blogging (1-170) life; title=Backports as an official Debian service
* backports.org currently lacks a security team and infrstructure, like
testing has. Currently it's possible that someone uploads a package and
stops caring and nobody notices. I guess the people running backports.org
are aware of this and do their best to prevent it (and afaik dont really
want backports.org to become official) but for an official backports
service I think this issue needs to be tackled. What do you think?
* I also like backports to become officially endorsed and supported as I
would like stable to continue to have no new features introduced.
[1 EtchAndAHalf] and LennyAndAHalf being the exceptions to this rule,
though I see some (currently only potential) problems in the way it's
handled now.
[1] http://wiki.debian.org/EtchAndAHalf
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Sun, 4 May 2008 16:49:15 +0200
blogging (1-169) life; title=Are changelog entries a thing of the past or not?
* Do you write your changelog entries in past or presence? Policy 4.4
doesn't recommend anything.
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Sun, 4 May 2008 13:33:34 +0200
blogging (1-168) life; title=friendly fire
* [1 Sune], I have begun to think that it might actually be useful if many
people replied to this kind of backscatter and make sure, that the
mailsystem works as intended. Mail gets delivered. (Or not, as it's
recognized as spam. Something which is possible in 2008.)
[1] http://pusling.com/blog/?p=68
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Sun, 4 May 2008 01:52:47 +0200
blogging (1-167) life; title=working firewire kernels for sid updated
* Just a quick note: I've updated my sid kernel repository (the one which the
only change of enabling the old firewire stack along with the new one) to
2.6.24-6, the old [1 instructions] still apply.
* Unfortunatly my pegasos2 died after building that package in march, so from
now on I will only provide packages for amd64 and i386. But you can use my
sources and trivially rebuild them :-)
[1] http://layer-acht.org/blog/debian/#1-155
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Mon, 28 Apr 2008 10:33:15 +0200
blogging (1-166) life; title=oldschool certified signature
* This is a [1 certified signature] of mine, accompanied by my second tie on
the right. I expect to wear it as often as my first tie, that is about twice
in ten years :-)
* The document in question is part of three of its kind and they are used to
officially found the [2 OLPC Deutschland e.V.] association...
<img src="http://layer-acht.org/100_2208_400.jpg" />
* [3 Congrats to the state of New York and its citizens]!
[1] http://layer-acht.org/100_2208_1024.jpg
[2] http://wiki.olpc-deutschland.de
[3] http://www.nyvv.org/boblog/2008/04/23/libertyvote-leaves-new-york/
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Thu, 24 Apr 2008 22:23:04 +0200
blogging (1-165) life; title=community planets
* The planets on [1 planet.debian-community.org] are up again, sorry for the
delay in getting this fixed. The reason was a hardware failure of the raid
controller, then it took some time to find a new machine and then I first
got very busy and then ill.
* If you are interested in another language planet for Debian contributors,
please [2 contact us], setting one up is a matter of minutes. And after
that, feeds can be added by editing a wikipage. Currently there are only
English, Italian and German planets.
* If you want to help with adminstrating the site, please contact me.
[1] http://wiki.debian-community.org/planets/
[2] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/d-community-discuss
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Mon, 21 Apr 2008 21:43:10 +0200
blogging (1-164) life; title=number three
* [1 Thijs], how about creating two planets, one for Debian content and one
for non-Debian content, and merge them on a third planet, which gets to be
called planet.debian.org?
[1] http://loeki.tv/log/archives/77-The-problem-with-Planet-Debian.html
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Mon, 21 Apr 2008 17:06:46 +0200
blogging (1-163) life; title=Almost Debian free weekend
* I just came home from Berlin where we founded the OLPC Germany association
("[1 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] http://www.olpc-deutschland.de
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Sun, 20 Apr 2008 20:18:25 +0200
blogging (1-162) life; title=4 months and eleven days
* I'm still ill with quite heavy fever, I feel like doing nothing, I'm even
to weak to walk the dog properly... but he copes well and is great as usual
:-)
* Thinking about Debian doesn't make me feel better at all, reading through
the [1 comments of lucas post] didnt help at all. Since 2000???! Gosh.
* Unfortunatly the [2 NM statistics] miss two important data points: 1. people
who made it thru NM and 2. people waiting for account creation. The second
is only "good" to attribute blame, the first would be nice to have, so one
could easily see, whether nowadays less people apply for NM or whether
there are just less people in NM because the process is faster now.
* I don't remember when exactly, but sometime in the past I resolved for
myself to only blog positive things here, I'm seriously considering to drop
this policy and poste a mean rant every day or so, either til Debian is
really dead or those things are fixed or I am kicked.
* Ironically it needs people to fix stuff, but yet most people in Debian are
overworked. Maybe we should try to get more people in...
* Besides fixing stuff and keeping up, there was also this thing called inno-
what?
* Also ironically I'm also and still very annoyed by whiners.
* Guess I will look for a book or a movie now.
[1] http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/blog/?p=286#comments
[2] http://heracles.corsac.net/~corsac/debian/nm/
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Wed, 16 Apr 2008 13:30:03 +0200
blogging (1-161) life; title=sick
* It seems spring has finally arrived in northern Germany and I'm laying in
bed, trying to get rid of a flu. So in case you are waiting for something
from me, you will have to wait a bit longer :-(
* Plans for today: stay in bed most of the time, eat properly, walk the dog
twice more and do the monthly upload of debian-edu-doc.
* /me sadly waves to [1 KiBi] - do what is good for you & have some fun!
[1] http://ikibiki.org//tags/debian/
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Tue, 15 Apr 2008 11:50:44 +0200
blogging (1-160) life; title=random bits
* [1 Instructions] how to use etchanhalf kernels are available too, please
report problems to the mailinglist mentioned there.
* I still have oldworld powerpc hardware to give away, if someone wants to
have those for testing the [1 new snd-powermac driver] or whatever, please
contact me. Appearantly my mail didn't make it to the powerpc list when I
originally sent it, so I've just resend it.
* Today I will switch the second PCs of my parents to Debian etch. They seem
to like it and "Gnome is not really different than Windows" ;-)
[1] http://wiki.debian.org/EtchAndAHalf
[2] http://q-funk.blogspot.com/2008/04/updated-alsa-driver-for-early-powerpc.html
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Wed, 9 Apr 2008 09:49:35 +0200
blogging (1-159) life; title=Extremadura details
* I thought the spanish region of Extremadura had 4 million inhabitants and
200000 computers running GNU/Linex, a custom Debian distribution.
* I was wrong. It's 1 million inhabitants and ca. 100000 computers running
Linex - which is a much better ratio :-)
* The exact number is not really known, because about 2000 computers (or
so, details...!) don't provide data back for some unknown reasons. Probably
a configuration detail.
* Details are sooo important, and I love that. But at the same time, details
are irrelevant (100000 or 102000...), I love that too.
* Personally, I think the Debian Edu developer gathering the last 3.5 days
here in Extremadura was very productive and fun. It was so productive,
there were so many fun, interesting and insightful discusssions, that
currently I can only think of one detail, I want to mention here, which
really isn't a detail, but something bigger. I'm very very happy about the
work which was put into [1 bug 311188] here, mostly by [2 Winnie]. #311188
is just a meta bug, the juice is in the details, all the bugs which are
blocking this bug.
* And as you are probably interesting in this detail, why we care so much
about this bug, let me explain: the blocking bugs of that bug will prevent
upgrades from Lenny to Lenny+1 from working without problems for Debian Edu
installations. That's why we care - it's only a detail, but an important
one.
* And now I'll run to get a last drink from the hotel bar, instead of
correcting details in this post. Thank you, Cesar y Jose, for arranging
this great meeting and everybody else, who makes Debian a fun thing to
work on details and the great picture!
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/311188
[2] http://www.der-winnie.de/blog/debian/
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Sat, 5 Apr 2008 23:40:30 +0200
blogging (1-158) life; title=Hardware and the magic of forth
* Last week, while I was already busier than I like, the cpu fan of my pegasos
powerpc server blew off, and the resulting heat then killed the CPU. Which
was quite a pain, as I used powerpc vservers on it, for which I had no
replacement hardware. Or so I thought.
* Time for an advertisment break: I'm giving away my oldworld powerpc macs,
if you are interested in a beige G3, a 7200 or 4400 powermac, contact me.
I doubt anyone will, these machines are more then ten years old. So I will
probably give them to recycling next week. Be fast!
* I'll also give away my pegasos2 board (and case) to the first person
asking.
* To make a two day story very short, I now run my vserver on a ten year old
iMac, the very first model in a translucent case with build-in monitor,
with 160 megabytes of RAM and 233 Mhz powerpc CPU. Yay. It's actually ok
for what I need it.
* The insane part is the booting. The hard disc has a MSDOS partition layout,
as this is what the pegasos uses. But the iMac of course needs a HFS
layout, so I need to use a boot CD, for which I've used a modified
installer CD, where I replaced the kernel and initrd with the one I want.
(Mostly because I didn't remember how to create a bootable CD on macs.) For
some reason, the mac wouldnt boot this CD directly, so I've decided to use
OpenFirmware (OF) to load yaboot (the bootloader) from CD manually and then
yaboot will boot the kernel which can mount its root filesystem even from a
disk with msdos partition layout :-)
* And now I'll tell you about the magic of forth in OpenFirmware - which was
only needed because I was stubborn and kept the kernel inside the directory
install/powerpc on the CD... In OF you need to seperate pathes with
backslashes, but with the OF installed on this iMac you can't type them!
(No comment on that.) But you can use forth to evaluate them...
* And so I use '" boot cd:,"(5C)install"(5C)yaboot" evaluate' in OpenFirmware,
in which I get a prompt through pressing alt-windows-O-F while powering the
machine on, to boot my main server at home. Easy.
* I don't intend to do this very often (it runs 24/7), my new server has a
XScale IXP422 266 mhz CPU and runs Debian armel :-)
* But more on this later, now I need to throw out more old hardware, stuff
I will never use again and which just takes physical space. Modern
hardware is [1 tiny] - as can be seen on this huge pic! :-))
* Oh, I almost stayed with powerpc: The "Conceptronic Grab'n'GO CH3WNAS" has
nice specs too, is a bit cheaper and should be able to run Debian as well,
but there are some missing bits until a 2.6 kernel will run and I wanted a
solution which works today. And the FSG-3 (has better specs, that is, more
RAM and more ethernet ports, allowing 4 vlans and) runs the new armel port
already, the sub architecture patches "just" needs kernel mainline inclusion
and there is no d-i support yet. But if you press the reset button on
poweron, it will query a bootp server for its own IP address and for a file
called zImage-recovery... :-)
* And for those who care about the finished FOSDEM 2008 videos: unfortunatly
I had even more hardware issues (which I refered to in the ... blog posting
last week), which blocked me from working on them. But I will resume this
work now (most of it is done by the computer anyway). Now, that I brought
my laptop to warranty repair and put the disk into my desktop... To be
clear: the laptop incident now is not the case I blogged about last week
when I just wrote "..." - that was another machine where I intended to
postprocess the videos on and now use as my laptop and to postprocess the
videos on. I guess now you can somewhat imagine what I thought when my
laptop broke two days ago on a harmless wednesday evening?
* Hardware. It's great when it works.
