Search Results: "Muammar El Khatib"

29 February 2016

Muammar El Khatib: Cast audio from Debian to chromecast audio

I recently decided to buy a chromecast audio (CCA) to use with my Harman Kardon Soundsticks III. My main motivation was to avoid plugging the 3.5mm jack to the phone or the computer when I wanted to switch devices. Bluetooth connectivity was not an option given their poor quality of sound and short range of the signal to connect (limited to 10m). There are many different options in the market being Sonos the most widely spoken and known right now because of its Hi-Fi Wifi solution. But Sonos is also very expensive tech. For instance, the starting price of a connected speaker is around $200. Another limitation going beyond price is the fact that you can only stream using Sonos application (as far as I investigated) something I don t find appealing. As I already had my speakers, I was looking for something to cast over them using wifi. Sonos also proposes a feature called Connect which is like what CCA does but for a price which is 10 times more expensive!.

3 January 2016

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 35 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between December 20th to December 26th: Toolchain fixes Mattia Rizzolo rebased our experimental versions of debhelper (twice!) and dpkg on top of the latest releases. Reiner Herrmann submited a patch for mozilla-devscripts to sort the file list in generated preferences.js files. To be able to lift the restriction that packages must be built in the same path, translation support for the __FILE__ C pre-processor macro would also be required. Joerg Sonnenberger submitted a patch back in 2010 that would still be useful today. Chris Lamb started work on providing a deterministic mode for debootstrap. Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: bouncycastle, cairo-dock-plug-ins, darktable, gshare, libgpod, pafy, ruby-redis-namespace, ruby-rouge, sparkleshare. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: reproducible.debian.net Statistics for package sets are now visible for the armhf architecture. (h01ger) The second build now has a longer timeout (18 hours) than the first build (12 hours). This should prevent wasting resources when a machine is loaded. (h01ger) Builds of Arch Linux packages are now done using a tmpfs. (h01ger) 200 GiB have been added to jenkins.debian.net (thanks to ProfitBricks!) to make room for new jobs. The current count is at 962 and growing! diffoscope development Aside from some minor bugs that have been fixed, a one-line change made huge memory (and time) savings as the output of transformation tool is now streamed line by line instead of loaded entirely in memory at once. disorderfs development Andrew Ayer released disorderfs version 0.4.2-1 on December 22th. It fixes a memory corruption error when processing command line arguments that could cause command line options to be ignored. Documentation update Many small improvements for the documentation on reproducible-builds.org sent by Georg Koppen were merged. Package reviews 666 (!) reviews have been removed, 189 added and 162 updated in the previous week. 151 new fail to build from source reports have been made by Chris West, Chris Lamb, Mattia Rizzolo, and Niko Tyni. New issues identified: unsorted_filelist_in_xul_ext_preferences, nondeterminstic_output_generated_by_moarvm. Misc. Steven Chamberlain drew our attention to one analysis of the Juniper ScreenOS Authentication Backdoor: Whilst this may have been added in source code, it was well-disguised in the disassembly and just 7 instructions long. I thought this was a good example of the current state-of-the-art, and why we'd like our binaries and eventually, installer and VM images reproducible IMHO. Joanna Rutkowska has mentioned possible ways for Qubes to become reproducible on their development mailing-list.

