Search Results: "asb"

14 June 2026

Jonathan Dowland: HeroQuest

_First Light_ box First Light box
My youngest daughter and I recently started playing the tabletop game HeroQuest. Specifically, the recently-issued, cut-down variant HeroQuest: First Light. This is quite advanced for her age, and I'm a little surprised she's taken to it, but she's really loving it, It's pushed her to read bits of lore on cards and quest books that is way above her expected reading level, and we've been exercising her maths by adding up the gold we find on our quests and calculating what the heroes can buy with it in the store afterwards. Originally from 1989, Hasbro re-issued HeroQuest in 2020. I read about it at the time but didn't buy it. I wasn't sure who I would play it with. It also seemed expensive to me. It probably wasn't unusually expensive in 2020, nor now, for the sheer volume of finely-sculpted miniatures included. I also knew I had the original game in the loft, and I wasn't that keen on buying something I already had, although untangling the contents from several similar boxed games would take me many hours, and I wasn't sure how much of the game I would find.
mix of old and new mix of old and new
First Light was compelling because it is much, much cheaper than the full remake, so I was happy to take a punt. It's cheaper because it doesn't have any plastic monsters or furniture: instead cardboard cut-outs that stand up on plastic stands. For us, that is a significant drawback: 3D miniatures are much more immersive, But I can re-use the plastic miniatures I can find from the original game. First Light has a newly written adventure, better suited to beginners than the original game. The re-issue(s) have new art and new model sculpts that look fantastic. They've changed anything which tied into Games Workshop's IP and I'm really happy about that. They've made an effort to add women, almost entirely absent from the original. I'm certain my daughter wouldn't have tried it otherwise.

12 December 2025

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Updates about DebConf Video Team Sprint, rebootstrap, SBOM tooling in Debian and more! (by Anupa Ann Joseph)

Debian Contributions: 2025-11 Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

DebConf Video Team Sprint The DebConf Video Team records, streams, and publishes talks from DebConf and many miniDebConfs. A lot of the infrastructure development happens during setup for these events, but we also try to organize a sprint once a year to work on infrastructure, when there isn t a DebConf about to happen. Stefano attended the sprint in Herefordshire this year and wrote up a report.

rebootstrap, by Helmut Grohne A number of jobs were stuck in architecture-specific failures. gcc-15 and dpkg still disagree about whether PIE is enabled occasionally and big endian mipsen needed fixes in systemd. Beyond this regular uploads of libxml2 and gcc-15 required fixes and rebasing of pending patches. Earlier, Loongson used rebootstrap to create the initial package set for loong64 and Miao Wang now submitted their changes. Therefore, there is now initial support for suites other than unstable and use with derivatives.

Building the support for Software Bill Of Materials tooling in Debian, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n Vendors of Debian-based products may/should be paying attention to the evolution of different jurisdictions (such as the CRA or updates on CISA s Minimum Elements for a Software Bill of Materials) that require to make available Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) of their products. It is important then to have tools in Debian to make it easier to produce such SBOMs. In this context, Santiago continued the work on packaging libraries related to SBOMs. This includes the packaging of the SPDX python library (python-spdx-tools), and its dependencies rdflib and mkdocs-include-markdown-plugin. System Package Data Exchange (SPDX), defined by ISO/IEC 5962:2021, is an open standard capable of representing systems with software components as SBOMs and other data and security references. SPDX and CycloneDX (whose python library python3-cyclonedx-lib was packaged by prior efforts this year), encompass the two main SBOM standards available today.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Carles improved po-debconf-manager: added checking status of bug reports automatically via python-debianbts; changed some command line options naming or output based on user feedback; finished refactoring user interaction to rich; codebase is now flake8-compliant; added type safety with mypy.
  • Carles, using po-debconf-manager, created 19 bug reports for translations where the merge requests were pending; reviewed and created merge requests for 4 packages.
  • Carles planned a second version of the tool that detects packages that Recommends or Suggests packages which are not in Debian. He is taking ideas from dumat.
  • Carles submitted a pull request to python-unidiff2 (adapted from the original pull request to python-unidiff). He also started preparing a qnetload update.
  • Stefano did miscellaneous python package updates: mkdocs-macros-plugin, python-confuse, python-pip, python-mitogen.
  • Stefano reviewed a beets upload for a new maintainer who is taking it over.
  • Stefano handled some debian.net infrastructure requests.
  • Stefano updated debian.social infrastructure for the trixie point release.
  • The update broke jitsi.debian.social, Stefano put some time into debugging it and eventually enlisted upstream assistance, who solved the problem!
  • Stefano worked on some patches for Python that help Debian:
    • GH-139914: The main HP PA-RISC support patch for 3.14.
    • GH-141930: We observed an unhelpful error when failing to write a .pyc file during package installation. We may have fixed the problem, and at least made the error better.
    • GH-141011: Ignore missing ifunc support on HP PA-RISC.
  • Stefano spun up a website for hamburg2026.mini.debconf.org.
  • Rapha l reviewed a merge request updating tracker.debian.org to rely on bootstrap
    version 5.
  • Emilio coordinated various transitions.
  • Helmut sent patches for 26 cross build failures.
  • Helmut officially handed over the cleanup of the /usr-move transition.
  • Helmut monitored the transition moving libcrypt-dev out of build-essential and bumped the remaining bugs to rc-severity in coordination with the release team.
  • Helmut updated the Build-Profiles patch for debian-policy incorporating feedback from Sean Whitton with a lot of help from Nattie Mayer-Hutchings and Freexian colleagues.
  • Helmut discovered that the way mmdebstrap deals with start-stop-daemon may result in broken output and sent a patch.
  • As a result of armel being removed from sid , but not from forky , the multiarch hinter broke. Helmut fixed it.
  • Helmut uploaded debvm accepting a patch from Luca Boccassi to fix it for newer
    systemd.
  • Colin began preparing for the second stage of the OpenSSH GSS-API key exchange package split.
  • Colin caught and fixed a devscripts regression due to it breaking part of Debusine.
  • Colin packaged django-pgtransaction and backported it to trixie , since it looks useful for Debusine.
  • Thorsten uploaded the packages lprng, cpdb-backend-cups, cpdb-libs and ippsample to fix some RC bugs as well as other bugs that accumulated over time. He also uploaded cups-filters to all Debian releases to fix three CVEs.

19 September 2025

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 15.0.2-2 on CRAN: Transition to Armadillo 15

armadillo image Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language and is widely used by (currently) 1261 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 41.4 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 647 times according to Google Scholar. This versions updates the 15.0.2-1 release from last week. Following fairly extensive email discussions with CRAN, we are now accelerating the transition to Armadillo. When C++14 or newer is used (which after all is the default since R 4.1.0 released May 2021, see WRE Section 1.2.4), or when opted into, the newer Armadillo is selected. If on the other hand either C++11 is still forced, or the legacy version is explicitly selected (which currently one package at CRAN does), then Armadillo 14.6.3 is selected. Most packages will not see a difference and automatically switch to the newer Armadillo. However, some packages will see one or two types of warning. First, if C++11 is still actively selected via for examples CXX_STD then CRAN will nudge a change to a newer compilation standard (as they have been doing for some time already). Preferably the change should be to simply remove the constraint and let R pick the standard based on its version and compiler availability. These days that gives us C++17 in most cases; see WRE Section 1.2.4 for details. (Some packages may need C++14 or C++17 or C++20 explicitly and can also do so.) Second, some packages may see a deprecation warning. Up until Armadillo 14.6.3, the package suppressed these and you can still get that effect by opting into that version by setting -DARMA_USE_LEGACY. (However this route will be sunset eventually too.) But one really should update the code to the non-deprecated version. In a large number of cases this simply means switching from using arma::is_finite() (typically called on a scalar double) to calling std::isfinite(). But there are some other cases, and we will help as needed. If you maintain a package showing deprecation warnings, and are lost here and cannot workout the conversion to current coding styles, please open an issue at the RcppArmadillo repository (i.e. here) or in your own repository and tag me. I will also reach out to the maintainers of a smaller set of packages with more than one reverse dependency. A few small changes have been made internal packaging and documentation, a small synchronization with upstream for two commits since the 15.0.2 release, as well as a link to the ldlasb2 repository and its demonstration regarding some ill-stated benchmarks done elsewhere. The detailed changes since the last CRAN release follow.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 15.0.2-2 (2025-09-18)
  • Minor update to skeleton Makevars,Makevars.win
  • Update README.md to mention ldlasb2 repository
  • Minor documentation update (#487)
  • Synchronized with Armadillo upstream (#488)
  • Refine Armadillo version selection in coordination with CRAN maintainers to support transition towards Armadillo 15.0.*

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

17 September 2025

John Goerzen: Installing and Using Debian With My Decades-Old Genuine DEC vt510 Serial Terminal

