Search Results: "abhijith"

12 April 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, March 2024 (by Roberto C. S nchez)

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In March, 19 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 0.0h (out of 10.0h assigned and 4.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 14.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 59.5h (out of 47.5h assigned and 52.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 40.5h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 22.0h (out of 20.0h assigned and 2.0h from previous period).
  • Ben Hutchings did 9.0h (out of 2.0h assigned and 22.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 15.0h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Daniel Leidert did 12.0h (out of 12.0h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 0.0h (out of 3.0h assigned and 57.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 60.0h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 22.5h (out of 7.25h assigned and 15.25h from previous period).
  • Holger Levsen did 0.0h (out of 0.5h assigned and 11.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 12.0h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 0.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 60.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 60.0h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 19.5h (out of 24.0h assigned), thus carrying over 4.5h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 9.25h (out of 3.5h assigned and 8.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.75h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 19.0h (out of 16.5h assigned and 2.5h from previous period).
  • Sean Whitton did 4.5h (out of 4.5h assigned and 1.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 1.5h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 25.0h (out of 24.5h assigned and 35.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 35.0h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 12.0h (out of 12.0h assigned).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 19.5h (out of 0.0h assigned and 48.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 29.25h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In March, we have released 31 DLAs. Adrian Bunk was responsible for updating gtkwave not only in LTS, but also in unstable, stable, and old-stable as well. This update involved an upload of a new upstream release of gtkwave to each target suite to address 82 separate CVEs. Guilhem Moulin prepared an update of libvirt which was particularly notable, as it fixed multiple vulnerabilities which would lead to denial of service or information disclosure. In addition to the normal security updates, multiple LTS contributors worked at getting various packages updated in more recent Debian releases, including gross for bullseye/bookworm (by Adrian Bunk), imlib2 for bullseye, jetty9 and tomcat9/10 for bullseye/bookworm (by Markus Koschany), samba for bullseye, py7zr for bullseye (by Santiago Ruano Rinc n), cacti for bullseye/bookwork (by Sylvain Beucler), and libmicrohttpd for bullseye (by Thorsten Alteholz). Additionally, Sylvain actively coordinated with cacti upstream concerning an incomplete fix for CVE-2024-29894.

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14 March 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, February 2024 (by Roberto C. S nchez)

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In February, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 10.0h (out of 14.0h assigned), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 13.5h (out of 24.25h assigned and 41.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 52.5h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Ben Hutchings did 2.0h (out of 14.5h assigned and 9.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 22.0h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Daniel Leidert did 10.0h (out of 10.0h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 3.0h (out of 28.25h assigned and 31.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 57.0h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 7.25h (out of 4.75h assigned and 15.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 12.75h to the next month.
  • Holger Levsen did 0.5h (out of 3.5h assigned and 8.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.5h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 0.0h (out of 18.25h assigned and 41.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 60.0h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 3.5h (out of 8.75h assigned and 3.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.5h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 13.5h (out of 13.5h assigned and 2.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.5h to the next month.
  • Sean Whitton did 4.5h (out of 0.5h assigned and 5.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 1.5h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 24.5h (out of 27.75h assigned and 32.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 35.5h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 12.0h (out of 12.0h assigned).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 11.25h (out of 26.75h assigned and 33.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 48.75 to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In February, we have released 17 DLAs. The number of DLAs published during February was a bit lower than usual, as there was much work going on in the area of triaging CVEs (a number of which turned out to not affect Debia buster, and others which ended up being duplicates, or otherwise determined to be invalid). Of the packages which did receive updates, notable were sudo (to fix a privilege management issue), and iwd and wpa (both of which suffered from authentication bypass vulnerabilities). While this has already been already announced in the Freexian blog, we would like to mention here the start of the Long Term Support project for Samba 4.17. You can find all the important details in that post, but we would like to highlight that it is thanks to our LTS sponsors that we are able to fund the work from our partner, Catalyst, towards improving the security support of Samba in Debian 12 (Bookworm).

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

12 February 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, January 2024 (by Roberto C. S nchez)

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In January, 16 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 14.0h (out of 7.0h assigned and 7.0h from previous period).
  • Bastien Roucari s did 22.0h (out of 16.0h assigned and 6.0h from previous period).
  • Ben Hutchings did 14.5h (out of 8.0h assigned and 16.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.5h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Daniel Leidert did 10.0h (out of 10.0h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 10.0h (out of 14.75h assigned and 27.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 31.75h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 9.75h (out of 25.0h assigned), thus carrying over 15.25h to the next month.
  • Holger Levsen did 3.5h (out of 12.0h assigned), thus carrying over 8.5h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 8.75h (out of 9.5h assigned and 2.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.25h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 13.5h (out of 8.25h assigned and 7.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.5h to the next month.
  • Sean Whitton did 0.5h (out of 0.25h assigned and 5.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.5h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 9.5h (out of 23.25h assigned and 18.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 32.25h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 12.0h (out of 10.25h assigned and 1.75h from previous period).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 8.5h (out of 35.75h assigned), thus carrying over 24.75h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In January, we have released 25 DLAs. A variety of particularly notable packages were updated during January. Among those updates were the Linux kernel (both versions 5.10 and 4.19), mariadb-10.3, openjdk-11, firefox-esr, and thunderbird. In addition to the many other LTS package updates which were released in January, LTS contributors continue their efforts to make impactful contributions both within the Debian community.

