Search Results: "sunweaver"

Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In February, 112.50 work hours have been dispatched among 11 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

Antoine Beaupr did 8h.
Ben Hutchings did 14 hours (out of 11.25 hours allocated + 10 extra hours remaining, meaning that he still has 7.25 extra hours to do over March).
Brian May did 10 hours.
Chris Lamb did 18 hours (instead of the 11.25 hours he was allocated, he will work less in March).
Damyan Ivanov did 4 hours (out of 11.25 hours allocated, leaving 7.25 extra hours for March).
Guido G nther did 7 hours (out of 11.25 hours allocated, leaving 4.25 extra hours for March).
Markus Koschany did 11.25 hours.
Mike Gabriel did 8 hours.
Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 12 hours (out of 11h allocated + 2.50 remaining, thus keeping 1.50 extra hours for March).
Scott Kitterman did 8 hours.
Thorsten Alteholz did 11.25 hours.

Evolution of the situation The number of sponsored hours continued to decrease a little bit. It s not worrisome yet but we should try to get back to a positive slope if we want to be able to do an outstanding job for wheezy LTS. On the positive side, TOSHIBA renewed their platinum sponsorship for another 6 months at least and we have some contacts for new sponsors, though they are far from being concluded yet. We are now in transition between squeeze LTS and wheezy LTS. The paid contributors are helping the security team by fixing packages that were fixed in squeeze already but that are still outstanding in wheezy. They are also taking generic measures to prepare wheezy LTS (for example to ensure all packages work with OpenJDK 7.x since support for 6.x will be dropped in the LTS period). Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold (none this month).

Platinum sponsors:

TOSHIBA (for 5 months)

Gold sponsors:

The Positive Internet (for 21 months)
Blablacar (for 20 months)
Linode LLC (for 10 months)

Silver sponsors:

Domeneshop AS (for 20 months)
Universit Lille 3 (for 20 months)
Trollweb Solutions (for 18 months)
Nantes M tropole (for 14 months)
University of Luxembourg (for 12 months)
Dalenys (for 10 months)
Univention GmbH (for 6 months)
Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 6 months)

Bronze sponsors:

David Ayers IntarS Austria (for 21 months)
Offensive Security (for 21 months)
Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 21 months)
Evolix (for 20 months)
Freeside Internet Service (for 20 months)
MyTux (for 20 months)
Linuxhotel GmbH (for 18 months)
Intevation GmbH (for 17 months)
Daevel SARL (for 16 months)
Bitfolk LTD (for 15 months)
Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 15 months)
Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 14 months)
NUMLOG (for 14 months)
WinGo AG (for 13 months)
Ecole Centrale de Nantes LHEEA (for 9 months)
Sig-I/O (for 7 months)
Entr ouvert (for 5 months)
Adfinis SyGroup AG

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February 2016 has been a very active month regarding me contributing to the FLOSS world.

Finalizing MATE uploads to Debian with regards to the Beta 1 Freeze of Ubuntu 16.04
Work on RDP related packages in Debian
Work on Debian Edu related packages
Work on Debian LTS
Work on nx-libs (NX v3)

Honouring my Sponsors I am happy to share that this month's FLOSS work has been sponsored by various sponsors.

Work on the packages mate-dock-applet, topmenu-gtk and getting GIR-support back into libwnck has been sponsored by Martin Wimpress, the main driving force (AFAIK) behind Ubuntu MATE [1].
Work on Debian LTS has been sponsored by the various Debian LTS sponsors proxied through Freexian SARL (thanks to Raphael Hertzog for organizing the paid LTS contributors team via his company) [2].
Work on nx-libs has been sponsored by the Qindel Group [3].

