I have recently switched my http server from Apache to nginx. The switch was mostly painless thanks to the good documentation available on the nginx wiki. I have been able to move all my public virtual hosts, and have already noticed the improvement on how fast the pages load. Here is a sample graph of the disk I/O rates of my linode showing before/after the switch to nginx: I only had an issue with StatusNet due to the default behavior of spawn-cgi to not spawn any PHP child except if told otherwise. I also had to fix the OpenID plugin for WordPress, as per this commit. For now, I keep apache running for the DSPAM Web UI, which requires suexec. I know I can easily run the CGI through a different user, but still have to polish my setup for FastCGI.

After using identi.ca microblogging patform for 2 years or so, I have recently decided to set up my own StatusNet instance to benefit from the power of federation. The setup is quite easy, but I still have some tuning left. Most of the plugins I have tried (XMPP, realtime and twitter bridge) were very resource intensive, especially for my tiny virtual server, I hence had to disable them. I can live without them. You can now follow my dents on sn.kirya.net. If you were following me on identi.ca, please update your subscription, the account will remain there but I do not expect to use it anymore. The current problems with identi.ca show how important federation and decentralization are. My timeline is very quiet for now though, I encourage more people to setup their own instances.

After using identi.ca microblogging patform for 2 years or so, I have recently decided to set up my own StatusNet instance to benefit from the power of federation. The setup is quite easy, but I still have some tuning left. Most of the plugins I have tried (XMPP, realtime and twitter bridge) were very resource intensive, especially for my tiny virtual server, I hence had to disable them. I can live without them. You can now follow my dents on sn.kirya.net. If you were following me on identi.ca, please update your subscription, the account will remain there but I do not expect to use it anymore. The current problems with identi.ca show how important federation and decentralization are. My timeline is very quiet for now though, I encourage more people to setup their own instances.

Since the 3.5.0 release, Openbox automatically starts applications with .desktop files in /etc/xdg/autostart. This was already the case with previous releases when setting the . $GLOBALAUTOSTART instruction in the autostart script. This instruction is now deprecated. This has puzzled me as some applications were started twice in my Openbox session: those launched via my ~/.config/openbox/autostart script which are also launched through xdg autostart. I also like to use notify-osd when in openbox, but it seems the new gnome-fallback session requires notification-daemon. In my Openbox session, I have noticed that notification-daemon was launched whereas my autostart script specifies to use notify-osd. I then discovered that /etc/xdg/autostart/notification-daemon.desktop was the cause of this. I had to drop a notification-daemon.desktop file in my ~/.config/autostart/ directory with the following contents: The last two lines allow me to not start notification-daemon only when using Openbox ie. it still starts automatically when launching a GNOME session. You can check what applications are automatically started through xdg with: The results are quite amazing, most applications being only configured to start in GNOME or KDE, but nothing seems to be very coordinated amongst maintainers. I find this quite misleading, and would prefer openbox to stick with the previous default behaviour. Who said diehard ?!

As I own several more or less recent laptops, some of their features require updated/new kernel modules to work as expected. I have hence decided to create Debian packages for them, primarily for my own use. Note that these packages are meant to be used with caution, I have only tested them on my own hardware, and they would deserve more careful review. All -source and -dkms packages are available in my personal repository for Debian sid. The sources are maintained in git, as usual.

• rts5139
  This new module is already in linux-next and adds support for recent 5129/39 Realtek card readers.
• psmouse-elantech
  This is the psmouse module with basic v3 hardware support for newer devices not currently supported by the in-tree module.
  See the discussion at #633595 for more information.
• acerhdf
  The in-tree acerhdf module doesn t support the BIOS version 1.3314 of my Aspire 1810TZ, while the module available at http://www.piie.net/?section=acerhdf does. I have hence packaged this version, and even submitted a one-line patch upstream which has been accepted for linux 3.1. My first (tiny) contribution!
• omnibook
  I have also taken the time to update the omnibook package. The project is still unmaintained upstream, but I have git commit access, hence if anybody is interested in taking over

The DSPAM project has recently released the 3.10.0 version of free content-based spam filter. Besides various bug fixes, the most important change is the switch to the AGPL-3 license (from GPL-2). The Debian packages are almost ready, but still require further testing as they have been largely amended, especially to add multiarch support. I expect to upload them to unstable within the next week or so, and, if no major problem happens in the meantime, will upload them to squeeze-backports as soon as they reach testing.

Thanks to Lars Wirzenius who has written a nice how-to on GnuPG subkeys on the Debian wiki, I am now using a signing subkey. If you happen to have my key 0x258E26B1 in your public keyring, please update it: This will allow me to keep my master private key offline while still being able to sign mail or Debian packages for upload.

