On February 4th and 5th, Debian will be attending FOSDEM 2017 in Brussels, Belgium; a yearly gratis event (no registration needed) run by volunteers from the Open Source and Free Software community. It's free, and it's big: more than 600 speakers, over 600 events, in 29 rooms. This year more than 45 current or past Debian contributors will speak at FOSDEM: Alexandre Viau, Bradley M. Kuhn, Daniel Pocock, Guus Sliepen, Johan Van de Wauw, John Sullivan, Josh Triplett, Julien Danjou, Keith Packard, Martin Pitt, Peter Van Eynde, Richard Hartmann, Sebastian Dr ge, Stefano Zacchiroli and Wouter Verhelst, among others. Similar to previous years, the event will be hosted at Universit libre de Bruxelles. Debian contributors and enthusiasts will be taking shifts at the Debian stand with gadgets, T-Shirts and swag. You can find us at stand number 4 in building K, 1 B; CoreOS Linux and PostgreSQL will be our neighbours. See https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEvents/be/2017/FOSDEM for more details. We are looking forward to meeting you all!

Ian Jackson - dgit in two slides with attitude :)

Mike Crowe - Code Club - volunteering to teach programming to school children in after school clubs. Scratch: version 1 is packaged for Debian and Raspberry Pi CSS HTML Python - all materials provided. Projects for Microbits as well. No slides.

Dimitri Ledkov - SPI board - explaining about SPI. SPI - US non-profit, also registered in Europe. Collects donations, can register trademarks, can hold assets on your project's behalf. Volunteer project: controlled by member orgs.

Guus Sliepen - ifupdown - dual protocol, bonding, VPNs, wireless,
- too many slides :)

Just got here, partway into Guus Sliepen's talk about issues with sourceless packages and the DFSG. Lots of problems with, for example, music for games and imagery and also areas where packages autobuild / use generated blobs which are not supplied or are not able to be regenerated.

Checked in by front desk - thanks again to Lisa, to Jo McIntyre and Lucy Wayland who have been very patient waiting for us, very helpful as ever, chasing us at the end of each day to reconcile badges and people and doing all the useful stuff that no one sees.

ARM security folk are still here, obviously, and the building work has stopped for the weekend so we can get in and out of the building more readily. Thanks once again to the ARM staffers who are also Debian-ites and to the ARM management who have to authorise all of this and allow us to use their facilities, buildings and guest WiFi. It's testament to a whole lot of hard work behind the scenes that this all seems seamless and (generally) works so well

At DebConf 16 I was working on a systemd backport for Debian/jessie. Results are officially available via the Debian archive now. In Debian jessie we have systemd v215 (which originally dates back to 2014-07-03 upstream-wise, plus changes + fixes from pkg-systemd folks of course). Now via Debian backports you have the option to update systemd to a very recent version: v230. If you have jessie-backports enabled it s just an apt install systemd -t jessie-backports away. For the upstream changes between v215 and v230 see upstream s NEWS file for list of changes. (Actually the systemd backport is available since 2016-07-19 for amd64, arm64 + armhf, though for mips, mipsel, powerpc, ppc64el + s390x we had to fight against GCC ICEs when compiling on/for Debian/jessie and for i386 architecture the systemd test-suite identified broken O_TMPFILE permission handling.) Thanks to the Alexander Wirt from the backports team for accepting my backport, thanks to intrigeri for the related apparmor backport, Guus Sliepen for the related ifupdown backport and Didier Raboud for the related usb-modeswitch/usb-modeswitch-data backports. Thanks to everyone testing my systemd backport and reporting feedback. Thanks a lot to Felipe Sateler and Martin Pitt for reviews, feedback and cooperation. And special thanks to Michael Biebl for all his feedback, reviews and help with the systemd backport from its very beginnings until the latest upload. PS: I cannot stress this enough how fantastic Debian s pkg-systemd team is. Responsive, friendly, helpful, dedicated and skilled folks, thanks folks!