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9 February 2024

Abhijith PA: A new(kind of) phone

I was using a refurbished Xiaomi Redmi 6 Pro (codename: sakura . I do remember buying this phone to run LineageOS as I found this model had support. But by the time I bought it (there was a quite a gap between my research and the actual purchase) lineageOS ended the suport for this device. The maintainer might ve ended this port, I don t blame them. Its a non rewarding work. Later I found there is a DotOS custom rom available. I did a week of test run. There seems lot of bugs and it all was minor and I can live with that. Since there is no other official port for redmi 6 pro at the time, I settled on this buggy DotOS nightly build. The phone was doing fine all these(3+) years, but recently the camera started showing greyish dots on some areas to a point that I can t even properly take a photo. The outer body of the phone wasn t original, as it was a refurbished, thus the colors started to peel off and wasn t aesthetically pleasing. Then there is the Location detection issue which took a while to figure out location and battery drains fast. I recently started mapping public transportation routes, and the GPS issue was a problem for me. With all these problems combined, I decided to buy a new phone. But choosing a phone wasn t easy. There are far too many options in the market. However, one thing I was quite sure of was that I wouldn t be buying a brand new phone, but a refurbished one. It is my protest against all these phone manufacturers who have convinced the general public that a mobile phone s lifespan is only 2 years. Of course, there are a few exceptions, but the majority of players in the Indian market are not. Now I think about it, I haven t bought any brand new computing device, be it phones or laptops since 2015. All are refurbished devices except for an Orange pi. My Samsung R439 laptop which I already blogged about is still going strong. Back to picking phone. So I began by comparing LineageOS website to an online refurbished store to pick a phone that has an official lineage support then to reddit search for any reported hardware failures Google Pixel phones are well-known in the custom ROM community for ease of installation, good hardware and Android security releases. My above claims are from privacyguides.org and XDA-developers. I was convinced to go with this choice. But I have some one at home who is at the age of throwing things. So I didn t want to risk buying an expensive Pixel phone only to have it end up with a broken screen and edges. Perhaps I will consider buying a Pixel next time. After doing some more research and cross comparison I landed up on Redmi note 9. Codename: merlinx. Based on my previous experience I knew it is going to be a pain to unlock the bootloader of Xiaomi phones and I was prepared for that but this time there was an extra hoop. The phone came with ROM MIUI version 13. A small search on XDA forums and reddit told unless we downgrade to 12 or so it is difficult to unlock bootloader for this device. And performing this wasn t exactly easy as we need tools like SP Flash etc. It took some time, but I ve completed the downgrade process. From there, the rest was cakewalk as everything was perfectly documented in LineageOS wiki. And ta-da, I have a phone running lineageOS. I been using it for some time and honestly I haven t come across any bug in my way of usage. One advice I will give to you if you are going to flash a custom ROM. There are plenty of videos about unlocking bootloader, installing ROMs in Youtube. Please REFRAIN from watching and experimenting it on your phone unless you figured a way to un brick your device first.

12 January 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, December 2023 (by Roberto C. S nchez)

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In December, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 7.0h (out of 7.0h assigned and 7.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 16.0h (out of 26.25h assigned and 8.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 19.0h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 16.0h (out of 16.0h assigned and 4.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 8.0h (out of 7.25h assigned and 16.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 16.0h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 8.0h (out of 26.75h assigned and 8.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 27.0h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 25.0h (out of 18.0h assigned and 7.0h from previous period).
  • Holger Levsen did 5.5h (out of 5.5h assigned).
  • Jochen Sprickerhof did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 0.0h (out of 25.75h assigned and 9.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 35.0h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 35.0h (out of 35.0h assigned).
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 9.5h (out of 5.5h assigned and 6.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.5h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 8.255h (out of 3.26h assigned and 12.745h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.75h to the next month.
  • Sean Whitton did 4.25h (out of 3.25h assigned and 6.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.75h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 16.5h (out of 21.25h assigned and 13.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 18.5h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 10.25h (out of 12.0h assigned), thus carrying over 1.75h to the next month.
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 18.75h (out of 11.25h assigned and 13.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 6.0h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In December, we have released 29 DLAs. A particularly notable update in December was prepared by LTS contributor Santiago Ruano Rinc n for the openssh package. The updated produced DLA-3694-1 and included a fix for the Terrapin Attack (CVE-2023-48795), which was a rather serious flaw in the SSH protocol itself. The package bluez was the subject of another notable update by LTS contributor Chris Lamb, which resulted in DLA-3689-1 to address an insecure default configuration which allowed attackers to inject keyboard commands over Bluetooth without first authenticating. The LTS team continues its efforts to have a positive impact beyond the boundaries of LTS. Several contributors worked on packages, preparing LTS updates, but also preparing patches or full updates which were uploaded to the unstable, stable, and oldstable distributions, including: Guilhem Moulin s update of tinyxml (uploads to LTS and unstable and patches submitted to the security team for stable and oldstable); Guilhem Moulin s update of xerces-c (uploads to LTS and unstable and patches submitted to the security team for oldstable); Thorsten Alteholz s update of libde265 (uploads to LTS and stable and additional patches submitted to the maintainer for stable and oldstable); Thorsten Alteholz s update of cjson (upload to LTS and patches submitted to the maintainer for stable and oldstable); and Tobias Frost s update of opendkim (sponsor maintainer-prepared upload to LTS and additionally prepared updates for stable and oldstable). Going beyond Debian and looking to the broader community, LTS contributor Bastien Roucari s was contacted by SUSE concerning an update he had prepared for zbar. He was able to assist by coordinating with the former organization of the original zbar author to secure for SUSE access to information concerning the exploits. This has enabled another distribution to benefit from the work done in support of LTS and from the assistance of Bastien in coordinating the access to information. Finally, LTS contributor Santiago Ruano Rinc n continued work relating to how updates for packages in statically-linked language ecosystems (e.g., Go, Rust, and others) are handled. The work is presently focused on more accurately and reliably identifying which packages are impacted in a given update scenario to enable notifications to be published so that users will be made aware of these situations as they occur. As the work continues, it will eventually result in improvements to Debian infrustructure so that the LTS team and Security team are able to manage updates of this nature in a more consistent way.

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12 December 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, November 2023 (by Roberto C. S nchez)

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering. Some notable fixes which were made in LTS during the month of November include the gnutls28 cryptographic library and the freerdp2 Remote Desktop Protocol client/server implementation. The gnutls28 update was prepared by LTS contributor Markus Koschany and dealt with a timing attack which could be used to compromise a cryptographic system, while the freerdp2 update was prepared by LTS contributor Tobias Frost and is the result of work spanning 3 months to deal with dozens of vulnerabilities. In addition to the many ordinary LTS tasks which were completed (CVE triage, patch backports, package updates, etc), there were several contributions by LTS contributors for the benefit of Debian stable and old-stable releases, as well as for the benefit of upstream projects. LTS contributor Abhijith PA uploaded an update of the puma package to unstable in order to fix a vulnerability in that package while LTS contributor Thosten Alteholz sponsored an upload to unstable of libde265 and himself made corresponding uploads of libde265 to Debian stable and old-stable. LTS contributor Bastien Roucari s developed patches for vulnerabilities in zbar and audiofile which were then provided to the respective upstream projects. Updates to packages in Debian stable were made by Markus Koschany to deal with security vulnerabilities and by Chris Lamb to deal with some non-security bugs. As always, the LTS strives to provide high quality updates to packages under the direct purview of the LTS team while also rendering assistance to maintainers, the stable security team, and upstream developers whenever practical.