[1] http://www.g6eui.co.uk/FSG_Gallery/DSC00920.html
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Fri, 21 Mar 2008 12:20:00 +0100
blogging (1-157) life; title=too busy for words...
* I need/want to write a slightly more verbose posts about why I blogged this
short and cryptic post saying "hardware..." but, aeh, due to more hardware
problems I don't really have time for that. Doh.
* OTOH, if you happen to have about 300gb or more space on some server unused
and you are able to make some traffic too, I would very much like you to
contact me and mirror the DebConf video archive, so that we have another
backup.
* The source disk has a problem currently (it seems to be ok, but...) and we
have one mirror, which is what you access at [1 http://meetings-archive.d.n],
which is even backed up to a tape library. So in theory, we should be fine.
In practice there is Murphy and I would sleep better if I knew the data is
safe at yet another location.
* Anyone? (After DebConf8 I expect it to be 400gb data, btw...)
[1] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Thu, 20 Mar 2008 09:55:21 +0100
blogging (1-156) life; title=Hardware
* ...
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Sun, 16 Mar 2008 00:37:48 +0100
blogging (1-155) life; title=debian kernel packages with the old firewire stack
* [1 To] [2 cater] [3 the] [4 impressive] [5 number] [6 of] [7 Debian] [8 users] who cannot use the Debian
kernels in sid and lenny, I have decided to provides packages which just
one change: the old firewire enabled. That means, one has to blacklist one
or the other and one can continue to use Debian kernels even if one has to
do video work or anything else with firewire. Win!
* It's true, the new firewire stacks needs testing, bug reports and fixing. I
believe we get more of this, if users keep using Debian kernels and are not
forced to rebuild the kernel, to be able to use the hardware.
* The wiki page about the [9 Juju migration] explains how to blacklist one
stack. You probably will have to blacklist the modules already in the
initrd image (or not include all modules in them)...
* Packages for amd64, i386 and powerpc are available with apt from this repo:
deb http://layer-acht.org/debian sid 1394kernel
* Source is there as well, just replace deb with deb-src as usual. The version
number is higher than the current one in sid, but - by using a tilde - lower
than the next upload.
* I intend to provide those packages, updated whenever there is a new version
in sid, as long as firewire in Debian sid is fundamentally broken. And I
hope this won't be long! :-)
* After discussing this with maks he suggested to provide the old stack via
the linux-modules-extra-2.6 package. And then there is also the option
that Juju is finally getting usable. One or the other will happen
eventually ;-)
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/436267
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/449272
[3] http://bugs.debian.org/450836
[4] http://bugs.debian.org/441206
[5] http://bugs.debian.org/441179
[6] http://bugs.debian.org/435224
[7] http://bugs.debian.org/435062
[8] http://bugs.debian.org/434551
[9] http://wiki.linux1394.org/JujuMigration
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Mon, 10 Mar 2008 21:49:06 +0100
blogging (1-154) life; title=When did you stop using .doc?
* Advocating and using mpeg videos reminded me a lot of .doc documents... Just
say no. [1 Very interesting read], I'm really looking forward to even more
substancial news! Good things come to those who wait :-)
* BTW, if you used [2 oggconvert] successfully to create [3 Dirac] files, I'd
like to hear about it. It didn't work for me with the DV files from FOSDEM.
I've tried with latest [4 schroedinger] in sid and hit [5 #468766]. And
unfortunatly I know I won't have time to followup to it soon... I only
started to blog to share the very first [6 link] of this post (which you should
really read if you're interested in video and linux) and then got carried
away :-)
* Update: Thinking of it, the question should be: if you successfully played a
Dirac file on Debian, I'd like to hear about it :-) Encoding wasn't the
problem... I think I'll STF later for some Dirac files and try to play
them.
[1] http://www.advogato.org/person/rillian/diary.html?start=106
[2] http://packages.debian.org/oggconvert
[3] http://dirac.sourceforge.net/
[4] http://packages.debian.org/source/sid/schroedinger
[5] http://bugs.debian.org/468766
[6] http://www.advogato.org/person/rillian/diary.html?start=106
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Wed, 5 Mar 2008 12:26:46 +0100
blogging (1-153) life; title=FOSDEM 2008 Debian dev room videos sneak preview
* Somehow the title of this blog post makes me think of a very long german
word and doesn't sound really english to me. But I guess you either already
noticed or don't care or both :-)
* So, whatever: right now the encoding batch of the high resolution theora
videos from the [1 Debian dev room at FOSDEM] is running and the the low
resolution theora videos are being uploaded. Yay! These videos will become
available at [2 the usual place] within the next hours.
* These are unedited videos as they were recorded to hard disk in Brussels.
And even like this they already look really great, thanks to dvswitch and
the slidegrabber and they also sound really good! IMHO ;-) (And for sure,
the high res ones are much better than the low res ones...) Out of fourteen
talks, ten will need simple post-processing: just cutting away something in
the beginning and at the end. The other four are a bit more complicated, as
I'll need to grab from tape and cut them together.
* And there is significantly more stuff I want and will blog about these
recordings and our setup in general, but this will have to wait. It's 1:42 AM
and I'm a bit tired :)
* So I'll just say "thank you all who made this possible" (you know who you
are and I don't "only" mean the volunteers listed on [3 our event wiki page]
but all helpful people at FOSDEM) and have fun at (or watching the streams
from) the [4 Linux Audio Conference]!
* P.S.: "umount -l" made my day.
[1] http://fosdem.org/2008/schedule/devroom/debian
[2] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2008/fosdem/
[3] http://wiki.debian.org/FosdemVideo2008
[4] http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20080228.105314.bfebe2f3.en.html
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Fri, 29 Feb 2008 01:45:38 +0100
blogging (1-152) life; title=For those who are not going to FOSDEM
* <img src="http://layer-acht.org/going-to-fosdem.png" width="150"
height="89" />
* For those who are not going to FOSDEM, the DebConf video team aims to
provide live streams of all talks in the [1 Debian dev room] as
an [2 ogg theora stream]. I hope it will work out :-)
* Currently there is a single server behind that URL. If we see lots of
viewers we can add another server with round robin dns easily. Please
submit your offer in the teams irc channel or on the mailinglist, if you
already operated at streaming server for DebConf7 in Edinburgh that would
be best.
* And if you do attend FOSDEM please consider [3 helping the video team],
there are still about 20 positions to cover (operating the camera, the
audio mixer and the video mixer). All those jobs are easy and fun, if
you don't have to do them for the whole conference ;-)
[1] http://www.fosdem.org/2008/schedule/devroom/debian
[2] http://fosdem.debconf.org:8000/stream.ogg
[3] http://wiki.debian.org/FosdemVideo2008
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Thu, 21 Feb 2008 19:34:05 +0100
blogging (1-151) life; title=Dance like no one is watching
* Yesterday I decided to add a nice layout to my local ikiwiki setup. So I
browsed the [1 CSS market] and choose a layout originally developed by
Erwin Aligam, which you can see at [2 Winnies blog] in action.
* And then the expected/desired effect kicked in: inspired by the nice
layout I cleaned and reorganized the contents until late at night. Eye
candy can be useful indeed!
* And for those wondering about the title of this post: it's also the title
of my local wiki :-) Dance and look up the full quote!
[1] http://ikiwiki.info/css_market/
[2] http://www.der-winnie.de/blog/debian/
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Thu, 14 Feb 2008 11:02:56 +0100
blogging (1-150) life; title=Rain
* Rain is a four letter word.
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Sun, 20 Jan 2008 17:54:30 +0100
blogging (1-149) life; title=Running Etch on the XO-1
* As blogged on friday, it's quite easy to run [1 Etch on the OLPC XO-1]
laptop. I've now put my notes describing the neccessary steps on my own
webspace - the [2 OLPC page on the wiki] needs some more cleanup to make
it more useful again and I created that webpage of mine anyway, to document
my backports for the XO. So this was just an easy step to share my notes
with the world.
* Before creating a d-i image for the XO, I'll probably finish the
[3 sugar-base packaging] and upload it, as this is more urgent (or
relevant for development) than having a(nother) native installation method.
("Another" because I think there is some debootstrap based shell script
somewhere...)
[1] http://layer-acht.org/debian/olpc/
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/OLPC
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/444021
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Mon, 14 Jan 2008 00:17:32 +0100
blogging (1-148) life; title=xorg backports for etch updated
* I'm uploading new [1 backports of xorg for etch] at this moment. They
are based on what was on unstable on the 9th on January, which was
xorg 1:7.3+10. Thanks to XSF for their great work!
* I've also included a backport of [2 Andres Salomons xserver-xorg-video-amd]
package, as the one in sid is not uptodate enough for the OLPC laptop.
[1] http://layer-acht.org/debian/xorg-etch-backports/
[2] http://queued.mit.edu/~dilinger/sid/xserver-xorg-video-amd_2.7.6.5-1.dsc
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Mon, 14 Jan 2008 00:17:07 +0100
blogging (1-147) life; title=about Debian on the OLPC and OLPC Europe and more
* Originally I planned to post this with the title "Last night I slept with
300 people" but this night happened two weeks ago... It was the night
before the fourth and last day of the [1 24C3] were I slept in the gym :-)
Actually I also planned to blog on the third day but then this day turned
out to be really busy... and then I arrived home on new years eve and
suddenly it was a week later and now it's the 10th of January. Time flies
when you're having fun. And as you might have noticed it's not even the
10th anymore...
* Timewarp back to the chaos communication congress! I think it's safe to
say that the Debian booth at the 24C3 was a success. It was a nice meeting
(and storage) point for Debian people, we collected quite some donations
for t-shirts and stuff (the exact amount needs to be examined still) and
we were able to help various users and contributors answering Debian
specific questions of both kinds: how to install/configure/fix foo and
packaging and other development questions from a number of people.. And we
had a babelbox setup which was much better understood and perceived, once
I added a sign explaining it :-)
* Thanks a lot to the 24C3 organizers and the angels (thats how the congress
volunteers are called) for making such a smooth and interesting
conference as well as giving such a great space to the Debian booth!
And equally thanks a lot to all the people operating our booth! For those
who are interested to attend next year: roughly 64 talks were held in
english, and 26 in german. I saw about five events live...
* <img src="http://layer-acht.org/zero_day_exploit.jpg" width="640"
height="480" />
* The sign hung for about an hour unmodified...
* On the third day of the congress we had an [3 OLPC.de] meeting, which was
quite productive and resulted in us founding [4 OLPC Germany] this
monday. In the aftermath of this meeting I came up with the idea
of having an [5 OLPC Europe event at FOSDEM] in Brussels in February, which
by now has been accepted and scheduled by the FOSDEM organizers. Yay!
So if you are in Europe and involved or interested in the OLPC, please
mark the 23rd of February 15-17 localtime in your calendar :-) The idea of
these projects is probably best summarized with "think global, act local and
global", for more detail please read our [6 vision]. (And keep in mind
this is in its very early stages.) OLPC Europe should also become an
interface for all those european OLPC efforts which have been popping
up recently and which all take up ressources in Cambridge, the OLPC
"mothership", taking ressources away from the children of the world.
