Hello everyone! I am very excited to report about the awesome progress we made with Tanglu, the new Debian-based Linux-Distribution. First of all, some off-topic info: I don t feel comfortable with posting too much Tanglu stuff to Planet-KDE, as this is often not KDE-related. So, in future Planet-KDE won t get Tanglu information, unless it is KDE-related You might want to take a look at Planet-Tanglu for (much) more information. So, what happened during the last weeks? Because I haven t had lectures, I nearly worked full-time on Tanglu, setting up most of the infrastructure we need. (this will change with the next week, where I have lectures again, and I also have work to do on other projects, not just Tanglu ^^) Also, we already have an awesome community of translators, designers and developers. Thanks to them, the Tanglu-Website is now translated to 6 languages, more are in the pipeline and will be merged later. Also, a new website based on the Django framework is in progress. The Logo-Contest We ve run a logo-contest, to find a new and official Tanglu logo, as the previous logo draft was too close to the Debian logo (I asked the trademark people at Debian). More than 30 valid votes (you had to be subscribed to a Tanglu Mailinglist) were received for 7 logo proposals, and we now have a final logo: I like it very much Fun with dak I decided to use dak, the Debian Archive Kit, to handle the Tanglu archive. Choosing dak over smaller and easy-to-use solutions had multiple reasons, the main reason is that dak is way more flexible than the smaller solution (like reprepro or min-dak) and able to handle the large archive of Tanglu. Also, dak is lightning fast. And I would have been involved with dak sooner or later anyway, because I will implement the DEP-11 extension to the Debian Archive later (making the archive application-friendly). Working with dak is not exactly fun. The documentation is not that awesome, and dak contains many hardcoded stuff for Debian, e.g. it often expects the unstable suite to be present. Also, running dak on Debian Wheezy turned out to be a problem, as the Python module apt_pkg changed the API and dak naturally had problems with that. But with the great help of some Debian ftpmasters (many thanks to that!), dak is now working for Tanglu, managing the whole archive. There are still some quirks which need to be fixed, but the archive is in an usable state, accepting and integrating packages. The work on dak is also great for Debian: I resolved many issues with non-Debian dak installations, and made many parts of dak Wheezy-proof. Also, I added a few functions which might also be useful for Debian itself. All patches have of course been submitted to upstream-dak. Wanna-build and buildds This is also nearly finished Wanna-build, the software which manages all buildds for an archive, is a bit complicated to use. I still have some issues with it, but it does it s job so far. (need to talk to the Debian wanna-build admins for help, e.g. wanna-build seems to be unable to handle arch:all-only packages, also, build logs are only submitted in parts) The status of Tanglu builds can be viewed at the provisoric Buildd-Status pages. Setting up a working buildd is also a tricky thing, it involves patching sbuild to escape bug #696841 and applying various workarounds to make the buildd work and upload packages correctly. I will write instructions how to set-up and maintain a buildd soon. At time, we have only one i386 buildd up and running, but more servers (in numbers: 3) are prepared and need to be turned into buildds. After working on Wanna-build and dak, I fully understand why Canonical developed Launchpad and it s Soyuz module for Ubuntu. But I think we might be able to achieve something similar, using just the tools Debian already uses (maybe a little less confortable than LP, but setting up an own LP instance would have been much more trouble). Debian archive import The import of packages from the Debian archive has finished. Importing the archive resulted in many issues and some odd findings (I didn t know that there are packages in the archive which didn t receive an upload since 2004!), but it has finally finished, and the archive is in a consistent state at time. To have a continuous package import from Debian while a distribution is in development, we need some changes to wanna-build, which will hopefully be possible. Online package search The Online-Package-Search is (after resolving many issues, who expected that? ) up and running. You can search for any package there. Some issues are remaining, e.g. the file-contents-listing doesn t work, and changelog support is broken, but the basic functionality is there. Tanglu Bugtracker We now also have a bugtracker which is based on the Trac software. The Tanglu-Bugtracker is automatically synced with the Tanglu archive, meaning that you find all packages in Trac to report bugs against them. The dak will automatically update new packages every day. Trac still needs a few confort-adjustments, e.g. submitting replies via email or tracking package versions. Tanglu base system The Tanglu metapackages have been published in a first alpha version. We will support GNOME-3 and KDE4, as long as this is possible (= enough people working on the packaging). The Tanglu packages will also depend on systemd, which we will need in GNOME anyway, and