blogging (1-221) life; title=friendly...
* [1 How to defeat the KKK with an open mind and laughter]. Hillarious and
brilliant.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBwIRq_hmjg
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:53:09 +0200
blogging (1-220) life; title=email nirvana - i has it!
* In [1 August 2007] I saw [2 inbox zero] and realised I really need to treat
my email like this (basically: no procastrination, do stuff immediatly or
put in proper todo lists, don't check mail all the time). Since about a
month I manage to deal with my inbox so that I was down to 1-10 mails,
which already was a huge improvement and since 10 days I'm finally down to
zero - and this feels really good: When checking new mails I'm not
constantly (several times a day) reminded of old stuff I still need to do
(and constantly mark it 'unread' so that I don't forget, which also takes
time) and so it's much faster and also a lot lighter on my brain and
multitasking capabilities. It totally rocks my world and I cannot believe
I've lived so long with so much email the old way... I get about 500 per
day, lots of system mails but more from mailinglists and until a month
I'd say I spent more than an hour on it in average, while now it's down
to 30min, or less. Which IMO is acceptable for that amount of information
and communication :-)
* If you are stuck with too many emails, watch that movie and just do it.
Or do something else ;-)
[1] http://layer-acht.org/blog/debian/#1-120
[2] http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=973149761529535925
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:22:05 +0200
blogging (1-219) life; title=We are Iran too
* Germany is now a state with internet censorship like China or Iran. Even
worse, Germany is also no real democracy anmore, not even on paper. One main
characteristic of a democracy is the seperation of powers into executive
("=police"), a legislature (="parlament" or whoever makes the laws), and a
judiciary ("=courts and judges"). With the internet censorship law which has
been passed this thursday, this seperation is no more: the police defines
which pages must be censored (without anyone controlling them), these lists
must to stay secret, and so there is no way to challenge them.
* <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdIA0jeW-24"><img src="http://layer-acht.org/china.png" /></a>
* 1984 was yesterdays fiction. This is 2009. Excuse me while I puke. Also
excuse this brief blogpost (leaving out many many aspects), but there is
already a lot of information on the net about this, eg. [1 in English]
and [2 German].
* On the plus side, quite some people now have woken up and became politicaly
active. The (electronic) petition against had the highest participation ever
(over 130000 people signed), even higher than the one against increase of
fuel prices. And that alone tells a lot.
* It was quite telling (though not unexpected) that two hours after the law
was passed the first request to extend its scope (to different type of
content) was made. I'm sure it was the first in a long series to come. And
all in the interest of public safety. Either you are with us, or you are
with the terrorists. I think I have heard that one before.
* "War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength", so true.
[1] http://netzpolitik.org/2009/the-dawning-of-internet-censorship-in-germany/
[2] http://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/handelsblatt-kommentar/dammbruch-im-internet;2365208
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Sat, 20 Jun 2009 10:50:04 +0200
blogging (1-218) life; title=The videoteam wants (to give) YOU (a t-shirt)!
* The videoteam is looking for someone (or two) who is willing and able to
hack on Pentabarf and merge last years video controller code into the
current codebase. Pentabarf is written in Ruby, additionally some, little
SQL knowledge is needed. There is a test server, so you cannot really break
things. The video controller is used to provide the videoteam with a nice
workflow for scheduling roles for recording (who is operating the cameras,
who the video-mixer, the audio mixer) and reviewing (set cut marks, rate
quality and completeness of the recording) as well es scheduling of
encodings and uploads. If you want to help out, you need to be able to
dedicate some time in the upcoming four weeks as well as during DebCamp.
During DebConf things will hopefully just work :-) (Always the optimist...
;) If you can help here, please join #debconf-video on OFTC.
* Additionally we are looking for a crowd of helpers for operating the cameras
and mixers as well as for reviewing. These jobs require a dedication of an
hour or two (though we won't stop you if you work more) and can be done by
basically anyone, even if you have zero experience in that area. That's how
most^all of us started :-)
* We can even offer something in return, besides the thanks of the Debian
community for making those video possible: 40 videoteam t-shirts will be
given out on a "first registered, first come" base. Obviously registering is
not really enough, you also need to turn up for the schedule you signed up
for :-) For now just add your name to the [1 team members] wiki page. Then,
once the video controller is set up (and the talk schedule is available),
add yourself in penta for the shifts you actually want to work.
* Thank YOU already!
[1] http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf9/Videoteam/Help#Team_members
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Fri, 19 Jun 2009 11:54:23 +0200
blogging (1-217) life; title=What understanding, learning and security have in common
* Since some years I've been stating on occasions, that I consider myself
dead on the day I stop learning.
* It just occurred to me that there is a less morbid way to express this:
understanding and learning are like security, there is no final state to
achieve, those are ongoing processes which shall never stop. Once they
stop, they basically fail. Luckily the fix is almost easy: restart the
processes :-)
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Wed, 17 Jun 2009 13:25:14 +0200
blogging (1-216) life; title=Quanto suerte tengo - running and more in Cáceres!
* This morning I have been running in Cáceres for the first time, yay!
Tomorrow I will have been running every day for three weeks now, with only 3
days missed: two I had fever and yesterday I was lazy and slept way too long
for any sensible running. Running is only sensible here+now before 9am, even
after sunset it stays too hot for hours (and it's not summer yet) and also
it's just no fun to go running after a hot day.
* So in a week I should know the city basics better than I do now, there is no
big park close anyway, so I'm just running on the streets. Also Anto is busy
showing me interesting places more hidden, which obviously really helps and
is fun too.
* In related news, I had my second longer conversation (>20min) in spanish
this saturday. I still make a mistake per every second word or so, at least
(but not one per word..!), but hey, I'm finally talking in spanish! And
isn't "bad spanish" the second most spoken language in the world anyway?!
:-D
* Tonight there will be another DebCon9 localteam IRC meeting and some of these
days we will visit the venue again, this time looking for and arranging more
detailed stuff, like the serverroom location, basic network and video setup,
accessible accommodation details, etc.. And there are many more details being
arranged abroad (eg T-shirts and the schedule..) by a still growing and
already great team and so by now I finally started to really look forward to
DebConf9...!
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:09:48 +0200
blogging (1-215) life; title=motivational mails for debian-edu-doc
* This weekend I implemented an idea I had some weeks ago: sending regular
mails with the translation status and the contents status of
[1 debian-edu-doc] to the Debian Edu mailinglist, in the hope this would
motivate people to finish the documentation and its translations. Currently
the package contains [2 four different manuals], translated in up to 6
languages: the old Debian Edu etch manual, the new Debian Edu lenny manual
and manuals for teachers using Rosegarden and Audicity. All four are being
written on wiki.debian.org, then exported to Docbook, then .po files are
created with the great po4a tool suite. Those .po files are kept in svn of
the the debian-edu-doc package, for translators to edit. Detecting missing
or half finished content is done by putting the string "FIXME" plus a
description what to fix in the wiki text. Then a small script is run by cron
every 2nd and 4th sunday of the month, which outputs the translation status
and greps for FIXME and formats this nicely. The [3 result] looks like this:
* <code>
The (translated) debian-edu-lenny manual as PDF or HTML is available at http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/
To understand this mail better, please read /usr/share/doc/debian-edu-doc/README.<br>
This mail is automatically send by a cronjob run by Holger Levsen every two weeks. Please send feedback, suggestions, flames and cookies via this list.<br>
debian-edu-lenny-manual.de.po: 545 translated messages, 193 fuzzy translations, 220 untranslated messages.<br>
debian-edu-lenny-manual.es.po: 85 translated messages, 204 fuzzy translations, 669 untranslated messages.<br>
debian-edu-lenny-manual.fr.po: 447 translated messages, 279 fuzzy translations, 232 untranslated messages.<br>
debian-edu-lenny-manual.it.po: debian-edu-lenny-manual.it.po:7683: end-of-line within string<br>
debian-edu-lenny-manual.nb.po: 711 translated messages, 159 fuzzy translations, 88 untranslated messages.<br>
----------------------------------<br>
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Lenny//Features<br>
FIXME: describe new features in 5.0.1+edu0 here.<br>
----------------------------------<br>
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Lenny//Requirements<br>
FIXME: a description of main-server and thinclient-server is missing.<br>
----------------------------------<br>
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Lenny//Installation<br>
FIXME: probably each paragraph on this page needs to be (slightly) rewritten for lenny.<br>
FIXME: describe PXE installation here, if its only two sentences, then they should be here.<br>
FIXME: path to preseed file location missing<br>
----------------------------------<br>
[...]<br>
====================<br>
24 FIXMEs left to fix<br>
====================<br>
</code>
* I'm quite happy with the result, now we we just need to fix those FIXMEs :-)
* The same tools will probably be used for the
[4 illustrated Lenny installation guide] and maybe others. I've described the
[5 requiered structure] for such a manual on wiki.d.o in an email to
debian-boot (as the discussion about that guide happened there), in case
you are interested.
