Search Results: "ianw"

9 September 2023

Bits from Debian: DebianDay Celebrations and comments

Debian Celebrates 30 years! We celebrated our birthday this year and we had a great time with new friends, new members welcomed to the community, and the world. We have collected a few comments, videos, and discussions from around the Internet, and some images from some of the DebianDay2023 events. We hope that you enjoyed the day(s) as much as we did! Maqsuel Maqson

"Debian 30 years of collective intelligence" -Maqsuel Maqson Brazil Thiago Pezzo

Pouso Alegre, Brazil Daniel Pimentel

Macei , Brazil Daniel Lenharo

Curitiba, Brazil Daniel Lenharo

The cake is there. :) phls Honorary Debian Developers: Buzz, Jessie, and Woody welcome guests to this amazing party. Carlos Melara Sao Carlos, state of Sao Paulo, Brazil Carlos Melara Stickers, and Fliers, and Laptops, oh my! phls Belo Horizonte, Brazil sergiosacj Bras lia, Brazil sergiosacj Bras lia, Brazil Mexico Jathan 30 a os! Jathan A quick Selfie Jathan We do not encourage beverages on computing hardware, but this one is okay by us. Germany h01ger

30 years of love h01ger

The German Delegation is also looking for this dog who footed the bill for the party, then left mysteriously. h01ger

We took the party outside Stefano Rivera

We brought the party back inside at CCCamp Belgium Stefano Rivera

Cake and Diversity in Belgium El Salvador Gato Barato Canel n Pulgosky

Food and Fellowship in El Salvador South Africa highvoltage

Debian is also very delicious! highvoltage

All smiles waiting to eat the cake Reports Debian Day 30 years in Macei - Brazil Debian Day 30 years in S o Carlos - Brazil Debian Day 30 years in Pouso Alegre - Brazil Debian Day 30 years in Belo Horizonte - Brazil Debian Day 30 years in Curitiba - Brazil Debian Day 30 years in Bras lia - Brazil Debian Day 30 years online in Brazil Articles & Blogs Happy Debian Day - going 30 years strong - Liam Dawe Debian Turns 30 Years Old, Happy Birthday! - Marius Nestor 30 Years of Stability, Security, and Freedom: Celebrating Debian s Birthday - Bobby Borisov Happy 30th Birthday, Debian! - Claudio Kuenzier Debian is 30 and Sgt Pepper Is at Least Ninetysomething - Christine Hall Debian turns 30! -Corbet Thirty years of Debian! - Lennart Hengstmengel Debian marks three decades as 'Universal Operating System' - Sam Varghese Debian Linux Celebrates 30 Years Milestone - Joshua James 30 years on, Debian is at the heart of the world's most successful Linux distros - Liam Proven Looking Back on 30 Years of Debian - Maya Posch Cheers to 30 Years of Debian: A Journey of Open Source Excellence - arindam Discussions and Social Media Debian Celebrates 30 Years - Source: News YCombinator Brand-new Linux release, which I'm calling the Debian ... Source: News YCombinator Comment: Congrats @debian !!! Happy Birthday! Thank you for becoming a cornerstone of the #opensource world. Here's to decades of collaboration, stability & #software #freedom -openSUSELinux via X (formerly Twitter) Comment: Today we #celebrate the 30th birthday of #Debian, one of the largest and most important cornerstones of the #opensourcecommunity. For this we would like to thank you very much and wish you the best for the next 30 years! Source: X (Formerly Twitter -TUXEDOComputers via X (formerly Twitter) Happy Debian Day! - Source: Reddit.com Video The History of Debian The Beginning - Source: Linux User Space Debian Celebrates 30 years -Source: Lobste.rs Video Debian At 30 and No More Distro Hopping! - LWDW388 - Source: LinuxGameCast Debian Celebrates 30 years! - Source: Debian User Forums Debian Celebrates 30 years! - Source: Linux.org

31 July 2023

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities July 2023

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

Issues

Debugging

Review

Administration
  • Debian IRC: rescue empty Debian IRC channel
  • Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication
  • Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The libpst, nmap, sptag, pytest-rerunfailures work was sponsored. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

2 December 2022

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities November 2022

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration
  • Debian IRC: setup topic/entrymsg to redirect OFTC #debian-jp to the Debian Japan IRC server, cleaned up #debianppc ChanServ metadata
  • Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve domains, approve accounts

Communication

Sponsors The libemail-outlook-message-perl, purple-discord, sptag, celery work was sponsored. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

1 November 2022

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities October 2022

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration
  • Debian BTS: unarchive/reopen/triage bugs for reintroduced packages nautilus-image-converter, swift-im, runit-services
  • Debian IRC: removed 2 spammers from OFTC, disable anti-spam channel modes for some channels
  • Debian servers: restart processes due to OOM
  • Debian wiki: approve accounts

Communication
  • Initiate discussion about the apt hook protocol
  • Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors All work was done on a volunteer basis.

1 June 2021

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities May 2021

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration
  • Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication
  • Joined the great IRC migration
  • Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The purple-discord, sptag and esprima-python work was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

31 January 2021

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities January 2021

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration
  • Debian ports: fix header on incoming.ports.d.o/buildd
  • Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication
  • Initiate discussions about aptly, Linux USB gadgets maintenance
  • Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC
  • Invite organisations to post on FOSSjobs

Sponsors The samba work, apt-listchanges work, pytest-rerunfailures upload, python-testfixtures/python-scrapy bugs and python-scrapy related backports were sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

1 May 2020

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities April 2020

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration
  • myrepos: fix the forum
  • Debian: restart non-responsive tor daemon, restart processes due to OOM, apply debian.net changes for DD with expired key
  • Debian wiki: approve accounts
  • Debian QA services: deploy changes, auto-disable oldoldstable pockets

Communication

Sponsors The purple-discord work was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

