I m widely know (by my peers, not globaly know, as you may guess) for being a well controlated person when it comes to spending my sacred and beloved money. Actually, I m so well controlated that I m sometimes seen as someone who hates to spend money. Sometimes I m almost convinced that people thinking that way about me are right, but then I get back to my conscious mind and realize that they think like this because people tend not to agree with what they don t practice and, generally speaking, society has been continuosly teaching them to become as consumists as possible. Obviously, I m not completely protected against consumism, as I m human and have as much desires as anyone else, but I think I m doing well on keeping myself from being taken to the path which lead us to bit the bullet and spend our money on something. What contributes to this control also demonstrates how we re used to learn better only from mistakes, as I already spent too much money on things which I initially thought I desperately needed, but which after I realized weren t actually all that much needed after all. I have been trying to avoid wasting money on an e-book reader for months. At the beggining it was a piece of cake, as there wasn t a real option (mind you that I live in Brazil, not in the USA or some other so called first world country). However, in the last few months, the scenario has been changing and it seems that these days there are actually some options available. I have been researching privately about options for months and have become well aware of all the advantages and disavantages of all the options available today. Sorry, I won t be pointing the right option to you, as your best option probably will be different from mine and recommending things isn t the point of this post. Technically speaking, the options available today seems to provide me with what I need. There are no doubts that almost any of them would be good (but not all of them would be the right ) choices and actually would represent a real improvement over the current situation. So, one might ask, why not go ahead and just buy the damn thing ? For most of the people out there, it would seem to be the right thing to do, as I would be doing conscious and well researched purchase after all. Well, I would be doing something good for myself for sure, but the government actually would need to show me some respect and prove me they have some respect for me as well. Amazon, for example, is shipping the Kindle for other countries and Brazil is one of them. I would surely just go ahead and buy it the day the shipment was announced and that was almost what I did. What prevented me from doing so was the insane/absurd takes government is applying on anything one wants to import from another country. Even after converting the price from dollars to the local currency (reais), the price is something like three to four times higher that the original price in the origin country. It s insanely prohibitive for the vast majority of citizens and one could wonder why this is so when this is a device used basically for reading. Mind you that the government has big tax reductions for importing books, for example, which are seen as culture related items and so get to win some advantages over other non-culture related items. To summarize it all, if you want to convince yourself how not to spend money on something, even when you really want to, just do the math regarding the amount of the taxes you would need to pay and I assure you there will be no regrets when latter you think why you did not bought it.

Recently I ve been dealing with requests for LDAP directories configs which clearly demonstrates how little people understand about directories and what they are capable of doing. A significant amount of people I know seems to really get it wrong when it comes to what they want from a directory. Actually, they somehow think that a LDAP directory will do whatever is needed for their application to store, retrieve, validate, authenticate and even take decisions based on no data provided at all. These people think that one should just deploy a directory using the minimum effort approach and suddenly everything will just work. They don t seem to realize that for their application to make use of a directory it should be prepared to do so. They can t accept it when they are told that the directory won t just work and by some unknow enchantment get their systems data stored, validated, authenticated and, shockingly for them, that it won t make their credentials consolidated so lots of different services will out of the box just start working using the same username/password pair. Also, some people don t understand the difference between a LDAP directory and a single sign-on (SSO) system. They don t realize that a directory won t, by itself (i.e. without additional software and some respectable amount of tweaking), provide them the ability to authenticate against it only a single time and have their credentials shared among all their systems. That s it. Said. Don t get me wrong. All that was metioned above is possible, but it isn t done by LDAP alone. LDAP is just a bunch of protocols and a directory is only one nice place to store information. What will be done with this information, how it wll be treated and how it could be used to produce meaningful results are almost always up to the application and/or to some middleware or added plugin/overlay/connector/whatever. Next time someone ask you to install LDAP so I can get rid of all my different username/passwords and use only one instead , be afraid. Be very afraid and present him/her some theorical knowledgment regarding the topic. Or, better said, insert some clue into his/her brain.