* In mostly unrelated news, I've started running everyday again six days ago
(slowly running a bit further each day) and yesterday I've also started with
doing gymnastics. It was high time to realize and to change some stuff in my
life, and it looks like I finally heard the call. And doing sports is by far
not the only thing I want to do very differently again, it's just the most
visible atm and it's also quite easy to do. Also I can feel it in my legs
today :-) Now I "just" need to keep going forward, change is a continuous
process, and nothing to be done with. Ever. The day I stop changing myself,
the day I stop learning, I consider myself to be dead. I'm glad I woke up,
thanks for contributing to making me wake up and for bearing with me
sometimes.
[1] http://packages.qa.debian.org
[2] http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/
[3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2009/05/msg00233.html
[4] http://wiki.debian.org/LennyIllustratedInstall
[5] http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2009/05/msg00742.html
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Tue, 02 Jun 2009 12:15:45 +0200
blogging (1-214) life; title=A dummies guide to install Debian Lenny
* Or such :-)
* The official title is [1 Illustrated Guide to Installing Debian GNU Linux]
and IMHO it's a nice and simple guide, how to install Debian Lenny,
including screenshots how an installation from Windows looks like.
* What's missing are instructions how to install from USB, translations and
probably other stuff. If you don't know how to contribute to Debian, this
is an option! ;-)
* If there is interest in creating translations, the same scripts as in the
<code>debian-edu-doc</code> package could be used. Contact me if you are
interested in that.
[1] http://wiki.debian.org/LennyIllustratedInstall
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Mon, 25 May 2009 19:37:10 +0200
blogging (1-213) life; title=towel day
* Today is [1 towel day]! So if you leave the house make sure to take a
towel with you, to show your tribute to Douglas Adams and also because
a towel is a very useful thing to carry around. I did and indeed it
was very handy to have one, to protect against the sun and to remove
sweat from my neck and face :-)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towel_Day
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Mon, 25 May 2009 14:32:23 +0200
blogging (1-212) life; title=I've been walking through Caceres today
* Wow!
* Caceres is a nice small city in Extremadura, or so I thought... tonight
I've been walking through the old medivial city of Caceres, and I must say
I'm completly wow. I've seen quite some beautiful old cities or rather
some streets in cities, but in Caceres the complete inner city is still
there more or less like it was some hundreds years ago.
* If you are going to Caceres this summer, enjoy the nights in the city -
during the day it will be too hat anyway :-)
* I'm looking forward to a great conf this summer!
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Thu, 21 May 2009 01:36:51 +0200
blogging (1-211) life; title=Appropriate talk about porn: it's abuse
* Russel, I agree that some porn sites are facing interesting technical
challenges, but I wouldn't suggest using them as example for anything,
just like a talk about the challenges of torture is always inappropriate
in a human society.
* Porn is, except for self made porn and some other corner cases, abuse and
oppression. Simple as that.
* And please, before you try to argue against that simple statement, read
the lyrics of [2 no answer for a dancer] from one of my favorite bands,
consolidated, and think for more than ten minutes. If we were living in
really free societies, porn could be fun.
* Which reminds me of a [3 quote] from [4 Rebecca L. Eisenberg]: "A truly
radical view of pornography recognizes that we are what we consume -- and
if we are going to alter the face of society, and destroy Victorian and
religious notions like gender altogether -- as I believe we must -- we
must be willing to evaluate and change every aspect of our lives,
including the images we feed ourselves as we fuck, as terrifying as it
sounds. Like it or not, revolution is a scary concept." The complete text
where this quote is from can be found online on [5 her webpage].
* P.S: If you hear me playing "the internet is for porn" (this musicalsong)
or remember me doing so - can you now see the great irony? I would have
hoped you've seen it before. Or at least wondered, what the hell I was
doing.
[1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2009/05/17/appropriate-talks-about-porn/
[2] http://canadianfermentation.wordpress.com/2008/04/30/no-answer-for-a-dancer/
[3] http://www.heartless-bitches.com/culture/honorAF.shtml
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Eisenberg
[5] http://www.omino.com/~dom/clips/salvoporn.html
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Sun, 17 May 2009 08:49:25 +0200
blogging (1-210) life; title=holidays in the sun
* After i had to cancel my [1 last attempt] to go to Spain due to suddenly
catching a heavy flu, I'm now having some [2 holidays in the sun]! Not
quite like in those lyrics, rather some unexpected but long needed break
from my normal routines. Part of them I'll be keeping here, ie I'll be
going to Cáceres in the next days for real... at least that's my plan now.
* Loving regards to those people in Spain and Germany helping me making this
possible, so that I can learn and enjoy and recover!
[1] http://layer-acht.org/blog/debian/#1-209
[2] http://www.elyrics.net/read/s/sex-pistols-lyrics/holidays-in-the-sun-lyrics.html
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Sat, 16 May 2009 15:26:01 +0200
blogging (1-209) life; title=great timing. not.
* Yesterday I booked a ticket for going to [1 Cáceres] in two days. Today I
got ill. Guess I will stay in bed most of the next 24h.
[1] http://debconf9.debconf.org/
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Fri, 01 May 2009 17:50:20 +0200
blogging (1-208) life; title=beautiful blend
* Even if I knew about the [1 BrDesktop] project for some years, I never
really saw it. Then by chance, I stumbled on their webpage, which has
[2 beautiful screenshots of a pure blend Debian installer] and an
[3 understandable download page].
* And the best is, it's [4 pure Debian]! Very nice work.
[1] http://brdesktop.org/
[2] http://brdesktop.org/cdd/wiki/Screenshots
[3] http://brdesktop.org/cdd/wiki/Download
[4] http://packages.debian.org/sid/brdesktop-gnome
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Thu, 23 Apr 2009 16:53:43 +0200
blogging (1-207) life; title=It's been seven hours and fifteen days...
* or such
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Tue, 07 Apr 2009 15:33:00 +0200
blogging (1-206) life; title=Ada Lovelace naming scheme
* Two days ago I read about the [1 Ada Lovelace day], which was an event were
men and women were asked to blog about the women in technology which made an
impact on them, in an effort to present girls (and women) all over the world
with female role models in technology.
