According to Aurelien Jarno, it's possible to run Debian/ARM and both Debian/MIPS platforms inside an emulator that itself is packaged and runs on Debian. Since fairly recently (about a month or two, I guess), the same is true for Debian/m68k. Granted, the emulator you need to install isn't called "qemu", but with ARAnyM (short for 'Atari Running on Any Machine') it is now possible to run Debian/m68k. And it's fairly easy to do, too:

• Download the installer images for Debian/m68k
• Install the aranym package
• Run aranym once. This will create a directory .aranym with a default config file.
• create a file to be used as a disk image: dd if=/dev/zero of=./disk.img bs=1k seek=2M count=1.
• Edit the configuration file. The important bits are the section [IDE0] and [LILO]. It's pretty self-explanatory.
• Run aranym-mmu -N -l.

There, you have a free m68k development machine! Note, however, that there might be issues with the network interface; the NIC in the emulated machine is unlike any real, actual Atari hardware. There is a driver for Linux, but I'm not 100% sure whether it's been integrated in the Debian kernels yet. I'm sure Christian will kick me awake on this, though ;-)

In addition to the ARM platform, it is now possible to emulate a MIPS (big endian) or MIPSEL (little endian) machine running Debian under QEMU. It could be used as a cheap MIPS/MIPSEL development machine to test your packages, provided that you have a not to slow i386, AMD64 or PowerPC computer. Running on an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ the emulated system is around 10% faster than my SGI Indy R4400SC 200MHz and possibly with much more RAM (my emulated system has 512 MB of RAM). Also for the ones who know about the Indy SCSI controller, the transfer rate is around 13 MB/s on the emulated system. I have written a small howto explaining how to install Debian Etch on such an emulated MIPS or MIPSEL machine, using Debian-Installer RC1, which has just been released. Thanks to Daniel Jacobowitz who has recently improved QEMU/MIPS a lot, and to Thiemo Seufer who has started the integration of the MIPS QEMU platform in Debian-Installer and in the Debian kernel. Note 1: I have written this howto very quickly, so there are probably some mistakes. Comments are welcome.
Note 2: I have updated the ARM howto to take in account improvements from Debian-Installer RC1

Martin, I can’t let you say that experimental is autobuilt. I have uploaded a few versions of the glibc to experimental in the last few months and only arm, hppa and alpha have tried to build them. Before the summer mips and mipsel also have tried to build the experimental glibc. And the last version has not been tried on alpha, despite the fact it includes a fix and should now build correctly on this architecture.

Hopefully I have most Debian architectures at home, but alpha, m68k and ia64, so I can build the glibc on my own machines. For m68k and ia64, I can use debian.org machines. Concerning alpha, the debian porting machine, ie escher.debian.org, is locked down since the compromise about 4 months ago. And no answer to my mail to debian-admin… Hopefully a user kindly gave me an access on his machine, thanks. The glibc 2.5 is now building correctly on this machine, but I can’t upload the package because I can’t trust the machine. That really sucks. What about removing alpha from the release architectures? After all, it fails to comply with the etch candidate release architecture criteria for months. Update: Some build daemons had glibc in “weak-no-autobuild”. Thanks Martin for fixing that.

Directed by jd & adn Genre: Action / Adventure / Sci-Fi / Thriller / Horror / Drama / Humor
Runtime: several weeks
Country: A lot
Language: English
Color: Color (Technicolor, QT, GTK and ncurses) Tagline: They stole their project, now they want it back. Plot Outline: In September 2006, a group of developpers from the Debian planet rise against the corruption leading the government.
User Comments: Great action, great suspense, great cultural satire, and a great mind-bender. Awards: Waiting for nomination. Quotes:

• Bah, if you don't want to read me, just don't , Sven Luther
• Oh my. , Clint Adams
• Or maybe I'm withdrawing my support because I'm busy with my chainsaw. , Josselin Mouette
• "I'm withdrawing my support because the developers might agree with AJ rather than me"? Come on. , Matthew Garett
• OH NO YOU DON'T. This thread is _not_ about you, it is _not_ about Frans Pop, and it is _not_ about debian-installer. , Peter Samuelson

Cast overview

	Anthony Towns (aj), as the Debian Project Leader		Denis Barbier (bouz), as The Recaller
	Aurelien Jarno (aurel32), as one Seconder		Clint Adams (schizo), as one Seconder
	MJ Ray (mjr), as one Seconder		Pierre Habouzit (madcoder), as one Seconder
	Martin Schulze (joey), as one Seconder		Marc Dequ nes (duck), as one Seconder