31 October 2017

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities October 2017

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration
  • Debian: respond to mail debug request, redirect hardware access seeker to guest account, redirect hardware donors to porters, redirect interview seeker to DPL, reboot system with dead service
  • Debian mentors: security updates, reboot
  • Debian wiki: upgrade search db format, remove incorrect bans, whitelist email addresses, disable accounts with bouncing email, update email for accounts with bouncing email
  • Debian website: remove need for a website rebuild
  • Openmoko: restart web server, set web server process limits, install monitoring tool

Sponsors The talloc/cmocka uploads and the remmina issue were sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

19 May 2017

Michael Prokop: Debian stretch: changes in util-linux #newinstretch

We re coming closer to the Debian/stretch stable release and similar to what we had with #newinwheezy and #newinjessie it s time for #newinstretch! Hideki Yamane already started the game by blogging about GitHub s Icon font, fonts-octicons and Arturo Borrero Gonzalez wrote a nice article about nftables in Debian/stretch. One package that isn t new but its tools are used by many of us is util-linux, providing many essential system utilities. We have util-linux v2.25.2 in Debian/jessie and in Debian/stretch there will be util-linux >=v2.29.2. There are many new options available and we also have a few new tools available. Tools that have been taken over from other packages New tools New features/options addpart (show or change the real-time scheduling attributes of a process):
--reload reload prompts on running agetty instances
blkdiscard (discard the content of sectors on a device):
-p, --step <num>    size of the discard iterations within the offset
-z, --zeroout       zero-fill rather than discard
chrt (show or change the real-time scheduling attributes of a process):
-d, --deadline            set policy to SCHED_DEADLINE
-T, --sched-runtime <ns>  runtime parameter for DEADLINE
-P, --sched-period <ns>   period parameter for DEADLINE
-D, --sched-deadline <ns> deadline parameter for DEADLINE
fdformat (do a low-level formatting of a floppy disk):
-f, --from <N>    start at the track N (default 0)
-t, --to <N>      stop at the track N
-r, --repair <N>  try to repair tracks failed during the verification (max N retries)
fdisk (display or manipulate a disk partition table):
-B, --protect-boot            don't erase bootbits when creating a new label
-o, --output <list>           output columns
    --bytes                   print SIZE in bytes rather than in human readable format
-w, --wipe <mode>             wipe signatures (auto, always or never)
-W, --wipe-partitions <mode>  wipe signatures from new partitions (auto, always or never)
New available columns (for -o):
 gpt: Device Start End Sectors Size Type Type-UUID Attrs Name UUID
 dos: Device Start End Sectors Cylinders Size Type Id Attrs Boot End-C/H/S Start-C/H/S
 bsd: Slice Start End Sectors Cylinders Size Type Bsize Cpg Fsize
 sgi: Device Start End Sectors Cylinders Size Type Id Attrs
 sun: Device Start End Sectors Cylinders Size Type Id Flags
findmnt (find a (mounted) filesystem):
-J, --json             use JSON output format
-M, --mountpoint <dir> the mountpoint directory
-x, --verify           verify mount table content (default is fstab)
    --verbose          print more details
flock (manage file locks from shell scripts):
-F, --no-fork            execute command without forking
    --verbose            increase verbosity
getty (open a terminal and set its mode):
--reload               reload prompts on running agetty instances
hwclock (query or set the hardware clock):
--get            read hardware clock and print drift corrected result
--update-drift   update drift factor in /etc/adjtime (requires --set or --systohc)
ldattach (attach a line discipline to a serial line):
-c, --intro-command <string>  intro sent before ldattach
-p, --pause <seconds>         pause between intro and ldattach
logger (enter messages into the system log):
-e, --skip-empty         do not log empty lines when processing files
    --no-act             do everything except the write the log
    --octet-count        use rfc6587 octet counting
-S, --size <size>        maximum size for a single message
    --rfc3164            use the obsolete BSD syslog protocol
    --rfc5424[=<snip>]   use the syslog protocol (the default for remote);
                           <snip> can be notime, or notq, and/or nohost
    --sd-id <id>         rfc5424 structured data ID
    --sd-param <data>    rfc5424 structured data name=value
    --msgid <msgid>      set rfc5424 message id field
    --socket-errors[=<on off auto>] print connection errors when using Unix sockets
losetup (set up and control loop devices):
-L, --nooverlap               avoid possible conflict between devices
    --direct-io[=<on off>]    open backing file with O_DIRECT 
-J, --json                    use JSON --list output format
New available --list column:
DIO  access backing file with direct-io
lsblk (list information about block devices):
-J, --json           use JSON output format
New available columns (for --output):
HOTPLUG  removable or hotplug device (usb, pcmcia, ...)
SUBSYSTEMS  de-duplicated chain of subsystems
lscpu (display information about the CPU architecture):
-y, --physical          print physical instead of logical IDs
New available column:
DRAWER  logical drawer number
lslocks (list local system locks):
-J, --json             use JSON output format
-i, --noinaccessible   ignore locks without read permissions
nsenter (run a program with namespaces of other processes):
-C, --cgroup[=<file>]      enter cgroup namespace
    --preserve-credentials do not touch uids or gids
-Z, --follow-context       set SELinux context according to --target PID
rtcwake (enter a system sleep state until a specified wakeup time):
--date <timestamp>   date time of timestamp to wake
--list-modes         list available modes
-r, --reorder <dev>  fix partitions order (by start offset)
sfdisk (display or manipulate a disk partition table):
New Commands:
-J, --json <dev>                  dump partition table in JSON format
-F, --list-free [<dev> ...]       list unpartitioned free areas of each device
-r, --reorder <dev>               fix partitions order (by start offset)
    --delete <dev> [<part> ...]   delete all or specified partitions
--part-label <dev> <part> [<str>] print or change partition label
--part-type <dev> <part> [<type>] print or change partition type
--part-uuid <dev> <part> [<uuid>] print or change partition uuid
--part-attrs <dev> <part> [<str>] print or change partition attributes
New Options:
-a, --append                   append partitions to existing partition table
-b, --backup                   backup partition table sectors (see -O)
    --bytes                    print SIZE in bytes rather than in human readable format
    --move-data[=<typescript>] move partition data after relocation (requires -N)
    --color[=<when>]           colorize output (auto, always or never)
                               colors are enabled by default
-N, --partno <num>             specify partition number
-n, --no-act                   do everything except write to device
    --no-tell-kernel           do not tell kernel about changes
-O, --backup-file <path>       override default backup file name
-o, --output <list>            output columns
-w, --wipe <mode>              wipe signatures (auto, always or never)
-W, --wipe-partitions <mode>   wipe signatures from new partitions (auto, always or never)
-X, --label <name>             specify label type (dos, gpt, ...)
-Y, --label-nested <name>      specify nested label type (dos, bsd)
Available columns (for -o):
 gpt: Device Start End Sectors Size Type Type-UUID Attrs Name UUID
 dos: Device Start End Sectors Cylinders Size Type Id Attrs Boot End-C/H/S Start-C/H/S
 bsd: Slice Start  End Sectors Cylinders Size Type Bsize Cpg Fsize
 sgi: Device Start End Sectors Cylinders Size Type Id Attrs
 sun: Device Start End Sectors Cylinders Size Type Id Flags
swapon (enable devices and files for paging and swapping):
-o, --options <list>     comma-separated list of swap options
New available columns (for --show):
UUID   swap uuid
LABEL  swap label
unshare (run a program with some namespaces unshared from the parent):
-C, --cgroup[=<file>]                              unshare cgroup namespace
    --propagation slave shared private unchanged   modify mount propagation in mount namespace
-s, --setgroups allow deny                         control the setgroups syscall in user namespaces
Deprecated / removed options sfdisk (display or manipulate a disk partition table):
-c, --id                  change or print partition Id
    --change-id           change Id
    --print-id            print Id
-C, --cylinders <number>  set the number of cylinders to use
-H, --heads <number>      set the number of heads to use
-S, --sectors <number>    set the number of sectors to use
-G, --show-pt-geometry    deprecated, alias to --show-geometry
-L, --Linux               deprecated, only for backward compatibility
-u, --unit S              deprecated, only sector unit is supported