I wanted to let my readers know that I migrated from my previous hosting to a new one. There was nothing wrong with the previous one, but I wanted to go out shopping for something cheaper and still as reliable. Lots of friends gave me good recommendations for Linode and the price was tempting so I thought : Why not ? . The most noticeable advantage, apart from the price reduction, was the speed improvement, as I got myself a more powerful VPS and then now I have more room for new experiments. Later I also noticed some little but very welcome improvements. These are just minor details, but together they account for a great experience. So, I m here to let you guys now that if you want a good, reliable, speedy, and still cheap hosting provider for your VPS, just give Linode a try. I m sure you won t be disappointed.

It s no secret for those who follow me on Twitter/identi.ca that I have been toying with virtualization technologies for some time now. I have been using Xen in production for some time and, apart from not thinking it s the way to go for future virtualization, it s quite usable right now, specially if you are going to use Debian Lenny as the dom0, as it now has a more modern kernel than the dreaded 2.6.18 we Xen users were forced to keep using. However, I have been keeping my eyes on KVM as well, as I always liked how much simpler and well integrated into the Linux kernel it is. I m even subscribed to the KVM development mailing list, even not understanding most of the things the developers are talking about there. It s no problem for me, I just want to know what s being worked on and what s on the pipeline. As a KVM fan, I m also using it intensively as a tool for prototyping servers. It s easy enough to set up a new Debian server to test things on and learn new technologies, as well as troubleshoot problems without intefering with production environments. Althought KVM is not as good as Xen when it comes to performance, it s quickly improving every single day. And, for those of you who still believes KVM is only about full virtualization, I m happy to say that it has come a long way and paravirtualization has started to infiltrate KVM land as well. Today, KVM already sports paravirtualized clock (pvclock), paravirtualized memory management unit (pv MMU) and VirtIO drivers. Actually, it seems that KVM these days is the biggest user of VirtIO, maybe only loosing the leadership to Rusty s lguest. By using VirtIO s disk and network drivers (virtio_blk and virtio_net, respectively, and its associated modules), KVM can deliver a much improved I/O experience than when using QEMU s emulated drivers. For this reason, it s always preferable to use VirtIO drivers whenever possible when setting up your KVM guests. During the Etch lifetime, one will need to do some tricks in order to use VirtIO when using Etch as a guest under KVM. However, when preparing Lenny s d-i, the developers were smart enough to add to it virtual disk detection support. What it means is that now, starting with Lenny, d-i will recognize that it s being given a VirtIO block device and automatically load the needed kernel modules to support it. Also, the disk detection and partition modules (partman et all) were modified to show a detected virtual disk (i.e. /dev/vdX) and let the user partition it, as well as grub-installer was changed to allow GRUB to be installed onto a virtual disk s MBR, effectively making d-i a really powerful virtualization aware installer. Here you can see Lenny s d-i showing a detected virtual disk, named vda : Brazilian Portuguese readers could see the version using brazilian portuguese texts on the screen here. Sure, d-i also received a lot of improvements and special support for installing Lenny as a Xen domU was added as well, but I haven t played with it yet, so I won t comment on that right now. And, hey, one can even use virt-install and virt-manager to deploy KVM guests under Lenny And you know what gives me even more confidence that KVM will be a first class citizen inside Debian ? The fact that Steve Kemp is toying with the idea to change his xen-hosting.org project so it would become a new kvm-hosting.org project. Maybe I m praying for the preacher here, but Steve is very well well know for being the author of xen-tools and xen-shell, as well as being the creator of a number of other nice free softwares. And, judging by the comments on his post about the future kvm-hosting.org project, it seems that Steve maybe will need to update xen-tools and xen-shell to account for KVM or create a new set of tools dedicated exclusively to KVM based on his past experience creating the current tools for Xen. Good times ahead for those of us who are surfing the Debian Virtualization wave, indeed