Thanks to all people and companies sponsoring my work on FLOSS projects. This month's MATE uploads to Debian With regards to the Beta 1 Freeze date of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (18th Feb 2016), Martin Wimpress, Vangelis Mouhtsis and I performed quite some work on Debian MATE. Uploads to Debian unstable:

caja 1.12.4-2 [4]
mate-menu 5.6.8-1 [5]
mate-panel 1.12.2-1 [6]
mate-dock-applet 0.67-3 (NEW) [7]
mate-polkit 1.12.0-3 [8]
eom 1.12.2-1 [9]
pluma 1.12.2-1 [10]
topmenu-gtk 0.2.1+git20151210.8c6108f-2 (NEW) [11]
mate-tweak 3.5.7-1 (latest upload on 2nd of March) [12]

The Debian MATE Packaging Team also took over maintenance of the GTK-2+ legacy package libwnck [13]. The first upload introducing some major changes and package clean-ups caused a slight wave [14] because of a missing dependency in libwnck-dev (that fell victim to some clean-ups in debian/control). Those issues have been addressed immediately and have now been settled. The main reason for working on a legacy package like libwnck was the need for having gir1.2-wnck-1.0 (back) in Debian. The new MATE dock applet requires the libwnck GIR package to be present at runtime. One of the novelties in Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS will be the option to adapt the look and feel of the MATE desktop to how a Unity-based desktop looks like. Martin Wimpress is giving intense work to providing a dock applet and topmenu support as one alternative among the various Ubuntu MATE desktop experiences provided. The alternative desktop layouts can be configured with the MATE Tweak tool. Work on RDP related packages Work on FreeRDP 1.1 as currently in Debian I finally managed to give some priority (and thus time) to fixing various issues in the freerdp package in Debian [15]. Many people had provided patches and solutions to open issues and I tried to honour as many of those, as possible. Please note that I had to disable the GStreamer support in FreeRDP for the recent uploads, as the currently used Git snapshot of FreeRDP only supports GStreamer 0.10's API whereas the security team is in the process of having gstreamer0.10-* packages removed from the Debian stretch/unstable archives. Work on FreeRDP 2.0, coming to Debian soon Furthermore, Bernhard Miklautz is currently working on a freerdp2 package, which will bring the latest Git snapshot of FreeRDP upstream into Debian (and also re-introduce GStreamer support, based on GStreamer 1.0). Bernhard invested a lot of time on pushing the current HEAD of FreeRDP upstream [16] towards a FreeRDP 2.x version. Starting with FreeRDP 2.x it will be possible to install different FreeRDP versions on one system without file naming conflicts. For March 2016, I have doing the final freerdp2 reviewing on my todo list (possibly together with H ctor Or n Mart nez who is highly interested in the RDP backend support in Wayland/Weston), so that we can provide first uploads to Debian experimental sometime the coming month. The packaging progress is continuously discussed on the #freerdp channel on Freenode and can also be viewed on Github [17]. Review of revised XRDP package Recently, Dominik George from Teckids e.V. [18] contacted me about reviewing their effort of updating the Debian package xrdp, which currently is in ITA state [19]. Feedback has been provided and I am waiting for a ping from his side so that I can take some (ideally) final looks at the package and sponsor the upload. Work on Debian Edu related packages This month, I spent a couple of hours of work on several Debian Edu related tasks, some of them induced by problems at local school sites we support.

Fix the gosa package in Debian unstable [20]
Document a switch-over to systemd-networkd for Debian Edu jessie notebooks [21]
Help out in fixing outstanding issues in ldap2bind [22]
Upload a new shutdown-at-night package version to Debian unstable [23]
Fix some icon issues in the italc package [24]
Take a first glance at packaging terminal-quest [25]
Playing with the Lego Mindstorm (NXT) tools

Work on Debian LTS My 8h-portion of work for the Debian LTS Project, I performed at the very end of February. With the Debian squeeze LTS EOL date on 29th February, I saw to finalizing my personal open todos regarding Debian squeeze LTS, which basically was getting two CVE issues fixed in the lxc package [26]. The rest of the work hours has been spent on helping out the Security Team of Debian with open CVE issues in Debian wheezy packages:

Providing a .debdiff for gosa in Debian wheezy (addressing CVE-2015-8771 and CVE-2014-9760)
Investigating an open issue in smarty3 (CVE-2014-8350) and providing a recommendation on how to handle that (which is: pick the latest smarty3 3.1.21-1 from Debian jessie and provide that to users of Debian wheezy)
Taking a first look at pdns regarding a fix for CVE-2014-7210 in Debian wheezy

Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In December, 113.50 work hours have been dispatched among 9 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

Antoine Beaupr did 11.5h.
Ben Hutchings did 15 hours (out of 15 hours allocated + 10 extra hours remaining, meaning that he still has 10 extra hours to do over February).
Chris Lamb did 18 hours.
Guido G nther did 13 hours (out of 12 hours allocated + 1 remaining).
Mike Gabriel did 16 hours (8 hours allocated + 8h remaining).
Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 18 hours (out of 12h allocated + 8.50 remaining, thus keeping 2.50 extra hours for February).
Scott Kitterman did 8 hours.
Thorsten Alteholz did 30 hours.