15 June 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 7 in Stretch cycle

What happened about the reproducible builds effort for this week: Presentations On June 7th, Reiner Herrmann presented the project at the Gulaschprogrammiernacht 15 in Karlsruhe, Germany. Video and audio recordings in German are available, and so are the slides in English. Toolchain fixes Daniel Kahn Gillmor's report on help2man started a discussion with Brendan O'Dea and Ximin Luo about standardizing a common environment variable that would provide a replacement for an embedded build date. After various proposals and research by Ximin about date handling in several programming languages, the best solution seems to define SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH with a value suitable for gmtime(3).
  1. Martin Borgert wondered if Sphinx could be changed in a way that would avoid having to tweak debian/rules in packages using it to produce HTML documentation.
Daniel Kahn Gillmor opened a new report about icont producing unreproducible binaries. Packages fixed The following 32 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: agda, alex, c2hs, clutter-1.0, colorediffs-extension, cpphs, darcs-monitor, dispmua, haskell-curl, haskell-glfw, haskell-glib, haskell-gluraw, haskell-glut, haskell-gnutls, haskell-gsasl, haskell-hfuse, haskell-hledger-interest, haskell-hslua, haskell-hsqml, haskell-hssyck, haskell-libxml-sax, haskell-openglraw, haskell-readline, haskell-terminfo, haskell-x11, jarjar-maven-plugin, kxml2, libcgi-struct-xs-perl, libobject-id-perl, maven-docck-plugin, parboiled, pegdown. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which did not make their way to the archive yet: reproducible.debian.net A new variation to better notice when a package captures the environment has been introduced. (h01ger) The test on Debian packages works by building the package twice in a short time frame. But sometimes, a mirror push can happen between the first and the second build, resulting in a package built in a different build environment. This situation is now properly detected and will run a third build automatically. (h01ger) OpenWrt, the distribution specialized in embedded devices like small routers, is now being tested for reproducibility. The situation looks very good for their packages which seems mostly affected by timestamps in the tarball. System images will require more work on debbindiff to be better understood. (h01ger) debbindiff development Reiner Herrmann added support for decompling Java .class file and .ipk package files (used by OpenWrt). This is now available in version 22 released on 2015-06-14. Documentation update Stephen Kitt documented the new --insert-timestamp available since binutils-mingw-w64 version 6.2 available to insert a ready-made date in PE binaries built with mingw-w64. Package reviews 195 obsolete reviews have been removed, 65 added and 126 updated this week. New identified issues: Misc. Holger Levsen reported an issue with the locales-all package that Provides: locales but is actually missing some of the files provided by locales. Coreboot upstream has been quick to react after the announcement of the tests set up the week before. Patrick Georgi has fixed all issues in a couple of days and all Coreboot images are now reproducible (without a payload). SeaBIOS is one of the most frequently used payload on PC hardware and can now be made reproducible too. Paul Kocialkowski wrote to the mailing list asking for help on getting U-Boot tested for reproducibility. Lunar had a chat with maintainers of Open Build Service to better understand the difference between their system and what we are doing for Debian.

1 January 2012

Muammar El Khatib: Happy new year

I just wanted to wish to all readers of planet Debian and the Debian project itself, a Happy new year 2012!

3 December 2010

Debian News: New Debian Developers (November 2010)

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

28 December 2009

Muammar El Khatib: I am getting older

Well, today I am getting older. I am 26 now. I am singing this song for me:

They Might Be Giants -- Older

You're older than you've ever been.
And now you're even older.
And now you're even older.
And now you're even older.

You're older than you've ever been.
And now you're even older.
And now you're older still.

TIME! Is marching on.
And time.. is still marching on.
This day will soon be at an end and now it's even sooner.
And now it's even sooner.
And now it's even sooner.
This day will soon be at an end and now it's even sooner.
And now it's even sooner.
And now it's sooner still.

You're older than you've ever been.
And now you're even older.
And now you're even older.
And now you're even older.

You're older than you've ever been.
And now you're even older.
And now you're older still.

:-)

24 December 2009

Muammar El Khatib: Installing Adobe Air in Debian AMD 64 (TweetDeck can be used)

I love twitting using TweetDeck. So that, I started to investigate how to install Adobe Air in Debian AMD64 and, it was a real pain in the ass. I have found a way of installing it in Debian AMD64.

First of all, you need to install the following packages:

$ sudo apt-get install ia32-libs lib32nss-mdns lib32asound2 lib32gcc1 lib32ncurses5 lib32stdc++6 lib32z1 libc6 libc6-i386 lib32nss-mdns libcanberra-gtk-module


After installing them, we have to create some symlinks from the location of some of those libraries in /emul/ia32-linux/usr/lib/ to /usr/lib32/. For accomplishing it, do the next:

$ cd /usr/lib32/
$sudo ln -s /emul/ia32-linux/usr/lib/libnss3.so .
$sudo ln -s /emul/ia32-linux/usr/lib/libssl3.so .
$sudo ln -s /emul/ia32-linux/usr/lib/libsmime3.so .
$sudo ln -s /emul/ia32-linux/usr/lib/libnspr4.so .
$sudo ln -s /emul/ia32-linux/usr/lib/libnssutil3.so.1d .
$sudo ln -s /emul/ia32-linux/usr/lib/libplc4.so.0d .
$sudo ln -s /emul/ia32-linux/usr/lib/libplds4.so .