Here I ll try to present you some tips on how one could easily make a playground become a paid fun. And no, I won t be teaching you how to become rich, although I would like if you would teach me how that could be accomplished as I m trying to come up with a way to do just that for a couple of years now and failed miserably. Recently, I ve been setting up KVM virtual machines in order to do a lot of testing for a project I m involved with. Letting boring details aside, one could say that a very long, boring and error prone setup was finished after a lot of work and it worked like a charm in the end, as a KVM machine. As always, laziness is a given and when you are into it you empower yourself to come up with some nice hacks and goes that extra mile to find out how one could not to have to do boring and repetitive things again and again, in the best spirit of let s have some work now and save me ten times more work later . As I m becoming more and more into that spirit of laziness, there I went looking for a way which would let me transform my beloved and nice working KVM machine into a fully featured real physical server. After some tips from microblogosphere friends (thanks fike), I had some ideas on how that could be accomplished. Turned out my ideas weren t really all that right so there I went again looking for a way to do what I wanted. After some research I found out that the KVM guys already gave some thought about it and even had a ready solution to my problem : it s called qemu-nbd. Yes, by now everyone should know that KVM builds on top of the excelent (just not so snappy) QEMU. However, as I m a Debian user, here I should say that in Debian, most notably Debian sid/unstable, the qemu-nbd binary was renamed to kvm-nbd, just as the KVM binary is called only kvm and not qemu-system-x86_64 or whatever else is called these days upstream. NBD (short for Network Block Device) is a nice thing. I hadn t tried it before (I certainly used and am still using in some projects of mine the not-upstreamed-yet-but-so-nice-that-I-couldnt-resist DRBD, which seems to share some ideas which NBD). In short (read NBD link for more info on that), NBD allows the Linux kernel to use a remote server as a block device. Also, its upstream is a fellow Debian developer (hello Wouter). How nice s it ? As NBD is an upstreamed kernel feature, you don t need to go to the external-module-route-hell. You only need the userland tools, which are nicely packaged and integrated into Debian as well. They re only one aptitude away, so you could use this command to bring it to your KVM host :

aptitude install nbd-client

After that, you will want to export your image file (the file which represents the disk of you virtual machine) as a NBD block device, so you will be able to mount it under your KVM host and do whatever you want to do with it. Here s how one would do it :

kmv-nbd conect=/dev/nbd0 myimagefile.img

I tested it using both qcow2 and raw disk images and both worked like a charm so I don t think you will have any problems here. Next, you need to create a directory structure under your KVM host which temporarily will be used to mount the partitions inside the virtual block device of your KVM machine. You could do this like this :

mkdir /newserver mkdir /newserver/usr mkdir /newserver/var mkdir /newserver/home

In the example above, I ve created these directories because I want my new server to have separated root, /usr, /var and /home partitions and mount points. Feel free to adapt to any kind of partitioning layout you please. Next, you will mount yout virtual machine filesystem under a temporary location, so you will be able to copy all of its content later to your final desired destination, i.e. the real partitions inside the real disk you are going to use in your future real server (not a virtual machine anymore). I did it using :

mkdir -p /mnt/temp mount /dev/nbd0p1 /mnt/temp

Notice that the /dev/nb0p1 above is my root partition inside my KVM machine, only that it s represented now in my KVM host in NBD s device node notation here. I ve only one partition inside this particular virtual machine (aside from the swap partition). Next, you want to mount the partitions on the real disk you want to be used in your new real server under the directories created earlier so you will be able to chroot to then later and do any tweaks you may want to, like fixing /etc/fstab, /boot/grub/device.map, /boot/grub/menu.lst and all these places we know makes references to block devices which may differ from the situation you had in your virtual machine running under the KVM. Here s what I used :

mount /dev/sdb1 /newserver mount /dev/sdb3 /newserver/usr mount /dev/sdb5 /newserver/var mount /dev/sdb6 /newserver/home