30 April 2017

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities April 2017

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration
  • Debian systems: quiet a logrotate warning, investigate issue with DNSSEC and alioth, deploy fix on our first stretch buildd, restore alioth git repo after history rewrite, investigate iptables segfaults on buildd and investigate time issues on a NAS
  • Debian derivatives census: delete patches over 5 MiB, re-enable the service
  • Debian wiki: investigate some 403 errors, fix alioth KGB config, deploy theme changes, close a bogus bug report, ping 1 user with bouncing email, whitelist 9 email addresses and whitelist 2 domains
  • Debian QA: deploy my changes
  • Debian mentors: security upgrades and service restarts
  • Openmoko: debug mailing list issue, security upgrades and reboots

Communication
  • Invite Wazo to the Debian derivatives census
  • Welcome ubilinux, Wazo and Roopa Prabhu (of Cumulus Linux) to the Debian derivatives census
  • Discuss HP/ProLiant wiki page with HPE folks
  • Inform git history rewriter about the git mailmap feature

Sponsors The libconfig-crontab-perl backports and pyvmomi issue were sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

2 February 2017

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities January 2017

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration
  • Debian: reboot 1 non-responsive VM, redirect 2 users to support channels, redirect 1 contributor to xkb upstream, redirect 1 potential contributor, redirect 1 bug reporter to mirror team, ping 7 folks about restarting processes with upgraded libs, manually restart the sectracker process due to upgraded libs, restart the package tracker process due to upgraded libs, investigate failures connecting to the XMPP service, investigate /dev/shm issue on abel.d.o, clean up after rename of the fedmsg group.
  • Debian mentors: lintian/security updates & reboot
  • Debian packages: deploy 2 contributions to the live server
  • Debian wiki: unblacklist 1 IP address, whitelist 10 email addresses, disable 18 accounts with bouncing email, update email for 2 accounts with bouncing email, reported 1 Debian member as MIA, redirect 1 user to support channels, add 4 domains to the whitelist.
  • Reproducible builds: rescheduled Debian pyxplot:amd64/unstable for themill.
  • Openmoko: security updates & reboots.

Debian derivatives
  • Send the annual activity ping mail.
  • Happy new year messages on IRC, forward to the list.
  • Note that SerbianLinux does not provide source packages.
  • Expand URL shortener on SerbianLinux page.
  • Invite PelicanHPC, Netrunner, DietPi, Hamara Linux (on IRC), BitKey to the census.
  • Add research publications link to the census template
  • Fix Symbiosis sources.list
  • Enquired about SalentOS downtime
  • Fixed and removed some 404 BlankOn links (blog, English homepage)
  • Fixed changes to AstraLinux sources.list
  • Welcome Netrunner to the census

Sponsors I renewed my support of Software Freedom Conservancy. The openchange 1:2.2-6+deb8u1 upload was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

9 October 2016

Hideki Yamane: Simplest debian/watch file GNOME packages

Simplest (two lines) debian/watch file GNOME-related packages, you can just copy&paste it.
version=4
http://download.gnome.org/sources/@PACKAGE@/([\d\.]+[02468])/@PACKAGE@-@ANY_VERSION@@ARCHIVE_EXT@

31 March 2016

Antoine Beaupr : My free software activities, march 2016

Debian Long Term Support (LTS) This is my 4th month working on Debian LTS, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. I spent half of the month away on a vacation so little work was done, especially since I tried to tackle rather large uploads like NSS and Xen. I also worked on the frontdesk shift last week.