* Then on the last day of the 24C3 congress I also gave the DebConf7 "thank
you, Sponsor"-package to those four people from the [7 freifunk community],
who helped us out with accesspoints for Edinburgh. Much to my surprise and
joy, they were really happy about it! Funnily two of those four are also
among the three OpenWRT developers who ported OpenWRT to the OLPC laptop,
which I borrowed to them somewhat in return :-) And now we work together
in OLPC.de and .eu. Networking is sometimes really really fun.
* Fast forward to 2008. Two days ago I finanlly had the time to to run etch,
lenny and sid on the OLPC laptop (with wireless (including WPA), xorg and
sound working and dualbooting with the original fedora install) and then
yesterday I've created a usbstick which successfully booted a "d-i
prototype". Yay! And best of all (for me), most of the actual work was
done by other people, I just had to collect the pieces. My next steps will
be documenting what I did and prepare a d-i image which actually works. I
don't have pics yet (it's Debian running on a laptop, I guess you can
imagine this), so for now I will just post another picture I received some
three months ago and which made me incredibly happy at that time:
* <img src="http://layer-acht.org/openwrt_olpc.jpg" width="640"
height="423" />
* When I have a working d-i running on it, I'll post more pics.
[1] http://events.ccc.de/congress/2007
[2] http://berlin.ccc.de/~24c3_torrents/
[3] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Germany
[4] http://olpc-deutschland.de/
[5] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Europe/Fosdem
[6] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Europe/Vision
[7] http://global.freifunk.net/
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Fri, 11 Jan 2008 23:23:56 +0100
blogging (1-146) life; title=24C3 day two - 8h to complete a blog post
* It's noon now and half the attendees or so the day hasn't really begun.
Sure, some people here at the [1 24C3] in Berlin are having lunch already,
but most are having breakfast or not even that yet. As the Debian booth is
set up (mugs are sold out, bags almost...) and there are no interesting
talks for me at the moment, I'm having a second breakfast in the smokers
lounge is the cellar. Officially, this is the third non smoking congress
and inofficially it's the third time there is an official smoker place ;-)
This time, it's a lounge with comfortable sofas, ambient light and loud
music...
* About four weeks ago I was contacted by Martin Michlmayr and asked if the
video team could make use of some hardware donation a company wanted to
sponsor. I said yes, and so last week two boxes arrived at my house: a
small audio mixer, a Behringer XENYX 1202 with 12-channels and XLR and
chinch inputs, which is supposed to help us improve the audio quality in
small venues. The second box contained a TwinPact100, which is a video
converter box. It has an SVGA-input (supporting up to 1600x1200), an
SVGA-output (sending the same signal out) and DV (firewire) output (and
more features we don't really care about). So for us it's basically a
SVGA-passthrough box which also outputs a video stream (of a speakers
laptop in our use case) over firewire. So no more capturing of slides with
a normal camera, yay! Yesterday Ben Hutchings and me tested this box and
found it working, then Ben also fixed an issue with [2 dvswitch], which we
use to mix different firewire video streams together, probably even as
soon as FOSDEM again! Many thanks to [3 hitflip.de] for this nice
donation!
* When I arrived here this morning I hoped to see the [4 BabelBox] I set up
last night to be still running, and it was, yay! BabelBox is a d-i setup
which loops through an installation of Debian etch in 36 languages, mostly
using the graphical installer. And this will be running here for approx 72
hours non-stop resulting in 289 installations without a single keystroke
:) IMO it shows real nicely two of the three major strengths of d-i:
internationalisation and automatisation.
* I guess it's pretty unlikely that I'll find some time during the last two
days of the congress to take [5 Andre Salomons packages for the OLPC laptop]
and demonstrate d-i's third major feature: it's modular design. It's more
likely to be an excercise for next year though (I'll arrive home on the
31st..), here is too much stuff happening. Installing babelbox was just
following a good howto. In any case, there is a [6 OLPC.de] meeting
planned tomorrow at 12.30 noon at the Debian booth or in the Embedded
Corner. Just come along and look out for the green cluster of XOs :)
* And by now it's 8 PM - time flies when you're having fun. I just noticed
that my wireless connection is up since seven hours uninterrupted! Wow.
[1] http://events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Fahrplan/
[2] http://www.hitflip.de
[3] http://alioth.debian.org/projects/dvswitch/
[4] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/BabelBox
[5] http://queued.mit.edu/~dilinger/sid/
[6] http://olpc-deutschland.de
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Fri, 28 Dec 2007 20:07:16 +0100
blogging (1-145) life; title=Volldampf voraus
* "[1 Volldampf voraus]" ("full steam ahead") is the motto of this years
chaos communication congress, which should express a particular request
for talks and projects featuring forward looking hands-on topics.
If you are not attending check out the schedule anyway, it covers a huge
variety of topics and most of the events are in English and all should be
streamed live.
* Since about two hours the debian booth (located in the upper floor next
to the Embedded Corner) is finally set up (thanks to a bunch of friendly
debian people - we are still looking forward to welcome you to sit
behind the booth and answer peoples questions), the fourth slot of talks
is beginning now and in an hour I hope I'll find time for some food...!
* If you are at the congress and want to try the wireless mesh networking
provided by the freifunk community, you can either use OLSR or B.A.T.M.A.N
as routing protocols. Last night I've uploaded [2 batmand] and [3 olsrd]
packages to experimental, featuring those development versions which are
supposed to be used here. They are also available on my webserver for etch
and sid (follow the previous links).
[1] http://events.ccc.de/congress/2007/
[2] http://layer-acht.org/batmand/
[3] http://layer-acht.org/olsrd/
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Thu, 27 Dec 2007 15:05:22 +0100
blogging (1-144) life; title=HTML5 and the video tag
* Maybe you have heard about Nokia, or rather a Nokia employee speaking in
the name of the company, spreading FUD about ogg theora and proposing it
shouldn't be recommended in HTML5. [1 Read this article] from the metavid
blog to learn in 10min why it really is clueless FUD and nothing else.
Morons! And most probably that word is too friendly...
[1] http://metavid.ucsc.edu/blog/2007/12/11/the-attack-against-ogg-theora-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-proprietary-web/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 13 Dec 2007 10:02:46 +0100
blogging (1-143) life; title=third awesome blog post
* And hopefully my last :-)
* I've decided I'll stay with awesome and not go back to ion3. True, it
doesn't fully support xrandr, but so does ion. And it's on the [1 roadmap]
for awesome 2.1, so I figured I will probably switch between two screens
and only one maybe ten times or so, until the feature is there. And,
adding and removing screens is a PITA with ion as well.
* The second missing feature is a panel or the ability to run [2 docker],
but then, I only use this to run [3 nm-applet]. My current workaround is
to run [4 xfce4-panel] in tab9 and run nm-applet there. Looks a bit ugly,
but hey, it's tab9, I don't care (for the time being).
* Besides those two issues I'm really happy. It's fast, it's slick, it
doesn't get in the way, floating mode rocks, switching between modes
rocks, the default keyboard shortcuts make sense and I use the mouse less
often. Plus the author is a nice fellow. And by now it even got
documentation!
* Oh, another issue: The cat is gone. That's totally unacceptable. Therefore
I propose to fork awesome and bring back the cat and call the fork TWMFKAA ;-)
[1] http://awesome.naquadah.org/roadmap/
[2] http://packages.qa.debian.org/docker
[3] http://packages.qa.debian.org/network-manager-gnome
[4] http://packages.qa.debian.org/xfce4-panel
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 12 Dec 2007 20:06:55 +0100
blogging (1-142) life; title=not yet awesome enough
* While I'm still running awesome as my window manager currently and though I
do like it, I will switch back to ion on the next login. "Some XRandR
support" is not yet enough... it crashes when I add or remove a screen.
* Besides that, the only other thing missing is that I have not yet found
out how to use <pre>docker</pre> sensibly. Hints welcome.
* So overall: looks very promising, but not yet a feature complete
replacement for me. But good things will come to those who wait :-)
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sun, 9 Dec 2007 10:22:36 +0100
blogging (1-141) life; title=awesome reading
* When I was a kid, I often started to read a book and didn't do anything
until I finished it. This is what I did yesterday until this morning
again... :-) Nowadays I do this rarely, but if it's happens, I have a lot
of fun in a fictional world.
* Now that I finished the book I decided it's a good time to give awesome a
try. And unlike the last time, which was last week in a plane, I now also
have access to the documentation, which makes using it a lot easier :)
* I think I like awesome already, after just five minutes. Even if there are
three things I'm currently missing: runniny arbituary commands with F3,
ssh with F4 and the cute cat on the awesome webpage. I think it's totally
unawesome that it's gone!!!
* And for those wondering what awesome is: it allows me to say "good-bye
ion" :-)
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 8 Dec 2007 15:20:46 +0100
blogging (1-140) life; title=what is going on in Venezuela
* Obviously I don't know, but I guess that [1 this article] is much closer
to the truth than most of the news sites and magazines.
[1] http://www.gregpalast.com/fear-of-chavez-is-fear-of-democracy/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 5 Dec 2007 18:49:02 +0100
blogging (1-139) life; title=five in seven and four in one
* On friday the 16th I blogged that I hoped to manage to upload five package
in the next seven days and I've made it! Yay!
* Ok, for the last upload I cheated, I uploaded it 5 minutes after midnight
UTC, while normally I'm on MET :) The packages I uploaded were: [1 olsrd]
(new upstream release), [2 tuxmath] (new upstream release, I already
blogged about it), [3 tuxtype] (just adding Vcs-pseudo headers),
[4 debian-edu-doc] (made it through NEW already, yay, more in a dedicated
blog post soon) and [5 batmand] (closing ITP #405588, still in NEW. This
package was mostly prepared by Wesley Tsai, thanks and I'm looking forward
to meet you in December :)
* Yesterday I was too busy with RL and with preparing the upcoming
[6 Debian Edu r1 release] to blog about the above and now I'm also not
really in the mood to add more links and information (like how to provide
translations for tuxtype, tuxmath or debian-edu-doc...)
* Because my current mood is: happy and hungry! Very hungry.
* I've spent the morning reviewing the last four packages for the r1 edu
release, accepting them into our etch and sending [7 announcements], which
were eaten by a configuration problem. But the listmasters are aware
of the problem and I'm confident they'll resolve it soon. Otherwise
we can't send the release announcement out, something I'm really looking
forward to finally see happen after four months of work! The only things
left to do now are testing and finishing the release notes and the press
release :)
* Out for lunch!
[1] http://packages.qa.debian.org/olsrd
[2] http://layer-acht.org/blog/debian/#1-138
[3] http://packages.qa.debian.org/tuxtype
[4] http://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-doc
[5] https://www.open-mesh.net/batman
[6] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/roadmap
[7] http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sun, 25 Nov 2007 14:26:28 +0100
blogging (1-138) life; title=shiny and localized tuxmath
* Yesterday I've uploaded a shiny new upstream version of [1 tuxmath].
Besides many bugfixes, new "crystal" icons, hall of fame, a demo mode,
being able to track completed lessons and better configuration options
(you can create your own lessons now), this version also finally supports
localisation. Yay!
* But, as this feature is really new, there are only translations for dutch,
czech, norwegian bokmål and nynorsk available. So if you have a moment to
spare, please consider translating those 84 strings, which are probably
20-30 unique strings, the rest being variations. (Divided by 3, divided by
4, etc...)