We have started using qemu for automated testing at work. Right now we only have one kernel and disk image that I threw together by hand (for ARM), so I spent a big chunk of this afternoon trying to figure out how to do it and document the process. When I did it last time, I needed major kernel hacks and qemu patches and debian-installer tweaks, because the ARM emulation didn't have anything capable of working as a hard drive; so I took some code that Paul had written to use the Angel RDI semihosting operations as a "virtual block device" that talked to the host system. I added support for this hack to qemu and forced d-i to install even though there was only a single non-partitionable device. Since then, Paul added real PCI support to the ARM qemu. So I expected everything to be much easier. I took Aur lien Jarno's excellent writeup and prepared to try again. But since we already had a functional ARM disk image, that was lower priority... I decided to try MIPS. I helped get the MIPS softmmu port working about a year ago, but it hasn't been receiving a whole lot in the way of care (though there's a bunch of unreviewed patches for it). First I discovered that I'd never gotten initrds implemented last time I worked on qemu-system-mips. So I hacked that together. Then I needed a drive; I used root NFS in my last setup, but the whole point of this experiment was to avoid that. So I added the emulated ISA IDE controller. Good news: both of those worked easily! And the d-i session starts up OK, and even writes to the disk OK; partition tables were discovered at next boot. I've posted some patches for these. Bad news: it hangs during formatting the swap partition, consuming endless CPU. It's definitely doing _something_ in userspace, but I'm not sure what, and it's hard to find out. I've heard other reports of faulty MIPS emulation recently, too. I know how to debug this sort of thing, but it's really more time-consuming than I can manage now :-( While waiting for builds in that, I resolved to try reproducing a nasty kernel bug in qemu for x86-64: since I booted into 2.6.19-rc1 all my coredumps have been truncated very short. My normal hardware kernel boots OK, but if I rebuild the kernel with the default config and debug info, it doesn't:

checking if image is initramfs...it isn't (bad gzip magic numbers); looks like an initrd
Freeing initrd memory: 5498k freed
*hang*

And the other thing that's apparently not been getting a lot of love lately is the debugging stub; if I attach GDB, it dies much earlier, so I can't set a breakpoint at initramfs detection to see what's going on. Overall result for the day: Argh!

You want a cheap ARM development machine to test your packages? You can actually have one for free (both as in beer and as in speach ) provided that you have a not to slow i386, AMD64 or PowerPC computer. The solution is called QEMU, a generic and open source processor emulator which can emulate i386, x86_64, ARM, MIPS, PowerPC and Sparc systems. Running an Athlon 64 3800+ the emulated system is around 20% faster than the popular NSLU2 and possibly with much more RAM (my emulated system has 256 MB of RAM). I have written a small howto explaining how to install Debian Etch on such an emulated ARM machine. Note: I have written this howto very quickly, so there are probably some mistakes. Comments are welcome.

Today in bug report #369411:

“I do oppose an NMU as you haven’t actually explained why this patch is
necessary. Ubuntu doesn’t have this patch and yet has been building
32-bit alsa for several releases without problems.”

While Ubuntu has this patch included for 3 weeks now. I have written this patch to fix an RC bug in Debian…

As you may have noticed, lirc is now broken since several months. Amaya posted a RFA some weeks ago. My mistake is that I asked her what she was planning to do with it. She answered to this with a "you are now a new project manager on Alioth" (just kidding ;) ). But I managed to get aurel32 working on it too.
The package was really in a bad shape, anyway. My main problem is that I don't have any hardware to test, but, in fact, for now it did not block me out. Furthermore, one of my co-worker really helped me and sent me several patches. And a new version 0.8.0-1 is now hitting experimental. Please, if you use lirc, consider testing it ASAP.

I gave a talk about Debian GNU/kFreeBSD at FOSDEM 2006. It tooks me time, but I finally have made the slides available.

Yesterday I have setup a kfreebsd-amd64 (ie GNU/kFreeBSD on an amd64 CPU) build daemon. Its name is shockley.aurel32.net (all my machines are named related to electronics), and it has Sempron 2600+ CPU. As you can see on the photo, it is still missing a decent case. There are actually two machines on the the photo, the motherboard in the case is maxwell’s one (one of the kfreebsd-i386 build daemon), while the one on the top front is shockley’s one. That’s a bit strange, but the amd64 motherboard needs a power supply with a P4 connector, while the other one only needs a small power supply. Thanks to Ingo Juergensmann, the kfreebsd-amd64 architecture is now listed on http://buildd.net. As you can see on the graph, this machine is very fast (it only runs for 24 hours!).

