Search Results: "he"

11 April 2025

Bits from Debian: DebConf25 Registration and Call for Proposals are open

The 26th edition of the Debian annual conference will be held in Brest, France, from July 14th to July 20th, 2025. The main conference will be preceded by DebCamp, from July 7th to July 13th. We invite everyone interested to register for the event to attend DebConf25 in person. You can also submit a talk or event proposal if you're interested in presenting your work in Debian at DebConf25. Registration can be done by creating an account on the DebConf25 website and clicking on "Register" in the profile section. As always, basic registration is free of charge. If you are attending the conference in a professional capacity or as a representative of your company, we kindly ask that you consider registering in one of our paid categories. This helps cover the costs of organizing the event while also supporting subsidizing other community members attendance. The last day to register with guaranteed swag is 9th June. We encourage eligible individuals to apply for a diversity bursary. Travel, food, and accommodation bursaries are available. More details can be found on the bursary information page. The last day to apply for a bursary is April 14th. Applicants should receive feedback on their bursary application by April 25th. The call for proposals for talks, discussions and other activities is also open. To submit a proposal, you need to create an account on the website and click the "Submit Talk Proposal" button in the profile section. The last day to submit and have your proposal considered for the main conference schedule, with video coverage guaranteed, is May 25th. DebConf25 is also looking for sponsors; if you are interested or think you know of others who would be willing to help, please get in touch with sponsors@debconf.org. All important dates can be found on the link here. See you in Brest!

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 294 released

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 294. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Correct longstanding issue where many ">"-based version tests used in
  conditional fixtures were broken due to the lack of a __gt__ method.
  Thanks, Colin Watson! (Closes: #1102658)
* Address a long-hidden issue in the test_versions testsuite where we weren't
  actually testing ">" as it was masked by the tests for equality in the
  testsuite.
* Update copyright years.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

10 April 2025

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in March 2025

Debian LTS This was my hundred-twenty-ninth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on: Last but not least I started to work on the second batch of fixes for suricata CVEs and attended the monthly LTS/ELTS meeting. Debian ELTS This month was the eightieth ELTS month. During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on: Last but not least I started to work on the second batch of fixes for suricata CVEs and attended the monthly LTS/ELTS meeting. Debian Printing This month I uploaded new packages or new upstream or bugfix versions of: This work is generously funded by Freexian! Debian Matomo This month I uploaded new packages or new upstream or bugfix versions of: This work is generously funded by Freexian! Debian Astro This month I uploaded new packages or new upstream or bugfix versions of: Unfortunately I had a rather bad experience with package hijacking this month. Of course errors can always happen, but when I am forced into a discussion about the advantages of hijacking, I am speechless about such self-centered behavior. Oh fellow Debian Developers, is it really that hard to acknowledge a fault and tidy up afterwards? What a sad trend. Debian IoT Unfortunately I didn t found any time to work on this topic. Debian Mobcom This month I uploaded new upstream or bugfix versions of almost all packages. First I uploaded them to experimental and afterwards to unstable to get the latest upstream versions into Trixie. misc This month I uploaded new packages or new upstream or bugfix versions of: meep and meep-mpi-default are no longer supported on 32bit architectures. FTP master This month I accepted 343 and rejected 38 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 347.

John Goerzen: Announcing the NNCPNET Email Network

From 1995 to 2019, I ran my own mail server. It began with a UUCP link, an expensive long-distance call for me then. Later, I ran a mail server in my apartment, then ran it as a VPS at various places. But running an email server got difficult. You can t just run it on a residential IP. Now there s SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and TLS to worry about. I recently reviewed mail hosting services, and don t get me wrong: I still use one, and probably will, because things like email from my bank are critical. But we ve lost the ability to tinker, to experiment, to have fun with email. Not anymore. NNCPNET is an email system that runs atop NNCP. I ve written a lot about NNCP, including a less-ambitious article about point-to-point email over NNCP 5 years ago. NNCP is to UUCP what ssh is to telnet: a modernization, with modern security and features. NNCP is an asynchronous, onion-routed, store-and-forward network. It can use as a transport anything from the Internet to a USB stick. NNCPNET is a set of standards, scripts, and tools to facilitate a broader email network using NNCP as the transport. You can read more about NNCPNET on its wiki! The easy mode is to use the Docker container (multi-arch, so you can use it on your Raspberry Pi) I provide, which bundles: It is open to all. The homepage has a more extensive list of features. I even have mailing lists running on NNCPNET; see the interesting addresses page for more details. There is extensive documentation, and of course the source to the whole thing is available. The gateway to Internet SMTP mail is off by default, but can easily be enabled for any node. It is a full participant, in both directions, with SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and TLS. You don t need any inbound ports for any of this. You don t need an always-on Internet connection. You don t even need an Internet connection at all. You can run it from your laptop and still use Thunderbird to talk to it via its optional built-in IMAP server.