Six years ago, I was inspired to buy a DEC serial terminal. Since then, my collection has grown to include several DEC models, an IBM 3151, a Wyse WY-55, a Televideo 990, and a few others. When you are running a terminal program on Linux or MacOS, what you are really running is a terminal emulator. In almost all cases, the terminal emulator is emulating one of the DEC terminals in the vt100 through vt520 line, which themselves use a command set based on an ANSI standard. In short, you spend all day using a program designed to pretend to be the exact kind of physical machine I m using for this experiment! I have long used my terminals connected to a Raspberry Pi 4, but due to the difficulty of entering a root filesystem encryption password using a serial console on a Raspberry Pi, I am switching to an x86 Mini PC (with a N100 CPU). While I have used a terminal with the Pi, I ve never before used it as a serial console all the way from early boot, and I have never installed Debian using the terminal to run the installer. A serial terminal gives you a login prompt. A serial console gives you access to kernel messages, the initrd environment, and sometimes even the bootloader. This might be fun, I thought. I selected one of my vt510 terminals for this. It is one of my newer ones, having been built in 1993. But it has a key feature: I can remap Ctrl to be at the caps lock position, something I do on every other system I use anyhow. I could have easily selected an older one from the 1980s. A DEC vt510 terminal showing the Debian installer Kernel configuration To enable a serial console for Linux, you need to pass a parameter on the kernel command line. See the kernel documentaiton for more. I very frequently see instructions that are incomplete; they particularly omit flow control, which is most definitely needed for these real serial terminals. I run my terminal at 57600 bps, so the parameter I need is console=ttyS0,57600n8r. The r means to use hardware flow control (ttyS0 corresponds to the first serial port on the system; use ttyS1 or something else as appropriate for your situation). While booting the Debian installer, according to Debian s instructions, it may be useful to also add TERM=vt102 (the installer doesn t support the vt510 terminal type directly). The TERM parameter should not be specified on a running system after instlalation. Booting the Debian installer When you start the Debian installer, to get it into serial mode, you have a couple of options:
  1. You can use a traditional display and keyboard just long enough to input the kernel parameters described above
  2. You can edit the bootloader configuration on the installer s filesystem prior to booting from it
Option 1 is pretty easy. Option 2 is hard mode, but not that bad. On x86, the Debian installer boots in at least two different ways: it uses GRUB if you re booting under UEFI (which is most systems these days), or ISOLINUX if you are booting from the BIOS. If using GRUB, the file to edit on the installer image is boot/grub/grub.cfg. Near the top, add these lines:
serial --unit=0 --speed=57600 --word=8 --parity=no --stop=1
terminal_input console serial
terminal_output console serial
Unit 0 corresponds to ttyS0 as above. GRUB s serial command does not support flow control. If your terminal gets corrupted during the GRUB stage, you may need to configure it to a slower speed. Then, find the linux line under the Install menuentry. Edit it to insert console=ttyS0,57600n8r TERM=vt102 right after the vga=788. Save, unmount, and boot. You should see the GRUB screen displayed on your serial terminal. Select the Install option and the installer begins. If you are using BIOS boot, I m sure you can do something similar with the files in the isolinux directory, but haven t researched it. Now, you can install Debian like usual! Configuring the System I was pleasantly surprised to find that Debian s installer took care of many, but not all, of the things I want to do in order to make the system work nicely with a serial terminal. You can perform these steps from a chroot under the installer environment before a reboot, or later in the running system. First, while Debian does set up a getty (the program that displays the login prompt) on the serial console by default, it doesn t enable hardware flow control. So let s do that. Configuring the System: agetty with systemd Run systemctl edit serial-getty@ttyS0.service. This opens an editor that lets you customize the systemd configuration for a given service without having to edit the file directly. All you really need to do is modify the agetty command, so we just override it. At the top, in the designated area, write:
[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=-/sbin/agetty --wait-cr -8 -h -L=always %I 57600 vt510
The empty ExecStart= line is necessary to tell systemd to remove the existing ExecStart command (otherwise, it will logically contain two ExecStart lines, which is an error). These arguments say: The systemd documentation refers to this page about serial consoles, which gives more background. However, I think it is better to use the systemctl edit method described here, rather than just copying the config file, since this lets things like new configurations with new Debian versions take effect. Configuring the System: Kernel and GRUB Your next stop is the /etc/default/grub file. Debian s installer automatically makes some changes here. There are three lines you want to change. First, near the top, edit GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT and add console=tty0 console=ttyS0,57600n8r. By specifying console twice, you allow output to go both to the standard display and to the serial console. By specifying the serial console last, you make it be the preferred one for things like entering the root filesystem password. Next, towards the bottom, make sure these two lines look like this:
GRUB_TERMINAL="console serial"
GRUB_SERIAL_COMMAND="serial --unit=0 --speed=57600 --word=8 --parity=no --stop=1"
Finally, near the top, you may want to raise the GRUB_TIMEOUT to somewhere around 10 to 20 seconds since things may be a bit slower than you re used to. Save the file and run update-grub. Now, GRUB will display on both your standard display and the serial console. You can edit the boot command from either. If you have a VGA or HDMI monitor attached, for instance, and need to not use the serial console, you can just edit the Linux command line in GRUB and remove the reference to ttyS0 for one boot. Easy! That s it. You now have a system that is fully operational from a serial terminal. My original article from 2019 has some additional hints, including on how to convert from UTF-8 for these terminals. Update 2025-09-17: It is also useful to set up proper locales. To do this, first edit /etc/locale.gen. Make sure to add, or uncomment:
en_US ISO-8859-1
en_US.IBM437 IBM437
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 
Then run locale-gen. Normally, your LANG will be set to en_us.UTF-8, which will select the appropriate encoding. Plain en_US will select ISO-8859-1, which you need for the vt510. Then, add something like this to your ~/.bashrc:
if [  tty  = "/dev/ttyS0" -o "$TERM" = "vt510" ]; then
        stty -iutf8
        # might add ixon ixoff
        export LANG=en_US
        export MANOPT="-E ascii"
        stty rows 25
fi
if [ "$TERM" = "screen" -o "$TERM" = "vt100" ]; then
    export LANG=en_US.utf8
fi
Finally, in my ~/.screenrc, I have this. It lets screen convert between UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1:
defencoding UTF-8
startup_message off
vbell off
termcapinfo * XC=B%, -,
maptimeout 5
bindkey -k ku stuff ^[OA
bindkey -k kd stuff ^[OB
bindkey -k kr stuff ^[OC
bindkey -k kl stuff ^[OD

11 September 2025

John Goerzen: Performant Full-Disk Encryption on a Raspberry Pi, but Foiled by Twisty UARTs

In my post yesterday, ARM is great, ARM is terrible (and so is RISC-V), I described my desire to find ARM hardware with AES instructions to support full-disk encryption, and the poor state of the OS ecosystem around the newer ARM boards. I was anticipating buying either a newer ARM SBC or an x86 mini PC of some sort. More-efficient AES alternatives Always one to think, what if I didn t have to actually buy something , I decided to research whether it was possible to use encryption algorithms that are more performant on the Raspberry Pi 4 I already have. The answer was yes. From cryptsetup benchmark:
root@mccoy:~# cryptsetup benchmark --cipher=xchacha12,aes-adiantum-plain64 
# Tests are approximate using memory only (no storage IO).
#            Algorithm         Key        Encryption        Decryption
xchacha12,aes-adiantum        256b       159.7 MiB/s       160.0 MiB/s
xchacha20,aes-adiantum        256b       116.7 MiB/s       169.1 MiB/s
    aes-xts                   256b        52.5 MiB/s        52.6 MiB/s
With best-case reads from my SD card at 45MB/s (with dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=/dev/null bs=1048576 status=progress), either of the ChaCha-based algorithms will be fast enough. Great, I thought. Now I can just solve this problem without spending a dollar. But not so fast. Serial terminals vs. serial consoles My primary use case for this device is to drive my actual old DEC vt510 terminal. I have long been able to do that by running a getty for my FTDI-based USB-to-serial converter on /dev/ttyUSB0. This gets me a login prompt, and I can do whatever I need from there. This does not get me a serial console, however. The serial console would show kernel messages and could be used to interact with the pre-multiuser stages of the system that is, everything before the loging prompt. You can use it to access an emergency shell for repair, etc. Although I have long booted that kernel with console=tty0 console=ttyUSB0,57600, the serial console has never worked but I d never bothered investigating because the text terminal was sufficient. You might be seeing where this is going: to have root on an encrypted LUKS volume, you have to enter the decryption password in the pre-multiuser environment (which happens to be on the initramfs). So I started looking. First, I extracted the initrd with cpio and noticed that the ftdi_sio and usbserial modules weren t present. Added them to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules and rebooted; no better. So I found the kernel s serial console guide, which explicitly notes To use a serial port as console you need to compile the support into your kernel . Well, I have no desire to custom-build a kernel on a Raspberry Pi with MicroSD storage every time a new kernel comes out. I thought well I don t stricly need the kernel to know about the console on /dev/ttyUSB0 for this; I just need the password prompt which comes from userspace to know about it. So I looked at the initramfs code, and wouldn t you know it, it uses /dev/console. Looking at /proc/consoles on that system, indeed it doesn t show ttyUSB0. So even though it is possible to load the USB serial driver in the initramfs, there is no way to make the initramfs use it, because it only uses whatever the kernel recognizes as a console, and the kernel won t recognize this. So there is no way to use a USB-to-serial adapter to enter a password for an encrypted root filesystem. Drat. The on-board UARTs? I can hear you know: The Pi already has on-board serial support! Why not use that? Ah yes, the reason I don t want to use that is because it is difficult to use that, particularly if you want to have RTS/CTS hardware flow control (or DTR/DSR on these old terminals, but that s another story, and I built a custom cable to map it to RTS/CTS anyhow). Since you asked, I ll take you down this unpleasant path. The GPIO typically has only 2 pins for serial communication: 8 and 10, for TX and RX, respectively. But dive in and you get into a confusing maze of UARTs. The mini UART , the one we are mostly familiar with on the Pi, does not support hardware flow control. The PL011 does. So the natural question is: how do we switch to the PL011, and what pins does it use? Great questions, and the answer is undocumented, at least for the Pi 4. According to that page, for the Pi 4, the primary UART is UART1, UART1 is the mini UART, the secondary UART is not normally present on the GPIO connector and might be used by Bluetooth anyway, and there is no documented pin for RTS/CTS anyhow. (Let alone some of the other lines modems use) There are supposed to be /dev/ttyAMA* devices, but I don t have those. There s an enable_uart kernel parameter, which does things like stop the mini UART from changing baud rates every time the VPU changes clock frequency (I am not making this up!), but doesn t seem to control the PL011 UART selection. This page has a program to do it, and map some GPIO pins to RTS/CTS, in theory. Even if you get all that working, you still have the problem that the Pi UARTs (all of them of every type) is 3.3V and RS-232 is 5V, so unless you get a converter, you will fry your Pi the moment you connect it to something useful. So, you re probably looking at some soldering and such just to build a cable that will work with an iffy stack. So, I could probably make it work given enough time, but I don t have that time to spare working with weird Pi serial problems, so I have always used USB converters when I need serial from a Pi. Conclusion I bought a fanless x86 micro PC with a N100 chip and all the ports I might want: a couple of DB-9 serial ports, some Ethernet ports, HDMI and VGA ports, and built-in wifi. Done.

10 September 2025

John Goerzen: ARM is great, ARM is terrible (and so is RISC-V)

I ve long been interested in new and different platforms. I ran Debian on an Alpha back in the late 1990s and was part of the Alpha port team; then I helped bootstrap Debian on amd64. I ve got somewhere around 8 Raspberry Pi devices in active use right now, and the free NNCPNET Internet email service I manage runs on an ARM instance at a cloud provider. ARM-based devices are cheap in a lot of ways: they use little power and there are many single-board computers based on them that are inexpensive. My 8-year-old s computer is a Raspberry Pi 400, in fact. So I like ARM. I ve been looking for ARM devices that have accelerated AES (Raspberry Pi 4 doesn t) so I can use full-disk encryption with them. There are a number of options, since ARM devices are starting to go more mid-range. Radxa s ROCK 5 series of SBCs goes up to 32GB RAM. The Orange Pi 5 Max and Ultra have up to 16GB RAM, as does the Raspberry Pi 5. Pine64 s Quartz64 has up to 8GB of RAM. I believe all of these have the ARM cryptographic extensions. They re all small and most are economical. But I also dislike ARM. There is a terrible lack of standardization in the ARM community. They say their devices run Linux, but the default there is that every vendor has their own custom Debian fork, and quite likely kernel fork as well. Most don t maintain them very well. Imagine if you were buying x86 hardware. You might have to manage AcerOS, Dellbian, HPian, etc. Most of them have no security support (particularly for the kernel). Some are based on Debian 11 (released in 2021), some Debian 12 (released in 2023), and none on Debian 13 (released a month ago). That is exactly the situation we have on ARM. While Raspberry Pi 4 and below can run Debian trixie directly, Raspberry Pi has not bothered to upstream support for the Pi 5 yet, and Raspberry Pi OS is only based on Debian bookworm (released in 2023) and very explicitly does not support a key Debian feature: you can t upgrade from one Raspberry Pi OS release to the next, so it s a complete reinstall every 2 years instead of just an upgrade. OrangePiOS only supports Debian bookworm but notably, their kernel is mostly stuck at 5.10 for every image they have (bookworm shipped with 6.1 and bookworm-backports supports 6.12). Radxa has a page on running Debian on one specific board, they seem to actually not support Debian directly, but rather their fork Radxa OS. There s a different installer for every board; for instance, this one for the Rock 4D. Looking at it, I can see that it uses files from here and here, with custom kernel, gstreamer, u-boot, and they put zfs in main for some reason. From Pine64, the Quartz64 seems to be based on an ancient 4.6 or 4.19 kernel. Perhaps, though, one might be able to use Debian s Pine A64+ instructions on it. Trixie doesn t have a u-boot image for the Quartz64 but it does have device tree files for it. RISC-V seems to be even worse; not only do we have this same issue there, but support in trixie is more limited and so is performance among the supported boards. The alternative is x86-based mini PCs. There are a bunch based on the N100, N150, or Celeron. Many of them support AES-NI and the prices are roughly in line with the higher-end ARM units. There are some interesting items out there; for instance, the Radxa X4 SBC features both an N100 and a RP2040. Fanless mini PCs are available from a number of vendors. Companies like ZimaBoard have interesting options like the ZimaBlade also. The difference in power is becoming less significant; it seems the newer ARM boards need 20W or 30W power supplies, and that may put them in the range of the mini PCs. As for cost, the newer ARM boards need a heat sink and fan, so by the time you add SBC, fan, storage, etc. you re starting to get into the price range of the mini PCs. It is great to see all the options of small SBCs with ARM and RISC-V processors, but at some point you ve got to throw up your hands and go this ecosystem has a lot of problems and consider just going back to x86. I m not sure if I m quite there yet, but I m getting close. Update 2025-09-11: I found a performant encryption option for the Pi 4, but was stymied by serial console problems; see the update post.