I was not a part of the devrooms team this year (like the last two years), Pascal did all the job! I was just a simple visitor and it’s a very cool position. Mark already bloged about the Classpath’s presentations, so you can find some interresting slides there. Saturday (25th February 2006) RMS Excellent talk about the patent. As always, Richard Stallman has great images to explain complex things. I still can’t understand all the GPL3 changes but I’ll try to read some more articles about it. Putting ‘Free’ into JFreeChart The presentation from David Gilbert was very cool. I did not know JFreeChart and it is really cool! This is a very big project and it makes very beautiful charts. I’d like to find some charts to do just to use it! Eclipse for GNU Classpath Development Tom Tromey did a fantastic presentation again. I already saw his presentations past years and it was still excellent. He already tried to explain me how to set up this Eclipse/GNU Classpath setup on IRC but I missed the “Don’t build automatically” hack. Everything should be on the Classpath’s wiki. Xen A presentation by Ian Pratt, leader of the Xen Source project. I heard about this project but I didn’t know that you could move an instance from a machine to another one! Amazing! Sunday (26th February 2006) I met Wouter in the bus but he lost his voice and asked me to introduce the speakers of the Debian room. I’m sorry for the three speakers I announced if it was not just as good as if Wouter did it. I wanna intend to the two conferences anyway. Women in Free Software I already wanna be at the talk of last year but I was in the Classpath devroom. Hanna M Wallach did a fantastic talk. I learned a lot of things and I know now that there really is a need of the debian-women project. I proposed her to put a phrase or a logo or something on the Debian-Java projects web pages and she seems to be pleased. Tonight, I went on #debian-women and it seems I did not understand nothing . So maybe I’d better do nothing about this unless I understand what I could do to help. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port After the talk of Hanna, I introduced the kFreeBSD talk of Aurelien Jarno. I wanna listen to this talk because I completely don’t know *BSD… I’m sorry but I don’t know more. And I still don’t know the difference with Linux and don’t know why I should, as a simple user change to some *BSD port? Debian-Java Meeting After the kFreeBSD talk, I introduced the SLIND talk in the Debian Room, told Wouter that I go to the Classpath Devroom… and listen to the end of the talk of Christian Thalinger (CacaoJVM — the site was down when I tried). Sorry Christian, I just don’t understant these thing During the talk (or was this just after the talk of Robert about JamVM?), I went eating with Wolfgang Baer. We went back during the Christian’s talk. Then we had a Debian-Java talk (I should be writing down the summary of this meeting instead of blogging)… I’ll send an email about the meeting, don’t worry Future of Classpath It is the time when Mark ask everybody: What do you do? How can we help you? It’s a great social/technical time when everybody listen carrefully to everybody. It’s wonderful. Maybe it’s the part I prefer in free software. I must say that I read some mailing lists before joining some project and the ‘Classpath’ (and friends) projects were the one I prefer because of that respect. Then came the camera… A team came in the room to film us. They claim they were making a movie about Free Software. Funny I discussed a little bit with the woman that seems to be the director and she asked for my email (no, Hanna, it was not because she felt I am sexy , nobody tells me 100 times I’m sexy ). I told her I was not one of the main contributor but she just wanna talk about free software and understand how it works. Closing Talk: The Challenge of the GNU/Linux Desktop by Jeff Waugh Jeff Waugh is an excellent speaker, I really enjoyed the presentation. A lot of humour, a lot of facts, it was really an excellent presentation. But Jeff, I still do not understand the Ubuntu business plan. I’m not a native english speaker and I did not understand a lot of jokes and some responses. Back! I messed up with my GSM, lost my PIN number or someting I don’t know (I did it a thousand times!), I went to the shop today (Feb. 28) to be able to call again. I also went to the office and the alarm was on… I asked for the security guard (I did not want to take risks the day of my birthday: February 28th)… we found nobody but someone tryied to enter on Sunday. I’ll try to prepare some report about Debian-Java tomorrow. The report will be reviewed by Wolfgang and Michael and I’ll send it on the debian-java list on Saturday or on Sunday.

I've discovered dbconfig-common project, a very interesting seanius work used to help to create new database based packages. I've joined to it and 've done my first commit to cvs.
Two new packages dbconfig-common based is ready to upload to sid, mydms and bulmacont. When dbconfig-common will be on sid, I've ask aurel32 to upload mydms to unstable.

Holidays is going down... Tomorrow I must come back to work, and it's not my preference in this moment. I've been enjoying my wife and sons. I must think in work again. In this hollidays, I've did:

- Packaged pngwriter for Debian. Nice person Paul Blackburn, the upstream. I've added to my contacts on messenger.
- Packaged a new version for acx100 driver (0.2.0pre8+44-1).
- I'm translating a d-i document to catalan (long)
- I'm translating FET to catalan (long looong)
- I have been working in correct RC bugs in Debian (none corrected, one I found was a false bug, and the another one is not a package bug, it was a kernel bug!).
- I offered me as a co-maintainer for cdrtools.

I must to thank to my sponsor Aurelien Jarno for sponsor me for my new maintained package pngwriter.

Well, sort of. I've now finally signed all the keys from DebConf5. My poor little OpenPGP smartcard is toasty warm. Well, not really, but it's got quite a work out. If haven't signed your key then:

• I don't think I've met you.
• I'm not sure I've seen proper ID that you are who you say you are.
• I lost my piece of paper that would confirm I've met you and have seen id/verified your fingerprint.
• master ate my mail to you, complaining about 8bit headers (this is something I should fix in signkey).
• Your mail server ate my mail, claiming it was spam.
• You use an idiot blacklist that there's no hope of me ever getting off because you're insane.
• You've greylisted me, and it'll get to you eventually.

Kudos to grep.be, progsoc.org, aurel32.net and linux.it, who all managed to have IPv6 MXes. Quite a low count for several hundreds mails to geeks I thought.