Frontdesk That work mainly consisted of figuring out how to best help the security team with the last uploads to the Wheezy release. For those who don't know, Debian 7 Wheezy, or "oldstable", is going to be unsupported by the security team starting end of april, and the Debian 6 Squeeze (the previous LTS) is now unsupported. The PGP signatures on the archived release have started yielding expiration errors which can be ignored but that are really a strong reminder that it is really time to upgrade. So the LTS team is now working towards backporting a few security issues from squeeze to wheezy, and this is what I focused on during triage work. I have identified the following high priority packages I will work on after I complete my work on the Xen and NSS packages (detailed below):
  • libidn
  • icu
  • phpmyadmin
  • tomcat6
  • optipng
  • srtp
  • dhcpcd
  • python-tornado

Updates to NSS and Xen I have spent a lot of time testing and building packages for NSS and Xen. To be fair, Brian May did most of the work on the Xen packages, and I merely did some work to test the packages on Koumbit's infrastructure, something which I will continue doing in the next month. For NSS, wheezy and jessie are in this weird state where patches were provided to the security team all the way back in November yet were never tested. Since then, yet more issues came up and I worked hard to review and port patches for those new security issues to wheezy. I'll followup on both packages in the following month.

Other free software work

Android TL;DR: there's an even longer version of this with the step-by-step procedures and that I will update as time goes on in my wiki. I somehow inherited an Android phone recently, on a loan from a friend because the phone broke one too many times and she got a new one from her provider. This phone is a HTC One S "Ville", which is fairly old, but good enough to play with and give me a mobile computing platform to listen to podcasts, play music, access maps and create GPS traces. I was previously doing this with my N900, but that device is really showing its age: very little development is happening on it, the SDK is closed source and the device itself is fairly big, compared to the "Ville". Plus, the SIM card actually works on the Ville so, even though I do not have an actual contract with a cell phone provider (too expensive, too invasive on my privacy), I can still make emergency phone calls (911)! Plus, since there is good wifi on the machine, I can use it to connect to the phone system with the built-in SIP client, send text messages through SMS (thanks to VoIP.ms SMS support) or Jabber. I have also played around with LibreSignal, the free software replacement for Signal, which uses proprietary google services. Yes, the VoIP.ms SMS app also uses GCM, but hopefully that can be fixed. (While I was writing this, another Debian Developer wrote a good review of Signal so I am happy to skip that step. Go read that.)
See also my apps list for a more complete list of the apps I have installed on the phone. I welcome recommendations on cool free software apps I should use!
I have replaced the stock firmware on the phone with Cyanogenmod 12.1, which was a fairly painful experience, partly because of the difficult ambiance on the #cyanogenmod channel on Freenode, where I had extreme experiences: a brave soul helped me through the first flashing process for around 2 hours, nicely holding my hand at every step. Other times, I have seen flames and obtuse comments from people being vulgar, brutal, obnoxious, if not sometimes downright homophobic and sexist from other users. It is clearly a community that needs to fix their attitude. I have documented everything I could in details in this wiki page, in case others want to resuscitate their old phones, but also because I ended up reinstalling the freaking phone about 4 times, and was getting tired of forgetting how to do it every time. I am somewhat fascinated by Android: here is the Linux-based device that should save us all from the proprietary Apple nightmares of fenced in gardens and censorship. Yet, public Android downloads are hidden behind license agreements, even though the code itself is free, which has led fellow Debian developers to work on making libre rebuilds of Androids to workaround this insanity. But worse: all phones are basically proprietary devices down to the core. You need custom firmware to be loaded on the machine for it to boot at all, from the bootloader all the way down to the GSM baseband and Wifi drivers. It is a minefield of closed source software, and trying to run free software on there is a bit of a delusion, especially since the baseband has so much power over the phone. Still, I think it is really interesting to run free software on those machines, and help people that are stuck with cell phones get familiar with software freedom. It seems especially important to me to make Android developers aware of software freedom considering how many apps are available for free yet on which it is not possible to contribute significantly because the source code is not published at all, or published only on the Google Store, instead of the more open and public F-Droid repository which publishes only free software. So I did contribute. This month, I am happy to announce that I contributed to the following free software projects on Android: I have also reviewed the literature surrounding Telegram, a popular messaging app rival to Signal and Whatsapp. Oddly enough, my contributions to Wikipedia on that subject were promptly reverted which made me bring up the subject on the page's Talk page. This lead to an interesting response from the article's main editors which at least added that the "its security features have been contested by security researchers and cryptography experts". Considering the history of Telegram, I would keep people away from it and direct people to use Signal instead, even though Signal has similar metadata issues, mostly because Telegram's lack of response to the security issues that were outlined by fellow security researchers. Both systems suffer from a lack of federation as well, which is a shame in this era of increasing centralization. I am not sure I will put much more work in developing for Android for now. It seems like a fairly hostile platform to work on, and unless I have specific pain points I want to fix, it feels so much better to work on my own stuff in Debian. Which brings me to my usual plethora of free software projects I got stuck in this month.

IRC projects irssi-plugin-otr had a bunch of idiotic bugs lying around, and I had a patch that I hadn't submitted upstream from the Debian package, which needed a rebuild because the irssi version changed, which is a major annoyance. The version in sid is now a snapshot because upstream needs to make a new release but at least it should fix things for my friends running unstable and testing. Hopefully those silly uploads won't be necessary in the future. That's for the client side. On the server side, I have worked on updating the Atheme-services package to the latest version, which actually failed because the upstream libmowgli is missing release tags, which means the Debian package for it is not up-to-date either. Still, it is nice to have a somewhat newer version, even though it is not the latest and some bugs were fixed. I have also looked at making atheme reproducible but was surprised at the hostility of the upstream. In the end, it looks like they are still interested in patches, but they will be a little harder to deploy than for Charybdis, so this could take some time. Hopefully I will find time in the coming weeks to test the new atheme services daemon on the IRC network I operate.