9 April 2025

Dirk Eddelbuettel: AsioHeaders 1.28.2-1 on CRAN: New Upstream

A new release of the AsioHeaders package arrived at CRAN earlier today. Asio provides a cross-platform C++ library for network and low-level I/O programming. It is also included in Boost but requires linking when used as part of Boost. This standalone version of Asio is a header-only C++ library which can be used without linking (just like our BH package with parts of Boost). This update brings a new upstream version which helps the three dependent packages using AsiooHeaders to remain compliant at CRAN, and has been prepared by Charlie Gao. Otherwise I made some routine updates to packaging since the last release in late 2022. The short NEWS entry for AsioHeaders follows.

Changes in version 1.28.2-1 (2025-04-08)
  • Standard maintenance to CI and other packaging aspects
  • Upgraded to Asio 1.28.2 (Charlie Gao in #11 fixing #10)

Thanks to my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report for this release. Comments and suggestions about AsioHeaders are welcome via the issue tracker at the GitHub repo.

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 now sponsor me at GitHub.

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Preparations for Trixie, Updated debvm, DebConf 25 registration website updates and more! (by Anupa Ann Joseph)

Debian Contributions: 2025-03 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.

Preparing for Trixie, by Rapha l Hertzog As we are approaching the trixie freeze, it is customary for Debian developers to review their packages and clean them up in preparation for the next stable release. That s precisely what Rapha l did with publican, a package that had not seen any change since the last Debian release and that partially stopped working along the way due to a major Perl upgrade. While upstream s activity is close to zero, hope is not yet entirely gone as the git repository moved to a new location a couple of months ago and contained the required fix. Rapha l also developed another fix to avoid an annoying warning that was seen at runtime. Rapha l also ensured that the last upstream version of zim was uploaded to Debian unstable, and developed a fix for gnome-shell-extension-hamster to make it work with GNOME 48 and thus ensure that the package does not get removed from trixie.

Abseil and re2 transition in Debian, by Stefano Rivera One of the last transitions to happen for trixie was an update to abseil, bringing it up to 202407. This library is a dependency for one of Freexian s customers, as well as blocking newer versions of re2, a package maintained by Stefano. The transition had been stalled for several months while some issues with reverse dependencies were investigated and dealt with. It took a final push to make the transition happen, including fixing a few newly discovered problems downstream. The abseil package s autopkgtests were (trivially) broken by newer cmake versions, and some tests started failing on PPC64 (a known issue upstream).

debvm uploaded, by Helmut Grohne debvm is a command line tool for quickly creating a Debian-based virtual machine for testing purposes. Over time, it accumulated quite a few minor issues as well as CI failures. The most notorious one was an ARM32 failure present since August. It was diagnosed down to a glibc bug by Tj and Chris Hofstaedtler and little has happened since then. To have debvm work somewhat, it now contains a workaround for this situation. Few changes are expected to be noticeable, but related tools such as apt, file, linux, passwd, and qemu required quite a few adaptations all over the place. Much of the necessary debugging was contributed by others.