20 February 2025

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp now used by 3000 CRAN packages!

3000 Rcpp packages As of today, Rcpp stands at 3001 reverse-dependencies on CRAN. The graph on the left depicts the growth of Rcpp usage (as measured by Depends, Imports and LinkingTo, but excluding Suggests) over time. Rcpp was first released in November 2008. It took seven year years to clear 500 packages in late October 2015 after which usage of R and Rcpp accelerated: 1000 packages in April 2017, 1500 packages in November 2018, 2000 packages in July 2020, and 2500 package in February 2022. The chart extends to the very beginning via manually compiled data from CRANberries and checked with crandb. The core part of the data set is generated semi-automatically when updating a (manually curated) list of packages using Rcpp that is available too. The Rcpp team aims to keep Rcpp as performant and reliable as it has been (and see e.g. here for more details). Last month s 1.0.14 release post is a good example of the ongoing work. A really big shoutout and Thank You! to all users and contributors of Rcpp for help, suggestions, bug reports, documentation or, of course, code.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

23 January 2025

Sergio Talens-Oliag: Ghostty Terminal Emulator

For a long time I ve been using the Terminator terminal emulator on Linux machines, but last week I read a LWN article about a new emulator called Ghostty that looked interesting and I decided to give it a try. The author sells it as a fast, feature-rich and cross-platform terminal emulator that follows the zero configuration philosophy.

Installation and configurationI installed the debian package for Ubuntu 24.04 from the ghostty-ubuntu project and started playing with it. The first thing I noticed is that the zero configuration part is true; I was able to use the terminal without a configuration file, although I created one to change the theme and the font size, but other than that it worked OK for me; my $HOME/.config/ghostty/config file is as simple as:
font-size=14
theme=/usr/share/ghostty/themes/iTerm2 Solarized Light

Starting the terminal maximizedAfter playing a little bit with the terminal I was turned off by the fact that there was no option to start it maximized, but is seemed to me that someone should have asked for the feature, or, if not, I could ask for it. I did a quick search on the project and I found out that there was a merged PR that added the option, so I downloaded the source code, installed Zig and built the program on my machine. As the change is going to be included on the next version on the package I replaced the binary with my version and started playing with the terminal.

Accessing remote machinesThe first thing I noticed was that when logging into remote machines using ssh the terminal variable was not known, but on the help section of the project documentation there was an entry about how to fix it copying the terminfo configuration to remote machines, it is as simple as running the following:
infocmp -x   ssh YOUR-SERVER -- tic -x -

Dead keys on UbuntuWith that sorted out everything looked good to me until I tried to add an accented character when editing a file and the terminal stopped working. Again, I looked at the project issues and found one that matched what was happening to me, and it remembered me about one of the best things about actively maintained open source software. It turns out that the issue is related to a bug on ibus, but other terminals were working right, so the ghostty developer was already working on a fix on the way the terminal handles the keyboard input on GTK, so I subscribed to the issue and stopped using ghostty until there was something new to try again (I use an Spanish keyboard map and I can t use a terminal that does not support dead keys). Yesterday I saw some messages about things being almost fixed, so I pulled the latest changes on my cloned repository, compiled it and writing accented characters works now, there is a small issue with the cursor (the dead key pressed is left on the block cursor unless you change the window focus), but that is something manageable for me.

ConclusionI think that ghostty is a good terminal emulator and I m going to keep using it on my laptop unless I find something annoying that I can t work with (i hope that the cursor issue will be fixed soon and I can live with it as the only thing I need to do to recover from it is changing the widow focus, and that can be done really quickly using keyboard shortcuts). As it is actively maintained and the developer seems to be quite active I don t expect problems and is nice to play with new things from time to time.

8 August 2024

Jonathan Carter: DebConf24 Busan, South Korea

I m finishing typing up this blog entry hours before my last 13 hour leg back home, after I spent 2 weeks in Busan, South Korea for DebCamp24 and DebCamp24. I had a rough year and decided to take it easy this DebConf. So this is the first DebConf in a long time where I didn t give any talks. I mostly caught up on a bit of packaging, worked on DebConf video stuff, attended a few BoFs and talked to people. Overall it was a very good DebConf, which also turned out to be more productive than I expeced it would. In the welcome session on the first day of DebConf, Nicolas Dandrimont mentioned that a benefit of DebConf is that it provides a sort of caffeine for your Debian motivation. I could certainly feel that affect swell as the days went past, and it s nice to be excited about some ideas again that would otherwise be fading.

Recovering DPL It s a bit of a gear shift being DPL for 4 years, and DebConf Committee for nearly 5 years before that, and then being at DebConf while some issue arise (as it always does during a conference). At first I jump into high alert mode, but then I have to remind myself it s not your problem anymore and let others deal with it. It was nice spending a little in-person time with Andreas Tille, our new DPL, we did some more handover and discussed some current issues. I still have a few dozen emails in my DPL inbox that I need to collate and forward to Andreas, I hope to finish all that up by the end of August. During the Bits from the DPL talk, the usual question came up whether Andreas will consider running for DPL again, to which he just responded in a slide Maybe . I think it s a good idea for a DPL to do at least two terms if it all works out for everyone, since it takes a while to get up to speed on everything. Also, having been DPL for four years, I have a lot to say about it, and I think there s a lot we can fix in the role, or at least discuss it. If I had the bandwidth for it I would have scheduled a BoF for it, but I ll very likely do that for the next DebConf instead!

Video team I set up the standby loop for the video streaming setup. We call it loopy, it s a bunch of OBS scenes that provide announcements, shows sponsors, the schedule and some social content. I wrote about it back in 2020, but it s evolved quite a bit since then, so I m probably due to write another blog post with a bunch of updates on it. I hope to organise a video team sprint in Cape Town in the first half of next year, so I ll summarize everything before then.

It would ve been great if we could have some displays in social areas that could show talks, the loop and other content, but we were just too pressed for time for that. This year s DebConf had a very compressed timeline, and there was just too much that had to be done and that had to be figured out on the last minute. This put quite a lot of strain on the organisers, but I was glad to see how, for the most part, most attendees were very sympathetic to some rough edges (but I digress ). I added more of the OBS machine setup to the videoteam s ansible repository, so as of now it just needs an ansible setup and the OBS data and it s good to go. The loopy data is already in the videoteam git repository, so I could probably just add a git pull and create some symlinks in ansible and then that machine can be installed from 0% to 100% by just installing via debian-installer with our ansible hooks. This DebConf I volunteered quite a bit for actual video roles during the conference, something I didn t have much time for in recent DebConfs, and it s been fun, especially in a session or two where nearly none of the other volunteers showed up. Sometimes chaos is just fun :-)
Baekyongee is the university mascot, who s visible throughout the university. So of course we included this four legged whale creature on the loop too!

Packaging I was hoping to do more packaging during DebCamp, but at least it was a non-zero amount:
  • Uploaded gdisk 1.0.10-2 to unstable (previously tested effects of adding dh-sequence-movetousr) (Closes: #1073679).
  • Worked a bit on bcachefs-tools (updating git to 1.9.4), but has a build failure that I need to look into (we might need a newer bindgen) update: I m probably going to ROM this package soon, it doesn t seem suitable for packaging in Debian.
  • Calamares: Tested a fix for encrypted installs, and uploaded it.
  • Calamares: Uploaded (3.3.8-1) to backports (at the time of writing it s still in backports-NEW).
  • Backport obs-gradient-source for bookworm.
  • Did some initial packaging on Cambalache, I ll upload to unstable once wlroots (0.18) hits unstable.
  • Pixelorama 1.0 I did some initial packaging for Pixelorama back when we did the MiniDebConf Gaming Edition, but it had a few stoppers back then. Version 1.0 seems to fix all of that, but it depends on Godot 4.2 and we re still on the 3 series in Debian, so I ll upload this once Godot 4.2 hits at least experimental. Godot software/games is otherwise quite easy to run, it s basically just source code / data that is installed and then run via godot-runner (godot3-runner package in Debian).

BoFs Python Team BoF Link to the etherpad / pad archive link and video can be found on the talk page: https://debconf24.debconf.org/talks/31-python-bof/ The session ended up being extended to a second part, since all the issues didn t fit into the first session. I was distracted by too many thing during the Python 3.12 transition (to the point where I thought that 3.11 was still new in Debian), so it was very useful listening to the retrospective of that transition. There was a discussion whether Python 3.13 could still make it to testing in time for freeze, and it seems that there is consensus that it can, although, likely with new experimental features like disabling the global interpreter lock and the just in time compiler disabled. I learned for the first time about the dead batteries project, PEP-0594, which removes ancient modules that have mostly been superseded, from the Python standard library. There was some talk about the process for changing team policy, and a policy discussion on whether we should require autopkgtests as a SHOULD or a MUST for migration to testing. As with many things, the devil is in the details and in my opinion you could go either way and achieve a similar result (the original MUST proposal allowed exceptions which imho made it the same as the SHOULD proposal). There s an idea to do some ongoing remote sprints, like having co-ordinated days for bug squashing / working on stuff together. This is a nice idea and probably a good way to energise the team and also to gain some interest from potential newcomers. Louis-Philipe V ronneau was added as a new team admin and there was some discussion on various Sphinx issues and which Lintian tags might be needed for Python 3.13. If you want to know more, you probably have to watch the videos / read the notes :)
    Debian.net BoF Link to the etherpad / pad archive link can be found on the talk page: https://debconf24.debconf.org/talks/37-debiannet-team-bof Debian Developers can set up services on subdomains on debian.net, but a big problem we ve had before was that developers were on their own for hosting those services. This meant that they either hosted it on their DSL/fiber connection at home, paid for the hosting themselves, or hosted it at different services which became an accounting nightmare to claim back the used funds. So, a few of us started the debian.net hosting project (sometimes we just call it debian.net, this is probably a bit of a bug) so that Debian has accounts with cloud providers, and as admins we can create instances there that gets billed directly to Debian. We had an initial rush of services, but requests have slowed down since (not really a bad thing, we don t want lots of spurious requests). Last year we did a census, to check which of the instances were still used, whether they received system updates and to ask whether they are performing backups. It went well and some issues were found along the way, so we ll be doing that again. We also gained two potential volunteers to help run things, which is great. Debian Social BoF Link to the etherpad / pad archive link can be found on the talk page: https://debconf24.debconf.org/talks/34-debiansocial-bof We discussed the services we run, you can view the current state of things at: https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianSocial Pleroma has shown some cracks over the last year or so, and there are some forks that seem promising. At the same time, it might be worth while considering Mastodon too. So we ll do some comparison of features and maintenance and find a way forward. At the time when Pleroma was installed, it was way ahead in terms of moderation features. Pixelfed is doing well and chugging along nicely, we should probably promote it more. Peertube is working well, although we learned that we still don t have all the recent DebConf videos on there. A bunch of other issues should be fixed once we move it to a new machine that we plan to set up. We re removing writefreely and plume. Nice concepts, but it didn t get much traction yet, and no one who signed up for these actually used it, which is fine, some experimentation with services is good and sometimes they prove to be very popular and other times not. The WordPress multisite instance has some mild use, otherwise haven t had any issues. Matrix ended up to be much, much bigger than we thought, both in usage and in its requirements. It s very stateful and remembers discussions for as long as you let it, so it s Postgres database is continuously expanding, this will also be a lot easier to manage once we have this on the new host. Jitsi is also quite popular, but it could probably be on jitsi.debian.net instead (we created this on debian.social during the initial height of COVID-19 where we didn t have the debian.net hosting yet), although in practice it doesn t really matter where it lives. Most of our current challenges will be solved by moving everything to a new big machine that has a few public IPs available for some VMs, so we ll be doing that shortly. Debian Foundation Discussion BoF This was some brainstorming about the future structure of Debian, and what steps might be needed to get there. It s way too big a problem to take on in a BoF, but we made some progress in figuring out some smaller pieces of the larger puzzle. The DPL is going to get in touch with some legal advisors and our trusted organisations so that we can aim to formalise our relationships a bit more by the time it s DebConf again. I also introduced my intention to join the Debian Partners delegation. When I was DPL, I enjoyed talking with external organisations who wanted to help Debian, but helping external organisations help Debian turned out to be too much additional load on the usual DPL roles, so I m pursuing this with the Debian Partners team, more on that some other time. This session wasn t recorded, but if you feel like you missed something, don t worry, all intentions will be communicated and discussed with project members before anything moves forward. There was a strong agreement in the room though that we should push forward on this, and not reach another DebConf where we didn t make progress on formalising Debian s structure more.