* In similar though more personal motivation I choose my machine naming scheme
at home two years ago: my (virtual) machines at home are named after women
who made a difference, mostly in IT, but also some in more general science.
Even though this list is not 100% in the spirit of pointing out the one
woman who made a personal difference to one self, I thought I share my list,
as I found it very interesting to learn about these great women myself.
* <i>goldberg</i> is named after [2 Adele Goldberg], who pioneered the
smalltalk programming language in the 70s. According to a sympathetic
annecdote she refused to show the system to Steve Jobs and only did so after
her superiors ordered her to do so. Thats were Apple got many ideas which
made them famous for being innovative...
* <i>goldwasser</i> is named after [3 Shafi Goldwasser], who is a RSA
professor at MIT, doing research in complexity theory, cryptography and
computational number theory. She is the co-inventor of zero-knowledge
proofs.
* <i>lovelace</i> is named after [4 Ada Lovelace], and is widely recognized as
the first programmer, who wrote a program (something that manipulated
symbols according to rules) for a machine which has not even been build at
that time. Of course, some men on this planet object to her being the first
programmer, as work by women is always insignificant... </irony or maybe
sarcasm>
* <i>bunten</i> is named afer [5 Danielle Bunten Berry], who was a game
designer and programmer best known for the games M.U.L.E. and Seven Cities
of Gold.
* <i>holberton</i> is named after [6 Betty Holberton], who was one of the six
original programmers of ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital
computer, during and after World War II.
* <i>hopper</i> is named after [7 Grace Hopper] who wrote the first compiler
ever, the A compiler. She was also heavily involved in creating COBOL and
standardizing COBOL and FORTRAN.
* <i>koller</i> is named after [8 Daphne Koller] who does AI research at MIT
and who seems to behind the idea of bayesian machine learning, which you
might know from your spam filters... (I can only state her involvement in
bayesian learning so vaguely as I'm basically clueless about the topic :)
* <i>leveson</i> is named after [9 Nancy Leveson] who is also an MIT
professior and is an expert in systems and software safety.
* Last but not least I like to remark that none of the women above is even
nearly covered with what I wrote here or what is written in wikipedia, which
I used as my main source for this blog post. It's simple impossible to sum
up one life that brief and be close to accurate.
* And then there is [10 another group of women] whose achievements are
noteworthy as well and who choose to present themselves on that webpage to
show others that Debian is not a mens club. Thank you (a lot) for that and
for your other contributions to Debian! If you want to learn more about
these giants, I recommend [11 this talk]. Guess who's achievements I admire
most in this group ;-)
* Somewhat unrelated I wish to shout cheers to Yvonne, who tought me many
things and who died six years ago today. You will also not be forgotten,
though the pain is mostly gone now (well, it's gone, except for days like
today). Thank you, among other stuff, for teaching me to celebrate and
cheer every day, even if not everything is cheerful. Wenn die Nacht am
tiefsten, ist der Tag am nächsten! :-)
[1] http://findingada.com/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adele_Goldberg_(computer_scientist)
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shafi_Goldwasser
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danielle_Bunten_Berry
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Holberton
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper
[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_Koller
[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Leveson
[10] http://women.debian.org/profiles/
[11] http://conf.au.linuxchix.org/heroes-presented-pia-waugh
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Thu, 26 Mar 2009 21:38:46 +0100
blogging (1-205) life; title=D-I - good things come to those who keep on improving
* I'm reading the d-i IRC team meeting [1 logfile] at the moment, and I must
say, I'm impressed by the clear communication and seeing people openly
discussing problems (while not forgetting the good stuff) and how to solve
them. I think that all those real life meetings we had in the last years
really help. Personalities are visible and respected, problems are
mentioned but the focus is on solutions. This meeting was mostly about
release management and debian-installer team issues, the next meeting is
planned to happen in two weeks and should focus on the technical details.
Feels good to be watching this :-)
[1] http://people.debian.org/~bubulle/d-i/irc-meeting-20090316/log
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Tue, 17 Mar 2009 11:12:39 +0100
blogging (1-204) life; title=a night to remember
* yesterday i went to a punk concert, drank some beers, danced some pogo, fell
on the slippery floor and crashed my knee once again. still i dont regret it
(yet?), it was great to feel alive and young again, though its the perfect
proof i'm not young anymore. but it was definitly worth it, i saw them the
first time in 1997 or 98 and yesterday was their goodbye concert. wunderbar.
* not sure if i should really blog this..
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Sun, 08 Mar 2009 14:59:31 +0100
blogging (1-203) life; title=FOSDEM videos released
* In a nice coincedence with the release of Lenny (cheers!!1), the
[1 low-quality versions] of the videos from the [2 Debian DevRoom] at
FOSDEM 2009 are available now!
* Better quality versions will be encoded and uploaded by Ben over the next
days. I'd also like to collect the [3 slides] from the talks there, so if you
had a talk there, please send them to Wouter and/or me, and Wouter, please
send me the slides you collected on the presetation computer ;-)
* Basically I'm very happy with our results, excpet for two things: sadly the
computer running dvswitch wasn't powerful enough to do picture in picture
(and due to time constraints we weren't able to switch to a more powerful
one), so we'll have to plan this better next year. And second, I have no
real clue how useful our streaming efforts are, I believe the recordings
are useful, but in both cases feedback from people who find them useful
is appreciated! Covering FOSDEM is certainly a lot of fun, but it's also a
lot of work and leaves not much room for seeing other parts of the
conference. So a short reply (I'll post this to d-d-a with reply-to set to
-project) will be very much appreciated! :)
* Big thanks go to Womble2, edrz, xerrako, Q_, danielsan, DaCa, tokkee,
luca, Yoe, Ganneff, franklin, huhn, luk, CarlFK, daven and some more
volunteers I cannot remember right now! Also not to be forgotten the
FOSDEM crew & volunteers for an awesome event and the people from CCC
Hamburg who came by car and took a lot of audio/video/computer equipment
for us (and left 90min later than planned! Thanks again!)! And also Debian
(via the DPL) for some 120 Euros to rent equiqment and for buying batteries
and the always needed duct-tape!
[1] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2009/fosdem/
[2] http://fosdem.org/2009/schedule/devrooms/debian
[3] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2009/fosdem/slides/
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Sun, 15 Feb 2009 18:03:22 +0100
blogging (1-202) life; title=FOSDEM streams live
* The streams from FOSDEM are live since 2min now, yay!
* [1 Updated and more verbose info] is available on -project.
* To say it mildly, the setup was chaotic, we could only get into the room
30min before our talked started. Which then started 30min late and was
recorded at least, as the beginning of Lucas' talk which is still running.
* BTW, that we couldn't get into the rooms earlier isn't within the FOSDEM
organizers responsibility, but the universities. And, one has to say, the
university is also pretty nice providing the venue free of charge.
* More later.
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2009/02/msg00007.html
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Sat, 07 Feb 2009 14:42:55 +0100
blogging (1-201) life; title=YOU CAN HAZ STREEMZ
* I has arrived in Brusselz and had pizza and beer already :-)
* In other news, we have a test stream up and the rest of the preparations
look good, so I'm confident you can haz streemz from the
[1 Debian dev room at FOSDEM]! (Times are UTC+1)
* Just follow the instructions from [2 Erics mail the debconf-video list].
* It's a totally unclear when we will be able to enter the room on Saturday,
and it might only possible at 13oo, right when Bens and my talk about our
video work is scheduled. That has been done on purpose, so in that case we
can use our talk slot for setting things up. I don't hope this will happen,
but it's the worst case...
* Oh, and if you're at FOSDEM, please help us out, we still have some
[3 volunteer slots to fill]. And more importantly, have a whole lot of fun!