Evolution of the situation As expected, we had a small drop in the amount of hours sponsored. New sponsors (re-)joined but others stopped too (Gree this time) mostly balancing the result. We only lost 2 hours of sponsored work. It would be nice if we could invert that curve and actually start again to get closer to our objective of funding the equivalent of a full time position. Let s hope that the switch to wheezy as the version supported by the LTS team will motivate many companies relying on Debian 7 in their IT system. In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation is close to last month(17 packages in dla-needed.txt, 27 in the list of CVE). It looks like that having about 20 packages needing an update is the normal situation and that we can t really get further down given the time required to process some updates (sometimes we wait until the upstream authors provides a patch, and so on). Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold.

Platinum sponsors:

TOSHIBA (for 4 months)

Gold sponsors:

The Positive Internet (for 20 months)
Blablacar (for 19 months)
Linode LLC (for 9 months)

Silver sponsors:

Domeneshop AS (for 19 months)
Universit Lille 3 (for 19 months)
Trollweb Solutions (for 17 months)
Nantes M tropole (for 13 months, renewal after a small break)
University of Luxembourg (for 11 months)
Dalenys (for 9 months)
Univention GmbH (for 5 months)
Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 5 months)

Bronze sponsors:

David Ayers IntarS Austria (for 20 months)
Offensive Security (for 20 months)
Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 20 months)
Evolix (for 19 months)
Freeside Internet Service (for 19 months)
MyTux (for 19 months)
Linuxhotel GmbH (for 17 months)
Intevation GmbH (for 16 months)
Daevel SARL (for 15 months)
Bitfolk LTD (for 14 months)
Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 14 months)
Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 13 months)
NUMLOG (for 13 months)
WinGo AG (for 12 months)
Ecole Centrale de Nantes LHEEA (for 8 months)
Sig-I/O (for 6 months)
Entr ouvert (for 4 months)
Adfinis SyGroup AG

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This article describes how to use systemd-networkd on Debian Edu 8.x (aka jessie) notebooks. What we have to deal with? At the schools we support we have several notebooks running Debian Edu 8.x (aka jessie) in the field. For school notebooks (classroom sets) we install the Debian Edu Workstation Profile. Those machines are mostly used over wireless network. We know that Debian Edu also offers a Roaming Workstation Profile at installation time, but with that profile chosen, user logins create local user accounts and local home directories on the notebooks (package: libpam-mklocaluser). For our customers, we do not want that. People using the school notebooks shall always work on their NFS home directories. School notebooks shall not be usable outside of the school network. Our woes... The default setup on Debian Edu jessie workstations regarding networking is this:

systemd runs as PID 1
ifupdown manages static network interfaces (eth0, etc.)
NetworkManager manages wireless network interfaces
for our customers we configured NetworkManager with a system-wide WiFi (WPA2-PSK) profile

We have observed various problems with that setup:

By default, network interface eth0 is managed by ifupdown (via /etc/network/interfaces):
```
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
```
Woe no. 1: In combination with systemd, this results in a 120sec delay at system startup.

In the last week of January, the project IT-Zukunft Schule (Logo EDV-Systeme GmbH and DAS-NETZWERKTEAM) had visitors from Norway: Klaus Ade Johnstad and Linnea Skogtvedt from LinuxAvdelingen [1] came by for exchanging insights, knowledge, technology, stories regarding IT services at school in Norway and Nothern Germany. This was our schedule... Tuesday

3pm Arrival of Klaus Ade and Linnea, meet up at LOGO with coffee and cake
4pm Planning the workshop, coming up with an agenda for the next two days (Klaus Ade, Andreas, Mike)
5pm Preparing OPSI demo sites (Mike, Linnea)
8pm Gr nkohl and Rotkohl and ... at Traum GmbH, Kiel (Klaus Ade, Linnea, Andreas, Mike)

