Search Results: "schmitz"

6 April 2011

Gerfried Fuchs: The Canterbury Project

The Background If you weren't online last Friday you probably have missed the big news announcement on the various community distribution websites. The main pages of them got replaced by a placeholder announcing the birth of The Canterbury Project. People started to wonder whether it is an April fool's prank or for real. This blog post is meant to shine a bit more light on it and address one comment received about it. If you go to the news item on the Debian site you'll get your answer about that it indeed was an April fool's prank. The idea for doing something in coordination with other distributions came to me when I thought about last year's (or was it already two year's ago?) prank that the various web cartoon sites pulled: they replaced their main page with the page of another cartoonist. My original idea was actually along that lines. So I started to dig up website contacts from different distributions, I was aiming at the big names in the community distribution sector. Given that my time is pretty limited these days with renovating the house we plan to live in soonish I knew I had to let in others in within Debian. I though didn't want to involve too many people, for several reasons: it should be a surprise to as many as possible, but more importantly, I didn't want to shy away other distributions by an overwhelming Debian involvement. That's also part of the reason why I didn't contact many Debian based distributions. So first contacts where made, a dedicated IRC channel used for coordination, and people involved joined in. Then the thing happened which the Free Software community is so well known for: additional ideas came in, two people independently addressed me whether it wouldn't be better that instead of a circle replacement of the frontpage, why not display the same page on all of them. And one of them added that a corresponding news item might make sense. So there we were, having to think about text to put into two things: the news item and the replacement page itself. At this stage Alexander threw in a project name with a background that was adopted. Francesca started with an idea for the news item, I started to put quotes in and asked for ones from the other involved people that fit their distribution well. Klaas came up with a template for the replacement page that we tweaked. Fortunately we ended up being five distributions and the colors of the banner did match the distribution ones rather well (except for one, we had to tweak the color of one banner). The Credits We were all set, and actually everything went fine. And it definitely caught the attention. This blog post goes out in thanks to the following people: I hopefully haven't forgotten anyone. There surely were some more people involved in the other distributions, and I guess the named people weren't aware of all the ones involved inside Debian. Feel free to drop missing names in the comments. Addressing Feedback Finally, let me address one concern raised: someone claimed that the real joke with this prank was that we would consider collaboration to be a joke. Actually, the total opposite is the case here. That it was possible to pull it off should be proof enough that Collaboration Across Borders actually is possible. And the background information put into the news section of the replacement site is real. Also, my personal quote in the news item was meant dead honest. I do believe that DEX has a limited point of view and only tackles part of the problem. Unfortunately, for such efforts to really come to life it takes people with a really long breath and dedication to it. Efforts like the VCS-PKG and the Freedesktop Games effort are more or less stalled. Even though a lot of people do believe in stronger collaboration to be a good thing, the basis is not working out too well. I'm in the fortunate position that for some of the packages I maintain there is exchange between packagers from different distributions to avoid common troubles. If it can't be done in the big it should at least be tried in the small. I want to specifically highlight again one part of the updates in the replacement page: the CrossDistro track at this year's FOSDEM. This one was more than fruitful, on several levels. From what I've heard a lot of discussion happened besides the talks too, and connections got established. It doesn't sound unlikely like this might be done again next year. So again, thanks for enjoying this April fool's prank, thanks to everyone who helped to deliver it, and especially a lot of thanks to the people who this might have got thinking of possibilities to improve on the collaboration front!

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20 April 2008

Holger Levsen: Almost Debian free weekend

I just came home from Berlin where we founded the OLPC Germany association ("OLPC Deutschland" e.V. in the last two days, which mostly ment deciding on our final constitution.

The meeting was quite relaxed, it contained just of two five hour sessions, followed by a very good and quite cheap dinner in a vietnamese restaurant with free wifi.

During the 3h trip back we already received two applications for new members :-) I happen to know this, because somehow I ended up on the board of the new association...

And so it was mostly a Debian free weekend, though not really: I slept at Henning Glawes place, a fellow DD and FAI developer and enjoyed his hospitality a lot, even if it was really short. Plus, I discussed with Matthias Schmitz the future of the munin package in Debian. Quick summary: get 1.2.6 out and into Lenny and expose the 1.3.x branch to more testing via experimental, so that hopefully 1.4 will be ready in time for Lenny+1. SSL support are the two words I'll mention now and here, why 1.4 is nifty, but there are more reasons. Check it out ;-)

And now I'll go afk to relax, saturday morning was also the first day I woke up completly free from fever...