Debian LTS contributors In November, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 7.0h (out of 0h assigned and 14.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 15.0h (out of 14.0h assigned and 9.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.75h to the next month.
  • Anton Gladky did 10.0h (out of 9.5h assigned and 5.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.0h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 16.0h (out of 18.25h assigned and 1.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 12.0h (out of 16.5h assigned and 12.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 16.75h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 17.25h assigned and 0.75h from previous period).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 15.5h (out of 23.5h assigned and 0.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.25h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 13.0h (out of 12.0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 14.5h (out of 16.75h assigned and 7.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.25h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 30.0h (out of 30.0h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 6.5h (out of 8.25h assigned and 15.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 17.25h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 5.5h (out of 12.0h assigned), thus carrying over 6.5h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 3.25h (out of 13.62h assigned and 2.375h from previous period), thus carrying over 12.745h to the next month.
  • Sean Whitton did 3.25h (out of 10.0h assigned), thus carrying over 6.75h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 10.0h (out of 13.5h assigned and 10.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 13.75h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 12.0h (out of 12.0h assigned).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 0.0h (out of 6.0h assigned and 17.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 23.75h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In November, we have released 35 DLAs.

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12 October 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, September 2023 (by Santiago Ruano Rinc n)

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In September, 21 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 10.0h (out of 0h assigned and 14.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 7.0h (out of 17.0h assigned), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
  • Anton Gladky did 9.5h (out of 7.5h assigned and 7.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.5h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 16.0h (out of 15.5h assigned and 1.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 1.0h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 17.0h (out of 17.0h assigned).
  • Chris Lamb did 17.0h (out of 17.0h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 30.0h (out of 30.0h assigned).
  • Guilhem Moulin did 18.25h (out of 18.25h assigned).
  • Helmut Grohne did 10.0h (out of 10.0h assigned).
  • Lee Garrett did 17.0h (out of 16.5h assigned and 0.5h from previous period).
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 4.5h (out of 0h assigned and 24.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 19.5h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 5.0h (out of 12.0h assigned), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 7.75h (out of 16.0h assigned), thus carrying over 8.25h to the next month.
  • Sean Whitton did 7.0h (out of 7.0h assigned).
  • Sylvain Beucler did 10.5h (out of 17.0h assigned), thus carrying over 6.5h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 13.25h (out of 16.0h assigned), thus carrying over 2.75h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In September, we have released 44 DLAs. The month of September was a busy month for the LTS Team. A notable security issue fixed in September was the high-severity CVE-2023-4863, a heap buffer overflow that allowed remote attackers to perform an out-of-bounds memory write via a crafted WebP file. This CVE was covered by the three DLAs of different packages: firefox-esr, libwebp and thunderbird. The libwebp backported patch was sent to upstream, who adapted and applied it to the 0.6.1 branch. It is also worth noting that LTS contributor Markus Koschany included in his work updates to packages in Debian Bullseye and Bookworm, that are under the umbrella of the Security Team: xrdp, jetty9 and mosquitto. As every month, there was important behind-the-scenes work by the Front Desk staff, who triaged, analyzed and reviewed dozens of vulnerabilities, to decide if they warrant a security update. This is very important work, since we need to trade-off between the frequency of updates and the stability of the LTS release.

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22 September 2023

Ravi Dwivedi: Debconf23

Official logo of DebConf23

Introduction DebConf23, the 24th annual Debian Conference, was held in India in the city of Kochi, Kerala from the 3rd to the 17th of September, 2023. Ever since I got to know about it (which was more than an year ago), I was excited to attend DebConf in my home country. This was my second DebConf, as I attended one last year in Kosovo. I was very happy that I didn t need to apply for a visa to attend. I got full bursary to attend the event (thanks a lot to Debian for that!) which is always helpful in covering the expenses, especially if the venue is a five star hotel :) For the conference, I submitted two talks. One was suggested by Sahil on Debian packaging for beginners, while the other was suggested by Praveen who opined that a talk covering broader topics about freedom in self-hosting services will be better, when I started discussing about submitting a talk about prav app project. So I submitted one on Debian packaging for beginners and the other on ideas on sustainable solutions for self-hosting. My friend Suresh - who is enthusiastic about Debian and free software - wanted to attend the DebConf as well. When the registration started, I reminded him about applying. We landed in Kochi on the 28th of August 2023 during the festival of Onam. We celebrated Onam in Kochi, had a trip to Wayanad, and returned to Kochi. On the evening of the 3rd of September, we reached the venue - Four Points Hotel by Sheraton, at Infopark Kochi, Ernakulam, Kerala, India.
Suresh and me celebrating Onam in Kochi.

Hotel overview The hotel had 14 floors, and featured a swimming pool and gym (these were included in our package). The hotel gave us elevator access for only our floor, along with public spaces like the reception, gym, swimming pool, and dining areas. The temperature inside the hotel was pretty cold and I had to buy a jacket to survive. Perhaps the hotel was in cahoots with winterwear companies? :)
Four Points Hotel by Sheraton was the venue of DebConf23. Photo credits: Bilal
Photo of the pool. Photo credits: Andreas Tille.
View from the hotel window.

Meals On the first day, Suresh and I had dinner at the eatery on the third floor. At the entrance, a member of the hotel staff asked us about how many people we wanted a table for. I told her that it s just the two of us at the moment, but (as we are attending a conference) we might be joined by others. Regardless, they gave us a table for just two. Within a few minutes, we were joined by Alper from Turkey and urbec from Germany. So we shifted to a larger table but then we were joined by even more people, so we were busy adding more chairs to our table. urbec had already been in Kerala for the past 5-6 days and was, on one hand, very happy already with the quality and taste of bananas in Kerala and on the other, rather afraid of the spicy food :) Two days later, the lunch and dinner were shifted to the All Spice Restaurant on the 14th floor, but the breakfast was still served at the eatery. Since the eatery (on the 3rd floor) had greater variety of food than the other venue, this move made breakfast the best meal for me and many others. Many attendees from outside India were not accustomed to the spicy food. It is difficult for locals to help them, because what we consider mild can be spicy for others. It is not easy to satisfy everyone at the dining table, but I think the organizing team did a very good job in the food department. (That said, it didn t matter for me after a point, and you will know why.) The pappadam were really good, and I liked the rice labelled Kerala rice . I actually brought that exact rice and pappadam home during my last trip to Kochi and everyone at my home liked it too (thanks to Abhijit PA). I also wished to eat all types of payasams from Kerala and this really happened (thanks to Sruthi who designed the menu). Every meal had a different variety of payasam and it was awesome, although I didn t like some of them, mostly because they were very sweet. Meals were later shifted to the ground floor (taking away the best breakfast option which was the eatery).
This place served as lunch and dinner place and later as hacklab during debconf. Photo credits: Bilal