Wednesday

8.30am more work on the OPSI demo site (Mike, Linnea)
10am pfSense (esp. captive portal functionality), backup solutions (Klaus Ade, all)
11am ITZkS overlay packages, basic principles of Debian packaging (Mike, special guests: Torsten, Lucian, Benni)
12am-2pm lunch break
2pm OPSI demonstration, discussion, foundation of the OpsiPackages project [2] (Mike)
4pm Puppet (Linnea)
7pm dinner time (eating in, Thai fast food :-) )
20pm Sepiida hacking (Mike, Linnea), customer care (Andreas, Klaus Ade)
22:30pm zZzZzZ time...

Thursday

In January 2016 I was finally able to work on various FLOSS topics again (after two months of heavily focussed local customer work):

Upload of MATE 1.12 to Debian unstable
Debian LTS packaging and front desk work
Other Debian activies
Edu Workshop in Kiel
Yet another OPSI Packaging Project

Upload of MATE 1.12 to Debian testing/unstable At the beginning of the new year, I finalized the bundle upload of MATE 1.12 to Debian unstable [1]. All uploaded packages are available in Debian testing (stretch) and Ubuntu xenial by now. MATE 1.12 will also be the version shipped in Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS. Additionally, I finally uploaded caja-dropbox to Debian unstable (non-free), thanks to Vangelis Mouhtsis and Martin Wimpress for doing first steps preparations. The package has already left Debian's NEW queue, but unfortunately has been removed from Debian testing (stretch) again due to build failures in one of its dependencies. Debian LTS work In January 2016 I did my first round of Debian LTS front desk work [2]. Before actually starting with my front desk duty, I worked myself through the documentation and found it difficult to understand the output of the lts-cve-triage.py script. So, I proposed various improvments to the output of that script (all committed by now). During the second week of January then, I triaged the following packages regarding known/open CVE issues:

isc-dhcp (CVE-2015-8605)
gosa (CVE-2015-8771, CVE-2014-9760)
roundcube (CVE-2015-8770)

Antoine Beaupr did 8h for his first month of work on LTS.
Ben Hutchings did 20 hours (out of 15 hours allocated + 15 extra hours remaining, meaning that he has 10 extra hours to do over January).
Chris Lamb did 12 hours.
Guido G nther did 9 hours (out of 8 hours allocated + 2 remaining, thus keeping 1 extra hour for January).
Mike Gabriel did nothing (the 8 hours allocated are carried over for January).
Rapha l Hertzog did 21.25 hours (18h allocated + 3.25h taken over from Mike s unused hours of November).
Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 15 hours (out of 18.25h allocated + 2 remaining + 3.25 taken over from Mike s unused hours of November, thus keeping 8.50 extra hours for January).
Scott Kitterman did 8 hours.
Thorsten Alteholz did 21.25 hours (out of 18.25h allocated + 3 hours taken over from Mike s unused hours of November).

Evolution of the situation We lost our first silver sponsor (Gandi.net, they prefer to give the same amount of money to Debian directly) and another sponsor reduced his sponsorship level. While this won t show in the hours dispatched in January, we will do a small jump backwards in February (unless we get new sponsors replacing those in the next 3 weeks). This is a bit unfortunate as we are rather looking at reinforcing the amount of sponsorship we get as we approach Wheezy LTS and we will need more support to properly support virtualization related packages and other packages that were formerly excluded from Squeeze LTS. Can you convince your company and help us reach our second goal? In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation is close to last month. It looks like that having about 20 packages needing an update is the normal situation and that we can t really get further down given the time required to process some updates (sometimes we wait until the upstream authors provides a patch, and so on). Thanks to our sponsors We got one new bronze sponsor but he s not listed (he did not fill the form where we request their permission to be listed).