1 September 2007

Michael Prokop: Froscon 2007 - lessons learnt

8 April 2007

Ingo Juergensmann: The big Debian day

Today - as many of you have already noticed - is/was a big day for Debian:



Well, I could add another topic:


In a more detailed view:
Sam Hocevar won the DPL election
Congrats to Sam! I can agree with most of the points he made in his DPL platform, e.g. a sexier website, sexier distribution, remaing the universal OS, etc.
sexier website: Really, the current design of Debians website is awful. It's really something back from the 90s. Bad look, bad design and stuff you're looking for is difficult to find, because it's badly structured and stuff is spread all over the place. I think, it would be good to have some decent CMS and some good designers/graphic artists - a good package maintainier doesn't make a good webdesigner.
sexier distribution: Many people are using Ubuntu because they're desktop users. The current release cycles are way too long and drive people away from Debian. It's a different matter, of course, for servers or managed systems like Terminal Servers or such. Those are fine with longer release cycles. Splitting up the release in some core and sub releases is a quite common proposal. Yes, this split is difficult, but I think it's the way to go.
remaing the universal OS: As of the release of Etch, Debian became the no-more-universal OS - just because m68k wasn't released for obscure reasons. I'm a great m68k user and now I'm left behind by Debian with the problem that my pet arch is not supported anymore. Running testing/unstable is not an option for m68k IMHO. Because the m68k porters didn't come up with an alternative release plan so far, I think it's the best to shutdown my 3 m68k machines - all of them are m68k buildds - within the next weeks or months. They're producing (well, some little) heat, some disturbing noise and consume a lot of power of course. Currently I accept those drawbacks in order to help the m68k port by donating CPU power running some buildds for about 7 years now. I've spent much more money on this purpose - not only for paying the electricity bills - for phone calls to get crashed remote machines rebooted, sending replacement parts for other buildds or even driving by car to bring machines or other parts to other persons (like crest.debian.org to Michael Schmitz or accel boards to the Netherlands for porting stuff. Anyway, I will happily reactivate the machines when it's up to make a new release for the m68k architecture again! :)

Some other point Sam mentioned in his platform is this:
There are very useful services around, such as http://www.buildd.net/, http://bts.turmzimmer.net/ or http://bjorn.haxx.se/debian/. I cannot understand why they are not Debian services.

I already had a conversation with Sam about this in which I expressed my general intention to develop at least Buildd.Net beyond its current state - it's quite frustrating for me to see Buildd.Net being stuck in development just because I've no more time and skill to develop Buildd.Net further. Sadly, my call for help wasn't as successful as I wanted. Only two persons wanted to help: faw and joey - and both are quite busy with other stuff.
Apparently, Buildd.Net will most likely suffer from shutting down my m68ks due to the missing m68k Etch release as well, because it was always a frontend to my m68k buildds in my eyes. All other stuff on Buildd.Net is just a nice addition to that. And when I don't operate m68k buildds on a daily basis, it's obvious that I won't invest much more time into the development of Buildd.Net. This is already true for the past year where I haven't found the time to fix some serious problems in the backend scripts and database of Buildd.Net, which basically breaks store_packages2.py (source and therefor ptracker.cgi(example) as well. I even haven't found the time to setup trac and svn again after the move to the new server during last autumn.
Erm, anyway.. back to the topic: I wish Sam the best for his period - but I don't think that he can make a big change. I doubt in general that any DPL is able to push big changes in Debian. One reason for this is the short period of just one year. Another reason is that many DDs won't let big changes to be made.