The device nodes above are from your real disk s partitions, not from any virtualized device block access method like NBD. Also, take care not to mount your primary disk s partitions (the ones you are using under in your KVM host) as you could destroy them easily. As you can see above, I m using /dev/sdbX as /dev/sda is my primary disk, the one under which my KVM host is running. Again, adapt to your scenario. Next, you just copy everything from your virtual machine filesystem (which is now accessible from within your NBD block device) to your real disk. I did it using :

cp -a /mnt/temp/* /newserver/

After that, you can disconnect your KVM virtual machine image file from the exported NDB device block using :

kvm-nbd -d /dev/ndb0

And then chroot to your real disk layout yout just copied to /newserver in order to fix anything which would make reference to block devices while running as a virtual machine under KVM but which now will be a completely different thing as a real server, like your /etc/fstab, /boot/grub/device.map, /boot/grub/menu.lst and so on. In order to chroot to your new soon-to-be-real filesystem you could use :

chroot /newserver

Then go nuts and start fixing everything you may think needs to be fixed so this filesystem could be used in a real server to boot it up. Im my case, I needed to fix /etc/fstab in order to mount my additional partitions (as under KVM I was using only a root and a swap partition and now, under the real server, I ll be using separated root, swap, /usr, /var and /home). Before I went changing more things, I fixed my /boot/grub/device.map and my /boot/grub/menu.lst files to point to /dev/sdb and /dev/sdb[1], respectively, so I could run grub-install from inside the chroot in order to install GRUB into the real new disk s MBR (master boot record), using :

grub-install /dev/sdb

Then, finally, I fixed /boot/grub/device.map and /boot/grub/menu.lst again so they would point to /dev/sda and /dev/sda[1], as /dev/sda will be the device node for this new disk when it wil be running under the new real server and not as a disk inside the KVM host machine. Next, I exited the chroot using :

exit

And umounted the new real disk s partitions, using (now already out of the chroot) :

umount /newserver/home umount /newserver/var umount /newserver/usr umount /newserver

Now you can take this new disk out of your KVM host machine, put it inside your new real server, physically install it there, turn on your new real server and everything installed while the filesystem in it was being used under the KVM virtual machine will be there, running nicely. And you re done. That s it. Also, it s important to point out that it s much easier being done than being said (or written, in this case) so, if it looks scary because of the size of this post, don t let it disincourage you as this whole thing is a pretty straightforward procedure, much easier than it seems. And as I know that I will receive lost of complaints from people which will tell me how inefficient this whole thing is and how I could have accomplished the exact same thing in a much easier and faster way (perhaps even with a already existing tool which would automate almost entirely the whole proccess), I would say to these people to please exercise their right to share ideas using the comments. Just be nice on me, please. After all, it was fun and I learned new things while doing it all, as well as I tried to share what I learned from this experience with my peers. That s what matters. Peace, love and geekness to all of you

Para n o fugir ao clich , aproveitei os feriados de final e in cio de ano para atualizar o Wordpress e fazer uma limpeza b sica no blog (troca de temas, desabilita o/habilita o de plugins, etc). Ainda estava utilizando a vers o 2.3.2 e atualizei direto para a vers o 2.7. Aparentemente, tudo foi bastante tranquilo. Demorei mais para fazer backups (como medida de precau o, n o que fosse algo estritamente necess rio) do que para concluir totalmente o processo de atualiza o. A equipe do Wordpress est de parab ns por tornar a experi ncia de atualiza o algo bastante suave, ainda mais em meu caso, com um pulo de uma vers o jur ssica diretamente para a ltima. Agora que o Wordpress est usando e abusando de conceitos Web 2.0/AJAX tudo ficou mais intutito. A interface de postagens, por exemplo, ficou bem mais amig vel em minha opini o. Outra novidade foi que o ScribeFire voltou a funcionar 100% agora, mas com as melhorias sens veis na interface de postagens provavelmente vou acabar abandonando-o. Quem sabe agora com as novas facilidades eu n o me anime a voltar a postar com maior frequ ncia ?

aba, if you happen to receive some feedback on this subject, please let me know. A comment in this post or even a blog post from you in Planet Debian would be great. Bloggind as there’s no comment support available in your blog.