DebConf 25 Registration website, by Stefano Rivera and Santiago Ruano Rinc n DebConf 25, the annual Debian developer conference, is now open for registration. Other than preparing the conference website, getting there always requires some last minute changes to the software behind the registration interface and this year was no exception. Every year, the conference is a little different to previous years, and has some different details that need to be captured from attendees. And every year we make minor incremental improvements to fix long-standing problems. New concepts this year included: brunch, the closing talks on the departure day, venue security clearance, partial contributions towards food and accommodation bursaries, and attendee-selected bursary budgets.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Helmut uploaded guess-concurrency incorporating feedback from others.
  • Helmut reacted to rebootstrap CI results and adapted it to cope with changes in unstable.
  • Helmut researched real world /usr-move fallout though little was actually attributable. He also NMUed systemd unsuccessfully.
  • Helmut sent 12 cross build patches.
  • Helmut looked into undeclared file conflicts in Debian more systematically and filed quite some bugs.
  • Helmut attended the cross/bootstrap sprint in W rzburg. A report of the event is pending.
  • Lucas worked on the CFP and tracks definition for DebConf 25.
  • Lucas worked on some bits involving Rails 7 transition.
  • Carles investigated why the job piuparts on salsa-ci/pipeline was passing but was failing on piuparts.debian.org for simplemonitor package. Created an issue and MR with a suggested fix, under discussion.
  • Carles improved the documentation of salsa-ci/pipeline: added documentation for different variables.
  • Carles made debian-history package reproducible (with help from Chris Lamb).
  • Carles updated simplemonitor package (new upstream version), prepared a new qdacco version (fixed bugs in qdacco, packaged with the upgrade from Qt 5 to Qt 6).
  • Carles reviewed and submitted translations to Catalan for adduser, apt, shadow, apt-listchanges.
  • Carles reviewed, created merge-requests for translations to Catalan of 38 packages (using po-debconf-manager tooling). Created 40 bug reports for some merge requests that haven t been actioned for some time.
  • Colin Watson fixed 59 RC bugs (including 26 packages broken by the long-overdue removal of dh-python s dependency on python3-setuptools), and upgraded 38 packages (mostly Python-related) to new upstream versions.
  • Colin worked with Pranav P to track down and fix a dnspython autopkgtest regression on s390x caused by an endianness bug in pylsqpack.
  • Colin fixed a time-based test failure in python-dateutil that would have triggered in 2027, and contributed the fix upstream.
  • Colin fixed debconf to automatically use the noninteractive frontend if stdin is not a terminal.
  • Stefano bisected and fixed a pypy translation regression on Debian stable and older on 32-bit ARM.
  • Emilio coordinated and helped finish various transitions in light of the transition freeze.
  • Thorsten Alteholz uploaded cups-filters to fix an FTBFS with a new upstream version of qpdf.
  • With the aim of enhancing the support for packages related to Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs) in recent industrial standards, Santiago has worked on finishing the packaging of and uploaded CycloneDX python library. There is on-going work about SPDX python tools, but it requires (build-)dependencies currently not shipped in Debian, such as owlrl and pyshacl.
  • Anupa worked with the Publicity team to announce the Debian 12.10 point release.
  • Anupa with the support of Santiago prepared an announcement and announced the opening of CfP and Registrations for DebConf 25.

Taavi V n nen: Writing a custom rsync server to automatically update a static site

Inspired by some friends,1 I too wanted to make a tiny website telling which event I am at this exact moment. Thankfully I already had an another toy project with that information easily available, so generating the web page was a matter of just querying that project's API and feeding that data to a HTML template. Now the obvious way to host that would be to hook up the HTML-generating code to a web server, maybe add some caching for the API calls, and then route external HTTPS traffic to it. However, that'd a) require that server to be constantly available to serve traffic, and b) be boring. For context: I have an existing setup called staticweb, which is effectively a fancy name for a couple of Puppet-managed servers that run Apache httpd to serve static web pages and have a bunch of systemd timers running rsync to ensure they're serving the same content. It works really well and I use it for things ranging from my website or whyisbetabroken.com to things like my internal apt repository. Now, there are two ways to get new content into that mechanism: it can be manually pushed in from e.g. a CI job, or the system can be configured to periodically pull it from a separate server. The latter mechanism was initially created so that I could pull the Debian packages from my separate reprepro server into the staticweb setup. It turns out that the latter makes a really neat method for handling other dynamically-generated static sites as well. So, for my "where is Taavi at" site, I ended up writing the server part in Go, and included an rsync server using the gokrazy/rsync package. Initially I just implemented a static temporary directory with a timer to regularly update the HTML file in it, but then I got an even more cursed idea: what if the HTML was dynamically generated when an rsync client connected to the server? So I did just that. For deployment, I slapped the entire server part in a container and deployed it to my Kubernetes cluster. The rsync server is exposed directly as a service to my internal network with no authentication or encryption - I think that's fine since that's a read-only service in a private LAN and the resulting HTML is going to be publicly exposed anyway. (Thanks to some DNS magic, just creating a LoadBalancer Service object with a special annotation is enough to have a DNS name provisioned for the assigned IP address, which is neat.) Overall the setup works nice, at least for now. I need to add some sort of a cache to not fetch unchanged information from the API since for every update. And I guess I could write some cursed rsyncd reverse proxy with per-module rules if I end up creating more sites like this to avoid creating new LoadBalancer services for each of them.