The excellent Swag Bag The DebConf registration desk was at the second floor. We were given a very nice swag bag. They were available in multiple colors - grey, green, blue, red - and included an umbrella, a steel mug, a multiboot USB drive by Mostly Harmless, a thermal flask, a mug by Canonical, a paper coaster, and stickers. It rained almost every day in Kochi during our stay, so handing out an umbrella to every attendee was a good idea.
Picture of the awesome swag bag given at DebConf23. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi

A gift for Nattie During breakfast one day, Nattie (Belgium) expressed the desire to buy a coffee filter. The next time I went to the market, I bought a coffee filter for her as a gift. She seemed happy with the gift and was flattered to receive a gift from a young man :)

Being a mentor There were many newbies who were eager to learn and contribute to Debian. So, I mentored whoever came to me and was interested in learning. I conducted a packaging workshop in the bootcamp, but could only cover how to set up the Debian Unstable environment, and had to leave out how to package (but I covered that in my talk). Carlos (Brazil) gave a keysigning session in the bootcamp. Praveen was also mentoring in the bootcamp. I helped people understand why we sign GPG keys and how to sign them. I planned to take a workshop on it but cancelled it later.

My talk My Debian packaging talk was on the 10th of September, 2023. I had not prepared slides for my Debian packaging talk in advance - I thought that I could do it during the trip, but I didn t get the time so I prepared them on the day before the talk. Since it was mostly a tutorial, the slides did not need much preparation. My thanks to Suresh, who helped me with the slides and made it possible to complete them in such a short time frame. My talk was well-received by the audience, going by their comments. I am glad that I could give an interesting presentation.
My presentation photo. Photo credits: Valessio

Visiting a saree shop After my talk, Suresh, Alper, and I went with Anisa and Kristi - who are both from Albania, and have a never-ending fascination for Indian culture :) - to buy them sarees. We took autos to Kakkanad market and found a shop with a great variety of sarees. I was slightly familiar with the area around the hotel, as I had been there for a week. Indian women usually don t try on sarees while buying - they just select the design. But Anisa wanted to put one on and take a few photos as well. The shop staff did not have a trial saree for this purpose, so they took a saree from a mannequin. It took about an hour for the lady at the shop to help Anisa put on that saree but you could tell that she was in heaven wearing that saree, and she bought it immediately :) Alper also bought a saree to take back to Turkey for his mother. Me and Suresh wanted to buy a kurta which would go well with the mundu we already had, but we could not find anything to our liking.
Selfie with Anisa and Kristi. Photo credits: Anisa.

Cheese and Wine Party On the 11th of September we had the Cheese and Wine Party, a tradition of every DebConf. I brought Kaju Samosa and Nankhatai from home. Many attendees expressed their appreciation for the samosas. During the party, I was with Abhas and had a lot of fun. Abhas brought packets of paan and served them at the Cheese and Wine Party. We discussed interesting things and ate burgers. But due to the restrictive alcohol laws in the state, it was less fun compared to the previous DebConfs - you could only drink alcohol served by the hotel in public places. If you bought your own alcohol, you could only drink in private places (such as in your room, or a friend s room), but not in public places.
Me helping with the Cheese and Wine Party.

Party at my room Last year, Joenio (Brazilian) brought pastis from France which I liked. He brought the same alocholic drink this year too. So I invited him to my room after the Cheese and Wine party to have pastis. My idea was to have them with my roommate Suresh and Joenio. But then we permitted Joenio to bring as many people as he wanted and he ended up bringing some ten people. Suddenly, the room was crowded. I was having good time at the party, serving them the snacks given to me by Abhas. The news of an alcohol party at my room spread like wildfire. Soon there were so many people that the AC became ineffective and I found myself sweating. I left the room and roamed around in the hotel for some fresh air. I came back after about 1.5 hours - for most part, I was sitting at the ground floor with TK Saurabh. And then I met Abraham near the gym (which was my last meeting with him). I came back to my room at around 2:30 AM. Nobody seemed to have realized that I was gone. They were thanking me for hosting such a good party. A lot of people left at that point and the remaining people were playing songs and dancing (everyone was dancing all along!). I had no energy left to dance and to join them. They left around 03:00 AM. But I am glad that people enjoyed partying in my room.
This picture was taken when there were few people in my room for the party.

Sadhya Thali On the 12th of September, we had a sadhya thali for lunch. It is a vegetarian thali served on a banana leaf on the eve of Thiruvonam. It wasn t Thiruvonam on this day, but we got a special and filling lunch. The rasam and payasam were especially yummy.
Sadhya Thali: A vegetarian meal served on banana leaf. Payasam and rasam were especially yummy! Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.
Sadhya thali being served at debconf23. Photo credits: Bilal

Day trip On the 13th of September, we had a daytrip. I chose the daytrip houseboat in Allepey. Suresh chose the same, and we registered for it as soon as it was open. This was the most sought-after daytrip by the DebConf attendees - around 80 people registered for it. Our bus was set to leave at 9 AM on the 13th of September. Me and Suresh woke up at 8:40 and hurried to get to the bus in time. It took two hours to reach the venue where we get the houseboat. The houseboat experience was good. The trip featured some good scenery. I got to experience the renowned Kerala backwaters. We were served food on the boat. We also stopped at a place and had coconut water. By evening, we came back to the place where we had boarded the boat.
Group photo of our daytrip. Photo credits: Radhika Jhalani

A good friend lost When we came back from the daytrip, we received news that Abhraham Raji was involved in a fatal accident during a kayaking trip. Abraham Raji was a very good friend of mine. In my Albania-Kosovo-Dubai trip last year, he was my roommate at our Tirana apartment. I roamed around in Dubai with him, and we had many discussions during DebConf22 Kosovo. He was the one who took the photo of me on my homepage. I also met him in MiniDebConf22 Palakkad and MiniDebConf23 Tamil Nadu, and went to his flat in Kochi this year in June. We had many projects in common. He was a Free Software activist and was the designer of the DebConf23 logo, in addition to those for other Debian events in India.
A selfie in memory of Abraham.
We were all fairly shocked by the news. I was devastated. Food lost its taste, and it became difficult to sleep. That night, Anisa and Kristi cheered me up and gave me company. Thanks a lot to them. The next day, Joenio also tried to console me. I thank him for doing a great job. I thank everyone who helped me in coping with the difficult situation. On the next day (the 14th of September), the Debian project leader Jonathan Carter addressed and announced the news officially. THe Debian project also mentioned it on their website. Abraham was supposed to give a talk, but following the incident, all talks were cancelled for the day. The conference dinner was also cancelled. As I write, 9 days have passed since his death, but even now I cannot come to terms with it.