    Social Conference Dinner
    Conference Dinner Photo from Santiago
    The conference dinner took place in the university gymnasium. I hope not many people do sports there in the summer, because it got HOT. There was also some interesting observations on the thermodynamics of the attempted cooling solutions, which was amusing. On the plus side, the food was great, the company was good, and the speeches were kept to a minimum, so it was a great conference dinner, even though it was probably cut a bit short due to the heat. Cheese and Wine Cheese and Wine happened on 1 August, which happens to be the date I became a DD at DebConf17 in Montr al seven years before, so this was a nice accidental celebration of my Debiversary :) Since I m running out of time, I ll add some more photos to this post some time after publishing it :P Group Photo As per DebConf tradition, Aigars took the group photo. You can find the high resolution version on Debian s GitLab instance.
    Debian annual conference Debconf 24, Busan, South Korea
    Photography: Aigars Mahinovs aigarius@debian.org
    License: CC-BYv3+ or GPLv2+
    Talking Ah yes, talking to people is a big part of DebConf, but I didn t keep track of it very well.
    • I mostly listened to Alper a bit about his ideas for his talk about debian installer.
    • I talked to Rhonda a bit about ActivityPub and MQTT and whether they could be useful for publicising Debian activity.
    • Listened to Gunnar and Julian have a discussion about GPG and APT which was interesting.
    • I learned that you can learn Hangul, the Korean alphabet, in about an hour or so (I wish I knew that in all my years of playing StarCraft II).
    • We had the usual continuous keysigning party. Besides it s intended function, this is always a good ice breaker and a way to for shy people to meet other shy people.
    • and many other fly-by discussions.

    Stuff that didn t happen this DebConf
    • loo.py A simple Python script that could eventually replace the obs-advanced-scene-switcher sequencer in OBS. It would also be extremely useful if we d ever replace OBS for loopy. I was hoping to have some time to hack on this, and try to recreate the current loopy in loo.py, but didn t have the time.
    • toetally This year videoteam had to scramble to get a bunch of resistors to assemble some tally light. Even when assembled, they were a bit troublesome. It would ve been nice to hack on toetally and get something ready for testing, but it mostly relies on having something like a rasbperry pi zero with an attached screen in order to work on further. I ll try to have something ready for the next mini conf though.
    • extrepo on debian live I think we should have extrepo installed by default on desktop systems, I meant to start a discussion on this, but perhaps it s just time I go ahead and do it and announce it.
    • Live stream to peertube server It would ve been nice to live stream DebConf to PeerTube, but the dependency tree to get this going got a bit too huge. Following our plans discussed in the Debian Social BoF, we should have this safely ready before the next MiniDebConf and should be able to test it there.
    • Desktop Egg there was this idea to get a stand-in theme for Debian testing/unstable until the artwork for the next release is finalized (Debian bug: #1038660), I have an idea that I meant to implement months ago, but too many things got in the way. It s based on Juliette Taka s Homeworld theme, and basically transforms the homeworld into an egg. Get it? Something that hasn t hatched yet? I also only recently noticed that we never used the actual homeworld graphics (featuring the world image) in the final bullseye release. lol.
    So, another DebConf and another new plush animal. Last but not least, thanks to PKNU for being such a generous and fantastic host to us! See you again at DebConf25 in Brest, France next year!

      9 January 2024

      Louis-Philippe V ronneau: 2023 A Musical Retrospective

      I ended 2022 with a musical retrospective and very much enjoyed writing that blog post. As such, I have decided to do the same for 2023! From now on, this will probably be an annual thing :) Albums In 2023, I added 73 new albums to my collection nearly 2 albums every three weeks! I listed them below in the order in which I acquired them. I purchased most of these albums when I could and borrowed the rest at libraries. If you want to browse though, I added links to the album covers pointing either to websites where you can buy them or to Discogs when digital copies weren't available. Once again this year, it seems that Punk (mostly O !) and Metal dominate my list, mostly fueled by Angry Metal Guy and the amazing Montr al Skinhead/Punk concert scene. Concerts A trend I started in 2022 was to go to as many concerts of artists I like as possible. I'm happy to report I went to around 80% more concerts in 2023 than in 2022! Looking back at my list, April was quite a busy month... Here are the concerts I went to in 2023: Although metalfinder continues to work as intended, I'm very glad to have discovered the Montr al underground scene has departed from Facebook/Instagram and adopted en masse Gancio, a FOSS community agenda that supports ActivityPub. Our local instance, askapunk.net is pretty much all I could ask for :) That's it for 2023!

      9 August 2023

      Antoine Beaupr : OpenPGP key transition

      This is a short announcement to say that I have changed my main OpenPGP key. A signed statement is available with the cryptographic details but, in short, the reason is that I stopped using my old YubiKey NEO that I have worn on my keyring since 2015. I now have a YubiKey 5 which supports ED25519 which features much shorter keys and faster decryption. It allowed me to move all my secret subkeys on the key (including encryption keys) while retaining reasonable performance. I have written extensive documentation on how to do that OpenPGP key rotation and also YubiKey OpenPGP operations.

      Warning on storing encryption keys on a YubiKey People wishing to move their private encryption keys to such a security token should be very careful as there are special precautions to take for disaster recovery. I am toying with the idea of writing an article specifically about disaster recovery for secrets and backups, dealing specifically with cases of death or disabilities.

      Autocrypt changes One nice change is the impact on Autocrypt headers, which are considerably shorter. Before, the header didn't even fit on a single line in an email, it overflowed to five lines:
      Autocrypt: addr=anarcat@torproject.org; prefer-encrypt=nopreference;
       keydata=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
      
      After the change, the entire key fits on a single line, neat!
      Autocrypt: addr=anarcat@torproject.org; prefer-encrypt=nopreference;
       keydata=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
      
      Note that I have implemented my own kind of ridiculous Autocrypt support for the Notmuch Emacs email client I use, see this elisp code. To import keys, I pipe the message into this script which is basically just:
      sq autocrypt decode   gpg --import
      
      ... thanks to Sequoia best-of-class Autocrypt support.

      Note on OpenPGP usage While some have claimed OpenPGP's death, I believe those are overstated. Maybe it's just me, but I still use OpenPGP for my password management, to authenticate users and messages, and it's the interface to my YubiKey for authenticating with SSH servers. I understand people feel that OpenPGP is possibly insecure, counter-intuitive and full of problems, but I think most of those problems should instead be attributed to its current flagship implementation, GnuPG. I have tried to work with GnuPG for years, and it keeps surprising me with evilness and oddities. I have high hopes that the Sequoia project can bring some sanity into this space, and I also hope that RFC4880bis can eventually get somewhere so we have a more solid specification with more robust crypto. It's kind of a shame that this has dragged on for so long, but Update: there's a separate draft called openpgp-crypto-refresh that might actually be adopted as the "OpenPGP RFC" soon! And it doesn't keep real work from happening in Sequoia and other implementations. Thunderbird rewrote their OpenPGP implementation with RNP (which was, granted, a bumpy road because it lost compatibility with GnuPG) and Sequoia now has a certificate store with trust management (but still no secret storage), preliminary OpenPGP card support and even a basic GnuPG compatibility layer. I'm also curious to try out the OpenPGP CA capabilities. So maybe it's just because I'm becoming an old fart that doesn't want to change tools, but so far I haven't seen a good incentive in switching away from OpenPGP, and haven't found a good set of tools that completely replace it. Maybe OpenSSH's keys and CA can eventually replace it, but I suspect they will end up rebuilding most of OpenPGP anyway, just more slowly. If they do, let's hope they avoid the mistakes our community has done in the past at least...

      29 June 2023

      C.J. Collier: Converting a windows install to a libvirt VM

      Reduce the size of your c: partition to the smallest it can be and then turn off windows with the understanding that you will never boot this system on the iron ever again.
      Boot into a netinst installer image (no GUI). hold alt and press left arrow a few times until you get to a prompt to press enter. Press enter. In this example /dev/sda is your windows disk which contains the c: partition
      and /dev/disk/by-id/usb0 is the USB-3 attached SATA controller that you have your SSD attached to (please find an example attached). This SSD should be equal to or larger than the windows disk for best compatability. A photo of a USB-3 attached SATA controller To find the literal path names of your detected drives you can run fdisk -l. Pay attention to the names of the partitions and the sizes of the drives to help determine which is which. Once you have a shell in the netinst installer, you should maybe be able to run a command like the following. This will duplicate the disk located at if (in file) to the disk located at of (out file) while showing progress as the status.
      dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/disk/by-id/usb0 status=progress
      If you confirm that dd is available on the netinst image and the previous command runs successfully, test that your windows partition is visible in the new disk s partition table. The start block of the windows partition on each should match, as should the partition size.
      fdisk -l /dev/disk/by-id/usb0
      fdisk -l /dev/sda
      If the output from the first is the same as the output from the second, then you are probably safe to proceed. Once you confirm that you have made and tested a full copy of the blocks from your windows drive saved on your usb disk, nuke your windows partition table from orbit.
      dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M count=42
      You can press alt-f1 to return to the Debian installer now. Follow the instructions to install Debian. Don t forget to remove all attached USB drives. Once you install Debian, press ctrl-alt-f3 to get a root shell. Add your user to the sudoers group:
      # adduser cjac sudoers
      log out
      # exit
      log in as your user and confirm that you have sudo
      $ sudo ls
      Don t forget to read the spider man advice enter your password you ll need to install virt-manager. I think this should help:
      $ sudo apt-get install virt-manager libvirt-daemon-driver-qemu qemu-system-x86
      insert the USB drive. You can now create a qcow2 file for your virtual machine.
      $ sudo qemu-img convert -O qcow2 \
      /dev/disk/by-id/usb0 \
      /var/lib/libvirt/images/windows.qcow2
      I personally create a volume group called /dev/vg00 for the stuff I want to run raw and instead of converting to qcow2 like all of the other users do, I instead write it to a new logical volume.
      sudo lvcreate /dev/vg00 -n windows -L 42G # or however large your drive was
      sudo dd if=/dev/disk/by-id/usb0 of=/dev/vg00/windows status=progress
      Now that you ve got the qcow2 file created, press alt-left until you return to your GDM session. The apt-get install command above installed virt-manager, so log in to your system if you haven t already and open up gnome-terminal by pressing the windows key or moving your mouse/gesture to the top left of your screen. Type in gnome-terminal and either press enter or click/tap on the icon. I like to run this full screen so that I feel like I m in a space ship. If you like to feel like you re in a spaceship, too, press F11. You can start virt-manager from this shell or you can press the windows key and type in virt-manager and press enter. You ll want the shell to run commands such as virsh console windows or virsh list When virt-manager starts, right click on QEMU/KVM and select New.
      In the New VM window, select Import existing disk image
      When prompted for the path to the image, use the one we created with sudo qemu-img convert above.
      Select the version of Windows you want.
      Select memory and CPUs to allocate to the VM.
      Tick the Customize configuration before install box
      If you re prompted to enable the default network, do so now.
      The default hardware layout should probably suffice. Get it as close to the underlying hardware as it is convenient to do. But Windows is pretty lenient these days about virtualizing licensed windows instances so long as they re not running in more than one place at a time. Good luck! Leave comments if you have questions.