* Please file them as [2 wishlist bugs against the package]. Thanks!
[1] http://packages.debian.org/tuxmath
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/tuxmath
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sun, 18 Nov 2007 12:47:51 +0100
blogging (1-137) life; title=first snow
* Inspired by a certain blog/foo post, I want to announce that I've seen my
first snow of this winter last night, too. Not enough to really cover the
ground, but a bit to at least give the impression the ground ist covered.
* I don't mind the cold, as long as it isn't raining. Since two days it's so
cold that the dog isn't muddy after walking him, and that's quite good.
Still I really look forward to be in Spain next friday, and little because
of the weather ;-)
* And I would be really happy if I manage to do five uploads to Debian
within the next seven days, though only three would already make me happy.
And now back to non-Debian work...
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 16 Nov 2007 12:05:44 +0100
blogging (1-136) life; title=new Debian stickers coming soon
* Some time ago I met Colle from the CCC who told me she could create
Debian stickers like the ones [1 seppy] used to make. And today I saw
the first preview:
<img src="http://layer-acht.org/blog/debian/debian-sticker.jpg" />
* If you want one or some, make sure you'll attend [2 24C3] or wait til we
meet the next time :-) Remember: good things...
* Thanks a lot to Colle for dealing with the printing!
[1] http://people.debian.org/~seppy/
[2] http://events.ccc.de/congress/2007/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 7 Nov 2007 19:02:36 +0100
blogging (1-135) life; title=The day the routers die
* [1 I suppose you better give it a try]. Wow.
* Unrelated, there is now [2 planet.it.debian-community.org] for the italian
(speaking) debian community. Yay.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_y36fG2Oba0
[2] http://wiki.debian-community.org/planets/it/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 30 Oct 2007 09:28:24 +0100
blogging (1-134) life; title=Debian contributor planets
* This blog post is long overdue, but mostly due to spending too much time on
Debian Edu (and to little on d-c.org), I haven't got around writing this.
* Since about a month an [1 english] and a [2 german] planet has been set up
as part of [3 debian-community.org] and is waiting for you to add your
feed. Yes, that's right, currently everybody can add any feed. This might
change, if/when this is abused, but currently we're still able to operate
in good faith :-) Just edit the "list of feeds".
* It's also trivial to create planets for other languages, in case you are
interested. Just drop by in #debian-community on OFTC and we'll set it up.
* And now, back to work, so that I can soon blog about some, as I think,
exciting news about Debian Edu.
[1] http://planet.en.debian-community.org/
[2] http://planet.de.debian-community.org/
[3] http://debian-community.org/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 26 Oct 2007 18:16:08 +0200
blogging (1-133) life; title=Small report from the meeting in Extremadura
* The last five days I've spent at the combined Debian Edu, FAI and CDD
meeting in [1 Mérida] in Extremadura, together with 17 others. The Debian
Edu / Skolelinux crowd was the biggest, followed by FAI, followed by CDD
people, though many were part of more than one project. "As usual" it was
great to meet many known faces and some unknown ones and to be able to
discuss stuff in [2 RL].
* Besides various small different things, I worked on the Debian Edu etch r1
release, our lenny roadmap (see the bottom of our [3 roadmap page] which
also covers etch r1) and the (technical side of the) german translation of
the [4 Debian Edu documentation]. Non edu related the new
[5 setupharddisk2] for FAI took most of my brain activity. And I've signed
all keys allready :-)
* We stayed at a very nice hotel in the even much nicer city of Merida,
which features a lot of roman ruins and history. For example, we walked
over the biggest roman bridge in the world! The only thing that was bigger
was the amount of good food we were forced to eat every day... Incredible.
This was my second visit to Merida and this time I finally managed to
visit the amphitheatre (with seats for 15000 people) and the Roman
theatre. (Unfortunatly the english page about [6 Emerita Augusta] is a
stub.) If you happen to come around that area make sure to spend some time
sight seeing, it is really worth it! People living in Merida literally
fear to rebuild their houses, because as soon as they start to dig, they
find something historical and have to turn their property into a museum
:-)
* In case you have not seen it yet, you should watch this small movie
from euro news about the [7 free software efforts in Extremadura].
Insightful and very good promotion, also to show around.
* Many thanks to César, José Luis and the Junta de Extremdura for hosting
such a great meeting! You rock!
* On a unrelated note, spam has gone crazy yesterday while traveling back,
15000 mails were not catched by my so far well working setup. ARG. I still
used to have a catchall setting, which was useful to give out addresses
like $company@mydomain, but now I will explicitly list those addresses and
disable catchall. And luckily for you I will not blog about every spam
mail I got... :) Generally I dont consider spam (the source of) evil, it's
money: as long as money rules the world, there will be spam. So since it's
a social problem, it is hardly solvable by technology. (That is, as long
as you want to receive mails from strangers, which I do.) IMO what's worse
than spammers are autoresponders to spam. Most of those 15000 mails were
auto-replies to spam. OMFSM.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mérida,_Spain
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Extremadura2007/Schedule
[3] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/roadmap
[4] http://wiki.skolelinux.no/DebianEdu/Documentation/Etch/
[5] http://faiwiki.informatik.uni-koeln.de/index.php/Setup_harddisks_2
[6] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerita_Augusta
[7] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nR8Oh0Js_lA
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 22 Oct 2007 15:27:56 +0200
blogging (1-132) life; title=mediawiki diffs and lazyweb
* Dear lazyplanet, I follow two mediawikis via reading the changes with RSS,
and I cannot really follow them well, as the diffs are not very readable.
For moinmoin wikis this is no issue, there are nice diff mails one can
subscribe to. Does anybody know a way to configure mediawiki, so that it's
possible to read the diffs? Or, an example of such a setup? If you do,
please contact me. Thanks.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 20 Oct 2007 17:15:56 +0200
blogging (1-131) life; title=Pleased
* Unfortunatly I couldn't attend yesterdays DebConf8 meeting, because
fortunatly an old friend of mine whom I haven't seen for almost five years
visited me. So I was very pleased when I came home later that evening and
could easily read the [1 minutes] provided by [2 meetbot]. I love it when
a plan comes together! :-)
[1] http://meetbot.debian.net/meetbot/debconf-team.20071015_1858.html
[2] http://meetbot.debian.net
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 16 Oct 2007 08:35:59 +0200
blogging (1-130) life; title=Home sweet etch
* All machines, virtual or not, at home now run etch. Yay. Actually, /me
powers up a seldom used server to upgrade that one too :-)
* Six more to go and then I'm ready for lenny ;-)
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 11 Oct 2007 14:31:44 +0200
blogging (1-129) life; title=meetbot to help IRC meetings
* On monday we held our first [1 Debian Edu IRC meeting] with the help of
[2 MeetBot]. MeetBot is just a very simple bot, actually it's a plugin for
[3 eggdrop], which can help with structuring a meeting, publishing logs
and writting the minutes. It's purpose is to help a human to chair a
meeting, not to chair the meeting on it's own. Because except for
publishing the logs it cannot do anything alone :-)
* Currently the bot idles in #debian-edu, #debconf-team and #debian-boot,
drop me a note if you are interested in trying it in another channel.
There's a wishlist and a small howto on it's homepage.
* Have fun (with shorter post-processing of meetings! :)
[1] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Meeting/
[2] http://meetbot.debian.net/
[3] http://packages.debian.org/eggdrop
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 10 Oct 2007 15:01:04 +0200
blogging (1-128) life; title=For those who think Debian is too picky
* Thanks kaol, [1 this comic] really makes my day! Best viewed in iceweasel
:-D
[1] http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/bonobo-conspiracy/?i=749
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 27 Sep 2007 12:48:38 +0200
blogging (1-127) life; title=Not quite a router
* Aigars, the fonera is a nice box, it justs lacks a second LAN port.
[1 See for yourself] :-)
[1] http://wiki.openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs/Hardware/Fon/Fonera
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 24 Sep 2007 16:22:40 +0200
blogging (1-126) life; title=Democracy as you knew it is over
* A new law is being made in germany, which will make consentual sex between
minors a crime, which has to be punished with four years of prison at
least, plus ending up in a sexual offenders database for life. I, for
one, do not welcome our new taliban overlords.
* These [1 two] [2 articles] explain the situation in full detail (in
german).
* In other news, it's 102 days until all electronic communication in germany
(as in the EU) will be logged for half a year. (Until a terrorist attack
happens which was planned for more than half a year...) This includes all
emails sent, the location data of all mobile phones, every webpage visited
and so on. From everybody. If you are in Berlin tomorrow, go [3 demonstrate].
I, for one, do not welcome George Orwells lack of imagination, 1984 looks
really pale today. (But it's still a good read.)
* My next blog post shall take place in teletubby land again and shall
feature smileys as well. Sigh.
[1] http://karlweiss.twoday.net/stories/4148132/
[2] http://karlweiss.twoday.net/stories/4227933/
[3] http://www.freiheitstattangst.de
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 21 Sep 2007 13:10:38 +0200
blogging (1-125) life; title=fixxx bugs like Joey Hess
* [1 Less than an hour]. Thanks! :-)
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/443213
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 19 Sep 2007 21:08:42 +0200
blogging (1-124) life; title=some simple backports
* [1 Bernd] blogged about the new version of gimp-plugin-registry he
packaged, which includes the cool new [2 GIMP Liquid rescale plug-in]
which I had to try out. It really rocks, though it is much slower than in
that video.
* Anyway, backports for etch are available at "deb http://layer-acht.org/debian etch backports"
Those are simple rebuilds of gimp-plugin-registry and opencv.
* If you replace backports with xorg or xorg-experimental you'll also find
rebuilds of xorg for etch, either from lenny or from experimental. They
are slightly outdated (built two weeks ago) and need to updated against
the newer sources, but they work for me.
[1] http://bzed.de/blog/gimp-plugin-registry_0.3.1-1
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NcIJXTlugc
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 15 Sep 2007 10:05:57 +0200
blogging (1-123) life; title=dancing and singing
* Today I'm dancing and singing. :-)
* In part because I've just uploaded a new version of [1 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.
[1] http://packages.debian.org/tuxmath
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 3 Sep 2007 10:14:24 +0200
blogging (1-122) life; title=nine days later
* I'm now only down to 55 unread mails, but I'm happy, as I'm now in the
region where those mails mean actual todo stuff.
* And, this weekend I've been mostly offline, having fun at a free festival.
Thus enjoying my second day without internet this year and my first day
without speaking or reading/writing english - though I enjoyed that much
less :-)
* [1 Joey], thanks for your suggestion to turn down the frequency of polling
mails. I'm happily polling every 30 minutes now too, and thinking of going
down to every 60 minutes.
[1] http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/inbox_zero/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 28 Aug 2007 16:31:19 +0200
blogging (1-121) life; title=Red Cross sued for using the red cross
* Various newspapers report that the health product giant Johnson & Johnson
is suing the Red Cross for using the red cross as a logo. Johnson &
Johnson registered the trademark in 1887, six years after the us-american
Red Cross started to use it. Needless to say, that a red cross has been in
use for much longer and that european Red Cross associations also exist
for quite some more years.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 20 Aug 2007 08:59:07 +0200
blogging (1-120) life; title=again
* Again I have 99 unread mails in my mailbox ;-)
* More than two weeks ago I watched [1 Inbox zero], which I recommend you
to watch if you have problems coping with your inbox, even if it mostly
boils down to "getting things done".