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between April 10th and April 16th 2016: Toolchain fixes

• Roland Rosenfeld uploaded transfig/1:3.2.5.e-6 which honors SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. Original patch by Alexis Bienven e.
• Bill Allombert uploaded gap/4r8p3-2 which makes convert.pl honor SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. Original patch by Jerome Benoit, duplicate patch by Dhole.
• Emmanuel Bourg uploaded ant/1.9.7-1 which makes the Javadoc task use UTF-8 as the default encoding if none was specified and SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH is set.

Antoine Beaupr suggested that gitpkg stops recording timestamps when creating upstream archives. Antoine Beaupr also pointed out that git-buildpackage diverges from the default gzip settings which is a problem for reproducibly recreating released tarballs which were made using the defaults. Alexis Bienven e submitted a patch extending sphinx SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH support to copyright year. Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: atinject-jsr330, avis, brailleutils, charactermanaj, classycle, commons-io, commons-javaflow, commons-jci, gap-radiroot, jebl2, jetty, libcommons-el-java, libcommons-jxpath-java, libjackson-json-java, libjogl2-java, libmicroba-java, libproxool-java, libregexp-java, mobile-atlas-creator, octave-econometrics, octave-linear-algebra, octave-odepkg, octave-optiminterp, rapidsvn, remotetea, ruby-rinku, tachyon, xhtmlrenderer. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• autopkgtest/3.20.3 uploaded by Martin Pitt, original patch by Alexis Bienven e.
• fop/1:2.1-3 uploaded by Mathieu Malaterre, original patch by Alexis Bienven e.
• fwupdate/0.5-4 by Mario Limonciello.
• gem/1:0.93.3-10 by IOhannes m zm lnig.
• imview/1.1.9c-16 by Anton Gladky.
• libappindicator/0.4.92-4 by Adam Borowski.
• libjlha-java/0.0.20050504-9 by Emmanuel Bourg.
• lwjgl/2.9.3+dfsg-1 by Markus Koschany.
• lxc/1:2.0.0~rc15-1 uploaded by Evgeni Golov, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• manpages-de/1.12-1 uploaded by Tobias Quathamer, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• pd-mrpeach/0.1~svn17615-1 by IOhannes m zm lnig.
• pyhoca-gui/0.5.0.6-1 uploaded by Mike Gabriel, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• r-cran-spatstat/1.45-0-1 by Andreas Tille.
• s5/1.1.dfsg.2-6 uploaded by Peter Pentchev, original patch by Juan Picca.
• samba/2:4.3.8+dfsg-1 by Jelmer Vernoo .
• sim4/0.0.20121010-3 uploaded by Andreas Tille, original patch by Alexis Bienven e.
• svxlink/15.11-1 uploaded by Felix Lechner, fixed upstream.
• tinc/1.0.28-1 by Guus Sliepen, fixed upstream.
• ucblogo/6.0+dfsg-1 by Reiner Herrmann.

Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them:

• mm-common/0.9.10-1 by Michael Biebl.

Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #820603 on viking by Alexis Bienven e: fix icon headers inclusion order.
• #820661 on nullmailer by Alexis Bienven e: fix the order in which files are included in the static archive.
• #820668 on sawfish by Alexis Bienven e: fix file ordering in theme archives, strip hostname and username from the config.h file, and honour SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH when creating the config.h file.
• #820740 on bless by Alexis Bienven e: always use /bin/sh as shell.
• #820742 on gmic by Alexis Bienven e: strip the build date from help messages.
• #820809 on wsdl4j by Alexis Bienven e: use a plain text representation of the copyright character.
• #820815 on freefem++ by Alexis Bienven e: fix the order in which files are included in the .edp files, and honour SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH when using the build date.
• #820869 on pyexiv2 by Alexis Bienven e: honour the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable through the ustrftime function, to get a reproducible copyright year.
• #820932 on fim by Alexis Bienven e: fix the order in which files are joined in header files, strip the build date from fim binary, make the embeded vim2html script honour SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH variable when building the documentation, and force language to be English when using bison to make a grammar that is going to be parsed using English keywords.
• #820990 on grib-api by Santiago Vila: always call dh-buildinfo.

diffoscope development Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek noted in #820631 that diffoscope doesn't work properly when a file contains several cpio archives. Package reviews 21 reviews have been added, 14 updated and 22 removed in this week. New issue found: timestamps_in_htm_by_gap. Chris Lamb reported 10 new FTBFS issues. Misc. The video and the slides from the talk "Reproducible builds ecosystem" at LibrePlanet 2016 have been published now. This week's edition was written by Lunar and Holger Levsen. h01ger automated the maintenance and publishing of this weekly newsletter via git.