Platinum sponsors:

TOSHIBA (for 3 months)

Gold sponsors:

The Positive Internet (for 19 months)
Blablacar (for 18 months)
Linode LLC (for 8 months)

Silver sponsors:

Domeneshop AS (for 18 months)
Universit Lille 3 (for 18 months)
Trollweb Solutions (for 16 months)
University of Luxembourg (for 10 months)
Rentabiliweb Group (for 8 months)
Univention GmbH (for 4 months)
Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 4 months)

Bronze sponsors:

David Ayers IntarS Austria (for 19 months)
Offensive Security (for 19 months)
Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 19 months)
Evolix (for 18 months)
Freeside Internet Service (for 18 months)
MyTux (for 18 months)
Linuxhotel GmbH (for 16 months)
Intevation GmbH (for 15 months)
Daevel SARL (for 14 months)
Bitfolk LTD (for 13 months)
Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 13 months)
Gree, Inc. (for 12 months)
Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 12 months)
NUMLOG (for 12 months)
WinGo AG (for 11 months)
Ecole Centrale de Nantes LHEEA (for 7 months)
Sig-I/O (for 5 months)
Entr ouvert (for 3 months)

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December 2015 was a month mainly dedicated to work for local contractors (local schools mainly) and my employer (University of Kiel, Git server migration). At the end of the month I had the privilege of attending the 32c3 ([1]) where we had a little sprint for the Arctica Project. Thanks to my family and esp. to my wonderful wife for letting me attend this always fascinating event at the end of each year. Horde Hacking One of my local customers is really interested in using a non-gated-community mail provider, so he asked me to host his company's mail addresses on my mail company's server. Something I regularly don't offer (anymore) except for dear friends and very patient customers. This customer sponsored several more work hours on hacking on the Kolab_Storage code in Horde and proposing bug fixes upstream [2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. Thanks for supporting my work on the Horde Groupware Framework. Thanks to Horde upstream maintainers (esp. Michael Rubinsky) for reacting on my bug submissions so promptly. Debian and Debian LTS Locally, I did a lot of work for our Debian Edu / Skolelinux customers again this months. read more

Yesterday, I did a bundle upload of all MATE 1.12 related packages to Debian unstable. Packages are currently building for the 22 architectures supported by Debian, build status can be viewed on the DDPO page of the Debian MATE Packaging Team [1] Again a big thanks to the packaging team. Martin Wimpress amongst others did a fabulous job in bumping all packages towards the 1.12 release series before the Christmas holidays. Over the holidays, I was able to review his work (99% perfect) and upload all binary packages to a staging repository. @Martin Wimpress: It is really time that we make a DM (Debian Maintainer) out of you!!! After testing all MATE 1.12 packages on a Debian unstable system, I decided to do a bundle upload yesterday. Lessons learned about bundling Debian uploads It absolutely makes sense to hold back package uploads of a project like the MATE desktop until all relevant packages are reviewed, pre-built and tested. When releasing MATE packages via the team's packaging Git [2], there are normally two actions to be taken on a package release:

commit "upload to unstable (debian/<pkg-version>)
tag that commit with "Debian release <pkg-version>

When reviewing so many Git projects, it is always problematic that people commit something else during the review phase. Especially, if the review work involves many packages (i.e., Git packaging repos) and requires several days or even weeks to get finished. read more

During our development sprint at 32c3 [1] and remote, we managed to get our--long awaited--mailing list server online:

Happy subscribing to those who are interested in remote desktop computing on Linux. Disclaimer: Please note that the Arctica Project is still in its infancy and we hope to have first releases during the upcoming year. Also we actively and intensively continue maintenance of what was formerly known as NX (version 3) [2]. light+love
Mike [1] https://events.ccc.de/category/32c3/ (traditionally down during the event)
[2] https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs

The force re-awakens. Jolla has received financing to continue the development of Sailfish OS. For futher reading, see...
https://blog.jolla.com/jolla-back-business/ People, please consider switching over to the Jolla phone and (hopefully) to the upcoming Jolla tablet. Stop using gated community [1] products [2,3]. The efforts done by Jolla on non-gated mobiled hardware is essential and should be supported by buying those products (i.e., help generating revenue). Providing Jolla with financial support can be one means of helping open-sourcing the Sailfish OS UIX developed by Jolla. I wish everyone reading this a good transition into 2016 and a fine 'Twelfth Night' (German: Rauhn chte) period. light+love from 32c3 [4]
Mike [1] https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7550-opening_event#video
[2] http://www.apple.com/iphone/
[3] http://www.android.com/
[4] https://streaming.media.ccc.de/32c3/

Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In November, 114.50 work hours have been dispatched among 8 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

Ben Hutchings did 5 hours only (out of 15 hours allocated + 5 extra hours remaining, meaning that he has 15 extra hours to do over December).
Chris Lamb did 13 hours (12h allocated + 1h remaining).
Guido G nther did 10 hours (out of 8 hours allocated + 4 remaining, thus keeping 2 extra hours for December).
Mike Gabriel did 6.5 hours only (out of 8 hours allocated + 8 hours remaining, the 9.5 unused extra hours have been dispatched to others for December).
Rapha l Hertzog did 21.25 hours.
Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 19 hours (out of 21h allocated, thus keeping 2 extra hours for December).
Scott Kitterman did 8 hours.
Thorsten Alteholz did 21.25 hours.

Evolution of the situation We lost one hour of funding for December due to a sponsor not renewing, and we don t have any new sponsor lined up right now. There s another sponsor who will reduce his sponsorship starting with 2016. While the situation is relatively healthy right now, we should continue the efforts to find new sponsors, both to ensure we can cover more software in wheezy and to better share the costs: having many small sponsors is more resilient than relying on a few big ones. And we still haven t reached our second goal of funding the equivalent of a full-time position. In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation is close to last month: the dla-needed.txt file lists 19 packages awaiting an update (2 less than last month), the list of open vulnerabilities in Squeeze shows about 22 affected packages in total (1 less than last month). Thanks to our sponsors The new sponsors are in bold.

Platinum sponsors:

TOSHIBA

Gold sponsors:

The Positive Internet (for 18 months already)
Blablacar (for 17 months already)
Linode LLC (for 7 months already)

Silver sponsors:

David Ayers IntarS Austria (for 18 months already)
Domeneshop AS (for 17 months already)
Universit Lille 3 (for 17 months already)
Trollweb Solutions (for 15 months already)
Gandi SAS (for 12 months already)
University of Luxembourg (for 9 months already)
Rentabiliweb Group (for 7 months already)
Univention GmbH (for 3 months already)
Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 3 months already)

Bronze sponsors:

Offensive Security (for 18 months already)
Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 18 months already)
Evolix (for 17 months already)
Freeside Internet Service (for 17 months already)
MyTux (for 17 months already)
Linuxhotel GmbH (for 15 months already)
Intevation GmbH (for 14 months already)
Daevel SARL (for 13 months already)
Bitfolk LTD (for 12 months already)
Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 12 months already)
Gree, Inc. (for 11 months already)
Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 11 months already)
NUMLOG (for 11 months already)
WinGo AG (for 10 months already)
Ecole Centrale de Nantes LHEEA (for 6 months already)
Sig-I/O (for 4 months already)
Entr ouvert

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"It" has arrived [1]. Finally... Summary first... In a nutshell: Support Jolla, support the Mer Project, support the development of Sailfish OS!!! If you are brave enough, even get a Jolla device yourself and find out what it's like. Impressions then... First impression... Go and get one yourself. Jolla smartphones are awesome. Second impression... Wow, there are some bugs here and there that require being fixed. Dropping the idea of giving away Jolla phones for X-mas to family members for now... Third impression... The Jolla Oy company currently goes through some sort of a death valley [2] that startups regularly face. Let's keep fingers crossed that the company survives. Well, then... Fourth impression... The hosting location of the source code of the free parts of the SailfishOS is not always evident. I am still investigating this... Especially software offered via http://openrepos.net does not always come with a reference to the source code of provided binary blobs. Overall impression... If you are a nerd or brave enough otherwise, go and get one!!! Especially if your N900 gradually starts falling apart. Personally, my impression is that the Jolla smartphone is the best of an "up-to-date" Free Software phone, we can get at the moment. read more