Visiting Abraham s house On the 15th of September, the conference ran two buses from the hotel to Abraham s house in Kottayam (2 hours ride). I hopped in the first bus and my mood was not very good. Evangelos (Germany) was sitting opposite me, and he began conversing with me. The distraction helped and I was back to normal for a while. Thanks to Evangelos as he supported me a lot on that trip. He was also very impressed by my use of the StreetComplete app which I was using to edit OpenStreetMap. In two hours, we reached Abraham s house. I couldn t control myself and burst into tears. I went to see the body. I met his family (mother, father and sister), but I had nothing to say and I felt helpless. Owing to the loss of sleep and appetite over the past few days, I had no energy, and didn t think it was good idea for me to stay there. I went back by taking the bus after one hour and had lunch at the hotel. I withdrew my talk scheduled for the 16th of September.

A Japanese gift I got a nice Japanese gift from Niibe Yutaka (Japan) - a folder to keep papers which had ancient Japanese manga characters. He said he felt guilty as he swapped his talk with me and so it got rescheduled from 12th September to 16 September which I withdrew later.
Thanks to Niibe Yutaka (the person towards your right hand) from Japan (FSIJ), who gave me a wonderful Japanese gift during debconf23: A folder to keep pages with ancient Japanese manga characters printed on it. I realized I immediately needed that :)
This is the Japanese gift I received.

Group photo On the 16th of September, we had a group photo. I am glad that this year I was more clear in this picture than in DebConf22.
Click to enlarge

Volunteer work and talks attended I attended the training session for the video team and worked as a camera operator. The Bits from DPL was nice. I enjoyed Abhas presentation on home automation. He basically demonstrated how he liberated Internet-enabled home devices. I also liked Kristi s presentation on ways to engage with the GNOME community.
Bits from the DPL. Photo credits: Bilal
Kristi on GNOME community. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.
Abhas' talk on home automation. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.
I also attended lightning talks on the last day. Badri, Wouter, and I gave a demo on how to register on the Prav app. Prav got a fair share of advertising during the last few days.
I was roaming around with a QR code on my T-shirt for downloading Prav.

The night of the 17th of September Suresh left the hotel and Badri joined me in my room. Thanks to the efforts of Abhijit PA, Kiran, and Ananthu, I wore a mundu.
Me in mundu. Picture credits: Abhijith PA
I then joined Kalyani, Mangesh, Ruchika, Anisa, Ananthu and Kiran. We took pictures and this marked the last night of DebConf23.

Departure day The 18th of September was the day of departure. Badri slept in my room and left early morning (06:30 AM). I dropped him off at the hotel gate. The breakfast was at the eatery (3rd floor) again, and it was good. Sahil, Saswata, Nilesh, and I hung out on the ground floor.
From left: Nilesh, Saswata, me, Sahil. Photo credits: Sahil.
I had an 8 PM flight from Kochi to Delhi, for which I took a cab with Rhonda (Austria), Michael (Nigeria) and Yash (India). We were joined by other DebConf23 attendees at the Kochi airport, where we took another selfie.
Ruchika (taking the selfie) and from left to right: Yash, Joost (Netherlands), me, Rhonda
Joost and I were on the same flight, and we sat next to each other. He then took a connecting flight from Delhi to Netherlands, while I went with Yash to the New Delhi Railway Station, where we took our respective trains. I reached home on the morning of the 19th of September, 2023.
Joost and me going to Delhi. Photo credits: Ravi.

Big thanks to the organizers DebConf23 was hard to organize - strict alcohol laws, weird hotel rules, death of a close friend (almost a family member), and a scary notice by the immigration bureau. The people from the team are my close friends and I am proud of them for organizing such a good event. None of this would have been possible without the organizers who put more than a year-long voluntary effort to produce this. In the meanwhile, many of them had organized local events in the time leading up to DebConf. Kudos to them. The organizers also tried their best to get clearance for countries not approved by the ministry. I am also sad that people from China, Kosovo, and Iran could not join. In particular, I feel bad for people from Kosovo who wanted to attend but could not (as India does not consider their passport to be a valid travel document), considering how we Indians were so well-received in their country last year.

Note about myself I am writing this on the 22nd of September, 2023. It took me three days to put up this post - this was one of the tragic and hard posts for me to write. I have literally forced myself to write this. I have still not recovered from the loss of my friend. Thanks a lot to all those who helped me. PS: Credits to contrapunctus for making grammar, phrasing, and capitalization changes.

12 September 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, August 2023 (by Roberto C. S nchez)

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In August, 19 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 0.0h (out of 12.0h assigned and 2.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 14.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 18.5h (out of 18.5h assigned).
  • Anton Gladky did 7.5h (out of 5.0h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.5h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 17.0h (out of 15.5h assigned and 3.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 1.5h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 18.5h (out of 9.0h assigned and 9.5h from previous period).
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 18.5h (out of 18.25h assigned and 0.25h from previous period).
  • Guilhem Moulin did 24.0h (out of 22.5h assigned and 1.5h from previous period).
  • Jochen Sprickerhof did 2.5h (out of 8.5h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 16.0h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 18.0h (out of 9.25h assigned and 9.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 0.5h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 28.5h (out of 28.5h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 24.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 24.0h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 18.5h (out of 13.0h assigned and 5.5h from previous period).
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 18.5h (out of 18.25h assigned and 0.25h from previous period).
  • Sean Whitton did 7.0h (out of 10.0h assigned), thus carrying over 3.0h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 18.5h (out of 9.75h assigned and 8.75h from previous period).
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 16.0h (out of 16.0h assigned).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 12.25h (out of 0h assigned and 12.25h from previous period).

Evolution of the situation In August, we have released 42 DLAs. The month of August turned out to be a rather quiet month for the LTS team. Three notable updates were to bouncycastle, openssl, and zabbix. In the case of bouncycastle a flaw allowed for the possibility of LDAP injection and the openssl update corrected a resource exhaustion bug that could result in a denial of service. Zabbix, while not widely used, was the subject of several vulnerabilities which while not individually severe did combine to result in the zabbix update being of particular note. Apart from those, the LTS team continued the always ongoing work of triaging, investigating, and fixing vulnerabilities, as well as making contributions to the broader Debian and Free Software communities.

