Right now, in many parts of the world, people are celebrating the Software Freedom Day 2012. The Debian project as well is participating to some of these events with talks, demos and partying. In particular, you can find our project members actively involved in different locations and activies, among which: Brazil Novo Hamburgo, RS

• BASH for sysadmins
• What is the Debian Project?
• ZFS: quick presentation for sysadmins.

Italy Quiliano, SV

• Introduction to the Debian Project

UK Rugby A series of hands-on live demonstrations, including:

• Linux-based machines running Debian or Debian-derived distributions
• FreedomBox for visitors to check out
• Raspberry Pi machines running Raspbian, used to help local children and parents learn Scratch

Personally, right now I m celebrating in Italy, attending a talk by the famous kernel hacker Alessandro Rubini (a really great speech about our freedom and how software impacts it). Cheers from the Italian Riviera!

As an enthusiast Open Hardware supporter, I regularly read the always brilliant Dangerous Prototype blog.
Last week it featured a short but complete tutorial about unbricking a Seagate Dockstar with OpenOCD and the Bus Pirate. The Bus Pirate is an open source hacker multi-tool that talks to electronic stuff, and which can be used as a JTAG adaptor (and much more!).
OpenOCD, the widespread free JTAG debugger, recently gained support for it. The good news is that, after almost a year and half of development, OpenOCD 0.5.0 has been finally released and is currently available in both Debian testing and unstable. Get it from the repository while it is hot, no need to fiddle with autotools and build tools anymore As a side-note for interested parties, SWD (Serial Wire Debugging) support is currently under development, along with its companion library (libswd). Hack and enjoy!

The Italian L10N team has not been very active nor growing in recent years. In particular, we pretty much failed at attracting new members in our team, with the result that untranslated files are piling up and manpower is scarce. Following a suggestion of our uber-active Francesca, we decided to try a new move to invert the trend: organizing brief weekly online sprints open to everybody, where graybeard translators will help newcomers getting to grips on Debian L10N infrastructure while collaboratively working on yet-untranslated targets. Last week, we tried our first and very introductory sprint, with a preliminary meeting on IRC to give instructions and setup ad-hoc pads. As a result, we ended with linux-2.6 po-debconf and a web-page completely translated and proofread by almost fifteen people in just a couple a hours. The key point however is that the majority of participants were fresh L10N-newbies, which we hope will join us permanently very soon after this first contact. Encouraged by the initial positive result, we already announced our next sprint for Thursday 11th, which will be focused on package descriptions translation (preceded by a crash course on DDTSS, its related web interface). We hope that even more users will join us this time, and encourage other stalled translation teams in experimenting a similar approach to revive activity and encourage participation.

From the 17th to the 19th of September in Perugia, Italy, it took place the 5th edition of the Italian Debian Community Conference, which has been attended by many contributors and users. For the first time, the event has been organized in collaboration with the Italian Ubuntu community, as to create a new joint conference in order to foster shared contributions and emphasizing the large common ground of our projects. This new experimental kind of mini-conference was then labeled DUCC-IT, to reflect both the local profile and the mutual collaboration. After the initial social night, spent discussing of several ongoing free software efforts and having dinner all together, the conference official opening started on Saturday, temporarily housed at University of Perugia, with a series of talks and hands-on session aimed at recruiting new contributors to work on development, translations, documentation writing and marketing. It has been a good opportunity to celebrate the Software Freedom Day too, in collaboration with FSUG Italia and the participation of some local schools.

The event been also attended by some members of the Debian Women and Ubuntu Women teams (whose goal is to promote women participation in both projects), who organized a round-table debate taking the Italian panorama as a study case. The discussion embraced different topics, ranging from the wide difference in numbers, to the deep causes of this phenomenon and how to improve the situation. With the help of the hacklab staff (hosting the debate), an audio/video streaming has been made available in real-time, and many remote participants joined us with comments and questions. This new kind of collaboration between our communities was found to be really positive and more events has already been drafted for the next year, including a translation sprint and a contributors meeting. We encourage worldwide local communities to try and engage in a similar experiment: organizing and joining a DUCC event will be pure fun. A detailed report of the conference will be soon available, completed by photos, participants comments, video records and slides for the talks.
We d really like to thank the Math Department of University of Perugia, the Projectz On Island hacklab, FSUG Italia, the Ubuntu-it community and everyone who contribute to this event.

Being a rather patient and peaceful guy, I acknowledge that perfection is a difficult goal and I rarely rant publicly about troubles I ve stumbled upon.
Today however, I feel I have to wholeheartedly agree with Bernd about Guruplug: it has been a waste of money. I received mine in May, with the order placed and payed in February. First thing noticed is the issue with the power supply: I really think they forgot QA testing on these machines, as my PSU (and many others, just skim through the official forum) blew up just an hour after power-up. I wasn t lucky enough to admire over-heating and internal (mis-)cooling, as it went immediately through GlobalScale sales department for a RMA under warranty. And then I waited for GlobalScale, for an actually working unit. And still I am, it s almost September now. Patiently waiting (hoping, I d say) for some answers. I m not sure who to blame here, Marvell, GlobalScale or both, for this issues with regards to QA, design and sales. But I m quite sure the final result has been already perfectly described: a major fail.