[1] http://www.fosdem.org/2009/schedule/devrooms/debian
[2] http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20090205.215105.65eb5f60.en.html
[3] http://wiki.debian.org/FosdemVideo2009
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Fri, 06 Feb 2009 14:30:27 +0100
blogging (1-200) life; title=FOSDEM streaming
* So for those of you, not going to FOSDEM, there should be streaming. :-)
* For the sake of full disclosure: this is the first time streaming is
officially planned at the [1 FOSDEM Debian dev room], but so far maybe the
worst prepared. So this announcement is probably a bit too brave...
* But I thought I send it anyway. I'm quite very confident it will happen,
despite my desorganisation atm (and the little time to set up and test on
saturday). And as it would be very sad, if there were streaming, but no
viewers due to lack of announcement of the streams, I decided to write
this here.
* The URL of the streams should be announced/linked on
http://video.debconf.org but will definitly be also announced on our
wiki page where we keep track of the [2 volunteer shifts] (for those
watching at home, those times are UTC+1). Please enter your name in the
schedule there, if you want to help us, we have 60 shifts to fill.
(15 talks, 4 positions for each: 2 camera operators, video mixer,
audio mixer.)
* Watch this space :-) (Though a proper announcement shall also be send to
the project mailinglist.)
[1] http://fosdem.org/2009/schedule/devrooms/debian
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/FosdemVideo2009
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Wed, 04 Feb 2009 22:22:24 +0100
blogging (1-199) life; title=Yay!
* [1 Yay]!
* Cheers to the release team!
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2009/02/msg00000.html
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:13:35 +0100
blogging (1-198) life; title=Memetime
* <img src="http://layer-acht.org/going-to-fosdem.png" width="150"
height="89" />
* And again [1 we will be recording and streaming] the talks and discussions
in the Debian Dev room. For that, we are still looking for a good DV
camera <b>with line-in</b> (audio) - please contact me in case you can
lend us one for those two days.
[1] http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20090109.163916.a52cf366.en.html
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Tue, 20 Jan 2009 12:01:56 +0100
blogging (1-197) life; title=Get involved
* A few month ago I stumbled on this new page about [1 how to get involved in fedora]
and today I saw a [2 similar page about sugar]. (I like the sugar one
slightly better, but that's really a minor detail.)
* I would really jump around in joy if someone would come up with a similar
page for Debian, probably started in the Debian wiki, but IMO it should end
up as an official page in the long run. (Whether by developing some
mechanism to make some wiki pages official or by putting it into the static
page, is IMO yet another minor detail here.
* (I don't consider improving the Debian webpage a minor thing, not at all,
quite the contrary, but in the context of creating a good entry point for
getting involved in Debian, I do.)
[1] http://fedoraproject.org/join-fedora
[2] http://sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/GettingInvolved
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Mon, 19 Jan 2009 13:40:19 +0100
blogging (1-196) life; title=Please show some respect while standing on the shoulders of giants
* I unsubscribed from -devel and -vote the other day, as the pain/gain ratio
was just not worth it anymore (and -project is very much pending). Sadly, I
still could not escape from what I wanted to escape from, as some people
bring up those discussions and "their style" on planet.
* Please show some fscking respect to your peers! Debian is not about freedom
(whether you like it or not, and no matter how you define freedom), it's
not about freedom of speech or being open minded, it's just about creating
the greatest free operating system. The free operating system, that's why
we are here.
* I for one, disagree with many debian contributors ideas and believes,
whether (those ideas are) Debian related or not. To give one example, I
think religion is hillarious and believing in (a) higher being(s) is a sure
sign of an ill (or weak, or both, or whatever) mind. (Quite similar to
smoking btw, and for those who don't know, I do smoke.) But I'm not shoving
this down all the time to anybody who makes a religious reference in Debian
(nor in real life). Quite the contrary, I do admire quite some people who
take motivation out of their religious believes to do things they think are
good. I belive this is quite common the other way round too, eg when
religious and human-rights motivated groups work together to help
immigrants. They dont share (all) the same beliefs, and in some they have
huge disagreements (eg. I think religion is the root and a
means^wcontributor to many of the worlds evils) but they choose to
respectfully disagree on these views to be able to work together on the
common goal they share: help immigrants.
* And in the same way I (try to) (dis)agree with my fellow Debian peers about
their insane or great ideas. I try to respectfully disagree (or
respectfully agree). And I do acknowledge that I sometimes fail, eg the
above words about religion might have hurt some peoples feelings. I do give
a damn about having hurt those people (so I ment to say sorry with that in
cheek damn joke), even though I dont give a damn about religion. And I
think the last sentence might have been too sharp to be respectful while I
belive the above paragraph is fine. I also think its fine to be
disrespectful (in or outside Debian) once in a while, since we are all
humans and make mistakes once in a while, but I dont think it's fine to
have those people in Debian who fail all the time (or too often), be it
because they are incompetent to treat fellow peers with respect or because
they dont care (or because they think they do something good with their
kindergarten rhetoric).
* Contributing to Debian is not a human right (and suppressing some voices
(and esp. noise) in Debian is not censorship, for fucks sake!). We are only
here, because we are standing on the shoulders of giants (except for the
very few giants among us) and because we want to create/improve a great
operating system. And thats why I think it's perfectly acceptable and
desirable to not allow those messages here, which are distracting and/or
blocking of from reaching this goal. An occasional outburst (and be that a
2-4 weeks long or a single big outburst) doesnt qualify in my book for
being kicked out, no matter how harsh or unreasonable it was. Constant
disruption IMO is. Where to draw the line is tricky (and I'm convinced
there can't be a single written "line" covering everything in Debian), but
not to draw any lines will result in only the vocal and thick-skin
minorities to stay.
* And with nice, respectful communities (which have a policies quite a lot
like the DFSG) like fedora and ubuntu available, failing to be(come again)
a respectfull community might really contribute a lot to the end or slow
decline of Debian. Sure, "the end of Debian!11" is a somewhat constant
meme, but it is (sadly) not like Debian is undestroyable. Debian is very
certainly much easier to destroy than to rebuild.
* We need to take measures to prevent some peoples ideas of freedom from
harming or destroying the project. And I don't mean some peoples ideas of
Debian police state or Debian teletubby county - I'm very confident those
ideas will not win here. But sadly I can see the results of poisonous
people, or rather, their behaviour win.
* And undoubtfully I also can see many great people in Debian making sure
this will not happen.
* The future is unwritten and I wish we show our fellows the respect they
deserve. Debian wasn't made by you, more than 99,99999% of it was made by
other people. And if you have to, attack ideas, not people. And usually
it's also unneeded to _attack_ an idea (merely challanging it is usually
enough), because usually the Debian person proposing it is not so stupid
not to take your criticism into consideration.
* That's why I'm still in favor of a social committee, even though I see very
much the dangers of power abuse and the cultural norms in a world wide
project. But I see much more danger in not stopping unrespectful assholes
from urinating into our living rooms and work benches, using the waiver of
"free speech" and "we all have different standards of whats acceptable."
* Simpler said: either you respect the community or this community shall not
be yours.
* That said, I wish you all a very merry xmas, whether you celebrate and
believe, or one of the two, or none. Be happy and let it be. And may we
have a great 2009, despite we'll release lenny that late! ;-)
* P.S.: I'll post this to -project as well, so you can reply more easily.