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

15 August 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, July 2023 (by Santiago Ruano Rinc n)

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In July, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 2.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 24.75h (out of 18.25h assigned and 6.5h from previous period).
  • Anton Gladky did 5.0h (out of 5.0h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 17.0h (out of 17.0h assigned and 3.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.0h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 14.0h (out of 24.0h assigned), thus carrying over 9.5h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 24.0h (out of 24.75h assigned), thus carrying over 0.25h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 23.25h (out of 24.75h assigned), thus carrying over 1.5h to the next month.
  • Jochen Sprickerhof did 10.0h (out of 20.0h assigned), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 16.0h (out of 9.75h assigned and 15.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.25h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 24.75h (out of 24.75h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 0.0h (out of 13.0h assigned and 11.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 24.0h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 19.25h (out of 14.75h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.5h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 25.5h (out of 10.5h assigned and 15.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 0.25h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 16.0h (out of 21.25h assigned and 3.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.75h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 16.0h (out of 16.0h assigned).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 1.5h (out of 0h assigned and 13.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 12.25h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In July, we have released 35 DLAs. LTS contributor Lee Garrett, has continued his hard work to prepare a testing framework for Samba, that can now provision bootable VMs with little effort, both for Debian and for Windows. This work included the introduction of a new package to Debian, rhsrvany, which allows turning any Windows program or script into a Windows service. As the Samba testing framework matures it will be possible to perform functional tests which cannot be performed with other available test mechanisms and aspects of this framework will be generalizable to other package ecosystems beyond Samba. July included a notable security update of bind9 by LTS contributor Chris Lamb. This update addressed a potential denial of service attack in this critical network infrastructure component.

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

15 July 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, June 2023 (by Roberto C. S nchez)

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In June, 17 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 12.0h (out of 6.0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 28.0h (out of 0h assigned and 34.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 6.5h to the next month.
  • Anton Gladky did 5.0h (out of 6.0h assigned and 9.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 17.0h (out of 17.0h assigned and 3.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.0h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 24.0h (out of 16.5h assigned and 7.0h from previous period).
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 24.0h (out of 21.0h assigned and 2.5h from previous period).
  • Guilhem Moulin did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Lee Garrett did 25.0h (out of 0h assigned and 40.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 15.5h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 23.5h (out of 23.5h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 13.0h (out of 0h assigned and 24.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.0h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 13.5h (out of 9.75h assigned and 13.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 8.25h (out of 23.5h assigned), thus carrying over 15.25h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 20.0h (out of 23.5h assigned), thus carrying over 3.5h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 16.0h (out of 16.0h assigned).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 25.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 25.5h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In June, we have released 40 DLAs. Notable security updates in June included mariadb-10.3, openssl, and golang-go.crypto. The mariadb-10.3 package was synchronized with the latest upstream maintenance release, version 10.3.39. The openssl package was patched to correct several flaws with certificate validation and with object identifier parsing. Finally, the golang-go.crypto package was updated to address several vulnerabilities, and several associated Go packages were rebuilt in order to properly incorporate the update. LTS contributor Sylvain has been hard at work with some behind-the-scenes improvements to internal tooling and documentation. His efforts are helping to improve the efficiency of all LTS contributors and also helping to improve the quality of their work, making our LTS updates more timely and of higher quality. LTS contributor Lee Garrett began working on a testing framework specifically for Samba. Given the critical role which Samba plays in many deployments, the tremendous impact which regressions can have in those cases, and the unique testing requirements of Samba, this work will certainly result in increased confidence around our Samba updates for LTS. LTS contributor Emilio Pozuelo Monfort has begun preparatory work for the upcoming Firefox ESR version 115 release. Firefox ESR (and the related Thunderbird ESR) requires special work to maintain up to date in LTS. Mozilla do not release individual patches for CVEs, and our policy is to incorporate new ESR releases from Mozilla into LTS. Most updates are minor updates, but once a year Mozilla will release a major update as they move to a new major version for ESR. The update to a new major ESR version entails many related updates to toolchain and other packages. The preparations that Emilio has begun will ensure that once the 115 ESR release is made, updated packages will be available in LTS with minimal delay. Another highlight of behind-the-scenes work is our Front Desk personnel. While we often focus on the work which results in published package updates, much work is also involved in reviewing new vulnerabilities and triaging them (i.e., determining if they affect one or more packages in LTS and then determining the severity of those which are applicable). These intrepid contributors (Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, Markus Koschany, Ola Lundqvist, Sylvain Beucler, and Thorsten Alteholz for the month of June) reviewed dozens of vulnerabilities and made decisions about how those vulnerabilities should be dealt with.

Thanks to our sponsors

30 June 2023

Abhijith PA: Running Debian on my phone

You might have already read my blog titled Running PostmarketOS on my phone . After running pmOS on phone, my mind kept talking run Debian . So I started preparing for that. At the moment no straight way tool exist in Debian like postmarketOS s pmbootstrap. Well I can compile what is already available, do debootstrap rootfs. But I don t know how to build the final image that can be flashed from recovery. One crooked idea I had is, extract the pmOS image, find the packages and its configurations. For eg: usbmodem package in postmarketos are configured to connect to host network when plugged. I deboostrap ed the rootfs, compared with postmarketos and installed extra packages and copied configuration. I repacked and compressed to new image. Then flashed with twrp. The phone was booting. So I connected the usb cable and run, 
ssh abhijith@172.16.42.1

abhijith@172.16.42.1's password: 
Linux arm64 3.10.107-Cherry #1-postmarketOS SMP PREEMPT Sat Dec 18 13:08:52 UTC 2021 aarch64
The programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.
Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent
permitted by applicable law.
abhijith@arm64:$
Yay!. I have a working Debian phone. I quickly installed lxde and that is working perfectly. debian-leeco

