So, since I registered the URL for serving the unofficial Debian images for the Raspberry computers, raspi.debian.net, in April 2020, I had been hosting it in my Dreamhost webspace. Over two years ago yes, before I finished setting it up in Dreamhost Steve McIntyre approached me and invited me to host the images under the Debian cdimages user group. I told him I d first just get the setup running, and later I would approach him for finalizing the setup. Then, I set up the build on my own server, hosted on my Dreamhost account and forgot about it for many months. Last month, there was a not particularly happy flamewar in debian-arm@lists.debian.org finished with me stating I would be moving the hosting to Debian infrastructure soon. Well It took me a bit over a month to get this sorted out, together with several days of half-broken links, but it is finally done: raspi.debian.net is a CNAME for ftp.acc.umu.se, which is the same system that hosts cdimage.debian.org. And, of course it is also reachable as https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/raspi/ looks more official, but is less memorable Thanks a lot to Steve for the nudging, and to maswan to help finalizing the setup. What next? Well, the images are being built on my server. I d love to move the builder over to Debian machines as well. When? How? That s still in the air.

Steve is about to sign the release and to begin the push across to the mirrors.Although it sometimes seems like an age, this will be approximately 8 hours rather than 15 hours - a 50% improvement in release timetable means that the behind the scenes work has been well worth while.We always find tweaks, improvements, things we forgot and genuine bugs. Once again: We've found that live images can be significantly memory intensive on older hardware or machines with limited memory. The boot process for any live CD image expands a squashfs so that the image runs entirely in memory. This is particularly noticeable on the 32 bit i386 images. These really require a minimum of 2GB of memory if you are using the heavier weight desktop images like KDE or Gnome: much less and they will either be unreasonably slow or just fail to work.There is also now a note on the download pages warning on this.Thanks once again to maswan early on and Sledge, RattusRattus, Isy, Schweer, linux-fan and sqr not for helping out in testing images. I'm listening in to an impromptu chat explaining the behind the scenes steps to run to actually sign and push the final images so we're a short while away from publishing to the principal CD image machine. At the same time, the torrent seeders will be started and the scripts will push to update the mirrors. And so to the next time :)Handy tip For people running mirrors of debian-cd: If you're low on disk space, perhaps you could remove the 10.7 images by hand before running your next sync scripts to allow space for 10.8 to move in: any ftpsync or rsync process might only remove the old images after copying in the new ones. It's only about 220GB - but you don't want that to be an instantaneous 440GB.

As is traditional, every three months or so: another Debian point release is being prepared today. This one is 10.8. As ever, not a huge amount of change if you've been updating your Debian machines regularly. CD/DVD/BluRay and other media files are all being produced today.
Images are gradually being built and rsync'ed: tests are under way and the ususal suspects are taking part. A couple of issues: thanks very much indeed to maswan for chasing up early problems with petersson. Some script changes behind the scenes over the last month or so should mean that the images are built significantly more in parallel and this may mean we finish the release process much more quickly today.

Jo and I spent a few days in Sweden and had an awesome time! The main reason for being there was Leif and Maria's wedding way up north in Skellefte . They cunningly organised their ceremony for the Midsummer weekend, which was an excellent plan - we had a full weekend of partying while we were there. :-) We had some time to ourselves while we were there, so we wandered about a little and got to see some of the beautiful coastal countryside. Then on the way home we stopped off in Ume to visit Mattias Wadenstein (maswan) and his wife Melanie, and he showed me around some of the machines that he's been admining on behalf of Debian. Maybe I'm a sad geek, but I feel quite a bond with one of the machines there, pettersson.debian.org. It's the official CD build machine for Debian, and I've been responsible for thrashing it really hard for the last 5 years or so... :-) Massive thanks to the University of Ume and their Academic Computer Club for hosting Debian machines and serving all the CD images for us! The only downsides from the trip were the massive tiredness (midnight sun is pretty, but notconducive to sleep!) the mosquito bites and the nasty plague^Wcold that we picked up while we were there... Ah well. :-)