      20 December 2022

      Freexian Collaborators: Recent improvements to Tryton's Debian Packaging (by Mathias Behrle and Rapha l Hertzog)

      Foreword Freexian has been using Tryton for a few years to handle its invoicing and accounting. We have thus also been using the Debian packages maintained by Mathias Behrle and we have been funding some of his work because maintaining an ERP with more than 50 source packages was too much for him to handle alone on his free time. When Mathias discovered our Project Funding initiative, it was quite natural for him to consider applying to be able to bring some much needed improvements to Tryton s Debian packaging. He s running his own consulting company (MBSolutions) so it s easy for him to invoice Freexian to get the money for the funded projects. What follows is Mathias Behrle s description of the projects that he submitted and of the work that he achieved. If you want to contact him, you can reach out to mathiasb@m9s.biz or mbehrle@debian.org. You can also follow him on Mastodon.

      Report In January 2022 I applied for two projects in the Freexian Project Funding Initiative.
      • Tryton Project 1
        • The starting point of this project was Debian Bug #998319: tryton-server should provide a ready-to-use production-grade server config. To address this problem instead of only providing configuration snippets the idea was to provide a full featured guided setup of a Tryton production environment, thus eliminating the risks of trial and error for the system administrator.
      • Tryton Project 2
        • The goal of this project was to complete the available Tryton modules in Debian main with the latest set available from tryton.org and to automate the task of creating new Debian packages from Tryton modules as much as possible.

      Accomplishments As the result of Task 1, several new packages emerged:
      • tryton-server-postgresql provides the guided setup of a PostgreSQL database backend.
      • tryton-server-uwsgi provides the installation and configuration of a robust WSGI server on top of tryton-server.
      • tryton-server-nginx provides the configuration of a scalable web frontend to the uwsgi server, including the optional setup of secure access by Letsencrypt certificates.
      • tryton-server-all-in-one puts it all together to provide a fully functional Tryton production environment, including a database filled with basic static data. With the installation of this package a robust and secure production grade setup is possible from scratch, all configuration leg work is done in the background.
      The work was thoroughly reviewed by Neil Williams. Thanks go to him for his detailed feedback providing very valuable information from the view of a fresh Tryton user getting in first contact with the software. A cordial thank you as well goes to the translation teams providing initial reviews and translations for the configuration questions. The efforts of Task 1 were completed with Task 2:
      • A Tryton specific version of PyPi2deb was created to help in the preparation of new Debian packages for new Tryton modules.
      • All missing Tryton modules for the current series were packaged for Debian.
      On top of those two planned projects, I completed an additional task: the packaging of the Tryton Web Client. The Web Client is a quite important feature to access a Tryton server with the browser and even a crucial requirement for some companies. Unfortunately the packaging of the Web Client for Debian was problematic from the beginning. tryton-sao requires exact versions of JavaScript libraries that are almost never guaranteed to be available in the different targeted Debian releases. Therefore a package with vendored libraries has been created and will hopefully soon hit the Debian main archive. The package is already available from the Tryton Backport Mirror for the usually supported Debian releases.

      Summary I am very pleased that the Tryton suite in Debian has gained full coverage of Tryton modules and a user-friendly installation. The completion of the project represents a huge step forward in the state-of-the-art deployment of a production grade Tryton environment. Without the monetary support of Freexian s project funding the realization of this project wouldn t have been possible in this way and to this extent.

      17 October 2022

      Scarlett Gately Moore: New KDE Gear snaps in the works

      KDE Extras 22.08.2 was released! https://kde.org/announcements/gear/22.08.2/ So I am working on new snaps! This release also includes a new content snap I made with frameworks 5.98 and Qt 5.15.6. With all the new goodness, I am (Re) testing all snaps to make sure they are working as expected. You can find a link to all of my snap releases from the KDE Snap Store Releases on the menu above. Some notable releases that have new fixes and improvements are: New 22.08.2 releases re-tested on arm64 and amd64: More coming soon! Please consider donating! I am seeking employment, but until then, I need assistance with gas to power my generator to power my laptop. Solar doesn t work great in these coming winter months  Thank you for your consideration! https://www.patreon.com/sgmoore

      12 April 2022

      Sven Hoexter: Emulating Raspi2 like hardware with RaspiOS in 2022

      Update of my notes from 2020.
      # Download a binary device tree file and matching kernel a good soul uploaded to github
      wget https://github.com/vfdev-5/qemu-rpi2-vexpress/raw/master/kernel-qemu-4.4.1-vexpress
      wget https://github.com/vfdev-5/qemu-rpi2-vexpress/raw/master/vexpress-v2p-ca15-tc1.dtb
      # Download the official Rasbian image without X
      wget https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspios_lite_armhf/images/raspios_lite_armhf-2022-04-07/2022-04-04-raspios-bullseye-armhf-lite.img.xz
      unxz 2022-04-04-raspios-bullseye-armhf-lite.img.xz
      # Convert it from the raw image to a qcow2 image and add some space
      qemu-img convert -f raw -O qcow2 2022-04-04-raspios-bullseye-armhf-lite.img rasbian.qcow2
      qemu-img resize rasbian.qcow2 4G
      # make sure we get a user account setup
      echo "me:$(echo 'test123' openssl passwd -6 -stdin)" > userconf
      sudo guestmount -a rasbian.qcow2 -m /dev/sda1 /mnt
      sudo mv userconf /mnt
      sudo guestunmount /mnt
      # start qemu
      qemu-system-arm -m 2048M -M vexpress-a15 -cpu cortex-a15 \
       -kernel kernel-qemu-4.4.1-vexpress -no-reboot \
       -smp 2 -serial stdio \
       -dtb vexpress-v2p-ca15-tc1.dtb -sd rasbian.qcow2 \
       -append "root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rw rootfstype=ext4 console=ttyAMA0,15200 loglevel=8" \
       -nic user,hostfwd=tcp::5555-:22
      # login at the serial console as user me with password test123
      sudo -i
      # enable ssh
      systemctl enable ssh
      systemctl start ssh
      # resize partition and filesystem
      parted /dev/mmcblk0 resizepart 2 100%
      resize2fs /dev/mmcblk0p2
      
      Now I can login via ssh and start to play:
      ssh me@localhost -p 5555
      

      25 February 2022

      Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp now used by 2500 CRAN packages!

      2500 Rcpp packages As of this morning, Rcpp stands at 2501 reverse-dependencies on CRAN. The graph on the left depicts the growth of Rcpp usage (as measured by Depends, Imports and LinkingTo, but excluding Suggests) over time. Rcpp was first released in November 2008. It probably cleared 50 packages around three years later in December 2011, 100 packages in January 2013, 200 packages in April 2014, and 300 packages in November 2014. It passed 400 packages in June 2015 (when I tweeted about it), 500 packages in late October 2015, 600 packages in March 2016, 700 packages in July 2016, 800 packages in October 2016, 900 packages early January 2017, 1000 packages in April 2017, 1250 packages in November 2017, 1500 packages in November 2018, 1750 packages in August 2019, 2000 packages in July 2020, and 2250 package in March of last year. The chart extends to the very beginning via manually compiled data from CRANberries and checked with crandb. The next part uses manually saved entries. The core (and by far largest) part of the data set was generated semi-automatically via a short script appending updates to a small file-based backend. A (manually curated) list of packages using Rcpp is available too. Also displayed in the graph is the relative proportion of CRAN packages using Rcpp. The four per-cent hurdle was cleared just before useR! 2014 where I showed a similar graph (as two distinct graphs) in my invited talk. We passed five percent in December of 2014, six percent July of 2015, seven percent just before Christmas 2015, eight percent in the summer of 2016, nine percent mid-December 2016, cracked ten percent in the summer of 2017, eleven percent in 2018 and passed 12.5 percent or one in every eight CRAN packages dependens on Rcpp along with the 2000 packages mark. Truly stunning. As before, there is more detail in the chart: how CRAN seems to be pushing back more and removing more aggressively (which my CRANberries tracks but not in as much detail as it could), how the growth of Rcpp seems to be slowing somewhat outright and even more so as a proportion of CRAN as one would expect a growth curve to. The Rcpp team continues to aim for keeping Rcpp as performant and reliable as it has been (and see e.g. here for some more details). A really big shoutout and Thank You! to all users and contributors of Rcpp for help, suggestions, bug reports, documentation or, of course, code. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

      This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

      13 May 2021

      Shirish Agarwal: Population, Immigration, Vaccines and Mass-Surveilance.

      The Population Issue and its many facets Another couple of weeks passed. A Lot of things happening, lots of anger and depression in folks due to handling in pandemic, but instead of blaming they are willing to blame everybody else including the population. Many of them want forced sterilization like what Sanjay Gandhi did during the Emergency (1975). I had to share So Long, My son . A very moving tale of two families of what happened to them during the one-child policy in China. I was so moved by it and couldn t believe that the Chinese censors allowed it to be produced, shot, edited, and then shared worldwide. It also won a couple of awards at the 69th Berlin Film Festival, silver bear for the best actor and the actress in that category. But more than the award, the theme, and the concept as well as the length of the movie which was astonishing. Over a 3 hr. something it paints a moving picture of love, loss, shame, relief, anger, and asking for forgiveness. All of which can be identified by any rational person with feelings worldwide.

      Girl child What was also interesting though was what it couldn t or wasn t able to talk about and that is the Chinese leftover men. In fact, a similar situation exists here in India, only it has been suppressed. This has been more pronounced more in Asia than in other places. One big thing in this is human trafficking and mostly women trafficking. For the Chinese male, that was happening on a large scale from all neighboring countries including India. This has been shared in media and everybody knows about it and yet people are silent. But this is not limited to just the Chinese, even Indians have been doing it. Even yesteryear actress Rupa Ganguly was caught red-handed but then later let off after formal questioning as she is from the ruling party. So much for justice. What is and has been surprising at least for me is Rwanda which is in the top 10 of some of the best places in equal gender. It, along with other African countries have also been in news for putting quite a significant amount of percentage of GDP into public healthcare (between 20-10%), but that is a story for a bit later. People forget or want to forget that it was in Satara, a city in my own state where 220 girls changed their name from nakusha or unwanted to something else and that had become a piece of global news. One would think that after so many years, things would have changed, the only change that has happened is that now we have two ministries, The Ministry of Women and Child Development (MoWCD) and The Ministry of Health and Welfare (MoHFW). Sadly, in both cases, the ministries have been found wanting, Whether it was the high-profile Hathras case or even the routine cries of help which given by women on the twitter helpline. Sadly, neither of these ministries talks about POSH guidelines which came up after the 2012 gangrape case. For both these ministries, it should have been a pinned tweet. There is also the 1994 PCPNDT Act which although made in 1994, actually functioned in 2006, although what happens underground even today nobody knows  . On the global stage, about a decade ago, Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt argued in their book Freakonomics how legalized abortion both made the coming population explosion as well as expected crime rates to be reduced. There was a huge pushback on the same from the conservatives and has become a matter of debate, perhaps something that the Conservatives wanted. Interestingly, it hasn t made them go back but go forward as can be seen from the Freakonomics site.

      Climate Change Another topic that came up for discussion was repeatedly climate change, but when I share Shell s own 1998 Confidential report titled Greenhouse effect all become strangely silent. The silence here is of two parts, there probably is a large swathe of Indians who haven t read the report and there may be a minority who have read it and know what already has been shared with U.S. Congress. The Conservative s argument has been for it is jobs and a weak we need to research more . There was a partial debunk of it on the TBD podcast by Matt Farell and his brother Sean Farell as to how quickly the energy companies are taking to the coming change.