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between December 20th to December 26th: Toolchain fixes Mattia Rizzolo rebased our experimental versions of debhelper (twice!) and dpkg on top of the latest releases. Reiner Herrmann submited a patch for mozilla-devscripts to sort the file list in generated preferences.js files. To be able to lift the restriction that packages must be built in the same path, translation support for the __FILE__ C pre-processor macro would also be required. Joerg Sonnenberger submitted a patch back in 2010 that would still be useful today. Chris Lamb started work on providing a deterministic mode for debootstrap. Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: bouncycastle, cairo-dock-plug-ins, darktable, gshare, libgpod, pafy, ruby-redis-namespace, ruby-rouge, sparkleshare. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• a7xpg/0.11.dfsg1-9 uploaded by Markus Koschany, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• at/3.1.18-1 uploaded by Laurent Bigonville, original patch by Reiner Herrmann, merged by Jose M Calhariz.
• bibtool/2.61+ds-2 by Jerome Benoit.
• bup/0.27-2 uploaded by Robert Edmonds, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• deja-dup/34.1-1 uploaded by Laurent Bigonville, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• gauche-gl/0.6-1 by NIIBE Yutaka.
• ifupdown/0.8 uploaded by Guus Sliepen, original patch by Lunar.
• jing-trang/20131210+dfsg+1-4 by Samuel Thibault.
• libp11/0.3.0-2 by Eric Dorland.
• pdns/4.0.0~alpha1-1 by Christian Hofstaedtler.
• pdns-recursor/4.0.0~alpha1-1 by Christian Hofstaedtler.
• qupzilla/1.8.9~dfsg1-1 uploaded by Georges Khaznadar, fixed upstream.
• ros-genpy/0.5.7-4 uploaded by Jochen Sprickerhof, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• signify/1.14-3 by Mattia Rizzolo, obsoleting patches submitted by Chris Lamb and akira.
• sleepyhead/0.9.8-2 by Sergio Durigan Junior.
• texi2html/1.82+dfsg1-5 by Mattia Rizzolo, previous patch by Juan Picca.
• titanion/0.3.dfsg1-6 by Markus Koschany, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• tj3/3.5.0-3 uploaded by Vincent Bernat, original patch by Vincent Bernat.
• vcsh/1.20151229-1 by Richard Hartmann.
• waitress/0.8.10-1 uploaded by Andrew Shadura, original patch by Juan Picca.
• xtel/3.3.0-19 by Samuel Thibault.

Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them:

• kmod/22-1 uploaded by Marco d'Itri, original patch by Lunar.
• libgcrypt20/1.6.4-4 by Andreas Metzler.
• loadlin/1.6f-4 uploaded by Samuel Thibault, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• pathological/1.1.3-13 uploaded by Markus Koschany, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• yacas/1.3.6-1) uploaded by Muammar El Khatib, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.

Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #808459 on pywavelets by Chris Lamb: add support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in the documentation generator.
• #808652 on nexuiz-data by Reiner Herrmann: sorts with the locale set to C.
• #808667 on libmouse-perl by Reiner Herrmann: sorts the list of filenames to be embedded.
• #808679 on libcorelinux by Reiner Herrmann: sort the list of files in the generated Makefile.
• #808711 on ca-certificates by Reiner Herrmann: sort the list of certificates before it is embedded.