November 2015 was a month where I could not work on much FLOSS, unfortunately. Due to family members and myself being ill, things got stalled and delayed. Local customer projects always receive prioritized attention in such phases. Ayatana Indicators As already posted in a separate article [1], I spent quite some time on studying the architectural design of Ayatana/Ubuntu Application Indicators. For the pure purpose of studying I forked various code projects around Indicators and tested them on Debian unstable. Unfortunately, I did not come to a point where things really started working at runtime. Git projects of the various Ayatana Indicators compenents can be found on Github [2]. Debian and Debian LTS For Debian LTS, I had to dispatch several of the open hours to other team members, because things got delayed here. I spent 6.5h on backporting a patch for CVE-2015-1335 [3] to lxc 0.7.x (as found in Debian squeeze and Ubuntu 12.04) [4]. This is still work in progress and I hope for a solution before X-mas. Locally, I did a lot of work for our Debian Edu / Skolelinux customers, but there has not been much to contribute back to the FLOSS realm, so far. read more

October 2015 has been mainly dedicated to contracted/payed work. Only a few issues I could address during the last month:

Fix FTBFS of Arctica Greeter on non-Ubuntu systems
Co-working on renewed Xinerama support in nx-libs
Development of GOsa Password Management Add-on
Improving Debian Edu main server upgrade documentation (from Debian Edu squeeze to Debian Edu jessie)
Fixing my personal Horde Groupware installation for access via mobile devices
Learning Dovecot et al.

Arctica Project While having a week off from work, I managed to get Arctica Greeter to build on non-Ubuntu systems. The issue was very simple. The build crashed during the test suite run and it was caused by the XDG_DATA_DIRS variable not being set in my clean build environment. Furthermore, I added various more session type icons to Arctica Greeter (XFCE, LXDE, MATE, OpenBox, TWM, Default X11 Session, etc.) and also rebased the Arctica Greeter code base against all recent commits found in Unity Greeter for Ubuntu 15.10 / upcoming 16.04. Together with Ulrich Sibiller, I continued our work on the new Xinerama implementation for the remote X11 server nxagent (used as x2goagent in X2Go). However, this is unfortunately still work in progress, because various theoretical monitor layout issues became evident that require being handled in the new code before it can get merged into nx-libs's current 3.6.x branch. Also, I managed to do some little work on https://arctica-project.org, the still too rudimentary project homepage. read more

As many (Debianic) people possibly know, the appindicator support (libindicator, libappindicator, etc.) in Debian is very weak and outdated. Various native indicators (e.g. indicator-* packages , where * is "datetime", "sound", "session", etc.) are missing or unmaintained in Debian and neither is the indicator-application service available (a service that allows other applications e.g., like the nm-applet tool to dock to the indicator area of the desktop's panel bar). Furthermore, no recent appindicator related uploads have been seen in Debian (last seen uploads are from 2013). I recently e-mailed with Andrew Starr-Bochicchio, one of the Ayatana Packaging team members, about the current Debian status of indicator packages specifically and Ayatana packages [1] in general. The below information summarizes (I hope) what I got from the mail exchange: read more

Having ordered a Jolla smartphone in the last week of September 2015, I already accepted by now that possibly Jolla smartphones don't really exist. But today (finally!) after six weeks of acceptance... / waiting... I received a mail with the below subject:

    Subject: Jolla Shop: Shipping confirmation for order #500010511

Maybe Jolla smartphones do really exist... Let's see if that phone will be a venerable successor for my beloved N900.
\o/ .oO ( Hurray ! )
I will keep you posted, so stay tuned...
light+love
Mike

For a school customer here in Nothern Germany, I developed another GOsa Add-On this week, the Add-On's name is: Password Management Add-On for GOsa (gosa-plugin-pwreset). This password management and reset tool allows one to administratively mass-reset user passwords in GOsa based on various approaches.

A CSV file can be uploaded containing user IDs and new passwords. The CSV file format for this is: comma-separated, no quotes, two columns (<uid>, <userPassword>).
An organizational unit of the LDAP tree can be selected and for all user accounts in that section of the LDAP tree (i.e., the selected OU and all sub-OUs), new passwords can be set. The passwords will get auto-generated when using this approach.
Other approach needed? Please get in touch and provide me with a description of your potential use case.

Before passwords are actually changed, the site admin has various options:

Passwords can be adapted on screen (also the auto-generated passwords).
Password changes for individual users can be skipped by unticking the user's "Really?" checkbox.
Expect more features to come...