When I installed my new laptop, I decided to switch from sleepd to GNOME Power Manager (GPM). The rationale behind this decision was to get screen dimming for free while keeping other features because GPM uses UPower which uses pm-suspend and pm-powersave behind the scene. This means that it is easy to execute scripts on suspend or when the AC is unplugged by putting them in /etc/pm. I don t use a full GNOME desktop. My desktop is running FVWM which is just a window manager. However, I already use some parts of the GNOME environment:

• GDM as a display manager because it is the only one that is able to handle ConsoleKit correctly. This means that GDM is able to register your session to ConsoleKit and make it active. Without that, you won t be considered as the user sitting in front of the screen and DBus won t allow you to interact with most of your hardware unless you add yourself to a lot of groups. ConsoleKit enables the at_console property used by most policies.
• Network Manager to handle both wired and wireless connections. Connecting to some random AP using only command line tools is rather cumbersome (assume that the AP is using WPA). Connecting to a broadband network with a 3G dongle is even more cumbersome.
• GNOME bluetooth applet because interacting with BlueZ bluetooth stack is now done with DBus only and the command line tools have been removed. Therefore, you need to write your own tools or use this small applet that do most of the work for you.

What s working It happens that most of the features just do not work. However, suspend when closing the lid works fine. The icon in the systray works fine too (but there is a small bug). The screen dimming feature on idle also works (but there are annoying bugs with it). The visual feedback when pressing brightness keys works too.

What s not working It seems that I am not the only one to have problem with GPM: there are currently 115 bugs opened in the Debian BTS. If you want to get some debug output from gnome-power-manager, run it with --verbose flag. --debug flag does nothing (and supersedes --verbose).

Nothing happens when pressing the power button I have configured GPM to ask me what to do when I press the power button. But when I press the button, nothing happens. Looking at the source, here is the snippet of code that is executed:

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if (policy == GPM_ACTION_POLICY_INTERACTIVE) GpmSession *session; egg_debug ("logout, reason: %s", reason); session = gpm_session_new (); gpm_session_logout (session); g_object_unref (session);

In fact, this is not GPM that will ask you the question, but GNOME session manager because GPM triggers logout. If you don t run a full GNOME session, nothing will happen. My workaround is just to set the action to Suspend .

Does not sleep when idle GPM is configured to go to sleep after 2 hours on AC or 30 minutes on battery. This does not work for me because idle detection is delegated to external programs. There are four variables used by GPM to determine if we are idle:

• session_idle which is the idle hint from ConsoleKit,
• idle_inhibited which is set when another program asks to disable idle detection (a video player which does not want the screen to be dimmed),
• suspend_inhibited which means a program do not want we going to sleep (a music player for example)
• x_idle which tells if X is idle or not (someone is moving the mouse or typing on the keyboard).

To allow GPM to suspend when we are idle, x_idle and session_idle must be true while suspend_inhibited and idle_inhibited must be false. For screen dimming purpose, you just need to have x_idle set to true and idle_inhibited set to false. Currently, only GNOME Screensaver seems to tell ConsoleKit if the session is idle or not. XScreenSaver does not contain anything about this. I am using xautolock with xlock and I am pretty sure they won t tell GPM if I am idle. You can use dbus-send to circumvent this problem:

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$ dbus-send --system --dest=org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit \ > --type=method_call --print-reply --reply-timeout=2000 \ > /org/freedesktop/ConsoleKit/Manager \ > org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit.Manager.GetCurrentSession method return sender=:1.6 -> dest=:1.106 reply_serial=2 object path "/org/freedesktop/ConsoleKit/Session1" $ dbus-send --system --dest=org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit \ > --type=method_call --print-reply --reply-timeout=2000 \ > /org/freedesktop/ConsoleKit/Session1 \ > org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit.Session.SetIdleHint boolean:true method return sender=:1.6 -> dest=:1.108 reply_serial=2

While I understand what is the rationale behind those choices (no code duplicate and allowing external programs to hinder power management), it lacks some fallback in case you don t use GNOME Screensaver (which is the key component here). I first though this was bug #594706 but this is not the case. I have opened (and closed) bug #628755. UPDATED: Jump to the conclusion for an updated solution for this problem.

Brightness is not restored to the previous value after idle When GPM undims the screen, it does not restore the previous value. It seems to be bug #617310 which is marked as fixed in upstream. I did not investigate it.

Wrong number of batteries reported I only have one battery but after one suspend/resume cycle, GPM thinks I have two. Maybe this is a bug of UPower. Maybe this is bug #606434. I did not investigate it. Maybe there is an happy interaction with bug #456280.