reproducible.debian.net Statistics for package sets are now visible for the armhf architecture. (h01ger) The second build now has a longer timeout (18 hours) than the first build (12 hours). This should prevent wasting resources when a machine is loaded. (h01ger) Builds of Arch Linux packages are now done using a tmpfs. (h01ger) 200 GiB have been added to jenkins.debian.net (thanks to ProfitBricks!) to make room for new jobs. The current count is at 962 and growing! diffoscope development Aside from some minor bugs that have been fixed, a one-line change made huge memory (and time) savings as the output of transformation tool is now streamed line by line instead of loaded entirely in memory at once. disorderfs development Andrew Ayer released disorderfs version 0.4.2-1 on December 22th. It fixes a memory corruption error when processing command line arguments that could cause command line options to be ignored. Documentation update Many small improvements for the documentation on reproducible-builds.org sent by Georg Koppen were merged. Package reviews 666 (!) reviews have been removed, 189 added and 162 updated in the previous week. 151 new fail to build from source reports have been made by Chris West, Chris Lamb, Mattia Rizzolo, and Niko Tyni. New issues identified: unsorted_filelist_in_xul_ext_preferences, nondeterminstic_output_generated_by_moarvm. Misc. Steven Chamberlain drew our attention to one analysis of the Juniper ScreenOS Authentication Backdoor: Whilst this may have been added in source code, it was well-disguised in the disassembly and just 7 instructions long. I thought this was a good example of the current state-of-the-art, and why we'd like our binaries and eventually, installer and VM images reproducible IMHO. Joanna Rutkowska has mentioned possible ways for Qubes to become reproducible on their development mailing-list.

Guus strikes back with a new Scientific tutorial in the Free OpenGL wikibook. It deals with tracing the Mexican Hat 3D function using surfaces, removing hidden ones, and also shows how to avoid visual artifacts when adding grid lines.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenGL_Programming/Scientific_OpenGL_Tutorial_05

Here's the fourth tutorial from Guus on Scientific OpenGL, this time going 3D, plotting the "Mexican Hat" function, and covering various line drawing methods as well as Index Buffer Objects.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenGL_Programming/Scientific_OpenGL_Tutorial_04

Here's a third tutorial from Guus focused on GPU-assisted plotting. It also provides excellent exercices on manipulating the OpenGL windows using the Viewport and the Scissors

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenGL_Programming/Scientific_OpenGL_Tutorial_03

The OpenGL wikibook is free documentation, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions; see the CC-BY-SA or GFDL licenses for details

Guus wrote another scientific OpenGL tutorial, storing ordinates as a one-dimensional texture for increased performances.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenGL_Programming/Scientific_OpenGL_Tutorial_02

I also went ahead and added a tutorial on two-sided lighting:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/GLSL_Programming/GLUT/Two-Sided_Surfaces

Remember: this is free documentation that you can share and/or improve upon - make sure you do so

Guus started a new section in the OpenGL wikibook about scientific uses! In a first tutorial, he showcases how to interactively plot a simple mathematic function:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenGL_Programming#The_scientific_arc

The lighting front is also progressing with a new tutorial on ambient and specular lights:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/GLSL_Programming/GLUT/Specular_Highlights

Enjoy!

Wat. een. deceptie.