* /me smiles and continues to update tuxmath :-)
[1] http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=973149761529535925
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sun, 19 Aug 2007 14:45:08 +0200
blogging (1-119) life; title=Debians 24th birthday
* So Debian is now 14 years old - ignoring the timezone differences :-)
Thanks for all your contributions and have fun with Debian today and
everyday! ;-)
* While thinking about it, I remembered a question I was recently asked in
an interview to look into my crystal ball and tell how Debian will look
like in ten years. I couldn't really figure out a concrete answer, I just
said vaguely that I hope it changes in some ways, while I hope other
things stay like they are.
* What do you think?
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Thu, 16 Aug 2007 00:31:48 +0200
blogging (1-118) life; title=First three days of CCCamp
* It's shortly after midnight and day one of the cccamp is "over". Which
doesn't mean the "first" day is over at all, lots of intergalactic
hackerparties are going on and besides, most people didn't arrive today
but earlier.
* I guess the most amazing thing I've seen where two people forging two
different kinds of steel, something I haven't expected to see here at all
:) The atmosphere, the people and their projects, the light effects and
the venue are simply wow. The venue is an ex military airport turned into
an open air museum and now hosting the Chaos Communication Camp 2007 with
2000 participants coming from ma
ny countries and backgrounds and involved in a diversity of stuff.
* The Debian gathering currently is more private camping than a open booth,
though we have a huge tent to use, we have not really done so so far:
today it was more important to get a decent sun shade for where our
private tents are and relaxing and socialising...
* The above I wrote at the end of the first night and then yesterday I was
busy setting up the Debian village or corner in one of the huge Freifunk
tents and getting some backlog done. Now we are having some table space
(and some unused sofa space) next to the openWRT and the GnuRadio project,
which gives lots of opportunities for interesting discussions, plus there
are some workshops (mostly soldering) taking place in this tent as well.
* And now I'll go out to go to buy some tickets for a round flight above
the camp :-)
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 10 Aug 2007 15:56:06 +0200
blogging (1-117) life; title=blog recycling
* [1 This] makes me smile.
* And even the DM GR makes me smile, as I hope it will pass :-) [2 Stefano]
summarized nicely why I think DMs are a good thing.
* And "as usual" [3 Joey] came up with a new interesting thought: <i> The
interesting thing to consider is, if this vote fails, how can the bug be
fixed without another vote?</i>
[1] http://bjorn.haxx.se/debian/testing.pl?package=fai-kernels
[2] http://www.bononia.it/~zack/blog//posts/2007/07/me_on_DM.html
[3] http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/voting_on_sponsorship/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 27 Jul 2007 10:44:11 +0200
blogging (1-116) life; title=Tuareg...
* Half a year ago Tolimar [1 blogged about a book] called Tuareg, which
sounded very interesting, so I asked him to lend it to me, which he
did in Edinburgh. Last night, I decided to read a bit, to calm down
before going to sleep. At 5am I had finished the book... :) And I
must say, I really really liked it, including those two last chapters
Tolimar didnt like :) Not exactly a happy end, but IMO a very good end.
Recommended to read.
[1] http://blog.schmehl.info/Debian/book-review-tuareg
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 19 Jul 2007 13:51:33 +0200
blogging (1-115) life; title=nuclear power is safe and pigs can fly
* Hamburg is surrounded by four nuclear power plants, and two of those were
partly on fire two weeks ago. So far, so bad. Now a list from 2001
is [1 becoming public] which describes on 50000 pages (no joke) the
problems in one of the four. I guess Debian has less than 50000 known and
open bugs....
* Not to mention that nuclear waste needs to be stored securily for several
ten thousand years and that so far this problem has not been really solved.
* But I guess I don't care either: I guess the problems of war, hunger,
global warming and the fights for oil and clean water and food will become
much more pressing in a much shorter timeframe...
* So enjoy life like there is no tomorrow! But also keep in mind that there
might be a tomorrow or next year, and that you'd still want the earth to
be a nice place to be. And don't tell me I should stop smoking for my
future. If, I should stop it for my present well being.
* Back to virtual reality now...
[1] http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/0,1518,494850,00.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 17 Jul 2007 20:32:20 +0200
blogging (1-114) life; title=DebConf7 videos
* Not really any new videos yet, but at least the [1 existing videos] from
DebConf7 are now available in low and high quality.
* I'll keep you informed on the progress on providing the rest and possible
also with information how you can help.
* And I'm running ion3 again, yay! So much faster...
[1] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2007/debconf7/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 2 Jul 2007 17:33:50 +0200
blogging (1-113) life; title=Happy Camper
* [1 ikiwiki] rules my world! Today I switched [2 debian-community.org] and my
personal todo list to ikiwiki, and I must say, I'm impressed and happy.
Just being able to use svn+vim to edit and organize a wiki or more
generally, information, really rocks. Joey, thanks a swarm of fish for
ikiwiki!!
* On a somewhat, very loosly related note, I've decided to give up on gnome
and beryl, and go back to ion2 or maybe 3. Beryl and Gnome are nice and
fancy, and it's good to show others that Debian can be beautiful, but
a.) it's way slower than using ion as window manager. And b.) I'm now
running 2.6.21 and have been using [3 powertop]... ;) Maybe I'll come
back to a typical desktop UI with Lenny.. :)
* And, now you might ask, how is this related? I formerly used [4 Riot] as
Information Organisation Tool, which is written by the same author as ion.
That said, I totally want to run a free fork of ion3 with a proper licence.
* I *heart* debian stable with custom repositories! :)
[1] http://ikiwiki.info
[2] http://debian-community.org
[3] http://packages.qa.debian.org/powertop
[4] http://modeemi.fi/~tuomov/riot/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 30 Jun 2007 23:12:59 +0200
blogging (1-112) life; title=home again
* Incredible but true: from the three cities in three countries I've been in
today, Hamburg is the warmest.
* Managed to "read" half of my 11000 mails backlog today during the journey,
yay!
* Unpacked all the tech stuff on my bed and managed to do laundry already,
yay yay!
* Found a nice green surprise on my Desktop at home, when I came back. Yay
to more tech toys ;-)
* Missing DebConf again and already! Thanks to everyone who made it a great
experience, I'm looking forward to DebConf8 already :-)
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 25 Jun 2007 19:55:58 +0200
blogging (1-111) life; title=two weeks in Edinburgh
* Today it's been two weeks since I've landed in Edinburgh. On my trip I
starting writing a blog post which since then I haven't had time to
finish. By now my workload has become a lot less, but it's still to high
to finish that post, which is mostly about my involvement in OLPC, if I
remember correctly :-)
* I'll stop here now and finish that post later, so I can do some videoteam
and non-videoteam stuff, like preparing my talk about debian-comunity.org
and having fun and chats with other people. And creating another loldebian
blog post, which obviously has very high priority ;-)
* There is no rain in Edinburgh. Except maybe yesterday.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 21 Jun 2007 17:41:47 +0200
blogging (1-110) life; title=linuxtag was harmless fun
* I wrote this 15h ago:
* It's midnight, the sun is shining, below me are beautiful montains, partly
covered in snow. In less than 48h I will be home again.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 2 Jun 2007 15:14:41 +0200
blogging (1-109) life; title=towel day
* Today is [1 towel day] and after quite some real sunny days this morning
it's raining and lightning and thunder... I think I like a purely symbolic
towel day better ;-)
* Don't leave home without it.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towel_Day
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 25 May 2007 10:49:55 +0200
blogging (1-108) life; title=freedom is like health
* You will probably only see its real value and scope, when you have lost
it already.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 22 May 2007 13:51:09 +0200
blogging (1-107) life; title=mmmm i love unix and debian
* Converting all filenames from latin1 filenames to utf8? apt-cache search
tree utf ; sudo apt-get install convmv ; man convmv ; convmv -f latin1
-t utf-8 -r $path
* Add --notest for full flavor :)
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 16 May 2007 15:29:30 +0200
blogging (1-106) life; title=all numbers can be 0wned
* By clicking on [1 this link] you possible violate the DMCA again, it
contains yet another 0wned number. But it also has instructions how
to make up your own 128 bit number, which noone else can legally use
anymore - in countries where the DMCA is valid or can be enforced.
So, better don't click ;-) Or much rather, better do.
* If I were bored, I would probably play with the [2 vanity gpg key]
generator, to generate a very special gpg key, but I'm not bored :)
Also it's not quite so much fun, to start a script and wait.
[1] http://www.boingboing.net/2007/05/07/howto_own_a_128bit_n.html
[2] http://www.ccc.de/congress/2004/fahrplan/event/131.de.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 8 May 2007 14:03:49 +0200
blogging (1-105) life; title=another video and more licence joy
* [1 Sam] blogged about a talk he gave about the Debian project, which is
available as a video (in french) too. Since I believe
meetings-archive.debian.net should collect all (more or less relevant)
videos about Debian, I [2 copied it overthere] to preserve it for teh future.
* And once again, the licence fun strikes. Neither the video nor the slides
are accompanied with one. I have good faith that they are licenced freely,
but I'd like to know for sure...
[1] http://sam.zoy.org/blog/2007-05-07-bits-from-the-dpl-blog-talks-ftp-master
[2] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2007/etch-install-party-carrefour-du-numerique/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 7 May 2007 12:17:38 +0200
blogging (1-104) life; title=more uploads and less manual configuration
* Yesterday I did my first uploads of my own packages to Debian! Yay :)
Though nothing spectacular: fai-kernels to unstable, build against 2.6.20
and fixing a wishlist bug for adding a driver with is in the normal
kernels and fai-kernels to stable-proposed-updates fixing the same
wishlist bug.
* Then I decided to do a full backup over night and reinstall my laptop with
FAI in the morning, to see if all my (systems) configuration is now done
correctly and automatically. Well, now it is :-) And as I kept my
home-dir, everything looks (and is) the same as yesterday. Yay!
* With one exception: I threw editing files for network configuration on my
laptop away and switched to network-manager(-gnome). After reading
/usr/share/doc/network-manager/README.Debian I added myself to the netdev
group (I hope this is done automatically if doing a desktop install with
d-i) and now it works very nicely, also with WPA :)
* Right, since two and a half weeks I switched away from ion3. To gnome :)
So far I like it, but let's see what I run in half a year...
* Now I hope I'll get that real cheap (oldie but goldie) ISDN mobile phone
on ebay, so I can have some fun with asterisk soonish. I'm getting this
new ISDN phone so that I can keep my old landline setup intact - for the
time when I set up asterisk and after that.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 24 Apr 2007 19:13:00 +0200
blogging (1-103) life; title=etch live-CDs available
* Actually I have nothing to do with it, I just thought I announce them here
as I haven't seen them announced anywhere. I have tried the Gnome desktop
one today and it worked nicely, there are also images with KDE and Xfce
available on [1 live.debian.net].
* So I guess I'll carry three media around with me in future: the
multiarch-DVD and CD (as nicely described by [2 Joey Hess]) and an i386
live-CD - unfortunatly live CDs for other archs are not available yet.