14 June 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, May 2023 (by Roberto C. S nchez)

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In May, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 6.0h (out of 6.0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.0h to the next month.
  • Anton Gladky did 6.0h (out of 8.0h assigned and 7.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.0h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 17.0h (out of 17.0h assigned and 3.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.0h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 17.0h (out of 16.0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Daniel Leidert did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 12.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 12.0h to the next month.
  • Dominik George did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 20.34h from previous period), thus carrying over 20.34h to the next month.
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 32.0h (out of 18.5h assigned and 16.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.5h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 20.0h (out of 8.5h assigned and 11.5h from previous period).
  • Holger Levsen did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 40.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 40.5h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 34.5h (out of 34.5h assigned).
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 18.25h (out of 20.5h assigned and 11.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 13.75h to the next month.
  • Scarlett Moore did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Sylvain Beucler did 34.5h (out of 29.0h assigned and 5.5h from previous period).
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 16.0h (out of 15.0h assigned and 1.0h from previous period).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 5.5h (out of 5.0h assigned and 26.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 25.5h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In May, we have released 34 DLAs. Several of the DLAs constituted notable security updates to LTS during the month of May. Of particular note were the linux (4.19) and linux-5.10 packages, both of which addressed a considerable number of CVEs. Additionally, the postgresql-11 package was updated by synchronizing it with the 11.20 release from upstream. Notable non-security updates were made to the distro-info-data database and the timezone database. The distro-info-data package was updated with the final expected release date of Debian 12, made aware of Debian 14 and Ubuntu 23.10, and was updated with the latest EOL dates for Ubuntu releases. The tzdata and libdatetime-timezone-perl packages were updated with the 2023c timezone database. The changes in these packages ensure that in addition to the latest security updates LTS users also have the latest information concerning Debian and Ubuntu support windows, as well as the latest timezone data for accurate worldwide timekeeping. LTS contributor Anton implemented an improvement to the Debian Security Tracker Unfixed vulnerabilities in unstable without a filed bug view, allowing for more effective management of CVEs which do not yet have a corresponding bug entry in the Debian BTS. LTS contributor Sylvain concluded an audit of obsolete packages still supported in LTS to ensure that new CVEs are properly associated. In this case, a package being obsolete means that it is no longer associated with a Debian release for which the Debian Security Team has direct responsibility. When this occurs, it is the responsibility of the LTS team to ensure that incoming CVEs are properly associated to packages which exist only in LTS. Finally, LTS contributors also contributed several updates to packages in unstable/testing/stable to fix CVEs. This helps package maintainers, addresses CVEs in current and future Debian releases, and ensures that the CVEs do not remain open for an extended period of time only for the LTS team to be required to deal with them much later in the future.

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

16 May 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, April 2023 (by Roberto C. S nchez)

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In April, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 6.0h (out of 0h assigned and 14.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 18.0h (out of 16.5h assigned and 24.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 22.5h to the next month.
  • Anton Gladky did 8.0h (out of 9.5h assigned and 5.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 17.0h (out of 17.0h assigned and 3.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.0h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 16.0h (out of 12.0h assigned and 12.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.0h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Dominik George did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 20.34h from previous period), thus carrying over 20.34h to the next month.
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 4.5h (out of 11.0h assigned and 9.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 16.0h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 8.5h (out of 8.0h assigned and 12.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.5h to the next month.
  • Helmut Grohne did 5.0h (out of 2.5h assigned and 7.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.0h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 0.0h (out of 31.5h assigned and 9.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 40.5h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 12.5h (out of 0h assigned and 24.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.5h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 8.5h (out of 4.75h assigned and 15.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.5h to the next month.
  • Stefano Rivera did 1.0h (out of 0h assigned and 28.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 27.0h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 35.0h (out of 40.5h assigned), thus carrying over 5.5h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 15.0h (out of 15.0h assigned and 1.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 1.0h to the next month.
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 3.5h (out of 11.0h assigned and 18.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 26.0h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In April, we have released 35 DLAs. The LTS team would like to welcome our newest sponsor, Institut Camille Jordan, a French research lab. Thanks to the support of the many LTS sponsors, the entire Debian community benefits from direct security updates, as well as indirect improvements and collaboration with other members of the Debian community. As part of improving the efficiency of our work and the quality of the security updates we produce, the LTS has continued improving our workflow. Improvements include more consistent tagging of release versions in Git and broader use of continuous integration (CI) to ensure packages are tested thoroughly and consistently. Sponsors and users can rest assured that we work continuously to maintain and improve the already high quality of the work that we do.

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

29 April 2023

Abhijith PA: Attending FOSSASIA 2023

I attended FOSSASIA 2023 summit held at Lifelong Learning Institute, Singapore. A 3 day long parallel talk filled conference. Its my second time attending FOSSASIA. The first one was 2018 summit. Like last time, I didn t attend much talks but focussed on networking with people. A lot of familiar faces there. PV Anthony, Harish, etc. I vounteered to run Debian Booth at the exhibition hall distributing stickers, flyers. Rajudev also helped me at the booth. Most of the people there used debian or its derivates or know debian already, its easier for me that way, that I don t have do much explaining compared to other booths. Thanks to Parth for looking after booth in my breaks. debian_booth1 debian_booth2 Sometimes our booth also act as cloak room :). Ours was close to the entrance door and we may be similar faces to folks. So people come and drop their bags before they go to talks. One thing I love about the such conference is that people have very different hardwares that I never able to see otherwise. I remember KDE booth had a Steam Value portable gaming board running KDE plasma. Then a person have this eyeglass which act as a monitor. Then the usual DJI drones but custom programmed. It was very lovely to meet and play around with exotic hardwares. Kurian whom I met during a Debian packaging workshop in Kerala was a speaker at FOSSASIA. He presented a talk titled OpenAI Whisper and it s amazing power to do finetuning . I was his unofficial PR guy, taking pictures :).

Weather Clear sky, little hot and humid. The weather was quite nice for me except the surprise rain and small thunderstorms. Comparing to my place s temperature, its wonderful.

28 February 2023

Russell Coker: Links February 2023

Vox has an insightful interview with the author of Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century [1]. The main claim of that book is that The 140 years from 1870 to 2010 of the long twentieth century were, I strongly believe, the most consequential years of all humanity s centuries . A claim that seems well supported. PostMarketOS is an interesting OS for hardware designed for Android [2]. It is based on Alpine Linux, is small, and modular. If you want to change something just change that package not the entire image. Also an aim is to have as much commonality between devices as possible, all phones with the same CPU family can run the same packages apart from the kernel and maybe some utilities related to hardware. Abhijithpa blogged about getting started with pmOS, it seems easy to do [3]. Interesting article about gay samurai [4]. Regarding sex with men or women an elderly arbiter, after hearing the impassioned arguments of the two sides, counsels that the wisest course is to follow both paths in moderation, thereby helping to prevent overindulgence in either . Wow. The SCP project is an interesting collaborative SciFi/horror fiction project [5] based on an organisation that aims to Secure and Contain dangerous objects and beings and Protect the world from them. The series of stories about the Anti-Memetics Division [6] is a good place to start reading.
Related posts:
  1. Links January 2023 The Intercept has an amusing and interesting article about senior...
  2. Links February 2020 Truthout has an interesting summary of the US Wars Without...
  3. Links February 2021 Elestic Search gets a new license to deal with AWS...