Inability to set configure actions when the UPS runs out of battery This is bug #390602. In addition to laptop batteries, UPower also supports UPS. In this case, GPM displays a special icon to tell if the UPS is fully charged. However, there is no possibility to execute special actions when the UPS is unplugged, like hibernate after 10 minutes or something like this. This seems to be a problem with the interface because looking with gconftool-2, we can spot variables like low_ups or critical_ups which allow to set actions when the UPS is almost out of battery. Moreover, the UPS icon only displays after one suspend/resume cycle but I am too lazy to report and debug this issue. Since, the icon disappear if I restart GPM, I am confident that the bug is in GPM.

Conclusion The conclusion is that GPM is not really that buggy but it really needs to be run in a full-blown GNOME desktop. The main problem is not really GPM. New technologies like UPower and ConsoleKit get pushed by freedesktop.org initiative, they get implemented by GNOME (and, I suppose, KDE) because they have tons of people following the appropriate mailing lists and any alternative just gets crushed by all those unpublicized changes. UPDATED: I got several helpful comments about this problem. There are two possible solutions:

1. Use xfce4-power-manager. It handles brightness control in a better way and don t need an external program to tell when the current session is idle. It still needs a session manager to ask what to do when using the power button. The drawback to this solution is that you start to pull another desktop environment into your environment. You had some parts of GNOME and now you have some parts of XFCE. This solution was proposed by Sylvain Collilieux.
2. Use gnome-session, gnome-screensaver and keep gnome-power-manager. As pointed by Julien Valroff, gnome-screensaver needs gnome-session to detect idleness. However, gnome-session starts a whole GNOME desktop. Again, there are two solutions. The first one is to replace gnome-session by something lighter implementing the bare minimum to make gnome-screensaver happy. Another suggestion is to configure gnome-session to start your favorite environment.

I start mine from ~/.xsession and here is what I have added at the top of it:

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# If not done, restart ourself with gnome-session if [ -z "$SESSION_MANAGER" ]; then [ -d ~/.config/autostart ] mkdir ~/.config/autostart rm -f ~/.config/autostart/* cat <<EOF > ~/.config/autostart/xsession.desktop [Desktop Entry] Name=Xsession Comment=Start .xsession Exec=$(readlink -f $0) Type=Application X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true EOF exec gnome-session --autostart=$HOME/.config/autostart fi # Otherwise, keep starting stuff # [...] exec fvwm-crystal

It will be my first time there, I hope I'll manage to meet lots of people I only know through mailing-lists. See you there!

The following developers got their Debian accounts in the last month:

• Jeremie Corbier (jcorbier)
• John Sullivan (johns)
• Muammar El Khatib (muammar)
• Heiko Stuebner (mmind)
• David Bremner (bremner)
• Niels Thykier (nthykier)
• Julien Valroff (julien)

Congratulations!

A few months after starting the NM process, I have just been accepted as a Debian Developer. My account name is simply: julien I have been a Debian user for about 10 years now, and have begun contributing to Debian in 2005. I have then been accepted as a Debian Maintainer in 2007. This post is mainly to thank:

• all my sponsors: Christoph Haas (haas) , Lo c Minier (lool), Free Ekanayaka (freee), Maximiliano Curia (maxy) and Micah Anderson (micah),
• my advocate: Matthijs M hlman (matthijs)
• my AM (who actually make it happen in a really short time frame, thanks a lot to him): Xavier Oswald (xoswald)
• all people who helped me during the process, to name a few: Christoph Berg (myon), Enrio Zini (enrico), Peter Palfrader (weasel)

Also thanks to all people who have already sent their congratulations, it makes me very proud!

I am now back home after 2 days spent at the first mini DebConf Paris. It was really nice to meet a lot of people, and to be able to discuss various aspects of Debian and Free Software in general. People came from all over Europe (at least from the UK, Spain, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Greece, and obviously a majority of French people). All the talks I have been able to attend were really interesting, and some of the slides have already been made available by their author:

• Debian and Ubuntu by Lucas Nussbaum
• Debian Quality Assurance by Lucas Nussbaum
• Latest features of dpkg-dev by Rapha l Hertzog
• Smart cards in Debian by Ludovic Rousseau

I have also taken part to the keysigning party, which will now allows me to use my newly generated 4096R key. The group picture is also online, as well as a more comprehensive gallery. Thanks a lot to the organisation team, you guys have made an awesome work! See you all next year!

My vacation is now over, and I think it is now time for me to summarise what I have done with regards to free software. First, I have sent my first real contributions to OpenStreetMap, in the area of my small town: http://osm.org/go/0DCaXeZ
I still have a lot of things to learn, but things are already better than they were!
I will also shortly write an article about how to use the GlobalSat DG-100 data logger on Debian GNU/Linux.
Working on OSM is real fun, as it can be done in family. I have also spent some time to test & improve the Debian packages for DSPAM (available from my repository). I have moved the SVN repository to a new GIT repository available at: http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-dspam/dspam.git;a=summary. Matthijs M hlmann (matthijs) is currently reviewing the packages, and will upload them to the official archive if everything is ok. Matthijs also accepted to be my advocate for my New Maintainer application. Thanks a lot to him! I am now waiting to be assigned an Application Manager: http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=julien%40kirya.net As usual, I have also been quite active at reporting bugs on the Debian BTS. unfortunately, I haven t had the possibility to fix (RC) bugs.