  1. Mostly from Sammy's where.fops.at.

8 April 2025

Petter Reinholdtsen: Some notes on Linux LUKS cracking

A few months ago, I found myself in the unfortunate position that I had to try to recover the password used to encrypt a Linux hard drive. Tonight a few friends of mine asked for details on this effort. I guess it is a good idea to expose the recipe I found to a wider audience, so here are a few relevant links and key findings. I've forgotten a lot, so part of this is taken from memory. I found a good recipe in a blog post written in 2019 by diverto, titled Cracking LUKS/dm-crypt passphrases. I tried both the john the ripper approach where it generated password candidates and passed it to cryptsetup and the luks2jack.py approach (which did not work for me, if I remember correctly), but believe I had most success with the hashcat approach. I had it running for several days on my Thinkpad X230 laptop from 2012. I do not remember the exact hash rate, but when I tested it again just now on the same machine by running "hashcat -a 0 hashcat.luks longlist --force", I got a hash rate of 7 per second. Testing it on a newer machine with a 32 core AMD CPU, I got a hash rate of 289 per second. Using the ROCM OpenCL approach on the same machine I managed to get a hash rate of 2821 per second.
Session..........: hashcat                                
Status...........: Quit
Hash.Mode........: 14600 (LUKS v1 (legacy))
Hash.Target......: hashcat.luks
Time.Started.....: Tue Apr  8 23:06:08 2025 (1 min, 10 secs)
Time.Estimated...: Tue Apr  8 23:12:49 2025 (5 mins, 31 secs)
Kernel.Feature...: Pure Kernel
Guess.Base.......: File (/usr/share/dict/bokm l)
Guess.Queue......: 1/1 (100.00%)
Speed.#1.........:     2821 H/s (8.18ms) @ Accel:128 Loops:128 Thr:32 Vec:1
Recovered........: 0/1 (0.00%) Digests (total), 0/1 (0.00%) Digests (new)
Progress.........: 0/935405 (0.00%)
Rejected.........: 0/0 (0.00%)
Restore.Point....: 0/935405 (0.00%)
Restore.Sub.#1...: Salt:0 Amplifier:0-1 Iteration:972928-973056
Candidate.Engine.: Device Generator
Candidates.#1....: A-aksje -> fiskebil
Hardware.Mon.#1..: Temp: 73c Fan: 77% Util: 99% Core:2625MHz Mem: 456MHz Bus:16
Note that for this last test I picked the largest word list I had on my machine (dict/bokm l) as a fairly random work list and not because it is useful for cracking my particular use case from a few months ago. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

7 April 2025

Scarlett Gately Moore: KDE Snap Updates, Kubuntu Updates, More life updates!

Icy morning Witch Wells AzIcy morning Witch Wells Az
Life: Last week we were enjoying springtime, this week winter has made a comeback! Good news on the broken arm front, the infection is gone, so they can finally deal with the broken issue again. I will have a less invasive surgery April 25th to pull the bones back together so they can properly knit back together! If you can spare any change please consider a donation to my continued healing and recovery, or just support my work  Kubuntu: While testing Beta I came across some crashy apps ( Namely PIM ) due to apparmor. I have uploaded fixed profiles for kmail, akregator, akonadiconsole, konqueror, tellico KDE Snaps: Added sctp support in Qt https://invent.kde.org/neon/snap-packaging/kde-qt6-core-sdk/-/commit/bbcb1dc39044b930ab718c8ffabfa20ccd2b0f75 This will allow me to finish a pyside6 snap and fix FreeCAD build. Changed build type to Release in the kf6-core24-sdk which will reduce the size of kf6-core24 significantly. Fixed a few startup errors in kf5-core24 and kf6-core24 snapcraft-desktop-integration. Soumyadeep fixed wayland icons in https://invent.kde.org/neon/snap-packaging/kf6-core-sdk/-/merge_requests/3 KDE Applications 25.03.90 RC released to candidate ( I know it says 24.12.3, version won t be updated until 25.04.0 release ) Kasts core24 fixed in candidate Kate now core24 with Breeze theme! candidate Neochat: Fixed missing QML and 25.04 dependencies in candidate Kdenlive now with Galxnimate animations! candidate Digikam 8.6.0 now with scanner support in stable Kstars 3.7.6 released to stable for realz, removed store rejected plugs. Thanks for stopping by!