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Sun, 21 Dec 2008 15:36:49 +0100
blogging (1-195) life; title=Happiness
* <img src="http://layer-acht.org/happiness.jpg" width="254"
height="184" />
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Sun, 07 Dec 2008 23:21:06 +0100
blogging (1-194) life; title=Interesting things to discover in Extremadura - or on the effects of Linex
* Of course everybody in our crowd noticed the huge "Wifi zone powered
by Debian" sticker with a Deban swirl at the restaurant door where we
had dinner :-) And the Debian wallpaper among the other images on the
screensaver on the restaurants computer was probably also noticed by
many. What really freaked me out though (in a very positive sense) was
that the owner/someone (? I have no idea, I talked with him, but not
about restaurant ownership...) wrote the billing programm himself.
When shown the features it looked to me like a good one, with a simple
and nice looking interface and appearantly feature complete to manage the
restaurant (including creditcard interface etc.). The cashier computer
was running Debian and the app is written in gambas2, which is a BASIC
interpreter with build-in database abstraction layers and supporting gtk
and QT. And he plans to release this as free software. Yay. Yay Yay Yay!
* Me looks forward to this to happen and also to get the .svg of the sticker
mailed :)
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Thu, 27 Nov 2008 20:36:43 +0100
blogging (1-193) life; title=awesome bts and snow
* Right now, I'm a happy hacker: I just added a keybinding and shell
oneliner consisting of four piped commands finally invoking the
[1 bts] command to my [2 awesome] configuration. So now I can
press Mod+F4 (anywhere, anytime) and then either enter a bug number
or get a tab completion list of bugs I already looked at. Totally
awesome. And I guess there is room for improvements once I have used
/usr/bin/bts more :)
* In related news I'm currently flying from Zürich (which made me think
about snow...) to Madrid, in anticipation of the Debian QA/i18n/ftpteam
meeting, which will start tomorrow evening with a bus drive to Caceres,
the town where DebConf9 will be held in 2009. And somehow I didnt feel
like going through my mails, I rather wanted to do some interesting new
stuff. So I started to read the bts manpage...
* To bring this post to and end, I share Gunnars feeling about all these
snow blog posts, [3 you insensitive colds]! Last friday morning, Hamburg
was among the first cities in Germany getting snow (the cold was coming
from Greenland, thus from north west and Hamburg is pretty much
north-north-west in Germany). Unfortunatly, the snow was almost gone in
the city by friday noon, so when all these "got lots of snow" blog posts
popped up on planet, I felt a bit like Gunnar...
[1] http://packages.debian.org/devscripts
[2] http://packages.debian.org/awesome
[3] http://gwolf.org/node/1868
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Wed, 26 Nov 2008 03:01:33 +0100
blogging (1-192) life; title=Dear DSA FTPMaster Keyring-Maint Secretary FrontDesk DPL
* For one, I think it might be a good idea to pause this proposal now.
(Reason: lenny)
* And I definitly think you should develop it using the DEP procedure. (And
not a series of mails to different lists and some blog posts, which is
very hard to follow.) And most probably this "you" (delegates) should
become a "we" (Debian).
* Love, Holger.
* P.S.: my changelog form blog engine looks cool, but fails with commata in
titles. Gah.
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:59:15 +0200
blogging (1-191) life; title=RC bug a week - week 6
* Sorry, no news or RC bugs touched from me this week, I have simply been
to busy with other stuff. And actually it hasn't been a full week since
last "RC bug a week" post, but I decided to post today anyway, to come
back to blogging this on tuesdays.
* The bug count has been going further down to [1 129 bugs], which is still
129 too many ;-) So please, if you have some spare cycles, look at the
list and contribute to getting it down, rather sooner or later! /me wants
new features, but that needs a lenny release first! :-)
[1] http://bts.turmzimmer.net/details.php?bydist=both&sortby=packages&ignhinted=on&ignclaimed=on&ignpending=on&igncontrib=on&ignnonfree=on&ignbritney=on&ignotherfixed=on&new=7&refresh=1800
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Tue, 30 Sep 2008 14:46:58 +0200
blogging (1-190) life; title=RC bug a week - week 4+5
* The last two weeks I've been too busy to do much work for the release or
blog about my and our efforts to get lenny out of the door.
[1 Two weeks ago] we were at 144 RC bugs which are open in lenny and not
fixed in sid, today it's [2 138], thats not much progress :( OTOH,
[3 d-i has finally been frozen] and the amount of bugs alone is not a good
indicator per se, as can be seen with the 500k bug contest ;-)
* So, what have I done in the last two weeks regarding the release? I
sponsored two uploads, irusian for [4 497255] and poker-network for
[5 498497], though poker-network was then removed from testing, because
it was simply too buggy.
* Then I up+downgraded [6 498852], because it very much sounded RC but then
turned out to be unreproducible :-) Last friday I uploaded munin 1.2.6-6
which includes a fix for [7 494547] an annoying and important bug,
leading to a useless mail every 5min...
* And today I had [8 fun] finally closing [9 322762] after doing a
(delayed-2) NMU to fix [10 359574], so lenny will not include code
refering to /usr/doc anymore, a promise we already gave for woody. Yay.
* I shall blog next monday or tuesday again about this and have fixed another
RC bug by then. But, then, I will have to do my taxes next week...
[1] http://layer-acht.org/blog/debian/#1-184
[2] http://bts.turmzimmer.net/details.php?bydist=both&sortby=packages&ignhinted=on&ignclaimed=on&ignpending=on&igncontrib=on&ignnonfree=on&ignbritney=on&ignotherfixed=on&new=7&refresh=1800
[3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2008/09/msg00977.html
[4] http://bugs.debian.org/497255
[5] http://bugs.debian.org/498497
[6] http://bugs.debian.org/498852
[7] http://bugs.debian.org/494547
[8] http://amayita.livejournal.com/188005.html
[9] http://bugs.debian.org/322762
[10] http://bugs.debian.org/359574
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:06:49 +0200
blogging (1-189) life; title=I'm a SPI contributing member now
* [1 That]'s all.
[1] http://www.spi-inc.org/about-spi/membership
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Thu, 11 Sep 2008 11:18:55 +0200
blogging (1-188) life; title=RC bug a week - week 3
* Last week I was in Extreamdura, Spain, polishing [1 fai] for Lenny. So I
only fixed one RC bug ([2 494243]), which was affecting Lenny the day
[3 mrvn] pointed me to it, but wasnt anymore when I uploaded it yesterday.
The reason is simple: quite some removals of buggy packages have taken
place, yay! (And gerris was one of them...)
* Speaking of which, the bug count has been gone quite dramatically.
According to the [4 simple graph] we are down to 310 (last week 383, the
week before 428), according to [5 this turmzimmer view] we are now down
to 266 (last week 339), but I have found yet a better one, according to
which we are at [6 144 RC bugs affecting Lenny]!
* 144 bugs ain't many for a thousand developers ;-))
* Last week I pointed you to rc-alert, which helps finding buggy software
you are using. [7 Rhonda] pointed out <pre>rc-alert -d TU -o and</pre> to
me, which will show RC bugs (of packages installed on your system) which
are open in unstable _and_ testing. This only works in testing/lenny or
with devscripts from backports.org. It won't show you which have been
removed from testing though ;-) Read the rc-alert manpage for other
interesting queries to hunt bugs!