      Health Budget Before going to Covid stories. I first wanted to talk about Health Budgets. From the last 7 years the Center s allocation for health has been between 0.34 to 0.8% per year. That amount barely covers the salaries to the staff, let alone any money for equipment or anything else. And here by allocation I mean, what is actually spent, not the one that is shared by GOI as part of budget proposal. In fact, an article on Wire gives a good breakdown of the numbers. Even those who are on the path of free markets describe India s health business model as a flawed one. See the Bloomberg Quint story on that. Now let me come to Rwanda. Why did I chose Rwanda, I could have chosen South Africa where I went for Debconf 2016, I chose because Rwanda s story is that much more inspiring. In many ways much more inspiring than that South Africa in many ways. Here is a country which for decades had one war or the other, culminating into the Rwanda Civil War which ended in 1994. And coincidentally, they gained independence on a similar timeline as South Africa ending Apartheid in 1994. What does the country do, when it gains its independence, it first puts most of its resources in the healthcare sector. The first few years at 20% of GDP, later than at 10% of GDP till everybody has universal medical coverage. Coming back to the Bloomberg article I shared, the story does not go into the depth of beyond-expiry date medicines, spurious medicines and whatnot. Sadly, most media in India does not cover the deaths happening in rural areas and this I am talking about normal times. Today what is happening in rural areas is just pure madness. For last couple of days have been talking with people who are and have been covering rural areas. In many of those communities, there is vaccine hesitancy and why, because there have been whatsapp forwards sharing that if you go to a hospital you will die and your kidney or some other part of the body will be taken by the doctor. This does two things, it scares people into not going and getting vaccinated, at the same time they are prejudiced against science. This is politics of the lowest kind. And they do it so that they will be forced to go to temples or babas and what not and ask for solutions. And whether they work or not is immaterial, they get fixed and property and money is seized. Sadly, there are not many Indian movies of North which have tried to show it except for oh my god but even here it doesn t go the distance. A much more honest approach was done in Trance . I have never understood how the South Indian movies are able to do a more honest job of story-telling than what is done in Bollywood even though they do in 1/10th the budget that is needed in Bollywood. Although, have to say with OTT, some baggage has been shed but with the whole film certification rearing its ugly head through MEITY orders, it seems two steps backward instead of forward. The idea being simply to infantilize the citizens even more. That is a whole different ball-game which probably will require its own space.

      Vaccine issues One good news though is that Vaccination has started. But it has been a long story full of greed by none other than GOI (Government of India) or the ruling party BJP. Where should I start with. I probably should start with this excellent article done by Priyanka Pulla. It is interesting and fascinating to know how vaccines are made, at least one way which she shared. She also shared about the Cutter Incident which happened in the late 50 s. The response was on expected lines, character assassination of her and the newspaper they published but could not critique any of the points made by her. Not a single point that she didn t think about x or y. Interestingly enough, in January 2021 Bharati Biotech was supposed to be share phase 3 trial data but hasn t been put up in public domain till May 2021. In fact, there have been a few threads raised by both well-meaning Indians as well as others globally especially on twitter to which GOI/ICMR (Indian Council of Medical Research) is silent. Another interesting point to note is that Russia did say in its press release that it is possible that their vaccine may not be standard (read inactivation on their vaccines and another way is possible but would take time, again Brazil has objected, but India hasn t till date.) What also has been interesting is the homegrown B.1.617 lineage or known as double mutant . This was first discovered from my own state, Maharashtra and then transported around the world. There is also B.1.618 which was found in West Bengal and is same or supposed to be similar to the one found in South Africa. This one is known as Triple mutant . About B.1.618 we don t know much other than knowing that it is much more easily transferable, much more infectious. Most countries have banned flights from India and I cannot fault them anyway. Hell, when even our diplomats do not care for procedures to be followed during the pandemic then how a common man is supposed to do. Of course, now for next month, Mr. Modi was supposed to go and now will not attend the G7 meeting. Whether, it is because he would have to face the press (the only Prime Minister and the only Indian Prime Minister who never has faced free press.) or because the Indian delegation has been disinvited, we would never know.

      A good article which shares lots of lows with how things have been done in India has been an article by Arundhati Roy. And while the article in itself is excellent and shares a bit of the bitter truth but is still incomplete as so much has been happening. The problem is that the issue manifests in so many ways, it is difficult to hold on. As Arundhati shared, should we just look at figures and numbers and hold on, or should we look at individual ones, for e.g. the one shared in Outlook India. Or the one shared by Dr. Dipshika Ghosh who works in Covid ICU in some hospital
      Dr. Dipika Ghosh sharing an incident in Covid Ward

      Interestingly as well, while in the vaccine issue, Brazil Anvisa doesn t know what they are doing or the regulator just isn t knowledgeable etc. (statements by various people in GOI, when it comes to testing kits, the same is an approver.)

      ICMR/DGCI approving internationally validated kits, Press release.

      Twitter In the midst of all this, one thing that many people have forgotten and seem to have forgotten that Twitter and other tools are used by only the elite. The reason why the whole thing has become serious now than in the first phase is because the elite of India have also fallen sick and dying which was not the case so much in the first phase. The population on Twitter is estimated to be around 30-34 million and people who are everyday around 20 odd million or so, which is what 2% of the Indian population which is estimated to be around 1.34 billion. The other 98% don t even know that there is something like twitter on which you can ask help. Twitter itself is exclusionary in many ways, with both the emoticons, the language and all sorts of things. There is a small subset who does use Twitter in regional languages, but they are too small to write anything about. The main language is English which does become a hindrance to lot of people.

      Censorship Censorship of Indians critical of Govt. mishandling has been non-stop. Even U.S. which usually doesn t interfere into India s internal politics was forced to make an exception. But of course, this has been on deaf ears. There is and was a good thread on Twitter by Gaurav Sabnis, a friend, fellow Puneite now settled in U.S. as a professor.
      Gaurav on Trump-Biden on vaccination of their own citizens
      Now just to surmise what has been happened in India and what has been happening in most of the countries around the world. Most of the countries have done centralization purchasing of the vaccine and then is distributed by the States, this is what we understand as co-operative federalism. While last year, GOI took a lot of money under the shady PM Cares fund for vaccine purchase, donations from well-meaning Indians as well as Industries and trade bodies. Then later, GOI said it would leave the states hanging and it is they who would have to buy vaccines from the manufacturers. This is again cheap politics. The idea behind it is simple, GOI knows that almost all the states are strapped for cash. This is not new news, this I have shared a couple of months back. The problem has been that for the last 6-8 months no GST meeting has taken place as shared by Punjab s Finance Minister Amarinder Singh. What will happen is that all the states will fight in-between themselves for the vaccine and most of them are now non-BJP Governments. The idea is let the states fight and somehow be on top. So, the pandemic, instead of being a public health issue has become something of on which politics has to played. The news on whatsapp by RW media is it s ok even if a million or two also die, as it is India is heavily populated. Although that argument vanishes for those who lose their dear and near ones. But that just isn t the issue, the issue goes much more deeper than that Oxygen:12%
      Remedisivir:12%
      Sanitiser:12%
      Ventilator:12%
      PPE:18%
      Ambulances 28% Now all the products above are essential medical equipment and should be declared as essential medical equipment and should have price controls on which GST is levied. In times of pandemic, should the center be profiting on those. States want to let go and even want the center to let go so that some relief is there to the public, while at the same time make them as essential medical equipment with price controls. But GOI doesn t want to. Leaders of opposition parties wrote open letters but no effect. What is sad to me is how Ambulances are being taxed at 28%. Are they luxury items or sin goods ? This also reminds of the recent discovery shared by Mr. Pappu Yadav in Bihar. You can see the color of ambulances as shared by Mr. Yadav, and the same news being shared by India TV news showing other ambulances. Also, the weak argument being made of not having enough drivers. Ideally, you should have 2-3 people, both 9-1-1 and Chicago Fire show 2 people in ambulance but a few times they have also shown to be flipped over. European seems to have three people in ambulance, also they are also much more disciplined as drivers, at least an opinion shared by an American expat.
      Pappu Yadav, President Jan Adhikar Party, Bihar May 11, 2021
      What is also interesting to note is GOI plays this game of Health is State subject and health is Central subject depending on its convenience. Last year, when it invoked the Epidemic and DMA Act it was a Central subject, now when bodies are flowing down the Ganges and pyres being lit everywhere, it becomes a State subject. But when and where money is involved, it again becomes a Central subject. The States are also understanding it, but they are fighting on too many fronts.
      Snippets from Karnataka High Court hearing today, 13th March 2021
      One of the good things is most of the High Courts have woken up. Many of the people on the RW think that the Courts are doing Judicial activism . And while there may be an iota of truth in it, the bitter truth is that many judges or relatives or their helpers have diagnosed and some have even died due to Covid. In face of the inevitable, what can they do. They are hauling up local Governments to make sure they are accountable while at the same time making sure that they get access to medical facilities. And I as a citizen don t see any wrong in that even if they are doing it for selfish reasons. Because, even if justice is being done for selfish reasons, if it does improve medical delivery systems for the masses, it is cool. If it means that the poor and everybody else are able to get vaccinations, oxygen and whatever they need, it is cool. Of course, we are still seeing reports of patients spending in the region of INR 50k and more for each day spent in hospital. But as there are no price controls, judges cannot do anything unless they want to make an enemy of the medical lobby in the country. A good story on medicines and what happens in rural areas, see no further than Laakhon mein ek.
      Allahabad High Court hauling Uttar Pradesh Govt. for lack of Oxygen is equal to genocide, May 11, 2021
      The censorship is not just related to takedown requests on twitter but nowadays also any articles which are critical of the GOI s handling. I have been seeing many articles which have shared facts and have been critical of GOI being taken down. Previously, we used to see 404 errors happen 7-10 years down the line and that was reasonable. Now we see that happen, days weeks or months. India seems to be turning more into China and North Korea and become more anti-science day-by-day

      Fake websites Before going into fake websites, let me start with a fake newspaper which was started by none other than the Gujarat CM Mr. Modi in 2005 .
      Gujarat Satya Samachar 2005 launched by Mr. Modi.
      And if this wasn t enough than on Feb 8, 2005, he had invoked Official Secrets Act
      Mr. Modi invoking Official Secrets Act, Feb 8 2005 Gujarat Samachar
      The headlines were In Modi s regime press freedom is in peril-Down with Modi s dictatorship. So this was a tried and tested technique. The above information was shared by Mr. Urvish Kothari, who incidentally also has his own youtube channel. Now cut to 2021, and we have a slew of fake websites being done by the same party. In fact, it seems they started this right from 2011. A good article on BBC itself tells the story. Hell, Disinfo.eu which basically combats disinformation in EU has a whole pdf chronicling how BJP has been doing it. Some of the sites it shared are

      Times of New York
      Manchester Times
      Times of Los Angeles
      Manhattan Post
      Washington Herald
      and many more. The idea being take any site name which sounds similar to a brand name recognized by Indians and make fool of them. Of course, those of who use whois and other such tools can easily know what is happening. Two more were added to the list yesterday, Daily Guardian and Australia Today. There are of course, many features which tell them apart from genuine websites. Most of these are on shared hosting rather than dedicated hosting, most of these are bought either from Godaddy and Bluehost. While Bluehost used to be a class act once upon a time, both the above will do anything as long as they get money. Don t care whether it s a fake website or true. Capitalism at its finest or worst depending upon how you look at it. But most of these details are lost on people who do not know web servers, at all and instead think see it is from an exotic site, a foreign site and it chooses to have same ideas as me. Those who are corrupt or see politics as a tool to win at any cost will not see it as evil. And as a gentleman Raghav shared with me, it is so easy to fool us. An example he shared which I had forgotten. Peter England which used to be an Irish brand was bought by Aditya Birla group way back in 2000. But even today, when you go for Peter England, the way the packaging is done, the way the prices are, more often than not, people believe they are buying the Irish brand. While sharing this, there is so much of Naom Chomsky which comes to my mind again and again