which also allows some great new features in KDE. Side-effect of using systemd is at least for the start that Tanglu boots a bit slow, because we haven t done any systemd adjustments, and because systemd is very old. We will have to wait for the systemd and udev maintainers to merge the packages and release a new version first, before this will improve. (I don t want to do this downstream in Tanglu, because I don t know the plans for that at Debian (I only know the information Tollef Fog Heen & Co. provided at FOSDEM)) The community The community really surprised me! We got an incredible amount of great feedback on Tanglu, and most of the people liked the idea of Tanglu. I think we are one of the less-flamed new distributions ever started . Also, without the very active community, kickstarting Tanglu would not have been possible. My guess was that we might be able to have something running next year. Now, with the community help, I see a chance for a release in October The only thing people complained about was the name of the distribution. And to be really honest, I am not too happy with the name. But finding a name was an incredibe difficult process (finding something all parties liked), and Tanglu was a good compromise. Tanglu has absolutely no meaning, it was taken because it sounded interesting. The name was created by combining the Brazilian Tangerine (Clementine) and the German Iglu (igloo). I also dont think the name matters that much, and I am more interested in the system itself than the name of it. Also, companies produce a lot of incredibly weird names, Tanglu is relatively harmless compared to that . In general, thanks to everyone participating in Tanglu! You are driving the project forward! The first (planned) release I hereby announce the name of the first Tanglu release, 1.1 Aequorea Victoria . It is Daniel s fault that Tanglu releases will be named after jellyfishes, you can ask him why if you want I picked Aequorea, because this kind of jellyfish was particularly important for research in molecular biology. The GFP protein, a green fluorescent protein (=GFP), caused a small revolution in science and resulted in a Nobel Prize in 2008 for the researchers involved in GFP research (for the interested people: You can tag proteins with GFP and determine their position using light microscopy. GFP also made many other fancy new lab methods possible). Because Tanglu itself is more or less experimental at time, I found the connection to research just right for the very first release. We don t have a time yet when this version will be officially released, but I expect it to be in October, if the development speed increases a little and more developers get interested and work on it. Project Policy We will need to formalize the Tanglu project policy soon, both the technical and the social policies. In general, regarding free software and technical aspects, we strictly adhere to the Dbian Free Software Guidelines, the Debian Social Contract and the Debian Policy. Some extra stuff will be written later, please be patient! Tanglu OIN membership I was approached by the Open Invention Network, to join it as member. In general, I don t have objections to do that, because it will benefit Tanglu. However, the OIN has a very tolerant public stance on software patents, which I don t like that much. Debian did not join the OIN for this reason. For Tanglu, I think we could still join the OIN without someone thinking that we support the stance on software patents. Joining would simply be pragmatic: We support the OIN as a way to protect the Linux ecosystem from software patents, even if we don t like the stance on software patents and see it differently. Because this affects the whole Tanglu project, I don t want to decide this alone, but get some feedback from the Tanglu community before making a decision. Can I install Tanglu now? Yes and no. We don t provide installation images yet, so trying Tanglu is a difficult task (you need to install Debian and then upgrade it to Tanglu) if you want to experiment with it, I recomment trying Tanglu in a VM. I want to help! Great, then please catch one of us on IRC or subscribe to the mailinglists. The best thing is not to ask for work, but suggest something you want to do, others will then tell you if that is possible and maybe help with the task. Packages can for now only be uploaded by Debian Developers, Ubuntu Developers or Debian Maintainers who contacted me directly and whose keys have been verified. This will be changed later, but at the current state of the Tanglu archive (= less safety checks for packages), I only want people to upload stuff who definitely have the knowledge to create sane packages (you can also proove that otherwise, of course). We will later establish a new-member process. If you want to provide a Tanglu archive mirror, we would be very happy, so that the main server doesn t have to carry all the load. If you have experience in creating Linux Live-CDs or have worked with the Ubiquity installer, helping with these parts would be awesome! Unfortunately, we cannot reuse parts of Linux Mint Debian, because many of their packages don t build from source and are repackaged binaries, which is a no-go for the Tanglu main archive. Sneak peek And here is a screenshot of the very first Tanglu installation (currently more Debian than Tanglu):