[1] http://live.debian.net/etch-builds/
[2] http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/tour_of_the_Debian_4.0_CDs/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 20 Apr 2007 21:31:56 +0200
blogging (1-102) life; title=xp and office for 3$
* The company which latest real innovation was Clippy [1 plans] to give away
their flagship products in certain parts of the world for 3$ now. I would
not be surprised if their shares are worth less than that by 2015 :-)
[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6571139.stm
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 20 Apr 2007 09:37:03 +0200
blogging (1-101) life; title=first uploads
* I've just done my first uploads to a debian.org machine, even if that
"only" were powerpc builds of clamav for volatile etch and sarge, yay!
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 17 Apr 2007 21:48:29 +0200
blogging (1-100) life; title=Singing not whining
* Even though the network at dudesconf worked flawlessly even for me after
whining here about my laptop on saturday, I have now resolved to
concentrate on positive aspects here, as I believe Debian as much as
everybody else needs positive thinking rather than negative thoughts.
* Dudesconf/DebConf.es3 rocked, though two days is a bit too short :) Caring
organizers, almost 24h food supply, vegetarian food for the needy, meeting
"old faces" again, being able to attach new faces to old nicks/names and
meeting new people. And doing some juggling once again for more than two
minutes.
* On another positive aspect, the new server for debian-community.org is now
up and running etch with a 2.4.27 kernel from sarge (because of [1 317258]),
the content will be migrated either tonite after work (I doubt
it) or mañana. Seperate post still pending...
* [2 Bastian], I completly agree. Is any artist reading this and able to
dedicate some time and effort to create (a) proposal(s) for a better
design for wiki.debian.org? I believe the proper place to propose designs
and discuss them is the debian-www list, though any place is fine for
posting proposals.
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/317258
[2] http://blog.venthur.de/2007/04/15/since-more-and-more-people-are-referencing-to-wikidebianorg/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 16 Apr 2007 11:15:25 +0200
blogging (1-99) life; title=let the beer flow at least
* Frustration and (missing) flow blew my mind away in the last hours. I
didn't count them properly, but I would guess I had more than 20 network
connection losses today. And in at least 75% of them I was working online
or in the middle of an irc conversation.
* Then I switched to wired networking and after 5min I had another network
crash. Ten minutes later my laptop froze completly when loading planet.
* So I switched to a beer flow. I'm uneasy to commit to drink a beer for
each network loss, but this is how I feel at the moment.
* Besides these little annoyances, dudesconf is pretty and pretty well
organized, thanks and kudos to the team making this possible and taking
care of many little details. You rock! I haven't heard anybody else
complain about the network so I guess it's my lovely hardware - which is
running etch, reinstalled this wednesday, so I don't blame the software
except some drivers for not properly (as in open) documented hardware.
* I'm looking forward to next year when I can easily justify buying a new
laptop to myself.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 14 Apr 2007 19:06:18 +0200
blogging (1-98) life; title=I hope at least it's sunny in Brussels too
* While taking a coffee break while driving to Dudesconf in A Coruna today,
I saw Hamburg in the news on spanish TV. It seems the weather in Hamburg
is so good currently, that it's newsworthy on spanish TV :-)
* As long as it doesnt rain too much, I dont care about the weather...
And currently I'm happy to sit here in a gym with around 20 Debian geeks,
and look forward to get some Debian stuff done on the weekend...
debian-community.org really deserves some attention, but I won't be
surprised if dont find time the next 36h.
* For those who wonder: Dudesconf really is DebConf.es3 - I have no idea why
it's not called like this.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 14 Apr 2007 02:25:49 +0200
blogging (1-97) life; title=joy and pain
* My plan for coming home yesterday evening was simple: go to init 1 on my
laptop and do a full backup while I sleep, followed by a reinstall with
fai in the morning. That part of the plan worked pretty well: after less
than then an hour of work, aeh, actually waiting and having breakfast, my
laptop is 100% setup as it was yesterday, running shiny beryl on etch and
all the configuration is the same as it was yesterday. Yay! Looks, feels
and is the same system, but the installation is 60min old. So much for the
joy.
* The pain also started when I came home yesterday: the datacenter where my
server is hosted had a huge power outtage yesterday evening and this
morning there were and currently still are some hundred customers getting
their machines up again. I wonder what exactly happend to turn off the
power for a whole datacenter (they have megawatt sized diesel generators
for power backup) but at least I'm happy it's not a hardware failure on my
server. And while my server and services is up again since more than an
hour, www.aol.de, which is also hosted there, is still down ;-)
<b>Update:</b> The power was only gone for 40min, the rest of outtage is
still a bit of a mystery to me: outgoing connections worked fine, incoming
not at all. So I'm not really convinced that it wasn't coincidence that
the reboot fixed my server...
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 11 Apr 2007 14:04:10 +0200
blogging (1-96) life; title=modern life told in pictures
* Absolutly [1 amazing pictures]!
[1] http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php?id=7
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 6 Apr 2007 12:16:56 +0200
blogging (1-95) life; title=my first act as a DD
* I just voted :) Dunno yet if that worked, but if not, I'll manage... as
I'm pretty tired I decided to vote one plattform, not person, the same as
NOTA (as I really think those ideas won't do Debian any good, quite the
contrary). Maybe I'll change that in a few days, dunno yet.
* Due to being quite busy with work the last days or rather weeks, this was
my first act as a DD, which I couldn't do before. I'm still using my
guest-alioth account and due to the freeze (yay!) no uploads yet.
* Quite to the contrary (not really, but I find it very ironic) I've build
my first rpm yesterday :-) I ported fai to fedora... more on this soon.
* Since a week ago debian-community.org runs on its own server, currently
managed by three admins with fai. The webpage is still static html, but
ikiwiki should be up on the weekend, in some free minutes I already looked
into it and played with it on the new machine. I'll write a more detailed
blog entry about this when it's ready.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 27 Mar 2007 08:23:42 +0200
blogging (1-94) life; title=little details again
* [1 Marc], fwiw imo LCD-displays and RAM-memory are much more fun :-) ymmv.
[1] http://blog.zugschlus.de/archives/526-About-Acronyms-and-non-Acronyms.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 23 Mar 2007 20:00:38 +0100
blogging (1-93) life; title=Please think of the animals formerly known as kittens
* [1 Pretty please]!
[1] http://developer.mozilla.org/wiki-images/en/e/e0/Moz_ffx_openStandards_1024x768.jpg
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 23 Mar 2007 16:15:58 +0100
blogging (1-92) life; title=Monthy Python 2.0
* I believe this [1 website] is a new venture from Monthy Python. It's
completly hillarious. Don't miss "baby got bible", "the atheist",
basically all videos from "SoldierInGodsArmy" and countless other
gems.
* I'm also amused thinking about the job of the editors. I'm sure they
have a hard time, sorting out which videos are tagged "feature this"
for fun rather than seriously and similar with the "inapproriate" tagged
ones. And watching the videos doesn't really help them :-)
* Claimer: obviously, if religion wouldn't have killed and destroyed
so many lives (and still is), this would be even more funny. And I would
make less fun about religious people like those. Amen.
* And if you believe that there is one god or one goddess or seven or 23,
fine with me. I think [2 we are just a bunch of monkeys] anyway.
[1] http://godtube.com/
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a15KgyXBX24
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 21 Mar 2007 00:03:50 +0100
blogging (1-91) life; title=Now I understand...
* So [1 Jeff] went vegan, so that he can drive a nice, small & [2 shiny car]
with good conscience ;-)
* More seriously, I don't think that even with Smarts it's possible to be
ecological if everybody drives ones own car.
[1] http://jbailey.livejournal.com/33311.html
[2] http://www.hummer-h1.ch/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 20 Mar 2007 18:21:27 +0100
blogging (1-90) life; title=Dellbian
* Vote for [1 Debian] GNU/other! ;-)
* In other news, I can vote in Debian now, too :-) And instead of thanking
here all the people who helped and supported me in NM (for which I'm very
thankful, indeed), I'd like to thank all the people who make and made
Debian a great operating system and a fun place "to be". Keep on rocking!
* And [2 Gunnar], congrats to you too! I'm impressed and a bit envious :-)
[1] http://www.dell.com/linuxsurvey
[2] http://www.gwolf.org/index.php?blog/show/215
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 14 Mar 2007 12:26:18 +0100
blogging (1-89) life; title=finally almost summer
* Today was the first time this year I walked the dog wearing nothing but a
t-shirt - well almost :-) Yay!!! 2nd day with blue sky in a row!!1
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 13 Mar 2007 16:06:33 +0100
blogging (1-88) life; title=DebConf needs help
* We need to send out invitation letters for people needing a Visa to come
to DebConf. And we really need to do this soon, as a Visa application
process can take months. So it needs to be done real soon now.
* So if you have some spare time (I don't) and care about people coming from
countries needing a Visa to visit UK, please read [1 this thread].
* As I understand it (which might be wrong or inaccurate) the Debian UK or
DebConf Ltd. people want more feedback from UK visa officials outside the
UK. I'm sure there is better information how you can help in this thread,
if not, please ask.
[1] http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20070306.200404.86f3007b.en.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 12 Mar 2007 13:17:42 +0100
blogging (1-87) life; title=secure remote controlled aircrafts
* What a joke. If they are really remote controlled it would mean teh
terrorists don't even have to enter airplanes to do evilfoo, they can hack
and control them remotly. And even if the autopilot is not remote
controlled, but just a local computer in the plane, it can be hacked and
programmed.
* Computers, surveillance and control don't create security. Justice, food
and basic needs do.
* -
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 12 Mar 2007 13:17:41 +0100
blogging (1-86) life; title=for those who cannot wait
* The low quality theora versions of the [1 videos from the Debian Devroom]
at FOSDEM 2007 are available online now.
* Better quality ones and slides will follow as they appear.
* The encoded videos from the NetConf and the Formal Dependency Management
talks are broken, the DV files look ok, so I expect I will be able to fix
them, but this might take some time.
* Enjoy :-)
* P.S.: Maybe it's worthwhile to go for speaker microphones next year...
[1] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2007/fosdem/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 3 Mar 2007 16:07:49 +0100
blogging (1-85) life; title=FOSDEM videos and d-community.org
* FOSDEM was great! And too short. (But this is maybe a feature.) And too
crowded, which is also a feature. Too tired for more, I am only blogging
anyway, cause I cannot sleep and because I realized I should probably
comment on the videos here, instead of answering many times indiviudally.
* The recording of the videos went fine. I have all 13 talks of the debian
devroom on (unchecked) tapes. Thanks to Herman for the camera, I'll send
your powersupply to you tomorrow.
* A hour of DV needs about 13 GB. So I need to buy a new hard drive. Then I
need to give it to a friend, who'll copy the tapes to disc. Then encoding
and uploading. If all goes well, the videos should be online in a week or
two. Definitly, when they're ready :-)
* The debian-community talk went well, although I was too much in a hurry,
because I had to start late due to the previous talk and having to end
5min early, so pixie could get her (then belated) plan back (with the
camera and awesome tripod). I got quite some good feedback, which already
resulted in a bit further developing of some ideas, which I "documented"
on #debian-community before writing this. More to come.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 27 Feb 2007 01:54:05 +0100
blogging (1-84) life; title=FOSDEM
* Wow! Great and unexpected network at FOSDEM! Yay! At least in the Debian
developer room. The camera is also set up and we recorded the first talk
already :-)
* FOSDEM is organized pretty well this year again and again it's great to
meet so many different people here!