      Caste Issues I had written about caste issues a few times on this blog. This again came to the fore as news came that a Hindu sect used forced labor from Dalit community to make a temple. This was also shared by the hill. In both, Mr. Joshi doesn t tell that if they were volunteers then why their passports have been taken forcibly, also I looked at both minimum wage prevailing in New Jersey as a state as well as wage given to those who are in the construction Industry. Even in minimum wage, they were giving $1 when the prevailing minimum wage for unskilled work is $12.00 and as Mr. Joshi shared that they are specialized artisans, then they should be paid between $23 $30 per hour. If this isn t exploitation, then I don t know what is. And this is not the first instance, the first instance was perhaps the case against Cisco which was done by John Doe. While I had been busy with other things, it seems Cisco had put up both a demurrer petition and a petition to strike which the Court stayed. This seemed to all over again a type of apartheid practice, only this time applied to caste. The good thing is that the court stayed the petition. Dr. Ambedkar s statement if Hindus migrate to other regions on earth, Indian caste would become a world problem given at Columbia University in 1916, seems to be proven right in today s time and sadly has aged well. But this is not just something which is there only in U.S. this is there in India even today, just couple of days back, a popular actress Munmun Dutta used a casteist slur and then later apologized giving the excuse that she didn t know Hindi. And this is patently false as she has been in the Bollywood industry for almost now 16-17 years. This again, was not an isolated incident. Seema Singh, a lecturer in IIT-Kharagpur abused students from SC, ST backgrounds and was later suspended. There is an SC/ST Atrocities Act but that has been diluted by this Govt. A bit on the background of Dr. Ambedkar can be found at a blog on Columbia website. As I have shared and asked before, how do we think, for what reason the Age of Englightenment or the Age of Reason happened. If I were a fat monk or a priest who was privileges, would I have let Age of Enlightenment happen. It broke religion or rather Church which was most powerful to not so powerful and that power was more distributed among all sort of thinkers, philosophers, tinkers, inventors and so on and so forth.

      Situation going forward I believe things are going to be far more complex and deadly before they get better. I had to share another term called Comorbidities which fortunately or unfortunately has also become part of twitter lexicon. While I have shared what it means, it simply means when you have an existing ailment or condition and then Coronavirus attacks you. The Virus will weaken you. The Vaccine in the best case just stops the damage, but the damage already done can t be reversed. There are people who advise and people who are taking steroids but that again has its own side-effects. And this is now, when we are in summer. I am afraid for those who have recovered, what will happen to them during the Monsoons. We know that the Virus attacks most the lungs and their quality of life will be affected. Even the immune system may have issues. We also know about the inflammation. And the grant that has been given to University of Dundee also has signs of worry, both for people like me (obese) as well as those who have heart issues already. In other news, my city which has been under partial lockdown since a month, has been extended for another couple of weeks. There are rumors that the same may continue till the year-end even if it means economics goes out of the window.There is possibility that in the next few months something like 2 million odd Indians could die
      The above is a conversation between Karan Thapar and an Oxford Mathematician Dr. Murad Banaji who has shared that the under-counting of cases in India is huge. Even BBC shared an article on the scope of under-counting. Of course, those on the RW call of the evidence including the deaths and obituaries in newspapers as a narrative . And when asked that when deaths used to be in the 20 s or 30 s which has jumped to 200-300 deaths and this is just the middle class and above. The poor don t have the money to get wood and that is the reason you are seeing the bodies in Ganges whether in Buxar Bihar or Gajipur, Uttar Pradesh. The sights and visuals makes for sorry reading
      Pandit Ranjan Mishra son on his father s death due to unavailability of oxygen, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, 11th May 2021.
      For those who don t know Pandit Ranjan Mishra was a renowned classical singer. More importantly, he was the first person to suggest Mr. Modi s name as a Prime Ministerial Candidate. If they couldn t fulfil his oxygen needs, then what can be expected for the normal public.

      Conclusion Sadly, this time I have no humorous piece to share, I can however share a documentary which was shared on Feluda . I have shared about Feluda or Prodosh Chandra Mitter a few times on this blog. He has been the answer of James Bond from India. I have shared previously about The Golden Fortress . An amazing piece of art by Satyajit Ray. I watched that documentary two-three times. I thought, mistakenly that I am the only fool or fan of Feluda in Pune to find out that there are people who are even more than me. There were so many facets both about Feluda and master craftsman Satyajit Ray that I was unaware about. I was just simply amazed. I even shared few of the tidbits with mum as well, although now she has been truly hooked to Korean dramas. The only solace from all the surrounding madness. So, if you have nothing to do, you can look up his books, read them and then see the movies. And my first recommendation would be the Golden Fortress. The only thing I would say, do not have high hopes. The movie is beautiful. It starts slow and then picks up speed, just like a train. So, till later. Update The Mass surveillance part I could not do justice do hence removed it at the last moment. It actually needs its whole space, article. There is so much that the Govt. is doing under the guise of the pandemic that it is difficult to share it all in one article. As it is, the article is big

      4 May 2021

      Benjamin Mako Hill: NSF CAREER Award

      In exciting professional news, it was recently announced that I got an National Science Foundation CAREER award! The CAREER is the US NSF s most prestigious award for early-career faculty. In addition to the recognition, the award involves a bunch of money for me to put toward my research over the next 5 years. The Department of Communication at the University of Washington has put up a very nice web page announcing the thing. It s all very exciting and a huge honor. I m very humbled. The grant will support a bunch of new research to develop and test a theory about the relationship between governance and online community lifecycles. If you ve been reading this blog for a while, you ll know that I ve been involved in a bunch of research to describe how peer production communities tend to follow common patterns of growth and decline as well as a studies that show that many open communities become increasingly closed in ways that deter lots of the kinds contributions that made the communities successful in the first place. Over the last few years, I ve worked with Aaron Shaw to develop the outlines of an explanation for why many communities because increasingly closed over time in ways that hurt their ability to integrate contributions from newcomers. Over the course of the work on the CAREER, I ll be continuing that project with Aaron and I ll also be working to test that explanation empirically and to develop new strategies about what online communities can do as a result. In addition to supporting research, the grant will support a bunch of new outreach and community building within the Community Data Science Collective. In particular, I m planning to use the grant to do a better job of building relationships with community participants, community managers, and others in the platforms we study. I m also hoping to use the resources to help the CDSC do a better job of sharing our stuff out in ways that are useful as well doing a better job of listening and learning from the communities that our research seeks to inform. There are many to thank. The proposed work was the direct research of the work I did as the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford where I got to spend the 2018-2019 academic year in Claude Shannon s old office and talking through these ideas with an incredible range of other scholars over lunch every day. It s also the product of years of conversations with Aaron Shaw and Yochai Benkler. The proposal itself reflects the excellent work of the whole CDSC who did the work that made the award possible and provided me with detailed feedback on the proposal itself.

      11 April 2021

      Vishal Gupta: Sikkim 101 for Backpackers

      Host to Kanchenjunga, the world s third-highest mountain peak and the endangered Red Panda, Sikkim is a state in northeastern India. Nestled between Nepal, Tibet (China), Bhutan and West Bengal (India), the state offers a smorgasbord of cultures and cuisines. That said, it s hardly surprising that the old spice route meanders through western Sikkim, connecting Lhasa with the ports of Bengal. Although the latter could also be attributed to cardamom (kali elaichi), a perennial herb native to Sikkim, which the state is the second-largest producer of, globally. Lastly, having been to and lived in India, all my life, I can confidently say Sikkim is one of the cleanest & safest regions in India, making it ideal for first-time backpackers.

      Brief History
      • 17th century: The Kingdom of Sikkim is founded by the Namgyal dynasty and ruled by Buddhist priest-kings known as the Chogyal.
      • 1890: Sikkim becomes a princely state of British India.
      • 1947: Sikkim continues its protectorate status with the Union of India, post-Indian-independence.
      • 1973: Anti-royalist riots take place in front of the Chogyal's palace, by Nepalis seeking greater representation.
      • 1975: Referendum leads to the deposition of the monarchy and Sikkim joins India as its 22nd state.
      Languages
      • Official: English, Nepali, Sikkimese/Bhotia and Lepcha
      • Though Hindi and Nepali share the same script (Devanagari), they are not mutually intelligible. Yet, most people in Sikkim can understand and speak Hindi.
      Ethnicity
      • Nepalis: Migrated in large numbers (from Nepal) and soon became the dominant community
      • Bhutias: People of Tibetan origin. Major inhabitants in Northern Sikkim.
      • Lepchas: Original inhabitants of Sikkim

      Food
      • Tibetan/Nepali dishes (mostly consumed during winter)
        • Thukpa: Noodle soup, rich in spices and vegetables. Usually contains some form of meat. Common variations: Thenthuk and Gyathuk
        • Momos: Steamed or fried dumplings, usually with a meat filling.
        • Saadheko: Spicy marinated chicken salad.
        • Gundruk Soup: A soup made from Gundruk, a fermented leafy green vegetable.
        • Sinki : A fermented radish tap-root product, traditionally consumed as a base for soup and as a pickle. Eerily similar to Kimchi.
      • While pork and beef are pretty common, finding vegetarian dishes is equally easy.
      • Staple: Dal-Bhat with Subzi. Rice is a lot more common than wheat (rice) possibly due to greater carb content and proximity to West Bengal, India s largest producer of Rice.
      • Good places to eat in Gangtok
        • Hamro Bhansa Ghar, Nimtho (Nepali)
        • Taste of Tibet
        • Dragon Wok (Chinese & Japanese)

      Buddhism in Sikkim
      • Bayul Demojong (Sikkim), is the most sacred Land in the Himalayas as per the belief of the Northern Buddhists and various religious texts.
      • Sikkim was blessed by Guru Padmasambhava, the great Buddhist saint who visited Sikkim in the 8th century and consecrated the land.
      • However, Buddhism is said to have reached Sikkim only in the 17th century with the arrival of three Tibetan monks viz. Rigdzin Goedki Demthruchen, Mon Kathok Sonam Gyaltshen & Rigdzin Legden Je at Yuksom. Together, they established a Buddhist monastery.
      • In 1642 they crowned Phuntsog Namgyal as the first monarch of Sikkim and gave him the title of Chogyal, or Dharma Raja.
      • The faith became popular through its royal patronage and soon many villages had their own monastery.
      • Today Sikkim has over 200 monasteries.

      Major monasteries
      • Rumtek Monastery, 20Km from Gangtok
      • Lingdum/Ranka Monastery, 17Km from Gangtok
      • Phodong Monastery, 28Km from Gangtok
      • Ralang Monastery, 10Km from Ravangla
      • Tsuklakhang Monastery, Royal Palace, Gangtok
      • Enchey Monastery, Gangtok
      • Tashiding Monastery, 35Km from Ravangla


      Reaching Sikkim
      • Gangtok, being the capital, is easiest to reach amongst other regions, by public transport and shared cabs.
      • By Air:
        • Pakyong (PYG) :
          • Nearest airport from Gangtok (about 1 hour away)
          • Tabletop airport
          • Reserved cabs cost around INR 1200.
          • As of Apr 2021, the only flights to PYG are from IGI (Delhi) and CCU (Kolkata).
        • Bagdogra (IXB) :
          • About 20 minutes from Siliguri and 4 hours from Gangtok.
          • Larger airport with flights to most major Indian cities.
          • Reserved cabs cost about INR 3000. Shared cabs cost about INR 350.
      • By Train:
        • New Jalpaiguri (NJP) :
          • About 20 minutes from Siliguri and 4 hours from Gangtok.
          • Reserved cabs cost about INR 3000. Shared cabs from INR 350.
      • By Road:
        • NH10 connects Siliguri to Gangtok
        • If you can t find buses plying to Gangtok directly, reach Siliguri and then take a cab to Gangtok.
      • Sikkim Nationalised Transport Div. also runs hourly buses between Siliguri and Gangtok and daily buses on other common routes. They re cheaper than shared cabs.
      • Wizzride also operates shared cabs between Siliguri/Bagdogra/NJP, Gangtok and Darjeeling. They cost about the same as shared cabs but pack in half as many people in luxury cars (Innova, Xylo, etc.) and are hence more comfortable.