In the case that you have problems with libplds4.so.0d, create the symlink like this:


$sudo ln -s /emul/ia32-linux/usr/lib/libplds4.so.0d libplds4.so.0d


Now, it is time to download Adobe AIR (in this case version 1.5).

$wget http://airdownload.adobe.com/air/lin/download/latest/AdobeAIRInstaller.bin


Once it is downloaded, we have to make the .bin file an executable:

$ sudo chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin


Then, we can proceed to install it:

$ sudo ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin


If you get an error like this:

Error loading the runtime (libnss3.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64)


It means that you haven't done the symlink from /emul/ia32-linux/usr/lib/libnss3.so to /usr/lib32/ correctly or that you haven't installed the library which is missed ('apt-file search' is your friend).

If everything goes fine, then the last steps are:

sudo cp /usr/lib/libadobecertstore.so /usr/lib32


Note: make a symlink if you prefer.

And for TweetDeck I had to do this:

Download libgnome-keyring0 for 32 bits (in this example I used the one from SID, if you are using testing, download the one from that release that you are using), extract it with dpkg and copy the libraries to /usr/lib32:

$ wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/g/gnome-keyring/libgnome-keyring0_2.28.2-1_i386.deb
$ sudo dpkg-deb -x libgnome-keyring0_2.28.2-1_i386.deb libgnome-keyring0_2.28.2-1
$ sudo cp libgnome-keyring0_2.28.2-1/usr/lib/* /usr/lib32/


Then install TweetDeck (http://tweetdeck.com/download/) and Enjoy :-)

Note: If you find any problem, please do not hesitate to write a comment so that I can help you or we can improve this post.

27 November 2009

Muammar El Khatib: Things that happens when you don't know what you are talking about

In Debian, if there exists a bug in a version of a package in SID (let's take as an example GRUB2 version 1.97+20091125-1), and it has a severity marked as Critical, then it won't touch testing until such a bug is fixed... It is as simple as that.

What happen when?:

a) You are not sure which Debian release you are using.
b) You are not sure how Debian handles bugs reported with severity: critical.

Answer: http://pvanhoof.be/blog/index.php/2009/11/27/debian-wtf

:S

26 November 2009

Muammar El Khatib: error: you need to load the linux kernel first

If you are getting the problem which is written in the title of this post related to a recent upgrade in Debian SID of GRUB2 to version 1.97+20091125-1, then you have to modify your grub.cfg and remove the /boot/ part of the entries referred to the kernel image and initrd in the grub.cfg configuration file.

For more info: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=558042



10 November 2009

Muammar El Khatib: On email addresses. Is there an impact?

I have been reading comments on Sandro's post about the use of email addresses. I am not sure about what he really wanted to express exactly, because I can't see anything wrong when someone from other distro upload a package into the archive and they use their distro's mail addresses so it is clear that I don't agree with the first point of his post. Now, regarding the second point, I don't understand why when being a DD and an Ubuntu Developer at the same time some people prefer uploading to Debian archive using @ubuntu.com but well, anyone is free of doing what they think is correct and this is not something which is in the policy so it's OK. But reading the first point made by Stefano's post made me understand why.

I got surprised when I read the Jon's post about debian kernel contributors and I looked for the word debian in http://lwn.net/Articles/247582/ and nothing was found. I subscribed for a while, just for curiosity, in the Linux Kernel Mailing List and I was able to read some mails from people I know they are in Debian and just because the patches weren't signed off with debian mail addresses Debian does not appear in such a post at lwn.net. I'd like to add that, for not being misunderstood, I do respect all kernel contributors, because their contributions are really important for the whole community and we are aware of Debian's contributions. My point is that it should be accepted that there exists an impact when using one or another email address and it should be considered (when you are part of both projects, in this case, Debian and Ubuntu).