5 April 2025

Russell Coker: HP z840

Many PCs with DDR4 RAM have started going cheap on ebay recently. I don t know how much of that is due to Windows 11 hardware requirements and how much is people replacing DDR4 systems with DDR5 systems. I recently bought a z840 system on ebay, it s much like the z640 that I recently made my workstation [1] but is designed strictly as a 2 CPU system. The z640 can run with 2 CPUs if you have a special expansion board for a second CPU which is very expensive on eBay and and which doesn t appear to have good airflow potential for cooling. The z840 also has a slightly larger case which supports more DIMM sockets and allows better cooling. The z640 and z840 take the same CPUs if you use the E5-2xxx series of CPU that is designed for running in 2-CPU mode. The z840 runs DDR4 RAM at 2400 as opposed to 2133 for the z640 for reasons that are not explained. The z840 has more PCIe slots which includes 4*16x slots that support bifurcation. The z840 that I have has the HP Z-Cooler [2] installed. The coolers are mounted on a 45 degree angle (the model depicted at the right top of the first page of that PDF) and the system has a CPU shroud with fans that mount exactly on top of the CPU heatsinks and duct the hot air out without going over other parts. The technology of the z840 cooling is very impressive. When running two E5-2699A CPUs which are listed as 145W typical TDP with all 44 cores in use the system is very quiet. It s noticeably louder than the z640 but is definitely fine to have at your desk. In a typical office you probably wouldn t hear it when it s running full bore. If I was to have one desktop PC or server in my home the z840 would definitely be the machine I choose for that. I decided to make the z840 a build server to share the resource with friends and to use for group coding projects. I often have friends visit with laptops to work on FOSS stuff and a 44 core build server is very useful for that. The system is by far the fastest system I ve ever owned even though I don t have fast storage for it yet. But 256G of RAM allows enough caching that storage speed doesn t matter too much. Here is building the SE Linux refpolicy package on the z640 with E5-2696 v3 CPU and the z840 with two E5-2699A v4 CPUs:
257.10user 47.18system 1:40.21elapsed 303%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 416408maxresident)k
66904inputs+1519912outputs (74major+8154395minor)pagefaults 0swaps
222.15user 24.17system 1:13.80elapsed 333%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 416192maxresident)k
5416inputs+0outputs (64major+8030451minor)pagefaults 0swaps
Here is building Warzone2100 on the z640 and the z840:
6887.71user 178.72system 16:15.09elapsed 724%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 1682160maxresident)k
1555480inputs+8918768outputs (114major+27133734minor)pagefaults 0swaps
6055.96user 77.05system 8:00.20elapsed 1277%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 1682100maxresident)k
117640inputs+0outputs (46major+11460968minor)pagefaults 0swaps
It seems that the refpolicy package can t use many more than 18 cores as it is only 37% faster when building with 44 cores available. Building Warzone is slightly more than twice as fast so it can really use all the available cores. According to Passmark the E5-2699A v4 is 22% faster than the E5-2696 v3. I highly recommend buying a z640 if you see one at a good price.

Russell Coker: More About the HP ML110 Gen9 and z640

In May 2021 I bought a ML110 Gen9 to use as a deskside workstation [1]. I started writing this post in April 2022 when it had been my main workstation for almost a year. While this post was in a draft state in Feb 2023 I upgraded it to an 18 core E5-2696 v3 CPU [2]. It s now March 2025 and I have replaced it. Hardware Issues My previous state with this was not having adequate cooling to allow it to boot and not having a PCIe power cable for a video card. As an experiment I connected the CPU fan to the PCIe fan power and discovered that all power and monitoring wires for the CPU and PCIe fans are identical. This allowed me to buy a CPU fan which was cheaper ($26.09 including postage) and easier to obtain than a PCIe fan (presumably due to CPU fans being more commonly used and manufactured in larger quantities). I had to be creative in attaching the CPU fan as it s cable wasn t long enough to reach the usual location for a PCIe fan. The PCIe fan also required a baffle to direct the air to the right place which annoyingly HP apparently doesn t ship with the low end servers, so I made one from a Corn Flakes packet and duct tape. The Wikipedia page listing AMD GPUs lists many newer ones that draw less than 80W and don t need a PCIe power cable. I ordered a Radeon RX560 4G video card which cost $246.75. It only uses 8 lanes of PCIe but that s enough for me, the only 3D game I play is Warzone 2100 which works well at 4K resolution on that card. It would be really annoying if I had to just spend $246.75 to get the system working, but I had another system in need of a better video card which had a PCIe power cable so the effective cost was small. I think of it as upgrading 2 systems for $123 each. The operation of the PCIe video card was a little different than non-server systems. The built in VGA card displayed the hardware status at the start and then kept displaying that after the system had transitioned to PCIe video. This could be handy in some situations if you know what it s doing but was confusing initially. Booting One insidious problem is that when booting in legacy mode the boot process takes an unreasonably long time and often hangs, the UEFI implementation on this system seems much more reliable and also supports booting from NVMe. Even with UEFI the boot process on this system was slow. Also the early stage of the power on process involves fans being off and the power light flickering which leads you to think that it s not booting and needs to have the power button pressed again which turns it off. The Dell power on sequence of turning most LEDs on and instantly running the fans at high speed leaves no room for misunderstanding. This is also something that companies making electric cars could address. When turning on a machine you should never be left wondering if it is actually on. Noise This was always a noisy system. When I upgraded the CPU from an 8 core with 85W typical TDP to an 18 core with 145W typical TDP it became even louder. Then over time as dust accumulated inside the machine it became louder still until it was annoyingly loud outside the room when all 18 cores were busy. Replacement I recently blogged about options for getting 8K video to work on Linux [3]. This requires PCIe power which the z640s have (all the ones I have seen have it I don t know if all that HP made have it) and which the cheaper models in the ML-110 line don t have. Since then I have ordered an Intel Arc card which apparently has 190W TDP. There are adaptors to provide PCIe power from SATA or SAS power which I could have used, but having a E5-2696 v3 CPU that draws 145W [4] and a GPU that draws 190W [4] in a system with a 350W PSU doesn t seem viable. I replaced it with one of the HP z640 workstations I got in 2023 [5]. The current configuration of the z640 has 3*32G RDIMMs compared to the ML110 having 8*32G, going from 256G to 96G is a significant decrease but most tasks run well enough like that. A limitation of the z640 is that when run with a single CPU it only has 4 DIMM slots which gives a maximum of 512G if you get 128G LRDIMMs, but as all DDR4 DIMMs larger than 32G are unreasonably expensive at this time the practical limit is 128G (which costs about $120AU). In this case I have 96G because the system I m using has a motherboard problem which makes the fourth DIMM slot unusable. Currently my desire to get more than 96G of RAM is less than my desire to avoid swapping CPUs. At this time I m not certain that I will make my main workstation the one that talks to an 8K display. But I really want to keep my options open and there are other benefits. The z640 boots faster. It supports PCIe bifurcation (with a recent BIOS) so I now have 4 NVMe devices in a single PCIe slot. It is very quiet, the difference is shocking. I initially found it disconcertingly quiet. The biggest problem with the z640 is having only 4 DIMM sockets and the particular one I m using has a problem limiting it to 3. Another problem with the z640 when compared to the ML110 Gen9 is that it runs the RAM at 2133 while the ML110 runs it at 2400, that s a significant performance reduction. But the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. Conclusion I have no regrets about buying the ML-110. It was the only DDR4 ECC system that was in the price range I wanted at the time. If I knew that the z640 systems would run so quietly then I might have replaced it earlier. But it was only late last year that 32G DIMMs became affordable, before then I had 8*16G DIMMs to give 128G because I had some issues of programs running out of memory when I had less.