[1] http://packages.qa.debian.org/fai
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/494243
[3] http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=brederlo%40informatik.uni-tuebingen.de
[4] http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/
[5] http://bts.turmzimmer.net/details.php?bydist=lenny&sortby=packages&ignhinted=on&ignpending=on&igncontrib=on&ignnonfree=on&ignbritney=on&new=7&refresh=1800
[6] http://bts.turmzimmer.net/details.php?bydist=both&sortby=packages&ignhinted=on&ignclaimed=on&ignpending=on&igncontrib=on&ignnonfree=on&ignbritney=on&ignotherfixed=on&new=7&refresh=1800
[7] http://alfie.ist.org/blog
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Tue, 9 Sep 2008 09:08:54 +0200
blogging (1-187) life; title=We had joy we had fun we had changelogs in the sun
* In an hour the online part of this combined embedded+fai meeting in Badajoz
in Extremadura, Spain, will sadly be over, but the sadness will hopefully
be compensated by good food (yes, the food at the last dinner was great)
and more fun! To me it were three intensive days (plus some two half days
of intense travelling) which were really productive. This post is a summary
of what I did here, to document how useful these meetings are. I'm only one
person out of 18, who did some Debian work here, much more stuff was done,
most of it I probably didnt even notice, as 14 people where working on
embedded stuff, which I mostly ignored... ;-) That said, I think it was
still very nice to have this meeting together, a.) because I'm quite
interested in embedded stuff and b.) because the embedded crowd is a fun
one to hang around with!
* Right now I'm quite tired so that I dont fully remember what I have done on
the first day :) It included uploading the DebConf7 mpeg videos which will
now be used by [1 Miguel Gea] to create DVDs from those, so that he gets
familar with the toolchain, so that he then can do the DebConf8 DVDs once
those videos are (fully) ready. That will still take some time though, but
hopefully not too long.
* Unlike DebConf8 I also brought my fancy new fonera2 with me, in the hope to
give it to someone to work on emdebian support for it. This is quite a
longer road, as currently uclibc is not part of Debian, but thats only one
step in this puzzle. Much to my joy Per Andersson took the opportunity to
play with it and now took it home with him to document how to run Debian on
it. I'm looking forward to see progress on this in the future ;-) Update:
uclibc support is only needed for running Debian from the 4mb flash it has.
But since it also has an usbport one can attach some storage there and run
a full Debian system, just like on the nslug, which also has 32mb of RAM.
* Unfortunatly I basically forgot about the [2 FSG-3] I also took with me
(which was for good reasons, one the second and third day I mostly did FAI
work), but then I remembered 90min before the end, which was really too
late. Narf. But [3 Riku] had a short look at it and told me one thing I
didn't knew before: (at least) arm(el) kernels need to have the cpu id set
in the kernel and the debian kernels don't have that, as they are build for
more than one cpu type, so one has to prepend an arm assembler code
instruction before running the kernel... I'm curious to do this soon :-)
* But I have more hardware news to tell: [4 César Gómez Martín] (thanks for
organizing this meeting, too!!!1) gave me back my OLPC laptop which I
borrowed to him quite some time ago, so he could use it for a talk he gave
at a university in Extremadura, so now I finally could give Andres Salomon
new [5 debian image for the XO] a try. It was really nice to finally see a
nice Debian gnome desktop on the device :-)
* Today the FAI group, that was Sebastian, Michael, Thomas and me, also took
a break to visit the [6 Alcazaba de Badajoz] (built around 1100, so roughly
900 years ago) which is an amazing building (thats why I linked to the
spanish wikipedia entry as it has nicer pictures), from where you can see
most of the city. I've been to [7 Badajoz] at least three times now and I'm
really glad I finally did that, it's only 5min away from the office where
the meeting was held and I highly recommend it to anyone going here.
* Oh, and last and definitly not least I did a lot of work on FAI too.
Besides discussing stuff which will hit planet after I posted this (hah!
[8 Michael already posted it], though without proper credit, so I will do
a repost) I mostly reviewed changes and patches and discussed bugs, I
didn't develop many patches myself (well, except one for the changelog..)
but I've read every change at least twice, once as a commit msg and once
in a full review. Plus many patches I read more often... all in all I think
FAI is now in an great shape for lenny (which was the only thing we worked
on during the weekend, we discussed some future plans, but work was only
done for lenny), except that we want to another upload (with only
documentation changes) after the upcoming one (which has quite some
documentation changes already, but also some RC+important and some trivial
bugfixes).
* As you might have guessed, I started this entry on saturday and am
finishing it now. According to the topic of the #extremadura2008 channel,
which we created to coordinate between the groups, we also fixed 7 RC bugs
(or 8? one should really document the bug numbers and not the number of
bugs..) affecting lenny and 3 more which are only relevant to sid. Which is
not as many as I would have liked to be fixed, but then, it wasn't a
("traditional") bug squashing party either. Which makes me wonder, are
there any planned in the coming weeks?
* So all in all I think this meeting was really very productive. Plus, I also
enjoyed a special half an hour of real holidays: on saturday we had to
leave lunch without having a chance to have a coffee afterwards, so I
stumbled into a random cafe on the way to the venue. Turned out it was a
very nice one, where due to its nice interiour I managed to reflect on
life, 42 and all the rest almost immediatly. A totally unexpected but
needed break. I wont say more here, because the thoughts and memories are
really mostly relevant for me, but I'm really happy I found that space.
DebConf8 and this meeting both were really fun, but I really didnt have a
minute to reflect things. 30 minutes to do that is definitly not enough,
but it was a good start. Now I just need to find another opportunity to
continue with it. I hope this will happen before the next Extremadura
meeting ;-)
[1] http://xerakko.livejournal.com/
[2] http://layer-acht.org/debian/fsg-3
[3] http://suihkulokki.blogspot.com/search/label/debian
[4] http://cek.bitacoras.com
[5] http://queued.mit.edu/~dilinger/debxo/
[6] http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcazaba_de_Badajoz
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badajoz
[8] http://michael-prokop.at/blog/2008/09/08/fai-developer-meeting-in-extremaduraspain/
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Mon, 8 Sep 2008 15:00:30 +0200
blogging (1-186) life; title=RC bug a week - week 2
* Last week I started [1 my personal RC bug quest], to get the RC bug counter
down and Lenny released some time this year. Sadly, a release in
September 2008 is [2 not possible] anymore.
* Since last week I've been mostly with other stuff, like coming back home
after DebConf8 and catching up on some real life issues... So I wasn't
very productive and only downgraded [3 496967] and verified that
[4 484045] can really be closed by now. But at least it brought the
counter down a bit :-)
* Last week we were at 428 open RC bugs, [5 today] it's "only" 383. If we
keep this speed, Lenny will be released in 15 weeks. So I certainly hope
for some removals to happen soon..! ;-)
* Using the alternative BTS view, I see [6 359 RC bugs effecting lenny], or
[7 339] if I exclude contrib and non-free. So "only" 13 weeks...
* While writing this blog post I thought that rc-alert should be able to list
only bugs, which effect a specific distro and much to my joy, rc-alert from
devscripts in lenny and sid has a "-d" option :-)
[1] http://layer-acht.org/blog/debian/#1-184
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2008/08/msg00944.html
[3] http://bugs.debian.org/496967
[4] http://bugs.debian.org/484045
[5] http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/
[6] http://bts.turmzimmer.net/details.php?bydist=lenny&sortby=packages&ignhinted=on&ignpending=on&ignbritney=on&new=7&refresh=1800
[7] http://bts.turmzimmer.net/details.php?bydist=lenny&sortby=packages&ignhinted=on&ignpending=on&igncontrib=on&ignnonfree=on&ignbritney=on&new=7&refresh=1800
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Tue, 2 Sep 2008 17:45:37 +0200
blogging (1-185) life; title=patch-tracking made easy
* [1 Well done], kudos! (I noticed via [2 497410].)
* For those who are to lazy to follow the first link: it's a system to view
all patches applied to the upstream sources for packages in stable, testing
and unstable.