4 November 2006

Anthony Towns: More DWN Bits

Following Joey’s lead, here’s some DWN-style comments on some of the stuff I’ve been involved in or heard of over the past week… A future for m68k has been planned on the release list, after being officially dropped as a release architecture in September. The conclusion of the discussion seems to be that we’ll move the existing m68k binaries from etch into a new “testing-m68k” suite that will be primarily managed by m68k porters Wouter Verhelst and Michael Schmitz, and aim to track the real testing as closely as can be managed. In addition the m68k will aim to make installable snapshots from this, with the aim of getting something as close as possible to the etch release on other architectures. A new trademark policy for Debian is finally in development, inspired by the Mozilla folks rightly pointing out that, contrary to what we recommend for Firefox, our own logos aren’t DFSG-free. Branden Robinson has started a wiki page to develop the policy. The current proposal is to retain two trademark policies – an open use policy for the swirl logo, that can be used by anyone to refer to Debian, with the logo released under an MIT-style copyright license, and left as an unregistered trademark; and an official use license for the bottle-and-swirl logo, with the logo being a registered trademark, but still licensed under a DFSG-free copyright license. The hope is that we can come up with at least one example, and hopefully more, of how to have an effective trademark without getting in the way of people who want to build on your work down the line. Keynote address at OpenFest. Though obviously too modest to blog about this himself, Branden Robinson is currently off in Bulgaria, headlining the fourth annual OpenFest, speaking on the topics of Debian Democracy and the Debian Package Management System. New Policy Team. After a few days of controversy following the withdrawal of the policy team delegation, a new policy team has formed consisting of Manoj Srivastava, Russ Allbery, Junichi Uekawa, Andreas Barth and Margarita Manterola. Point release of sarge, 3.1r4. A minor update to Debian stable was released on the 28th October, incorporating a number of previously released security updates. Updated sarge CD images have not been prepared at this time and may not be created until 3.1r5 is released, which is expected in another two months, or simultaneously with the etch release. Debian miniconf at linux.conf.au 2007. While it may technically not be supposed to be announced yet, there’s now a website for the the Debian miniconf at linux.conf.au 2007, to be held in Sydney on January 15th and 16th (with the rest of the conference continuing until the 20th). This year derived distributions are being explicitly encouraged to participate, so competition is likely to be high, and it’s probably a good idea to get your talk ideas sorted out pretty quickly if you want them to be considered!

19 April 2006

Wouter Verhelst: Pbbuttonsd

PMU-based laptops can use either pmud (which works, but doesn't have a lot of features—and which, occasionally, is maintained by fellow m68k porter Michael Schmitz) or pbbuttonsd, (which is a lot better) for their power management. Pbbuttonsd also has support for doing stuff with the hotkeys on the apple keyboard, like changing the screen brightness, the sound volume, or going to sleep (if your laptop supports it) after one uses the power button. In addition, pbbuttonsd will reduce the screen brightness if the laptop is running on battery power and hasn't been used for a while. This is cool. Unfortunately, it also does it if I'm using an external USB mouse to browse the web and don't touch my keyboard or touchpad for a while. This is not so cool.

12 January 2006

Joachim Breitner: Schmiz' Katze im Jubez

Heute war die Impro-Theater-Gruppe der Uni, Schmitz’ Katze, im Jubez zu sehen. Diese leider nicht sehr h ufigen Auftritte lasse ich mir - soweit m glich - nicht entgehen. Trozdem wird es einem dank der Improvisation nicht langweilig. So wurde man heute mit Reagenzglaskindern, Lagefeuergeschichten und Horror-B gelbrettern begl ckt.Nach einer kurzen Aufw rmzeit anfangs zeigte die Truppe vor der Pause Bestleistung. Bew hrt haben sich dabei die traditionellen Spiele. Nach der Pause wurde lange und am St ck “Fishing in the Stream of Conciousness” gespielt, und sollte wohl einen k sterlischen Touch bekommen. Das war schade, denn es zog sich bisweilen ein wenig und wirkliche Lacher waren etwas d nner geseht. Um so beeindruckender war Jens’ Auftritt als posenreicher Jesus beim Abendmal. Auch sonst - als komplettes Italienisches Landhaus mit K hlschrank und BH - war er heute in bester Verfassung. Daher geht mein “Bester Improvisat r des Abends” an Jens.F r die Freunde des Theatersports, der kompetitiven Variante des Improtheaters: Am 10. Dezember kommt die T binger Theatersportgruppe Harlekin ins Jubez: Diese professionelle(?) Truppe spielt in einer andren Liga, hier sind die Sponanlieder chartreif und jede Szene erneut orginell (zumindest habe ich sie so in Erinnerung).