Syncthing I have also re-discovered Syncthing, a file synchronization software. Amazingly, I was having trouble transferring a single file between two phones. I couldn't use Bluetooth (not sure why), the "Wifi sharing" app was available only on one phone (and is proprietary, and has a limit of 4MB files), and everything else requires an account, the cloud, or cabling. So. Just heading to f-droid, install syncthing, flash a few qr-codes around and voil : files are copied over! Pretty amazing: the files were actually copied over the local network, using IPv6 link-local addresses, encryption and the DHT. Which is a real geeky way of saying it's completely fast, secure and fast. Now, I found a few usability issues, so much that I wrote a whole usability story for the developers, which were really appreciative of my review. Some of the issues were already fixed, others were pretty minor. Syncthing has a great community, and it seems like a great project I encourage everyone to get familiar with.

Battery stats The battery-status project I mentionned previously has been merged with the battery-stats project (yes, the names are almost the same, which is confusing) and so I had to do some work to fix my Python graph script, which was accepted upstream and will be part of Debian officially from now on, which is cool. The previous package was unofficial. I have also noticed that my battery has a significantly than when I wrote the script. Whereas it was basically full back then, it seems now it has lost almost 15% of its capacity in about 6 months. According to the calculations of the script:
this battery will reach end of life (5%) in 935 days, 19:07:58.336480, on 2018-10-23 12:06:07.270290
Which is, to be fair, a good life: it will somewhat work for about three more years.

Playlist, git-annex and MPD in Python On top of my previously mentioned photos-import script, I have worked on two more small programs. One is called get-playlist and is an extension to git-annex to easily copy to the local git-annex repository all files present in a given M3U playlist. This is useful for me because my phone cannot possibly fit my whole MP3 collection, and I use playlists in GMPC to tag certain files, particularly the Favorites list which is populated by the "star" button in the UI. I had a lot of fun writing this script. I started using elpy as an IDE in Emacs. (Notice how Emacs got a new webpage, which is a huge improvement was had been basically unchanged since the original version, now almost 20 years old, and probably written by RMS himself.) I wonder how I managed to stay away from Elpy for so long, as it glues together key components of Emacs in an elegant and functional bundle:
  • Company: the "vim-like" completion mode i had been waiting for forever
  • Jedi: context-sensitive autocompletion for Python
  • Flymake: to outline style and syntax errors (unfortunately not the more modern Flycheck)
  • inline documentation...
In short, it's amazing and makes everything so much easier to work with that I wrote another script. The first program wouldn't work very well because some songs in the playlists had been moved, so I made another program, this time to repair playlists which refer to missing files. The script is simply called fix-playlists, and can operate transparently on multiple playlists. It has a bunch of heuristics to find files and uses a MPD server as a directory to search into. It can edit files in place or just act as a filter.

Useful snippets Writing so many scripts, so often, I figured I needed to stop wasting time always writing the same boilerplate stuff on top of every file, so I started publishing Yasnippet-compatible file snippets, in my snippets repository. For example, this report is based on the humble lts snippet. I also have a base license snippet which slaps the AGPLv3 license on top of a Python file. But the most interesting snippet, for me, is this simple script snippet which is a basic scaffolding for a commandline script that includes argument processing, logging and filtering of files, something which I was always copy-pasting around.

Other projects And finally, a list of interesting issues en vrac:
  • there's a new Bootstrap 4 theme for Ikiwiki. It was delivering content over CDNs, which is bad for privacy issues, so I filed an issue which was almost immediately fixed by the author!
  • I found out about BitHub, a tool to make payments with Bitcoins for patches submitted on OWS projects. It wasn't clear to me where to find the demo, but when I did, I quickly filed a PR to fix the documentation. Given the number of open PRs there and the lack of activity, I wonder if the model is working at all...
  • a fellow Debian Developer shared his photos workflow, which was interesting to me because I have my own peculiar script, which I never mentionned here, but which I ended up sharing with the author

30 March 2016

Ian Wienand: Durable photo workflow

Ever since my kids were born I have accumulated thousands of digital happy-snaps and I have finally gotten to a point where I'm quite happy with my work-flow. I have always been extremely dubious of using any sort of external all-in-one solution to managing my photos; so many things seem to shut-down, cease development or disappear, all leaving you to have to figure out how to migrate to the next latest thing (e.g. Picasa shutting down). So while there is nothing complicated or even generic about them, there are a few things in my photo-scripts repo that might help others who like to keep a self-contained archive. Firstly I have a simple script to copy the latest photos from the SD card (i.e. those new since the last copy -- this is obviously very camera specific). I then split by date so I have a simple flat directory layout with each week's photos in it. With the price of SD cards and my rate of filling them up, I don't even bother wiping them at this point, but just keep them in the safe as a backup. For some reason I have a bit of a thing about geotagging all the photos so I know where I took them. Certainly some cameras do this today, but mine does not. I have a two-progned approach; I have a geotag script and then a small website easygeotag.info which quickly lets met translate a point on Google maps to exiv2 command-line syntax. Since I take a lot of photos in the same place, the script can store points by name in a small file sourced by the script. Adding comments to the photos is done with perhaps the lesser-known cousin of EXIF -- IPTC. Some time ago I wrote python bindings for libiptcdata and it has been working just fine ever since. Debian's python-iptcdata comes with a inbuilt script to set title and caption, which is easily wrapped. What I like about this is that my photos are in a simple directory layout, with all metadata embedded within the actual image files in very standarised formats that should be readable by anywhere I choose to host them. For sharing, I then upload to Flickr. I used to have a command-line script for this, but have found the web uploader works even better these days. It reads the IPTC data for titles and comments, and gets the geotag info for nice map displays. I manually coralle them into albums, and the Flickr "guest pass" is perfect for then sharing albums to friends and family without making them jump through hoops to register on a site to get access to the photos, or worse, host them myself. I consider Flickr a cache, because (even though I pay) I expect it to shut-down or turn evil at any time. Interestingly, their AI tagging is often quite accurate, and I imagine will only get better. This is nice extra metadata that you don't have to spend time on yourself. The last piece has always been the "hit by a bus" component of all this. Can anyone figure out access to all these photos if I suddenly disappear? I've tried many things here -- at one point I was using rdiff-backup to sync encrypted bundles up to AWS for example; but I very clearly found the problem in that when I forgot the keep the key safe and couldn't unencrypt any of my backups (let alone anyone else figuring all this out). Finally Google Nearline seems to be just what I want. It's off-site, redundant and the price is right; but more importantly I can very easily give access to the backup bucket to anyone with a Google address, who can then just hit a website to download the originals from the bucket (I left the link with my other "hit by a bus" bits and pieces). Of course what they then do with this data is their problem, but at least I feel like they have a chance. This even has an rsync like interface in the client, so I can quickly upload the new stuff from my home NAS (where I keep the photos in a RAID0). I've been doing this now for 350 weeks and have worked through some 25,000 photos. I used to get an album up every week, but as the kids get older and we're closer to family I now do it in batches about once a month. I do wonder if my kids will ever be interested in tagged and commented photos with pretty much their exact location from their childhood ... I doubt it, but it's nice to feel like I have a good chance of still having them if they do.