[1] http://patch-tracking.debian.net/
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/497410
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Tue, 2 Sep 2008 14:23:55 +0200
blogging (1-184) life; title=One RC bug per week
* Probably still affected by jetlag, I've decided at the end of last week
while going through my Debian mailinglists backlog, to (try to) fix one
RC bug per week from now on until Lenny is released. I guess I was also
influenced by [1 Neils talk about Lenny] at DebConf8 :-) At that time,
which it is merely nine days ago, there were 378 RC bugs open in Lenny.
Today we have 428 :-(
* Also I decided I will blog about this regulary, in the hope that others
pick up similar procedures for them, so that we can release Lenny sometime
soon. We, as a project, need to gain speed in fixing these issues, this
will only happen if more people start fixing these bugs. After that, we
can happily go back to adding more features! ;-)
* So for now I closed (or contributed to closing) three bugs: #492299:
downgraded & closed, generic bug report, users didnt provide moreinfo,
#495587 (bug in atd, caused by a bug in lsb-base, suggested to forcemerge),
#438885 (downgraded, as all blocking bugs for this one have been fixed).
* For [2 475036] (removal of kernel-package requested by maintainer) I
updated status in the bugreport and notified the kernel-team, that they
are one of the two last users of this package in Debian. Not sure which
change is more appropriate now: fix kernel-package, so that it can stay in
Lenny, or change the linux-2.6 build-system.
* The other package which uses kernel-package is cdfs-src, but I'm not sure
we should with that package anyway, see [3 482075].
* That's it for this week. Oh, I forgot to mention why I choose one RC bug
per week: it's a goal I can fullfill. If I'd choose more, I might not
manage to keep up with my plan and stop it altogether. So I choose
something which I hopefully can manage over a some period of time ;-) I'm
aware this is not very much, but at least something.
* What's your plan to help releasing Lenny on time?
[1] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2008/debconf8/low/817_Lenny.ogg
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/475036
[3] http://bugs.debian.org/482075
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Mon, 25 Aug 2008 16:42:26 +0200
blogging (1-183) life; title=DebConf8 video prereleases available for download
* All "low quality" videos (which in fact have better quality than the
streams had) from DebConf8 are now available for download at the
[1 usual location]. Enjoy!
* I expect the rest of the high quality ones to appear during the next 48h,
after that I'll start with the remaining post processing, which will take
a bit longer, probably some weeks, hopefully only a few though :-)
* Currently there are 57 events available in low quality (4,9G in size) and
30 in high (14G). The SPI event is the only one I know that is missing,
but I still need to check if we have it on tape and if there are more
missing.
* If you notice any non-obvious problems with these videos, please don't tell
me, but do describe the problem in our [2 todo list]. Thanks!
* To make that a bit more clear: There is only one kind of obvious problem:
more than one file per event. It's obvious that these need to be merged.
All other issues, like a completly missing event, missing beginning of an
event, or silence instead of audio, etc. should be noted in our todo-list.
Your help here is very much appreciated.
[1] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2008/debconf8/low/
[2] http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf8/Videoteam/ToDo
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Sat, 23 Aug 2008 14:54:34 +0200
blogging (1-182) life; title=Custom Debian Distributions shall now be called...
* Debian Integrated Solutions. (DIS, pronounced "dish".)
* Or at least, that's what seems to become the result of [1 this thread] on
the[2 debian-custom] mailinglist (and some RL discussions at DebConf8).
* I've not yet participated in the renaming discussions, at the moment I can
only say what others already said: the terms "custom" and "distribution"
both have several problems and renaming won't be easy. Now that I've said
that, it occurs to me that I do have something to add: renaming established
names is never easy, but can very well be worth the effort, if the
established name is problematic / has shortcomings and the new one is way
better.
* And there I have my doubts. TTBOMK or IME, neither Debian Med nor Debian
Edu qualify as "solutions", but are a (great) basis to build solutions...
* Hmm, I mostly started to write this blog post, to make more people aware of
this discussion and not to add new arguments. This should better be done
on the debian-custom mailinglist. Please reply there :-)
* In not totally unrelated news I'm back in Europe and catching up on my
various backlogs. Tomorrow I plan to connect the harddrive with the
Debconf8 videos and start/continue with that [3 backlog]... If you notice
any problems with the already released videos, please don't tell me, but
put them in that wiki page. Thanks!
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-custom/2008/08/msg00014.html
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-custom/
[3] http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf8/Videoteam/ToDo
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:42:08 +0200
blogging (1-181) life; title=Thanks to the videoteam!
* So, [1 DebConf8] is over (currently we have three machines left in the
network, the video storage server, the video encoding server and my
laptop...) and IMO it rocked! I really enjoyed being here, meeting many
many known faces and getting to know quite some new ones and learning a
bit here and there, even though I was mostly doing videoteam work :-)
* And this should be the main message of this blog post: many many thanks
to all the different members of the videoteam. You have been awesome! The
camera operators, the sound and video mixers, the moderators (which
strictly speaking are not part of the videoteam but nonetheless helped
us very much), those of you who reviewed the videos, the debconf network
admins, the localteam members who prepared the venue fantastically, those
who prepaid for hardware (and Debian for paying in the end) and took it
here, those who helped with the set up here, the hotel staff who generally
were very helpful (for example they agreed to dig holes in their walls),
the absent team members who helped via irc and very much Damián Viano for
his awesome work on pentabarf and Ben Hutchings for dvswitch and most of
the debconf-video package.
* Also I like to thank Amaya very much for bearing with me and for all the
love and joy you give me! Te quiero!
* [2 Thank you] all! Very very much.
* (And now I'm curious who I forgot...)
* I'm also really happy we got videoteam t-shirts this year and at the same
time this is probably the biggest regret I have regarding the videoteam:
We didn't have enough t-shirts for everyone who deserved one. But things
can definitly be worse :-)
* Recordings, as much as we have them, are being uploaded at the
[3 usual place]. You can help us with post processing by adding comments
about problems (non-obvious ones only, please. If a event is split into
two files, thats an obvious problem), to our [4 todo wikipage].
* See you! Have fun!
[1] http://debconf8.debconf.org
[2] http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf8/Videoteam/Thanks
[3] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2008/debconf8/
[4] http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf8/Videoteam/ToDo#Problems_you_spotted_in_the_encoded_videos
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Sun, 17 Aug 2008 07:00:10 +0200
blogging (1-180) life; title=What has a pirate flag to do with Debian?
* Some people asked me during the group photo why I brought a pirate flag to
the group picture. One explaination is is pretty simple, but not the real
answer: since DebConf5 there always has been a pirate flag at DebConf. The
real answer to me is, that if the content mafia wants to label the cultural
technique of copying, which is as old as humankind and the base of all our
inventions as "pirating", them I'm very proud and happy to be a pirate.
* A somewhat longer answer will give you the films "steal this movie", part 1
and 2, which are available (under a CC licence) for direct download on
[1 homer at DebConf8] (please use the wired network..) or via torrents on
[2 their website].
* The first part mostly tells the story of the raid of the piratebay servers
in Sweden, while the second part tries (and IMO succeeds very well) to
paint the bigger picture. My favorite quote from the movies is "when the
winds of change are blowing, some people are building shelters and others
are building windmills".
* Another insightful (and scary) quote is "you can't stop filesharing without
a police state", and if you look around, that's what's being tried. So why
is the content mafia afraid of file sharing? It's not really because of us
consumers being consumers and "stealing" some content. I'm sure they can
live with the "loss", that's not the reason. What they can't stand (nor
survive) is millions of consumers becoming producers (and sellers of
content). That's the threat they need to prevent.