Devido a um projeto no trabalho, bem poss vel que eu tenha que passar as pr ximas semanas (ou meses, quem sabe) me dedicando a produzir muita documenta o. Eu escrevo muito diariamente, mas desde sempre s uso vim. Por m, devido a essa documenta o ter que ser produzida em um formato que possa ser compartilhado com outras pessoas normais (n o t cnicas), me vi obrigado a come ar a explorar as possibilidades do OpenOffice.org Writer, j que o m nimo que eu poderia fazer era dar for a ao padr o ODF. N o estou acostumado com esse tipo de software e n o consigo gostar de processadores de texto complexos como esses, mas pelo que vi at o momento, ele parece at bem completo. O mais estranho perceber que, depois de um tempo lidando com o bicho, voc se d conta de que est fazendo downloads de verificadores ortogr ficos e de dicion rios de termos de inform tica e, o pior de tudo, est realmente usando isso tudo. Uau ! Tenho medo do que pode estar por vir. Acho que vou come ar a virar usu rio comum. Socorro

Sorry Planet Debian. The last post was intended to appear on Planeta Debian Brasil only, not on Planet Debian. I tend to separate my posts written in english and in portuguese using different categories for each and have both Planet Debian and Planet Debian Brasil being feed from the relevant URL for each category. It was just a mistake from my part giving the last post (written in portuguese) the wrong category. It’s already fixed and I hope not to make the same mistake again in the future.

Tenho aqui comigo um o in cio de um texto antigo, que comecei a escrever h uns dois anos atr s, sobre porque eu uso Debian. Nunca consegui finaliz -lo direito, mas achei que n o seria justo deix -lo aqui jogado em um diret rio empoeirado de meu HD (meu ~/txt tem muita coisa iniciada e n o finalizada). Um dia ainda vou termin -lo e acrescentar mais conte do, s preciso estar num dia inspirado para tirar todas as id ias da cabe a e coloc -las na forma de palavras. De qualquer forma, mesmo inacabado, espero que gostem. E lembrem-se : meu blog aceita coment rios