I have previously blogged about Ethernet bonding on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Now I have a need to do the same thing on Debian Etch - to have multiple Ethernet links for redundancy so that if one breaks the system keeps working. The first thing to do on Debian is to install the package ifenslave-2.6 which provides the utility to manage the bond device. Then create the file /etc/modprobe.d/aliases-bond with the following contents for a network that has 10.0.0.1 as either a reliable host or important router. Note that this will use ARP to ping the router every 2000ms, you could use a lower value for a faster failover or a higher value
alias bond0 bonding
options bond0 mode=1 arp_interval=2000 arp_ip_target=10.0.0.1 If you want to monitor link status then you can use the following options line instead, however I couldn’t test this because the MII link monitoring doesn’t seem to work correctly on my hardware (there are many Ethernet devices that don’t work well in this regard):
options bond0 mode=0 miimon=100 Then edit the file /etc/network/interfaces and inset something like the following (as a replacement for the configuration of eth0 that you might currently be using). Note that XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX must be replaced by the hardware address of one of the interfaces that are being bonded or by a locally administered address (see this Wikipedia page for details). If you don’t specify the Ethernet address then it will default to the address of the first interface that is enslaved. This might not sound like a problem, however if the machine boots and a hardware failure is experienced which makes the primary Ethernet device not visible to the OS (IE the PCI card is dead but not killing the machine) then the hardware address of the bond would change, this might cause problems with other parts of your network infrastructure.
auto bond0
iface bond0 inet static
pre-up modprobe bond0
hwaddress ether XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
address 10.0.0.199
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 10.0.0.1
up ifenslave bond0 eth0 eth1
down ifenslave -d bond0 eth0 eth1 There is some special support for bonding in the Debian ifup and ifdown utilities. The following will give the same result as the above in /etc/network/interfaces:
auto bond0
iface bond0 inet static
pre-up modprobe bond0
hwaddress ether 00:02:55:E1:36:32
address 10.0.0.199
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 10.0.0.1
slaves eth0 eth1 The special file /proc/net/bonding/bond0 can be used to view the current configuration of the bond0 device. In theory it should be possible to use bonding on a workstation with DHCP, but in my brief attempts I have not got it working - any comments from people who have this working would be appreciated. The first pre-requisite of doing so is to use either MII monitoring or broadcast (mode 3), I experimented with using options bond0 mode=3 in /etc/modprobe.d/aliases-bond but found that it took too long to get the bond working and dhclient timed out. Thanks for the howtoforge.com article and the linuxhorizon.ro article that helped me discover some aspects of this. Update: Thanks to Guus Sliepen on the debian-devel mailing list for giving an example of the slaves directive as part of an example of bridging and bonding in response to this question.

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I have previously blogged about Ethernet bonding on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Now I have a need to do the same thing on Debian Etch - to have multiple Ethernet links for redundancy so that if one breaks the system keeps working. The first thing to do on Debian is to install the package ifenslave-2.6 which provides the utility to manage the bond device. Then create the file /etc/modprobe.d/aliases-bond with the following contents for a network that has 10.0.0.1 as either a reliable host or important router. Note that this will use ARP to ping the router every 2000ms, you could use a lower value for a faster failover or a higher value
alias bond0 bonding
options bond0 mode=1 arp_interval=2000 arp_ip_target=10.0.0.1 If you want to monitor link status then you can use the following options line instead, however I couldn’t test this because the MII link monitoring doesn’t seem to work correctly on my hardware (there are many Ethernet devices that don’t work well in this regard):
options bond0 mode=0 miimon=100 Then edit the file /etc/network/interfaces and inset something like the following (as a replacement for the configuration of eth0 that you might currently be using). Note that XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX must be replaced by the hardware address of one of the interfaces that are being bonded or by a locally administered address (see this Wikipedia page for details). If you don’t specify the Ethernet address then it will default to the address of the first interface that is enslaved. This might not sound like a problem, however if the machine boots and a hardware failure is experienced which makes the primary Ethernet device not visible to the OS (IE the PCI card is dead but not killing the machine) then the hardware address of the bond would change, this might cause problems with other parts of your network infrastructure.
auto bond0
iface bond0 inet static
pre-up modprobe bond0
hwaddress ether XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
address 10.0.0.199
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 10.0.0.1
up ifenslave bond0 eth0 eth1
down ifenslave -d bond0 eth0 eth1 There is some special support for bonding in the Debian ifup and ifdown utilities. The following will give the same result as the above in /etc/network/interfaces:
auto bond0
iface bond0 inet static
pre-up modprobe bond0
hwaddress ether 00:02:55:E1:36:32
address 10.0.0.199
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 10.0.0.1
slaves eth0 eth1 The special file /proc/net/bonding/bond0 can be used to view the current configuration of the bond0 device. In theory it should be possible to use bonding on a workstation with DHCP, but in my brief attempts I have not got it working - any comments from people who have this working would be appreciated. The first pre-requisite of doing so is to use either MII monitoring or broadcast (mode 3), I experimented with using options bond0 mode=3 in /etc/modprobe.d/aliases-bond but found that it took too long to get the bond working and dhclient timed out. Thanks for the howtoforge.com article and the linuxhorizon.ro article that helped me discover some aspects of this. Update: Thanks to Guus Sliepen on the debian-devel mailing list for giving an example of the slaves directive as part of an example of bridging and bonding in response to this question.

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