24 April 2015

Michael Prokop: The #newinjessie game: new forensic packages in Debian/jessie

Repeating what I did for the last Debian release with the #newinwheezy game it s time for the #newinjessie game: Debian/jessie AKA Debian 8.0 includes a bunch of packages for people interested in digital forensics. The packages maintained within the Debian Forensics team which are new in the Debian/jessie stable release as compared to Debian/wheezy (and ignoring wheezy-backports): Join the #newinjessie game and present packages which are new in Debian/jessie.

26 March 2015

Zlatan Todori : Random bits

Gogs I installed today Gogs and configured it with mysql (yes, yes, I know - use postgres you punk!). I will not post details of how I did it because:
  • It still has "weird" coding as pointed already by others
  • It doesn't have fork and pull request ability yet
And there was end of journey. When they code in fork/PR , I will close my eyes on other coding stuff and try it again because Gitlab is not close to my heart and installing their binary takes ~850MB of space which means a lot of ruby code that could go wrong way. It would be really awesome to have in archive something to apt install and have github-like place. It would be great if Debian infrastructure would have the possibility to have that.

Diaspora* Although I am thrilled about it finally reaching Debian archive, it still isn't ready. Not even closely. I couldn't even finish installation of it and it's not suitable for main archive as it takes files from github repo of diaspora. Maybe poking around Bitnami folks about how they did it.

The power of Free software Text Secure is was an mobile app that I thought it could take on Viber or WhatsUp. Besides all its goodies it had chance to send encrypted SMS to other TS users. Not anymore. Fortunate, there is a fork called SMSSecure which still has that ability.

Trolls So there is this Allwinner company that does crap after crap. Their latest will reach wider audience and I hope it gets resolved in a matter how they would react if some big proprietary company was stealing their code. It seems Allwinner is a pseudo for Alllooser. Whoa, that was fun!

A year old experiment So I had a bet with a friend that I will run for a year Debian Unstable mixed with some packages from experimental and do some random testings on packages of interest to them. Also I promised to update aggressively so it was to be twice a day. This was my only machine so the bet was really good as it by theory could break very often. Well on behalf of Debian community, I can say that Debian hasn't had a single big breakage. Yay! The good side: on average I had ~3000 packages installed (they were in range from 2500-3500). I had for example xmonad, e17, gnome, cinnamon, xfce, systemd from experimental, kernels from experimental, nginx, apache, a lot of heavy packages, mixed packages from pip, npm, gems etc. So that makes it even more incredible that it stayed stable. There is no bigger kudos to people working on Debian, then when some sadist tries countless of ways to break it and Debian is just keeps running. I mean, I was doing my $PAID_WORK on this machine! The bad side: there were small breakages. It's seems that polkit and systemd-side of gnome were going through a lot of changes because sometimes system would ask password for every action (logout, suspend, poweroff, connect to network etc), audio would work and would not work, would often by itself just mute sound on every play or it would take it to 100% (which would blow my head when I had earplugs), bluetooth is almost de facto not working in gnome (my bluetooth mice worked without single problem in lenny, squeeze, in wheezy it maybe had once or twice a problem, but in this year long test it's almost useless). System would also have random hangs from time to time. The test: in the beginning my radeon card was too new and it was not supported by FLOSS driver so I ended up using fglrx which caused me a lot of annoyance (no brightness control, flickering of screen) but once FLOSS driver got support I was on it, and it performed more fluid (no glitches while moving windows). So as my friends knew that I have radeon and they want to play games on their machines (I play my Steam games on FLOSS driver) they set me the task to try fglrx driver every now end then. End result - there is no stable fglrx driver for almost a year, it breaks graphical interface so I didn't even log into DE with it for at least 8 months if not more. On the good side my expeditions in flgrx where quick - install it, boot into disaster, remove it, boot into freedom. Downside seems to be that removing fglrx driver, leaves a lot of its own crap on system (I may be mistaking but it seems I am not). Debian with love Well, that's all for today. I think so. You can never be sure.

Zlatan Todori : Random bits

Gogs I installed today Gogs and configured it with mysql (yes, yes, I know - use postgres you punk!). I will not post details of how I did it because:
  • It still has "weird" coding as pointed already by others
  • It doesn't have fork and pull request ability yet
And there was end of journey. When they code in fork/PR , I will close my eyes on other coding stuff and try it again because Gitlab is not close to my heart and installing their binary takes ~850MB of space which means a lot of ruby code that could go wrong way. It would be really awesome to have in archive something to apt install and have github-like place. It would be great if Debian infrastructure would have the possibility to have that.