Por qu Debian ? Eu tamb m ou o esta pergunta quase diariamente. Para que eu n o tenha que respond -la novamente a toda vez que me perguntem, resolvi sentar e escrever uma resposta padr o para a mesma. Assim, toda vez que algu m me faz esta mesma pergunta novamente, eu simplesmente pe o para a pessoa ler este texto. Aspectos t cnicos Qualidade. Sim, qualidade. Erroneamente, a maioria das pessoas que n o utilizam Debian ou que n o o conhecem pensam que o grande motivo pelo qual o Debian se diferencia das outras distribui es GNU/Linux puramente pela exist ncia da ferramenta APT, a qual auxilia na resolu o autom tica de depend ncias, facilitando enormente o gerenciamento de softwares. Realmente, trata-se de uma ferramenta extremamente til. Por m, atualmente, diversas distribui es GNU/Linu baseadas em pacotes no formato RPM (Red Hat, Fedora, Mandriva, etc) utilizam por padr o ou suportam, mesmo que n o oficialmente, mecanismos de resolu o autom tica de depend ncias e gerenciamento de softwares similares ao APT. Algumas at mesmo utilizam um porte do pr prio APT, adaptado para funcionamento com pacotes no formato
RPM. O que diferencia o Debian das demais distribui es GNU/Linux a qualidade. O apt-get a parte vis vel qual o usu rio tem acesso e que parece fazer toda a m gica. Por m, por atr s dele, existe um componente fundamental, frequentemente esquecido pelos usu rios : a pol tica de empacotamento de softwares Debian. O projeto Debian possui um documento extenso e altamente detalhado, que descreve, em cada m nimo detalhe, ao que um pacote de software precisa estar atento para poder ser considerado um pacote oficial e fazer parte da distribui o. A pol tica de empacotamento de softwares o que faz com que o Debian seja altamente superior s outras distribui es. Ela bem definida, clara e aplicada rigorosamente. Ferramentas de apoio aos desenvolvedores auxiliam a refor ar a aplica o das regras ditadas pela pol tica e qualquer pacote de software que n o siga fielmente o que dita o Manual de Pol ticas Debian n o inclu do em uma vers o oficial da distribui o, n o importando o qu o importante seja o componente de software fornecido pelo pacote. Isso, somado s diversas equipes internas existentes dentro do projeto Debian, garante a qualidade da distribui o. Equipes de QA (Quality Assurance), de seguran a, de ger ncia de release, ger ncia de relatos de erros e diversas outras equipes garantem que um sistema operacional funcional e altamente integrado seja criado, em oposi o a mera corre o de problemas em pacotes de softwares isolados. Adicionalmente, cada software passa por um intenso processo de avalia o antes que possa ser aceito oficialmente e adicionado a distribui o. Al m dos in meros detalhes t cnicos, tamb m existe uma equipe de especialistas legais que analisam as licen as de distribui o dos softwares antes de aceit -los como parte da distribui o. O fato do Debian ser atualmente a distribui o GNU/Linux que suporta a maior quantidade de arquiteturas de hardware que o kernel Linux suporta tamb m adiciona qualidade distribui o, uma vez que, como parte do processo de porte das aplica es para uma arquitetura de hardware suportada pelo Debian, in meras falhas s o descobertas e corrigidas, o que contribui
para a qualidade final do software. Logicamente, some a isso tudo o fato do projeto Debian possuir o maior acervo de softwares livres empacotados e prontos para uso existente da atualidade, deixando para tr s todas as outras distribui es GNU/Linux, inclusive as distribui es comerciais. Atualmente, s o mais de 15.000 pacotes de softwares prontos para uso e facilmente instal veis. Aspectos estrat gicos (ou independ ncia tecn logica) Uma das grandes vantagens estrat gicas que se ganha ao utilizar Debian a independ ncia tecnol gica. L gico, a grande maioria das distribui es GNU/Linux atuais s o livres, mas nada garante que continuar o a ser livres por toda sua exist ncia. Claro, sempre existir o grupos de pessoas dispostos a iniciar uma nova distribui o com base em uma vers o livre existente de uma distribui o comercial caso algo aconte a com a empresa que a desenvolveu e que impossibilite a continuidade da distribui o. Mas criar uma comunidade e manter um projeto grande como o de uma distribui o GNU/Linux, com toda a infraestrutura j fornecida pelo projeto Debian, leva tempo, anos. E consome anos de trabalho de milhares de volunt rios. O projeto Debian j tem tudo isso funcionando e uma experi ncia de 13 anos nessa rea. Exemplos de problemas com o envolvimento de interesses privados de empresas no desenvolvimento de distribui es GNU/Linux n o s o somente te ricos e recentemente tivemos provas da exist ncia dos mesmos, com empresas privadas terminando a continuidade do acesso a atualiza es de seguran as para suas distribui es de uso livre e sem custo e, em
muitos casos, praticamente obrigando seus usu rios a migrarem para vers es comerciais de suas distribui es. O projeto Debian criou o Contrato Social Debian. O item n mero 1 desse contrato social diz que o Debian ir sempre permanecer composto de 100% software livre. De igual import ncia, o item n mero 4 desse mesmo documento diz que a prioridade do projeto Debian ser sempre seus usu rios e o software livre, o que, na pr tica, garante que interesses comerciais n o ser o colocados em primeiro plano e que os usu rios n o ser o for ados a migrarem para vers es comerciais da distribui o em momento algum. A Defini o Debian de Software Livre, mais um documento produzido pelo projeto Debian, possui grande import ncia na comunidade de software livre, tendo sido utilizado como base para a cria o do Defini o de C digo Aberto (Open Sorce), a qual individuais e empresas aderentes ao modelo de desenvolvimento aberto de software usam como base para cria o de licen as de softwares que os qualifiquem como software aberto (Open Source).