16 September 2009

Muammar El Khatib: Exchange

Well, I was so tired of my mini hp 2133 that I decided to exchange it or selling it. The main reason of this is the lack of Linux support from VIA (No 3d acceleration, no free driver for Wifi, etc). I was looking at http://www.mercadolibre.com.ve/ and I found a guy who was selling/exchanging a G1. When I saw that, I thought: this could be the chance to get a G1 without using the credit card :-P. So I contact this guy, I met him at La Vereda del Lago de Maracaibo and after checking both devices we made the exchange.

I have to say that I am happy with the exchange because I was using a Motorola w180 which is a fuckin' shame of phone. Besides, the G1 is in very good shape.

The G1 is a very amused phone. I had to reset it. Such a process was very easy. I followed the procedure at http://www.androidcentral.com/factory-reset-tmobile-g1/

It's time to go to bed now, or I hope so ;-). I think I have done a good exchange, don't you think so?

28 April 2009

Muammar El Khatib: Open Chrome = Wireless problem in HP 2133?

I had almost two weeks without Wireless connection in my HP 2133. Due of the fact of being busy doing other stuff, it was today until I had time to try something. So, I proceeded to google it and I found a bug in Launchpad about it. There was said that the problem was caused by Open Chrome driver. I have to accept that when I read it I was kind of skeptic. I thought: What has to do a Video Driver with a Wi Fi microcode not responding? (real translation: WTF is this?)

So, I open a terminal. I went to /etc/X11/xorg.conf and I change the only line in xorg.conf (new version of XORG was able to recognize the Video Card and it was working right without using the bunch of options and sections as you can see in http://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/HP/HP2133 , except the fact that Wi Fi stopped working) to this:


Section "Device"
Identifier "VESA"
Driver "vesa"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
Screen 0
Option "ActiveDevice" "LCD,CRT"
Option "ForceLCD"
Option "SWCursor" "True"
EndSection


I restarted the machine, because I had fucked off Wicd trying to get connected to the Wireless Router and there wasn't any way to get it work again, and when I entered my XFCE4 session and tried the Wireless it just worked again... shit.. I can't understand. That was weird. So for the record. If you are getting this problem to get connected with your HP 2133 using either Debian or Ubuntu, given that you got it working before, so change the driver in the Device section from Open Chrome to VESA and you should get the problem solved. I tested it in Debian Unstable.

3 April 2009

Muammar El Khatib: Making backups is good

Since I bought the mini HP, I have an additional disc-space of 160 GB. So, I took as a custom syncing my old and dear laptop with this new one using rsync. For some stupid reason, but I start thinking that this is something related to the Murphy's Law, I didn't make a sync these last 2 days. I made a mistake with LVM when resizing my /home partition in the old laptop (which I was using during these 2 days) and now I am crossing my fingers to be able to recover the filesystem.

So, if you are reading this I'll advise you something. For the sake of god, If you can maintain backups constantly, do not ever hesitate to have them as updated as possible, so that you won't feel like a dumbass just like I feel right now. For being a lazy, I am now having lots of work to do in order to repair my file system. If I had made a backup I wouldn't have been feeling so worried about this. The worst of all, it is that I am working in other stuff like writing my thesis, so I cannot concentrate...

Remember, making backups is something very good. (That phrase was for me)

18 March 2009

Muammar El Khatib: Chris Cornell?

I just stumble into this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyOtb136n6g

My first impression was: WTF???!!!! I was used to listening to Cornell in Sound Garden, Audioslave or in his Album Euphoria Morning, but this is the shittest change that I have seen ever. I was told to visit his web page, a request made from Gerardo Curiel, maybe with the hope that that had been a joke, but When I went there... it was real... Chris Cornell had become in a kind of Justin Timberlake :S

What should I expect now? Deftones doing something like this?:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKrq_7ROcpY

8 March 2009

Muammar El Khatib: International Women's Day

Today is the International Woman's Day (IWD) so I will take advantage of my blog to congratulate all women either into the Debian Project and in General.