* More "later", but rather after the weekend, I prefer to talk to people
here instead of writing long blog entries... :-)
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 24 Feb 2007 15:38:31 +0100
blogging (1-83) life; title=debian-community.org
* I wanted to write a much longer blogpost about [1 debian-community.org]
before FOSDEM, where I'll have a opportunity to present the idea in some
greater detail anyway. But as we are about to leave from the Debian-Edu
[2 gathering in Soissons], I guess my time will not allow it.
* So I will not waste much time to describe here, what debian-community.org
is about, you can read about most of the ideas on the webpage already
anyway. I have quite some more ideas and concrete plans, which I will
reveal in Brussels and after that on the site itself.
* And for those, who cannot make it to FOSDEM (or just to [3 my presentation],
which is at the end of the schedule) the DebConf videoteam will also
(try to) record the talks in the Debian room at FOSDEM - we'll see if that
will work :-)
* Besides being aware since some time that Debian has developers and users
and (officially) nothing in between, there were two talks at LCA2007
which inspired me to start debian-community.org: the talk by Jono Bacon
about the [4 ubuntu community] and the keynote from Kathy Sierra about
[5 passionate users]. I suggest you watch both, they both are very
insightful. If you are really low on time, I really suggest to find some.
And if you can't, watch Kathy's :-)
* But personally I think both are a must see. They changed my way of
thinking about Debian, the OS, the project and the community. Thanks
Kathy and Jono!
* Oh, last but definitly not least: please join the #irc-channel, the list
(both linked on the website) and get involved. Especially if you want to
help to shape your local(ized) debian community!
[1] http://debian-community.org
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/DevCampFrance2007
[3] http://fosdem.org/2007/schedule/events/debian_community
[4] http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/linux.conf.au/2007/video/talks/173.ogg
[5] http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/linux.conf.au/2007/video/friday/Friday_0900_Sierra.ogg
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 23 Feb 2007 16:11:54 +0100
blogging (1-82) life; title=OLPC questioned
* Tuesday I gave a talk about debian-edu to members of the [1 Emmaüs]
community, who are - among other activites - refurbishing old computers,
make them usuable again by installing debian-edu and (keep or) send them
to Africa. They looked quite puzzled when I mentioned our cooperation with
[2 OLPC] and what OLPC intends to do: send new computers to developing
countries! I resolved this by saying that I think both approaches are
useful, as this will spread access to technology and knowledge faster ;-)
* While fixing my slides after the talk (which btw are based on the same
talk held at LCA and were now translated to [3 french]) I discovered this
[4 interesting] [5 critisism] to OLPC. After reading them, I still think
both approaches are useful, but recycling should definitly not been
forgotten over this "new toy" :-) TMTOWTDI!
[1] http://www.emmaus-international.org
[2] http://www.laptop.org
[3] http://layer-acht.org/slides/
[4] http://www.fairinternational.org/fi-artikkel_245.nml
[5] http://www.fairinternational.org/fi-artikkel_244.nml
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 22 Feb 2007 15:44:52 +0100
blogging (1-81) life; title=life's too short
* ...so I left some more IRC channels. for now I'll stay on those
mailinglists, but if the unfun continues, I'll stop that too. Ironically
just when I have time for IRC again...
* Have fun!
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sun, 18 Feb 2007 21:23:45 +0100
blogging (1-80) life; title=gone from irc for a while
* I just decided I will leave most IRC channels now, for hopefully not more
than a week. I'm busy with $work$, or rather I need to be more busy with
it, and IRC is too much distracting me, resulting in less work getting done
and being to hectic and harsh on IRC as well.
* You can query me on IRC, but usually I prefer mails. See you in a while...
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 12 Feb 2007 14:26:25 +0100
blogging (1-79) life; title=ARRRRRRgentina!
* Mañana arrrrrrgentina will probably be annouced offically as the location
for DebConf8!
* Kudos to the Venezuelian team for their (almost equally) great bid and very
fair behaviour in the decision meeting! In the end of the meeting when I saw
.ar as the winner (not by much, but enough to be willing to go for it), I
feared a painful end, but no, the opposite happened.
* Thank you all. And now let's make DebConf7 a real fun and productive event
first! :-)
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 12 Feb 2007 00:29:06 +0100
blogging (1-78) life; title=The world as seldom seen before...
* Browse these [1 maps to see the world] with different eyes.
[1] http://www.worldmapper.org/textindex/text_index.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 2 Feb 2007 14:02:47 +0100
blogging (1-77) life; title=a small rant about the sun or rather the lack of it
* Yesterday it was cold (which is no problem in itself for me) and rainy
(which is!) in Hamburg. Having to go outside various times, my mood went
down during the day, as the rain kept going... late at night my mode got
better, but that's another story :-)
* Today, the sun shone in my face when I woke up, when I went out and up to
now it's still sunny. Yay! Yay yay yay even!!
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 1 Feb 2007 11:43:00 +0100
blogging (1-76) life; title=Chaos Communication Camp 2007
* The [1 CCCamp 2007] will be held from August 8th lasting until August 12th
2007 on an airport museum close to Berlin - you can go there directly by
plane! :)
* If you have no idea what a chaos communication camp is, check out this
[2 video from the camp 2003] - basically its 2000 hackers, camping,
outside, lots of workshops, lectures and crazy - and somehow computer
related - stuff happening, connected to the outside world with a nice
fat uplink - in 2003 it was 155mbps :)
* I don't think a debian booth is appropriate there, but a debian camp
inside the camp would be fun!
[1] http://events.ccc.de/2007/01/24/chaos-communication-camp-2007/
[2] http://chaosradio.ccc.de/media/video/chaos_communication_camp_2003.m4v
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 26 Jan 2007 09:02:58 +0100
blogging (1-75) life; title=Melbourne...
* [1 Andree], it's been announced in the LCA closing ceremony: [2 Melbourne]
will be brilliant! :)
* Currently Melbourne is not so brilliant: I have fever and lay in bed. And
except for the really beautiful botanic garden I have not seen much yet,
and I somewhat doubt I'll see a lot more this time.
[1] http://andreeleidenfrost.blogspot.com/2007/01/linuxconfau-2007-gleanings.html
[2] httP://www.mel8ourne.org
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 25 Jan 2007 10:21:48 +0100
blogging (1-74) life; title=SLUG meeting
* Yesterday I attended the [1 Sydney Linux User Group] january meeting and
gave a talk about the DebConf video-team and the differences in our setups
compared to LCA2007 ([2 slides available] now, video soon).
* It was good to see a bunch of people from LCA again and the 2nd talk about
[3 slack], googles internal maintainance tool which was just freed, was
also quite interesting. For me there was nothing really new, as slack
works quite similar as [4 FAI], the interesting part was to compare them :)
* Unfortunatly I didn't see the report about googles summer of code, as it
was held in parallel. But you can't have icecream with fries :-)
* Fortunatly I also could attend the [5 Sydney linuxchix] meeting before the
SLUG meeting, where a good introduction to Ruby on Rails was given.
* Relocating to Melbourne now - cheers and thanks to everyone in Sydney
contributing to the good times I had here! :-)
[1] http://slug.org.au/node/55
[2] http://layer-acht.org/slides/
[3] http://www.sundell.net/~alan/projects/slack/
[4] http://packages.debian.org/unstable/source/fai
[5] http://sydney.linuxchix.org/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 23 Jan 2007 03:35:06 +0100
blogging (1-73) life; title=swimming
* Yesterday we went swimming in Bondi beach in Sydney. While the air was
hot, around 40 degrees, the water was not: only 18! Freakin' cold :-D
* Today it's colder here, barely 30 degrees.
* And now you in the northern hemisphere can all hate me :-)
* More debian/lca/foms related blogging still pending, etoobusy.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 22 Jan 2007 01:08:12 +0100
blogging (1-72) life; title=mmmmmmmmmmmmm
* Thanks. And many more hugs.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 16 Jan 2007 15:57:51 +0100
blogging (1-71) life; title=not much blogging - just some slides
* It's all about motivation and at the moment I'm not really motivated to
seriously blog about my time at LCA, I'm simply too exhausted.
* My talks about the debian-edu and live-package yesterday went well, it's
just a pity the microphone died during the live-package talk, so that
there won't be a video from it, as video without audio is quite useless :)
* The only useful thing I could think of today, was to start to collect the
[1 slides of all talks] I have been given (and will be giving) in a central
location on my server, so you can easily find them. Currently only the LCA
and FOMS slides are there, I will add the rest, when I'm ready ;-) That's
also when I'll finish my report about the FOMS conference :-/
* I guess I need a nap.
[1] http://layer-acht.org/slides
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 16 Jan 2007 05:00:59 +0100
blogging (1-70) life; title=The trip to planet LCA
* 5 days ago I started my journey to Australia on monday afternoon by going
to Hamburg airport. The security at London Heathrow was disgusting and
silly as expected, but I won't go into much more detail here, just one
thing: the memory of losing my beloved Free Software Foundation pullover
last summer at a security checkpoint at LHR made me kept checking my stuff
all the time, which somehow fitted very well in the paranoia... But I
should also mention the one plus thing in Terminal 4: a nice smoking lounge
with power sockets and comfy chairs. Anyway...
* The flight entertainment system in the 747 was very cool, with lots of
movies and documentaries on demand, so that I didnt bother to read any of
the books I packed nor used my laptop batteries completly, though the
latter was mostly due to the lack of space in the plane and having worked
quite a bit prior to leaving. So I watched four movies to not fall asleep
in the (european) night and get into australian timezone, which worked more
or less quite well. Not sleeping is a good way to switch timezones, but the
side effect is sleepiness, doh!
* Out of those four movies the only one really worth mentioning is "Little
miss sunshine", a really great movie, very funny and quite insightful as
well. See it! On my way back I might even choose to see it again :) I
didn't really understand much of the english in "the black dahlia" but it
was quite interesting to see how smoking once was ubiquitous as the war on
terror is today :)
* The flight itself was not as bad and boring as expected, they even thought
about the poor smokers and made the whole plane get out in Bankgok, only
to enter it again 30min later. Needless to say that it took those 400 people
a bit longer...
* BTW, and in case the famous lazyweb is reading: Kolkata (formerly called
Calcutta) from 10km above really looked like it was swamped, but according
to wikipedia this only happens in summer. Any ideas what I saw / why it
looks liked this?
* When I arrived in Sydney, I was not only welcomed by the sun and summer
(yaaaaaay!!), but also by Sylvia, the (main) [1 FOMS organizer], who was
so very kind to come to the airport at 7.30 AM to pick me up (yaaay!). More
about FOMS in another blog entry very soon to come.
[1] http://www.annodex.org/events/foms2007/Main/HomePage
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 13 Jan 2007 12:27:37 +0100
blogging (1-69) life; title=killergames and hackertools
* Erich, it's not only [1 killergames] which threatens the legal
distribution of linux in germany, but also hackertools like ping, ethereal
or nmap. Check out [2 this article] (german only), which explains the new
law which will come into effect in germany on the 15th of march this year.