* And that's in very short why I think a pirate flag is appropiate at
DebConf. We are producers and if free production of ideas and art is only
possible for pirates, I say allrrrrrright ;-)
* I very much recommend these two movies to everybody who is slightly
interested in this topic and look forward for part 3, which should be in
production by now. I hope this blog post made you curious to watch them,
even though I feel that I couldn't summarize the movies as good as I would
like to. DebConf8 took some tolls on me. I haven't even blogged about this
wunderbare conference yet :-)
* I also plan to bring a Debian flag to [3 DebConf9] :-) If you happen to be
an artist and want to create a design, I'd be very happy. At the moment
I'm not fully sure if the flag will be printed or embroidered so the
design should probably pretty basic. A red swirl on white (or black?)
background, maybe accompanied with the letters "Debian". Other ideas or
comments?
* <img src="http://layer-acht.org/homecooking.png" />
[1] ftp://homer/upload/
[2] http://stealthisfilm.com
[3] http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf9
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Fri, 15 Aug 2008 06:41:51 +0200
blogging (1-179) life; title=DebConf8 video streams
* in seven hours DebConf8 will officially begin, you can participate by
watching the live video streams as described on the [1 streams info page]
- have fun!
* The [2 schedule] for tomorrow/today is available in - follow the links for
the schedule for the other days. The times are localtime which is ART and
equals to UTC-3.
* Apologies for the short notice. But it should not come totally surprising
for most of you! ;-)
* More posts about Mar del la Plata pending since 9 days, IOW since I'm
here...
[1] http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf8/Streams
[2] https://penta.debconf.org/dc8_schedule/day_2008-08-10.en.html
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Sun, 10 Aug 2008 08:01:51 +0200
blogging (1-178) life; title=Update on debian-community.org
* Since at least two months I wanted to write this blog post, as I have
realised that I can't give [1 debian-community.org] the love it needs. But I
have even been to busy to write this Request For Help... :-(
* Since September 2007 three community planets ([2 english], [3 italian] and [4 german])
exists and are used and (since a bit longer) there is a wiki, a [5 mailinglist]
and an IRC channel (#debian-community on OFTC) and a server running this.
* And then it got stalled, yet two out of three DPL candidates mentioned
debian-community.org during the DPL IRC debate, believing it was alive
and kicking. (Or at least not stalled as it was at that time.) The planets
are alive, but that's it. Or rather that was it, there has been some
activity recently! :-)
* Last week, [6 Andreas Putzo] approached me and told me he wanted to spend
some of his holidays to work on the long proposed email and jabber
services. And by now he already did so! Yay.
* Still, please consider this request for help (or invitation ;) still to be
valid. For example, mail+jabber work now, but there is no documentation on
our wiki...
* There are many ways you can help, the best is to take initiative. If you
want to, please join the IRC channel or send a mail to the list. I'll
still hang around, but probably not much more. I certainly don't plan to
stand in the way, rather the opposite. And of course, should you attend
DebConf8, I'd also love to talk to you :-)
* So much for now, now I'll continue with other pre-Argentina todo entries
:-)
* Hah. Forgot one link: if you haven't seen it yet, please take a 30 sec.
look at [7 join.fedoraproject.org]. Very well done. I'd like to see
debian-community.org to become a bit like that :-)
[1] http://debian-community.org
[2] http://wiki.debian-community.org/planets/en/
[3] http://wiki.debian-community.org/planets/it/
[4] http://wiki.debian-community.org/planets/de/
[5] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/d-community-discuss
[6] http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=andreas%40putzo.net
[7] http://join.fedoraproject.org
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Tue, 29 Jul 2008 18:42:27 +0200
blogging (1-177) life; title=Lenny frozen
* [1 Lenny has been frozen] some four hours ago and still nobody blogged
it yet, so I decided to break the news to those who care more about blogs
and planets then old fashioned nice mailing-lists :-)
* Unfortunatly no word was said about the kernel for lenny, so I asked on
#debian-release whether that means, we will release with 2.6.25, which
is what's in unstable and testing atm. The answer from a release team
member was: no, it will probably be 2.6.26.
* Happy polishing!
* /me goes back to arriving in wonderful Madrid with wonderful company :-)
* The above blog post was written yesterday but due to an user error due to
being too tired I didn't manage to post it until now. But as still no one
blogged about the freeze... :-)
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/07/msg00007.html
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:39:35 +0200
blogging (1-176) life; title=Liberated and migrated
* An hour ago the [1 ttf-liberation] package finally migrated to Lenny, yay!
In case this doesn't ring a bell for you, check out [2 wikipedia] or the
[3 original announcement]. Those are free fonts with the same metrics as
Times, Arial and Courier.
* My thanks go to Alan Baghumian, the Debian maintainer, and Max Spevack,
Tom Callaway and some unnamed lawyers from RedHat, for helping resolving
some licence questions, plus the unnamed artist(s) at RedHat, who made the
fonts.
[1] http://packages.qa.debian.org/ttf-liberation
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts
[3] http://www.press.redhat.com/2007/05/09/liberation-fonts/
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Wed, 2 Jul 2008 19:14:01 +0200
blogging (1-175) life; title=Sivember
* Please remind me to take November off and have some holidays. khtxbye :-)
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:53:40 +0200
blogging (1-174) life; title=there is no fair use and no fair trials - YOU are the enemy?
* "The Motion Picture Association of America said Friday
intellectual-property holders should have the right to collect damages,
perhaps as much as $150,000 per copyright violation, without having to
prove infringement."
* [1 Without having to prove infringement]. What's next in your pipe dreams?
Evidence collected by breaking into computers and collecting^wcreating
data?? :)
* The funny thing is: those dinosaurs don't have to fear the consumers.
(And some of the smarter ones have realised that by now.) They need to
fear the massive amount of new _creators_, who don't need those old
dinosaurs anymore.
[1] http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/06/mpaa-says-no-pr.html
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Sat, 21 Jun 2008 23:14:22 +0200
blogging (1-173) life; title=66h offline
* This weekend I was offline for 66h, neither touching my computer nor the
internet. That was a first this year. It was great! Amaya and me visited a
small village in northern spain, which I knew from earlier travels and
which is quite isolated from civilisation: no internet connection (3 or 4
valleys and 15km to the next DSL line), no water connection (but a fountain
up the mountain), no power connection (but solar power and a generator for
heavier machines), no road noise (you can hear the river down in the valley
though, and lots of birds), a few happy people and some cats and dogs. Now
I have two blisters on my hand and a light sunburn on my back (from digging
out bad weeds from a wineyard), my bag hurts from stealing^wtaking stones
plates from a church roof and I'm relaxed and happy even though my inbox
and todo list is back to normal insanity :-) And I am quite sure it won't
take another six years until my next visit there.
* But now back to the weeds in my inbox, putting stones in NEW and working
together with nice friendly people distributed all over the world.
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Mon, 16 Jun 2008 11:03:28 +0200
blogging (1-172) life; title=Yay!
* Mrs. Rodrigo, I'm looking very much forward to spend three weeks of DebConf
with you! Y a cogemos un avion! ;)
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Wed, 11 Jun 2008 23:42:23 +0200
blogging (1-171) life; title=swamped
* Just a short note that I'm currently swamped with work and other stuff
and that I will get back to stuff I said I would do as soon as I can.
Which I have no idea when this will be, currently I'd love a weekend
without touching a computer and I have faint hopes that this might happen
time in June.
* Don't hesitate to contact me and/or do stuff I said I'd do.
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Tue, 20 May 2008 12:48:59 +0200
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 