4 April 2025

Gunnar Wolf: Naming things revisited

How long has it been since you last saw a conversation over different blogs syndicated at the same planet? Well, it s one of the good memories of the early 2010s. And there is an opportunity to re-engage! I came across Evgeni s post naming things is hard in Planet Debian. So, what names have I given my computers? I have had many since the mid-1990s I also had several during the decade before that, but before Linux, my computers didn t hve a formal name. Naming my computers something nice Linux gave me. I have forgotten many. Some of the names I have used:

Guido G nther: Booting an Android custom kernel on a Pixel 3a for QMI debugging

As you might know I'm not much of an Android user (let alone developer) but in order to figure out how something low level works you sometimes need to peek at how vendor kernels handles this. For that it is often useful to add additional debugging. One such case is QMI communication going on in Qualcomm SOCs. Joel Selvaraj wrote some nice tooling for this. To make use of this a rooted device and a small kernel patch is needed and what would be a no-brainer with Linux Mobile took me a moment to get it to work on Android. Here's the steps I took on a Pixel 3a to first root the device via Magisk, then build the patched kernel and put that into a boot.img to boot it. Flashing the factory image If you still have Android on the device you can skip this step. You can get Android 12 from developers.google.com. I've downloaded sargo-sp2a.220505.008-factory-071e368a.zip. Then put the device into Fastboot mode (Power + Vol-Down), connect it to your PC via USB, unzip/unpack the archive and reflash the phone:
unpack sargo-sp2a.220505.008-factory-071e368a.zip
./flash-all.sh
This wipes your device! I had to run it twice since it would time out on the first run. Note that this unpacked zip contains another zip (image-sargo-sp2a.220505.008.zip) which will become useful below. Enabling USB debugging Now boot Android and enable Developer mode by going to Settings About then touching Build Number (at the very bottom) 7 times. Go back one level, then go to System Developer Options and enable "USB Debugging". Obtaining boot.img There are several ways to get boot.img. If you just flashed Android above then you can fetch boot.img from the already mentioned image-sargo-sp2a.220505.008.zip:
unzip image-sargo-sp2a.220505.008.zip boot.img
If you want to fetch the exact boot.img from your device you can use TWRP (see the very end of this post). Becoming root with Magisk Being able to su via adb will later be useful to fetch kernel logs. For that we first download Magisk as APK. At the time of writing v28.1 is current. Once downloaded we upload the APK and the boot.img from the previous step onto the phone (which needs to have Android booted):
adb push Magisk-v28.1.apk /sdcard/Download
adb push boot.img /sdcard/Download
In Android open the Files app, navigate to /sdcard/Download and install the Magisk APK by opening the APK. We now want to patch boot.img to get su via adb to work (so we can run dmesg). This happens by hitting Install in the Magisk app, then "Select a file to patch". You then select the boot.img we just uploaded. The installation process will create a magisk_patched-<random>.img in /sdcard/Download. We can pull that file via adb back to our PC:
adb pull /sdcard/Download/magisk_patched-28100_3ucVs.img
Then reboot the phone into fastboot (adb reboot bootloader) and flash it (this is optional see below):
fastboot flash boot magisk_patched-28100_3ucVs.img
Now boot the phone again, open the Magisk app, go to SuperUser at the bottom and enable Shell. If you now connect to your phone via adb again and now su should work:
adb shell
su
As noted above if you want to keep your Android installation pristine you don't even need to flash this Magisk enabled boot.img. I've flashed it so I have su access for other operations too. If you don't want to flash it you can still test boot it via:
fastboot boot magisk_patched-28100_3ucVs.img
and then perform the same adb shell su check as above. Building the custom kernel For our QMI debugging to work we need to patch the kernel a bit and place that in boot.img too. So let's build the kernel first. For that we install the necessary tools (which are thankfully packaged in Debian) and fetch the Android kernel sources:
sudo apt install repo android-platform-tools-base kmod ccache build-essential mkbootimg