After 4 weeks using exclusively Gnash as flash player, I have switched back to Adobe Flash Player. Though I had found workarounds for major video sites (including Youtube and DailyMotion), I have had a lot of issues with musical websites, most of them being still designed in Flash . To use Adobe Flash Player on my amd64 desktops, I have used Bart Marten s workaround described in the Debian wiki. It works fine though the player randomly crashes on some websites, and the browser needs to be restarted so that it works again. This 4-week experience was fine, but I am a little bit puzzled that there is still no usable free flash player. Hopefuly, things will improve over time the sooner, the better!

Adobe recently announced they have (temporarily) stopped working on the amd64 version of their Flash Player for GNU/Linux. The previous releases contain a big security issue, which makes them totally unusable. As I didn t want to wait until the flashplugin-nonfree package to be updated to support the i386 plugin through nspluginwrapper (as suggested in #586273), I have decided to simply switch to the free alternative: gnash. After a few hours with it, I am now able to use most of the websites I usually visit, including Youtube and Dailymotion. Note that I use Iceweasel, which does not support WebM (for now), nor H.264 (which will never be supported by Mozilla). Youtube support is brought by a Greasemonkey user script available at: http://turanct.wordpress.com/2010/02/25/gnash-youtube/
The only tiny drawback is that the videos load in pause mode. For now, everything else seems to work fine. Users of other browers (Chromium, Safari, Opera) can try their HTML5 beta: http://www.youtube.com/html5 It is even easier for Dailymotion, as the videos on their HTML5 beta program are encoded in the Ogg Theora format, which is natively supported by Iceweasel/Firefox >= 3.5. To ease things, I have written a small Greasemonkey script which simply automatically redirects www.dailymotion.com to openvideo.dailymotion.com. This script can be downloaded here. The drawback is that videos won t play before they are loaded completely, which is not a big problem anyway. I still cannot play the videos avilable on Vimeo, and have noticed while wirting this post that the Flash file uploader of WordPress didn t work with gnash (obviously, WP provides an alternative way for file upload). I will go on with this experience as long as I do not see major issue with gnash.
I will also update this post, or add comments, if I encounter other issues, or find any alternatives. I would be curious to read your comments if you have run similar experience.

Today, I have finally permanently deleted my Facebook account. I have followed Matt Zimmerman s procedure, and it seems everything went well.
Now, I just need to not login to Facebook over the next 14 days, which shouldn t be a problem at all (my last connection was something like 2 or 3 months ago!). My aim is now to make more and more people use identi.ca as their primary social network. I will also follow the Diaspora project. My identi.ca profile : http://identi.ca/julienvalroff

The DSPAM team have just announced their first official release, one year after the project was taken over by the Community. You can download the sources from the SourceForge project. Unofficial Debian packages are being built right now, but will only be uploaded to my repository after a bit more testing, during the week-end I guess.
They are meant to be uploaded to the official Debian archive once they are considered as ready by the pkg-dspam team. Hopefully, they will be part of Squeeze.

Well, I haven t moved myself, but my server is now hosted in the new Linode datacenter located in London. The migration has caused a downtime of more or less 4 hours yesterday, time for the data to cross the ocean.
The migration was successful, though you might still experience issues to connect to the services hosts on this linode due to the new IP adressess (both IPv4 and IPv6). Most DNS servers should however now be up-to-date. Thanks again to Linode for their great service and support.

Though I haven t used (and won t use) Ubuntu, it has a few things I appreciate (as far as I know them): Ubuntu One: I wish we could have something similar for Debian users (ideally, it should be extended so that we could sync our calendars, contacts, liferea data etc.). usb-creator: seems the easiest way to create a bootable usb stick containing a complete and customisable environment. I am aware of the existence Debian Live, but I must say I haven t given it a try yet. Desktop orientation: Ubuntu users are in a large majority desktop users. Ubuntu is imho desktop-oriented, and I particularly like the artwork coherence (from boot loader to default desktop).

After having converted my packages to the new 3.0 (quilt) source format, I have decided to move everything to GIT. rkhunter was moved to Alioth s collab-maint project, and I have set up a personal GIT repository for the other packages. This page on the wiki has helped a lot. I now need to learn how to use this tool, but my first tests are very encouraging.
I haven t had to change my packaging workflow, switching from svn-buildpackage to git-buildpackage. I am even able to build i386 packages on my amd64 machine as before without the need to change anything in my ~/.pbuilderrc.