Something else I am involved in Debian for a very long time now, first as Debian Maintainer and then as Debian Developer and I never thought much about the work the Debian system administrators do. I didn t know how dak worked or how Wanna-build handles the buildds and what exactly the ftpmasters have to do. By not knowing, I mean I knew the very basic theory and what these people do. But this is something different than experiencing how much work setting up and maintaining the infrastructure is and what an awesome job the people do for Debian, keeping it all up and running and secure! Kudos for that, to all people maintaining Debian infrastructure! You rock! (And I will never ever complain about slow buildds or packages which stay in NEW for too long )

When Reddit sold to Cond Nast and the founders all moved to California, their old place in Davis Square was empty for a few months and they let Mika I move in and take it over. It's an awesome place and we're still there along with some Web 2.0 graffiti they left on the roof. And so it is with pleasure that I've agreed to be interviewed by redditor Danny Piccirillo in a giant igloo he helped build -- if the unseasonably warm weather streak of weather doesn't manage to melt it before next week. Questions are being gathered at Reddit so feel free to go there and ask me any question you'd like to see me answer in an igloo.

Today I'm dancing and singing. :-)

In part because I've just uploaded a new version of tuxmath which IMO has a great improvement: tuxmath is a math game for children, where the player has to solve little math computations, otherwise the cities on the bottom of the screen get destroyed like in space invaders. Which is not exactly suited very well for little children. So the idea came up, to instead use igloos, which melt, so that in the end a penguin has to escape from the igloo when it gets destroyed. Very cute, but still the same gameplay. And the best thing is, those igloos were painted by a third grade daughter of one the developers.

What about a reat time strategy game, kinda Command and Conquer, with penguins as the main characters, surrounded by the polar freeze, and throwing mercilessly snowballs against each other? That’s what SnowballZ is about: march through snow laden forests to conquer new frontiers and grow your small army. Ambush enemy lines with blasts of freezing snowballs. Of course, don’t forget to feed your troops with fresh fish, or warm them up in a nice igloo, if you expect them to grant you a good victory. And don’t neglect your home, invaders are just over the next snow drift! The packages are already in Debian SID, so there’s no excuse for not trying it, just get ready for the next snowfall!

Yet another liberated game: Oolite, a clone of Elite.

I am the maintainer of the package; it was introduced as a non-free game in Debian, but a week ago upstream has announced that the game is now relicensed with a dual model licensing with GPL and cc-nc-sa 2.0 (the old license). Also, the change applies retroactively to the 1.65 release while further releases will be licensed GPL only and GPL/cc-nc-sa 3.0 for the code and data, respectively.

I have prepared the packages (oolite 1.65-5 and oolite-data 1.65-2) and Simon Richter agreed to make the honorary upload :-) tomorrow morning.

I hope he doesn't forget to build the packages by passing the '-sa' parameter to dpkg-buildpackage :-) and that these packages will reach Etch just in time for release.


As a bonus to this change, the game will be autobuilt on amd64, too.

(BTW, why isn't there any amd64 buildd in the non-free buildd network? Any technical reason?)

Update: the amd64 build seems that was behind in January when I installed the game on my new laptop. 1.65-4 seems that has been built a month ago, much later than the other arches.

Update: It seems that the package is on a positive trend on popularity: a constant rise in the number of oolite package installations is visible...