The women's history, from my point of view, has been involved of many difficult situations. Women have had to face the inequality in many ways and levels. On the other hand, it has changed a lot but there still happening some cases nowadays.

I got surprised, when I read the article in Wikipedia, by some controversial facts. Sometimes it is a shame our "human" behavior...

25 February 2009

Muammar El Khatib: Debian on HP 2133.

I got a HP 2133. I have installed Debian in it, successfully :-) Here, I'll show all the steps I followed in order to install Debian.
First of all, you'll need an USB stick (formatted to FAT16). We need to convert such a device, in a bootable one. For making it, we have to download two files. One of them is boot.img.gz that you can get from http://debian.org/devel/debian-installer/ in the section "other images (netboot, usb stick, floppy, etc)". The other one, is a business card or a netinst image.

When you have downloaded them, we can proceed to make the next:

$ zcat /root/boot.img.gz > /dev/sdbX
(where sdbX should be changed for the correct device for you, maybe dmesg tail when you insert the USB stick will help you).

When you have executed what I have stated above, then you have to copy either the business card or the netinst ISO image (just one of them ;-)). Doing this, our USB stick has become in a bootable device. You cannot copy a complete CD ISO, just netinst or business ones.

[Update] Note: If your system refuses to boot, try this:

# install-mbr /dev/sdb


(where sdb should be changed for the correct device for you, maybe dmesg tail when you insert the USB stick will help you).

Now, you can proceed to boot your HP mini using the USB stick and proceed with the installation process. After installing Debian, I'd suggest you to boot again, in Rescue Mode, to change the file acpi-support which is in /etc/default directory. Look for the line number 92 and set SAVE_VBE_STATE to false. Doing this you will avoid the annoying white screen you get when the system tries to save such a state.

Now, the problem you will face is the ******* resolution. After trying some xorg.conf files, I found one that worked for Debian. You can find it here.

For the wireless card I found this post http://jomcode.com/fadhil/?p=59 which worked pretty nice.

I still have to make the 3d acceleration work, but I haven't had the time to do it. Furthermore, I'll paste this info in http://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/HP/HP2133 so that if someone has a HP2133, will be able to contribute or add some more information.

11 February 2009

Muammar El Khatib: Funny Political Propanga.

On February 15th, we are having an election to decide whether a constitutional amendment will be accepted or not in Venezuela. I don't want to talk about this. Instead, I'd like to talk about the funniest Political Propaganda I have seen at the moment regarding the elections.

I was driving from my girlfriend's home to mine when suddenly I saw a guy with a banner hanged on him. When he was near to my car, I was able to read what he had written on the banner. I read:

"Vota NO a la mierda. Dale bomba".

Look at the picture:




Translated it means:

"Vote NO to the shit. Flush the toilet".

I got very surprised about the imagination used by that guy. I laughed out loud. I think it has been the funniest political propaganda that I have seen ever.. :-P

Muammar El Khatib: Funny Political Propaganda.

On February 15th, we are having an election to decide whether a constitutional amendment will be accepted or not in Venezuela. I don't want to talk about this. Instead, I'd like to talk about the funniest Political Propaganda I have seen at the moment regarding the elections.

I was driving from my girlfriend's home to mine when suddenly I saw a guy with a banner hanged on him. When he was near to my car, I was able to read what he had written on the banner. I read:

"Vota NO a la mierda. Dale bomba".

Look at the picture:




Translated it means:

"Vote NO to the shit. Flush the toilet".

I got very surprised about the imagination used by that guy. I laughed out loud. I think it has been the funniest political propaganda that I have seen ever.. :-P

2 February 2009

Muammar El Khatib: Debian Lenny might be released this month

I'd like to join those who also feel the happiness of knowing that a new Debian release is getting closer :-) It has been a long wait, but the result will be a good one.

I am anxious to see the official announce and to have a bunch of new versions of packages in unstable, so that my system will be more funny than it is :-D


31 December 2008

Muammar El Khatib: Happy New Year

I just wanted to wish you all a Happy New Year :-)

Next.