      Gangtok
      • Time needed: 1D/1N
      • Places to visit:
        • Hanuman Tok
        • Ganesh Tok
        • Tashi View Point [6,800ft]
        • MG Marg
        • Sikkim Zoo
        • Gangtok Ropeway
        • Enchey Monastery
        • Tsuklakhang Palace & Monastery
      • Hostels: Tagalong Backpackers (would strongly recommend), Zostel Gangtok
      • Places to chill: Travel Cafe, Caf Live & Loud and Gangtok Groove
      • Places to shop: Lal Market and MG Marg

      Getting Around
      • Taxis operate on a reserved or shared basis. In case of the latter, you can pool with other commuters your taxis will pick up and drop en-route.
      • Naturally shared taxis only operate on popular routes. The easiest way to get around Gangtok is to catch a shared cab from MG Marg.
      • Reserved taxis for Gangtok sightseeing cost around INR 1000-1500, depending upon the spots you d like to see
      • Key taxi/bus stands :
        • Deorali stand: For Darjeeling, Siliguri, Kalimpong
        • Vajra stand: For North & East Sikkim (Tsomgo Lake & Nathula)
        • Rumtek taxi: For Ravangla, Pelling, Namchi, Geyzing, Jorethang and Singtam.
      Exploring Gangtok on an MTB

      North Sikkim
      • The easiest & most economical way to explore North Sikkim is the 3D/2N package offered by shared-cab drivers.
      • This includes food, permits, cab rides and accommodation (1N in Lachen and 1N in Lachung)
      • The accommodation on both nights are at homestays with bare necessities, so keep your hopes low.
      • In the spirit of sustainable tourism, you ll be asked to discard single-use plastic bottles, so please carry a bottle that you can refill along the way.
      • Zero Point and Gurdongmer Lake are snow-capped throughout the year
      3D/2N Shared-cab Package Itinerary
      • Day 1
        • Gangtok (10am) - Chungthang - Lachung (stay)
      • Day 2
        • Pre-lunch : Lachung (6am) - Yumthang Valley [12,139ft] - Zero Point - Lachung [15,300ft]
        • Post-lunch : Lachung - Chungthang - Lachen (stay)
      • Day 3
        • Pre-lunch : Lachen (5am) - Kala Patthar - Gurdongmer Lake [16,910ft] - Lachen
        • Post-lunch : Lachen - Chungthang - Gangtok (7pm)
      • This itinerary is idealistic and depends on the level of snowfall.
      • Some drivers might switch up Day 2 and 3 itineraries by visiting Lachen and then Lachung, depending upon the weather.
      • Areas beyond Lachen & Lachung are heavily militarized since the Indo-China border is only a few miles away.

      East Sikkim

      Zuluk and Silk Route
      • Time needed: 2D/1N
      • Zuluk [9,400ft] is a small hamlet with an excellent view of the eastern Himalayan range including the Kanchenjunga.
      • Was once a transit point to the historic Silk Route from Tibet (Lhasa) to India (West Bengal).
      • The drive from Gangtok to Zuluk takes at least four hours. Hence, it makes sense to spend the night at a homestay and space out your trip to Zuluk

      Tsomgo Lake and Nathula
      • Time Needed : 1D
      • A Protected Area Permit is required to visit these places, due to their proximity to the Chinese border
      • Tsomgo/Chhangu Lake [12,313ft]
        • Glacial lake, 40 km from Gangtok.
        • Remains frozen during the winter season.
        • You can also ride on the back of a Yak for INR 300
      • Baba Mandir
        • An old temple dedicated to Baba Harbhajan Singh, a Sepoy in the 23rd Regiment, who died in 1962 near the Nathu La during Indo China war.
      • Nathula Pass [14,450ft]
        • Located on the Indo-Tibetan border crossing of the Old Silk Route, it is one of the three open trading posts between India and China.
        • Plays a key role in the Sino-Indian Trade and also serves as an official Border Personnel Meeting(BPM) Point.
        • May get cordoned off by the Indian Army in event of heavy snowfall or for other security reasons.


      West Sikkim
      • Time needed: 3N/1N
      • Hostels at Pelling : Mochilerro Ostillo

      Itinerary

      Day 1: Gangtok - Ravangla - Pelling
      • Leave Gangtok early, for Ravangla through the Temi Tea Estate route.
      • Spend some time at the tea garden and then visit Buddha Park at Ravangla
      • Head to Pelling from Ravangla

      Day 2: Pelling sightseeing
      • Hire a cab and visit Skywalk, Pemayangtse Monastery, Rabdentse Ruins, Kecheopalri Lake, Kanchenjunga Falls.

      Day 3: Pelling - Gangtok/Siliguri
      • Wake up early to catch a glimpse of Kanchenjunga at the Pelling Helipad around sunrise
      • Head back to Gangtok on a shared-cab
      • You could take a bus/taxi back to Siliguri if Pelling is your last stop.

      Darjeeling
      • In my opinion, Darjeeling is lovely for a two-day detour on your way back to Bagdogra/Siliguri and not any longer (unless you re a Bengali couple on a honeymoon)
      • Once a part of Sikkim, Darjeeling was ceded to the East India Company after a series of wars, with Sikkim briefly receiving a grant from EIC for gifting Darjeeling to the latter
      • Post-independence, Darjeeling was merged with the state of West Bengal.

      Itinerary

      Day 1 :
      • Take a cab from Gangtok to Darjeeling (shared-cabs cost INR 300 per seat)
      • Reach Darjeeling by noon and check in to your Hostel. I stayed at Hideout.
      • Spend the evening visiting either a monastery (or the Batasia Loop), Nehru Road and Mall Road.
      • Grab dinner at Glenary whilst listening to live music.

      Day 2:
      • Wake up early to catch the sunrise and a glimpse of Kanchenjunga at Tiger Hill. Since Tiger Hill is 10km from Darjeeling and requires a permit, book your taxi in advance.
      • Alternatively, if you don t want to get up at 4am or shell out INR1500 on the cab to Tiger Hill, walk to the Kanchenjunga View Point down Mall Road
      • Next, queue up outside Keventers for breakfast with a view in a century-old cafe
      • Get a cab at Gandhi Road and visit a tea garden (Happy Valley is the closest) and the Ropeway. I was lucky to meet 6 other backpackers at my hostel and we ended up pooling the cab at INR 200 per person, with INR 1400 being on the expensive side, but you could bargain.
      • Get lunch, buy some tea at Golden Tips, pack your bags and hop on a shared-cab back to Siliguri. It took us about 4hrs to reach Siliguri, with an hour to spare before my train.
      • If you ve still got time on your hands, then check out the Peace Pagoda and the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway (Toy Train). At INR 1500, I found the latter to be too expensive and skipped it.


      Tips and hacks
      • Download offline maps, especially when you re exploring Northern Sikkim.
      • Food and booze are the cheapest in Gangtok. Stash up before heading to other regions.
      • Keep your Aadhar/Passport handy since you need permits to travel to North & East Sikkim.
      • In rural areas and some cafes, you may get to try Rhododendron Wine, made from Rhododendron arboreum a.k.a Gurans. Its production is a little hush-hush since the flower is considered holy and is also the National Flower of Nepal.
      • If you don t want to invest in a new jacket, boots or a pair of gloves, you can always rent them at nominal rates from your hotel or little stores around tourist sites.
      • Check the weather of a region before heading there. Low visibility and precipitation can quite literally dampen your experience.
      • Keep your itinerary flexible to accommodate for rest and impromptu plans.
      • Shops and restaurants close by 8pm in Sikkim and Darjeeling. Plan for the same.

      Carry
      • a couple of extra pairs of socks (woollen, if possible)
      • a pair of slippers to wear indoors
      • a reusable water bottle
      • an umbrella
      • a power bank
      • a couple of tablets of Diamox. Helps deal with altitude sickness
      • extra clothes and wet bags since you may not get a chance to wash/dry your clothes
      • a few passport size photographs

      Shared-cab hacks
      • Intercity rides can be exhausting. If you can afford it, pay for an additional seat.
      • Call shotgun on the drives beyond Lachen and Lachung. The views are breathtaking.
      • Return cabs tend to be cheaper (WB cabs travelling from SK and vice-versa)

      Cost
      • My median daily expenditure (back when I went to Sikkim in early March 2021) was INR 1350.
      • This includes stay (bunk bed), food, wine and transit (shared cabs)
      • In my defence, I splurged on food, wine and extra seats in shared cabs, but if you re on a budget, you could easily get by on INR 1 - 1.2k per day.
      • For a 9-day trip, I ended up shelling out nearly INR 15k, including 2AC trains to & from Kolkata
      • Note : Summer (March to May) and Autumn (October to December) are peak seasons, and thereby more expensive to travel around.

      Souvenirs and things you should buy

      Buddhist souvenirs :
      • Colourful Prayer Flags (great for tying on bikes or behind car windshields)
      • Miniature Prayer/Mani Wheels
      • Lucky Charms, Pendants and Key Chains
      • Cham Dance masks and robes
      • Singing Bowls
      • Common symbols: Om mani padme hum, Ashtamangala, Zodiac signs

      Handicrafts & Handlooms
      • Tibetan Yak Wool shawls, scarfs and carpets
      • Sikkimese Ceramic cups
      • Thangka Paintings

      Edibles
      • Darjeeling Tea (usually brewed and not boiled)
      • Wine (Arucha Peach & Rhododendron)
      • Dalle Khursani (Chilli) Paste and Pickle

      Header Icon made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com is licensed by CC 3.0 BY

      19 April 2020

      Sven Hoexter: Emulating Raspi2 like hardware with Rasbian in 2020

      To follow some older (as in two years) ARM assembler howto, I searched for a quick and dirty way to run a current Rasbian with qemu 4.2 on Debian/unstable. The end result are the following notes to get that up and running:
      # Download a binary device tree file and matching kernel a good soul uploaded to github
      wget https://github.com/vfdev-5/qemu-rpi2-vexpress/raw/master/kernel-qemu-4.4.1-vexpress
      wget https://github.com/vfdev-5/qemu-rpi2-vexpress/raw/master/vexpress-v2p-ca15-tc1.dtb
      # Download the official Rasbian image without X
      wget -O raspbian_lite_latest.zip https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian_lite_latest
      unzip raspbian_lite_latest.zip
      # Convert it from the raw image to a qcow2 image and add some space
      qemu-img convert -f raw -O qcow2 2020-02-13-raspbian-buster-lite.img rasbian.qcow2
      qemu-img resize rasbian.qcow2 +2G
      # start qemu
      qemu-system-arm -m 2048M -M vexpress-a15 -cpu cortex-a15 \
       -kernel kernel-qemu-4.4.1-vexpress -no-reboot \
       -smp 2 -serial stdio \
       -dtb vexpress-v2p-ca15-tc1.dtb -sd rasbian.qcow2 \
       -append "root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rw rootfstype=ext4 console=ttyAMA0,15200 loglevel=8" \
       -nic user,hostfwd=tcp::5555-:22
      # login at the serial console as user pi with password raspberry
      sudo -i
      # enable ssh
      systemctl enable ssh
      # resize partition and filesystem
      parted /dev/mmcblk0 resizepart 2 100%
      resize2fs /dev/mmcblk0p2
      
      Now I can login via ssh and start to play:
      ssh pi@localhost -p 5555
      
      So for me that is sufficient, I have network connectivity to install an editor, transfer files and can otherwise work with tmux to have some session multiplexing. Additional Notes

      Next.