I managed to miss the Igloofest by Piknic lectronik this weekend, which was kind of a bummer since it seemed like it would be such an awesome event. But with a downturn in the temperature -- another -20C day yesterday, with wind chill bringing it down to -28C -- it was just too hard to justify bringing a 1-year-old to an outdoor event. We did manage to do some fun things this weekend, anyways. Saturday was our first day house-hunting. We're planning to buy an apartment or condo in the Plateau Mont-Royal this year, before July 1. July 1 is the traditional Moving Day in Quebec -- the day that every renter in the province either renews their year-long lease or moves to a new apartment. We're going to move out of Renterhood this year altogether, and get into the fun of home ownership. Wish us luck. Anyways, we saw a great place this Saturday, and we plan to do some more house hunting over the next few weeks. We're going to make a decision about whether to stay in our current apartment or not before March 1, when we begin our big road trip down to Austin for South by Southwest. tags: montreal quebec piknicelectronic igloofest cold house-hunting moving day

Bruncher This afternoon we had a great bruncher with friends at our (current) apartment. We invited over Jeremy and Lina and their two girls Syvlie and Clea, who arrived at our door like an advertisement for a skiing school. I love talking to the girls -- they're really smart and sweet people. We also had over Maj's friend Emmy and her husband Stef, as well as their daughter Isadora. Emmy is originally from Oaxaca (city), and Stef is German. They moved here a few months ago, and Maj and Amita June met Emmy and Isadora at their playgroup. This was the first time I met Stef; I got to use my German introduction lessons for this week on him. Guten Tag! Ich hei e Evan! Freut Mich! Isadora speaks Spanish with her mother and German with her father. She'll grow up bilingual, but unfortunately not speaking either of the languages of the bilingual city she's living in. My guess is that she'll probably be pretty expert at four languages by the time she's 10 or so. Maj cooked today, and made a really great smoked salmon gratin, white bean vegetable soup, and hors d'oeuvres. I put together a green salad to round it out. We opened up a couple of bottles of crispy vinho verde and had a very nice afternoon time. The kids got along great; Sylvie and Clea are several years older than Amita and Isadora (one day apart!), but they were really gentle and nice with the little ones. tags: bruncher lina jeremy emmy stef amitajune german isadora sylvie clea

The snow we got a couple of days ago hasn't abated here in Montreal. We had a cold snap right after the snowfall, so temperatures have been around -20C for the last couple of days. Last night Maj had her French classes at the Montreal YMCA, and Micaela had spent the day seeing art museums and visiting bookstores downtown. (She's a poetry nut -- loves finding books by Canadian poets, francophone and anglophone, that she can't get at home in Melbourne.) So Amita and I went to meet her about halfway from our local Metro station, at the Pizzad lic on Ave Mont Royal. I covered Amita in about 10 layers of clothing, then put her on her little purple sled and dragged her up towards Mont Royal. She kept wanting to get up and walk herself ("Up!" is her newest and most insistent word), but when she was standing she wouldn't walk at all. So it was a long time getting to the restaurant. When we got there, Micaela was leaning against the front door shivering. Apparently Pizzad lic is out of business (bummer!). A graver cause for concern, however, was Amita's face: the parts showing around her scarf were tomato red from the cold. Gah! We rushed her home (crying all the way), and when I got her undressed she had a red stripe across the middle of her face like the people in those frozen pizza ads. I bathed her cheeks in cold water, and then gave her a hot bath, and by the time she was out she was calm and regular-colored. We got pizza delivered at home, which she enjoyed a lot. No permanent damage, as far as I can tell, except to my self-confidence as a competent parent. When Maj got home later that night, she reminded me that for extremely cold weather you have to put Vaseline on babies' cheeks to protect their delicate skin from the cold. Amita and I went to Loblaw's this morning to do some grocery shopping (in the car), which was a much more reasonable experience. Tonight for dinner I made pat chinois, a plate with baked mashed potatoes and ground beef known to English-speakers as shepherd's pie. (I make it with mushrooms and veggie beef.) Here in Quebec it's called "Chinese casserole", for unknown reasons. The best guess is that French Canadian lumberjacks worked at sites in the USA where it was common to have Chinese immigrant cooks. Confronted with a potato dish they didn't recognize, they assumed it was a meal from the cooks' home country. I don't know if this origin is true or not, but it sure is a good story. Anyways, it's good stick-to-your-ribs food, which you need on a night like this. When it gets down to -28C (as it will tonight), you need a lot of carbs running your internal furnace for you. tags: montreal snow cold shepherds pie pat chinois quebec babies amitajune

