Monday, July 7 to Monday, July 21, 2025. As tradition follows before the next DebConf the local organizers in France will start the conference activities 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 DebConf24 website for more details on this. Debian thanks the commitment of numerous sponsors to support DebConf24, particularly our Platinum Sponsors: Infomaniak, Proxmox, and Wind River. We also wish to thank our Video and Infrastructure teams, the DebConf24 and DebConf committees, our host nation of South Korea, 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, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and India. More information about DebConf is available from https://debconf.org/. About Infomaniak Infomaniak is an independent cloud service provider recognized throughout Europe for its commitment to privacy, the local economy and the environment. Recording growth of 18% in 2023, the company is developing a suite of online collaborative tools and cloud hosting, streaming, marketing and events solutions. Infomaniak uses exclusively renewable energy, builds its own data centers and develops its solutions in Switzerland, without relocating. The company powers the website of the Belgian radio and TV service (RTBF) and provides streaming for more than 3,000 TV and radio stations in Europe. About Proxmox Proxmox provides powerful and user-friendly Open Source server software. Enterprises of all sizes and industries use Proxmox solutions to deploy efficient and simplified IT infrastructures, minimize total cost of ownership, and avoid vendor lock-in. Proxmox also offers commercial support, training services, and an extensive partner ecosystem to ensure business continuity for its customers. Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH was established in 2005 and is headquartered in Vienna, Austria. Proxmox builds its product offerings on top of the Debian operating system. About Wind River Wind River For nearly 20 years, Wind River has led in commercial Open Source Linux solutions for mission-critical enterprise edge computing. With expertise across aerospace, automotive, industrial, telecom, and more, the company is committed to Open Source through initiatives like eLxr, Yocto, Zephyr, and StarlingX. Contact Information For further information, please visit the DebConf24 web page at https://debconf24.debconf.org/ or send mail to press@debian.org.

21 September 2023

Jonathan Carter: DebConf23

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
  • #1037299 Install Debian -> Untrusted application launcher
  • #1037123 Minimal HD space required too small for some live images
  • #971003 Console auto-login doesn t work with sysvinit
At least Calamares has been trixiefied in testing, so there s that! Desktop stuff:
  • #1038660 please set a placeholder theme during development, different from any release
  • #1021816 breeze: Background image not shown any more
  • #956102 desktop-base: unwanted metadata within images
  • #605915 please mtheake it a non-native package
  • #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 -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.

18 September 2023

Bits from Debian: DebConf23 closes in Kochi and DebConf24 announced

DebConf23 group photo - click to enlarge 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.

17 August 2023

Jonathan Carter: Debian 30th Birthday: Local Group event and Interview

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.

16 August 2023

Bits from Debian: Debian Celebrates 30 years!

Debian 30 years by Jeff Maier 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

5 August 2023

Bits from Debian: Debian Project Bits Volume 1, Issue 1


Debian Project Bits Volume 1, Issue 1 August 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: 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: Example of the sources.list file
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm main
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm main
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/ bookworm-security main
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/ bookworm-security main
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates main
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates main
Example using the components:
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm main non-free-firmware
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm main non-free-firmware
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/ bookworm-security main non-free-firmware
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/ bookworm-security main non-free-firmware
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates main non-free-firmware
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates main non-free-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: 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.

25 July 2022

Bits from Debian: DebConf22 closes in Prizren and DebConf23 dates announced

DebConf22 group photo - click to enlarge 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.

9 September 2021

Bits from Debian: DebConf21 online closes

DebConf21 group photo - click to enlarge 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: 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.

16 August 2021

Andrew Cater: Happy Birthday, Debian!

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.

30 August 2020

Bits from Debian: DebConf20 online closes

DebConf20 group photo - click to enlarge 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.

2 August 2020

Holger Levsen: 20200802-debconf4

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! :)

20 June 2017

Steve McIntyre: So, Stretch happened...

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. Party 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... :-(

18 June 2017

Jonathan Carter: Debian 9 is available!

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!

17 June 2017

Jonathan Carter: Debian 9 is available!

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!

16 August 2016

Lars Wirzenius: 20 years ago I became a Debian developer

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's been a good twenty years. And the fun ain't over yet.

7 March 2016

Laura Arjona Reina: More involved in the Debian Publicity team

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 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!
Comments?
You can comment about this blog post in this pump.io thread.

Filed under: My experiences and opinion Tagged: Communities, Contributing to libre software, Debian, Developer motivations, English, Free Software

9 February 2016

Jose M. Calhariz: A Selection of Talks from FOSDEM 2016

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.

4 January 2016

John Goerzen: Hiking a mountain with Ian Murdock

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. Progeny's Bandwidth Chart 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. IMG_6197_v1

3 January 2016

Carl Chenet: To be alerted if no more tweet is sent from your Twitter account: Twitterwatch

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 ! It runs with Python 3.4 and the Tweepy library. You can install it from PyPI or from sources. The documentation is available on Readthedocs. You can read about how to install it, configure it and use it. It s the first release but the main features do the job already. In order to use it, you need a twitterwatch.ini file as following:
[twitter]
consumer_key=ml6jaiBnf3pkU9uIrKNIxAr3o
consumer_secret=4Cmljklzerkhfer4hlj3ljl2hfvc123rezrfsdatpokaelzerp
access_token=213416790-jgJnrJG5gz132nzerl5zerwi1ahmnwkfJFN9nr2j
access_token_secret=WjanlPgqDKlunJ4Knr11k2bnfk3jfnwkFjeriFZERj16Z
[schedule]
; duration between 2 checks in minutes
check_interval=60
[mail]
host=localhost
from=admin@myserver.org
to=foo@mylaptop.org
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!

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