mkdir aosp-kernel && cd aosp-kernel
repo init -u https://android.googlesource.com/kernel/manifest -b android-msm-bonito-4.9-android12L
repo sync
With that we can apply Joel's kernel patches and also compile in the touch controller driver so we don't need to worry if the modules in the initramfs match the kernel. The kernel sources are in private/msm-google. I've just applied the diffs on top with patch and modified the defconfig and committed the changes. The resulting tree is here. We then build the kernel:
PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH ./build_bonito.sh
The resulting kernel is at ./out/android-msm-pixel-4.9/private/msm-google/arch/arm64/boot/Image.lz4-dtb. In order to boot that kernel I found it to be the simplest to just replace the kernel in the Magisk patched boot.img as we have that already. In case you have already deleted that for any reason we can always fetch the current boot.img from the phone via TWRP (see below). Preparing a new boot.img To replace the kernel in our Magisk enabled magisk_patched-28100_3ucVs.img from above with the just built kernel we can use mkbootimgfor that. I basically copied the steps we're using when building the boot.img on the Linux Mobile side:
ARGS=$(unpack_bootimg --format mkbootimg --out tmp --boot_img magisk_patched-28100_3ucVs.img)
CLEAN_PARAMS="$(echo "$ ARGS "   sed -e "s/ --cmdline '.*'//" -e "s/ --board '.*'//")"
cp android-kernel/out/android-msm-pixel-4.9/private/msm-google/arch/arm64/boot/Image.lz4-dtb tmp/kernel
mkbootimg -o "boot.patched.img" $ CLEAN_PARAMS  --cmdline "$ ARGS "
This will give you a boot.patched.img with the just built kernel. Boot the new kernel via fastboot We can now boot the new boot.patched.img. No need to flash that onto the device for that:
fastboot boot boot.patched.img
Fetching the kernel logs With that we can fetch the kernel logs with the debug output via adb:
adb shell su -c 'dmesg -t' > dmesg_dump.xml
or already filtering out the QMI commands:
adb shell su -c 'dmesg -t'    grep "@QMI@"   sed -e "s/@QMI@//g" &> sargo_qmi_dump.xml
That's it. You can apply this method for testing out other kernel patches as well. If you want to apply the above to other devices you basically need to make sure you patch the right kernel sources, the other steps should be very similar. In case you just need a rooted boot.img for sargo you can find a patched one here. If this procedure can be improved / streamlined somehow please let me know. Appendix: Fetching boot.img from the phone If, for some reason you lost boot.img somewhere on the way you can always use TWRP to fetch the boot.img currently in use on your phone. First get TWRP for the Pixel 3a. You can boot that directly by putting your device into fastboot mode, then running:
fastboot boot twrp-3.7.1_12-1-sargo.img
Within TWRP select Backup Boot and backup the file. You can then use adb shell to locate the backup in /sdcard/TWRP/BACKUPS/ and pull it:
adb pull /sdcard/TWRP/BACKUPS/97GAY10PWS/2025-04-02--09-24-24_SP2A220505008/boot.emmc.win
You now have the device's boot.img on your PC and can e.g. replace the kernel or make modifications to the initramfs.

Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues: To boldly build what no one has built before

Last week, we (Helmut, Jochen, Holger, Gioele and josch) met in W rzburg for a Debian crossbuilding & bootstrap sprint. We would like to thank Angest pselt e. V. for generously providing us with their hacker space which we were able to use exclusively during the four-day-sprint. We d further like to thank Debian for their sponsorship of accommodation of Helmut and Jochen. The most important topics that we worked on together were: Our TODO items for after the sprint are: In addition to what was already listed above, people worked on the following tasks specifically: Thank you all for attending this sprint, for making it so productive and for the amazing atmosphere and enlightening discussions!

Evgeni Golov: naming things is hard

I got a new laptop (a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 12, more on that later) and as always with new pets, it needed a name. My naming scheme is roughly "short japanese words that somehow relate to the machine". The current (other) machines at home are (not all really in use): Then, I happen to rent a few servers: I also had machines in the past, that are no longer with me: And also servers from the past: So, what shall I call the new one? It will be "juuni" ( ), which means 12. Creative, huh?