Piknic lectronik The good snow we're having means that one of my favourite events of the year is going to be white and cold and fluffy and fun. For the last few years, Piknic lectronik, the group that produces weekend outdoor parties on le Ste H l ne on the site of Expo 67, has done a single, crazy outdoor party in the dead of winter. This year, the party, called "Igloofest", is happening in the Vieux Port on the Quai Jacques Cartier. It's going to be two nights, January 19-20 (that's 29-30 Niv se for you aficionados of the French Revolutionary Calendar), from 5 to 11PM. We're going out on Friday night -- our pals from Ninjatune are part of the party, and our friend DJ Ghost Beard is on that evening. It should be a great time; I'm really looking forward to dancing in the snow and having vin chaud afterwards. tags: montreal piknic lectronik party dancing ninjatune winter snow

BarCampMontreal II: Camp Harder Just got the news from my blogroll: Sylvain Carle notes that the second BarCampMontreal will take place April 28th. That's going to be close for us; we'll be at the Wikitravel Get-together in Puerto Rico up until the 22nd. And we plan to fly there from Miami. But, hey: stranger things have happened. Our BarCamp last year was an absolute blast (see my follow-up on Journal/1 Brumaire CCXV); lots of fun people doing interesting things in fun ways, and then talking about it. I'd really like to be there for this next one. tags: barcamp montreal barcampmontreal wikitravel puerto rico

Louisianne I'm happy to see that in an alternative history universe called Ill Bethisad, the French Revolutionary Calendar is used in the North American francophone nation of Louisianne. On the downside, my city of Ville-Marie is in the royalist enclave of New Francy, which uses the boring old calendar. Ill Bethisad is an impressive alternative-history project, and the wiki format seems to really be conducive to its further development. Great idea, and nice to see the ol' FRC included. tags: alternative history french revolutionary calendar ill bethisad north america

Baby Lessig Congrats to Lawrence Lessig and family on the birth of a new son. tags: baby lessig

I've followed AJ's experiment in funding free software development with his AJ Market with interest and have thrown money in the pot once or twice for some of the projects I care about. It's an interesting approach. I'm too lazy to do anything like that, or rather, I'm already paid sufficiently to work on free software that doing a joeyh market would too much resemble work. However, I did decide to try something I've seen done occasionally, since I also wonder how that works out -- I added a paypal donations button to the website for one piece of free software. Just as a test, to see if it annoys anyone, and if anyone bothers clicking on it. I chose alien since it's well known, regularly used by a suprisingly large number of people and even appears on the first page of otherwise quite amusing results on a google search for "alien". (I suppose that adding google ads to the page would generate more money, but in a probably less interesting way.) Unlike AJ, I won't promise that clicking on the link will motivate me to work on anything. In fact, the most likely use of any money I get from this will be to pass the buck along to the AJ market or something similar.

Over the last few weeks, I've implemented some new features in DDPO. The system, originally written by Igor Genibel, is a mix of Python, Perl, and PHP generated from WML, so it's quite interesting to see how these languages interact. The main new features are the ability to add arbitrary packages to the list displayed, and an automatic listing of all NMUs and sponsored uploads in the new "uploads" section. (Thanks to Ryan Murray, Joerg Jaspert, and Joey Schulze for helping fix the projectb for that!) I won't repeat the details here, read the d-d-a posting for that. Another nice thing is the link to Ian Lynagh's popcon graphs which I had mostly ignored so far. Have a look at my DDPO page to see the new features - feedback welcome!

Today kickass’ combo : the popcon graph + the PTS I’m pretty happy to see that each new backup-manager package brings a couple of new users. As expected, each variation in the graph can be associated to an upload in the archive. Popcon graphs rock!