Diaspora* Although I am thrilled about it finally reaching Debian archive, it still isn't ready. Not even closely. I couldn't even finish installation of it and it's not suitable for main archive as it takes files from github repo of diaspora. Maybe poking around Bitnami folks about how they did it.

The power of Free software Text Secure is was an mobile app that I thought it could take on Viber or WhatsUp. Besides all its goodies it had chance to send encrypted SMS to other TS users. Not anymore. Fortunate, there is a fork called SMSSecure which still has that ability.

Trolls So there is this Allwinner company that does crap after crap. Their latest will reach wider audience and I hope it gets resolved in a matter how they would react if some big proprietary company was stealing their code. It seems Allwinner is a pseudo for Alllooser. Whoa, that was fun!

A year old experiment So I had a bet with a friend that I will run for a year Debian Unstable mixed with some packages from experimental and do some random testings on packages of interest to them. Also I promised to update aggressively so it was to be twice a day. This was my only machine so the bet was really good as it by theory could break very often. Well on behalf of Debian community, I can say that Debian hasn't had a single big breakage. Yay! The good side: on average I had ~3000 packages installed (they were in range from 2500-3500). I had for example xmonad, e17, gnome, cinnamon, xfce, systemd from experimental, kernels from experimental, nginx, apache, a lot of heavy packages, mixed packages from pip, npm, gems etc. So that makes it even more incredible that it stayed stable. There is no bigger kudos to people working on Debian, then when some sadist tries countless of ways to break it and Debian is just keeps running. I mean, I was doing my $PAID_WORK on this machine! The bad side: there were small breakages. It's seems that polkit and systemd-side of gnome were going through a lot of changes because sometimes system would ask password for every action (logout, suspend, poweroff, connect to network etc), audio would work and would not work, would often by itself just mute sound on every play or it would take it to 100% (which would blow my head when I had earplugs), bluetooth is almost de facto not working in gnome (my bluetooth mice worked without single problem in lenny, squeeze, in wheezy it maybe had once or twice a problem, but in this year long test it's almost useless). System would also have random hangs from time to time. The test: in the beginning my radeon card was too new and it was not supported by FLOSS driver so I ended up using fglrx which caused me a lot of annoyance (no brightness control, flickering of screen) but once FLOSS driver got support I was on it, and it performed more fluid (no glitches while moving windows). So as my friends knew that I have radeon and they want to play games on their machines (I play my Steam games on FLOSS driver) they set me the task to try fglrx driver every now end then. End result - there is no stable fglrx driver for almost a year, it breaks graphical interface so I didn't even log into DE with it for at least 8 months if not more. On the good side my expeditions in flgrx where quick - install it, boot into disaster, remove it, boot into freedom. Downside seems to be that removing fglrx driver, leaves a lot of its own crap on system (I may be mistaking but it seems I am not). Debian with love Well, that's all for today. I think so. You can never be sure.

30 December 2014

Michael Prokop: Installing Debian in UEFI mode with some stunts

For a recent customer setup of Debian/wheezy on a IBM x3630 M4 server we used my blog entry State of the art Debian/wheezy deployments with GRUB and LVM/SW-RAID/Crypto as a base. But this time we wanted to use (U)EFI instead of BIOS legacy boot. As usual we went for installing via Grml and grml-debootstrap. We started by dd-ing the Grml ISO to a USB stick ( dd grml64-full_2014.11.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=1M ). The IBM server couldn t boot from it though, as far as we could identify it seems to be related to a problem with the IBM server not being able to properly recognize USB sticks that are registering themselves as mass storage device instead of removable storage devices (you can check your device via the /sys/devices/ /removable setting). So we enabled Legacy Boot and USB Storage in the boot manager of the server to be able to boot Grml in BIOS/legacy mode from this specific USB stick. To install the GRUB boot loader in (U)EFI mode you need to be able to execute modprobe efivars . But our system was booted via BIOS/legacy and in that mode the modprobe efivars doesnt work. We could have used a different USB device for booting Grml in UEFI mode but because we are lazy sysadmins and wanted to save time we went for a different route instead: First of all we write the Grml 64bit ISO (which is (U)EFI capable out-of-the-box, also when dd-ing it) to the local RAID disk (being /dev/sdb in this example):
root@grml ~ # dd if=grml64-full_2014.11.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=1M
Now we should be able to boot in (U)EFI mode from the local RAID disk. To verify this before actually physically rebooting the system (and possibly getting into trouble) we can use qemu with OVMF:
root@grml ~ # apt-get update
root@grml ~ # apt-get install ovmf
root@grml ~ # qemu-system-x86_64 -bios /usr/share/qemu/OVMF.fd -hda /dev/sdb
The Grml boot splash comes up as expected, perfect. Now we actually reboot the live system and boot the ISO from the local disks in (U)EFI mode. Then we put the running Grml live system into RAM to not use and block the local disks any longer since we want to install Debian there. This can be achieved not just by the toram boot option, but also by executing grml2ram on-demand as needed from user space:
root@grml ~ # grml2ram
Now having the local disks available we verify that we re running in (U)EFI mode by executing:
root@grml ~ # modprobe efivars
root@grml ~ # echo $?
0
Great, so we can install the system in (U)EFI mode now. Starting with the according partitioning (/dev/sda being the local RAID disk here):
root@grml ~ # parted /dev/sda
GNU Parted 3.2
Using /dev/sda
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) mklabel gpt
(parted) mkpart primary fat16 2048s 4095s
(parted) name 1 "EFI System"
(parted) mkpart primary 4096s 100%
(parted) name 2 "Linux LVM"
(parted) print
Model: IBM ServeRAID M5110 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 9000GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags:
  Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name        Flags
   1      1049kB  2097kB  1049kB  fat16        EFI System
   2      2097kB  9000GB  9000GB               Linux LVM
(parted) quit
Information: You may need to update /etc/fstab.
Then setting up LVM with a logical volume for the root fs and installing Debian via grml-debootstrap on it:
root@grml ~ # pvcreate /dev/sda2
  Physical volume "/dev/sda2" successfully created
root@grml ~ # vgcreate vg0 /dev/sda2
  Volume group "vg0" successfully created
root@grml ~ # lvcreate -n rootfs -L16G vg0
  Logical volume "rootfs" created
root@grml ~ # grml-debootstrap --target /dev/mapper/vg0-rootfs --password secret --hostname foobar --release wheezy
[...]
Now finally set up the (U)EFI partition and properly install GRUB in (U)EFI mode:
root@grml ~ # mkfs.fat -F 16 /dev/sda1
mkfs.fat 3.0.26 (2014-03-07)
WARNING: Not enough clusters for a 16 bit FAT! The filesystem will be
misinterpreted as having a 12 bit FAT without mount option "fat=16".
root@grml ~ # mount /dev/mapper/vg0-rootfs /mnt
root@grml ~ # grml-chroot /mnt /bin/bash
Writing /etc/debian_chroot ...
(foobar)root@grml:/# mkdir -p /boot/efi
(foobar)root@grml:/# mount /dev/sda1 /boot/efi
(foobar)root@grml:/# apt-get install grub-efi-amd64
[...]
(foobar)root@grml:/# grub-install /dev/sda
Timeout: 10 seconds
BootOrder: 0003,0000,0001,0002,0004,0005
Boot0000* CD/DVD Rom
Boot0001* Hard Disk 0
Boot0002* PXE Network
Boot0004* USB Storage
Boot0005* Legacy Only
Boot0003* debian
Installation finished. No error reported.
(foobar)root@grml:/# ls /boot/efi/EFI/debian/
grubx64.efi
(foobar)root@grml:/# update-grub
[...]
(foobar)root@grml:/# exit
root@grml ~ # umount /mnt/boot/efi
root@grml ~ # umount /mnt/
root@grml ~ # vgchange -an
  0 logical volume(s) in volume group "vg0" now active
That s it. Now rebooting the system should bring you to your Debian installation running in (U)EFI mode. You can verify this before actually rebooting into the system by using the qemu/OVMF trick from above once again.