3 April 2025

Gregor Herrmann: Debian MountainCamp, Innsbruck, 16 18 May 2025

the days are getting warmer (in the northern hemisphere), debian is getting colder, & quite a few debian events are taking place. in innsbruck, we are organizing MountainCamp, an event in the tradition of SunCamp & SnowCamp: no schedule, no talks, meet other debian people, fix bugs, come up with crazy ideas, have fun, develop things. interested? head over to the information & signup page on the debian wiki.

Junichi Uekawa: I was hoping to go to debconf but the frequent travel is painful for me right now that I probably won't make it.

I was hoping to go to debconf but the frequent travel is painful for me right now that I probably won't make it.

2 April 2025

Dirk Eddelbuettel: nanotime 0.3.12 on CRAN: Maintenance

Another minor update 0.3.12 for our nanotime package is now on CRAN. nanotime relies on the RcppCCTZ package (as well as the RcppDate package for additional C++ operations) and offers efficient high(er) resolution time parsing and formatting up to nanosecond resolution, using the bit64 package for the actual integer64 arithmetic. Initially implemented using the S3 system, it has benefitted greatly from a rigorous refactoring by Leonardo who not only rejigged nanotime internals in S4 but also added new S4 types for periods, intervals and durations. This release responds to recent CRAN nag of also suggesting packages used in demos, makes a small update to the CI script, and improves one version comparison for conditional code. The NEWS snippet below has the fuller details.

Changes in version 0.3.12 (2025-04-02)
  • Update continuous integration to use r-ci action with bootstrap
  • Add ggplot2 to Suggests due to use in demo/ which is now scanned
  • Refine a version comparison for R 4.5.0 to be greater or equal

Thanks to my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report for this release. More details and examples are at the nanotime page; code, issue tickets etc at the GitHub repository and all documentation is provided at the nanotime documentation site.

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 now sponsor me at GitHub.

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities March 2025

Changes

Issues

Sponsors The SWH work was sponsored. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

1 April 2025

Colin Watson: Free software activity in March 2025

Most of my Debian contributions this month were sponsored by Freexian. You can also support my work directly via Liberapay. OpenSSH Changes in dropbear 2025.87 broke OpenSSH s regression tests. I cherry-picked the fix. I reviewed and merged patches from Luca Boccassi to send and accept the COLORTERM and NO_COLOR environment variables. Python team Following up on last month, I fixed some more uscan errors: I upgraded these packages to new upstream versions: In bookworm-backports, I updated python-django to 3:4.2.19-1. Although Debian s upgrade to python-click 8.2.0 was reverted for the time being, I fixed a number of related problems anyway since we re going to have to deal with it eventually: dh-python dropped its dependency on python3-setuptools in 6.20250306, which was long overdue, but it had quite a bit of fallout; in most cases this was simply a question of adding build-dependencies on python3-setuptools, but in a few cases there was a missing build-dependency on python3-typing-extensions which had previously been pulled in as a dependency of python3-setuptools. I fixed these bugs resulting from this: We agreed to remove python-pytest-flake8. In support of this, I removed unnecessary build-dependencies from pytest-pylint, python-proton-core, python-pyzipper, python-tatsu, python-tatsu-lts, and python-tinycss, and filed #1101178 on eccodes-python and #1101179 on rpmlint. There was a dnspython autopkgtest regression on s390x. I independently tracked that down to a pylsqpack bug and came up with a reduced test case before realizing that Pranav P had already been working on it; we then worked together on it and I uploaded their patch to Debian. I fixed various other build/test failures: I enabled more tests in python-moto and contributed a supporting fix upstream. I sponsored Maximilian Engelhardt to reintroduce zope.sqlalchemy. I fixed various odds and ends of bugs: I contributed a small documentation improvement to pybuild-autopkgtest(1). Rust team I upgraded rust-asn1 to 0.20.0. Science team I finally gave in and joined the Debian Science Team this month, since it often has a lot of overlap with the Python team, and Freexian maintains several packages under it. I fixed a uscan error in hdf5-blosc (maintained by Freexian), and upgraded it to a new upstream version. I fixed python-vispy: missing dependency on numpy abi. Other bits and pieces I fixed debconf should automatically be noninteractive if input is /dev/null. I fixed a build failure with GCC 15 in yubihsm-shell (maintained by Freexian). Prompted by a CI failure in debusine, I submitted a large batch of spelling fixes and some improved static analysis to incus (#1777, #1778) and distrobuilder. After regaining access to the repository, I fixed telegnome: missing app icon in About dialogue and made a new 0.3.7 release.

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