* Obviously you need hackertools, to be able to check if you're system is
secure or vulnerable, but unfortunatly common sense is a lost art
nowadays.
* More maybe later, I'm in a hurry, but I at least wanted to make this
remark. More discussion and evaluation of this is definitly needed!
[1] http://blog.drinsama.de/erich/en/linux/debian/2007011001-csu-macht-debian-illegal
[2] http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/82996
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 10 Jan 2007 21:35:58 +0100
blogging (1-68) life; title=the previous post
* Maybe I should have made clearer, that the previous post was not debian
related, except for the foms/lca bit.
* As I'm waiting for the overwriting the new disc with random data to finish
anyway, I'll use the time to work on my next, debian related post: my
impressions from [1 23C3].
[1] http://events.ccc.de/2007/01/04/23c3-lecture-videos-forthcoming/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 6 Jan 2007 21:58:58 +0100
blogging (1-67) life; title=always look on the bright side of life...
* And chances are you'll never be forgotten! Thanks for the joy and jolly,
excuse my lack of time today, I'm preparing stuff for my hopefully very
joyful journey to [1 FOMS] and [2 linux.conf.au 2007] :-)
* Enough said for you and me, and now and here, so have hugs and happy days!
/me smiles.
[1] http://www.annodex.org/events/foms2007/
[2] http://lca2007.linux.org.au/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 6 Jan 2007 16:07:17 +0100
blogging (1-66) life; title=happy new year!
* As a start, I just want to quote and link to what Ganneff said last year
already: Thanks, [1 Have a good new year and continue the good work]!
[1] http://ganneff.de/blog/2006/12/27#thanks
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 1 Jan 2007 15:04:42 +0100
blogging (1-65) life; title=Who can you trust?
* Only six days until [1 23C3] basically starts. I'm looking very much
forward to [2 lots of interesting stuff] and much more I guess. (The
schedule is made with Pentabarf which we're also using for [3 DebConf7],
btw.)
* Also this year for the first time there will be a
[4 chaotic debian presence] where we would very much appreciate your help
which will be rewarded with a badge like the one below :-)
* Please [5 leave your name on the wiki page] or tell [6 Mario] or me if you
intend to help and that we should prepare a badge for you :-)
* <img src="http://layer-acht.org/23c3-debian_small.jpg" />
[1] https://events.ccc.de/congress/2006/
[2] https://events.ccc.de/congress/2006/Fahrplan/
[3] https://debconf7.debconf.org
[4] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEventsCCCBerlin
[5] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEventsCCCBerlin
[6] http://blog.marioiseli.com/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 20 Dec 2006 21:46:11 +0100
blogging (1-64) life; title=happy customer
* Yesterday I ordered three books at [1 bookzilla.de], they arrived here
less than 36h later. But what I like most is, that they give the full
provision they earn (5% of the price you pay) to the
[2 Free Software Foundation Europe]. It's also nice that shipping in
germany in free.
[1] http://www.bookzilla.org
[2] http://www.germany.fsfeurope.org/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 20 Dec 2006 17:07:20 +0100
blogging (1-63) life; title=language shapes our behaviour
* If you agree you might understand why I blog about the sign in front of
a restaurant I just passed by. Compare "buffet libre" with "all you can
eat".
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 18 Dec 2006 19:19:48 +0100
blogging (1-62) life; title=no video homework?
* Due to the excellent infrastructure here, four out of five talks are
already online at the [1 usual suspects location], and the fifth talk,
well, has not been held yet :-)
* I expect other formats to be available later today, and then I'll also
come up with better filenames and send a mail to the qa-list.
* Now off for breakfast!
[1] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/qa-meeting-badajoz/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 16 Dec 2006 08:44:20 +0100
blogging (1-61) life; title=the many faces of QA
* The miboot enabled d-i sarge floppies for oldworld powerpc are now
available again, you can find them on [1 layer-acht.org].
When/if :) I become a DD, I'll move them to people.d.o and leave a note on
my webserver...
* Just like [2 last year], the video-team (thanks Cesar, por todo!) will
make the [3 recordings of this years talks] available when they are ready.
I will announce them here and on the -qa list then.
* Besides this, I have been mostly working on debian-edu and enjoying being
in a very nice old town with a bunch of geeks.
[1] http://layer-acht.org/d-i-miboot/
[2] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2005/qa-meeting-darmstadt/
[3] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/qa-meeting-badajoz/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 15 Dec 2006 12:19:17 +0100
blogging (1-60) life; title=on a second thought
* On my way to the QA meeting in Extremadura today, where I am now using the
hotels wireless, "secured" by very poor obscurity, I thought about my
[1 blog post of earlier today], and I would like to add two things now:
* 16 million ip addresses for continents of 0.5 to 2 billion people per
continent is *really* little,
* ipv6 will give us roughly 667 quadrillion addresses per square millimeter
of the earth's surface - but I believe the digital divide will become
worse. Two words: [2 net neutrality].
[1] http://layer-acht.org/blog/debian/#1-59
[2] http://www.savetheinternet.com/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 14 Dec 2006 01:26:37 +0100
blogging (1-59) life; title=virtual reality?
* You probably know this famous cartoon-map, the world according to Ronald
Reagan or the USA. Welcome to the [1 new world order]. Companies are as
big as whole continents. And there is still some room for more companies
or web 3.0.
* I wonder how IPv6 really looks like.
[1] http://xkcd.com/c195.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 13 Dec 2006 13:28:05 +0100
blogging (1-58) life; title=security? get over it
* It seems, that GnuPG has [1 much more problems] then the recently fixed
security hole. The linked post is unfortunatly in german (except for a
quote of some appearantly pretty bad code in gnupg). Fefe (who does code
reviews for a living) points out the following highlights: gnugp2
now includes graphical outputs (why o why), links non-optionally to
libusb and a smartcard-library, and the code size has tripled since
version 1.0. And basically Werner Koch agrees with him: in
[2 the announcement] he writes, that the whole codebase needs a security
review, but they cannot afford to do it. Doh.
* Stefan Esser [3 retired from the PHP Security Response Team]. Until
reading his post I basically believed PHP code basically has so many
problems, because it's so easy to code. Today I just want to thank
[4 Alexander Wirt], [5 Jan Wagner] and Stefan Esser, the author of
suhosin.
* Last but not least, [6 firefox] or [7 iceweasel] also seems to have
[8 problems]. /me hugs dillo but misses its CSS support...
[1] http://blog.fefe.de/?ts=bb8644fb
[2] http://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-announce/2006q4/000246.html
[3] http://blog.php-security.org/archives/61-Retired-from-securityphp.net.html
[4] http://packages.debian.org/testing/web/php4-suhosin
[5] http://packages.debian.org/testing/web/php5-suhosin
[6] http://blog.fefe.de/?ts=bb858612
[7] http://blog.fefe.de/?ts=bb858e72
[8] http://blog.fefe.de/?ts=bb859c83
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sun, 10 Dec 2006 19:21:28 +0100
blogging (1-57) life; title=bash KDE or Gnome and support Microsoft
* If you ever said to someone (not deeply involved in free software), you
shouldn't use KDE, it sux, Gnome is much better, or if you said, you
shouldn't use Gnome, it sux, KDE is much better, then please read this
email about [1 hazardous or good arguments about desktop usability]
from Knut Yrvin.
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2006/12/msg00015.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 8 Dec 2006 16:34:39 +0100
blogging (1-56) life; title=A true story from the deep internet
* <toresbe> I FOUND IT!!!
* <toresbe> I FOUND THE FIREWIRE CARD! \o/
* <p2-mate> hehe
* <p2-mate> it was somewhere between the cray CPU boards ? :)
* <toresbe> VAX :D
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 8 Dec 2006 11:40:49 +0100
blogging (1-55) life; title=freedom aint a value by itself alone
* i'm working on and advocating software freedoms, yet i wont be happy at
all, if a nuclear bomb would run debian to achieve its goal of killing
millions of people^w^w^w^wprotecting our freedoms.
* i value my freedom to jump into the cold elbe river in winter, but i
probably won't do it.
* and i really dislike it when people stink of too much parfum or of too
much dirt. but i value their freedoms to smell as they want as i value my
freedom (not) to wash myself when i feel like it, or to go away if it
stinks to me (or to stay despite so). and i also value your freedom to go
away or stay and/or tell me when i stink or smell good.
* freedom alone has no value. like money doesn't help if all food is
poisoned or you're in jail. likewise security is worthless without
freedom. and sometimes^walways someones freedom is taking away someone
elses freedom. freedom is a compromise and unlimited freedom can be as bad
or worse than no freedom. the tricky thing is to get dealing with the
limits right and in a free way.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 5 Dec 2006 13:31:57 +0100
blogging (1-54) life; title=tag your packages in no time
* The new [1 web-editor for debtags] is amazing! Very intuitive and easy
to use, I just tagged my packages in less than five minutes :) Try it.
* You'll get quite sensible suggestions for tags and the interface to view
and choose from all existing tags is, well, very intuitive and easy to
use! :) Choose 'view all tags' to get a view on all facets (a la
categories)...
* Try it! :)
* And if you're bored (which I'm not...), there is a nice overview of the
[2 150 most popular packages without tags]. Great work!
[1] http://debtags.alioth.debian.org/edit.html
[2] http://debtags.alioth.debian.org/todo.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 27 Nov 2006 13:12:40 +0100
blogging (1-53) life; title=download free software - patent it - profit
* Today I read that [1 Intel basically completly patented VoIP] as long as
the UI is somehow connected to a personal computer instead of a normal
telephone. What makes this madness even more braindead, is the fact that
[2 the patent was filed two month after the initial release of asterisk], a
free software for VoIP.
* /me goes to patent the wheel and the fork now. Oh wait, I don't have the
money to file a patent right now. Hopefully nobody with money reads this
blog ;-)
[1] http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=7120140
[2] http://www.marko.net/asterisk/archives/9912/0000.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 24 Nov 2006 19:54:46 +0100
blogging (1-52) life; title=so you thought we would be coming to an end soon
* [1 JoeyH], thanks for [2 this link]! Glad to see that there are many many
releases to come :-)
[1] http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/DWN_bits_3.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Toy_Story_characters
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 22 Nov 2006 01:05:46 +0100
blogging (1-51) life; title=stuff I did today
* Prepared an upload for the new upstream version of tuxmath (two small
bugfixes only), who thankfully got sponsored again and immediatly by
by [1 Kari Pahula] - thanks again! A new upstream maintainer for tuxtype
has also been found, btw & yay!
* Finished setting up [2 failive.debian.net], which in future will
automatically build two fai-cds (currently only one), for fully
automatatic installation of the booted system. To better reflect that
those are not the usual live-cds, the vhost will soon be renamed to
[3 faicd.debian.net]...
* I also want to mention [4 edulive.debian.net] here, though I have done
nothing about it today. This should become a replacement for the current
[5 handmade live-cd], but currently its stalled by ENOTIME and [6 these]
[7 two] RC bugs.
* Speaking of debian-edu, I spent some parts of this afternoon to create
this [8 statuspage for the skolelinux repository] which got me more
familar with dak and which will hopefully help us keeping the archive in a
good state :-)
* Testi 