21 February 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, January 2023 (by Anton Gladky)

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering. This is the first monthly report in 2023.

Debian LTS contributors In January, 17 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS. which is possibly the highest number of active contributors per month! Their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 0.0h (out of 3.0h assigned and 11.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 14.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 26.25h (out of 26.25h assigned).
  • Anton Gladky did 11.5h (out of 8.0h assigned and 7.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.5h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 8.0h (out of 24.0h assigned), thus carrying over 16.0h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 8.0h (out of 0h assigned and 43.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 35.0h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 20.0h (out of 17.5h assigned and 2.5h from previous period).
  • Helmut Grohne did 10.0h (out of 15.0h assigned), thus carrying over 5.0h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 7.5h (out of 20.0h assigned), thus carrying over 12.5h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 26.25h (out of 26.25h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 4.5h (out of 10.0h assigned and 6.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.5h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 3.75h (out of 18.75h assigned and 7.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 22.5h to the next month.
  • Stefano Rivera did 4.5h (out of 0h assigned and 32.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 28.0h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 23.5h (out of 0h assigned and 38.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 15.0h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 10.0h assigned and 4.0h from previous period).
  • Tobias Frost did 19.0h (out of 19.0h assigned).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 43.25h (out of 26.25h assigned and 17.0h from previous period).

Evolution of the situation Furthermore, we released 46 DLAs in January, which resolved 146 CVEs. We are working diligently to reduce the number of packages listed in dla-needed.txt, and currently, we have 55 packages listed. We are constantly growing and seeking new contributors. If you are a Debian Developer and want to join the LTS team, please contact us.

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

16 January 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, December 2022 (by Anton Gladky)

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In December, 17 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 3.0h (out of 0h assigned and 14.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.0h to the next month.
  • Anton Gladky did 8.0h (out of 6.0h assigned and 9.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 24.0h (out of 9.0h assigned and 15.0h from previous period).
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Dominik George did 0.0h (out of 10.0h assigned and 14.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 24.0h to the next month.
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 8.0h in December, 8.0h in November (out of 1.5h assigned and 49.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 43.0h to the next month.
  • Enrico Zini did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.0h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 17.5h (out of 20.0h assigned), thus carrying over 2.5h to the next month.
  • Helmut Grohne did 15.0h (out of 15.0h assigned, 2.5h were taken from the extra-budget and worked on).
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 10.0h (out of 7.5h assigned and 8.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 6.0h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 24.5h (out of 20.25h assigned and 11.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.5h to the next month.
  • Stefano Rivera did 2.5h (out of 20.5h assigned and 14.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 32.5h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 20.5h (out of 37.0h assigned and 22.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 38.5h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 10.0h (out of 14.0h assigned), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
  • Tobias Frost did 16.0h (out of 16.0h assigned).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 51.5h (out of 42.5h assigned and 9.0h from previous period).

Evolution of the situation In December, we have released 47 DLAs, closing 232 CVEs. In the same year, in total we released 394 DLAs, closing 1450 CVEs. We are constantly growing and seeking new contributors. If you are a Debian Developer and want to join the LTS team, please contact us.

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

18 December 2022

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, November 2022 (by Anton Gladky)

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In November, 15 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 0.0h (out of 14.0h assigned), thus carrying over 14.0h to the next month.
  • Anton Gladky did 6.0h (out of 15.0h assigned), thus carrying over 9.0h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 9.0h (out of 24.0h assigned), thus carrying over 15.0h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Dominik George did 10.0h (out of 0h assigned and 24.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 14.0h to the next month.
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 0.0h (out of 38.0h assigned and 19.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 57.5h to the next month.
  • Enrico Zini did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.0h to the next month.
  • Helmut Grohne did 17.5h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 7.5h (out of 11.0h assigned and 5.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.5h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 20.25h (out of 0.75h assigned and 31.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.75h to the next month.
  • Stefano Rivera did 2.5h (out of 0h assigned and 17.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 14.5h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 35.5h (out of 23.0h assigned and 34.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 22.0h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 41.0h (out of 32.5h assigned and 25.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 16.5h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In November, we released 43 DLAs, fixing 183 CVEs. We currently have 63 packages in dla-needed.txt that are waiting for updates, which is 19 fewer than the previous month. We re excited to announce that two Debian Developers Tobias Frost and Guilhem Moulin, have completed the on-boarding process and will begin contributing to LTS as of December 2022. Welcome aboard!

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

15 December 2022

Abhijith PA: Running PostmarketOS on my phone

Couple of weeks back I installed PostmarketOS on my idle phone Leeco Le 1s , which was paper weight for some time now. It all started with a roadtrip to Pondicherry (I will soon write about this trip). As I was sitting on the front seat where Praveen s Librem 5 kept charing on the car dashboard. And we had a small discussion about PostmarketOS and how much new ports are available now. My idle phone came to my mind. After reaching home I started setting up porting pmOS to this device. Going through pmOS website, to my surprise there is already a port for this device. The OEM unlock is quite easy even though a little hiccup at begin (I suspect it is solely of my cable). The Xiaomi users knows the pain of unlocking bootloader. With the pmOS community preferred practice of using pmbootstrap, I built image for my device, flashed it. And phone boot stopped with pmOS logo. I thought I went to bootloop. I tried sxmo, xfce4, everything same nothing happening after boot logo splash. The pmOS troubleshooting wiki is quite good. They have documented most issues. Though screen is stuck I can still ssh to the phone. From wiki I came to know its a screen refresh problem. I installed msm-fb-refresher package and ran it as a daemon. Voila, I have a mate desktop. Mate Mate desktop is not at all touch friendly even though I tried to scaled up to read and tap things on the screen. Wiki suggest xfce4 is little more touch friendly. I started moving to xfce. Then again same problem, stuck at boot loop. This time it was with lightdm, I turned off CanGraphical issue warning and now I have xfce desktop. pmos xfce seems great comparing with mate. Nothing works as of now from a Mobile phone point of view. The phone maintainer says the battery is working, but I couldn t get it working. Its always in battery mode and 50% status. I thought the hardware buttons will never work. But with xev, I can see the hardware key event triggering.

Next.