The source code of this new GOsa Add-On is available on Github [1] and has also been uploaded to Debian's NEW queue already. light+love
Mike [1] https://github.com/gosa-project/gosa-plugin-pwreset

Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In September, 71.50 work hours have been dispatched among 7 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

Ben Hutchings did 9 hours (out of the 14.5 hours that he had allocated, he will catch up in October).
Guido G nther did 8 hours.
Mike Gabriel did 16 hours (8 assigned + 8 remaining from month before).
Rapha l Hertzog did 8 hours.
Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 14.5 hours.
Scott Kitterman did nothing out of the 4 hours allocated. He will catch up in October.
Thorsten Alteholz did 14.50 hours.

Evolution of the situation October is back to the highest level of funding with 85.5 hours funded. The late sponsors have all caught up now. And next month will again rise to a new record with multiple sponsors having joined up. So far we already have two new silver sponsors (Universit Jean Monnet de Saint- tienne and Univention GmbH) and a new bronze sponsor (Entr ouvert). Many thanks to them! With those sponsors we crossed the 50% mark that was our first objective. \o/ But we still need more support to reach our second goal of funding the equivalent of a full time position. That said the increased level of support already allows us to do a better job in some areas that have been neglected : I asked the paid contributors to work towards providing mysql-5.5 in squeeze since version 5.1 is no longer supported by Oracle. We need beta testers to test the upgrade, see this message on the mailling list. In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation is close to last month: the dla-needed.txt file lists 15 packages awaiting an update (3 less than last month), the list of open vulnerabilities in Squeeze shows about 23 affected packages in total (7 less than last month). Thanks to our sponsors The new sponsors are in bold.

Gold sponsors:

The Positive Internet (for 16 months already)
Blablacar (for 15 months already)
Linode LLC (for 5 months already)

Silver sponsors:

David Ayers IntarS Austria (for 16 months already)
Domeneshop AS (for 15 months already)
Universit Lille 3 (for 15 months already)
Trollweb Solutions (for 13 months already)
Gandi SAS (for 10 months already)
University of Luxembourg (for 7 months already)
Rentabiliweb Group (for 5 months already)
Univention GmbH
Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne

Bronze sponsors:

Offensive Security (for 16 months already)
Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 16 months already)
Evolix (for 15 months already)
Freeside Internet Service (for 15 months already)
MyTux (for 15 months already)
Linuxhotel GmbH (for 13 months already)
Intevation GmbH (for 12 months already)
Daevel SARL (for 11 months already)
FOSSter (for 11 months already)
Bitfolk LTD (for 10 months already)
Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 10 months already)
Gree, Inc. (for 9 months already)
Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 9 months already)
NUMLOG (for 9 months already)
WinGo AG (for 8 months already)
Ecole Centrale de Nantes LHEEA (for 5 months already)
Sig-I/O
Entr ouvert

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Here comes my "monthly" FLOSS report for August and September 2015. As 50% of August 2015 had been dedicated to taking some time off (spending time in Sweden with the family), it happened that even more workload had to be processed in September 2015.

Completion of MATE 1.10 in Debian testing/unstable and Ubuntu 15.10
Contribution to Debian LTS, Debian packaging
Development of GOsa Plugin SchoolManager
Automatic builds for Arctica Project
Forking Unity Greeter as Arctica Greeter (with focus on the remote logon part inside Unity Greeter)

Received Sponsorship My monthly 8h portion of working for the Debian LTS project I had to dispatch from August into September. Thus, I received 16h of paid work for working on Debian LTS in September 2015. For details, see below. Thanks to Raphael Hertzog for having me on the team [1]. Thanks to all the people and companies sponsoring the Debian LTS Team's work. The development of GOsa Plugin SchoolManager (for details, see below) was done on contract for a school in Nothern Germany. The code will be released under the same license as the GOsa software itself. Completion of MATE 1.10 in Debian testing/unstable and Ubuntu 15.10 In the first half of September all MATE 1.10 packages finally landed in Debian testing (aka stretch). Martin Wimpress handled most of the packaging changes, whereas my main job was being reviewer and uploader of his efforts. Thanks to John Paul Adrian Glaubitz for jumping in as reviewer and uploader during my vacation time. read more

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