Ok, isso por enquanto. Um dia ainda termino e acrescento mais conte do. Quem quiser comentar e dar novas id ias, esteja a vontade, nos coment rios ou por e-mail.

Yes, it’s true. Advogato is going offline. It’s sad to see such a good project going offline. I started using Advogato and reading some diaries there a lot of years ago and also wrote some entries myself there. Anyway, thanks Advogato for all the fish and good luck.

Nice to know that my friend Ot vio Salvador started his English blog. As he noted, his toughts will be sindicated on Planet Debian soon. It’s always a pleasure to know which are the newer crazy ideas he’s working on. Go Ot vio ! Update : I’m also blogging in Portuguese. My friends from Debian which can read Brazilian Portuguese can read my ramblings on my blog. With some luck, my ideas will soon also be available on Planeta Debian Brasil, a Brazilian planet for Debian lovers.

Well, I have just finished setting up my virtual machine in a hosting provider which offers a very nice virtual machine plan called VPS. It’s very nice because they give you full root access so you can install whatever you want to install. Also, it’s Debian based and even the control panel they provide is as I like things to be : minimalist and easy to use. Sure, it works like a charm also. I’m tired because I was fighting the blog system I installed for a long time trying to convince it to get installed in a proper VirtualHost but it kept giving me trouble everytime I tried to access its root page. I gave up and installed it in a directory under my default page and then it worked as expected. Someday I need to take a closer look at it and find out what really went wrong. Well, actually, I know what went wrong and I even knew how one could fix the issue as I already fixed issues like this one lots of time in the past, but this time my tricks didn’t helped. Anyway, mail setup is already working, complete with SSL-based IMAP/POP, SMTP-AUTH through SASL and all the basic services I wanted to have are already working. Now I think I can have some sleep a it’s past 4:00AM. Well, enough for a first post.

Meeting people's notes online Despite being on Advogato for some time (but not updating my online diary as often as I would like), I didn't noticed before that my friend faw was also keeping his activities properly documented on Advogato. I found that he recently even linked to my last post. I was searching for something interesting to read and remembered that for some time I used to read Advogato entries of some people I considered interesting, went to check it out and then I found his notes online. What a surprise :-) As I was already there reading his diary entries I took the chance to certify him as Journeyer according to Advogato's metric.

FISL7.0 : Done Ok, it's done. I'm now back at home, posting this blog entry after staying at Porto Alegre, Brazil, since April 18, attending to FISL7.0 (F rum Internacional de Software Livre, ou "International Free Software Forum" version 7.0). It was a nice time I had there, meeting lots of nice friends and helping in the Debian and Debian-BR-CDD booth we were running at the event. However, it was pretty difficult to keep up and don't fall sleep, as we were almost all the time in the booth for fours consecutive days, starting everyday from something like 9:00AM till something like 23:00. Of course I attended to some talks, but the booth was were I stayed for most of the time. I'm very tired right now but didn't wanted to sleep before posting something about the event. We had a party to celebrate the release of the 1.0 version of our local Custom Debian Distribution : Debian-BR-CDD, which is based on Sarge and aimed at brazilian desktop users. Lots of drinks, cakes and happy people in the front of our booth. That's nice when you think that FISL7.0 was an event which had something close to (or more than) 5.000 people attending. People worked very hard to make it happen and I would like to publicy thank everyone from the team for the great release, even if I didn't helped to do it at all :-) We heard from some people that some government people were evaluating GNU/Linux distributions for use at some specific places and it seems tha our distro was the one they picked. Great, and even better when you know that we already had some use-cases from some other government people even before the final 1.0 version. Well, it's Sarge, only with some pre-selected packages and a nice desktop design with only a couple of backports and some already-in-trunk debian-installer enhancements. Nice to see that Debian seems to be the preferred free/libre operating systems in lots pf places in Brazil. Thank's to all the Debian people for such a great OS :-)