28 November 2014

Ian Wienand: rstdiary

I find it very useful to spend 5 minutes a day to keep a small log of what was worked on, major bugs or reviews and a general small status report. It makes rolling up into a bigger status report easier when required, or handy as a reference before you go into meetings etc. I was happily using an etherpad page until I couldn't save any more revisions and the page got too long and started giving javascript timeouts. For a replacement I wanted a single file as input with no boilerplate to aid in back-referencing and adding entries quickly. It should be formatted to be future-proof, as well as being emacs, makefile and git friendly. Output should be web-based so I can refer to it easily and point people at it when required, but it just has to be rsynced to public_html with zero setup. rstdiary will take a flat RST based input file and chunk it into some reasonable looking static-HTML that looks something like this. It's split by month with some minimal navigation. Copy the output directory somewhere and it is done. It might also serve as a small example of parsing and converting RST nodes where it does the chunking; unfortunately the official documentation on that is "to be completed" and I couldn't find anything like a canonical example, so I gathered what I could from looking at the source of the transformation stuff. As the license says, the software is provided "as is" without warranty! So if you've been thinking "I should keep a short daily journal in a flat-file and publish it to a web-server but I can't find any software to do just that" you now have one less excuse.

17 November 2014

Daniel Leidert: Removal of debian.wgdd.de and cvs,svn,vcs .wgdd.de

If you've recently tried to browse to or apt-get from either cvs.wgdd.de, svn.wgdd.de, vcs.wgdd.de, debian.wgdd.de or ubuntu.wgdd.deyou've probably seen (and still are) an error (410, Gone) coming up and I'd like to give a short explanation why. cvs,svn,vcs .wgdd.deI've left my server provider and shut down the above services and only keep a small amount of services running. The domains cvs,svn,vcs .wgdd.de were used to provide (a) a subversion (SVN) server (via HTTPS and dav_svn) for some public and private work and (b) a CVS web-client to some old project works in CVS.Among the latter was e.g. old code to generate manual pages for the proprietary fglrx graphics driver, stuff that laid there untouched for many years. So I guess, it was about time to finally remove it :)The subversion web-client gave public access to some packaging work I do for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution, e.g. for the cvsweb, gtypist packages and some non-official packaging work. For the official packages I plan to move the files into the collab-maint web space and adjust the packages control files accordingly. Everything else will be hosted non-publicly in the future. I still intend to move stuff, that turns out to be useful for more people, to public places like github and Co. Update 17.11.2014: cvsweb, gurlchecker and gtypist have been moved to collab-maint. debian.wgdd.deI used this site to describe my usage of Debian GNU/Linux on the hardware I own ... laptop, servers etc. I wrote a few HOWTOs and provided a link collection with useful links. You can still find all of this using the archive.org service. I also had a repository up and working, especially to provide bluefish packages for users of Debian stable and Ubuntu. Half a year ago I dropped the Ubuntu build environments and packages and moved the Debian stable backports to official places. This effectively emptied the repository and left only the wgdd-archive-keyring package in place. So, there is no real need for a public repository anymore and the linklist probably got outdated too. All in all, I decided to stop this service (maybe I'll forward the site to here later :)).If you see an error regarding the debian.wgdd.de URL running apt-get or aptitude, then there is a reference to this site in /etc/apt/sources.list or /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*, which can be safely removed. Further you should get rid of the wgdd-archive-keyring package:
apt-get autoremove --purge wgdd-archive-keyring
... or the repository key:
apt-key del E394D996
What elseIn case you need any content from the mentioned services, just let me know.

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